Maybe. The night is full of maybes, always is, but tonight chaos will do its best and thinking will be harder, with all the mess about to let loose. Better, maybe.
Rue de Tolbiac begins taking life; it is May 30th, and the heretic procession in memory of Joan of Arc—burned seven hundred years ago, even though nobody remembers that story well—fills up all the streets of the district with platoons of naked whores, armed with torches, glinting scissors and makeshift heart-shaped grenades. The heart that never burned, Joan’s heart. The Maid of Orleans will do fireworks tonight. Revenge, at least once a year. Tonight, hectoliters of Cloud 4 must have been sold, and several loafs of C7t and other explosives.
Those legions of hysterical sluts, with their Carnival of flesh and bombs, make South Paris 5 look like a gigantic crazed meat-grinder.
Maybe? No, not really: it is as sure as death, that tonight the population of castrated males will significantly grow. Men stay shut in their homes, sitting in front of the door with a sawed-off on their legs, on guard, while they hear the steady clanging rhythm of scissors getting closer, down on the street; opening and closing their sharp mouths. Jesus.
Kiki never went to party with those lunatics, though she always carries a holy card of Joan in her bra—a lucky charm—more or less like any other whore in the district. They say that no pimp is ever going to mark your ass, they do not even try: like holy water for the possessed. It burns. Of course, marked asses in South Paris 5 are many. But faith is faith.
Maybe, so Janis Joplin keeps singing. Maybe Kiki is no longer going to need help from the Saint, now that she has become a pro killer. But best to keep Joan in her place, for now, Kiki thinks; she is still a Wasp on trial, after all.
At least, no customer is going to show up tonight; Kiki won’t be bothered, she won’t have to explain to tens of randy guys that she quit renting out the oyster between her legs. Maybe. Now, she is going to open that oyster only when she likes, and if you try to pry it open, you are going to cut yourself on the sharp edges of her knife made in Marseille.
But that maybe—a demon living like a king in South Paris 5, not planning at all to look for another throne room—wakes up. It puts on some underwear, special ones, with a hole for the tail; then, with a tin crown on its head, it begins pushing buttons of probability on its portable console, shuffling the cards. The visor squeezed in the claws of the odd creature lights up something like the map of the old Métro de Paris, a spider web of lines: blue, purple, ochre, orange, green, red. Tunnels and train cars by now stuffed with the monsters of the city, flayed by the rains of the Uxor Monsoon; they learned how to coexist with the rats, more welcoming than surface-dwelling human beings.
Every age has its fucking lepers.
The demon turns on the random engine of its cursed device and shifts the lines, the joints of probabilities, the knots of destinies and the flyovers of luck, making a big mess as usual. A clusterfuck of destinations, a nice slipknot at the scrotum of expectations, of normality: please expect anything, now. You need a little salt, sometimes, the demon snarls, before getting back into bed, satisfied.
And Kiki is caught up with it. Maybe.
Her videoeye unexpectedly lights up; someone is looking for her, and they insist ringing. Goddamn, even today with the procession? she mutters, running barefoot to slit the throat of that thing, that keeps whistling like a nuclear alarm.
Piss off! Are you from fuckin Mars?
But then she sees his face squeezed against the screen, framed by purple smokes: clusters of grenades blowing up closer and closer. Those damned hysterical whores. Joan! Joan! Joan! Listen to them!
He is Yaël, one of Kiki’s old customers, now something more than that. Maybe. In other words, Kiki has not been charging him for months.
Every whore has her mad, romantic, heretic lover, ready to flip over his own life and everything else to save the lady with no knickers shut in the ivory tower; with a hundred satyrs guarding her—a tail on their back and one in the front—beside a gigantic pimp with a M44-25, titanium-water-cooled machine gun, massacring princes on the drawbridge. But the formidable shooter is not there in Kiki’s case: nobody ever managed to mark her ass. Still, the troop of satyrs is always in full force for her, well-armed with pissed-off moray eels, long and short, always poisonous, more or less toothy.
Kiki immediately lets her Yaël in, just in time to avoid a few extra scissor blows. “What are you doing here?”
“Happy to see you too, Kiki… I know where you’ve been today, and I don’t like it,” Yaël is straight to the point, while serving himself a glass of synthetic Southern Comfort—which, with its orange soul, never denies a dose of courage to anyone. “With those bastards, really?” he finishes, swallowing it.
“Shit…and you came here, with the procession outside, only to tell me that you’re pissed?” Kiki replies. She likes Yaël…a nice guy, but he goes too fast for her…and she doesn’t really know where she wants to go, and most important: with whom.
“So what? Does it sound so strange that someone is worried about you? But never mind, what am I thinking, maybe that’s just how it works with…”
“With a whore, you want to say?” Kiki immediately loads venom in her fangs and spits it out as a warning. “Come on, pull it out, that word. What are you afraid of? W. H. O. R. E. Easy, right?”
