PRAISE FOR CODY GOODFELLOW
“Truly unique, imaginative and sometimes painfully graphic.”
—Rue Morgue
“One of the best writers of our generation.”
—Brian Keene, author of The Rising and Dark Hollow
“Cody Goodfellow is untouched as a breathless reporter of violent action, relating it in hurtling prose full of striking and sometimes hilarious metaphors.” —Strange Aeons
“Cody Goodfellow’s imagination is a freeway flyer, and his prose is a ride on a rocket-sled. He’s one of the two or three god-damned best writers in the Genres today.”
—Michael Shea, author of Nifft the Lean and Copping Squid
SILENT WEAPONS FOR QUIET WARS
“One can certainly see influences of Lovecraft, the New Wave of SF writers of the sixties, the Cyberpunks and Splatterpunks – and even surrealists like Kafka and Borges. Don’t get me wrong though, Cody Goodfellow is one of a kind. Highly Recommended!” —Dark Discoveries
“‘80s vintage horror with a contemporary edge. An exemplary wordsmith, his prose sticks a needle in your brain and gives it a twist. This stuff is Lovecraft on acid.”
—Laird Barron, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories
ALL-MONSTER ACTION
“Fuck, I wish I thought of that. . .”
—Guillermo del Toro, director of Pacific Rim and Pan’s Labyrinth
PERFECT UNION
“Perfect Union is Cronenberg’s The Fly on a grand scale: human/insect gene-spliced body horror, where the human hive politics are as shocking as the gore. This book would make Marx and Thoreau’s heads explode. In other words, astounding.”
—John Skipp, NY Times Bestselling author of The Light at the End and The Bridge
REPO SHARK
“It’s like a better American Gods that’s got the stoner/sunshine noir vibe of The Big Lebowski plus some John Waters level filth and a helping of Looney Tunes violence. . . Goodfellow has a way of writing packed sentences that never feels like showing off, a way of writing about a truly clueless and loathsome protagonist but still get you to feel for the guy.”
—Adam Cesare, author of Tribesmen and Video Night
RADIANT DAWN/RAVENOUS DUSK
“Cody Goodfellow has written the two best cross-genre-anthropological-Lovecraftian-military-thriller-stew books ever with Radiant Dawn and Ravenous Dusk. He’s like the Ellroy of speculative fiction . . .”
—Jeremy Robert Johnson, author of Skullcrack City, We Live Inside You, and Angel Dust Apocalypse
Cody Goodfellow was born in San Diego, California, and studied English Literature and Broadcasting at UCLA. He has written five novels––his latest is Repo Shark––and co-written three more with New York Times bestselling author John Skipp. He received the Wonderland Book Award twice for his previous collections, Silent Weapons For Quiet Wars and All-Monster Action. He wrote, co-produced and scored the short Lovecraftian hygiene film Stay At Home Dad, which can be viewed on YouTube. He is also a managing director of the H.P. Lovecraft Film Festival: Los Angeles and cofounder and editor at Perilous Press, a micropublisher of modern cosmic horror.
Cody Goodfellow’s
STRATEGIES
AGAINST
NATURE
KING SHOT PRESS
An imprint of Broken River Books
3 Monroe Parkway, Ste. P241
Lake Oswego, OR 97035
Copyright © 2015 by Cody Goodfellow
Cover art copyright © 2015 Nipon Jungkina
Fat of the Land art © Sebastian Mazuera
Cover design copyright © 2015 Matthew Revert
www.matthewrevert.com
Interior design by Michael Kazepis
Image restoration on page 261 by Tiffany Scandal
Portions of this book have appeared elsewhere: “Wasted on the Young,” Cemetery Dance, 2008. “At the Riding School,”The Bleeding Edge, 2010. “A Summer on Quiet Island,”Dead Bait 2, 2011. “Nature’s Mother,” Phantasmagorium #3, 2012. “Flea Circus,” Dark Fusions, 2013. “Waiting Room,” Lazy Fascist Review #2, 2014. “Wishing Well,” A Season in Carcosa, 2012. “What The Gods Eat,” Dark Recesses 11, 2006. “Fat of the Land,” Magazine of Bizarro Fiction, 2013. “Morning Coming Down” and “Girl On Girl” are original to this collection.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.
This is a work of fiction. All names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination. Where the names of actual celebrities or corporate entities appear, they are used for fictional purposes and do not constitute assertions of fact. Any resemblance to real events or persons, living or dead, is coincidental.
ISBN: 978-1-940885-20-9
Printed in the United States of America
FOR VICTORIA
Table of Contents
MORNING COMING DOWN
AT THE RIDING SCHOOL
WHAT THE GODS EAT
WAITING ROOM
A SUMMER ON QUIET ISLAND
WASTED ON THE YOUNG
NATURE'S MOTHER
FLEA CIRCUS
WISHING WELL
GIRL ON GIRL
FAT OF THE LAND
STRATEGIES
AGAINST
NATURE
MORNING COMING DOWN
“Hey dude, look at this!”
Toothless Stu shouts at Pike, who turns around to look just as the blue Windstar swerves across three empty lanes to hit Toothless Stu so hard it cuts him in half.
They’re picking up trash off the slope of ivy-encrusted dirt alongside the northbound I-75 on a muggy Sunday morning.
He’s not ten feet from Pike when it happens. Stu coming bounding down the embankment with something in his hand; Pike picking trucker bombs and Jumbo Jack wrappers out of the scabby ice plant, when the minivan comes shrieking in. The breeze from its passage snaps the big orange trashbag taut in Pike’s hand like a matador’s cape.
