Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2

by Wrath James White

  **My Moazirith.** Jerfastilhak embraced her. Their golden tongues twined, untwined, when Moazirith gently released from her lover’s heat.

  **I doubted your return,** she shrilled, **but you’ve shown me the folly of such thoughts.**

  Jerfastilhak surged with guilt over his recent musings … his abominable self-pity.

  His gaze met hers, and he saw there a violent beauty.

  The hunter’s heart boomed. Around Moazirith’s head formed a brilliant nimbus, nearly unbearable to behold.

  She levitated until taller than her lover.

  At that moment Jerfastilhak would gladly have given himself to Death, so searing, so erotic, was this vision! In the face of beauty, dread is annulled.

  **It is fortunate,** shrilled Moazirith, **that you have triumphed and returned. I would not relish the task of raising our offspring alone.**

  Dizziness invaded Jerfastilhak. All at once it did not matter that he and Moazirith were alone in the ugly-ones’ cheerless world. Were they not, by virtue of their very existence, miracles in such a place? One offspring—glorious!—pulsed within Moazirith’s womb; would not others follow, fill the emptiness of their days?

  **The ages we have seen,** Jerfastilhak shrilled, **and shared …**

  Something must be done to honor those whose lives had been ended so that Moazirith could keep hers.

  Jerfastilhak took in a large quota of bones. After a few moments he punched into himself, showered hot gold everywhere.

  Already his carapace began resealing. His lover dripped nuggets.

  White mass in pincher, he began.

  The ugly-ones had not died in vain.

  For the artistry of their Death angel sculpted a replica of the sky-raker in which they had ended.

  Prideful, Jerfastilhak shrilled, **A plaything for our young!**

  <<====>>

  AUTHOR’S STORY NOTE

  “Out Hunting for Teeth” is proof that I wrote Bizarro before it was cool—way before. In 1986 I’d been reading a lot of Yukio Mishima, and also a lot of Clive Barker, whose Books of Blood I reviewed for the late David B. Silva’s World Fantasy Award-winning The Horror Show magazine. I also was fortunate enough to be one of the first American writers to interview Clive. All of this highly charged, often lurid and shocking, stuff reached a flash-point in my 27-year-old head. I became fascinated (oh all right—obsessed) with the more horrifying end of Francisco Goya’s paintings, and had a nightmare after one long exploration of a fat volume of these. Over the years, and many revisions, “Teeth” had been purchased for two horror anthologies, both of which died on the vine. Its acceptance by Randy Chandler and Cheryl Mullenax for this superb Comet Press anthology proves, I guess, that old saw: “Third time’s the charm.”

  KOZMIC BLUES

  ALESSANDRO MANZETTI

  From The Monster, The Bad And The Ugly

  Editor: Jodi Renée Lester

  Publisher: Kipple Officina Libraria

  ______

  “Give me something strong.”

  The barman of The Croix Inversée prepares the transparent polyplastic cylinder, carefully brushing its rim with his special slush of Amphetamine S, and then pours the synthetic tequila all the way to the brim. As a final touch, he throws in a frozen slice of Nova Scotia lemon, full of parasites, letting it fall into the cylinder where it floats, then sinks like a submerged mine in the waters of old Normandy. This mix of things is called “yellow hail”; the microscopic eggs of the parasites clinging to the lemon pulp contain toxins that, in small doses, can fuck up your brain for a week.

  The sweet little animals with their darting tails have transformed the lemons into delicious psychotropic fruits, very fashionable in South Paris 5, the apocalyptic district of the city, inhabited by assholes, psychos, and organ collectors, bitches with their nails varnished with toxic blue paint, small cobras with tits, organized groups of cannibals, rapists with sharp, motorized prostheses, philanthropists with live biomechanical statues on their porches, pushers of Cloud 6 and 7 with first-row tickets to Limbo, Hell, and Nirvana. But the biggest sons of bitches are the mutant rats that rule over the Seine, beasts weighing seventy kilos that hunt at night, always hungry for human prey.

  South Paris 5 is one of the ghettos of high apocalyptic impact, the New France, the new world; defeated and forced to its knees, it has been swallowed by Chaos. Ghettos are everywhere, reproducing quickly, fucking like mad, devouring the still-healthy organs of the city like a toothed cancer.

