Jerry looked at himself and for the first time he noticed dozens of tubes connected to his back, arms and legs.
“What is all this?” Jerry asked.
“Think of it like this. You are one giant Slurpy. So we have several people with straws hooked up to you to make sure we don’t miss or lose a single drop. Just a few ounces of that stuff is worth a fortune.”
“You can’t do this!”
“I’m not. The Pentagon is. I just work here. Sorry kid. Don’t worry though. I left you some DVDs to keep you company during your stay.” The doctor held up a box containing a bunch of movies that looked like they just came from the Wal-Mart bargain bin. “I think they have Piranha Shark vs. Bugnado in there. That’s a good one. Anyway. Here you go. I’ll be back in a few hours to check on you.”
As the doctor turned and walked way, he knocked on a steel door that made a hissing sound as it was unsealed. The doc stepped through and the steel door slammed shut. Jerry looked around and flung the box of DVDs across the room. He tried to climb out of bed, but the tubes kept him in place. They had been surgically embedded into his skin. Panic began to set in as the reality of his situation hit. He’d spend the rest of his life in this place as a one-man pus factory for the government.
“You can’t do this!” he screamed. “Let me go! You can’t do this!” Tears ran down his face as he looked at the ground. He caught sight of one of the DVDs. It was called Attack of the Pus Monster. He threw his head back and laughed. Once the laughter started, he couldn’t stop it. He laughed hysterically at the irony of the whole thing. Attack of the Pus Monster? He was the Pus Monster. But that gave him an idea. He reached back and began tugging at the tubes, despite the pain he’d ripped one free. Chunks of skin and pus dripped from it as he pulled on the next one. When the doctor came back, he was in for a big surprise. A surprise from the real life pus monster.
THE GIRL WHO LOVED BRUCE CAMPBELL
CHRISTA CARMEN
From Corner Bar Magazine Vol. 1 #4
______
No Bottom Pond might have had a bottom, but as far as the three clammy and restless individuals that sat in the idling car by its banks knew, it very well might not. The cold sweats and body aches would not assail them for much longer; the lankier of the two males divvied up the wax baggies of brown powder, and each in turn began their own sacred ritual of preparation. It took only seconds for the first of the three to realize a key element was missing from their assorted paraphernalia.
“Dammit,” the stocky male said. “Does anyone have a water bottle?”
There was no reply as each of the three checked the space around their feet, and the nearest cup holder.
“Now what?” the lone female asked. “We can’t hit a gas station. We need to stay off the roads for a while, someone may have seen us leave that house.”
There was murmured agreement from the two men, followed by a morose silence. The lanky man broke the quiet with a snort of derision. “This shit’s fried our brains,” he said. “We’re sitting next to a lake, complaining about not having any water to shoot up with.”
“It’s not a lake, it’s a pond,” the woman said.
“Technically, it’s not even a pond. It’s an estuary. And we can’t use that water because it’s brackish.” The stouter man sounded matter-of-fact.
“What’s brackish mean? That it’s dirty? Please, I’ve seen you use the water from the tank of a gas station toilet, dirty should be the least of your worries.” This, from the woman.
“No, not dirty, brackish. It means it’s half freshwater, half salt. We can’t shoot that, it might mess with our bodies’ electrolyte levels or something.” Now the stocky man sounded less sure of himself.
The lanky man opened the car door. He reached for an empty Dunkin Donuts cup discarded on the floor of the passenger seat, removed the lid, and looked suspiciously into its depths. Shrugging, he started for the pond’s weedy shore.
“I didn’t just get away with a B&E and buy dope from the shadiest dealer in town to let a little saltwater stop me. It’s only half salt anyways,” he called over his shoulder.
The woman and the stout man watched him creep toward the water’s edge. He folded his tall frame in half and scooped a cupful of water into the Styrofoam. He did this in the light of a moon so close it seemed to be perched atop the hill that loomed over No Bottom Pond, a luminous cherry on top of a black forest cake.
