Mike Dies at the End / This Story is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don't Read It

By Whitney Bishop

In a world where all psychic abilities are caused by sexually transmitted diseases, two half-assed experts on all things supernatural pick up a really cute client. Together, the three of them survive haunted buildings, world-destroying paradoxes, universe-jumping elder gods, and one another. Oh, yeah, and Mike totally dies at the end. (Or does he?)

Originally written separately, these two short stories feature the same characters in two different tales of sexy gay supernatural nonsense. All references to properties with similar names are made lovingly and in the spirit of parodic license.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Whitney Bishop
• Release date: May 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310592942

Whitney Bishop

Editor-in-Chief of http://www.shousetsubangbang.com/; stories published there are under the name 'shukyou'.

Book preview

Mike Dies at the End

and

This Story is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don't Read It

Published by Whitney Bishop at Smashwords

Copyright 2007 and 2012 Whitney Bishop

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Table of Contents

Part the First: Mike Dies at the End

Part the Second: This Story is Full of Scorpions: Seriously, Dude, Don't Read It

author's notes

Mike Dies at the End

Solving the following riddle will reveal the awful secret behind the universe, assuming you do not go utterly mad in the attempt. If you already happen to know the awful secret behind the universe, feel free to skip ahead.

Let's say a hipster is chatting you up at an otherwise boring party — one of those homely types who'd have been shit out of luck had Weezer not brought nerd chic back. Anyway, he tells you how he once built a time machine. Nothing fancy, just a garden-variety thing. He went back about fifty years, hoping to get laid at Woodstock, and ended up sexing up this hot guy he picked up at a Joni Mitchell concert. This hot guy turned out to be the hipster's dad, who, convinced away from the straight side of the Force, moved to San Francisco, started wearing leather chaps, and never met the hipster's mom — and the hipster abruptly ceased to exist.

As luck would have it, though, this act of inadvertent suicide worthy of a Darwin Lifetime Achievement Award made it so that the hipster never traveled back in time in the first place, thus ensuring that his father followed the straight and narrow, married the hipster's mom, and sired their 2.5 kids, the youngest of whom went on to build a time machine, seduce his young, bearded father, and kick-start the entire chain of events that led to this self-perpetuating time paradox. In fact, says the hipster, playing with the lime in his midori sour, I'm probably not even here talking to you at all.

Is he right?

~*~

I could always tell the worst calls because they were always the ones that came while I was giving Mike head.

If you'd put them together in a grudge match, though, you'd have seen that calls came less often than he did in that apartment, so Mike reached over to the nightstand and flipped open his phone, even as I cursed him with a mouthful of dick. Carlos' Taqueria, he answered, just in case it was the CIA. Mike insisted spooks hated Mexican food. Once, in high school, he'd tried breaking into a secret government facility armed only with tacos, and had actually managed to take down a security guard, squirting packets of hot sauce like stun guns. Oh, sure. ...The Sonic on Main or on Elm? ...Got it. We should be there in... He glanced down at me, and I bared my teeth around his cock. Fifteen minutes? Great. He snapped the phone shut. Asshole.

The drive's twelve, I informed him, picking a stray pubic hair from where it'd lodged itself under my tongue.

He shrugged and settled back in the chair, his knees splayed. That's your problem.

~*~

Here's what everyone in the field knows but won't admit: all forms of psychic ability, and I do mean all, are sexually transmitted diseases. If more parents knew about this, there'd be fewer proud moms on Oprah talking about how intuitive their spawn are, and more federal investigations into daycare centers.

I found this out the hard way from a guy who picked me up in a bar one night. He seemed like an okay guy, a bit shifty, but you can chalk that up to nerves. Maybe I should have known something was wrong when skipped the standard 'I've never done anything like this before' closet-guy denial speech, flipped me over the hotel bed, and started pounding my ass. As sex went, it was fairly mediocre. Next morning, I saw him get up and leave the room, which was made weird by how I found his body a few minutes later a bloody mess in the bathtub.

It only occurred to me afterward that I'd actually seen him walk through, and not out, the door, but I don't do mornings.

Police grudgingly ruled it a pretty definitive suicide, since the cops in Springfield aren't exactly what you'd call charitable to faggots, dead or living. I figured the subsequent hallucinations were just a fluke, maybe brought on trauma or bad shellfish — at least, until I infected someone else.

Long story short, I sucked Mike's dick on a bet and now he sees ghosts. Fortunately, he still talks to me.

It's not just ghosts, though. All manner of weird shit tends to pop up on our radars: shoes that talk, coded messages in the traffic lights, houses that take walks when they think no one's looking. Sometimes the evening news addresses me by name. On a trip to see his aunt, Mike noticed that you can prove Fermat's Last Theorum if you stare at the New York City subway map long enough. It's kind of like being a paranoid schizophrenic, except with the occasional outside confirmation.

I fucked your mother, the squirrel on top of my car told me as I approached, and I shooed it off by opening the door. I'm adopted anyway.

There was a complex set of bullshit reasons Mike had laid out for the reason we took my car instead of his on jobs, and I didn't care enough to refute them, so we did. I checked the rear view mirror to make sure I didn't have any semen on my lips, shrugged at the faint stubble I hadn't tried to wrangle in a few days (I am not a beardy man), and put the car into reverse. Did our mystery caller say what she wanted?

He, actually, Mike corrected me. I was surprised — 98% of the people we come in to help are women. For one, women are more intuitive than men as a general rule; for another, I've never met another gay psychic, which should tell you something about the infection patterns. And he was vague, but he sounded pretty scared. And cute.

I rolled my eyes. Mike's attempts to set me up with anyone were annoyingly pointless. If the guy weren't infected already, there'd be no way I'd consider passing it on to him, and if he turned out to be already, well, he'd probably turn out to be straight, too. If it weren't for bad luck, I wouldn't have any at all. I ignored Mike all the way to the Sonic on principle.

As I pulled into the lot, I saw our man. It had to be him; even if he hadn't been searching the landscape with spooked, nervous eyes, he was the only person at the picnic tables (a concession to those who don't like their tater tots and Texas toast perched precariously over their crotches). Mike was right — he was cute — but I wasn't going to give him the satisfaction of knowing I agreed.

Ty? asked Mike, stretching out his hand as he walked up. I'm Mike, we spoke on the phone. This is Jason, like with the hockey mask.

Ty had that look to him of a community college student dressed by Marilyn Manson in a spiteful mood. I counted nine different piercings on his face alone, some in places I didn't know you should put holes through. He had a limp-wristed handshake, which was worth -3 points in the Would Fuck column. I like guys with confidence. The thing is, he said, without preamble, "I didn't know