Read Online Mark Henry_Amanda Feral 01 by Happy Hour of the Damned - Free Book Online Page B

skimmed my fingers across the pale skin on my arm. “So, is anything being done about the mistakes ?”
    “Oh, there’s a group that takes care of them,” Gil said, flippantly, discarding the topic, as if to say, we don’t discuss the help .
    I looked to Ricardo for elaboration, but none followed.
    Gil palmed a business card into mine that simply read Gilbert on one side and his phone number on the other, an old-fashioned calling card. How old was he? Ancient was my guess. He excused himself and sauntered up through the amphitheater of booths.
     
    Ricardo and I discussed some basic principles of the living dead 34 , while prowling the nearby waterfront. It was quiet, despite the cars rumbling on the viaduct above. An anorexic drizzle flitted through the air like the mist at the bottom of a falls.
    We settled into stride, one hundred feet behind two street kids that Ricardo suggested were likely runaways or hustlers. He listed several identifying characteristics, for which I found immediate rebuttals.
    “Jeans shredded at the ankle and knee,” he said, gesturing.
    “You can’t use that. That’s totally in fashion, right now.”
    “Dirty, unevenly shorn hair?” he suggested. Throwing it out there to see if it would stick.
    “Well, they are boys, Ricardo.”
    “Alright, point taken.” He tilted his head in the air, breathing in a familiar scent, indicating for me to do the same. “How do you explain the pungent aroma of patchouli oil, and underneath that, unwashed filth, old sweat, and dried semen?”
    “Whatever. There is no way you can smell—” I stopped talking. There was a smell in the air. I closed my eyes to focus. A combination of odors—the sharpness of dirty, crusty human creases; the slight chemical smell of ejaculate—it wafted from the boys like a rest-stop washroom; and the topper aroma—that ’80s pot smoke cover-up—patchouli. “Jesus. How can we smell all this?”
    “Some very well-known sommeliers are part of the family,” he said.
    “Seriously.”
    “You are a hunter, now. It is very important for you to sniff out appropriate victims, to determine both accessibility, and the potential for violent struggle.”
    “Uh—No,” I said, pointing at the boys. “Filth plus sweat plus semen equals an unscathed survivor. The only way those boys are going into this mouth is after a thorough scrubbing. I’m talking rubber gloves, bleach, and steel wool.”
    “That can be arranged.” He wiped what could have been drool from the corners of his mouth. “But I think, if you’ll just smell again. Inhale, deeper this time.”
    We gained on the boys, who ducked into a covered bus shelter. We stopped in the shadows of a boarded-up chowder house, still a good twenty yards away from our proposed quarry. I closed my eyes and sniffed the misty air, this time with more detail. First was the fallen rain, but beyond its freshness, patchouli, thick, seemingly impenetrable, faintly moldy, like the icky proximity of a rock concert queue. The scent hid the sweaty perfume of unwashed armpit and ass, and another, what Ricardo must have picked up as distinctly hustler—semen. These two boys, neither older than sixteen, survived the streets by way of their mouths. How does it come to this? I thought, but I knew—intolerance, alcohol, rage, neglect, the kid becomes fed up, tired, and runs. Everyone knows. Disney and Simba don’t tell you, but moments like these are points on the circle of life; on your knees, taking some old man’s cock-spit on your cheek and dirty clothes.
    Secondary smells came, deeper than those first, obvious fragrances: mustard crusted at the corner of a mouth, the ashy stink of smoke on a breath, the yellow of bile in a stomach. My head swam in the combination of scents; a drunken feeling passed through me; I was spinning, floating. I was no longer connected to my body.
    Swirling. Swirling. I thought of tidal pools and eddies and swirling.
    It seemed like minutes passed, not real