George Herring was a tall, slender man-his head was fashionably shaved and his ears had enough piercing to sport new jewelry just about every day. He was a manic fellow, his eyes were lit up with a bluish rage. George was the kind of man that, when he walked in a room, his agenda leaked out all over as if it were an invisible poisonous gas that you were afraid to acknowledge because you didn't want to know-it was none of your business.

Jay was sitting in the club when George came through. Jay was an observer, and he was making George's agenda his business. It wasn't that Jay was a detective or anything. It was just that in the social scheme of that club, or really anywhere else, he naturally gravitated toward the middle of things-the meat of things-right where the juicy stuff was. Jay kind of took up causes because that's the way he was-and he stopped questioning that about himself.

"Member or non-member?" The ex-whore asked Jay with a smile from behind the bar pointing at the Diet 7-Up that she shoved in front of him. "Non-member." Jay condescendingly mouthed.

"Dollar fifteen." She barked and bustling, feeling right at home getting him his change.

Jay popped open the can and watched George-nobody even wanted to get near the guy because he was seething with something-he looked at Jay with manic eyes that said:

"I know that you know that I don't want anyone to know." Jay had spoken to George one or two times before-but when it had become clear that Jay had him pegged, they became strangers again. Jay knew that the quickest way to get to know someone was to become strangers again. George was catching on to this and it was making him nervous. So nervous that he could not find a comfort zone in the club that Jay wasn't even a member of-but George really had no where else to go-especially after he had just done what he had done.

Jay sat there and smiled, he had moved right in and scrambled up George's comfort zone. See George's agenda was good at one time, but now it had become so twisted and perverted that it was out of control-he needed help, it was killing him, but he couldn't stop it. Jay was going to stop it for him-for the sake of principle-because he took up causes. Now Jay certainly was not altruistic, it was just that in order for him to survive, he was going to have to rid himself of George's agenda. The principle was that obviously, due to circumstances that gave Jay's life meaning, George had picked him to rearrange his agenda-the time had come.

It helped that Jay hated this guy, that way he could help him, and Jay was going to help him. George had so much hate for himself that he had just naturally attracted Jay to him, to help finish the job. Jay was a non-member so it would work out all that much for the better-a stranger was going to be George's best friend-they would get to know each other intimately as only strangers can. Jay knew it.

At first, Jay ran into George's agenda through a woman-Sara was her name. Sara had come up to Jay in the club-naturally the ones deep in trouble usually did. But Jay liked this one, took the experience with her at face value-and enjoyed it-he may as well have, because the true agenda was always soon to surface-usually right into Jay's lap. And it did, and it smacked of a nasty, manic, sick character.

Jay heard George's brown van back into a parking space behind the club just before he ordered the soda from the ex-whore. The brown van was the thing George kept his agenda in. It was no mystery to Jay why he parked that thing in the back. It was so George could come in through the back very nervous. Tonight he was really shaking, Jay could see. His bluish eyes were pulsating with mania-which was normal to the members. A lot of people were like that in there-maybe even worse. But to Jay, George stood out as he paced the corners of the club-like a dog looking for a satisfying place to piss. He was desperate to do something with the poison. It was eating him alive-and the thing was that none of the members cared. They couldn't because it was none of their business. But Jay cared. He had been called into this from the outside, the night that Sara had come up to him-a non-member that might help her from that which the members could not.

Jay looked over again at George. He could tell that if he were to make his move, it better be soon because George was getting restless. What was going on in that van had taken everything out of his rotten soul. Now the rancidity was more than he could stand. Paranoia was set intensely in his eyes; he was deathly afraid that someone besides Jay was going to find out, and that would mean an even more nightmarish demise.

The members would be able to torture him with passion, particularly the member that was married to Sara. Jay was going to be able to bring about the demise of George's agenda with intimacy, and the cool detachment of a stranger. After all, he had only known Sara for a short time. It was time for him to go ahead with it; George was falling apart with the anticipation of an unknown that was exclusive to Jay's huge imagination. That was the thing that attracted people like Sara to him; it gave them possibilities for rearranging the dead ends of their lives. It was the thing that people like George Herring were terrified of, but knew they would have to participate one way or another.

Jay got up from the stool. Without even having the guts to recognize it themselves, everyone in The Dead End Club turned and glanced trying to ignore their inner-shudders of fear and intrigue as Jay walked out the back door. Then they all glanced over at George who looked like a man flash-frozen, sheer terror climbing out of his every follicle with no where left to go. Jay went around to the side door of the brown van. His every suspicion was being validated; his imagination was proving as trusty as usual.

