Twink Death
by J.W. Bodden
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
Another slow night suddenly picked up with the scent of an easy mark. Holliday popped his trench coat for a drunkard staggering past the neon-stained cabarets, drawing him in with the scaled tattoos of a professional hustler. A little skin should’ve sealed the deal, but the trick only had eyes for younger fare working the graveyard shift. Once, clients flooded the Fancy Man’s Strip for Holliday’s famed wink and whistle, but now, they ebbed away to drown in greener seas.
The drunk left Holliday no choice but to up his game, untying the strings of a luck pouch. “Desire’s a shortcut to the grave,” he warned him. “Why don’t you let my bones call your shot?”
The leather pouch spilled over, rolling skeleton fish-heads on the pavement. With a practiced sleight of hand, Holliday nudged the skulls into strange formations, skeleton pyramids bereft of real meaning yet sinister looking enough to keep gullible tricks coming back for more.
He read the signs straight-faced but choking on a laugh. “The bones bid you bed me.”
Holliday took his liberties before the drunkard agreed. He tugged at the man’s belt buckle while his sticky fingers pinched a wallet fat with foreign bills. Half of seduction was misdirection. But drunks come in all sorts, from sloppy to somnambulist. Unfortunately, this one still had his wits about him. An open palm, pink as baked ham, struck Holliday across the face. Blood painted the sidewalk. The drunk chased him away as the other streetwalkers cackled and jeered.
Holliday cursed and slipped into the night crowd. He wandered past cathouses packed along a coastal thoroughfare. Staring up at the balconies, Holliday longed to share in the pricey gigolos’ prime positions on the upper tiers but reckoned he now belonged with the duds closer to ground. The hustler felt lost in the only home he’d ever known and no longer recognized his place in its tiered architecture. The Fancy Man’s Strip was no less dangerous than the ocean around it, sinking tourists and whores into the pimp’s grand altar to sex, vice, and mumbo jumbo.
Turning the corner, Holliday decided to scratch an itch for shapely but steroid-fed muscle. He hit the peep booth arcade, fed change into a machine’s coin chute, and adjusted his bulge as the screen door screeched open. A waterlogged stripper fluttered his gills behind the partition. The stud looked well-hung for a bio-modded fanatic; extreme, pelagic surgeries shriveled most zealots’ peckers. Holliday winked at the stud, but the dancer didn’t return the favor. Holliday tidied his makeup in a panic but realized cosmetics couldn’t hide what time had taken without mercy.
The counter timed out. Holliday watched the stripper wave listlessly as the screen closed. He sighed, trying not to take tonight’s rejections personally. New realities didn’t click on a dime. Holliday stared at the empty screen, fingers toying with pocket change—weighing whether his ego could take another hit—when he spotted the crowd’s reflection on its tinted glass. The crowd shuffled silently behind him, casting long shadows that devoured the artificial light. For a brief moment of lost time, he caught them spying on him with hundreds of burning, red eyeballs. Curious. Impatient. Hungry. Nobody romanced Holliday with bedroom eyes like that anymore.
But in a blink, the red gaze vanished as pedestrians went about their nocturnal business. Even as the crowd quickened and merged, Holliday couldn’t shake the thrill of their covetous eyes or his fear of them watching him. He decided to swear off the hard drugs before midnight.
Holliday shuffled weak-kneed out of the arcade, elbowing leather daddies and packs of gangbang johns. His body collapsed against a lamp post, searching the streets for red eyes, but he caught the scent of cheap patchouli instead. Two figures swaggered from the crowd, stuffing cash inside their lacy garters. Holliday stiffened. The Riptide Twins finally caught up with him. It’d taken them long enough. He blew the sister-brothers a kiss as they dragged him into an alley.
“Easy there. Rough play costs extra.” Holliday slipped from their grip but stayed on guard. The pimp’s bottom bitches earned their sobriquet by drowning troublesome rent boys.
“Stay in pocket. This isn’t your beat.” The sister-brothers merged their identities with a practiced yet disturbing synchronicity. “You wouldn’t be trying to earn some cash on the side?”
Holliday hated bottom bitches. They were always up a working man’s ass. But it was a sweet gig if you could get it. “That’s the game,” he shrugged. “Suckers are made to get played.”
