Baby's First Book of Seriously Fucked-Up Shit

by Robert Devereaux

  They snugged your badge into a real nice soft-leather case that felt as cozy as suede when you whipped it from your inside coat pocket and held it up for a citizen’s eyes.

  He maneuvered the Plymouth along the quiet streets, a bouquet of long-stemmed roses lying beside him.

  A lanky young man was walking an Airedale. John hit his horn lightly, waved, took the return wave. The dog’s no-nonsense yap filled the air with glee. Life was good. Life was very good. Life was very very very good.

  But it could be better.

  He could assure Sally that he loved her, that there’d never be for him any woman in the world but her. That was what a wife wanted to hear. For John, there’d only always been Sally.

  No one else. And there never would be anyone else. Never never never.

  He hummed a sprightly tune.

  There was Baxter Enterprises ahead. The guard at the gate grinned at him. He lifted the flowers, said, “For my sweet honey,” and the mustachioed geezer in uniform nodded and waved him through. “Say hello to the missus for me,” the guard shouted, shrinking in the rear view mirror.

  “I will,” yelled John. He rolled up the window, the corners of his mouth hurting from his smiles, and pressed on toward the main building.

  Baxter had his way with her. Though smart and snappy as always, Miss Holmes was passive like a good dolly ought to be.

  On the floor, upon the air mattress he forced her into blowing up, he felt all her secret places, he tasted her, he lay his bulky frame on her and forced his manhood inside her. The air was thick with bird smell, tainted by hints of formaldehyde from the embryos jarred on the table above them.

  So enthralled did he become and so passive and almost not-there was his victim that he lost track of his carving knife.

  And suddenly there was a tugging at his hand, and an emptiness there. Then his shoulder caught fire, a jag of outrage sinking thickly inside. His secretary wiggled like a bazillion panicked eels out from under him as the pain erupted, a swift deep cramp in his upper torso.

  He screamed, not continuous but blips—sharp, barked, like a wounded mutt. Her face flared and bloomed. Shrew, he thought.

  Termagant. That’s what she had turned into. She gripped the knife handle and yanked it out. He felt somehow as if his lungs fol owed it, and yet it was a hurt he needed from her. She had repented. She would help him to a hospital, stanch his blood, bandage him, make him all better, hold him, kiss him, dump her dorky boy in blue.

  Then she docked him. She fisted his shaft, razored a chill below, pressed it in, cutting through no-resistance, through sponge cake, burrowing and spreading a volcano of agony.

  Her first thrust had enervated him. He could only make faint shows of protest as she unmanned him. Suddenly he could no longer feel the squeeze, although he saw the purple flesh blanch in her fingers, saw her pry his member away, felt his groin skin peel up, a gigantic splinter of pain, toward his navel.

  His thing thwapped on the floor where she tossed it.

  He rocked and screamed, energy draining from between his legs. His at acker—he’d been the at acker; now she was—bounded up, clattered in his tools above, came back with a bone saw.

  And then, oh my god, she severed his hands.

  * * *

  Rage drove her on. This monster had touched her in all her secret places. Now she was dismantling him, all his offending parts off and away. That’s the way it had to be, Sally’s crazed mind told her.

  His resistance was all in his voice. The bone saw snagged on the air mattress, which burbled its air away through washes of blood. But the vile hand snapped off, cracking and tearing like an uncooked lobsterclaw. The other, as his stump feebly brushed her back with sticky protest, proved even easier.

  Time for his tongue.

  She’d brought back a bull castrator—why he had one, she didn’t stop to ask. But her bloody hands tore at his jaws and jammed the instrument deep down into his throat, watching the tongue slither in snug where a pizzle would ordinarily go.

  Then she clamped shut, freshets of blood upshooting, spraying her breasts with hot gore. And out the quivering tantalizing tormenting sucker came.

  Though it too had violated her, she didn’t toss the tongue to the floor as she’d done with his hands and his manhood. She rose, unlidded the first jar she saw, took out the chick embryo, and dropped in the tongue, lifting the jar, hugging its chill to her breasts.

  She was aimlessly meandering, slowly, randomly, her face a veil of tears, wounded tears, tears of rage.

