The Mammoth Book of Best New Erotica 4 Read online

  He adjusted the straps, pulled the buckles. He hadn’t attached the blinkers yet; he wanted to watch her eyes as the bit settled to the soft roof of her mouth, the panic as she realized that the pain wouldn’t go away. That every tug of the reins would make its demands on her in the same harsh language.

  He stroked her hindquarters gently – he’d taken off his glove and was using a bare hand – he stroked her arse and breasts as she stamped her feet in terror. He played with the reins, pulling to the left and right. And upward too, communicating that she’d be required to keep her head smartly erect, her chin eagerly raised.

  She stamped and shuddered, dancing, careening, trying to pull away. She knew better, of course, than to create this unnecessary pain for herself, but her fear was genuine – fascinating for both of them. He slapped her arse and shuddered in momentary wonder as her whole body flushed, her pink nipples turning deep brown. Sensing his arousal even through the monstrous veil of pain, she made a valiant, clever, sidelong feint, pulling one of the reins out of his hand.

  He grabbed it back, jerking her head up and then suddenly relaxing his hold. She lost her balance and tottered forward. He pulled straight downward, and she sank to her knees in front of him.

  “Head down.” His voice was soft: no anger, merely the slightest suggestion of disappointment. He nudged her forward, the sole of his boot pressing her upper back and shoulders toward the ground, “You will learn to obey my hands on the reins.” Her hindquarters rose as her shoulders sank to the ground.

  He prodded her with his boot until she reversed position, skittering on her knees to present herself for punishment. Hindquarters. White and vulnerable. Never chastised.

  “You will walk” (a swat of the riding crop).

  “And trot and canter” (another).

  “Prance and bow” (a third).

  “As I direct you” (two more).

  “And you will never” (a particularly stinging one, for emphasis) “oppose your will to mine.” He gave her the other four strókes in measured silence.

  She gasped and sobbed behind her bit. But she remained still beneath the blows, receiving them, he felt, with pride and generosity, the dark ropy-looking welts rising on her buttocks.

  He pulled her to her feet, holding the reins loosely now with one hand and prodding her lightly to turn toward him. Proud. Calm. Broken to bridle and needing only the lightest touch to indicate his will. She was his.

  Or was she? He trained her to pull carts, to preen in the dressage ring. She trotted all over the property, head high and proud, silver bells jingling, mouth exquisitely responsive to his hands’ subtlest tug at the reins. He engaged a groom to wash and feed her, to brush her hair into a tail as elegant as the one that streamed from the cleft between the fresh stripes on her rear.

  She liked his sculptures, too – often after she’d dressed herself they’d walk over to the barn and discuss how his work was progressing. And sometimes, when her son was on an overnight visit to cousins or grandparents, she’d stay the night in her little stable, sleeping soundly on straw and eagerly lapping oats and water from her trough. She had done so last week, in fact.

  But no, Lord Robert, she’d said – and, to his shame, she’d had to say it more than once – she had no intention of marrying again. The boating accident, the loss of Edward (oh no, Edward hadn’t been a horseman – his talents had lain . . . elsewhere) . . . she didn’t think she’d ever recover from it.

  Perhaps, she’d added, he shouldn’t be spending so much time with Lilith. Well, a handsome, talented, charming and awfully rich man like him should marry.

  But she’d had a lovely, a delightful time this afternoon, no it hadn’t hurt too much thank you, just enough, just the perfect amount. Her mouth had curved, its shy dimple flickering at the corner.

  As it did this morning, in accompaniment to her cheerful greeting that wasn’t it a lovely day Sir Robert, before she spurred Lucifer away.

  The older man gaped. “Didn’t know you knew her, Robert.”

  To which the younger one smiled sadly. “I don’t. Not really,” and galloped up the hill as though his life depended upon it.

  Author’s Note: Lady Catherine’s letter to The Englishwoman’s Domestic Companion is patterned on one that really did appear in the July 26, 1890, edition of the Family Doctor, a household periodical of the late Victorian era. The paradoxes of control of self and others, as well as the erotics of imminent rebellion under tight rein, were discussed with remarkable candour in these magazines, and are not my invention at all.

