Selected Transcripts from the "Hard Time Chronicles" of "Billy Budz"

Section 6 (28Mar2034)

6.01 (From Billy's "blog")

I couldn't believe they wholesaled Joe, like some used car with rust around the wheel wells and a noisy transmission. Okay, he's a little rough around the edges -- illiterate, ungrammatical, and profoundly ignorant -- but basically a sweet kid, and so is Robby. They got off to a bad start, and her name is Brenda. She's their mother. They like to think she's dead, and they make up all kinds of different stories about how she died. Sometimes it's an accident, sometimes a disease, sometimes murder. It's always painful, though, and she's always brave.

Brenda was a client of sorts, except she never had money. I'd give her a line of coke, and she'd turn into the world's fastest cleaning woman. Three or four lines, and the place would be really clean -- except something always was missing afterwards, especially when she brought the boys over to distract my attention. One day, while the boys were distracting me, she took off with all the cash I'd just collected from a pretty big deal. Come to think of it, now, the money had come from Conrad. Anyway, that was the last time anyone saw her around here.

I could have sold the boys and made at least some of my money back, but I didn't, don't ask me why. I didn't keep them either, though. Now, half a year later, Robby is hogging the blankets on my bed, and I've got it in my head that I have to find Joe. Life is nuts.

I finally caught up with the auctioneer, and for a small bribe he was happy to give me all the information he had. It seems that Joe was being such a pain in the ass that none of the boy brothels wanted him, so he and some Korean kid Pauly had on hand were thrown in with a batch of Jesists being sold by their parents for the greater glory of God. The whole lot of them were discounted to "some wack job," as the auctioneer put it, with a compound out in the desert. When he checked his records, he was able to tell me the "wack job" went by the name of "Prophet Eleazar," and his address was "Temple of the Sun."

Well, the desert covers a lot of territory, especially since the locusts came through -- and since the cyberwars crashed the internet, locating the headquarters of some minor cult is not as easy as it used to be. It was Tawana who finally came up with the idea of asking the Jesists, who were especially interested in converting "heretics." Sure enough, the local Jesist elder was able to provide directions.

"Watch out for them, though," he said. "They're sinners. Bad ones."

6.02 (From Stefan's narrative)

Billy is spending a mint to find that fucking kid. I can't complain because he's paying me real good, but I still think he must have lost his mind. Just renting that off-road truck had to set him back a bundle, not to mention putting all that gas in the tank. Okay, I shouldn't complain about that neither. I wouldn't want to go riding around the desert in his old Caddy, which only has light armor. Mostly I'm pissed because I know he never would have paid so much to find me if a slaver'd got me.

Well, sure enough, we're out there in the desert -- me and Billy and my buddy Blitzen, who Billy hired so as to have another AK47 firing if we needed it -- and before you know it there's bullets pinging off the truck. We saw some guys on horses way off, but the guys shooting at us had to be a lot closer, and we never even seen them. Sneaky bastards.

And then we pull over this hill and what do we see but a fucking pyramid, like it's fucking Egypt or something. Well, it wasn't finished yet, but you could tell that was what it was going to be, set right in the middle of like some kind of fort, with walls all around. So we drive up to this big gate, and Billy haloos them through the loudspeaker, and some old guy with a beard sticks his head over the wall and tells us to go away.

So Billy waves a wad of cash out the truck window, and says he wants to do a little business. Nobody says nothing for a minute or so, but then the gate opens and we drive in. Behind that gate is another gate, and we're in this courtyard with the two gates and walls all around. Then they close the first gate behind us, and we're locked in. I wasn't too worried, though, because I figured our truck could bust through. It's a big mother.

6.03 (From Kun's narrative)

I don't know why they hated us so much. Nobody else would even open a store in the black neighborhoods, and it's not like we were cheating them. We had to pay more than the super markets, so we had to charge more than the supermarkets. Then, after the locusts and the summer with all those fires, prices went up everywhere.

