Free Sloughing Off the Rot by Lance Carbuncle Page B

his energy. And with the flowing river of fire above and Wormwood casting down its green aura, he drifted back toward sleep, only to be accosted again by Lovethorn’s horrid, laughing countenance. Then the falling. And the jerking back awake. And the discomfort. And so it went through the night for John.
    On the ground around John, the others lapsed in and out of sleep and were also visited by Lovethorn’s empty eye sockets and his mocking laughter. They all squirmed restlessly and fought and fit with sleep. Like John, the men all found sleep elusive until just before sunrise, when exhaustion finally won out and the men achieved the empty, dreamless slumber.

     
    Santiago shook John awake. The smell of cooked dirt-rat filled the air. Crazy Talk and Two-Dogs-Fucking still lay on the ground, each on one side of Alf the Sacred Burro and cuddling up to the sickly donkey. John’s stirring awakened Alf. The burro choked on a gob of mucous and coughed it out onto Two-Dogs-Fucking, waking the bulbous slackard. Crazy Talk did not move.
    “Crazy Shit over there didn’t make you any breakfast, did he, now?” Santiago said, and he handed John a pointed stick with a fire-grilled dirt-rat impaled on it. His mossy smile sought John’s approval.
    The fat rodent’s eyes bulged and remnants of singed hair stuck to its head and ears. Grease dripped from the rat’s face. The smell of the rat-kabob tickled John’s salivary glands and a borborygmus rumbled in his gut. He ingurgitated all edible parts of the animal before rising and relieving his morning wood with a drawn-out arc of urine.
    Even after pissing a quart of fluid, John’s erection remained firm. He felt the tickle of arousal in his loins and found privacy behind a thick saguaro cactus. With a fervor that he had forgotten, John scratched his prurient itch, assailing his loins repeatedly. And the bloody slush at his feet once again spawned new and sundry creatures that crawled across the desert floor and evolved before John’s eyes. Several of the smaller jizz-critters scaled the towering cactus and perched on its arms, high above and staring down at John. Some of the creatures expired in the morning glare and others sprouted springy legs and fled across the landscape. John heard the excitement of Santiago and the others in the distance as they clubbed the beasts that invaded their camp. The men split and gutted the jizz-critters and fed on their meat for breakfast. John said nothing when he returned to find them cooking the creatures over the fire and eating them. Even if he thought to warn them, he had no idea what he would say.

     
    With their bellies full and heads dopey from fitful sleep, they set out on the red brick road again, with a direction and intent toward Android Lovethorn. The roiling river of clouds flowed rapidly overhead in the same direction as the men. Bloodwood trees occasionally shot from the ground along the side of the trail, spreading their limbs in a welcome gesture to the sky above, their rough bark oozing sweet, rubious sap. And they came upon a bloodwood tree with a man dangling by the neck from a rope, his face pecked clean by scavengers but the rest of his body intact and mummified by the desert sun. The man wore clothes of fine white linen, just like John’s. His feet sported sandals identical to John’s. His hair, crusted with sap from the tree, approximated the same shade and length as John’s longish brown hair.
    Crazy Talk stepped off of the path and peeled bark from the tree. He picked tiny pink grubs from the stripped bark and popped them in his mouth like a handful of pinyon nuts. Grabbing one of the dangling body’s feet, Crazy Talk set the corpse to swinging back and forth like a rotten-meat pendulum. “Word is, this the tenth specimen of similar linen-wrapped fruit that these trees have borne in so many moons,” said Crazy Talk, picking more grubs from the bark and eating them as the body swung behind him.
    “Well,