  Everything but the Smell of Lilies

  M. Christian

  She is wearing spandex pants decorated with the bold black and white icons of half a dozen Tokyo corporations. Her hair is in dreads, spiced with glittering watch parts. Her shoes are new and intelligent, contouring to her feet as she runs out of the crowd towards the place. Her poncho is tiger-striped, the newest Eurotrash fad, and the bystanders can see, as she pumps those strong legs in those black and white spandex pants, that she doesn’t have a top on, and that her nipples (flashing out from under the red and black of the poncho) are only covered by crosses of black electrical tape. She is a mix of black and something else. All can see – even in the midnight glare of Broadway’s brilliance of neon, lasers, fluorescents, and headlights from blurring cars – that her skin is a brown – like stained wood. Her face is high-cheekboned, her lips dark brown, her eyes hidden behind mirrored image-intensifying glasses.

  She is running for her life: down the street, through the sidewalk crowd – panic in her strides and panting breaths.

  It is drizzling, like static. The muscle at the door to the place don’t like it because it messes up their radar goggles. The clients don’t like it because it gets their furs and leathers all wet. The street drek don’t like it ’cause it pisses off the money and the muscle and they usually take it out on whoever is closest and can’t afford to fight back. The limos come and go, a high-class and costly river of black plastic and steel. The rich’s banter is light and sparkling above the rain and it blends, as only it could in the twenty-first century, with the chatter from the muscle’s narrow-band radios.

  She runs through the crowd, pushing street drek and citizens aside, glancing back over her shoulder at every opportunity. Panic lights her muscles, and she looks for someone to . . .

  The words finally come out in an oscillating scream as she slams against the first ring of genetically enhanced, neurochemically boosted, electronically hot-wired thugs. True to their purpose and few remaining authentic brain cells, they smash back – surrounding her with dense muscle and squealing radios and pushing her back into the crowd.

  Her hands are grasping claws, her nails draw blood in a triad streak down the face of one of them (who didn’t blink against his conditioning), and her legs hammer against his ballistic-nylon pants. Her scream sounds like some kind of a weapon and the few cheap, off-the-shelf guards pull their own and track the high windows around and up – unable to distinguish one crazed woman from an armed assault squad.

  Then an arm snakes out of the crowd and with a clean, sure swipe slices her throat ear to ear.

  The city is big, but not so big as to make the woman’s throat opening up and a fine fanning spray of arterial blood common-place. The muscle reacts first, being now freckled with potentially dangerous infected blood, and draws and aims . . . at nothing but the already twitchy street. At the sight of the weapons being quickly drawn and dropped to street level, anyone who has any kind of survival skills instantly turns and runs. To a streetful of people used to sudden urban violence, turning and running is called a riot. Luckily for the muscle and the few really innocent bystanders, the riot had a place to go: down the street like water down a cascade, away from the Men with Guns, away from the dangerous Blood, away from the Rich People being thrown into their cars by their over-reacting bodyguards.

  The street is nearly quiet very soon after save for the wailing of an approaching ambulance, calle
d in a moment of rare altruism by one of the suits, and the last foaming, crackling bubbles from the woman’s throat.

  The ambulance, one of the new Matzitas, arrives with a pulsing Doppler scream, parting the few bystanders who linger over the cooling corpse of the woman. Pulling up to the low curb, it clamshells open and coolly – as only micromechanicals and smartpolyplastics can – reaches out and touches her with the preciseness of Japanese manufacture. Like-born, the medic steps from the uncoiling and undulating machines, orchestrating their movements with a palm-sized control unit.

  Screened, probed, touched, sampled, sniffed, smelled, she is neatly picked off the cold and dirty sidewalk and swallowed into the ambulance’s expanded interior.

  Leaving behind the bodyguards giving statements to bored cops, the impatient suits, and the hungry stares of the on-lookers, the ambulance closes with her and the medic inside and screams away.

  Death is too easy for me. See it every day. No, that’s not the truth: some days I sit in the hospital bay with the warm and humming ambulance and just wait for it. But the deaths I do see – the leaking, shrieking, whining, crying ones – reach beyond their occasions to swallow me, even when I do nothing but sit in the bay and watch teevee. One of those deaths can last days for me, stretching beyond its instant.

  It’s easy to die, when you’re like me. I mean it’s easy to die, period, man. Slip in the tub, get iced for your wallet, the new strains, acts of God – all of it man. Easy as pie to lie down and croak – and it’s easy when you’re like me to get right back up again.