The first full moon to rise on Christmas in forty years had occurred the night before. “A Christmas miracle,” the woman had said sarcastically as they listened to a radio talk show host lament the previous night’s fog cover on their way to Shore Road, and the house they’d been casing most of the past week. The upscale home had yielded extensive reserves of jewelry, cash, and three guns. There’d been a safe, but they had no use for a safe. They only took what they could trade quickly and easily to their dealer, and Pablo had no interest in safes.
The lunar display of December twenty-sixth happened to be free from a smothering blanket of fog. As the woman watched the tall man return, she noticed that in the bright moonlight, the water’s surface had a strange sparkle to it, was almost phosphorescent in the gleam. Parts of the pond were the shiny, black, oil slick of water-in-moonlight she’d expect. Having spent her whole life in the seaside town, she’d seen water undulating under the moon enough times for the sight to be commonplace, but No Bottom Pond seemed greenish in its radiance, and seemed not to steam as much as gurgle, like the stew in a witch’s cauldron.
She forgot her inquisitiveness over the appearance of the water when the passenger door slammed shut. Three syringe tips plunged greedily into the captured pond water, transporting water from cup to three waiting spoons. Mysticism, Rhode Island was a small town (the population was reduced by half in the winter), and the heroin dealers had been tapped into the same pipelines in and out of the closest major cities for decades; the three longtime users expected the same cut and purity of dope they’d had both the previous day, and on the occasion of their first use. Subsequently, no lighter flicked on to form dancing shadows on the car walls, no Butane-fueled flame burned prospective toxins out of the contents of their spoons, spoons that had shed the innocence of their kitchen days for something more sinister. They each shot up, one, two, three, and each fell into that first nod of euphoria, a scarecrow short of Dorothy and her friends in the poppy field.
At the same time that legions of fish were rising to the vaporous surface of No Bottom Pond, dead and already beginning to putrefy, small boils began to pop up under the skin of the three beings in the car. The tall man thought he’d injected a “hot shot,” while the woman jerked out of her nod in wild agitation to inspect the tip of her needle, convinced she’d given herself “cotton fever” by neglecting to free the point from Q-tip remnants. Both of them were wrong.
The mutations occurred quickly and the changes were profound. When the transformation was complete, the three beings were no longer satisfied with the heroin that flowed through their veins. They were hungry for more. Hungry in a way that made every torturous withdrawal symptom or harrowing mental craving of the past seem like a petty annoyance, a mere itch that could go without being scratched.
Two hours earlier, a local scientist named Craig Silas stood on a dip of Watch Hill Road, a dark silhouette overlooking the river that rushed into No Bottom Pond. Craig worked at a nearby pharmaceutical company, and the previous year had snuck a project home to his basement laboratory to continue his work free from the oversight and ethical regulations of his employer.
In the wake of a country-wide opiate epidemic, Big Pharma had sufficient incentive to develop an opioid-free painkiller, eliminating the potential for abuse and addiction. Craig had stumbled on an unanticipated side-effect of the chemical compound he’d been studying, and upon bringing his research home, further unlocked the potential of the drug. Characteristics included superhuman strength, laser-point focus, and a complete inability to feel pain. Craig spent weeks hypoth
esizing on the drug’s seemingly limitless prospects, until he’d descended the basement stairs one morning to find one of the pink-eyed lab rats feasting on his cage-mates’ brains. It seemed that with every possibility of experiencing pain eliminated, the rats’ behavior had morphed into something much more ominous … and much more deadly.
After driving up and down the streets of Mysticism with the concoction swishing around a large vat in his trunk, Craig noticed that the adjacent river ran under the road and into a wide inlet. Theorizing that the body of water before him was the equivalent of a dead end street, he pulled onto the narrow shoulder and muscled the vat onto the guardrail before another car could appear. Craig Silas had left No Bottom Pond ten miles behind him by the time his miracle drug had seeped into the pond’s ecosystem, and was home in his favorite armchair with his feet up by the time the first transformations began to occur.
