Blood & Tacos #1 (5 page)

Now it was Bronte's time to smile. "We?"

The Wino touched her hand. "Yeah,
we
. You may be just some rich albino girl gone off the rails, but I ain't letting something as beautiful as you end up in some crazy hippie's stew."

Bronte placed her forehead to the cage bars, her lips poked succulently
through the metal lattice. The Wino rinsed his mouth out with a swig of rum
from the minibar bottle, thought about spitting it out, but swallowed instead.
As his lips met hers, the chanting started from outside – the longhairs were
feeding.

"You're special, man, don't ever forget that. What you got, what you are, man,
the universe has blessed you, man." That was what the male longhair said to
The Wino shortly after he and his girlfriend picked him up.

The Wino was adverse to hitchhiking, but he needed to split the city and split it quick. The car picked him up ten miles outside the city limits, passing him at first, then stopping and eventually reversing back to where The Wino walked along the roadside.

It was the girl who convinced him to take the ride, strawberry blonde and braless. If longhairs did one thing right, it was that their women didn't mind showing what they had and sharing it around. The girl could've filled out a sweater two times larger than the one she wore. She smiled and beckoned to him and told him they were going more than halfway towards where he wanted to be. Still, The Wino was suspicious. It was the cop car that tore past, sirens blaring, heading right back from where he'd come from that convinced him, finally, to accept the ride.

It was the biggest mistake of his life.

They gave him beers and called him "man" and asked about his life.

They mocked the war, they mocked the establishment, they mocked the President, they mocked all but the place where they were headed.

The Wino, beer-buzzed, felt his lips loosen, felt a rant coming, felt the urge to tell them that their side, their bullshit "counterculture" side was just as bad as The Man was, that the only way out was to be alone, was for a man to forge his own path, seize control of the universe by the throat and punch destiny in the face until it yielded.

But he made not a peep, which was strange because he wanted to.

And then things blurred and went spacy and for a moment he thought that maybe they were right, these hippies, maybe, just maybe, there
was
something more, something other, something beyond. But, no. It was just the Mickey Finn the dirty, cheating longhairs spiked his beer with.

And then, he woke up caged. A beautiful woman next to him, a whimpering, spineless geek on the other. Each of them "special." Each of them caged. Each of them afflicted with albinism.

And then, he met Theseus Jones.

Theseus Jones was tall and thin and had a pock-marked face indicative of childhood
chicken pox or acne so bad it would make the world itself blush for you.

The Wino was brought before him by two longhairs so put together, they clearly were on a diet of more than just lentils, an observation that proved apt once Albino Wino learned what it was, exactly, that went down here.

He didn't see much of the compound's property on the trip up to the main house, thrown into the back of a pick-up truck, one Longhair Charles Atlas driving, the other in the back with him, pointing a sawed-off in his face, just that it was as large and unkempt as the armpits on a longhair dude's old lady.

The main house was just a large, open space. Naked couples lay on cushion-covered floors, intertwined, locked at the genitals. The Wino's albino eyes struggled to adjust as he was dragged past the armed guards at the door, through the squirming masses, to Theseus Jones himself, who sat on an oversized wicker chair that looked like some abominable longhair throne.

The big longhairs dropped him at Theseus' feet. The Wino looked around, waiting for his eyes to focus, waiting for what seemed to be one huge, moaning, soft-skinned, writhing organism to cease its amorphousness and bleed out into separate shapes. Once it did, he looked up at Theseus who wore a crooked-toothed grin. A woman was on her knees before the cult leader, fellating him. She groaned as though hypnotised by the swollen organ between her jaws.

Theseus introduced himself and then said, "I like you. What's your name?"

The Wino replied, "They call me The Albino Wino."

Theseus chuckled. "Kooky handle, man."

The Wino shrugged. "It fits."

Theseus leaned across the arm of the wicker throne and produced a wine bottle. He uncorked it and handed it to The Wino. "Try it. Homegrown."

The Wino shook his head even though the urge was strong. "Had enough of your booze in the car. I'm all napped-out, thanks very much."

"It's not drugged, I assure you, man." Theseus himself drank heartily. He held the bottle out for The Wino, who took it on this second offering.

Drinking deeply, The Wino said, "You gonna tell me why I'm here, or we just gonna sit around and get drunk? That's cool with me, but if you're looking for me to participate in…this," he gestured at the longhairs humping like animals on the ground in more positions than he knew existed. "You gotta know, I ain't no swinger."

Theseus went to speak, but stopped himself. "One moment," he said right before he ejaculated furiously.