  I try not to get used to it, try not to have them stretch so far that they start to die in my dreams, when I eat, when I’m away from the ambulance. But I’ve been at it too long – they die in slippery, out-of-focus dreams and even when I sit down for dinner, soup becomes blood, meat becomes . . . meat. I look into everyone else’s eyes and expect to see the things I’ve seen reflected back at me, but I don’t. I don’t know what they see, but it sure isn’t what I see – what feels like every day.

  Like me, yeah. Painful, sure, but you just gotta lie back and think of the money. Isn’t that how it always is? Fucking for money, getting fucked for money – I just happen to get fucked over for money, that’s all. The big fuck, maybe, but still . . . I’m a whore. A whore with a specialty, that’s all. A real specialty.

  I look at people differently, I guess. You do that when you see them dying, when you see them hurt and crying. I don’t see them as they always look – smiling, laughing, getting angry . . . kissing or touching. . . . I see them broken and leaking, discovering that they’re meat and bones and blood. I see them in pain. Had a few girls in my life, even have two myself, now, but it’s strange to see them, hear them and even crawl into bed with them when you see the things I see. I keep expecting them to break, to leak, to cry. I see it all the time – so often it doesn’t seem right that they aren’t hurting or dying.

  Morley rigged it, the sick bastard. “There’s a need, babe, a need we can fill.” Yeah, you bastard – creeps like to fuck dead girls, so what do they need? You fucking guessed it. Problem is your usual dead chick will get all, kind of . . . unappealing after a point, right? What you need is a dead chick who can get up and walk out when the John’s finished. What you need is me – or me after Morley.

  Sometimes, the most real women I see are the ones who are lying still and cooling in the ambulance with me. The rest of them, the rest of the people I see, are just waiting to see me.

  “Just rearrange you a bit,” he says and gives me to his pals with the machines, the plastic parts, the implants. Technique noir, black tech, nasty bedroom tech. I remember one of them, this fat Chinese with skin like cheese – a clicking and whirring part of his face looking me over with God knows what: radar, microwaves, frigging sound for all I know. I remember him for the clicking and the whirring, and how he only spoke a few words of English. He also fucked me, I’m sure, while I was zoned under his machines, under his knife. My pussy smelled bad the next day, something that could’ve been come leaked out – smelled an awful lot like cheese, too.

  Like this one, here: they look so peaceful, so rested and still. Their skin is so cool, so smooth. Even with the blood . . . but I can fix that, a little swipe with disinfectant, a dab or two with a biohazard absorbent towelette. Such a long wound, a thin slice from ear to ear. Clean, must have been a fractal knife, or a monomolecular wire. Still, she is beautiful. Striking. Frozen at the peak of her beauty by the knife, or maybe that wire. Her face is like a magnet and I have a hard time doing the routine things I’m supposed to do. The implant and blood-screen fall away because of my entrancement. It’s all I can do to sit in the back and let the ambulance drive itself to Mercy. She has high, sharp cheekbones; a nose with just enough of an upturn; lips full but not cartoonish. She has such a natural, wild look, this one has. I can see her not lying, cooling, chilling, in the back of my ambulance, her negative signs showing on half a dozen flat-screen monitors, but rather running under a hot sun somewhere, naked and warm, wild grasses shushing by her fine, perfectly turned legs, not-too-big, not-too-small breasts bobbing and swinging free and bare under the same glowing sun. She isn’t a casualty, a DOA, a street drek; she is a primeval forest huntress, a priestess of a land long ago paved and sterilized.

  I’m a corpse. I’m a professional victim, a stiff for hire. Pull my string (okay, slit my throaty strangle me) and I do my little number. And while I’m down there on your floor, on your bed, you can do whatever you want to do to me. Special job, as only Morley’s dark doctors could have done. Don’t know all of it myself – one lung gone for a refillable tank of air (so no breathing), blood now flowing through the back of my neck so my throat can get sliced or crushed if you like that kind of thing. On cue I get all cold, my nipples get all stiff, my cunt chills, my eyes lock up (in case you like to see your reflection in them when you fuck my stiff self) and I’m dead. Everything but the smell of lilies. Pay in advance, don’t break the rules, and you can kill me, fuck me, and go back to the wife and kids. It’s a living, dying is . . .

