The Damned Highway by Nick Mamatas

dirty and raped.
    Everyone knows there are underground tunnels beneath Washington, but do we really know what goes on there? I see Kissinger, lathered with some sort of noxious grease, wiry body hair glistening like a mountain ape hosed down with vegetable oil, as he slides his remarkably fat prick into Van Doren’s backside, while some vague and indefinable form in the shadows does the same to him. I concentrate on Kissinger’s suitor, trying to see it better, but it remains shadowed, which is odd, since the entire orgy is brightly lit. I have a sense it is not human. Indeed, unless human silhouettes are suddenly shaped like eight-foot-tall cactuses with tentacles, there is nothing human about it at all. It’s one of these whipping tendrils that the creature thrusts into Kissinger’s rump, and all the while he moans and writhes with Van Doren doing the same beneath him, and everyone else in the room joins in the terrifyingly perverse festivities, fucking with a frenzy their kind usually reserve for killing brown people or gooks or long-haired hippie types. I recognize most of them. None of them is aware of my presence, lost as they are in their throes of passion, and for that, I am glad. One doesn’t watch the Speaker of the House fornicate with his twin daughters and live to tell about it too long. Not these days, and not in this town. I walk among them, stepping over copulating bodies like they are cordwood. I bear witness to sodomy and bestiality and masochism and incest and things that are impossible to describe. Those creatures lurk in the background, thrusting forth with their long tentacles, filling every orifice, regardless of function or gender. It is very loud, a cacophony of grunts and squeals and screams and sighs, and only some of them are human. The air stinks of sex and ammonia and fish, like worms on a sidewalk after a warm summer rain. And there in the midst of it all sits Nixon, looking squeamish and uncomfortable and about to vomit. This is a man who does not look like he’s having fun. Ho ho! He looks like he’s constipated and depressed and absolutely miserable. I’ve often heard rumors from other reporters that Nixon keeps an Asian mistress on a houseboat in San Francisco, but I’ve never believed it. In truth, Richard Nixon always struck me as asexual more than anything else. His overall demeanor at the spectacle surrounding him seems to verify this, his presence notwithstanding.
    â€œMr. President,” I say, wading through naked bodies to reach his side. “We meet again.”
    â€œYou!” Here is a reaction, an emotion other than revulsion. Surprise. Shock. Anger. Here is a man who is not happy to see me. I am about to ask him more when the bunker vanishes and I find myself back in the dingy motel room, fingers hovering over the keyboard. I still don’t know what country Yuggoth is in, but their psychedelic mushrooms are incredible.
    â€”—
    At around three a.m., there is pounding on the door. I’m unarmed and in nothing but boxer shorts and thick black socks. The Mojo Wire squeals and shivers as it eats my last page ever so slowly. I quickly get the sense that the knocking has been going on for hours, as the hinges of the door have been beaten halfway free of the doorjamb. But I am a serious writer and at serious work, and their interruptions be damned. It’s easy enough to match the timing of the banging with my own exhalations, and at the right moment I open the door and in flies, then tumbles, the hotel manager, a fire extinguisher-cum-battering ram leaving his hands and flying right out the window with a musical crash.
    I plant a foot on his neck, realizing as I do so that there is a hole in the toe of my stocking. “What’s this all about, junior? Speak quickly and truly, and I may let you live.”
    â€œY-you dirty son of a bitch,” he sputters. “The phones, what the hell are you doing to my phone system?