Big Trouble In Little Ass: A Novella Read online

“These hands are wrong for me,” he said grimly.

  Nell stared at him in surprise. “But why? Mike was strong as a bull.”

  Jude climbed out of the bathtub. Urine streamed off him like he was a waterfall. “Because I’m not going to wield a pickaxe and dig for gold with them, that’s why. I’m a gunfighter — I can already tell I can’t shoot with these hands.”

  “You won’t be shooting anyone,” Doc said. “Not here anyway.”

  Nell spat into the bathtub. Her spit became a worm that slithered over her pee. “Ike Dallas kidnapped Zizi last night, before he even came to your room. She’s likely dead by now.”

  She spat some more into the tub, then added: “The girls say it was Rosa that betrayed Zizi.” Her expression became enraged. “I’m going to find and kill her.”

  Jude winced. Zizi had been right — he’d been dumb to run his mouth off. Or to assume the Latino whore could be scared silent.

  He smiled grimly. “Thanks for fixing me up, Doc, but I am going to be shooting.”

  Nell winced. “No need to kill Edison anymore like Madam paid you to. She’s dead. Your business deal is over. Walk away. Take the money. Go.”

  “Take Nell with you, when you go,” Doc said. “She’s a good girl.”

  Jude coldly stared them down. “This business just got personal. Ike Dallas tried to kill me. I’ll settle that score if it’s the last thing I do.”

  Nell rolled her eyes. “And I suppose you expect us to help you?”

  Jude shook his head. “No point getting you both killed. Stay out of this.”

  “She can’t,” Doc said. “Wherever you go, she goes. No, it’s actually the other way around: Where she goes... you go.”

  Jude stared hard at him. “You got us married while I was unconscious?”

  Doc shook his head. “Nell’s urine is what’s currently keeping you alive. You need to have her with you at all times, for regular infusions of it.”

  Nell dipped a cup into the bath of urine. She raised it to her lips, pretended to sip from it. “Regular infusions,” she mouthed at Jude.

  Jude gaped at Doc incredulously. “What the hell?”

  (He was also amazed because he’d just realized that Nell had somehow peed a bathtub full of urine. And in how many hours? What did she have for a bladder? A herd of horses?)

  Doc nodded. “If she doesn’t infuse you regularly, you’ll die. It’s that simple.” He smiled reassuringly. “You don’t have to drink it. You can soak in it like just now, or even pour it over yourself; that will work for short spells. But drinking her water will restore you fastest, particularly if you get injured.”

  “And since you’re planning to go get shot up —” Nell interjected.

  Jude just stared at Doc.

  “One more thing,” Doc said. “The fresher her fluid is, the faster you’ll heal.”

  Jude stared at Nell in dismay. The liquid gravity of his fate slowly weighed down on him.

  He looked at Doc like a dog begging not to be whipped. “You mean I’m stuck with this... to her... for as long as I live?”

  Doc nodded. “Sorry Jude, only thing you don’t get is the wedding ring.”

  Nell glared angrily at Jude. Then she walked over to him and whispered in his ear. “Stop acting like you don’t like me, you ungrateful prick. I fucking saved your life. The sex last night wasn’t that bad, either, was it?”

  Jude forced a grin. “I guess I’m screwed then. But Doc, I at least need my right hand back, and I need my gun.”

  “I can reattach your hand,” Doc said. “I’ll simply remove this new one at the wrist.”

  Jude nodded. He turned to Nell. “Did you bring my gun here?”

  “The white pistol? Ike took it.”

  Jude’s expression turned black as a moonless night sky. “Another reason to visit Bennett’s ranch,” he said. “I need my damn gun back.” He scratched his chin. “Only problem is how to get to the ranch house unseen.”

  Doc thought a moment. “Don’t worry about that. I’m Little Ass’s undertaker. Edison’s sure to order a pair of coffins from me for his men’s funerals. You’ll be in a third one when I make the delivery.”

  CHAPTER 6

  Like everyone else on the EVB Ranch who’d so far seen it, Edison and Valhalla Swede Bennett both gaped at Claudio’s corpse when Ike Dallas dumped it on their parlor floor.