“You’re not playing anyone in your terminal condition,” they giggled. “Twink Death.”
Holliday countered with a spank to his rump. “Tricks run because of my jiggle for miles.”
“Away from it, maybe.” The bottom bitches peeled back a row of shark teeth. “Your symptoms are clear. Broad shoulders, puffed face, and a back you can’t wax smooth.” They traced his eyes, rites for the dead. “It’s a damned shame, but every twink has an expiration date.”
“You’re wrong.” He ate the lie, but it caught in his throat.
“Pray to the Fancy Man that you’re right,” they hissed. “Now, get back to work!”
Holliday fell in step behind them. “I’m coming,” he said. “Don’t twist your garters.”
Holliday followed the Riptide Twins to the Twink Terminal, a bus station turned pleasure hub. All around him, bleached-blond boys lured cars off the road, switchblades snug in their shorts. Their tattooed scales gleamed, branded the first time they turned out. Holliday cursed the bounce of their perky behinds. They didn’t know yet, but those asses jiggled on borrowed time.
He followed the spray-painted signs advertising a sale and climbed the platform. But the bottom bitches nabbed his coat, pulling him back to the curb. Gossipy twinks pointed and jeered.
“Where do you think you’re going?” The Twins dragged him to the curb. “Geriatrics don’t belong at the Terminal! Get on your knees with the junkies and rough trade in the Hole.”
Holliday planted his knees on the pavement, scraping the joints raw, refusing to budge one step closer to the shadowy, piss-leaking alleyways across the street. His entire body shuddered at the sight of doped-up rent boys, skinny as stilettos, servicing endless rows of bargain glory holes. The Hole was hell, closest to it on the Strip, and no place for a sex legend.
“I’m not getting on my knees for nickel and dime tourists,” he snapped at his keepers.
“Then maybe you should square up,” they teased, “and finally go clean.”
Their suggestion dug in like a knife to the gut. All Holliday knew was the Strip’s game—swindling suckers and easy living. He’d never been drawn to the square life. Didn’t think he’d care for it. Nevertheless, Holliday knew that things were about to turn, whether he liked it or not. His body was changing, melting into less bankable slop. The hustler needed either to age gracefully or to find a new niche in the sex trade ecosystem. Otherwise, he wouldn’t last long.
“There has to be another line of work for a professional with my credentials,” he pleaded, mostly to himself, knowing the Twins bled ice. “How about you throw a desperate slut a bone?”
“Wouldn’t be your first.” The Twins teased out mercy better than booth strippers did their gills. “But, if you’re willing to beg for it, we might know about a career opportunity for a seasoned streetwalker like you. Strictly garden-variety bedroom work—no hard labor required.”
“I’ll do anything to skip out of the Hole.” He was almost breathless.
“The Fancy Man’s harem’s looking for concubines,” they continued. “The pimp’s turnover is alarming. But that beast must get fed. The thing is, he hates breaking in rookies and dilettantes, prefers a man with mileage. If you still have the goods, the pimp might take you in.”
“Do you think I’m crazy? Every hustler knows nobody leaves the pimp’s harem alive.”
“Hookers like to tell tall tales. Whisper Bluebeard fetish-heresies. But they’re wrong. The Fancy Man is kind and generous with his flock. If he has a fault, it’s practicing what he preaches. The pimp can’t resist indulging his desires. He hoards whores like they’re going out in style.”
“I can wrap my mind around a pimp cross-dressing as a black widow,” Holliday chuckled, “but the god bit is above my paygrade. All I want to know is if I’m safe in his bed.”
“You’ll find the pimp of the lighthouse is more than flesh and bone.” The Twins slipped out of sync. “Trust us, there’s no better sugar daddy than god. The Fancy Man’s a romantic who loves sharing the poolside life with his men—suds, studs, and, some say, even the gift of youth.”
Holliday paced on the curb, hedging his bets. He figured one bed was as good as another with your back against the wall. But nothing came for free on the Strip—most certainly not faith.
“What’s his price?” he asked.
“You.” Their fangs snapped like a rattrap. “A concubine never walks the Strip again.”
He put on a show of devotion, palming his luck pouch. “How about we ask the bones?”
