**Chapter 1**
**Up From The Lake**
“You can’t walk this way,” shouted the tall, sunburnt golfer as Ernie emerged at the top of the ramp. It was only at this moment that Ernie first thought of how he must appear; soaking wet, mud-grimed, and plastered with feathers from the consort that was just now fading from his sense-memory along with the last light trails of the mescaline.
“I just want to get over to…the bus stop,” Ernie said.
“The bus stopped running an hour ago,” insisted the golfer, waving his nine iron and approaching with a brusque gait. “And this way is members only. You have to go out and around.”
But Ernie looked past him, to the horizon of the trimmed green, where evening traffic blurred through the chain-link fence. He pointed up.
“I just…”
“And I’ve told you bud,” the golfer was almost upon him, “you’ve got to go back and around.”
Ernie didn’t dare even look back, let alone go back the way he’d come, up from the muck of his lake flung ordeal. He thought of the many, ill-willed hands that had flung him there, and of the rara avis that had plucked him up from drowning and then tossed with him in strange congress in the muddy shallows. Was his life to ever be an interpolation of sudden enemies and sudden friends?
“This course is for members only, and that includes the path.”
As the aspect of the golfer filled Ernie’s vision the mescaline repronounced itself. The pores of the golfer’s face undulated like mud bubbles bursting across a molten surface.
“Are you sure?” Ernie asked.
“Yeah fella,” said the golfer. “I’m sure. I work here.” His stance was square, defensive now. The tenor of the words and the surety of the stance convinced Ernie that it was a practiced confrontation and a practiced speech.
“You go out…” the golfer pointed up, Ernie didn’t turn around to look the way he pointed, “and around.”
In his sparkly peripheral vision Ernie saw a fleet of golf carts closing in. Different white-shorted, polo-clad men manned the armada.
Ernie scanned to consider them. They were much the same; muscular, tanned or sunburnt, their hair tight at the sides and high on top, a few with hats, all with matching sunglasses that must been club issue, and a leer of leisurely menace all about them. Only one of the cart drivers had a woman beside him; lithe and pale in a white skirt and checkered top, a matching tam ‘o shanter perched on top of her silky, dyed-blonde hair. Her wide, green eyes tilted up once and locked with Ernie’s. Then she looked back down to where the tires ate up astroturf and crossed her arms, shivering.
Ernie felt just as cold under the cotton candy sky. In a few moments they had formed a half-circle around him. But he was not there;
he was back in that feathery grip, down in the shallows, from whence he’d come, from whence he could not return, could not shun the gift of his deliverance,
“Listen,” he said, “I got into a little bit of trouble and there’s more trouble for me still if I go ‘out and around.'”
Ernie told no lies. While another potential wet tangle from the insatiable avis wearied him some, he was far more weary of the white bus full of roughnecks who had delivered him into the drink. Even just the six of them had proved a far greater challenge than these ten or so could possibly offer.
“Not my problem,” said the golfer. His compatriots had each stalled their carts and were now standing at a marked distance to form a contemplative round. Ernie felt all at once that he was on a stage. The golfer seemed to swell with new confidence.
Ernie noticed, fleetingly, that the woman was the only one of the bunch who had not risen from her seat. She was not even looking up, just tapping her foot in place.
“What are you a drug addict?” said the golfer. “You stiff your dealer? Or no, you’ve got the look of a… of a Dollar Dueller? Yes!”
“Now hey…” but what really could Ernie say. While addict was a bit strong, he was on drugs. The mescaline was on its last legs but still rose and fell in waves so that the preppy attendants blurred into a breathing wall of polyester, and the cotton candy sky did little fire twirls. And yes, only six months ago Ernie had been a Dollar Dueller but had lost the stomach for death matches and desired no longer to make his money in such a way, despite his skill for it. He no longer wanted to confirm the world’s worst suspicions of the working class; that their desperation may become the entertainment of the owners. Not since…
“Piñata Party, eh!” said the golfer, now pointing with one finger at Ernie and beaming. The men around him laughed and nudged each other. The woman looked up, here eyes wet. Her down-sloping lips fell open, revealing braces that caught the sky’s pink sheen.