He opened the side door of George's van and found what he was looking for. Sara was suspended naked on a black nylon mesh hammock strung from the ceiling over the two front seats to the back doors. Jay climbed in and closed the doors behind him switching the dome light on above Sara's body. The interior of the van was lined with black velvet that was turning brownish with age. Sara was cuffed at the feet with leg irons to the hammock, her mouth was gagged with a strip of black velvet, and she looked at Jay with brilliant green eyes-she fell in love with him that instant, Jay could tell.

Her waist was restrained with a black leather harness woven through the hammock, and snugly padlocked. Sara's neck was restrained loosely with a black satin shard. Her huge breasts were heaving, she writhed and moaned tortuously in the hammock looking at Jay, lurching and twisting for him to join her in an ultimate meld of pleasure and pain. He saw the Exacto knife laying on the floor that was responsible for the superficial lacerations she had been inflicting on herself, for blood and the pleasure of the suicide invitation ritual. Blood was something that really turned her on since she had the operation that makes women feel like dead ends.

"Your blood is real sexy, it turns me on Sara, but I'm just going to watch." Jay whispered while he sucked on her ear lobe as if he were tonguing her clitoris. The beautifully disturbed woman just moaned from the depths of her soul because that was all that was left in there.

Inside the club, crazy with a mania that only finely cultivated jealousy can stir up, George was losing his mind. He ran out to the van and flung open the side doors. Scanning the interior, the bluish rage softened, and he was relieved for a moment to find that Jay was not in there like he had imagined. Although the mania would give way to depression if the kindling of jealousy were absent, George knew he would run into Jay again and again until the end-he needed him.

Jay watched from a crouched position on the floorboard as George took off his shirt and sat underneath the hammock, tonguing and licking Sara as she pushed her plush buttocks flesh through the nylon mesh closer to his salivating mouth. Jay watched as Sara agonized with pleasure-she kept staring at Jay, thanking him over and over with her eyes for the forbidden pleasure and pain that in her heart of hearts, she knew she deserved.

Jay stared back just like an intimate stranger could, detached-he was not even aroused at all. George took off his shorts and began stroking his penis across the velvet gag. He picked up the Exacto knife, putting it in Sara's hand. Sara desperately sliced the skin lightly around the base of his hard penis and rubbed blood over his testicles and all over her breasts. Then she cut her wrist a little more, wiping blood on George's rippled abdomen, and she glared at his penis with the passion of a castrator-the idea of which excited her to no end. After all, that would only be fair.

George climbed in the hammock and began plunging his penis into her. The brown van was rocking, the hammock was swinging, the harnesses and leg irons were chinking rhythmically, and Jay stood up. He unlatched one end of the hammock while the two plummeted to the floor. Jay hit George in the back of the neck with his fist, and quickly cuffed him to Sara. Sara was moaning with ecstasy and Jay looked at her as if she was crazy. Jay took down the other end of the nylon hammock and gathered up the ends, padlocking them together through the steel eyelets.

Matter-of-factly, Jay sat down in the driver's seat of the van, started it up, and pulled away from the club. He was headed for another place where he definitely was not a member-and neither was George. That would be the last thing that the two ever had in common.

The brown van crept to a halt in front of a small, typical Southern California home with an overgrown lawn strewn with riding toys and a rusted bicycle with one training wheel. There was one light burning in a front room. Jay could see a sad, hurting silhouette of a man that brought instant fondness into his heart, and the rush of memories from when he was in a similar place on a dead-end street once upon a time, before he started taking up causes.

Jay knocked on the front door and a tall Cuban man with saddened, surrendered eyes opened the door.

"Are your kids in bed? I have something they don't need to see." Jay said, greeting the man. The man seemed to recognize the van, and sighed, knowing everything would finally be exposed, that he really wasn't imagining the worst.

Jay opened the rear doors of the van and pulled the bundle of squirming, screaming naked bodies out and across the front lawn. As Jay turned the van around the dead-end street, he heard two rifle shots and roared off, there was another club down the road somewhere. He could leave the van there.

About the Author:

David Mitchell is a writer, actor, visual artist living in LA for five years. He is currently marketing a collection of 50 short stories as well as a feature length sci-fi screen play and a spec episodic exploring horror as realism. He welcomes email at David Mitchell. David also has stories published online at the Twilight Showcase.