Holliday tossed the augurs. The skulls moved with a nudge of his nimble fingers, fixing them to escape the Riptide Twins’ scheming. But this time, every bone refused to obey. They rolled with a will of their own. He stopped breathing as the fish heads pointed south to Midtown.
Holliday turned pale, scooping the augurs back into their pouch. Dread iced through his veins. “There’s no arguing with bones.” He shrugged at the Twins. “Let’s meet the Fancy Man.”
Holliday hopped off the Midtown trolley as it groaned to a stop. Outside the station, he shouldered past pilgrims and sex tourists clutching wads of pay-to-pray cash. The rabble crowded around the shrouded monk’s collecting tides by the curb, anointing believers with bucketloads of fish chum to stiffen their shameful, useless peckers. Lust made fools out of men.
He scowled at the tourists. “Suckers don’t need religion to get hard with me around.”
“Not after the monks give you a chum bath,” the sister-brothers cooed, sweet as a garrote.
Holliday’s guts tied into knots. “I’d rather take my chances at the glory holes.”
“A little entrails awaken the beast.” The Twins flashed a pair of shark-toothed grins not even a mother could trust. “How could a simple whore fault a god for indulging his pet kink?”
Holliday didn’t buy it, but played along. “I get it. Only bait reels in the big fish.” He squeezed through the pilgrims packed outside the terminal and weaved a pathway to the monks. A tropical breeze lifted their robes, revealing dorsal fins grafted along their spines. Holliday shucked his trench coat and dropped trou with a shimmie, wagging cheeks for the rubbernecks.
“Don’t get too excited,” he grinned, patting a monk’s hump. “I’ve got a hot date tonight.”
The monk sneered, dragging a bucket that screamed on the pavement. Holliday shivered as they slathered him with offal—meat sludge and maggots sliding from his belly to the gutters. The monks painted him red from head to heels. But Holliday knew a lure when he saw one. He couldn’t shake the feeling that these monks were baiting him like a fishing hook.
Back on the curb, Holliday showed off his new look for the bottom bitches. They nodded with approval. “Look at you all cleaned up and pretty. He’ll hardly notice the Twink Death rot.”
Holliday took their backhanded compliments, leaving sticky, red steps as he joined the Twins back on the road. He followed them past rectories, penance sex pods, and chum factories to the Surfwall Steps. The massive stairwell was festooned with fossilized leviathans half-eroded by time. Without warning, Holliday felt overwhelmed with a deep sense of grief. He mourned the ancient beasts, unfit for a modern biome. Just like they did, Holliday felt the winds of extinction closing in. He didn’t like admitting it, but eventually, both would lie trapped in stone.
His gaze turned to the beasts sleeping in the stairwell for a sign, and all awoke for him. For a split second, hundreds of red eyes leered at him from the stone. Lovestruck. Wet. Lewd. Holliday raced down the steps as their gaze faded and disappeared. Giant monsters ruled the Strip in a bygone age, just like they did now. And Holliday was the meat the beasts fed on.
His instincts screamed with chemical fear. Run. Hide. Identity stripped. Down low with a day job. Caffeinated among token coworkers. The square life. Holliday realized his time chasing after magic was up. Maybe growing up, becoming a new man, wouldn’t be so bad after all. But silently, he chuckled at his own naiveté. There were no second chances on the Strip. Youth was the best weapon for surviving a dangerous ecology. Holliday picked up his pace to the Fancy Man’s. Tonight, he felt a hustler’s luck might change. Flesh was always negotiable with a pimp.
The Surfwall Steps wound to the rugged coast. Grey sanddunes and weathered rock formations peppered the horizon. On the beaches, Holliday breathed in the thick ocean brine. The sea churned red, slapping rust-gutted trawlers stretched from the docks to the old lighthouse.
Holliday raised an eyebrow at the procession of twinks strutting on the boardwalk. Bottom bitches swarmed them, spackling pimples, greasing pecs, and stuffing jocks with precision. A handful of twinks bolted, breaking free of their handlers. But they didn’t get far. A hulking figure gunned them down from the docks. His knees turned to jelly at the blood splatter.
“You forgot to mention I had competition,” Holliday snarled at the bottom bitches.