  Sally’s foot struck something. She glanced down at it, Baxter’s right hand. The things it had done! Still with the jar hugged to her chest, she bent down, snatched the odious thing up and hurled it away from her.

  The bell jar rang from the impact, lifted, tottered, and fell with a decisive clatter to the tabletop, rolling off and shattering on the floor. The pink crystal pulsed and hummed. Its light filled the air. The sound it made rose, higher, higher, like a menacing theremin.

  And then the explosion came, pink goop in the air, on her flesh, down her throat. It coated her arms where they hugged the jar, radiating there, pulsing. Sally wanted to scream, but she choked on the stuff, and felt it strangely warm all over her.

  * * *

  Just as John killed the Plymouth, he felt a whumph in the air.

  It was a subtle pop but all his antennas of love and protection immediately sprang up and out.

  Sally was in danger.

  Without remembering how he’d done it, he was suddenly outside the car, his hands on the closed pinging car door. It felt as if it took forever but he raced to the entrance and plowed through, down corridor upon corridor to Sally’s lab. “Sally!”

  he yelled. “Sally! Sally! Sally!”

  No one.

  But John took in the door to the inner lab, its edge blasted and pulsing pink from lights within. He dashed to it, yanked it open.

  His wife was facing away from him, naked and sobbing.

  On the floor lay Doctor Baxter, parts of him missing, him nearly dead but not quite so. A gigantic rooster stood in a cage in the far corner, stinking the place up.

  John approached his naked wife. There was yucky pink stuff in her hair, all over her body, on the jar her hands gripped so tight. The residue of some pink substance lay like shards of shattered icicle on a far table.

  “Honey?” he said. “Are you okay?”

  Her face was slabbed in tears.

  She looked down, noticed what she was holding, set it with other jars like it on the table beside her.

  She turned to him, held out her hands but then raised them as he approached. “I… I’m all goopy.”

  “Here.” He looked around wildly, saw some linen on a shelf. “I’ll get you a towel.”

  He got her a towel.

  Doctor Baxter, gurgling, died. “He attacked me,” she said.

  John nodded. His wife was one savage biddy. But, by God, she’d had good reason. There was cleanup needing to be done, here and in their lives. But he vowed, by his love for her, to see things through to the end.

  * * *

  Baxter woofed his last breath. His mouth, his groin, his wriststumps felt as if God, frowning from on high, had snapped bear traps on them and salted his wounds, skewering his celestial disapproval in like sharp smoldering stakes that glowed white hot, turning, twisting, searing, never a dull moment in his tormented body.

  Then suddenly the pain, pricklike, was cut off.

  He was somewhere else. Somewhere cool and moist and cloying. He couldn’t see. He couldn’t hear. But he felt himself alive and whole, if uprooted. And he could taste, oh yes he could. Yucky tasting stuff; unpalatable, though he had no palate.

  But something most succulent lay close by, something he had tasted recently and could still, in sensual memory, recall with wicked delight. He pulsed. He surged. But this new body, if that’s what it was—limbless, but mere limb—would take some getting used to, to make it motile, to seek out and taste
that recalled succulence once more.

  A light shone, warm and pink (now how could he sense, being blind, colors?), a finger’s reach from him. It felt like sunlight on seedlings. He sensed arousal, the shift of flexible flesh, an overpowering urge to grow.

  In bed that night, after the police procedurals had swept through her, Sally tossed and turned. An extra long bath had helped, steaming there, quite out of it, till the water grew cool.

  But she still felt Doctor Baxter’s vile acts clinging to her—

  that and the glowing pink goop, the gargantuum the explosion had drenched her with.

  At midnight, she woke in a sweat.

  John was snoring beside her, big long snuffly snorts that made him less than appealing. His exhalations stank like sodden cigars, like burnt toast threaded with maggoty shreds of pork.

  When Sally shifted to turn him on his side, away from her, her pajamas clung tight. The buttons strained at her breasts, alternating left-and-right-facing vees of fabric. Her hips drew the cloth taut as snapped sheets. Breathing was difficult. Had she put on a pair of John’s pajamas by mistake? Nope. The monogram, a red SAH, was hers.

