Hotter Blood: More Tales of Erotic Horror

A HARD MAN IS GOOD TO FIND R. Patrick Gates

She was wet. Again.

Why the hell did I sit by the window?

The answer was obvious. Right outside the window a crew of bare-chested men were digging up the road. Several of them had decent bodies. One of them was drop-dead gorgeous.

She crossed her legs. The food came.

"This doctor at the hospital says I suffer from chronic fatigue. That's a very 'in' disease, you know. Shelly, the head nurse on my floor, says he's just trying to get in my pants, but I don't know." Her friend, Darlene, stopped talking long enough to pick through her chef's salad with a fork and remove all the onions.

"Jeff, that's the doctor, called it 'the yuppie disease.' One of the other nurses said it was contagious and I must have caught it from someone, but when I asked Jeff, he said that was baloney. Still, if it is contagious, I bet I got it from that weirdo Roger. I mean, Lisa, he is just too strange, even if he does drive a Ferrari and have a condo on Martha's Vineyard."

Darlene rattled on, but Lisa wasn't listening anymore. Everything her friend was saying she'd heard a hundred times before from her. The gorgeous one was running a jackhammer, making his muscles ripple and dance.

"When was the last time you really, really, got laid? I mean laid till you cummed your brains out and collapsed?" Lisa asked Darlene, never taking her eyes from the jiggling muscle outside the restaurant window.

Darlene, interrupted in the middle of listing the merits of Martha's Vineyard, looked in shock at Lisa. She blushed a deep red, but a twitch of a smile played at the corners of her mouth. "Lee! The way you talk! You sound like one of the guys!" Darlene giggled.

It was true. Lisa knew it. She'd always sounded like one of the guys. It was part of the problem.

The jackhammer stopped. The gorgeous one had noticed her practically drooling over him as he worked, and now he paused and looked at her. Lisa couldn't help herself; she licked her lips. He smiled.

"I only got… had… you know, sex like that once, I guess," Darlene said softly, self-consciously. "It was on the night of my senior prom in a vibrating bed at the Dew Drop Inn. A bunch of us rented a whole slew of rooms for a party — " Darlene stopped, suddenly realizing that Lisa wasn't listening. She followed her friend's eyes to the window. A good-looking construction worker was standing, hips thrust out, hand on crotch, beckoning to Lisa. Darlene could read his lips as he mouthed, "You want this?"

Darlene gasped in shock, then gasped again when she saw that Lisa was nodding and smiling back. "Lee!" Darlene exclaimed, embarrassment blushing in her cheeks. "My God! You're incredible! You'd better cut it out or he's going to think you're serious. That's how women get raped you know."

Lisa looked at her friend sideways, then back at the construction worker who was gathering up his coat and lunch pail, his eyes still on her, beckoning. "I'm sorry, Dar," Lisa said. "I've got to go."

Darlene sat agape as Lisa left with the construction worker.

The weekend was a blur for Lisa. They guy's name was Rod and he was a weekend cokehead working his way up to a full-time habit. Lee didn't care. She'd tried the sexual enhancements of coke before, was even into it heavily for a while. If it wasn't for her deviated septum, which gave her voice its nasal twang and often prevented her from snorting and getting off, she could have easily been a coke addict, too. Now she was a lot of things, but a nymphomaniac cokehead would have been hitting the bottom of the barrel. If she'd gone that route, it would've only been a matter of time before she would have been reduced to prostitution to support both her habits.

As soon as they got to his apartment, Rod produced a large baggie of nose candy. She did a few lines and was on her way. When Rod used an artist's feathery brush to apply some of the South American jungle dust to her nipples and other sensitive areas, she was lost.

She had snatches of memory: Rod doing line after line of coke, then making wild, gymnastic love to her for hours on end; drinking Jack Daniel's from the bottle, Rod using the bottle on her, filling her, drinking from her; people coming and going (did she make it with several of Rod's friends — Hey guys, check it out! This bitch is a nympho! — at once?). The overall memory, though, was of a blurring, bubbling endless eruption of sexual pleasure that sent her soaring into the depths of orgasmic unconsciousness.

When she woke, late Saturday night, her body ached everywhere and her mouth felt as if the proverbial army had marched through it — twice! Rod was asleep next to her, the rim of his nostrils caked with the remains of his last hit.

Lisa looked at his naked body in the moonlight coming through the window and felt the burning desire begin again deep in her groin. The past forty-eight hours had been the best sex she'd ever had. She'd come as close to the perfect orgasm as she was likely to get; it had taken drugs, liquor, and group sex, but still she'd come up short; still, she was left unsatisfied.

In the moonlight, she played with him, and despaired. She was never going to get what she needed. She was never going to reach the perfect plane of orgasmic fulfillment. There was no man alive who could satisfy her. She was thirty-two years old and had been searching for the perfect orgasm since she was ten and had lost her cherry to a bicycle seat on a long ride, during which she had also discovered her addiction to orgasms.