“You’ve got it covered,” the Twins said. “If anyone can charm the Salt Dame, it’s another old slut.” They pointed to a crone on the docks, brushing gun powder off her nipped-waist suit.
“I hate curators,” he muttered.
Holliday reluctantly climbed up the docks. Its decking was crowded with the pimp’s bio-modded procurers: Brine Bloods, a back-alley gang with no fear of reconstructive surgeries. Several bruisers girded around him. Cocksure thugs flexed their muscles, splaying bladed fins. Sharp crab pincers pinched his behind. Dreadlocked studs puckered with retractable jaws. Holliday politely rebuffed the Blood’s strange mating ritual and jumped into the Dame’s boat.
Holliday bowed for the curator, chum dribbling from his bare chest to his tight briefs. The Salt Dame scowled. Her wrinkled face was only an illusion caused by patches of grafted fish scales. Mismatched eyes narrowed on him, one human, the other radiant and savage. She pried Holliday’s mouth open, picked his nails for soot, and rummaged through his underwear. The glowing peeper slowly shifted from black to bright crimson as disappointment washed over her.
“One bad apple spoils the bunch,” she croaked to the Twins. “This one’s about to turn.”
For a heartbeat, he felt exposed, the veil of his fraud lifted, but umbrage beat out shame. “You’ve been out of the game too long,” he said. “My meat’s as tender as the night I turned out.”
The Dame drew her gun, jammed the barrel into her eyesocket, and popped the organ. “You don’t trust me?” She cast the red eye into the air. “Then let the pimp judge you himself.”
Holliday gulped as the eye drifted across the boat. It swooped down, pupils slitted into a black bar. He tried to arch a pose but only trembled. A hustler’s tricks felt cheap under its glare.
The eye reared overhead, blanching into a milky glow. The Salt Dame caught it and stuffed it into her empty socket with a squelch. As soon as the eye popped in, the woman broke into a fit. She dropped the gun. On her knees, brackish water gushed from her screaming mouth.
“Get him wet, boys!” she shrieked.
Holliday backtracked and hit the boat’s bulwarks. The Twins flashed their shark grins as they pushed him overboard. Cradled by swirling waves, the sea swallowed Holliday in one gulp.
A rush pulled Holliday under. He swam against the currents, body battered by the incoming pressure, but couldn’t slip their grip. Starlight vanished. The moon drowned. Holliday stopped fighting as exhaustion crept in and allowed himself to sink. The tidal surge carried him past whirlpools, trenches, and snaking seabed tunnels, surfacing inside a crumbling lighthouse.
Holliday floated belly-up on a pool flooding almost a third of the building. One floor up, he spotted a ledge ending in a locked doorway, two levels over stood a lone window, and a domed cupola loomed on top. Holliday’s eyes narrowed on the exits, deciding to make a break for it before the night got nastier. He climbed the walls, sure and steady at first, but his fingers slipped on moss, splashing him into the pool. A curse escaped his lips, but he couldn’t finish it.
Something fleshy, too smooth to be stone, brushed his rump. He peered dumbly into the water, watching a shadow stir. Holliday screamed as hundreds of red eyes flared from the deep.
The doorway above creaked open, drawing Holliday’s terrified gaze from the creature to the Twins. He smiled, relieved, even, to see them. He didn’t want to be left alone with the beast.
“There’s something in the water,” Holliday whispered.
“We know.” The Twins performed rites for the dead from a distance. “Your date’s ready.”
The pool churned with the gasps of drowned men. Tentacles rose, dredging a clutch of corpses fused to their ends. Holliday froze, mesmerized. The dead twisted as if deboned, writhing in an orgy of pale limbs. He fought against his weak urges, but the pretensions of taboo melted off as they approached. Holliday couldn’t help getting hard at the harem’s terrible beauty.
Holliday snapped out of his trance when a dead man darted from the harem. It nuzzled into his chest, skin soft but slick. The corpse’s hand slid into his briefs with an iron grip.
Pleasure tangled with pain. Holliday lunged at its lips, courting danger—until he made the mistake of looking down and meeting the creature’s gaze. The beast watched, playing the voyeur. Its hundred eyes blazed an inferno as Holliday’s dead darling moaned with unrestrained pleasure.