The Wino went to avert his eyes, but there wasn't many a place to avert them to.

The woman in front of Theseus got up off her knees, wiped her mouth, and winked at The Wino as she passed. It was the longhair chick from the car, the one who spiked his beers and bewitched him with her breasts, now on full display, slapping together meatily with each footstep.

"You're next," she said, winking and running her fingers through the curling flaxen thatch between her legs. She disappeared through the copulating masses, a naked, golden-haired apparition treading lightly amidst a vibrating minefield of flesh.

The Wino drank deeply from the bottle. Good hooch. Not that he'd admit it to Theseus. "Okay, what the hell is going on here?"

Theseus laughed some more and tucked his member back into his linen trousers. "All in good time, man. First I need some medication…" He snapped his fingers and a young girl appeared, maybe fourteen at most. Timid and flushed, she was dressed in a sheer white, diaphanous dress. She held a large tray, lines of powder expertly placed upon it. Alongside the lines, a small, hollow tube, carved from wood and stained near-black. Theseus patted the girl on the head, picked up the tube, put it to his nose and snorted up the lines.

The Wino shook his head. "Coke? That shit'll rot your brain."

Theseus wiped his nose, beckoned the girl to leave. He said, "That's not coke, man. That's
bone
. Grade-A albino bone."

The Wino almost dropped the wine. "What?"

"That's right," Theseus pointed at The Wino. "Your kind, you got the magic in you, brother…"

The Wino lunged for Theseus, managing, just, to get a hand to the cult leader's
throat before the big guys came back. The Wino went to fight, but the drugs
were still residually with him and his reflexes were off. It didn't take long
before things went black again, this time far more unpleasantly.

Time passed and became something slippery. Counting the minutes was like grabbing
fistfuls of running water. His minibar rum bottle emptied, here came the Delirium
tremens – nausea, trembling, fever. Unable to hold down the plates of gruel
and boiled vegetables.

The tale unfolded in a fever-dream, at times narrated by Bronte, at other times narrated by Theseus himself who may or may not have actually come to visit. Theseus as African Missionary, sent to save, finding only superstition and black magic. The myth of the albino as something magical, possessed with healing powers.

The Wino saw African albinos brutally slaughtered, their flesh consumed, their bones ground to powder and ingested. A lifelong migraine sufferer, Theseus was offered the services of an albino girl. He took her and was healed. He still wore the girl's powdered thumb bone in a vial around his neck.

A powerful speaker, a charismatic man, Theseus founded this longhair death cult, hopped up on the bones of American albinos, hunted and captured by roving teams, prepared by jaded ex-hippies burned by Vietnam, by Manson, by Altamont, their dreams soured, fighting the awfulness of the new America with a greater awfulness. All of them warped through indoctrination and cannibalism. There was no denying their health, however, this Bronte could attest to, as every second night, she was sent to "cure" some ailing cultist of his "affliction" through sex magic she had no idea she possessed.

One day, Johnny, little more than a bobbing torso by this point, did not return. The Wino knew that he and Bronte would have to make good on their escape plans.

He looked deep into Bronte's eyes and said, "This here horrible shit can no
longer stand."

The weapons at The Wino's disposal:

The empty minibar bottle he still kept nestled against his genitals so that he could inhale the dwindling fumes and transport himself to seedy big city bars.

And:

The uncanny, almost alien sexuality of Bronte and, apparently, his own uniquely musky brand of rugged albinism.

It was the couple who had picked him up and drugged and captured him that showed the most interest. She had made her own curiosity and arousal known at The Wino's first meeting with Theseus. Her boyfriend, or whatever you would like to label him, was clearly enraptured with Bronte. He had had his share of her, Bronte told The Wino, but so taken was he that he spent more time stroking her ivory skin, her alabaster hair than he did penetrating her.

The Wino couldn't blame him. Bronte was a mesmerist, unaware of the extent of her own loveliness. Should they escape this death farm, The Wino fully intended to probe whatever magic lay beneath the colorless cloud of her ghostly pubic hair.

The couple came essentially unarmed. She with a kitchen knife, he with a pitchfork. They stood nervously in front of the cages, lit by twilight cascading in through the open barn door, a young, stoned, sensual, hippie version of the couple in Grant Wood's
American Gothic
.

The Wino pleaded with them for booze – so drained was he from withdrawal that the only way he could sexually perform was with a spiritual fortification that had less to do with Jesus or Budda and more to do with Jack Daniels and Johnny Walker.