  Fleur drinks her usual drink, exchanging a look of complicity with Fakhr, the Egyptian barman who always knows how to serve, be it synthetic tequila or something else. After all these years, it seems like he can read her mind, as if he kept a special hygrometer under the counter that can measure the humidity of her pussy.

  A vintage, primitive music pours out of the blue walls of the Croix Inversée, the broken notes of Kozmic Blues by Janis Joplin, who sounds as if she’s got a rattlesnake in her throat, a two-hundred-year-old song which stirs the amniotic liquid of the ornamental aquariums in which the embryos of alien-looking calves slowly fry in their state of oblivion. Back in the good old days, aquariums were filled with lobsters, but uncontaminated animal proteins are now rarer than diamonds, rarer than splinters of dilithium.

  Fakhr gives Fleur a rag, winking. The hands of the woman are stained with blood; she’s just finished working her last customer. Best get clean, despite the low lights and the faint consciences of the customers at the bar, blind pilots of the Parisian night. Fleur quickly scrubs her hands and wrists, like a surgeon in the antechamber of an operating room, and then she licks her fingers and smiles at her favorite Egyptian, reflecting the white of his teeth in the heavy silver medallion hanging on her breast. The medallion is engraved with the Virgin Mary of Zeitun breastfeeding a calf. Syncretism, chaos, superstitions, and broken hopes.

  “Give me something strong.”

  The man is hanging by his arms from the ceiling of Fleur’s hideout, an apartment on Rue Bodard, wedged in on the sixth floor of a square building with rotten ribs and crumbling balconies, which keeps leaning to the right, a centimeter more each month, slowly sinking in the dark sperm of mud. Christ, South Paris 5 will turn into a fucking swamp in less than ten years. Just like everything else, maybe. Soon, good ole Earth will stop being a planet inhabited by humans, but a vast sewer that will shoot out crocodiles and corpses everywhere like nuclear missiles.

  And to think that until that moment, people had imagined the Apocalypse as a giant explosion or implosion, something immediate and spectacular like the Big Bang or a Big Crack, possibly a new Universal Deluge, which, instead of pouring from above, was going to come up from the ground, flooding everything with the shit of trillions of corpses, gushing out, still warm, in gigantic geysers. There were some who believed in the collision of a massive meteorite, the kind that had once wiped out entire species of dinosaurs. They certainly weren’t expecting to observe the falling stars of the new millennium: a swarm of forgotten, rotten satellites that crashed to Earth on a daily basis.

  In any case, no prophet had imagined this slow, unavoidable and heretical decadence of flesh and conscience, with the intermittent fall of scorching rains of sulphuric acid, which at least cleaned up some of the mess.

  “Give me something stronger.”

  The man is fanatically ecstatic for the pain caused by leather belts tightening on his skin, his balls, neck, and arms. Fleur knows how to make her customers enjoy the performance, no matter how depraved the sons of bitches are.

  Stronger, you say? The woman lowers herself from the ceiling, sadistically equipped like those of the ancient Grand Guignol theatre, a steel chain with a strong hook from a slaughterhouse trailing her like a shiny tail.

  “Hey, what the fuck are you doing?”

  The creator of his own dismemberment blinks, he’s likely still high, and the ghostly dogs of the Cloud 6 are biting at his calves, and biting hard, accelerating his hallucinations.

 
; “You said stronger, did you not?” Fleur whispers, bending to the floor, freeing the pile of steel, the coils that eagerly await the instant they will tighten on Ambroise’s flesh; he’s a city council member with Renaissance-like sideburns that reach down to his jaws, an earthworm with obstructed balls who’s just spent a thousand credits for two hours of treatment with one of the most creative and hungry mistresses of South Paris 5. The earthworm is sweating like a pig and keeps staring at the hook.

  After putting on latex gloves, Fleur begins to circle her customer, whispering a sequence of words, a horrid litany that would make anyone shiver.

  Suspension. Gun with a captive bullet. Stunning. Bleeding. Decapitation. Depilation. Skinning. Evisceration. Sectioning.

  “Christ, this is not funny! Undo everything; you have your money, bitch.”

  But Fleur can’t hear the prayers of her daily earthworm; the room is flooded by the music of Kozmic Blues, by the voice of Janis Joplin’s snake. They scream together, the earthworm and Joplin. Each time the music stops the man swears. Bloody blues. Fleur starts dancing around that totem of fresh flesh. Her wide purple skirt, stained with prints of big moths, opens like a fan, showing her long legs and releasing that sweet almond smell that comes from her panties, like Zyklon B for the greedy tongues of the many earthworms and legless souls.

