‘And what do you intend doing with the information you share?’
‘Oh, I am sure I can find a use for what I know, but you are wrong about my sharing the knowledge with Inga, Major Revell. I never share, not anything. Before I left the apartment I made sure that there was no one to share it with.’
TEN
‘For fuck’s sake, can’t you keep him quiet?’ Unable to tolerate the howling any longer, Gross left the room and went out into the overgrown beer garden. Shit, he’d had enough. If it’d be up to him he’d have turned the Range Rover about and headed back, except that there was a good reason why they couldn’t. They’d literally burned their bridges behind them.
Not bothering to find a place out of view of the window he opened his pants and emptied his bladder on to the defoliant withered stems of lupines. In the hope that the woman would look out and see him he took his time over tucking his penis away, shaking it thoroughly and playing with its circumcised head between his pudgy fingers before reluctantly conceding that she was not going to be so obliging.
If that autocratic prig Webb hadn’t been with them he’d have screwed her by now, opened those plump thighs of hers and given her the full benefit. He could almost imagine it. Best if she was sprawled back over a table, legs wide apart and dangling, so that he could see his penetration over the rim of his paunch.
It’d be lovely to hear her shout of protest as he withdrew at the moment of coming and shot the full load, in jerking spurts over her belly and into her fanny hair.
He’d pull her hand through it, to show her how much he’d done, then have her rub it all over her fat udders. Sweat coursed down him at the thought. Moving back toward the inn, he stopped where he could see her clearly and undid his pants again. Already blood-pumped to rock hardness, with practiced single hand strokes he began to masturbate.
At the third, and most prolonged, application of the cleaning-fluid soaked rag over his mouth and nose, Professor Edwards finally gave up the struggle, and after gagging violently, lapsed into unconsciousness. Even then his head continued to loll from side to side and his clumsily bandaged hands made involuntary jerking movements toward those parts of his torso most thickly covered by the big mounds of yellow blisters.
‘That is all I can do for him.’ Webb threw the rag aside, then had second thoughts and retrieved it, stowing it in a pack with the dusty half-empty plastic bottle from which the makeshift anaesthetic had come, on top of the small metal-boxed medical kit that had proved so pathetically inadequate. ‘If I eke it out, and we make good time the rest of the way then he can be kept like that. The Russians will be able to treat him.’
‘He looks horrible. What is it?’ All of her will power had been needed to prevent Sherry vomiting when she’d first seen the old man’s condition.
His emaciated body would not have been a pretty sight at any time, his anaemic flesh sagging in flaccid wrinkles, his withered genitals bracketed by the distended mounds of a double hernia. With much of it covered and discoloured by huge raised blisters that made it even less attractive.
‘There must have been a chemical in the water, a modern derivation of mustard gas perhaps. What ever it was it was present in sufficient strength to do what you see here. If he’d swallowed any quantity of it he’d be dead by now, but I don’t think he has, although a little of it does seem to have splashed on his face.’
Sherry couldn’t bring herself to step close enough to see where Webb was indicating. From her youngest days, from as far back as she could remember, right from when her mother had enrolled her with the child model agency, virtually every moment of her life had been in some way concerned with her appearance. Cosmetics, clothes, her hair, how she walked, smiled, talked, how she smelled: every waking moment filled with such things and thoughts of them, and most of the people around her had been similarly occupied with themselves.
A greater contrast with that narcissistic world than the Zone could not have been found. Any blemish, any deformed or ugly thing she found utterly distasteful and avoided, or had avoided. Here she was being presented with the incarnation of all that she most abhorred; gross disfigurement, old age, sickness, suffering…
‘Feeling faint?’ Still beaded with perspiration from the effort of attaining his orgasm, Gross entered the room, pausing to wipe his sticky fingers on faded curtains that gave off clouds of dust. ‘You need a drink. This should be just the place to find some. This way I think…’
‘We should only consume such supplies as we brought with us.’ Calling after the fat man, Webb’s words trailed off as Gross went down the cellar steps.
‘Don’t be such a fucking old woman.’
His reply to the caution came back to them amid the clinking of bottles, and was followed by a loud crash in turn succeeded by the prolonged sound of breaking glass.
‘Shit, it’s as black as fucking hell down there. Get me a torch from the… no, don’t bother, I’ve found a candle.’
A minute later he reappeared at the top of the stairs, his arms laden with bottles, and more protruding from the baggy pockets of his sports jacket,
‘Really, I’m quite serious, you shouldn’t even consider drinking any of those…’ Webb declined the slim necked green bottle thrust at him. ‘…they could be contaminated.’
‘Oh piss off, you fucking kill-joy.’ Depositing his load on a table, not bothering to catch a Riesling that rolled off to shatter on the stone floor, he delved through the interior of the medical kit until he discovered a small bottle of antiseptic.
Choosing a sparkling white completely at random, he liberally splashed a third of the disinfectant over the gold foil wrapped about the wine’s wire bound cork, wiping the surplus off immediately on his sleeve.
‘There, that’ll do it, you fussy sod. Here, try a bit.’ The cork came free with a bang as he wrenched at it, and a spout of foam splattered the floor and his shoes.
Again Webb declined, instead going over to Edwards to wrap a blanket about him. ‘We should keep moving. There is still a good distance to travel.’
‘So what’s your hurry. If there was someone after us, there’s not now, not with that bridge down. Isn’t that right, my little aging starlet?’
Sherry Kane also refused the offer of a drink, but immediately wished she’d accepted the offered bottle, just so as she could hit him with it. Gross made her shudder, he was so repulsive. There had been times, when she was resting, and the rent was due, when she’d had to take Johns like that… like the slob in the green Chevrolet with the stickers in the windows. He’d wanted her to piss on him. When his offer had reached a hundred she’d done it, standing astride him as he lay in the filth of a service road behind Sunset Boulevard.
Afterward she’d had to shower a dozen times. Not that he’d touched her, just laid there shining that pencil torch beam up her miniskirt and making gurgling noises like a baby. She’d been busting to go anyway, but it had taken a good ten minutes…
Gross reminded her of that one. In fact he reminded her of all the bad ones, all rolled together; the orals when they wouldn’t use a sheath and forced her to swallow, the annals who wanted it rough and wouldn’t use cream, the fanny hair pluckers, the biters…
Getting no response, no acceptance of his invitation to imbibe with him, Gross contented himself with sitting on a rail-back chair and making suggestive motions toward the woman by circling his fingers about the neck of the bottle and running them up and down.
He drank fast, belching loudly after every other pull. ‘Not bad this stuff. Don’t usually drink much plonk myself, leave it to French peasants and the trendy wine bar crowd, unless it’s free that is, at some buckshee union do.’ He threw his head back to drain the last drops, then chose another from the selection before him. After an even more cursory decontamination than he’d carried out on the first, he opened and started into a hock.