4:44am. Saturday. The Ziggurat Hotel and Casino. Las Vegas, NV.
Darkness.
Wetness.
Buzzing?
I pry my eyes open. A rubber duck vibrator undulates in a dance of orgasmic futility across the shower floor. It sports painted-on bondage gear, complete with tiny ball gag and slave collar.
I’m not wearing pants.
What the hell did I take?
As I make the agonizing journey from horizontal to vertical, more questions intrude:
Where am I? How did I get here? Am I lying in a puddle of water or urine? If it’s urine, is it my urine? I hope it’s my urine.
Okay, Tulsa. Let’s uncluster this fuck. Who? What? Why? Go.
Stepping out of the shower, I scan for clues to my whereabouts. The tiny bottles of complimentary shampoo and conditioner tell me I’m in a hotel bathroom. The absence of vomit stains tell me it’s not my hotel bathroom. And the Big Dead Lizard on the toilet tells me I am supremely and epically fucked.[1]
My name is Tulsa Kalhoun and my life is weird as shit.
I carefully approach the motionless Lizard. Slumped on his golden throne, he certainly looks dead. Real dead. Elvis dead. Standing, he’d be a few inches shy of seven feet tall. Is it “tall”? Or is it “long”? Fuck if I know their rules.
That’s a lie. I know one:
Lizards don’t die.
Let me repeat that:
Lizards. Don’t. Die.
Bullets bounce off ‘em. Explosions only tickle. And running them over just makes them hard.
It’s the one rule that’s allowed the Two Alien Lizardmen to covertly dominate the human race for the last few million years, give or take.[2] I’d be regular fucked if this was just a run-of-the-mill eat-gamble-and-screw Tourist Lizard Rube. But I’m double fucked because this is Doug.[3]
Yeah. That Doug. The Supreme High Lizard Overlord.[4] The Lizard King Jim Morrison sang about. On the toilet. Super naked and extra dead. And I’m standing over him with hazy memories and mysterious bruises.
Make that triple fucked.
I need to think. Need to run. Do I worry about fingerprints? Yes! Do I take a poke at Doug’s juicy, seventeen-inch Lizard cock? No! Wipe the place down? Yes! Towel. Now.
I do my best to clean my grubby prints off all the surfaces: floor, sink, tub, doorknob, leather-slave duck vibrator. Doug’s cock hangs over the toilet like a bloated, diabetic snake and just one little poke wouldn’t hurt anything—no, Tulsa! It’s a trap! Get out now!
I sashay out of the bathroom with the unhurried gait of someone who definitely isn’t fleeing a crime scene. I find myself in a kush party suite with all the luxury amenities: full bar, arcade games, hot tub, giant heated rock, foosball table—wait! Giant heated rock? Cornbread and fish farts! This isn’t just any suite. This is the Lizard Suite. The seasonal residence of our Two Reptillian Overlords. How the hell did I get in here?
The party…
The main room is unoccupied, so I figure it’s safe to abscond like a motherfucker. And abscond I do, straight into the en-suite elevator and down to a floor that doesn’t have a corpse on it.
My feet take over. With no help from my panicking brain, they move fast, getting as much plausible deniability between me and the corpse as possible. It’s all a blur of cheesy Egyptian decor until I remember to breathe, and find myself heaving mouthfuls of air behind the locked door of my economical, well-appointed junior suite.
How the fuck did I get into this mess?
Drugs, of course.
And Lucy.
[1] Not a literal lizard, but rather a space alien that looks like a big-ass lizard-man. Officially, he’s what’s known as an Alpha Draconian. Or an Alpha. Reptilian. Reptoid. Reptiloid. Personally, I prefer “Lizard” “Big Lizard” or “Scaly Bastard.”
[2] What happened a few million years ago? Well, two Space Lizards landed on our planet and accelerated the evolution of an infantile group of primates by teaching us language. They’ve bestowed upon our leaders gifts such as the wheel, the wherewithal to erect fences around cows, and mad pyramid building skillz. And all it cost humanity was a couple thousand human sacrifices and unquestioning devotion. You may think humans are in control, especially since over the last few thousand years most of you have been blissfully unaware that the scaly bastards even exist, but since they landed, they’ve called the shots. They’re bigger than us, they’re smarter than us and, most crucially, they can’t be killed.2.1
2.1 Present company excluded, apparently.
[3] His real name is unpronounceable, uncomprehendable, and unredactable.
[4] Terence is the other Lizard Overlord. He’s the cute one.
Meet Tulsa Kalhoun. Once upon a time she was a well-respected, pantsuit-wearing broadcast journalist— until an inconvenient supernatural awakening left her career and sanity in tatters. Now she stumbles through this world peddling a private pharmacy of perception-expanding herbal narcotics, made with plants you’ve never heard of from places not found on maps. (Like Delaware.)
But when Tulsa wakes up in a hotel bathroom, blacked out from a particularly indulgent vision quest bender, she knows that she's finally supremely and epically screwed. Because it's clearly not her hotel bathroom (for starters the pristine tiles are far too lacking in vomit stains). And there's a Big Dead Lizard on the toilet.
Being saddled with the corpse of a supposedly unkillable Lizard Overlord on the eve of the secret unveiling of Earth as the ultimate reptilian vacation destination was definitely not the plan, yo.
With no memory of what happened, and an ever more tenuous hold on the daily cocktail of alien pharmacologicals that barely keep her tethered to this plain of existence, Tulsa has to retrace her steps of the last week searching for clues of how she got to her current predicament. She’ll have to wade through a swamp of daunting challenges and colorfully shady characters like the Illuminati, the Youthinati, debauched Reptilian tourists, kinky gray aliens who are way too into butt stuff, Neckties, Necronauts, off-brand soda, her super-hot half-human half-Lizard ex-girlfriend and her own self-destructive tendencies.
Confused yet? Tulsa sure is.
Part fun romp. Part laxative. Part commentary on capitalism, global warming, the limits of human perception, and lizard dicks, Ash X's debut novella Midnight 99 is a phantasmagoric, consciousness-expanding odyssey for the mind and genitals that keeps you guessing at every turn.
Ash X is a genderfluid nonsense maker who currently lives in Los Angeles. They are not, as some darkweb forums allege, 13 otters in a trenchcoat pretending to be a human. When not writing, Ashley enjoys boxing, yoga, and diving to the bottom of the ocean to hunt for clams.
“Sci fi adventure, mixed in with a LGBT romance, liberally sprinkled with a whole lot of WTF… This book is chock full of amazingness. It starts off right away with the absolutely epic footnotes… The deeper you get into this story, the more you fall in love with Tulsa. ... Midnight 99 is a debut novella and it kicks off Ashley’s career with a bang. A glittery bang.”
