Oh, beautiful Judecca - you bathe in roses and seduce me to your side, and yet you bear the visage of a leprous wretch.

The gun's muzzle slipped against a ridged slickness. Eros grimaced, steadying himself. Against the roof of the mouth, the firearm cracked against teeth and pinched the swollen tongue. He mumbled to himself, "Close range blast, entry by hard palate, test one." Eros was blinded by a stinging red light. He straddled the body of a raider in the tunnels beneath the museum district searching for some hidden beauty in their corpses. He'd propped up the man beside the generator between the subway tunnels - Eros tried to imagine being here while thunderous beasts flew past on either side.
First, here, was the close range 'suicide shot.' The skull fragmented and soft grey matter nested in Eros's hair. He wiped the pus, the mucus, the blood from his eyes, and sat back.

The jaw hung lopsided, one side dislocated; the lips were seared from the heat and the teeth were shattered. Eros saw the shape of a woman in the cerebrospinal fluid mingled with blood as it collected and lustily dragged itself down the lips and chin of the corpse. "Beautiful."

After a moment of thoughtful silence, Eros raised his knife's point to rest just above the former man's ear. "Now, the real work."

Charon watched in disgust as Eros delved his hand into the murky cavity of a corpse's skull, scalped and shattered for his access. Eros kept his brow furrowed as though he were searching for something - the volume of his fist pushed a colorless puss up around his wrist until it overflowed, thick and heavy. After a moment, the man pulled harshly at something within the head until a thick stem was pulled from it. "This is where it'd be - the medulla oblongota. It's the thing that controls everything that keeps you alive and stuff like vomiting, coughing, sneezing... It's where the primal soul would be. It has to be."
He held the useless organ in his hand, slick with a former consciousness. He stared with empty eyes, his face relaxed, until finally he tossed it to the ground. "Souls don't fucking sneeze. It must be somewhere else."
Charon watched the kid's eyes leap to the remainder of the cranial ravine, a touch of disappointment in his eyes as he realized he had destroyed the rest of the brain with the bullet and his searching fingers - to the ghoul, the kid looked like a child who had gone to eat more of a candy bar before he realized he'd eaten it all. Or a dame who spread herself to fuck before he saw that her man was satisfied too soon.

"Bess! Mike?" He heard a quick shuffling far off down the tunnel. "Bess- where the fu-"
"Roy!" A shrill, girlish laugh echoed through the tunnels and Roy felt his hip for his knife. "Roy-roy where are you? We have company!" The voice rang out from the darkness of the subway.
Roy stood in the shattered diamonds of light thrust to the floor by the subway entrance. In the setting sun, the hall was cast the color of flesh. Roy moved hesitantly further down the tunnel."Fuck... who...?" That wasn't Bessie's voice - nor was it Mike's. Where the hell were all the ferals?
The voice further down in the subway fell to a male's; "I didn't need your cute little mask, Roy. I made my own. Two, even." Goddamned smoothskins, Roy thought shakily. "I really like the feel of ghoul leather on my skin."
The voice sounded abominable, irrational - odd inflections and forceful emphasis made Roy freeze. It sounded the way angry Raiders spoke, their brains half-evaporated and their eyes bloodred.

The view was rather grotesque as the smoothskin, Eros, stepped into the dim light, far enough down the tunnel in the darkness that he may have been standing there since Roy had entered. Red, broken flesh clung desperately to the human's face; the lips stretched into a shattered grin that clawed at Roy's eyes. He refrained from remembering that he'd seen that face speak - now it was the putty of a molded mask.
"Roy, baby, don't you want to greet your girlfriend?" His voice was high and mocking. The smoothskin smiled radiantly as he held his arms open to Roy, who had finally managed to pull his combat knife out. "I found out your plans, you... No one commands my actions, Roy. You think you can use me as a pawn? A fucking piece?" Eros had grabbed the chrome of the empty ticket booth and began to bend it, flimsy in his fingers. "I'll fucking rip you open."
Eros fingered the trigger of Lace at his hip. He continued to grin at the wretched shit that stared back. Eros continued to advance on the ghoul, his fingers dragging down the side of the ticket booth. He was in no mood for poetry, though the time was right. Roy's blue skin - gasping like the desert floor, cracking and screaming; it was begging to be torn from his muscles' hold. Eros had planned to use his own knife - tendons and tissues, so easy to slice. Stratum corneum* slides away as the Red Sea by Moses. Eros is nearly shaking from the tension. "You will pay, ghoul."
"Fuck you, you smooth fuck!" He bounds forward as Eros moves away; the latter feels a pang of lightning fly through his cheek as Roy slices his knife carelessly. Warmth engulfs his face and his spine tenses; his shoulders twitch irrationally.
"My fucking face." His throat scratched and burned as he growled the words. His teeth ached as they pressed hard together. As Roy stepped back from the failed attack, Eros leapt forward. He quickly had the ghoul on the floor. Eros struggled briefly to control the combat knife and stabbed it through Roy's shoulder. Another - Eros's own knife - through his cruciate ligaments. He would never run. "My face, Roy."
"Fuck you, pretty boy! You don't even know what it's like to kill, do you? Bessie and Mike probably tripped over their own goddamn feet and died! You dumb, cock-sucking, f-" A choked, bloodied shriek adjourned his speech.
"I've severed your oropharynx, Roy. You're attached to the fucking floor." Eros was screaming now. He pressed Lace's gleaming muzzle to Roy's forehead. As an afterthought, he dragged the muzzle erratically around the patchy flesh of Roy's face. A bullet glided gleefully through his cheek as he pulled the trigger randomly. Roy screeched again. "Sorry... I'll get it this time." Eros grabbed the blade he'd shoved into Roy's throat and impaled the ghoul's tongue, pulling it forward, forcing it from hiding. Lace kissed against the bottom of the tongue and shot a rain of warmth across Roy's face. "Before you die... I want you to know - I made Bessie scream my name and Micheal begged for his dirty little life. For all the world knows, so did you."

"What did you do to the woman?" Gob was rubbing incessantly at a mug as I told him the story. "Did you really...?"
"No, of course not. It's not because she was a ghoul - I just... I could never rape someone. It's disgusting. I mean, I'd kill someone with no regrets, but there's too much revealed and too much involved with sex." I bit the insides of my lips thoughtfully.
Gob nodded thoughtfully, not looking up.

Footnotes:

* Stratum corneum is the outermost layer of the epidermis.

If the second-half was kind of confusing, think of inception - it was a memory of a story he told Gob and then the memory of how Gob reacted.

Here it is. Somehow, at the eve of the four year anniversary of this story, I've posted a new chapter. Also, if you'll notice, I repaired the storyline, removed about 4 chapters, and condensed everything for readability.

My playlist for this piece... Conducting from the Grave, Aversion's Crown, and a lovely Hester Prynne.

Thanks for stopping by.