Sophisticated cognition already reduced to animalistic compulsion, the three addicts, who had become fiends of a different nature, were barely able to recall the chain of events that had led them to their last high, brought to the utmost intensity by the unorthodox mixture of heroin and pond-dispersed, opiate-free analgesic. But they were able to recall enough to know what they needed to do to feed the hunger that gnawed at their insides like so many of Silas’ lab rats. And so they began to move.
Kartya watched the spray of blood waterfall through the front door of the cabin, and grabbed Kit’s arm.
“That … was … awesome!” she cheered, the arm-grabbing escalating to arm-slapping. She turned to face her boyfriend. “How much time is left?” she asked him.
“Kar, just watch it, I’m not messing with it again. It’s thirty minutes long, like all the other episodes.”
This appeased Kartya enough to watch the last ten minutes in silence. She twirled a ringlet of cherry-coke-colored hair around blood-red fingernails. When the show was over, she turned to Kit again, eager to hear his opinion on the latest installment.
“Well,” Kit said. “They definitely set us up for an epic showdown at the cabin.”
“Agreed!” Kartya paused. “I wish there was more than ten episodes. That was a good one though. Buckets of blood!” A mischievous smile turned up the corners of her lips.
“Twisted, gory, and hilarious,” Kit said. “The dead cop put her fists through those campers’ skulls, and turned them into corpse puppets!”
“Let’s be serious, the other characters only exist to compliment Ash. To give the directors a springboard for Ash’s amazing one-liners. And so we can see some different weapons brandished against the Deadites. ‘Cause, you know, it can’t be all about Ash’s chainsaw arm and ‘boomstick.’” She mimed obliterating Kit with a shotgun blast to the face and snickered.
“Also, did I tell you that Ash, err, sorry, Bruce Campbell wrote an autobiography a few years back … called If Chins Could Kill?”
Kit gave her a look that conveyed both incredulity and reverence, and broke into a hearty chuckle, no doubt visualizing the B-list movie actor’s signature square chin.
“Are you kidding me? That’s amazing. You need to get that book.” He gestured to two bookshelves flanking the television, which still rolled the blood-splattered credits for the show.
Kartya nodded with enthusiasm but did not turn to regard the bookshelves, pointing instead to the two Vinyl Pop characters facing off from their respective posts atop surround sound speakers. The superbly detailed plastic Ash and an Army of Darkness Deadite had been Christmas gifts from her mother the previous morning. Though she didn’t share her daughter’s love for horror, Kartya’s mother knew Kartya and Kit harbored a cultish enthusiasm for Ash, and all things Evil Dead, from the campy originals to the 2013 remake, and now, the new original series. She had wrapped the figurines, knowing it would bring appreciative smiles to their faces.
“Instead of that wobbly speaker, a hardcover copy of If Chins Could Kill could be mini-Ash’s battleground in the fight against evil,” Kartya said.
Kit surveyed the current setup displaying their action figures, smiled, and got to his feet.
“You’re cute, babe. I love that you love blood and guts as much as I do.” Kit stretched his six-foot-three frame toward the ceiling and let out a groan. “But the party’s over. I have to get to work.”
“I can’t believe you agreed to work the night after Christmas,” Kartya said. She tried to pout, but a yawn claimed her features instead. “Although to be honest, you won’t miss much. I’m beat and will be asleep fifteen minutes after you leave.”
As Kit dragged himself up the stairs to change, Kartya heard a muffled chime, and realized she was sitting on her phone. A preview of the text message scrolled across the screen. Kartya’s friend Laura had written: “Better lock your door …”
Laura did well as an emergency room nurse, working as an independent contractor in different hospitals from Hartford to Boston. She vacationed often, and had just returned that morning from her fourth trip to St. John since the year began. Kartya thumbed at the screen until she could see the rest of the message. In its entirety, it read: “Better lock your door … because my house just got broken into.”
A fat worm of fear speared itself between the layers of Kartya’s intestines. There had been numerous reports of break-ins in Mysticism over the last month, and Laura lived less than a mile from the riverfront home Kartya and Kit rented. Her fingers jerking in furious spasms, Kartya texted Laura back: “Were you home? Are you ok? What did they take?”
