Futile Efforts (4 page)

Freddy wanted to fight but it was too late, his
speedos
were gone and Jude was already toying with his cock.
 
Wes stared at her with a mixture of delight and disgust, the same way he probably glared into his mirror every morning.
 
He wasn't defiling her as much as he was himself.

Jude licked the length of Freddy's shaft and let it hook along her top teeth.
 
I was sort of with him, getting into it, enjoying that pleasant feeling until she wrapped her hand around the corpse's cock and stroked way too hard.
 
It would've hurt like a bastard if he'd been alive.
 
She tugged and yanked and jerked until I wanted to scream for him. I clenched my jaws and groaned, and Jude slowed the pace, much more gentle.
 
I almost said thank you.

Dan vomited in the sand, straddled over the cooler.
 
He didn't wipe his mouth as he nabbed another can of beer and sucked it down as fast as he could and then one more.
 
He started to throw up again but held the liquor down, and the fog soon began to settle on his brain.
 
He dropped heavily onto the beach and swooned, shaking his head and begging, "No no, come on now, guys, no…."

Freddy probably felt the same way.
 
Jude had his limp prick hauled up as far as it would go, staring thoughtfully at it.
 
She inspected it closely, the head and underside, the size of his balls.
 
She smiled up at Wes and he realized then that he never should've started the game.
 
She was better at it and always would be, and now he was trapped with nowhere to crawl away to.
 
He'd bitten through his own lip and a trace of blood threaded down his chin.

"Fine, baby, fine," he
assented
as she hummed.
 
"Let's get him hard for you."

"Yes, Wesley, for me."

He found a piece of driftwood in the
sawgrass
, cracked off a five inch jagged section, and then stabbed it into the corpse's scrotum just beneath the testicles.
 
Wes carefully maneuvered the stick up through Freddy's shaft until it stood on its own, the wood jutting free from that torn dead pecker.
 
Something oozed but it wasn't blood.

Collapsing in the sand, Dan curled up and hid his nuts.
 
With a theatrical flourish, Jude took off her jeans and panties and tossed them onto the rocks.
 
She lay across Freddy's icy chest and slithered her
cunt
over his leg.
 
She moved wildly over him, fisting that mangled prick, writhing in a frenzy.
 
She used her own juices to lubricate him.
 
This was a mysterious and arcane theater, and I didn't want to think about what she might be acting out.

Finally Jude mounted the drowned kid, easing her pussy lips open with one hand while guiding that mutilated cock in with the other.

She kept their movements slow, rocking as she pushed down harder.
 
She let out a grunt of pain but kept sinking further.
 
A spurt of blood erupted black in the moonlight and she cried out but didn't stop.
 
A disfiguring smile scarred her face.
 
She gasped and squawked louder as she found the rhythm.
 
Betty stepped closer and breathed against my neck.
 
I didn't have an erection.
 
This wasn't sex or even madness, it was simply the way things had to be.

Soon Jude was quivering, keeping her eyes on Freddy's dead face as she moved above his body.
 
The stick splintered and pierced her further so that squirts of blood gushed out every time she slammed her hips down to catch his cock again.

Wes' eyes were as bright and blind as the unbroken panes of glass at the tower of the lighthouse.
 
A part of him wanted to kill Jude and yet an even stronger part of himself just wanted to suffer.
 
He'd been with her for five years and hadn't loved her for a minute, but at this instant she reached him in a way she'd never done before, and the sad bastard was actually grateful for it.

Jude dropped, clung to Freddy and drew her nails across his chest over and over until thin lines as white as fish bellies opened in his flesh. So far they could still have an open casket for him, but his mother better not ask the mortician too many questions.
 
Jude smoothed her fingertips over his face, brushing his forehead, running her hands through his hair, holding on while he punctured her further.
 
She let out a harsh "
Ngg
," noise that actually made Betty suck air between her teeth.

Jude climaxed, shuddering so hard that the stick snapped between her legs.

There was no point in trying to figure any of it out.

She'd been badly perforated, the blood swelling between her cunt lips and pouring out in a river filled with dark clots and torn tissue.
 
She didn't seem to mind.
 
She slid back and dropped aside, where she coiled beside Freddy as if he were much more of a man than Wes had ever been.
 
It drove Wes even further out of his skull.
 
His brain was in flames and it made his eyes narrow until tears squirted out onto his cheeks.
 
But he kept on smiling.

The dead fish stench of the night tide wafted past.
 
Freddy's after-shave mixed with it and came up with some new horribly foul odor.
 
Dan had thrown up so much that he was wracked by the dry heaves, sobbing softly to himself beside the fire.
 
Shadows danced across him as he spun and begged, "Please, we've got to get out of here.
 
They'll be coming for us.
 
The coast guard might be out there right now watching.
 
This is murder."

"He was already dead," Wes said.

"We killed him."

"We didn't kill the drowned pervert.
 
He fell off a ferry and couldn't swim in his Gucci shoes."

"What just happened," Dan said, "this…this…"
 
The heaves interrupted him.
 