  “Jonas is the same way, boss,” Ike informed them. “He’s outside in the wagon with the groceries.”

  “How’d a shark get inside him?” Edison asked. He was a tall thin man with slick black hair and a pencil-line moustache. Claudio’s abominable fusion of man and fish threatened to make Edison spew his dinner everywhere. He walked over to the bar and mixed himself a stiff whiskey.

  Ike explained in detail. “With this,” he concluded, handing Jude’s white pistol to Valhalla. Edison’s wife was a svelte blonde wearing a floor-length evening gown that entirely covered her feet.

  Edison returned with his drink. He and Valhalla studied Jude’s gun.

  “It’s made of bone, Edison,” Valhalla said. “Smells like fish bone.”

  Edison raised a startled eyebrow. He finished his whiskey, then broke the weapon open to check its ammo.

  There were three shells in the cylinder, and no spent casings. Edison thought the three empty chambers odd. Even odder, the ends of the unfired shells looked like frayed meat.

  He shook the bullets out into his hand.

  Frowning, he held one up so Valhalla and Ike could see it. Lamplight glinted off the bullet’s fingernail.

  “What sort of a weapon fires severed human fingers?” he asked.

  ***

  “A Comanche medicine woman gave me the gun, along with my horse,” Jude told Nell and Doc. “I don’t know where she got them. I rescued her husband from being killed by Union Army soldiers and she was grateful.”

  He flexed his reattached right hand. The surgery had been crude. Doc had hacked the miner’s hand off at the wrist, stitched Jude’s original hand on in its place, and asked Nell to urinate on it. Jude had watched the join knit together with the transparent urine-flesh.

  He dried his hand off with a towel.

  “Thanks, Doc. This is much better. I can fight now.” He frowned. “I need to get my gun back, before Edison Bennett starts using it on people. Who knows, I may even be in time to rescue Zizi.”

  ***

  Ike dumped Zizi down on the parlor floor.

  Rather than being cowed now, Zizi was furious. Her eyes glared knives at Edison and Valhalla. She’d worked herself into a rage during the trip out to the ranch. How dare Edison treat her this way, over what was rightfully hers?

  “Ungag her,” Edison said, stroking his moustache. “Sit her up.”

  “You evil son-of-a-drunk-skunk,” Zizi shrilled once her mouth was free. “How dare you — ?”

  “Shut up, Zizi,” Valhalla snapped. “Ike’s already told us what you were planning.” She pointed to where Rosa sat by the fire. “Your whore here confirmed it, so don’t try playing innocent.”

  Zizi turned to Rosa in a rage. “You stupid slut! I’ll tan your butt so hard you’ll need to wear a sombrero over it!”

  She turned back to Edison. “Let me go!”

  Edison regarded her with interest. “I don’t think so. You’ll most likely only try to have me killed again. Thank God, that Jude punk you hired couldn’t keep his mouth shut.” He grinned mirthlessly. “I really think it’s time you died, Zizi.”

  He looked to Valhalla. “What do you say, darling? Should we show her mercy?”

  Valhalla snorted. “Don’t ask silly questions, Edison. I warned you to kill her back when you took the ranch over, remember?”

  Edison’s face tightened at the retort, his lips compressed to thin lines. His eyes smoldered. He said nothing.

  “How about testing Jude’s gun on her?” Ike asked. “Then you’ll see for yourself how it works.”

  Edison’s simmering anger found an outlet. He smi
led. He suddenly felt much better. “Yes, let’s do just that.”

  He reloaded the finger bullets back into Jude’s white pistol.

  “Let me go this moment,” Zizi shrieked. “I’ll have the sheriff on you!”

  Edison snapped the gun’s breech shut and offered it to Valhalla. “You were right dear, we should have killed her. Would you like to — ”

  She sniffed. “You do it, Edison. You know I don’t like dirtying my hands with garbage.”

  Edison nodded. He turned and pointed the white revolver at Zizi. “Just an experiment, Zizi.”

  She stared at him, adamant. “Don’t you dare shoot me, you yellow prick!”

  “Shut up, Zizi,” Valhalla said nonchalantly. Her eyes narrowed. They glittered with anticipation.