  So beautiful. So natural she looks, even cooling and stiffening. She is a statue, an image on clear water. I try to be quiet, watching her, so as not to wake her. The image of her, quiet and still and not really, truly dead is so strong it’s almost enough to dissipate the clean wound across her throat, the whining instruments all crying she’s dead and the few specks of blood that remain on her poncho. Carefully, so as not to wake her, I move the poncho aside to better see her breasts – and so lovely they are: just the right size, somewhere between a nice cleavage and too small. They are fine, tight cones of deeply tanned skin. I can’t see her nipples, covered as they are by crosses of tape (a recent style). I notice as I move the poncho that her pants end a bit below her navel, that her navel is pierced with a steel ring, and that she has the tiniest of bellies – a gentle rise to her stomach that seems so perfect on her. It adds something to her, this little belly does – when everyone can look like anyone (with enough money, of course) this little pot brings her right down to me, in the ambulance. She is a woman, a wild and fiery woman – all heat and hunger. Dead yes, but more alive than most of the meat I haul to the hospital.

  Doesn’t help that I like it. Yeah, Morley, make me into a dying doll. Yeah, you freaky creep, remake me so I can die on cue. Wouldn’t work, you knew, if I didn’t get off on it, too – maybe not croaking for every fat, rich slob, but – shit – I dig stepping into even the weirdest fuck’s fucked-up trip. I don’t get off, really, about lying here all dead, brain still clicking away but body faking being all cold and still, but I sure as shit do when I watch them hunp my stiff body. That’s what gets me off, man, that’s what Morley saw as he sucked my toes and came in my shoe – that I come when you come from doing your weirdest shit. I get off watching them all – yeah, Morley, too – dig down in their weirdest shit and make me do it. That fucking makes me come . . .

  My still little angel. Justine Moor, 27, type B + the info
from the ident card in her slim little wallet going past my eyes, into the mind of the ambulance. I watch her still chest, her fixed and dilated eyes. Even with a clotted line across her throat she is more alive than anyone I have ever seen. She is more alive, more vital, than Ruth or Vivian, than the other attendants at Mercy Hospital, than the doctors, than the people who flash by the window of the speeding ambulance. She is immobile, chilling but more alive than anyone, than me – I can’t resist. She pulls me down to her with the force of her dead aliveness and I stroke the cool belly, run my quivering fingers up her sides to her lovely, pert breasts. I glide my hand up to cup them, to hold one like a still pillow, her nipples powerfully erect beneath the crosses of tape. My breathing is a hammer in my ears and my cock is painful iron in my uniform pants.

  Yeah, Morley sure can pick them. “Justine,” he said with that smile, that voice, “become a hardwired dead girl, a chilling and stiffening hooker, A corpse for rent,” Slice my throat, strangle me, fuck me – pay me. Pegged me, looked right into these eyes and picked just the right job for a fucked up rent-a-corpse like me. Like tonight, man, Morley comes right up and says “– die for me, babe.” Sure, no thought, no problem, man. I die for clients, right? So why shouldn’t I die for my fucking pimp? Some bent job, some need for a diversion – what better than little me doing the poor street drek routine, right up to the suits and their rented guns, then Morley with his straight-edge right on cue to slice my pretty throat. Just another Saturday night for me. All I gotta do is get to the damned hospital, turn myself back on, get up and get out. Morley’s got his distraction, I got my money. All is right with the – what the fuck? What’s this guy doing? Shit, man, of all the fucking ambulances I gotta get one with a perv. Fucking-A, man, just my luck. Shit . . .

  So still and quiet. So perfectly frozen. Carefully, I remove the tape from her breasts. Her nipples are hard – little fingers, not thumbs. Deep brown like chocolate babies, wrinkled and hard like tire rubber. I taste one, the right one, and it reminds me of a pencil eraser dipped in chilled water. It seems to fill my mouth – the fear, the excitement, the humiliation making the universe balloon till there’s just me, the background whine of the ambulance, and this dead girl’s nipple in my mouth. My hand moves without me to cup the breast, to feel the weight of it, to gently squeeze to know its shape: it is a firm breast, a young breast. Not warm, no, but soft like silk with a thick African-mixed skin. Her skin has the weight of a black woman’s but the color of coffee with way too much cream. As I lick and suck at her glorious nipple, my cock aches with the feverish pounding that fills my head and pushes the whine of the ambulance’s electric motor to somewhere in the deep background. I hear the sound of my lips sucking and kissing her breasts and nipples. I hear my hammering heartbeat and the hurricane of my breaths going in and out.