The Shaft Read Free

falls backward, piss and now blood squirting, his legs atangle in his dropped jeans. The pain of amputation slugs in. The arm he throws out to balance himself is seized by a wet mouth and ovoid shape of a football. Needle fangs slide through the ligatures of his wrist, slipping between the fine bones to mesh with a silver razor hiss. Arm-first, Boner is snapped back toward the tub, keys jangling, rills of blood coursing down the inside of his jacket sleeve. He cannot see the blood but he can feel it. His dick feels as though an icepick has been jammed through it. More blood. He remembers the wino's fresh puke, how body heat made it steam when it came out.
        Boner does not have a lot of time to ponder these sensations individually. In five seconds he will be dead.
        His boots thud into the wall hard enough to wake people in the basement. Before he can cut loose his first yelp his face is engulfed by something cool, chamois-soft and blubbery, packed in an inch of sliding goo. His last thought is of the gel they use to pack Spam. It doesn't smell so great, either. Boner is reeled in.
        Past that, it was no contest.
        

TWO
        
        The window panels on the Greyhound bus were made out of some kind of tough plastic. Scratch patterns stood out in three dimensions, causing passing city lights to halate and issue rainbow coronas. Just now, the streetlamps of anonymous towns were not coming too frequently. There was no moon tonight and beyond the windows it was dead dark.
         'No.'
        Jonathan stripped off his featherweight headphones. He disliked cutting off music before it was finished, but he had lapsed into a doze and now the outer rims of his ears were throbbing. Truncating music was a matter of personal control; when it was done for you, it was called commercial radio. The regret he felt as he poked the STOP button was trivial but genuine. Tangerine Dream ceased to exist in mid-bridge. Jonathan had been rotating the Walkman's batteries. Long haul, no spares, poor foresight. When you need to conserve your batteries you should at least stay awake for the performance.
        The running noise of the bus soared into his ears, unmuffled and crisp. They were cruising at a dull and steady fifty-five in the slow lane. Jonathan's overhead reading light was off and no other passenger cared to differ this late at night. Their driver was a robot, a professional white-line jockey who had not uttered a syllable past his pro forma departure spiel about all the things you were not supposed to do on a Greyhound bus.
        All there was: Night and blackness and time and bus noise, and Jonathan, all by himself now.
         'No.'
        He remembered the last time he had slept with Amanda.
        Wine with dinner always felled them both on workdays. They had snuggled for an hour before coasting down into sleep. He thought he had undressed her. Sometime after midnight he had awakened and gone to work on her. Their progression had become almost ritualistic.
        He scooted down, turned on his side, and insinuated his first and middle fingers between her legs, so gently. Amanda slept soundly on her back - a trick Jonathan could never duplicate - and he was in a position that allowed him to monitor the meter of her unconscious respiration, even her very heartbeat. He set up a soft rhythm, rubbing, using his saliva as a buffer, teasing the periphery of her perception for half an hour or so, until he could tell she was floating up from sleep to vague doze.
        His first reward came in the tiny moan that escaped her, and the way her legs drifted apart across cool blue sheets to permit him better access. This was the time when pressure and tempo became important.
        Her clitoris fattened beneath his fingers, swelling up firm and prominent as she began to assist him with sleepy, tidal movements. Another fifteen minutes passed. Jonathan watched the digital clock tick over as Amanda