Indeed it had been after Piñata Party that Ernie had sworn off the Death Duel racket. The golfer had him read like a book up and down. But the tone of the remembrance had rekindled fire in Ernie’s veins, fire that matched the fiery sky, fire that colored the mescaline’s last dance across the light in dark whorls of conflagration.
“Don’t…” Ernie began.
“What, friends of yours?” the golfer went on. “You know we’re only sad we couldn’t have been there. Thrill of a lifetime they said. Course we would have used our clubs not bats that’s not our…”
And the practiced poison set to work. Ernie took the golfer’s throat and lifted him up. He felt the circling audience tighten.
“Respect the Duel!” shouted Ernie, “since you wanted to see!”
“He didn’t call Duel yet!” one voice called in from the crowd.
“He called Duel.” It was the woman shouting now. She was standing, having joined the circle, at some distance from the man whom had driven her in. Every time he took a step sideways toward her she took another away. “He called Duel,” she repeated again, nodding toward the golfer who now turned blue under Ernie’s hands. “We all saw him lay down the challenge and you all formed the circle. If the stranger wins then Rolph’s spoils go to him.”
They seemed to hold their breath all at once, as though to match the suffocation of their comrade in Ernie’s vice, and to consider the woman’s words.
Finally another of them spoke, “fair enough, but if you kill him stranger, we will challenge you each in turn, successively, in the fashion of your craft. Can you kill twelve men each after the other with no respite? We will give you no quarter.”
Twelve? Ernie had miscounted. He looked down at his wrists where the trapped prey had clawed in an effort to escape, then up to his hands that pressed in on the golfer’s throat, then into the golfer’s eyes, rolling back white.
He released. The golfer fell to the astroturf. “Yield then!” Ernie shouted.
The golfer did not regain consciousness, though his breath began to heave.
“Yield!”
“He cannot yield,” another yelled from the circle. “And so the challenge continues…”
“Must we?” Another protested.
“This is the way of things,”
And this one speaking was the next to step before his unfinished comrade and to raise his fists against Ernie, who just so terribly, so terribly , wanted to be dry and to be home.
…
Twelve. Twelve each one after the other. It had been six months since he had fought such. Six months since Piñata Party… he’d rather not remember.
He could not properly consider the corpses he’d created, for darkness had spread over the golf course. The woman, the only other living soul left beside him, had become a shifting obscurity.
“Doesn’t this place…” he huffed, trying to regain himself, “doesn’t it have…lights?”
He saw her dark arm extend toward one of the corpses, “Brent turned on the lights,” she said. “That was his job.”
“Oh well…I just…”
He looked back for the first time, to where the moonlight glinted across the vast lake, to where the hooting of a bird chilled him at the thought of being set upon yet again by yet another body.
“Well,” said the woman, stooping to lift a key from the corpse of the man she’d rode in with and sidling into the driver’s seat of the cart, “come.” She patted the seat beside her.
Ernie huffed, reached up, tried to wipe the blood from his eyes, but only spread more of it across his face. Little of it was his own.
“For the spoils,” she said. “You won. The spoils are yours. But they’re in the locker room.”
His shoulders fell. He looked up. He thought he saw a great bird take over the moon. Was it her? The rara avis? Or was it the last of the mescaline? The shadow was gone and all that was left was the pale disc glowering down.
Ernie looked back at the woman sat behind the wheel of the golf cart.
“The locker room?”
…
She led him in through a red door that hissed closed and then slammed shut behind them.
“Through here,” she said.
“Wait,” he said, “are there…could I… shower?”
She looked back at him. Her eyes scanned up and down. She smiled.
“You were wet even before you wrestled with them,” she said. “What did you fall in the lake?”
“Something like that.”
“Right through there,” she said, and pointed down a bright, white corridor toward a dim hexagonal atrium.
The water pressure was faint so Ernie turned three wall-mounted showerheads on a single spot and stood beneath them all. He looked down as a stream of dark red, then pink, then brown, then green water fell from his body and sluiced along the checkered white tile toward the central drain. He cupped his hands and splashed a bevy of water over his face, through his hair. He did this twice. Then he began to cry.