  John snorted awake.

  “You okay?” he mumbled.

  “Yes,” she said. “Go back to sleep.”

  She tried to do the same. Funny. Her pajama bottoms used to cover her ankles. Now they’d started to creep up her calves, clinging there like wet wraps of seaweed.

  She dismissed it, tried to find sleep. But Baxter’s words of warning and the image of a ten-foot cock refused to leave her mind.

  John feigned sleep. But it wouldn’t come. In the moonlight seeping in their window, he let his glistening eyes open. His wife lay upon her back, dozing fitfully. It was a warm night.

  The covers slanted at her waist.

  My God, he thought, her breasts are mammoth.

  Sally was so beautiful. It tore him up inside that she’d endured the nightmare of being violated by Doctor Baxter.

  The warped deviant deserved to have his… but then John remembered. Baxter had had his… And by Sally’s dear hand.

  He propped himself slowly on one crooked arm, head in hand, and beheld her. Sweet face. Wanton hair, down now, rioting like rainbows on her pillow. Somehow, there seemed more of her tonight. He loved her so. He wished there were some way he could undo her pain.

  Undo her buttons.

  Her breasts were so huge. Pregnant women, he’d been told, got that way. Maybe they’d have a child after all. But he doubted that. They plumped there under the strain of cotton, huge soft cantaloupe mounds that would one day droop and sag like ugly sacks of pudding, but didn’t now. They cantilevered, as magic as flying buttresses in their firmness, their heft, their suspension.

  One day, maybe, Sally would let him see them naked.

  But that day, he knew, lay far in the future. His wife was no slut. And she’d been through a personal hell that would take time and patience to heal.

  The bastard (oops, he amended it to “bad man”) ought to have his…

  Ah yes. Small favors.

  Baxter felt in-tight. Jar-shaped. He had to get out before the confinement squeezed him to death. He’d never felt so helpless. Then he realized, with a virtual smack to his nonexistent forehead, that he was all muscle.

  He contracted, tensed. Waited until he felt cramped again.

  Then, abruptly, he flexed.

  And suddenly he was free!

  Sensing sharpness, he gingerly moved over fragments so as not to cut himself. He tasted wood, fell, thwapped to newly mopped linoleum tile. Licking the ammoniac tang of Mr. Clean, he pulsed and throbbed toward freedom.

  A pressure halted him. He smelled the black stink of Cat’s Paw shoe polish. Swooping across leather, he found flesh, flesh that shook, jittered. Panicked hands batted at him. But he clung tight, wrapping about an ankle. His spittle turned the flesh soft and absorbable. He took the stuff in, the blood, the bone, lapping up thigh meat as his victim fell, scream-vibes egging him on.

  It felt positively erotic to sate himself.

  Like lava, he smacked up the body inside the clothes, tasted groin slit, hair, belly, breasts. A female cop, was his guess as he gobbled. And alone, based on the help she didn’t get. His tonguebody thinned and imbibed, slapping like a wave, receding, drawing sandflesh, sandbone, after it, trails of bloodbubble foaming behind.

  When nothing remained but copsuit, he ambled on.

  Sally, by the dresser, held her glasses confusedly in her hand.

  The arms had snapped when she tried to put them on. But strangely she could see fine without them.

  “Listen,” John said to her. “I’ll take the day off. I’ve got time. We’ll go to the beach.”

  “You think that would help?” Nothing would help.

  “It’s worth a try.”

  After a time, she relented. Her husband seemed to be standing in a hole, but he was solid and assuring. It was a blessing to be in his care. When she took her one-piece into the bathroom to change, it wouldn’t fit.

  So they got in the car and went to Macy’s.

  For some reason a white bikini, one of those new and daring suits, seemed right. When she looked at herself in the dressing room mirror, Anita Ekberg came to mind. Milk bottles. My, my, she thought, I am filling out.

  She could scarcely pull her clothing over it, the red checked shirt, the slacks. Was it time to diet? No. She wasn’t fatter. Just larger. Hmmm.

  “Let’s go,” she said, taking John’s arm.

  On the drive to the beach, she brooded on gargantuum.

