Page 40 of The Dice Man


  Gina groaned sharply and the way she twisted indicated he must be hurting her somehow.

  `You bastard!' she snapped shrilly when she got her mouth free. She hit him as good a slap as she could from her close-up position, and he grinned and sunk his teeth into her shoulder. As she scratched at his back he toppled her backward onto the rug with a tremendous crash. When he raised himself off her to place his weapon into the disgusting cesspool, she got in a few blows at his face and then he was in and working.

  There wasn't much to see: just Osterflood's big buttocks moving a few inches up and down as he plowed away at Gina's rich earth and her fingers splayed out on his back and occasionally changing position, as if she were playing chords. Gina was groaning, when Osterflood abruptly rose to his knees, flipped her over onto her stomach like a farmer working with a sack of wheat and fumbled with his weapon to reengage the enemy in her other cave. When he thrust himself into her and fell forward upon her Gina let loose a terrible scream. It corresponded so perfectly with gun shots from the screen that I looked back quickly to see a beautiful, frightened peasant girl with a ripped blouse clutching the arm of the number one earnest American and the peasant spies blasting away from behind a chicken coop.

  Gina was fighting with her right arm to raise herself and twist Osterflood off and out -of her, but he bore down, pulling, her hair with one hand and controlling her right arm with the other. His professional-wrestler role seemed to be paying off.

  `Bitchbitchbitch,' he gasped, and the American was dragging the beautiful peasant girl through a cornfield and bullets were shattering the kernels every which way and Osterflood was banging Gina's head against the rug and the American tossed a grenade and whomp! the chink peasants were splattered like fertilizer over the cornfield and 'Diediedie-bitchbitch,' Osterflood hissed and with a supreme thrust deep into her anus they both screamed.

  An unearthly silence filled the room. The beautiful peasant girl was looking with most frightened eyes from the pieces of peasant to the earnest American. 'My God,' she said.

  `Steady,' the deep voice answered. `We've won this round, but there's always more of them.'

  Osterflood rolled off his conquered foe with a grunt, his weapon still cocked, but presumably discharged.

  Gina's hilly form lay quietly for a few moments and then she got to her knees and stood up. Although she was still facing away toward the TV set, I could see blood running in a tiny stream down the right corner of her mouth and something was smeared down the inside of one thigh. Slowly she moved off to the left and disappeared into what seemed to be a bathroom.

  I was perspiring a good deal and a lady was smiling ecstatically as she held up her laundry and I found myself sailing over to the liquor cabinet and fixing three more drinks, adding mostly melted ice.

  Osterflood was lying on his back when I sailed back again, but he sat up to take the drink I offered him. He stared wild-eyed at me.

  'I'm going to be killed,' he said.

  I'd forgotten all about that.

  He clutched at my pants leg, spilling part of his drink on the rug.

  'I'm going to die. I know it. You've got to do something.'

  'It's all right,' I said.

  'No, no, it's not, it's not. I feel it strongly. I deserve to die.'

  `Come into the kitchen,' I said.

  He stared wild-eyed at me.

  'I want to show you something,' I added.

  `Oh,' he said, and with a great effort he turned himself onto his hands and knees and staggered to his -feet.

  I flowed off behind his whale-like form toward the kitchen and as he passed through the door in front of me I drew my gun from my pocket, raised it in a long endless arc up over my head, and then down with all my force onto the top of Osterflood's huge head.

  'Wha'sat?'

  Osterflood said, stopping and turning, and slowly raising a hand to his head.

  I gazed openmouthed at his erect, swaying, hulking body.

  'It's .. . it's my gun,' I said.

  He looked down at the black little pistol hanging limply from my fist.

  'What'd you hit me for?' he said after a pause.

  'Show you my gun,' I said, still gaping at his blank, bleary, bewildered eyes.

  'You hit me,' he said again.

  We stared at each other, our minds working with the speed and efficiency of lobotomized sloths.

  'Just a tap. Show you my gun,' I said.

  We stared at each other.

  'Some tap,' he said.

  We stared at each other.

  'Protect you with. Don't tell Gina.' When he stopped rubbing the back of his head, his hand and arm dropped like an anchor into the sea.

  'Thanks,' he said dully, and moved past me back into the living room.