Yaël deflates on the sofa and shakes his head. “That’s not the point at all, and you know that. It’s just your fucking way of ending any argument.”
“What are you talking about?”
“What the hell, Kiki, I’m talking about your kid. Do you really think this is the way to get him back? Are you that foolish?”
“You leave Max out of this, that’s not your fucking business,” Kiki hisses, harsh scorching rage climbing her throat, tears welling in her large eyes. “You come here to preach, and you expect… Maybe you should have kept paying, like everyone else.” A cheap shot, that. Kiki well knows, and she knows it can hurt. Things to be expected, when you deal with vipers. You cannot be shocked for the odd bite.
“Fuck you. How much for listening to me?” Yaël snaps. “Is this how you thank me, when all I want is to take care of you? I’m just a deluded asshole, you’re right,” he says, chucking his card on the ground, in front of Kiki’s naked feet.
“You really don’t get it…last time I let someone take care of me, I found myself forced to spread my legs for friends and relatives. Nice deal. My own fucking uncle. And you, superman, you think you’re so different? Deal with it: you’re a man and you think with your balls, that’s all. If fucking me is no longer enough for you, find yourself another candidate…there are plenty out there who like the whip, and the master as well, trust me. Whore’s honor.”
“You’re out of your mind. Better your new friends, right? Nice people, really, bunch of psycho murderers,” Yaël snarls, springing up to his feet and heading toward the door, pushing Kiki away with an arm. “They’ll be your new masters…being on the payroll of the worst pieces of shit in the city…well, a bright prospect really, can’t argue with that. You’ll taste the whip, oh yes. But perhaps that’s just what you want.”
“Being paid to fuck people isn’t anything new for me, and you should know it well,” she replies, trying to grab his t-shirt to stop him. “You’ve understood nothing at all about me.”
“Let me go, and enough with the bullshit. It’s easy, you know: you just want to do whatever you like, and nobody must dare open his mouth. Me, less than anyone else. Next time, I’m going to pay for your fucking time, should I drop around here again.”
Yaël frees himself from Kiki’s arms around his waist, and he goes away, slamming the door, and this time it really seems to be for good. Maybe. Kiki looks at herself in the mirror, only a few seconds, and she sees what she fears more than anything: a survivor strangled by loneliness, her eyes sewn shut, useless, and a black snake around her neck—the serpent of bastard dreams. Cold and slimy. Damn. She runs to the window, leans out and screams at the top of her lungs, “Stop, you’ll get yourself killed out there!” But he is far already, swallowed by that black-and-purple night.
“Stay, please…” Kiki whispers, only to herself now, staring at the sidewalk below, splattered with neon lights and puddles of impossibility. But only the crazed chorus of the procession answers to her: Joan! Joan! Joan!
She puts something on and decides to follow Yaël, running after him. That is not like her at all; the last time she ran after a man she had a knife in her hand and she was lacking thirty credits to cash in, but does it matter now? Out there, tonight, Death sashays more than ever, a porcelain mask on her flesh-stripped face; she is beautiful as Joan now, and she grants macabre favors to everyone. Soon, the heretic screamers with their tits in the air will light up the stakes in Place Lautréamont. That fool, they’re going to get him!
Kiki launches herself out in the street. It is a napalm panorama, oxygen thickening with hydrazine3 and mercury fulminate, reek of formaldehyde and ground ants, those cursed solvents they use to turn the fat of the dead into beauty creams. But tonight, anything goes, to set the district streets on fire; yellow and red tongues can be seen everywhere, their bellies full of fuel as they lick buildings and scorched people. South Paris 5 looks ever more like a Venice with incandescent canals, crowded by the backs of people burned alive, black like tar. Stumps of over-grown bugs, and earthworms of melted guts, small unmoving flocks of human carcasses squeezed between the wings of living flesh of the heroines of the day, the easy-scissor queens.
Joan! Joan! Joan!
But the fire-show on the street will not last long, it cannot be any other way. The flight formation of fire drones has already lifted; soon, zinconium powder is going to snow on the district. Nothing to share with municipal service: that arsenal of aluminum birds belongs to Big Blue, who gladly lets that army of whores vent once a year; he must keep his flock of milk-cows loyal, and the celebration for Joan of Arc is a masterwork of smoke and mirrors to keep them quiet. But he cannot allow his fief to actually burn. He will let them scream and light the stakes, slaughter some useless specimens of the male race, hunt down testicles. But then, at seven in the morning, the eco-limbic bells of the whorehouses will toll the end of it all. Everybody knows how it works. They only toll twice a year: the day of Big Blue’s birthday and at the end of Joan’s celebration. Whoever does not get back to the pen, then, will have to deal with his mercenaries, goons armed to their teeth who can certainly play rough—a few years back, they filled up the Sein with woman stew. The rats were able to stock up, the bastards…invincible symbols of the Apocalypse.
