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  This last bit of smoke and fire caught the attention of the maiden who screamed and bucked back against her bonds at the sight of the wriggling lizards, proving Salo’s theory of the female’s superior powers of observation. She attempted to catch the warrior’s attention by screaming a loud and shrill warning call, but controlled by his lust, the warrior merely redoubled his efforts, twisting her mammaries and slapping her buttocks till she began screaming and arching her back once again. Alas, so involved had the pupil become in exploring the perfect scales and fiery recesses of his teacher that he missed this bit of proof of Salo’s theory that would have made an excellent footnote in his current project. Soon the proof of his passion, the swollen rod of flesh and scale, had poked from its hiding place, lubricated with fire and ready to sear the interior of his teacher. She, in turn, seemed even more eager for his attention, swishing her tail in a pendular motion, sweeping plants, rocks, and small animals aside with each movement of her tail, and pressing her dry, burning flesh against his.

  “You are an excellent pupil,” she murmured.

  “I’ve always thought science was the most important thing,” he said as he grasped her scales and maneuvered her under him, carefully positioning her so they could resume their observation of their research subjects.

  “Careful observation and excellent reporting. That is our mission.” She gasped the last line as he impaled her upon his burning flesh. The fire seared her interior walls, bringing forth a scream, but soon the melted flesh and stone within her turned liquid and lubricated his passage.

  The human warrior, still oblivious of the heated passion behind him and apparently unable to control his own lustful desires, plunged into the maiden, still wearing most of his armor. He thrust deeply into her, pumping back and forth while the female continued to squirm in his grasp, rubbing against him and pulling at the ropes that still restrained her. Both humans turned darker and darker shades of pink, and then red, panting more and more until both screamed loudly, and clutched one another tighter. The female’s toes curled.

  The human warrior, no longer in the grip of his lust, finally turned to see what had so alarmed and apparently aroused his partner. What he saw chilled even one so brave as he to the bone—the slain dragon not only alive and moving, but amorously involved with another, and even larger, one of its kind, both writhing and twisting on the ground, tearing at it and each other in the throes of passion, and spewing fire in every direction. Already much of the clearing was ablaze. Hastily, he retrieved his poniard, cut the ropes about the fair maiden’s wrists, tossed her over his shoulder, and set off towards his horse, now nervously stamping and whinnying.

  Neither dragon noticed the human warrior place their former captive on his horse, mount behind her, and then ride away. Instead, they concentrated on something more deeply satisfying than even the best scientific research. The student nuzzled his mentor and then fastened his teeth about the back of her neck. While the silly human pointy things couldn’t do much against dragon scale, dragon teeth were made of much sterner stuff. A burning drop of blood appeared at each knife-edged ivory point and sizzled against the student’s eager tongue.

  Now the ancient rhythms took over lizard mind and soul until that moment of fruition when pupil and mentor rocked across the ground, steam shooting from their snouts and nether regions like angry teapots or half-active volcanoes. Miles away, a shepherd hearing thunder emanating from a clear blue sky and seeing dust clouds rising in the distance, wisely took his flock back to their pens early. He rounded the first hill not a moment too soon, for had he waited, he would surely have seen the fireball that erupted and the animals, some singed, some still burning, running from the scene of passion. People say the French call orgasm “the little death.” Dragon orgasm is death writ large.

  The student thumped out the fire in the immediate area with his tail before laying his mentor down in the soft ash, for only a cad allows the lady to lie in the fire spot after sex. Then both relaxed in the afterglow of passion and smoldering vegetation. Staring down at his mentor’s gleaming scales, still burning from their fiery orgasm, the student mused on the extraordinary afternoon he’d had. Extraordinary and educational, he reminded himself. A scientific tour-de-force, he thought. Then an idea penetrated the lazy post-coital fog that had taken over his brain. Truly, ‘The Influence of Human Mating Rituals on Dragon Arousal’ would be the perfect dissertation topic. Indeed, the more he thought about it, the more he anticipated, if not the actual writing of it, then at least the research. Turning to his mentor, he asked, “So, shall I capture another maiden?”

  Copperhead Renaissance by Argus Marks

  one

  When Glenda Gareth came to the chemist to request a certain service, he told her the price was too much to pay.

  She was insistent, though. Ms. Gareth was a powerful woman, after all—an owner-operator and matron of the arts—but the chemist was immune to her kind of influence. What made him agree to her proposal was the fact that the service she asked him to perform involved her youngest daughter, Daphne. Because he and Daphne were the same age, and they’d shared the same private tutor for a while, before he’d started on the science track and she’d followed in her mother’s footsteps and taken business ed. She was a true beauty, as he recalled—a natural beauty, with no treatments or injections necessary to enhance it. He was never in love with her, exactly; but hers was a face he’d seen in many of his teenage daydreams.

  So he was surprised to learn what had happened to sweet Daphne during the years since he’d known her.

  “It’s that quad oxy,” Ms. Gareth explained, as if she was telling him her daughter only had a touch of the flu. “Both of her analysts agree that it’s a phase. Last Child Syndrome, you know. Plus, she was born in ’063, and the Bureau of Vitals claims the children from that year have the highest incidence of post-adolescent chemical dependence of any on record.”