  Two snake-eyed peasants were conspiring together on the screen, and I wandered over to the liquor cabinet and stared at the big photograph of Al Capone. Was it Al Capone? It was Al Capone. Robot-fashion I plucked three more fresh glasses from the neat stack there, poured in the dregs of ice from the bowl, and splashed some Scotch and water into each. I stirred them all idly with my finger, licked my finger and as a kind of dreamy afterthought, drew, from my jacket pocket the envelope of strychnine and poured about half of it (fifty mg) into one of the drinks. I stirred it with my finger again and was about to lick my finger but thought better of it. I poured the other half of the poison into an empty glass, filled it from the pitcher of water and stirred it with my finger again.

  'I'm going to die, whip me!' Osterflood was saying on his back from the floor. 'Beat me, kill me.'

  Gina had returned from wherever she had been and was standing over Osterflood, sweat glistening lightly on her chest and forehead. Her child's face peered down at him as at an interesting toad. Osterflood was groaning and writhing mildly on the rug. Then he stopped and said quietly.

  'Whip me.'

  Gina leaned down to her left and picked up her leather skirt and stepped into it, buttoning it loosely at her hips. She drew out the leather belt.

  'Would you two like a drink first?' I asked, holding the three Scotch drinks on a tray before me.

  Osterflood didn't seem to hear me, intent instead upon some inner light. Gina reached her free hand out and took one of the two harmless drinks and took a big swig from it.

  'Frank, would you like I began.

  Whack ! The belt burst across Osterflood's thighs like a cannon shot. He grunted and turned over onto his stomach.

  Whack ! it came across his buttocks; whack! across the back of his thighs. His powerful body arched in pain and then when Gina paused, collapsed trembling.

  I noticed now a bloody gash on Gina's shoulder and blood mixed with saliva was still sliding from her lower lip. She looked down at Osterflood and in a single swift terrifying motion slashed the belt across his back. Three or four pinkish welt lines were now clearly etched on his body.

  'Ahh,' I said. 'Is this part of the regular show?'

  She stood without answering, breathing deeply, a single line of sweat now running from the side of her neck down in between her breasts, which rose and fell moistly.

  'I'm dying, I'm dying,' Osterflood moaned. 'Beat me, please beat me.'

  'You white pig,' she said in a soft voice. 'Fat, man pig.'

  Thock! I absentmindedly took a sip from one of the drinks and spat it out on the rug. Wrong drink.

  A burst of applause flooded into the room and I glanced over to see a pompous little dictator parading down the aisle of an auditorium to the applause of formally dressed spics, or chinks, or gooks or greasies.

  'Drink,' I heard a voice say. Osterflood had gotten now to his knees and was reaching out an arm toward my tray. His eyes were unfocused and glittering. . - .

  I raised my free hand and Gina took from the tray a glass and handed it to Osterflood and he downed it at a gulp.

  Holding the third drink in my free hand, I sighed. Osterflood had taken the wrong drink.

  While Gina reached down to take
another swig from hers, I returned to Sugar Ray and Al Capone and poured two more drinks. I marched back again with my tray of three and stood just beside and behind Gina.

  'You're trying to kill me,' Osterflood said looking up at us from his knees. 'You shit-filled monster, you're trying to kill me:' He was staring at us glassy-eyed.

  Gina looked down at him, her large brown eyes radiant and curious, and for the first time she smiled, slightly.

  'Bad trip?' she asked quietly.

  'I see it all now,' Osterflood shouted at us. 'You're the killer!' He began shaking his head and trembling. 'Now I see, now I see! It's you!' The 'Thock!' that caught him across the face surprised both him and me, and he fell forward with a crash.

  `Yes, yes, whip me, I deserve it,' he groaned. 'Hit me again.'

  Gina looked down at him, the soft smile still on her face, and sweat running now from her forehead, chin and both heaving breasts.

  She raised the belt slowly till her arm was perpendicular above her head and then dropped it in a lazy arc snapping the belt at only half-force across his back. Osterflood writhed nevertheless, and Gina's soft smile became a sneer.