There are capsized roadcars all around, with their bellies burst by grenades and portraits of Joan painted on their crushed hoods.
Kiki manages to make her way through the crazed, naked bodies of that legion of flesh, as they march in testudo formation with men for upper shields, dragged along by the rolling tide of sluts, marred by their nails, carried two meters up in the air like rockstars during a concert. Direction, the usual: the stakes, ready to be lit in Place Lautréamont. Kiki hops and cranes her neck, looking for Yaël among the already-captured poor devils who try to free themselves from those hundred hands holding their hair, arms, legs, and balls. But the mess is too much, and Kiki cannot see, and then she ends up on the ground shoved by a party of whores who took her on. She must expect that: she is the only one dressed, in that pandemonium.
“Look at her…what do you think you’re doing?” the fattest says, a purple heart tied to her neck, before shaking her buttocks and motioning her mates to close in. “Undress her, make her remember what day this is.”
They surround her; two of them grab her pants, trying to slip them off, forcing her to lay on her back. But Kiki, who doesn’t even get in the shower without her knife, pulls out the blade hidden in her panties and she stabs the air in a zigzag motion, making the whores withdraw. “Damn bitch, you cut me!” the stick-thin one moans, though it seems she even has a hard time bleeding. Kiki springs on her feet, but the circle of flesh around her tightens. Damn, they’re too many.
The she-bison, the leader of the party with tits covering her bellybutton, stands aside to manage the lynching operation against a few just-caught male heads; now, she suddenly leaps forward, in a wobbling acceleration of cellulite, and she hits Kiki on the back with a metal bar. “Was it so difficult? Come on, hurry up: the stakes in the square are about to be lit,” the woman snarls, cleaning with the back of her hand the drool that keeps foaming from her mouth. Gross stuff, with silver reflections: the telltale of Cloud 4, the super-drug flowing in the veins of that army of apocalyptic bathers with bluish faces and pale buttocks. Not even a Cézanne doping with peyote suppositories could ever paint something like that.
Kiki is on the ground, stunned, and the heretics fall upon her like a skein of flesh. Immobilizing. They take off her clothes, they turn her ass in the air, and they hold her in four, squeezing hard her wrists and thighs. Joan! Joan! Joan! the demented women scream, while an old red-haired slut approaches with a toothless grin, her fingers brushing a pimp brander. Kiki does not give up, she manages to free a leg and hit the thin whore on her bony mug, then she begins shaking like a high-voltage cable, raising her belly from the ground; they can no longer hold her. But then the she-bison decides to get tough, sitting on Kiki’s back with her huge ass, and now it is really over. Straddling the girl—on creaking ribs—the fatso gives orders. “Brand her. Now. Next time she will remember Joan’s day for sure.”
The red-haired woman—her monkey face sneering more than ever—takes aim and thrusts the iron in the middle of Kiki’s right buttock. The girl screams and bites her lips until they bleed, but it will be over soon: the holy, heretic effigy of Joan of Arc, a half-bust with short hair, halo, and armor with cups for three breasts, will be on her skin now.
The pneumatic device packed by the apish whore drops the first row of micro-carvers down into her flesh, followed then by the other modules, hooking and spinning like flippable, swiveling matrixes, while the small ink tank empties out, purple squirting deep down, led by the incisions. It hurts, burns.
“Let’s impale her, we can use the bar,” the thin whore suggests—she has lost two incisors to Kiki’s kick in her face and now whistles, rather than talk. The others, too, seem aroused by the idea: “Yes, let’s put it inside of her, she is worse than the men…she is a bastard,” a woman adds, a bleeding testicle in her hand. But all of them wait for a nod from the charismatic she-bison, who still sits on Kiki with her avalanche of stuff. She looks like a pink pudding over a worn-out dish.
“No,” she roars. “On Joan’s day no woman is snuffing it. You have many preys to hunt, the right ones. Move your asses and take everybody to the stakes, before they start without us.”
The road quickly empties; the procession has reached the square and all the heretics are coming together there, for their scorching Sabbath. Kiki is on the ground, naked and in pain. She slowly raises her head, then she pushes on her palms and gets back up on her feet. Shit, getting away with it for years, and getting my ass marked just when I’ve quit…and by women, too, by whores! she thinks, clenching her teeth. The wound still burns. But she has no time; she too has to reach the square, hoping not to find Yaël there, in the cages, among those ready to be well cooked by that pack of possessed. Goddamn, tell me you managed to run, son of a bitch. It won’t be hard now, joining the others, with her tits in the open and the portrait of Joan on her right buttock, glittering under the artificial light of refraction lamplights.