He sputtered and coughed and his whole chest sounded parched and raw.
 
He could barely catch his breath.
 
He checked over his shoulder twice, as if his brother that committed suicide might be sneaking up on him.
 
"What happened, that…that wasn't right."

"He didn't complain."

"But—but—she's bleeding all over the goddamn place, just look at her."

"It's over, stop bawling.
 
We're leaving."

"Thank Christ!" Dan wailed, and he actually brought his hands together as if in prayer.
 
"But what are we going to do with him?"

"Bring the fucker with us.
 
We'll toss his dead ass out in front of a hospital someplace."

Dan nodded and reached down but couldn't bring himself to touch the corpse.
 
That busted cock hung at a freakishly weird angle, the splintered wood jutting out from the scrotum and shaft in several places.
 
Dan started to retch again and fell back into the sand.
 
I had the feeling that he didn't give much of a shit about plastic forks anymore.

Wes and I tossed Freddy in the trunk and everybody piled into the car.
 
I drove away from the point slowly.
 
It made me a little sad to leave, and I didn't quite know why.

I was wide awake but a certain tightness had gripped me. The road curved and I didn't want to follow it.
 
We drilled along on Ocean Parkway heading towards the bridges and the clubs, waiting for the police cars. The heater softly hummed as the headlights chopped twin channels through the darkness.

Betty chewed her bottom lip and squirmed beside me.
 
For the first time since seventh grade her presence didn't give me a sexual charge.
 
It was so unfamiliar that I felt nearly weightless.
 
I gripped the steering wheel harder just to keep hold of reality.
 
She needed something all right, and I could see those questions running through her mind—
what was it like, how did he feel to have him deep inside like that?
 
How did the dead love
?

We hadn't gone ten minutes down the parkway when Jude said, "Let's go back."

I didn't slam on the brakes, I was very proud about that, but I did let off the gas.
 
The headlights ignited the saw grass and the empty road ahead. Dan grimaced and began to sob but the tears wouldn't come for him.
 
His eyes snapped back open in fear as he stared out the window.
 
He remained silent.

Betty said, "
Wha
-"
 
Her voice had become strained, but wasn't full of anger or even disbelief.

 
"Let's go back.
 
Maybe there are more.
 
There should be more by now, the way the wind is blowing.
 
The current ought to be taking them past the point.
 
Those that don't wash up on Echo Island."

Weakly, Dan said, "Oh no, Jesus Christ, no.
 
We can't."

Betty turned.
 
"You're bleeding bad, Jude.
 
You've got to see a doctor."

"No, I'm fine."

"You're not fine.
 
You could bleed to death."

"It's all terrific, Betts.
 
We've got to get you one of your own."

Wes let out that laugh again and Betty drew her palms to ears.
 
"Oh, stop it, would you."

But Wes couldn't stop, or didn't want to.
 
Neither did Jude.

Neither did I.

I stepped down on the brake and made a U-turn across the shallow grass and gravel of the median.
 
Freddy shifted and thumped against my spare.

We pulled up back to the point and scoured the black shore.
 
The fire had died down to only glowing embers that sizzled.
 
The beer cans we'd tossed in were red hot and the metal was smoking.
 
We gathered up more driftwood and laid it over the embers until the branches blazed.
 
We used them like torches.
 
I had a very definite impression I'd once witnessed this same scene in
Lord of the Flies
.

The surf battered the rocks and gurgled up the beach as if vying for our attention.
 
The moon was still high enough to offset the whitecaps and etch the rolling waves in silver.

Jude had been right.

There were more now.

Not nearly the forty presumed missing, but another four corpses had washed aground like beached mermaids. You would think all the bodies would make this a place of horror and death, but instead there was an almost buoyant milieu, like other friends had arrived and joined us.
 
I could feel myself wanting to talk aloud to them, and I had to press my lips together to make sure I didn't.
 
I thought I heard Betty giggle in a sweet, bashful sort of fashion.

Wes grabbed each corpse and pulled it from the foam by himself.
 
He looked deeply into their faces as though he might recognize every one of them from out of his past.

There was an elderly man with a massive head wound.
 
Cerebral arteries splayed from his ruptured cranium and brain matter like egg yolk dribbled and hung in viscous strands.
 
Fifty yards further down the beach two middle-aged women
housefraus
, who must've summered out on the island, lay sprawled over one another, mouths open and trickling sea water.
 
On the other side of the butte was a guy about Freddy's age, who wore a gold chain with the letters SOL hanging from it.
 
Whether that was his name or only his initials, it's what they called him.

"
Sol
is kinda cute too, don't you think, Betts?"

Betty could only nod.

"I'm not greedy.
 
I'm giving this one to you."

"Jude, listen—"

"No need to thank me."

"Is that what you expect?"

Jude tittered, but she sounded sleepy, insubstantial.
 
She moved slowly, blood staining her jeans down to the knee.
 
I knew she wasn't going to make it, that she didn't want to leave the point, and I didn't care much.
 
But Betty—what did I feel about Betty, if anything?