  I put my tray full of drinks on the couch and came over behind Gina, reached my arms around and enclosed at last in my hands those two marvelous mounds. They were hot and sweaty and firm and I grunted with pleasure. As I squeezed and pinched, and sucked at the salty sweat of her neck, I felt Gina lean back again and 'whack' across Osterflood's buttocks, and after a short pause another heaving motion and 'whock!' and Osterflood and I both grunted, although presumably for different reasons. Then Gina turned to me and we were two hot mouths endlessly exploring each other's watery, snake-bulging wombs. Although my hands had removed her leather skirt and were around her bulging buttocks and digging into everything they could, my world was soon composed of mouths, huge caverns of tongue-tangled flow of motion endlessly plunging and being plunged, biting and being bitten, rising and sinking, filling and emptying, and I felt something scratching at my leg.

  'A drink,' Osterflood was saying. 'A drink, you fucking killer. One last drink.'

  Reluctantly, I tore my hands away from Gina and dreamwalked over to the couch and got him the desired drink.

  I straight-lined and she broke her mouth from mine and arched her head away from mine and said shrilly 'Suck me, suck me,' and cupped her breasts out toward me.

  I lowered my open mouth on to one and as I tongued and sucked and nibbled she moaned 'I'm a woman! I'm a woman!'

  'I know, I know,' I said as I moved from one mound of hot, salty honey to the next. She squeezed my head against her.

  'Hard, harder,' she moaned. I opened my mouth so wide I was afraid I'd never get it closed again and had a surrealistic vision of going through the rest of my life like a gaping fish and I drew all of 'one breast into my mouth as far as I could while I squeezed her other with both my hands pinching the nipple hard. Groaning, she pressed me tighter, shuddered, and began to pump her pelvis against me hard, and it flowed out of me at last, a molten roll of white womb-wetting foam, her fold opening and closing upon it swallowing with its honeyed tongues, her golden bowls rolling with my roll, filling where I rose, parting with my plunge, delirious, writhing, moaning, groaning done.

  Or mostly done. I un-swallowed her breast and managed to half-close my mouth and drew her warm soft body to mine and we churned at half-speed with each other, still enjoying the feel of it, my chin in her hair now, her lips and tongue idly tasting of the sweat of my chest and Osterflood was talking about dying dying dying and someone else was saying we could get there faster in a Ford.

  We sat there for two or three minutes, Osterflood grunting, his face twisted occasionally into a horrible grin and the canned hilarious laughter blasting out at us from the television set like slop thrown out a tenement window.

  Then I lifted Gina off me and walked over and collapsed into a sprawled sitting position on the couch wondering vaguely what time it was Agatha Christie time and how the great, clean, graceful murder, without fuss, emotion or violence, done with dignity, grace and aesthetic bliss was ever going to end. The handsome, silly husband was trying to explain to his pretty, silly wife why it was necessary to tell their teen-age daughter about the facts of life.

  'If I thought it was bees, she can think it is bees,' the woman said and the actors paused to let the machine roar away its bubbled laughter.

  Gina stood again now over Osterflood, the belt still in her hand - she hadn't released it from her hand since her first blow twenty minutes before. Osterflood was on his back, arcing slightly, his feet toward the couch. He was grinning moronically, his eyes bulging and his cock stiff.

  'I never meant to . .'

  he was muttering. `Nice boys nice girls . . . mistake . , . I'm sick, I'm sick . . . dying . . . see that now .. NEVER AGAIN ... be a good boy, Mommy, beat me BEAT ME.'

  Gina stepped over him with one leg so she straddled his head and shoulders and faced his feet. She leaned forward a few inches and let a gob of spit fall on to his belly.'

  'Now, Joanie, there's something I must tell you tonight,' the husband was saying.

  'Sure, Dad, but make it quick, Jack's coming with his motorcycle.'

  Gina, smiling a child's soft smile, raised her arm and swept it down thock! the belt tearing across his thighs. Again she raised it fascinating to watch the coil of her wet flesh, semen streaking the inside of her spread thighs, the breasts trembling as she hesitated at the top of the arc - and then whack! across his belly and extended rod. He screamed and vaulted his back, the grin still there, laughter from the television set spitting into the room like froth from a mad dog.

  Osterflood's moans and mumbles were mostly incoherent now, and Gina rose and struck twice more with all her force, he now totally vaulting his back as if raising his stomach and thighs to embrace the hissing belt.

  'Teen-agers today are so violent,' the silly woman said to a silly woman friend as they walked their dogs.