  Edison shot Zizi. There was the odd moment when the finger projectile visibly streaked through the air at her, and then it punctured her belly and disappeared.

  Zizi’s eyes bugged out. She jerked convulsively as the spikes of shark bone punched out of her sides. With a sound like someone taking a watery shit, a rotting shark head erupted like lava out of her brain.

  Chunks of brunette scalp splattered everywhere. Zizi’s eyes rolled back in her head. She slumped back, dead.

  Edison gaped at her like he was seeing a ghost.

  “See that, boss?” Ike asked.

  Edison remained speechless.

  Valhalla winced. “We should have killed her outside,” she said. “All that blood she’s spilling will be the devil itself to clean up.”

  Ike motioned to Rosa. “Go call some maids, tell them to bring mops and buckets.”

  Later Same Night

  “I’m worried by this evening’s events,” Valhalla Swede Bennett told her husband when they were alone in their bedroom.

  Edison kicked off his boots, and then undid his jacket. “Why, dear? With these latest developments, everything’s going wonderful for us. Zizi and her hired gun, Jude, are both dead — there’s no one to contest ownership of the ranch with us anymore. And now we can take over Zizi’s brothel as well.”

  Valhalla turned her back to him.

  “Unbutton me,” she said.

  Edison did so. He loved the way her white skin appeared out of the dress like magic as the fabric separated.

  Edison finished undoing Valhalla’s buttons. He sat on the four-poster bed and watched her undress.

  He felt the same sick, evil thrill as always when his wife dropped her skirts to her ankles, revealing her lower body.

  Valhalla Bennett’s buttocks and legs were those of a wolf. They were covered with white hair, and her legs were jointed in three places. Her feet were lupine paws, which was why she always wore floor-length dresses.

  She’d had her tail docked. It had made the backside of her dresses look funny.

  Both Valhalla’s sex and sexuality were lupine. As primal as that of a wolf in the wild. Her violent, aggressive eroticism occasionally overwhelmed Edison.

  He however didn’t regret stealing her away from her previous husband: Doc, Nell’s father.

  Valhalla Swede Bennett was Nell’s mother.

  ***

  “We’ll have a summoning,” Valhalla said. Naked, she padded over to a wardrobe and took out a wooden disc.

  The disc was two feet wide and covered with runic writing. Its middle was depressed into a shallow bowl in which a red hexagram was inscribed.

  Wearing only his nightshirt, Edison watched her. “Is this utterly necessary, Val?”

  “It is. I sense danger.”

  Edison nodded. “Okay then.” He began removing his nightshirt.

  ***

  They fucked doggy-style on the floor. While Valhalla occasionally appreciated the missionary position, her lower anatomy meant canine-style penetration suited her best.

  “Don’t wait for me,” she insisted. “What I want from you now is your seed, not your love. Empty yourself into me quickly. This is urgent.”

  Edison gripped her hairy haunches hard and stabbed himself deep into her wolf-vagina. He pulled out, stabbed inside again. Pulled out, stabbed again. He rode her down into the plush blue carpet, till her breasts spread out like saddlebags from her chest.

  He reached under her and grabbed her bristly belly hair then stabbed into her again and again.

  Valhalla squealed in pain. Edison was hurting her.

  Edison Bennett never fucked his wife gently. He rode her hips like she was a horse and he a bandit fleeing a posse. Hard and fast and desperate, always on the verge of falling out of the saddle.

  Valhalla never objected — she liked it hard and fast. Only now she was dry. The unmoist friction felt to her like skin rubbing on skin.

  Edison came. Then he pulled out of Valhalla’s bruised sex and flopped onto the bed, exhausted. His body trembled with overwhelming sensation.

  Squeezing her thighs tight together to prevent spillage, Valhalla quickly repositioned herself over the wooden disc on the floor. She squatted and relaxed, letting Edison’s semen drip out of her.

  She’d aimed it perfectly. The cum plopped into the shallow depression forming the disc’s middle.

  Valhalla now crouched by the side of the disc. Stirring the gelatinous pool with a finger, she recanted abominable incantations over it.

  The lines forming the bowl’s red hexagram glimmered like fire.

  The semen became more than it was.