They called it the Gook War, and we lost. I had a big family. Maybe my big sister's alive somewhere, I don't know. Everyone else is dead. My father and my uncle died first, at the store -- and Aunt Jin too. Later they came right into Koreatown, and burned it. We'd paid the cops to protect us, but they didn't. Why fight a mob of crazy niggers for a bunch of lousy gooks? My sister got me out of there, and we were together for a couple of months. Then she didn't get back one night, and I was on my own.

I was dumpster diving in an alley behind this pizza place I know. I figured it was safe enough because it was almost four in the morning, and worth it because you can always find something good to eat in that dumpster. Hell, sometimes they'll throw away a whole pie. I found two whole slices, pretty clean and with pepperoni, even, but it wasn't worth it because when I came out of the dumpster there were the two dingos blocking off both ends of the alley. I shouldn't have dropped the pizza, because they didn't give me anything to eat for a long time, I don't know how long. They locked me in a room with no windows. You kind of lose track of time.

It was probably the next day when they tossed Joe in with me, kicking and screaming about how he wants his brother. One of the dingos, the Arab guy I think, kicks him across the room and slams the door. He was banging at that door I don't know how long before he just sat down and started crying. So I went over and sat next to him, and he said, "I wants my brother."

I grew up in Koreatown, and there were kids there who only spoke Korean at home but still spoke better English than Joe. Well, whatever. We were there in that basement long enough so we got to be friends. They took us out a couple of times and tried to sell us, but Joe kicked up such a fuss nobody even gave us a second look. Finally they dumped us off at the slave auction, and that was the last we saw of them.

All Joe wanted was to get away and look for his little brother, and after a while I convinced him he'd have a better chance of getting away if he calmed down and pretended to cooperate. We got sold off to to the guy with the big beard, us and half a dozen Jesist kids.

6.04 (From Stefan's narrative)

Billy steps out of the truck, and a woman with a shotgun opens this little door in the inside gate and waves for him to go with her. Me and Blitzen just sat there in the truck running the air conditioner. It was fucking hot outside. Then somebody is knocking on the window, and we see this blond, maybe fifteen, sixteen, wearing this old fashioned dress like from a cowboy show, right down to the ground. Just the same, she looks pretty good to me, so I let her in.

"Oh," she says, "it's so nice and cool in here." Then she hikes up that long skirt up past her knees and starts waving cool air at her crotch, and me and Blitzen notice she's not wearing underwear. It takes about two minutes before we've folded down the back seats of the truck, and I'm fucking her pussy while Blitzen is up her ass. I mean, she never even told us her name first.

Later she tells us she's wife number six of some hairy old man who's one of the head honchos there, and she hates his guts. Well, I don't care why she fucked us, it still was a nice surprise.

6.05 (From Kun's narrative)

So beardy chained us up in the back of his truck, but we didn't leave for a while because he wanted to travel after dark. It was something about lost tribes, and how they never attacked at night, I don't know. Anyway, it was really late when we got out to their fort, and they took off the chains and locked us in this kind of big barn with a plank walls and a metal roof. There were other boys already there, and the biggest, ugliest one -- maybe sixteen, or seventeen, even -- came over with a couple of other big guys and said, "I'm the boss here, understand?"

I was afraid Joe was going to want to fight him, but he didn't. He was already looking around for a way to get out. Then Big Ugly picked out one of the Jesist kids -- the fat one -- and told him to drop his pants. Well, the kid didn't want to do it, so those other big kids with Big Ugly, they grabbed him, and Big Ugly pantsed him, and they laughed. Then they pushed him down on his hands and knees, and started smacking his fat ass. The kid tried crawling away, but where was he going to go? So they just followed him around, and kept smacking him.

Me, I figured if the other Jesist kids weren't going to help him, why should I?

Then Big Ugly drops his own pants, and I see the ugliest dick I ever saw. It's big, and kind of crooked, and covered with bumpy blue veins, and hard as a rock. And Big Ugly just spit on it once and, next thing you know, he's ramming it up the fat kid's ass. Well, the fat kid starts, uh, not screaming, not exactly -- but this high, breathy kind of squeak, over and over. And Big Ugly is laughing, yelling, "Squeal, piggy, squeal! Go on, little piggy, squeal!"

