Livejournal username: gonzo21
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Rating: 15
In the end this verse became fairly irrelevant in the telling of the story. My bad. Apologies offered.

Today is my wedding anniversary.

Yes, I, your beloved demigod Spider Jerusalem, once fell in love, and married a woman. At least, I think it was a woman. She might have been a demonic hellbeast from the dimension of suffering, I never thought to check her paperwork. Hah, in those days, checking somebody's paperwork before you married them could get you shot. Just shut up and sign on the dotted line bub, I need the greencard.

I'd like to think there was some logic to it, but truth be told, the whole experience was just one big crazy-assed gamble with incredibly dangerous smugglers in Cuba. I never loved her, no sir. And you can't prove nothing.

We met over dinner at the Hotel Nacionale in Havana. Cuba is a beautiful place, or at least it was, before the aggressive military action plan came along with attendant napalm flying from the sky and the patterned genetic-biological agents and chemical life-suppressants. The Air Force said they could win a war without taking any casualties at all. And nobody thought to ask why we were fighting in the first place. So impressed were we by the pretty lights and clever graphics.

They got rid of Castro though, made a Pinata out of him, and we were subjected to 24 hour live coverage of the President whupping that Pinata to bloody-bits on the Whitehouse Lawn before whipping out his cock and, ach, but we don't need to revisit that horrible scene do we now. Horrible, just horrible. Suffice as to say, a generation was avenged, and finally we could hold our heads high in the knowledge that we'd finally shown those backwater assclowns who was Boss around here. Oh yeah, we covered ourselves with glory.

Cuba still has something though. An echo, a sad mournful vibe of what it used to be like, back in the good old days. And I like places like that, the romance, I am drawn. Cuba is also at the centre of the New White Slave Trade, and that was really why I was in town. Say what you like about Castro, but at least he knew how to keep the more unsavoury elements of society in check. Okay, mostly he did it by shipping them off to Florida, but heck, another 30,000 dangerously unbalanced psychotics wandering the streets of Miami isn't going to be noticed by anybody.

Those were real bad hombres, make no mistake. And Castro's mass-exportation of his criminally insane is probably what got him into so much trouble. Communism was a dud, we all knew that. But drug-dealing convicts? Whoa boy, that's something we can come down on like a gibbering banshee of doom. And when 30,000 hardened psychotics moved in, the criminal scene in Florida changed overnight.

And what happened when we finally got rid of Castro? Why, those hardened criminals, grown rich and more numerous after their fattening in The Land Of The Free, moved right back out to Cuba, and took over. We traded the devil we knew for something infinitely worse.

I like it here. It is brutal, and it is dangerous, and the average life-expectancy of foreign nationals is measured in minutes. A land where the new-age pirates rule the seas, and we tolerate them because they're all packing the latest high-spec military hardware that we sold them for a damned good profit. And so what if they rove up and down the Atlantic Coast raiding towns and villages Viking-style, they only take a few people away with them. And a bit of raping and pillaging? Why, that's just good copy, looks good on the news. Wind-swept excitement as Coastguard cutters give thundering chase to the edge of international waters. And isn't it all kinda romantic anyway?

Yeah. Right. So here I was, undertaking a brutal expose of the burgeoning white slave trade. I wanted to know what was going on, this reversal. Huge numbers of good decent God-fearing white girls were being abducted from their loving all-American homes and being shipped screaming and crying to South America, Africa, Arabia, Europe, Australia and the Antarctic Colonies. I'd checked around, and unit price including delivery was a little over how much it would cost you to buy two base-blocks for your maker. Pretty cheap for a human life bub, and no mistake.

Or at least, that's how it looked. But I was suspicious. This was too easy. There was something else going on here, and I wanted to know what it was. And before long, I found out, from a polite little phonecall filled with that special kind of fear and loathing.