  Gina came back toward the couch, large eyes smiling at me, and took into her warm mouth my now boneless meat and sucked and chewed at it with good appetite. I smiled and stared stupidly at the image of two men on the screen, unearnest, silly men, talking earnestly about the horsepower of their earnest cars and of drag racing against their son's earnest motorcycles.

  Gina, her head bent back now, breasts trembling, had cupped my balls and buttocks with her hands and was forcing my now bulging, slimy, hot-tipped cock deeper into her mouth, pressing with her hands to force me deeper deeper plunging, a lady sword-swallower arching ever back deep to the throat moaning working me deeper, then out, gasping blowing licking open and down down again swallow whole the great worn weapon of the much beloved foe down fascinating, will my whole body be sucked up into her like a cartoon ghost by a vacuum cleaner? down, her finger now in my anus, then she pulling me out of her mouth breathing me, tonguing me, sliding a long hard kiss along the length of me and then in again deep deeper . . . and up for air.

  She twisted herself on to her back beside me on the couch, spread her legs, and, curving her head back again, directed me back into her mouth and to the base of her throat. The last thing I heard before her slimy thighs closed around my ears was the roar of motorcycles from the screen.

  Gina was awash with semen and sweat and her own love juices and she used my head like a giant penis and pressed at her openings, squeezing with her thighs, writhing for something to enter her, burying me in the silken slime of her cunt until I felt I was drowning and broke myself free. `We did it, we did it!' some male voice was crying from the television screen until the roar of other motorcycles drowned him out. Lowering my lips only to her clitoris I lengthened my hold on her buttocks to ooze my fingers into her rich openings, her cunt like a deep silken pool of the finest lubricants, her other a smooth, tight-fitting glove. I could feel Gina's hand around the base of my prick and occasionally enclosing my balls, and another hand around my buttocks and in my crack and another hand scratching hard at
my back and shoulder until I wondered where she got her third hand and suddenly saw five inches from my eyes the twisted horrible grin of Osterflood, eyes bulging.

  `Drink, drink,' he said and clawed at my shoulder.

  I raised myself off Gina and tore my lower half out of her mouth and marched off to the liquor cabinet to get that glass of water. When I marched back again Gina was standing beside Osterflood; he was slumped against the couch. She held out the belt to me as I approached.

  `You want to try a few?' she said.

  `No, no, I'm a pacifist,' I said. `Thanks anyway.'

  She stepped to his back and raised the belt, but I told her to wait until I had given him the glass of water. He turned to me and stretched out a trembly hand for the glass, took it, raised it to his lips and began gulping. Ssssst Thack! The belt tore across the hand and the glass and water spilled to the floor.

  'That wasn't very nice,' I said, wondering if Osterflood were immortal.

  She smiled bright-eyed at me, like a schoolgirl who has just accomplished a particularly good trick with a jump rope.

  `Save me, Rhinehart, save me,' Osterflood mumbled and clawed at my knees. But without Gina's striking him again he abruptly rolled on to the floor and vaulted his back. Gina smiled at him, but he stayed in his vaulted position; he was in another convulsion. As I watch, the belt fell lightly across my hair to my shoulder and Gina looped it so that she had me around the neck with the belt as noose and led me to the chair and forced me down into it.

  She straddled me, lowering herself in little dips against the stiff cock which she maneuvered first against and slightly into one hole and then the other and then she slid over me, burying the cock deep within her. We rubbed now, and bit and clawed, and squeezed and pinched and sucked and laughter poured over us and Osterflood gurgled and choked and a voice said, `So it isn't bees after all,' and I rose up and holding Gina tight to me by the buttocks I fell to a kneeling position on the rug and then forward on top of her she already coming in a frenzied pelvic pulsation sucking and biting at my shoulder and I rammed and Osterflood gurgled and I rammed at her rammed and rammed and rammed my mouth filled with breast and laughter flowing over us ramming ram and it ah flowed out hot ah molten wet lava pouring into her in ah in ah in and ram once more time GOOD AH ah ah good good good seeing Osterflood to my left beautiful grinning lying on his side knees drawn toward his belly his face beautiful twisted in its hideous grin his cock stiff his belly spilling his semen pools onto the rug his eyes open glassy, staring, fixed, unmoving, dead.