Since then she'd suffered every bizarre sexual humiliation and degradation, from having to be taken to the hospital at the age of fifteen to have a chunk of pepperoni stick removed from her womb, to taking on the entire football team after the Thanksgiving game her senior year in high school. Two decades of sexual adventurism and the closest she'd ever come to the perfect cum was this pitiful weekend with Rod and company. If AIDS didn't get her, boredom surely would.

Still asleep, Rod was stirring under her touch. He moaned deeply in his throat and his breathing became shallow. Lisa stroked him and felt the fire in her loins begin to spread. Moaning, more a cry of pain than of lust, Lisa went down on him, awakening his sleeping lust with her tongue and lips.

Rod moaned and Lee heard an echo of her pain in it. She worked on him faster, swelling him to the point of release, then backing off. Rod slept on, but his desire was fully awake and standing tall.

With a whimper of despair at the futility of it all, Lisa mounted him in the moonlight, pulling him inside her, wanting to pull all of him, his entire body, inside her as if that were the only way she could ever be satisfied.

His breathing became choppy. He began to buck beneath her. She rode him, tiny orgasms starting before she even had him all the way inside her, and sighed at the frustration of it all.

Rod began wheezing loudly with exertion as he convulsed beneath her. Just when she thought he would wear out, he began to make strange gargling noises and his bucking took on new energy. His writhing awakened the start of what she knew was going to be a truly momentous orgasm.

"Yes! Yes!" she cried. Please don't come too soon! she prayed.

His hands closed on her arms and he began to shake her. The first wave of the orgasm washed over her, electrifying her hips, driving their grinding motion to a pistonlike frenzy. Rod let go of her arms and reached for her breasts. He clutched at them feebly as the second wave hit her, much stronger than the first. Her stomach shimmied like a belly dancer's.

"Don't stop!" Lisa cried as Rod's hands collapsed to his sides. He's finished! she lamented. He lunged up into her once, twice, then a third time that drove so deep into her that the fourth and fifth waves of the orgasm rolled over her simultaneously.

Rod was unmoving beneath her. Lisa rode him faster, trying to keep him from wilting. Just a little longer! she silently pleaded. She was never going to make it. He was going to get soft. She was going to lose it. Again!

The unexpected happened: Rod didn't get soft. In fact, he got harder! It felt like he was swelling inside her. Lisa shrieked with joy.

Orgasms six through one hundred were a chain reaction, constantly bombarding her within the space of twenty minutes. After that, they all ran together into one endless, super-duper orgasm that incredibly got better and better and felt like it could go on forever.

It was still dark when she woke, but of what night it was, she was unsure. She had the feeling that more than just a few hours had passed. She woke on the floor at the foot of the bed, her legs tangled beneath her, thighs glued together, a bump the size of a golfball on the back of her head.

I fell out of bed, she thought, and she giggled. Despite the pain in her head and the soreness in her body, she felt fantastic. "It's happened," she whispered to the darkened ceiling. "I've done it." The itch was satisfied, the burning was quenched. She didn't know for how long, and didn't care at the moment. This was the first time since that fateful bike ride long ago that she was fully and completely satiated and satisfied with sex.

And it was fine; it was oh so fine.

Massaging her legs out from under her, she got to her knees. From there she was on eye level with the bed. She looked, blinked, looked again, and gasped at what she saw in the moonlight. The sleeping Rod was still erect! In fact, he was more than erect. His already ample size had swelled thicker and seemed to stand taller. The memory of it doing so inside her made Lisa smile until a hysterical cackle of joy was streaming from her open mouth. Laughing herself breathless, she climbed on Roger for another ride and was instantly consumed by another endlessly perfect orgasm.

The next time she woke it was daylight and she was dying of thirst, lying upside down in bed, her face only inches from Rod's testicles. They were shriveled and blue, but the rest of the organ was still hard and raging, though it was now a deep purple color. It had something on it. Lisa blinked her eyes and tried to focus. The something began to move.

It was a cockroach. The pun eluded her as, just for a second, she saw the bug in perfect detail: its chestnut brown exoskeleton, its antennae waving in the air, the legs clinging to the purple flesh, the mouth nibbling at the head of Rod's rod.

Lisa screamed a loud, long horror-movie scream — the kind of scream she'd always despised hearing from B-movie damsels in distress — and ran from the room. She barely made it to the bathroom before puking up the bile in her guts. Ten minutes later, after dousing her head under a long and cold shower, she crept back to the bedroom and peered around the doorjamb.

The cockroach was gone, but Rod's nibbled manhood still stood ramrod straight. Its color was very bad, as was most of the rest of him. His skin had taken on a grayish-purple tint that deepened to black and blue around his neck, under his arms, at his ankles, and, as she'd already noticed, at his groin.

His face was the worst. The eyes were open and staring at the ceiling. The skin was blue-gray and the lips were white and parted slightly as if awaiting a kiss. Inside his mouth, and filling his nostrils, vomit had dried to a hard crust.