  Ambroise opens his jaws until they creak, he can’t even scream anymore, unable to emit the slightest fucking sound. The hook sinks in at just the right angle, tearing open his back, splintering his spine, making its way through his flesh for a good, solid grip. Fleur stretches the steel chain using an electric pulley and raises the man’s body higher; he’s now swinging left and right, waving like a pirate flag, a living Jolly Roger against a blood-red background, a stylized slice of large intestine sticking out in the center.

  “Would you like another?” Fakhr mutters. Like the rest of the population, he too is super high and adrift at the Croix Inversée. Nomadic souls that migrate from one table to another, dragging their feet from one hole to the next, sinking their ass cheeks or faces into the flesh cushions for rent in the back rooms, equipped with the latest generation of electric pumps and a rich collection of coin-operated sex dolls for those who are too shy or can no longer get a boner. The auto-fucking armchairs are, of course, also available for the ladies who prefer the autopilot mode to cylinders of flesh that don’t always guarantee good performances. Rhythm is what is needed, damn it!

  “No, I’m okay for now. And you should slow down with that stuff, too, your hands are shaking and you look like shit. You’re drooling, for Christ’s sake!” Fleur replies, bitter. She’s the alpha female of this strange couple, and she never misses an opportunity to remind poor Fakhr. She would have told her Egyptian partner to go fuck himself a long time ago had it not been for his long cock and ability to procure excellent flesh targets for her. The counter of the Croix Inversée is a perfect observation deck for hunting. Naked bodies, gray and pink, solid or faded, knotted in the cubes of Plexiglas rooms, forming confused, random orgies, small paradises of floating cellulite, anchored to the ground by the viscous glue of bodily fluids, and by the telluric dance of tits and asses of all sizes. From his privileged position, Fakhr is able to examine, albeit superficially, the quality of all that fucking flesh, discover their stories, and only then carefully choose.

  “Aside from you getting off, have you thought about us? See any interesting specimens tonight?”

  Fleur is like that, beautiful but a real pain in the ass, demanding and jealous. Satisfying that flesh-eating Amazon was no easy task. With her cover as a bar whore, she had an easy time amid her colleagues ravished by super-drugs, hanging from the counter with their skinny bug-like arms and shadows of Purgatory in their watery eyes. Between their legs they had the rugged tubes of desperation and the twisted, oxidized conduits of their waning years. Fleur was the only one among the sluts who worked at the Croix Inversée with the ability to choose her customers with care.

  “Sure, honey, I never miss one, you know that. Have a look at table seven—do you see that big boy? He’s a rude jerk who just arrived yesterday from Marseilles. He looks really healthy and in good shape, compared to all this filth. He said that he’s been taking Cloud 6 for only a few days, so there’s no time to lose—his flesh will turn bitter in about a week. He’s already been cooked to perfection—I served him three ‘special’ cocktails. Right now he’d fuck just about anything, even a three-headed sheep, the kind bred in the Mesoamerican Republic. People say that …”

  “You think you’re so funny? Go fuck yourself. Tell those jokes to your bitches, to the druggies that you like to rub against. By the way, keep your hands off that bitch Mirabelle if you don’t want to lose your balls … All right, now I’m going to see the jerk. Give me half an hour and I’ll bring him home and turn him into a good meal. Look at those beautiful buttocks, it almost looks like a girl’s ass. I hope he’s not a fag. See you later, at home.”

  “Can’t wait, honey. I bought two bottles of Montrachet for dinner. They come from the thermo-ground harvest … this is the real deal, eh, they cost me more than your fake tits.”

  “I already told you to go fuck yourself. You must be deaf rather than stoned.”

  Kozmic Blues. Again.

  Ambroise pissed on himself. Fleur stuck a sponge in his mouth to silence him. She draws near the hanging meat, listens to the cracking of his shoulder blades. With a gentle push she makes him spin, increasing the torque so the steel hook penetrates deeper between the scapulae, as she walks in the opposite direction around the carousel, a blues carousel of stifled groans that fade and come back, the walls spinning fast, flying flesh. The living fountain begins to work as it should, throwing splashes of red in all directions, drawing arcs of blood in the air which break before landing on the floor in squiggles and abstractions.