Me, I grew up in the city, and I never heard a pig squeal, but maybe that's what it sounds like. And I was feeling like if there was a two-by-four or something I'd want to smash it over Big Ugly's head, except for those other big kids standing there watching, waiting their turns.

Then somebody else was laughing. We all looked up, and we saw her, looking through some kind of door or hatchway or something up by the roof, too high to reach. She was maybe fifteen, sixteen, with long blond hair in a braid. And she said, "Look at you, pig fucker! No wonder you're a slave. You never deserved any better, pig fucker."

So there's Big Ugly, standing there with his dick gone all soft and small and covered with blood and shit, and that girl who is just about his age or maybe younger is laughing at him for fucking the fat kid. For a second I almost felt sorry for him, but then there was the fat kid, curled up in a ball on the floor, making these little whimpery noises.

I think it was Joe who blew out the lamp.

6.06 (From Billy's "blog")

The Temple of the Sun looks like some Mormon offshoot, probably two or three times removed. They had the beards, and the polygamy, and the 19th century clothes. On the other hand, there's that pyramid they're building, which the Prophet Eleazar says he wants to cover with solar collectors. I didn't talk much theology, though -- all I wanted to do was negotiate a price for Joe.

Eleazar didn't even know if he had a Joe, and he didn't much care. If slaves had any use for names, then his slave drivers could worry about it. That didn't stop him negotiating a price, though, because one was the same as the next to him. If I made the right offer, I could have my pick. Well, I had my pick, but he didn't have Joe. Motherfucker.

I wonder if Blitzen knows he was named after one of Santa's reindeer. Probably not. Santa, it seems, was a socialist, and was eliminated rather a long time ago.

6.07 (From Kun's narrative)

I didn't sleep too good that night, even though I was really tired. The fat kid was wheezing real loud for a while, like my cousin did sometimes, but my cousin had his rescue inhaler in those days. The fat kid had nothing but blood leaking out his ass. There was nothing I could do for him, though, so I tried to sleep. One time I woke up and didn't hear the wheezing. The next time I woke up the sun was shining through the door, and there were women with long dresses yelling at us and cracking whips.

And the fat kid was dead. And the women were really pissed about that.

I knew it was the asthma that killed the fat kid -- he really didn't get fucked to death -- but there he was with his pants off and blood on his ass, and he was dead. What was someone supposed to think?

So, believe it or not, they lined us all up and told us to drop out pants, and one of them went down the line sniffing our dicks. If you ask me, we all kind of smelled like shit, but she zeroed right in on Big Ugly. Well, he looked so scared you didn't have to sniff the shit on his dick to know he was the one who fucked the fat kid. They got a rope and tied him up to one of the posts that holds up the roof, and then they whipped the shit out of him. He was passed out when they took the rest of us out to work on their stupid pyramid.

It's not a real pyramid, because the real ones are made of stone. We had school in Koreatown, so I know about that. Their pyramid is just a big pile of dirt, beaten down hard. Our job was putting a layer of adobe bricks on the outside, I guess to make it last longer. It was hot as hell, and there wasn't much water. When we got back to the barn that night, Big Ugly was still hanging from the post, but the fat kid was gone.

6.08 (From Stefan's narrative)

The kid Old Billy came back with didn't look anything like the little kid Robby, and sure enough, he wasn't the kid Joe. He's Chinese or something, and I couldn't figure what Billy wanted with him. Anyway, Billy had him talking in the recorder a good hour or so when we got back on the road. Me and Blitzen stayed in the back of the van, watching out for what that horny girl said were the Lost Tribes of Israel. Funny, but when we finally got to see them, they didn't look Jewish at all.

6.09 (From Kun's narrative)

There was this patch of dry blood on the floor, from the fat kid. It looked like -- well, it looked like what it was, an ass print. So the biggest one of the Jesist kids, maybe a year or two older than the rest, gets the others to kneel around it in a circle and start praying. Most of my family were Christians, but I don't think anybody would have thought of praying around some bloody ass print. Those Jesists, though, they got down on their knees, hands pressed together in front of them, praying Jesus this and savior that, I don't know.