He only cried a moment. Then he stretched down and touched his toes, bobbing up and down a few times, feeling his spine crack back into place. Then he stood again and placed two flat hands against the wall. He did as every Dollar Dueller is trained to do after a victory; he recited the nodnol for each life taken. Twelve times, by the end the words meant nothing. He completed, “amen,” and then began to look around for a bar of soap. There was none to be found.
“Agh,” he sighed.
“Ahem,” her heard her voice echo behind him. He turned.
She was in the doorway, as though summoned. By his prayers? By his frustration? Perhaps like a demon, the Delilah that had brought all this about. No, that wasn’t fair. They were all of them cogs in a conditioning system. He was a killer after all, could she be blamed any more than him for the part she played in the horrible grand affair of power dynamics in the oligarchical Hellscape of the metropolis?
He considered her in the dim light of the doorway. She was backlit by the brighter lights of the locker room behind, so that the front of her was cast in the low, blue gloom of the shower room. She was naked and holding a bar of black soap.
She was small, the whole of her body falling in one continuous slope from her shoulders down, her breasts a faint pronouncement with large, round nipples that looked purple in the dark. Her legs were pale and unmarked, nor did any other part of her body look like it had seen a moment of conflict or wear, other than occasional exercise on some indoor machine. Was this what a rich girl looked like naked? Ernie had never seen one before in person.
“I’ll wash you,” she said, “warrior.”
“What makes you think I want that?” said Ernie. The vitriol returned to his words. “I think you’re a sicko. Getting turned by watching me kill your friends.”
“Those weren’t my friends,” she said, crossing one leg over the other. Her body fell into a shadow. Her big eyes took on a whole new grandeur and went on shining. “I liked you from the moment I saw you,” she said, “and I can tell you like me too.”
She pointed at his cock; tumescent and twitching.
“That means nothing,” said Ernie. “I’m always hard. I’ve never been soft. Not ever, not a day.”
“Tough life.”
“It is tough. What the fuck would know about it?”
She dropped the soap to the ground and then walked toward him on her tip toes, her lithe nudity shifting in and out of the light, the shadows glinting along her like reflections in a blade. He was not used to this kind of woman, one so small and thin. There was no pride in it. Where was the muscle of battle? Where was the fat of winter stores? She did not seem man or woman to him. Yet there was her glistening sex, shifting with each swing of her legs. He already knew on his tongue what it’s texture would be. Somehow his tongue always knew.
“You want to feel softer,” she said, taking hold of his cock with one of her small hands and running her fingers up and down. Her hand was the smoothest thing he’d ever felt. What business did hand have being so smooth; in this time, in this place? How had she gone so long all her life not a day worked honestly. Yet by the movements and the flitter by which her fingers glided up and down the shaft he thought that at least this was work she knew, work she did with experience.
“That’s not going to help,” he said. “You didn’t invent me.”
“Oh I see why you’re so hard all the time,” she said, touching her other hand to his forehead. “Your chakras are calcified.”
“Oh I’m sure,”
“Your root chakra needs work,”
“My root…”
With gentle torsion she turned him around and pushed him against the wall. He felt her hands withdraw and heard her feet slap against the tiles away from him. A moment later he heard her returning. There was something in the insistence of her touch that kept him there, touching that wall.
Then he felt the bar of soap touch his back. It glided across his damp flesh, stinging in little scratches and tears left behind from the duels. She moved over him in one, slow circular motion, spiraling in and then out. Her free hand worked the lather over him in a back and forth motion, and he felt the bubbles grew beneath her alchemy.
Then here hands traveled down, first over his ass, then between, into the cleft.
“Oh,” he said.
“Shh,” she cooed, and worked both hands in, then dropped the soap, then worked the lather left between his cheeks into a slick of suds that make him feel wet inside. Her fingers began to trespass into his anus, little bits of soap probing his soft tissue.
“I, I,”
“Shh,”
And then she cupped her hands as for an offering and washed the soap out, running down from his whole, from his crack, from his cheeks, leaving just hot glow behind. He felt clean.
Then she pushed him forward and pressed her face between.