Then, it begins snowing; Big Blue’s drones have begun their firemen job, while all the cloacal gulls have already landed to skid on blood and sink their beaks in singed carcasses; their oysters, where sometimes they find a pearl. A human eye.
Exhausted, Kiki reaches Place Lautréamont; she pierces the quivering wall of flesh to get as close as possible to the cages, already lifted—to show the goods to everybody—on the right side of the square, in front of the balconies of the Café Miss Tétons. One of the many jukeboxes of flesh, alcohol and drugs, with its floating circular booths; sucking away your life, half a liter a day like a vampire in garters.
The four cages are chock-full with live catches, dangling in the air. The poor devils inside are all piled up and they do not even have the strength to scream anymore. Someone is missing an arm or a leg; one, sticking out from the bottom of a cage, crushed by all the others, his skin warped by the steel rectangles pressed against him, looks like he was bitten by smallpox.
Kiki cannot make out Yaël among the prisoners; impossible, in that mess of mixed bodies…there must be a hundred at least. She will have to wait for them to be carried to the already-lit stakes, one by one, and baptized by the executioner before being burned alive. One of the priestesses—wearing Joan’s glittering armor, a purple sword-shaped dildo tied to her neck, her face painted in red—climbs on the hastily-set stage, and she raises her hands in the shape of a vagina.
Joan! Joan! Joan!
Two other hydrophobic heretics carry on the stage the relic they are all waiting to see: Joan’s withered heart, looking more like a dark wooden fossil, sealed in a thermo-biologic box and illuminated by the bluish glow of an unknown synthetic gas: an atomic paradise, shrunk down to fifty centimeters, a small altered Ark of the Covenant. When the holo-system projects the relic upward—a sort of huge meteorite, hanging mid-air—the army of riotous whores start tearing off their hair and torturing their nipples.
Joan! Joan! Joan!
The cages are lowered to the ground and the unlucky guys are dragged out by their hair, toward the poles of their four stakes, each guarded by an executioner with his face covered by a purple hood and a hank of rope coiled around his shoulder. They are the only men admitted to the ceremony without being victims of it—all of them long since castrated. Collaborationism. Castratos by choice or by destiny, feeling part of another team by now. In other words, no testicles around on Joan’s day, no t-girls or mutated creatures of indefinable or double sex. The blessing of Uxor created many freaks of nature.
The square is soon saturated with smoke, screams of sluts and burned men. From the stage, the glittering priestess raises her eyes toward the roof of the building behind her; in the middle of it, the historic men-only shop of last-gen recreational dolls. With a gesture of her azure-painted hands, she orders that the freshly-hunted testicles be thrown to the crowd. Black, murderous hunger, one of the nasty side effects of Cloud 4…many will stay on an empty stomach; they are many, and the meatballs far too limited in number. Like always, scenes of spontaneous cannibalism will follow among the assault sluts. Little help are the flamethrowers of the loss-containment service—entrusted to a few modified W5 plesodroids, big and stupid energy-suckers, the same used at the Baden landfill: ton-heavy undertakers of junk and garbage, their shells peeled by the beaks of the cloacal gulls. Of course, they are a kind gift of Big Blue to his females in heat—the police don’t give a fuck about what happens in the district—and to Joan, sure enough, matron of all the coin-operated vulvas of South Paris 5, and not only.
Kiki, after a long pause, fearing every second to spot her Yaël among the victims in line like chicken to be plucked and cooked, gives a sigh of relief when the last victim is lighted up on the stake, after being covered in inflammable liquid and amniotic fluid. He made it! He must have made it! she fervently thinks. Hell, I really am a bitch…but where is he now?
««—»»
She rushes home, maybe he is there waiting for her. But just as she comes around the corner, when the façade of her palace shows itself illuminated by the red paint of the last dying fires, she sees something…someone lying on the sidewalk right in front of the door. She approaches slowly, biting her lips…her seventh sense, that of whores, makes her nipples tingle. And it is not a false alarm.
She bends over that macabre flesh sculpture, which seems covered in snow after the passage of the drones, and opens her eyes wide, forced to photograph an image that will fill her heart with vinegar forever. She caresses the face of the dead man’s battered body, his skin tinged with fresh blood and mutilated genitals, barely covered by the tattered fabric of a white wedding dress he was forced to wear with very little grace.
On his sawed-off neck, someone has sewn the head of a red-haired woman, who still seems to shout with her mouth gaping, revealing sparkling teeth plated with fake dilitium—a grim mirror of the sky up there, jeweled with few stars.
That’s him, Yaël, one of the last preys of those fanatic sows; through the lace of the dress neckline, Kiki recognizes three blue tears tattooed on his chest, near the heart, the same ones engraved on his skin a hundred nights ago, after he saw another man knock at the door and paying the ticket for Kiki’s paradise.
A plastic sunflower sticks out from the mouth of Yaël’s new female head; they say it is Joan of Arc’s favorite flower.
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