As she waited for Laura’s reply, Kit trudged back down the stairs. He was able to read the worry on her face with a single glance.
“What is it?” he asked.
“Laura and Seth’s house got broken into. I asked her what they took and if they were home. She hasn’t answered me yet.”
The concern on Kit’s face mixed with anger. With a grim headshake, he reached out to pull her off the couch.
“No way. This isn’t happening. No way I get switched to the night shift a month before the worst string of burglaries this town’s ever seen. Follow me.”
“But why? Where are we going?” Kartya asked him, her attention split between his grip on her forearm and her phone announcing a newly arrived message.
Kit gestured up the stairs, but let go of her so she could navigate to her text message app. She read silently, her brow creased, then raised her eyes to meet Kit’s.
“She said they were out getting drinks and they came home to a broken window in the living room. They’d been on vacation for the past week so someone obviously anticipated an empty house. They took jewelry, cash, some other valuables …” Kartya tried to trail off effectively, as if this was the extent of stolen goods.
“And? What else?” When she didn’t answer, he said, “What else did they take, Kartya?”
“Three guns were missing,” she said, knowing this information would fan Kit’s anger and apprehension into a full-blown blaze.
Motivated anew, Kit took her hand and resumed their ascent. In the guest bedroom, he retrieved a lockbox from an opaque-fronted entertainment stand.
“I would never forgive myself if something happened to you. I know you’re going to protest, but agree to it for my sake.” He pulled a handgun from the box and spun the cylinder, counting bullets.
“Kit,” Kartya objected.
“Please, just come here so I can give you a quick refresher on how to …”
“Kit—” She was about to insist on an end to this surreal conversation. Instead, Kartya sighed and took the gun from Kit’s hands, showing him that she remembered how to wield the weapon properly, cocking the hammer and adopting a shooter’s stance.
“You’ve dragged me to the range a hundred times. I know what I’m doing well enough to defend myself if it came to it.”
Kit nodded, but he seemed distracted. She uncocked the gun and returned it to the lockbox. Spinning on her heel for the hall, she stopped short when she heard the scrape of something much larger being unear
thed from the closet.
Without turning, she said, “Kit, I do not need the shotgun to be within arm’s reach when I go to bed tonight. End of discussion.”
Torn between Kartya’s obvious intention to refuse the shotgun and his need to be assured of her safety, Kit placed the shotgun on top of the stand.
“Fine,” he said. “But I’m leaving it here, just in case. The revolver is going on your nightstand. And that’s also not open for discussion.”
“Whatever,” Kartya said, believing that the house was impregnable. “Drive safe please, and try to have a good night at work.”
Kartya let Kit lead her into their bedroom, saying nothing as he placed the revolver on a paperback, two feet from where she was to lay her head down on the pillow. He kissed her goodnight and turned off the bedside lamp, and Kartya listened to his footsteps on the stairs as she nestled beneath the covers. Fewer than fifteen minutes after he departed, she was sound asleep.
A noise woke her, what sounded like the skeletal finger of a winter-dead tree tapping on a window. She sat up, disoriented. Had Kit forgotten something, perhaps his badge, or the food she’d packed for him to eat on his break? She groped for her cell, found the button to illuminate the screen. Ten forty-five. Kit would be forty-five minutes into an hour-long commute, so it wouldn’t be him tapping. She strained to catch the sound again, but it had stopped. Kartya sunk down onto the pillow, drawing the comforter up to her neck, then groaned. She flung the comforter back, forcing herself to bear the cold trek to the bathroom before returning to sleep. Halfway there, the tapping began again.
Kartya froze. There in the hallway, equally removed from both the revolver and the shotgun Kit had set out for her protection, vulnerable in her bare feet, with full bladder and panic fluttering in her brain like a moth trapped in a lantern, the details of the nearby break-in came roaring back, having been temporarily stolen by the fugue of sleep.
Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 2 Page 30