  Jones Beach was crowded that day. Must be lots of folks on vacation, John thought. They strolled along the shore, his wife’s statuesque body—and since when had she become statuesque?—drawing stares. There was no hope of finding seclusion, but between beachfronts, they found a bit more room to spread out the pea-green army blanket.

  At a distance, an unchaperoned bunch of teens played jungle music, tinny, from a tiny transistor radio.

  Sally tucked her hair into a bathing cap, white with plastic flowers daisied on it. John frolicked with her in the waves, splashing her, being splashed. For the moment, everything seemed normal again.

  Back on the blanket, her body glistened with droplets as she lay down. Sleek curvy back. Wondrous front. What a full voluptuous woman his wife was. Odd. In the store, her bikini had fit fine. Now the flesh strained at it and he fancied he could see the cloth tugging, thinning.

  “Jeepers, this suit is tight,” she said.

  John looked over at the teens. They were jiggling to the radio noise. Disgusting. America was in trouble.

  He heard Sally prepare a sneeze.

  When he turned to her, the sneeze blew into her hand and her suit exploded off her. For a second in the bright sunlight, his wife was bare-ass naked.

  She took the Lord’s name in vain.

  Then she grabbed a towel, two towels, and sat there rocking, crying, lamenting, “What’s happening to me?”

  Baxter tasted dirt, gravel, cinders, dog doo, hawked gobs of spit. He preferred the lady cop. He craved more female flesh, and one dainty dish in particular. When he picked up the tracks of his former secretary, he’d be hot on that cutie’s trail, no question.

  But in the meantime, he slithered along the edge of downtown North Allville. Somehow his senses of taste and touch were so acute, he could grope along an internal map of the town. He had ghost visions, ghost hearings, faint white whispered things, that corresponded to what was out there.

  A malt shop near the railroad tracks.

  He sniffed females, lots of them.

  The air jittered with passion sounds. He could feel the floor shaking as he slid through the open door. There were seven of them, smelling like high school cheerleader types.

  With his tip, he eased the door closed, locked it, turned the OPEN sign to CLOSED.

  High giggles knifed the air.

  Ponytails twirled, hips gyred in long poodle skirts.

&nbs
p; Then he attacked, and the giggles turned to screams.

  He sucked up girlflesh, swelled, grew. This was the life.

  Blood, bone, bile, chocolate malts half-digested in smooth taut burst tummies.

  Much better than dog doo.

  But nowhere near as delectable as sweet Sally Holmes.

  Weeks passed. The evidence of Sally’s transformation had become so clear that, the day after the beach fiasco, she fled.

  Nearly seven feet. She was growing and growing fast. As she left, she had to duck through the front door to avoid braining herself.

  She kept to the woods during the day, moving at night in a direction that called to her. To clothe herself, she stole sheets off lines, pinning them together with wooden clothespins.

  She raided gardens, wishing she had money to pay the good people she stole from.

  Her mind was expanding too. Her rage. And, God help her, her libido. She’d never been so horny and so angry, and her thoughts had never ranged so widely over being and nothingness, the meaning of life, and the silly putterings of the diminutive creatures she espied from where she hid. Whole passages of Plato and Aristotle she had slid over in school now came back, making sense. She embraced what was right in them, tossed what was wrong.

  When she was thirty feet tall, she began not to care who saw her move at night. At forty feet, she bared her breasts, feeling nightbreeze and sunlight tauten the huge nipples. At fifty feet, she started to tease the little people, gripping cars and jiggling them, lifting them by the roofs so swiftly that sometimes—like painfully inept special effects—it seemed she lifted the landscape along with it. She wrecked upright structures. Steeples, radio towers, anything lofty she tore off, feeling enraged and good and sweaty. During the day, she sought out bowllike depressions, cool, lush, comforting, to sleep in.

  She had no idea what place instinct drew her toward, but it was good, very good indeed. Of that she was sure.

  John fixed upon the US map the sergeant was pointing to. The country was going crazy. His wife, breasts bare as a harlot’s, had grown huge and was destroying property left and right.

  Rumors of a giant tongue circulated, and whole villages’

  populations disappearing. The only thing left behind? A trail of bloody saliva.