Which was why I was sitting in the lobby of the Hotel Nazionale, staring pensively out over the Havana sea-front, waiting for my food and drugs to be delivered. The House cocaine was said to be excellent and I couldn't wait to sample it.

The Hotel Nazionale was one of the few safe places for foreign nationals and journalists. The cartels which ran the island recognised the need for some sort of neutral turf, and this was it. Outside large groups of paid thugs made sure the unpaid kind of thug stayed well away. I had extra protection though, back in those days, I was known. People would talk to me. I was a close personal friend of Domingo Cortez. You don't know Domingo Cortez? Well, shit, just think yourself lucky my amigos. It was Domingo who had called me the previous night during dinner, to fill me in on what was really happening in this sleepy Island paradise.

That's when I saw her.

She probably wasn't that attractive. Bright red lipstick accentuating her blow-job lips, a fine exotic black silk dress, her teeth flashing and bright. Sharp. She was sharp, the whole of her, a luscious vibrating blade. I fell in love almost immediately. I was young in those days, and immeasurably foolish. I also wasn't really seeing her. It was all about the phonecall you see.

I hated that call. Because it confirmed something that I think I already knew perfectly damn well.

Nits make lice.

General Custer said that once, of his massacres of Native American women and children. It's a lesson the powers that be have never forgotten.

And that's what Domingo Cortez said to me, nits make lice. As he explained how he was receiving substantial cash subsidies from anonymous Swiss bank accounts, in exchange for abducting particular individuals, from particular houses.

You see, the Party In Power and the Party In Opposition don't really care which of them you support. But what they do care about are those few crazy lunatics who start thinking that maybe there should be a better system of Government, that maybe there is some easy way of reforming the System so that it becomes genuinely democratic.

The System does not like these people. These people are considered to be the most dangerous of terrorists. The only small problem is that most of them haven't actually broken any laws. So instead, some other method of dealing with them is required bubba, and it ain't pretty.

Enter the Vikings. Abducted wives, husbands, sons and daughters. An untraceable ransom note. The promise of their return one day, if you behave, and the threat that if you don't then your loved ones will almost certainly be gang-raped to death. A brutally simple solution to a problem, and Domingo Cortez assured me this was what was going on, just as he assured me there was not one single shred of proof.

It seemed so simple, your everyday tale of Government sponsored hit-squads. I was still suspicious. There was more.

Cue the girl with the blow-job lips. She sashayed over to my table and introduced herself. And that was me, hook, line, and sinker. All that was left was for me to be beached and gutted, by the left and quick.

Afterwards I found out that they had used genetically engineered pheromones to make me instantly fall in love with her. But at the time I was lost, swept away, and deep inside the inevitable craziness that followed our meeting, we found ourselves hijacking an expensive yacht in order to make our escape from the shores of Cuba, the wind blowing in her hair as we laughed and took some more drugs for we were young and in love and invincible for I was a God amongst mere mortal men.

Marrying the woman you've rescued from slavery surprisingly enough rarely works out. Particularly when the woman in question is a coldly-calculating honey-trap vixen she-bitch. An expensive whore of a woman who resented me on a level I've never really fully managed to appreciate, despite my very best efforts. I never thought it was possible for somebody to hate more than me, until I gazed upon her true face.

I realised I'd have to destroy her before she destroyed me. But she fulfilled her function: I forgot all about the white slave trade. Years of my life were swallowed up by that woman. Until finally I won and she gave up and had her head removed and cryogenically frozen with the strict instruction that she was not to be revived until I was good and dead.

Even in my darkest hallucinations, I could never have imagined that things would have turned out the way they did, when I was sitting there in that Hotel, the warm breeze, stunned by her beautiful pheromones. If only I'd spotted what she was. It was too easy, too convenient. I hated being young.

Youth really has very little to recommend it, and I pity those poor fools who try to stay that way forever.

I've never managed to find out exactly how much money she was paid to marry me, but there you go, I used to be married. My big guilty hateful secret.

But I never loved her.