  It transmogrified into the future as presented by the millions of children who would never be born because the sperm cells — the keys to their existence — lay in the bowl dying, a negation rendering every possibility of their ever existing a pathetic lie.

  The never-born opened the door to the future they would never experience to Valhalla.

  Valhalla Swede Bennett looked and saw.

  The future she saw in Edison’s semen was as murky as the liquid revealing it. Indistinct display of days unborn.

  Valhalla however clearly saw carnage and destruction. And bloody violent death. Possibly even hers and Edison’s.

  She saw all there was to see. The visions dissolved like rape fading into repressed memory.

  Valhalla crouched beside the disc, drained by the summoning experience.

  “Edison,” she whispered, her voice like yesterday’s ghost. “Edison, we’ve a big problem. Edison...?”

  There was no reply. Valhalla looked at the bed and rolled her eyes. Edison was sound asleep. His chest was rising and falling as rhythmically as his buttocks had been when he’d been fucking her.

  CHAPTER 7

  “This sure is some weird horse,” Nell said. “Never seen one with a crank up its ass before.”

  It was noon of the next day. Nell and Jude were hitching Jude’s horse to Doc’s funeral wagon. Doc’s regular horse, a threadbare gray mare, cropped grass and looked placidly on, pleased to be relieved of work.

  Jude cranked the white stallion’s ass-screw several more times. Once he was satisfied the horse wouldn’t break down on their way to the EVB Ranch, he dropped its tail back down over the lever.

  He walked over to stand by the animal’s head, running his fingers through its mane and feeding it sugar cubes.

  Nell stroked the horse’s flank. She liked its rough feel on her palm.

  Jude pulled a rifle from a saddle holster. “The old squaw gave me this also,” he said. “It’s good too, only not as deadly as the pistol.

  Doc took the firearm from Jude. “It’s made completely of wood!”

  “Looks like a carving,” Nell added. She scowled at Jude. “You’re going into a gunfight carrying a carved rifle? And taking me along?”

  Jude nodded. “The bullets are even stranger.” He got out a leather pouch from the horse’s saddlebags and opened it so they could see.

  Nell gasped at the white objects filling the pouch. She looked at Jude in confusion. “It fires human teeth?”

  “How is that even possible?” Doc asked.

  Jude shrugged. “You’re the scientist, Doc. All I
ever ask of a weapon is that it works.”

  Doc handed the wooden rifle back to Jude. “Time to deliver Edison’s coffins,” he said.

  “Two won’t be enough,” Jude said, climbing into the back of the hearse wagon. Once seated on one of the pinewood boxes, he slid back the wooden rifle’s breech cover and poured teeth into it. He slid the cover shut again. “We need a couple more coffins to bury Ike Dallas and Edison Bennett in.”

  ***

  Doc’s hearse wagon rolled up to the EVB Ranch at half past two in the afternoon.

  Nell was sitting in the driver’s seat with her father. Jude lay in one of the coffins in the rear.

  Jude stank like a dirty toilet now — the urine smell evaporated off him like cheap perfume off a whore.

  He also felt much less sensation than he had before.

  Shut in the coffin, he attempted coming to terms with this new version of himself. And also with the fact that he was chained to Nell from now on.

  Well at least she’s pretty, he thought. It could have been a lot worse — she could have been a dog.

  Jude’s desire for revenge smoldered in him like coals in a blacksmith’s furnace. He kept seeing the sadistic grin on Ike Dallas’s face when the man had been shooting his limbs off.

  Oh yes, he thought, judgment day’s coming for you, you ugly sack of Apache excrement.

  ***

  They were passed through at the ranch gate without so much as a peep into the wagon’s rear.

  “Yeah, Señor Doc,” a Mexican guard said. “Two people ees shot up last night. We ees gotta bury zem quick.”

  ***

  They delivered the coffins to the rear of the ranch house.

  “Those two on the left are yours,” Doc told the cowboy who came to unload the coffins. “Best pinewood I got.”

  “We need three boxes,” the cowboy replied. “Someone else caught a bullet last night. Some mad prostitute first attacks Mr. Bennett, and then she puts a gun in her mouth and blows her insane brains out. It took the maids hours afterwards to clean up the parlor.”