Holliday backed off as his gut dropped. He wasn’t kissing a corpse, but the pimp himself. Dread iced his veins, but he hid it with a practiced, cocksure grin. He petted the Fancy Man’s tentacles and slipped into old habits—haggling with a trick. “I hear you have a job opening?”
“Fragment assembly. Interlink divisions. Recycle,” the pimp warbled with a wet squelch.
Holliday couldn’t make out its blubberings at first. It took him a while to contextualize any meaning. But both worked the same trade. And in their business, there was only one thing to grumble about, hustlers. So, he eventually caught his drift. Being a pimp wasn’t easy. The constant churn of whores to keep this harem running was pushing a god to the end of its rope.
“You’re right,” he answered. “Good help is hard to find, but so’s first-rate ass. Mine was the finest on the Strip before it started to sag. But, trust me, nobody worked it harder. I have a seasoned pair of hands that can wrangle whores and spice up your pool party. If I get the job…”
“Fragment assembly. Interlink divisions. Recycle.” The pimp’s tendrils splayed overhead.
“Easy there,” Holliday cautioned. “I can’t join your stable yet. Only a sucker wouldn’t ask for a perk from a god. All I want is a little of your mumbo jumbo to give me back my youth.”
Tentacles undulated across the lighthouse to the beat of the beast’s breath. They stroked his cheek gently, not with desire but disenchantment, the grief of meeting your lover’s true self. “Fragment disassembly. Unlink divisions. Fragment assembly. Interlink divisions. Recycle.”
Holliday was almost insulted by the creature’s blubberings. It wanted his body to look age-weathered, decayed, and busted before he could merge with the harem— the fancies of god.
“So you want me to look my age?” he asked, stupefied. “What kind of a kink is that?”
The hustler took the pimp’s silence as confirmation. Holliday blushed. He never thought anyone would want him as he was, no less a pimp. Twink Death might not murder him after all.
Holliday gaped at the corpses dangling around him. Bodies supple with water-bloat, perfectly preserved in breathless death. He spotted a vacant, corpseless tentacle tempting him to his new station in the whore ecology. A bone-filed blade drew from the beast’s wriggling limbs.
“Fragment disassembly. Unlink divisions. Decycle.” Its burbles echoed across the tower.
There it was: a pimp’s steep price. Nothing came for free on the Strip, certainly not faith. “Is that it?” Holliday chuckled at the pimp, treading the line with god. “All I have to do is die?”
Death wasn’t exactly what wriggled in front of him, but it wasn’t a natural life either. But who was to say what was natural in the shadowy corners of the Fancy Man’s Strip? Holliday didn’t lie to himself. The pimp’s offer bulged his bloody underwear. All it wanted was him, without cosmetics or girdles. He cherished the simple offer. Strange in its sincerity yet still familiar, a body for a job. Besides, the Strip taught hustlers not to give up a sure thing for magic.
So Holliday played it the only way he knew how—Strip cult rules—and took out his pouch of bones. One more time, he rolled the augurs, itching to cheat the reading as usual. But he didn’t dare try this time. The fishheads bobbed, then sank to the creature hiding under the water. Every step Holliday took led him to this one moment, to his god-pimp. Fate called him below.
“What are you waiting for?” He puckered for the blade. “There’s no arguing with bones.”
Holliday gripped a tentacle like leading a trick by the tie. A skeleton blade jutted from the tip. He guided its sharp edge, splitting deep into his skull. Pain flared as he sank into the pool, then ebbed into toe-curling pleasure. The god’s touch was violent, but intimate. It dug its hooks in with practiced ease. Holliday didn’t struggle. The last trick in his pocket was dying pretty. He grinned, allowed his date to tickle his bits, and drank the boundless ocean, welcoming death in.
One level up, the Riptide Twins cackled at the sight of Holliday going under. The sister-brothers skipped on high heels near the edge, tossing bouquets of white lilies into the water. They began a dirge for the dead when a thundering wave crashed across the lighthouse.
Holliday’s corpse broke the surface—bone-white and oozing brine from its glowing eyes. A tentacle suspended him above the pool. His slack muscle and sinew moved as an extension of its appendage. A fragment perfectly interlinked as a vital part of the pimp’s harmonious whole. The harem’s new concubine dangled before the Twins and snapped salt-crusted teeth. “More!”