  Through her nostrils, Fleur inhales the smell of fear from the man, holding it for as long as she can in her lungs. It mostly smells like shit, of course, but also of boiling broth and mint, wet dirt and peeled apricots, a smoothie of adrenaline and crushed pine nuts. Fleur is discovering that the smell of those hanging from a hook always differs; it’s the aroma of their memories and their fear.

  Ambroise is still conscious, but he won’t be for long. The stunning awaits him, the same procedure used for horses, cows, and pigs when their ignorant journey on this planet comes to an end. While the oscillations slow to a stop, with the last rattling of the steel chain, Fleur leaves to load the captive-bolt pistol that will kill the man’s brain before his body is turned into food. A gradual transformation, Ambroise will travel very soon, shattered, through the digestive tunnels of Fleur and her companion.

  Fleur takes the ladder, approaches Ambroise’s suspended body, and climbs to the height of his head. She grabs him by the hair, turns him to face her, then kisses him on the forehead.

  She puts the gun to his forehead. Remain still, damn it, be a good boy … the retracted bolt will finish the job quickly and cleanly, bursting through the skull and erasing his brain: the blackout of bipolarized neurons. Total unconsciousness arrives at a speed of 73 meters per second, you don’t even see it coming. Nirvana arrives in all its glory, with its golden horizon and its hills looking like tits made of chalk, after a few seconds of muscle contractions. She just needs to take good aim, calculate the right angle to hit the brain cortex. Remain still, damn it, be a good boy … Fleur pulls the trigger, a deafening, simple noise. Ambroise’s shoes fly off with the last vital spasm of his body; it looked like someone stuck a high-voltage cable up his ass. Remain still, damn it, you’re dead …

  There is no time to lose, the meat might go bad or toughen up. Fleur pushes a metal table under Ambroise’s deflated body, still dangling. She bends his legs a little in order to place the body on the table, then she finally pulls the chain from the ceiling, and the ninety-two kilos of human flesh come raining down. The body remains upright for an instant, somehow managing to keep its balance, a priest
electrocuted by his own god, then at last falls face down with a crash.

  Fleur hears an ambulance siren screaming louder and louder, a high-pitched noise that manages to slip through the cracks of the windowless walls of her apartment’s slaughter room.

  The voracious Amazon smiles, knows that there is at least a fifty percent possibility, in this sewer of South Paris 5, that the emergency room of the hospital to which the ambulance is going is no better equipped than her slaughter room. Doctors will already be sharpening their makeshift tools … white, blue, and red codes for meat that is inedible or at risk of contamination by prions; code yellow for those who will become food for the sake of the overcrowded communities and the delicate tastes of extravagant rich people who can afford human delicacies and dilithium cutlery. It’s always best to remain standing in South Paris 5, at the cost of holding your guts in with your hands to prevent them from spilling out.

  Fleur holds the scalpel tight, slicing Ambroise’s body from the sternum down to the pubes, opening him, as if she was pulling down an imaginary zipper. This is the moment she likes best. She takes off her latex gloves and sticks her bare hands into that purple and red crevasse, wanting to feel the still-warm organs, first pulsing between her fingers, and then the throbbing stops. She thinks she can touch the soul of her victim, before the body cools. She imagines being able to grab the soul by its slimy tail, if only for a fleeting moment, before letting it evaporate and start its new journey.

  If not, the bio-freezer in the basement would contain many extinguished souls, trapped in stews, steaks, and human thighs, lunches and dinners for the next few weeks.

  “Can you buy me a strong drink?”

  Fleur, after sashaying through the room, sparking a boner pandemic in the bar, sits at table seven in the Croix Inversée, where the jerk from Marseilles is sitting, dishevelled. The man is drinking the third green ball blocker that Fakhr has prepared for him, all the while enjoying the company of two other whores, the Indian twins Padma and Karuka. Two sluts worth only a few credits, two monkeys who always work in pairs, who make ends meet only thanks to the magical third breast of Padma. A wonder of nature, the cleavage that bitch exposes, bordered with sparkling purple psychedelic stones that reach down to her navel. She has a small gecko with blue spots tattooed on her third, central tit, just above the nipple. The claws of the reptile are anchored to her flesh, like the other thousands of invisible fingerprints of loyal customers who breastfeed from that alien dune.