There was this other kid they called Jacko who was already there when we came, kind of a wise guy, and he says, "Hey, look, they're gonna have a circle jerk. Maybe Danny ought to dance for them." And some of the others yell, "Yeah! Dance for them, Danny!"

Now, Danny is a real fag, and he didn't need much encouragement. He yanks off his shirt and pants, jumps right in the middle of the Jesist kids' prayer circle, right on that bloody ass print, and starts dancing around in his ratty underpants. The kid has an ass like a girl -- well, better than most girls. Most girls would kill for an ass that good, round, and kind of soft and firm at the same time, if you know what I mean. So he yanks the back of his underpants up his crack and starts wiggling that ass in the Jesist kids' faces. The other kids, meanwhile, are clapping in rhythm and singing, "Go, go, Danny, shake it all around."

Now, the younger Jesist kids didn't know what to make of it, and a couple of them even blushed a little, but they kept on praying, repeating whatever the big one said. And the big one started praying louder, saying, "Lord, bless the soul of our friend Lardo..." Yeah, I thought it was funny too -- he was dead, and they were praying for him, but they were still calling the fat kid "Lardo." Maybe nobody even knew his real name.

Well, anyway, the big one has his hands together and he's praying as loud as he can for poor Lardo, but he can't get his eyes off Danny's ass! It was hysterical! And, sure enough, he pops a boner and tents out his pants. Well, Jacko sees it, of course, and says, "Oooh, I think somebody wants to come out and play." Then he goes and squats down next to the big Jesist kid and opens the kid's fly. I guess the kid didn't have any underpants, because his stiff dick pops right out.

I almost felt sorry for that Jesist kid, you know, because those Jesists made him so nuts. He just kept his hands pressed together under his chin and went right on praying and watching Danny's ass while Jacko jerked him off. He had big tears rolling down his face, but he couldn't stop praying, and he couldn't stop watching, and finally he couldn't help shooting a big wad all over Danny's feet and Lardo's bloody ass print.

6.10 (From Billy's "blog")

I like Kun. He's a very bright boy -- not especially cute, but quick, and literate. Not many boys I meet these days actually read and write.

The Koreans kept their schools going long after public education collapsed, but the Gook Wars put an end to that. I've always been of the opinion that the plutocrats were somehow responsible for the Gook Wars, redirecting black rage against the Asian communities before it was let loose on their own skinny white asses. They certainly managed to turn a profit on the wars, running hour after hour of violent and bloody footage on their television news channels, all the while selling soap and cereal and pharmaceuticals and fear.

We don't always have electricity, but when we do, we can count on television to be there for us. I try not to watch too often, but it's been a hard habit to break.

Anyway, I like Kun -- but how many boys can I keep?

6.11 (From Kun's narrative)

I turned to look at Joe when the Jesist kid shot his load, but Joe wasn't watching -- he was staring up at that hatch near the roof where the girl had been, laughing at Big Ugly, the night before. When he noticed I was looking at him looking at the hatch, he said, "If I gets me up there, I'm outa here. Gimme a boost?"

A boost wasn't enough. Standing on my shoulders he was still a few feet shy of the hatch -- but he saw something. There was a big nail, or a bolt, maybe, sticking out of the wall over the hatch. He jumped down off my shoulders and started stripping off his pants, thinking he could flip one leg up onto the nail and use them to pull himself up to the hatchway. It might have worked, but I had a better idea -- use a length of rope.

You know, nobody had bothered to let Big Ugly down from that post he was tied to, not even the other big kids who helped him buttfuck that fat boy. Me and Joe would have let him hang there too, but Joe needed the rope he was tied with, so we let him loose. He just fell down on the floor and lay there.

Joe tied a loop in one end of the rope, got back up on my shoulders, and flipped the loop up at that nail until it caught. Then he was up the wall, out the hatchway, and gone.

billy_budz@hush.ai