“Woah…”
“Lmmm,” she buzzed her tongue as it touched his anus, the wet, warm tip doing little circles around the ring. Then it went in about half and inch and he felt his soft inside lit up and sparkle as she licked licked licked within him.
“God.” And something did free up inside him. The cheeks of his ass spread at the force of her face bearing in even closer between. She hear the inhale of her smelling him with vigor and then she moaned out in another vibrating lion’s breath that sent heat up in him. Her tongue flicking flicking flicking, working some undiscovered nerve that had him going “ah, ah, ah,” as waves of heat and sparkling delight shocked up him.
His cock began to pulse with the movements of her tongue. He could feel, as he had never before with a touch to draw it out, his cum began to build and collect in his shaft, rising warmly toward the tip for escape.
She reached around, grabbing his cock with one hand, and with the other hand still behind reached beneath her chin and cupped his balls fully, so that all of himself was now confined, his anus reigned over by her lips and tongue, his balls in sacrum of her cupping palm, and his cock under the firm, smooth command of her rising and falling hand.
“Ahh, oh…” and it was coming on, up, out faster and hotter than ever before. He felt his guts clenching and working at a fever pace, with an energy he didn’t know was in him. And she leaned in and stuck her tongue deep deep inside, he felt it reach almost behind his balls, which jumped jumped in her palm, his shaft filled with heat, and the hot cum burst from his cock against the wall against the work of her stroking hand, and her tongue kept working inside him, he felt like it was pushing the cum up out from behind, working it working it. he felt like prey beneath a predator, pinned, eaten, defeated, conquered at last.
He felt her hands release, her tongue draw out, her face pull back from his ass. He heard her laugh. He slid down the wall on to his knees and close his eyes as the hot water covers him in total.
“Killer,” she said. “Don’t be so hard all the time. My little soft boy.”
“Aye,” he fell forward onto his elbows. Oh, he dreamt of sleep, he dreamt of home. He felt relieved, he felt undone. His spoils lay somewhere behind. But first, this woman, was she aid or was she just another game? Did she play with him or did she mean to save him?
His guard was down, which terrified him. She had brought it down quicker than any other before, with her practiced work upon his body. God, he prayed the nodnol for himself in silence.
He felt the bar of soap return to the soles of his feet, which seemed to retain some of the heat of the recent orgasm. The whole world was steam. Her felt her fingernails scratch at the dead skin of his feet, catching bits of it between, exfoliating that part of him that he conditioned rough to run through glass and over rocks.
He thought of her eyes and how they’d sparkled in the setting sun watching all the men die beneath his hands.
“I told you, it was just your root chakra needed work, so you could soften up.”
All at once he felt his heart seize up with terror. He flipped around on his knees and seized her by the shoulders.
She gasped.
“I’m never soft!” he said. “You see!”
She looked down. Indeed. He couldn’t even sleep, no part of him. Not until he was home.
Now it was he turned her around. She arched back, seeming collapse in on herself until she was a single point, legs, arms folded, face pressed into the draining water, half drowning, her small, round ass pronouncing back.
“Fucking take it,” she gargled through the stream.
He rubbed his read, spent cock over her throbbing labia, painting with a big of her own foam over her clit, up the slit, to tease at the tip of her entrance,”
“Yes, fucking…” but he didn’t sink in there, kept going up, up between her own white cheeks, to her own root, there to threaten, the head of his cock at least twice the diameter of her smile, pinched hole which now winked in the water against the threat.
“Could you even handle it?” he growled. “Or would I kill you like your friends?”
She shuddered. Her toes wiggled against his knees.
“I, I…”
“You want to undo me through my ass? Now let’s untangle you. Will you die? Can you handle me?”
It was like all at once her enthusiasm exploded.
“Yes, I can take you. Kill me, kill me.” She was weeping. She pressed back into him. He watched as the flesh tension finally gave and his cock disappeared into her ass. He expanded through the flesh vice entrance into the hot hollow within her.
She gave a deep moan which echoes up around the room. Then his other hand came around, found the wet nub of her clitoris. He pressed into it with his middle finger, rewetting with her own moisture every few seconds. She shuddered, shuddered, her insides clenched. He rose up into a footed squat and pumped down into her, his everhardness moving in and out, sliding almost to a physical limit before retracting back into the steam. Agh, it was the whole world inside her, it was the world that was hot, and there was not a dry place in the world, not a dry place other than home, all this was the slick warm wetness of eternity.