  He wanted to laugh. He’d also been born in ’063, of course, and he had to admit that they were a substandard lot, for the most part.

  “And the lab where she was conceived was investigated for improper procedures, I heard,” she went on, heaping more blame.

  It probably didn’t help having a mother who was the gravitational center of whatever universe she inhabited, regardless of the child’s birth order, the method of her conception, or the year she’d been born. The mention of quad oxy—or quad oxyprozalene, more commonly known as “copper” to its regular users—caused him some concern, because its addictive properties were extreme. The idea that angel-faced Daphne Gareth had become a copperhead was difficult for him to believe.

  So he was absolutely shocked when Glenda Gareth told him that they would be claiming her youngest daughter at the next scheduled zombie auction.

  two

  Attending a zombie auction was a unique experience in itself, but doing so in the company of a woman of Ms. Gareth’s status and position was positively surreal.

  The auctions were not a new phenomenon, but their frequency and popularity had increased dramatically since quad oxy hit the streets. They were technically illegal still, but nobody had been prosecuted or even arrested for participating in one for ten years or more. The local Homeland Rep was a former actor and New Age guru who considered them a harmless form of “freedom of expression.” The unofficial word was that his residuals weren’t quite as much as he’d been expecting and the area dealers, who’d unionized in ‘057, were making generous contributions to his campaign chest.

  So it was the dealers—Pharmaceutical Entrepreneurs Local 1625—who handled the auctions. What was being auctioned off were those accounts that were in arrears, to whom they’d extended liberal lines of credit and from whom no further payments were expected. They were selling their clients to the highest bidders, in other words; and, since most of them had already spent everything they owned on copper, all a buyer could expect to get was their bodies and souls. They were called zombie auctions because the addicts being offered
for sale usually looked like the walking dead already—pale and hollow-eyed, with the slack expression and complete lack of connection to reality so common to copperheads.

  What the buyers did with them was anybody’s guess, and the chemist had heard a few wild stories. The rumors of people being cut up and sold overseas as cattle feed or delicacies were probably untrue, since the body parts of a regular user of quad oxy would be too contaminated for any living thing to eat. The same went for harvesting their organs for transplant or using them for medical experiments. Prostitution and servitude were the most likely options, but any addict cut off from his or her supply of copper for long wouldn’t survive it; he’d also heard stories of desperate suicide attempts using all kinds of improvised methods. And what happened to those poor souls who nobody offered bids for he would rather not think about.

  The zombie auction he attended with Glenda Gareth was being held in the basement of an abandoned theater, in a section of the city he doubted she’d ever visited before. She didn’t seem the least bit uncomfortable in that setting, though. She chose their seats, facing the right side of the small stage, after paying the entry fee for both of them. They appeared to be in the family section, surrounded by others (like her) who’d come there to claim the children they’d previously disowned or cut off.

  To their left was a group of more sinister-looking buyers, who must’ve been pimps, judging from their demeanor and attire. One of them was wearing a gold lame coat that ran on batteries, another one had golden eyes and lips to match, and a third had every visible bit of his skin dyed a glowing gold. They projected wealth in a garish manner—a tradition from decades past—though Ms. Gareth, in her conservative faux-knit ensemble, easily spent more in a day than any of them made in a year.

  The man in charge of that affair—part auctioneer and part ringmaster for that unholy circus—assumed the stage to get things started then, wearing a shiny red coat and a thin moustache.

  “Welcome, ladies and gents,” he said, with all the charm of a snake in a jug of oil. “This is the Mayday Auction of Ladies Only. So get ready to bid on some a the finest merchandise ya ever did see. Right here on our stage.”

  The curtain opened on cue, and the zombies to be offered for sale that day were brought forward. They didn’t move on their own, really; a staff of masked stagehands dressed all in black guided the girls into position, in a line. There were fifteen of them—a relatively small batch; not long after the copper craze began, there’d been mass auctions of a hundred or more. They looked hypnotized, or at least sedated. Their hollow eyes barely blinked, and their flesh was either pale or sickly yellow depending on their level of addiction. Each of them was barefoot and dressed in an identical ill-fitting norlon smock.

  The chemist nearly asked Ms. Gareth which one of them was Daphne, since he didn’t recognize any of those poor haunted souls as the same girl he’d known just a few years ago. He finally realized that she was the one on the far right, standing right in front of them. Her thick hair was a mass of ragged ends and bald patches, no longer the shiny brunette he remembered. Her face was a grotesque caricature of its former self, complete with a black eye and swollen cheek. Her hands shook, and her whole body trembled more than any of the others. The natural beauty he’d once admired had turned into a human train wreck, somehow.

  He realized why she was the last (or first) one in line, then. The girls were arranged from best to worst, according to their level of addiction or how badly it’d affected them, it seemed. The three on the far left were still somewhat pretty, not yet drained completely dry of their dignity; the ones in the middle were showing signs of the inevitable deterioration the drug was known to cause; and those on the right were the full-blown copperheads, for whom the whole world had become their next fix. And Daphne stood on the end, as the ultimate zombie of the bunch.