Lisa went into the kitchen and made coffee, trying to keep calm. She had to think this through or she was going to be in major trouble. But even more important than her involvement in Rod's death and whether or not she was guilty of any crime, she had to know if his deadly erection was a freak occurrence or a commonplace thing. After all, she'd finally discovered a method of achieving the perfect orgasm, and she had to know whether it was a fluke or not. She felt bad that Rod was dead but — she was a realist if she was anything — she had barely known him. And as far as consciences went, hers had died a long time ago on a Thanksgiving Day in the boys' locker room.

Lisa drank the coffee, then called Darlene at the hospital. She tried to keep her voice light. "Hi Dar, it's Lee. How are you?"

Darlene's voice was icy in return. "I'm very busy right now."

"Look, Dar, I'm sorry about our lunch the other day."

"The other day? You mean last week, don't you?"

"Uh, yeah," Lee said hesitantly. How long had she been screwing a dead man? "Yeah, I mean last week. I'm sorry about that. Really."

"Hmm," Darlene answered doubtfully. "That's why it took you a whole week to call."

"Aw, come on, Dar. I said I was sorry. What more can I do?"

Darlene was silent.

"Listen Darlene," Lisa ventured, "I need some medical information."

"Well then, you'd better speak to a doctor. There's one here right now, and I hear he has a big cock, too, so you can make a fool of yourself over him." The phone thumped in Lisa's ear.

"Darlene?" she called.

A muffled male voice not too far from the phone said, "I have a big what?"

Lee was about to hang up when the male voice came on the line. "Hello? This is Doctor Peter Ruttles, can I help you?"

"Um, hello," Lee answered awkwardly.

"Are, uh, you a friend of Nurse Lemay's?" the doctor asked, matching her awkwardness.

"Yeah, well, at least I used to be."

"Oh. Uh, was there anything I can do for you?"

Lee hesitated, then decided to plunge ahead no matter how awkward she felt. This was too important. "Yes, actually, you can answer some questions for me," she replied in her best feminine in-need-of-help voice.

"I'd be delighted," the doctor said. "Perhaps you'd care to ask them over dinner at my place, say tonight?" he added in a suave voice.

Lee ignored the invitation for the moment. "All I need to know is: Is it unusual for a man to die with an erection?" she asked boldly, getting the reaction she expected.

"What? Are you kidding?" The doctor sounded shocked, but excited, too. There was a nervous giggle behind his words.

"No, no. You see, I'm having an argument with this friend who's always trying to put stuff over on me. I say she's pulling my leg and I want to show her up," she lied.

"Oh," the doctor said, trying to sound like he understood, or even believed her, but he was unconvincing. A hint of lechery crept into his voice when he spoke again. "I still think we could discuss it at my place. I can show you that live erections are much more fun than dead ones."

Don't bet on it, buster, Lee thought with a wry smile. "That might be nice," she said flirtatiously, "but I need this information right away. I'm meeting my friend for lunch."

"All right. If we can call it a date, I'll answer your question." Lisa agreed. "Your friend is right," the doctor explained. "It is very common for the blood to collect in the groin causing the penis to become engorged and erect in death."

Lisa smiled into the receiver. "Uh, how long would something like that necessarily last?" she asked.

"Oh, I guess until an undertaker removes the blood from the body or the thing rotted away, I guess," the doctor said, laughing awkwardly. "There's a statue in France of a fallen general, taken from a body cast of him days after he died, and his erection is very clear in the bronze. Now what time shall I pick you up for dinner?"

"Make it seven. And Dr. Ruttles, do me a favor? Please don't tell anyone that we have a date. I know from Darlene what gossips those nurses and doctors are there." The doctor readily agreed, and she gave him her address.

Lisa hung up and went back to the bedroom. From what Darlene said, Lee knew it had been at least a week since she had first shacked up with Rod. She wasn't absolutely sure when he had died, but she had a good idea it was Saturday night because from the look of him he was at least a couple of days overripe. She did some calculating and figured she'd been screwing a corpse for at least three days before it had begun to attract bugs. She gave a shiver of disgust at the thought of the roach, but not at what she'd done.

Lisa got dressed quickly and, taking an ounce of Rod's Bolivian marching powder and several of his syringes with her in her pocketbook, left the apartment quietly. No one saw her. All she had to worry about now was Rod's friends. She was counting on the fact that all they knew of her was her first name and what she looked like, and, because of the heavy cocaine use that had gone on, they probably wouldn't want to get involved.

When Doctor Peter Ruttles showed up at her door that evening, Lee greeted him in her hottest leather outfit and easily talked him into taking her to the local Holiday Inn where she had taken the liberty of reserving a room for them in his name. What she didn't tell him was that she had reserved the room for exactly three days.

At the end of the three days, during which time a "Do Not Disturb" sign hung on the door constantly, Lisa slipped out of the room and out a side exit of the hotel unnoticed. When the cleaning lady finally saw the "Do Not Disturb" sign taken from the door of the room the next day, she entered and found Dr. Ruttles dead. He was naked and bound to the bed with nylons. An empty syringe was sticking out of his arm, his decomposing member was still erect, and an eternal smile was etched on his face.