She felt scared for the first time all day. The way the force worked her open. She’d never let any other man into her ass before, no matter how they’d bagged, yet it was only the touch of this strange poor boy’s cock head against the soft flesh of her anus that convinced her to push back against him, swallow him up. She felt herself stretched, felt every organ’s impulse chime in different confusions. And she felt the total heat and resonance emanating from her clitoris as he worked it in a steady motion, til the two sensations joined up and she added a new and a new heat to the fog of the shower room, screaming, screaming, screaming against the ceiling, her own echo answering back like a fucked twin, and cumming, shivering, skewered by the heft of him, the dagger deep within her, his other hand came down and squeezed her breast, lifted her up, she felt her feet leave the floor, her clit worked on, the orgasm continuing in frantic, frightened heat, his cock deep deep within her ass, and she sat on the tile and sat her atop him as she went on cumming, when would it end, the heat, the shivers, the shocks of please waving from head to toe over her, and ricocheting off the sensation of his intrusion deep into her anus, the slowing work of his finger on her clit, and possessive grip by which his other hand held her breast. He pulled her close and kissed her neck. Then she felt his cock explode once more, this time inside her, filling her with hot molten gold.
…
They lay on the tile a long while together, getting wet and pruny under the continuing streams, in the continuing steam. He softened slightly, though never all the way, and slipped out of her. She turned and lay her head against his chest, her lips full of empty words, her eyes full of tears.
“I just want to go home,” he whispered.
“Let’s get you your spoils,” she finally said. “They’re just back in the locker rooms. Twelve dowry’s worth. You’re not poor anymore, least not for a bit.”
For the first time he laughed.
Ernie thought of his bed over the bridge, of the empty dark room waiting for him, of his cat meowing at the door, wondering where he was. He thought of his snake plant by the window shifting in the night breeze, waiting for the sun. He thought of sleep and what sanity it might return to him.
But just then a din echoed down the hallway, of the locker room door swinging open and angry voices filling the space.
“I want his fucking eyes! His eyes! I want to keep them in a jar!”
“Oh,” she said clutched him, “oh no.”
“Who…” his question went unanswered. She seized him up.
“I’ll keep the spoils safe for you.” She dragged him down the back way, toward an exit. He was still naked, and now the warmth that had undone him was replaced by cold, harsh, nightmare cold, as she threw open the door and pushed him out on the golf course.
“But I won fair and square,” he barked, “who could!”
“They don’t care!” she cried. “It’s…it’s their dads! And they don’t fight fair.”
Rich boys always have rich daddies. Hmm. He looked her in the eyes once more, scanned how the moonlight played off of her slight, naked body, which he now considered in a different light, and sighed.
“At least let me get a towel,” he begged.
“Who is that!” he heard a voice shout. “Is that him! I want his eyes.”
“And I get his tongue!”
“I just want to record him dying slow.”
She shook her head. “Go now,” she whispered, as footsteps rose behind. “I’ll distract them. I’ll keep your spoils safe. They don’t care about the rules. They don’t care about honor. They’re beyond all that.”
He saw a fat, pale face fill the dim light behind her. She slammed the door shut. He heard muffled voices begin to argue.
He turned and saw the vast expanse of golfing green. So much space for a sport played by so few. Grass cut short and watered while those just outside died of thirst. His eyes finally found the chain link fence he’d first lay aim on, and the beacon of the dormant bus stop just beyond. He ran toward it.
He heard an owl hooting. Was it that rara avis? Too many questions. Too many bodies. Oh, mother sky there’s no place like home.
He ran on.
…
**Will the rich boys’ daddies catch and torture our intrepid prizefighter? Will he make it home in time for sunrise? What more strange enemies and bedfellows might he meet along the way?**
**Find out in Chapter 2: Naked Hostage. Coming soon!**
Source: reddit.com/r/eroticliterature/comments/rj4yc6/ernie_everhard_fucks_his_way_home_ch1