  The gilded pimps had taken an intense interest in the addicts on the left, even assuming the stage to get a closer look at the merchandise, all under the watchful eye of the ringmaster. Stagehands came forward to assist, and they pulled open the smocks of the first three girls in turn by means of steelcro seals down the front, to show off their naked bodies. One pimp stood back to see all three at once, while the other two began a hands-on examination of their breasts as if testing ripe melons. They seemed to be having an argument then, about whether the tits were real, what they might be filled with, or the competence of the surgeons who’d done the work.

  Then the auction began, at last. They started with Daphne, to the chemist’s relief, since he had no desire to sit through the bidding on the other fourteen.

  “Here we go,” the ringmaster announced, with dramatic flair, pointing at the trembling shell of a girl. “She’s a three-time winner, folks. Low mileage, no previous owners, reduced for quick sale just to get things started.”

  One of the pimps yelled out a pity-bid of fifty thousand; so Ms. Gareth, using a palm set to punch in the numbers, had to offer fifty-thousand-and-one to buy back her youngest daughter’s body and soul.

  “It was a lot more the last time,” she observed.

  The chemist wasn’t too surprised to learn that she’d bought Daphne before, considering her familiarity with the routine of the zombie auction and the fact that the ringmaster had referred to her daughter as a three-time winner.

  “That won’t affect the detox, will it?” Ms. Gareth asked. “I mean, I know she’s pretty far gone. But that’s why I’m so desperate.”

  “No, it won’t affect it,” he replied. He should have qualified that statement, of course, because Daphne was much worse than he’d been expecting, and his methods had yet to be tested on a live subject. “But the price is high. It’s too much to pay.”

  “I’ll pay it,” she said. “Whatever it is.”

  He left her there to claim her merchandise, after giving Glenda Gareth written directions to the safe haven where Daphne should be delivered; and he went to that place to prepare for the grand challenge ahead of him.

  three

  Daphne needed to be fixed.

  She sat in a padded rocking chair, nodding off as she listened to her mother talk to the strange boy. She could barely keep her eyes open, as their conversation dragged on and on, like slow torture. They weren’t even saying anything that anybody could find the least bit interesting—catching up on family affairs and even discussing the local weather in great detail—and, in her mind, they were just repeating the same boring phrases over and over again.

  She tried to think about other things, but she could only concentrate on one subject, which was currently dominating every aspect of her miserable life. She thought about her last dose of dope and dreamed about her next one. Her head bobbed, fighting the urge to fall asleep sitting up, as she imagined herself in that wonderland of warmth where all of her cravings were quenched and her appetites satisfied.

  Her mother probably thought that bringing her there to that house in the middle of nowhere would keep her from using, at least for a few days. She knew that her mother had searched her luggage thoroughly for any contraband before they left home, but that hadn’t stopped Daphne from bringing along everything she needed to get high and stay that way. She’d had a lot of practice in the art of deception, after all.

  So she had a kit with her injector taped to her back, the spoon she used for cooking was tied to her left calf with a length of rubber tubing, and she’d hidden two lighters in her bra. And the dope itself, in two tiny baggies, was inside an old pocketwatch that had belonged to her father, which she’d lubricated with a little baby oil and inserted into her asshole.

  It wasn’t a comfortable arrangement, but she could stand it until it was time for her to sneak off to the bathroom and shoot up. And she actually liked the sensation of that watch wedged in her rectum, because it let her know that her treasure was safe and secure. If she could only stay awake while her mother droned on (and on) about nothing at all.

  She didn’t even know what they were doing there. They usual
ly went to visit family members when her mother wanted to get Daphne away from her dope for a few days. Except that they weren’t really on speaking terms with any of their kin anymore. Because Daphne had stolen something from every single one of them—money or any cheap bauble she could pawn for fast cash—and she’d probably insulted most of them to their faces at one time or another, since she tended to be talkative and tell the brutal truth when she was hurting for a fix. She couldn’t really remember what she’d said or who she’d said it to, though. But it was a fairly safe bet that all of those bridges had been burned to the ground, never to be rebuilt.

  And that place where her mother had brought her was in the mountains, in the middle of the wilderness—far from her regular dealer and other connections, where it would be impossible for her to score. The strange boy who lived there didn’t have anything worth stealing, and there weren’t even any neighbors’ houses she could rob.

  She had two doses left—or four half-doses, if she got desperate—which should’ve been enough for the next few days, if the lack of excitement didn’t put her in a coma first.

  four

  Daphne’s eyes were closed when that tedious conversation finally came to an abrupt end.

  It must’ve been the sudden silence that caused her to wake halfway with a jerk of her head. She saw her mother giving the strange boy a hug, the same as she had when they’d arrived. Her mother had her overnight bag over her shoulder, though, like she was getting ready to leave. Which was unexpected. Surely Daphne hadn’t lost track of time completely, sitting in that chair asleep for two whole days. Unless the strange boy told her that she and her junkie daughter weren’t welcome in his home, just like the rest of her family. Daphne hadn’t been paying attention to what they’d been talking about, after all.