Lucifer's Lottery - Edward Lee [57]
“Taproom!” you exclaim. “Beer?”
“Regrettably not, Mr. Hudson. Kegs of lager aren’t on the offering, just kegs—so to speak—of milk.”
“Milk?”
“Mammiferons . . .”
You enter the narrow bar. Various Demons and Humans sit about slate tables sipping from crude metal cups.
Howard points to the craggy brick wall behind the bar top. There is, indeed, a row of “taps” as one would expect in a beer hall but . . .
Are those . . . BREASTS? you ask yourself.
“Mammiferons,” Howard repeats. “They’re Hexegenically manufactured; particularized genes are spliced and then enspelled, for the desired result.”
All you can do is stare.
Six carriages of flesh hang along the wall, each sporting two bulbous breasts as large as basketballs. Veins pulse beneath the stretched, translucent skin. At first you think they must be torsos of preposterously endowed Human women but then you recall what Howard said about their “manufacture.” Betwixt each pair of breasts there seems to be an organic “chute” of some sort, and each rimmed chute yawns open as if in wait of something.
“It’s a wall of boobs!” you have no choice but to yell.
“The Mammiferons exist to produce milk in these more upscale taprooms.”
The metal gird that surrounds each enormous nipple reminds you of the connector on a car battery, and affixed to the top of each gird is a tap.
You watch as a shockingly attractive werewolf yanks down on a tap and fills a cup for a demonic customer.
“The barkeeps are Lycanymphs,” Howard elucidates. “Erotopathic female werewolves, oh, and look.” He points to one of the organic chutes between one of the pairs . . .
The bar’s janitor—some manner of ridge-browed Troll—lackadaisically drops a shovelful of sloppy refuse into the chute. The chute closes, pauses, then gulps.
“They’re brainless,” Howard goes on. “You can think of Mammiferons as living beverage dispensers. Miss?” he asks of the furred attendant. “A cup of the vintage, if you will.”
The voluptuous She-Wolf holds a metal cup beneath one of the massive teats, works the tap, and fills it up with slimy off-white milk.
“All we need do is feed them garbage and they produce milk for eons . . .” Howard smiles at the cup. “I must have some sustenance, lest exhaustion supervene the necessary ambling to come.” Howard drinks the cup of dense milk. “Such a treat!”
Yet all you can do is gawp at the row of preposterous, sodden breasts on the wall.
Hell really is a screwed-up place . . .
The feisty werewolf pours more drafts from the papillic taps.
“Howard?” you ask. “Can we get out of here? This is too much for me.”
“As you wish.” Howard takes you back out to the hectic street, and turns. “This is the ‘artsy’ District, though the insinuation, like all else in Hell, is quite false. It’s all petulantly commercial, I’m afraid.”
You pass some sort of café that reminds you of Starbucks, but the cups of coffee look more like cups of mud. Trendy Hellborns yak pretentiously, batting their eyes. When you pass what appears to be a bookstore, Howard exclaims, “Drat!” and then you spot the window sign that announces BOOK SIGNING TONIGHT! EDGAR ALLAN POE WILL AUTOGRAPH YOUR COPY OF HIS LATEST RELEASE, THE RISE OF THE HOUSE OF USHER!
“I can’t abide to miss a signing,” Howard laments. “But duty does indeed call.”
Marquees of lights blink around the next corner, and suddenly your inhuman ears pick up a punchy beat behind a low, crooning voice that sings, “Hardheaded shovel, stone-cold ground, six feet under’s where I’ll be found, so don’t you, step on my blue-suede shroud . . .”
“Hey, that voice is very familiar!” you insist and when your head-stick passes the little honky-tonk’s front door, you glimpse a flaming stage before a packed house. On the stage itself a man in a pompous white suit fringed with silver locomotes about, jerking his pelvis. He’s got heavy black sideburns and horns in his head.
No! you think. It can’t be!
Or . . . can it?
“Six for the money, six for the show, six for Lord Lucifer—go, cat, go!”
No!
“I’m not attuned to that particular genre of