Pike is looking right at him when it happens. Pike’s pretty sure that, whatever it was Stu wanted him to see, it wasn’t how totally he could be dismantled by a speeding vehicle.
Stu was a pothead and a misogynist pig, but worst of all, he was a whiner. Everything he’s said so far this morning remains like a rusty nail hammered into Pike’s brain. He got sent across the freeway from the van on the southbound side because he wouldn’t stop running his mouth on the van. Pike went with him because he got caught with the vodka and wouldn’t say whose it was.
Pike’s working off the last week of community service for a DUI. Still hung over from last night, would have the shakes if not for the eye-opener the boys passed around in the van. The only thought that doesn’t make him want to dry heave is the dream of drop-kicking the mouthy punk into traffic, although right now, there isn’t any.
Whatever Pike is going to say comes out as an empty croak with some bile and an Altoid behind it.
The late-model Windstar with oxidized blue metallic flake paint and peeling fake wood paneling separates Stu’s pelvis from spine like a picked flower. The top half of the skinny stoner caroms off the sloped windshield to windmill in the air, impossible to miss in his day-glo orange safety vest.
Instantly, the other members of the litter crew, all bunched up on the southbound shoulder, drop their bags and bolt for the van.
The Windstar swerves up onto the embankment, then sloshes back onto the road with the airbags deployed and the horn stuck braying like an air raid siren.
It’s 7:14 on a S
unday morning in late September. Already hot before the sun peers over the twelve-foot retaining walls of I-75, the air sticky with yesterday’s exhaust and tire dust. Nobody but fishermen, truckers and long-haul travelers on the road at this hour. The kind of Sunday morning quiet that dares you to break it, that gently urges you to go back to bed until Happy Hour. And the top half of Toothless Stu still hasn’t fallen to earth.
Pike looks down at the fresh skid mark on the thirsty asphalt, like a hesitation mark before the splash of impact. No brakes, just the skid of a wild turn, like they meant to hit him.
Stu’s torso comes to rest twenty feet away on the shoulder, next to shredded treads of a blown-out tire and a tiny pink child’s slipper. His legs are a jumble like a big crushed spider about fifty yards to the south.
And the thing Stu was going to show Pike, the thing that cost him his life, rolls up to his feet. He starts to bend over to pick it up, but a jolt of ice-water shoots up his spine. He turns and looks over his shoulder.
The northbound freeway curves to the left and dips behind the next rise of coastal hills a few hundred yards away, enough to give them a few seconds to see oncoming traffic. A Lumina passes by in the fast lane, slowing just enough for the passenger to make eye contact with Pike, who snaps out of it to wave his arms and croak, “Call 911!”
The act of speaking sends a blue bolt of epileptic agony through his brain. Pike’s been doing okay, so long as he moves as if his skull has no lid. If he carries it with the gentle care of a mug full of piping hot coffee, he won’t stroke out before he gets some relief. Not until he smells the unripe brown bouquet of Stu’s last meal does it occur to him to move away. His foot touches the big pink stuffed bunny with Toothless Stu’s blood all over it, kicks it down the road.
Pressing on his right eye, biting back bile because he hasn’t had solid food since Friday night. He turns to walk as fast as he can for the van without spilling his brains.
Chuy, the driver, throws the loading doors open, but stiff-arms the men trying to climb onboard. Shouting in their faces to get out there and help the assholes in the Windstar. “Community service, putos.” So Chuy is the only one in the big orange Econoline when it gets rear-ended by the pickup.
It’s a big-ass F-150 longbed with four dayworkers crammed into the cab. Must be late for a job in the next county. Doing seventy at least, it crushes the van’s rear end like an empty beer can and sends it up rocketing down the shoulder.
Two of Pike’s crew get smashed like bugs on the grill. A third gets ground to flank steak between the van and the retaining wall. Pivoting on the axis of its engine block, the van rebounds off the wall and swings out into the path of a Miata blowing eighty in the middle lane to pass a motor home hogging the fast lane.
The two of them collide and cartwheel down the freeway like hurled Matchbox cars, catching up to the motor home and the ski boat it’s towing. The crushed hulk of the van sideswipes the trailer, sending the ski boat knifing over the median. The Miata chops into the motor home’s fiberglass cabin like cardboard. And like a mop sweeping all into a neat, screaming pile comes the runaway truck.
Pike collapses against the concrete K-barrier on the median, clutching his head to keep the dead dry petals of his skull from crumbling and blowing away. Pressing his head against white concrete stained with the ballistic scribbles from tires, bursts of color from traded paint. In the split second that it all goes spinning by, his heart hammering the back of his throat and bile scalding the raw, blood-crusted gutters of his sinuses, all he can think is—
Hit me
The Ford pickup ends up nosed into the wall. The burnt-maple syrup stink of coolant makes him sick up on his boots. The livid bug-blood green gushes from the truck, but it covers the burgeoning smell of the bodies strewn all around it.
Two guys in fleece-lined denim jackets hang out the windshield with their heads crushed in. The driver still sits in his seat behind the slack airbag. His phone—he’s holding it to his ear and crying. No words, the sound is beneath words, below despair. . . .
And everything hurts but Pike homes in on that phone, on the sound that cuts through all the other sounds to stick a white-hot corkscrew into his hangover. The driver in the pickup truck smashes his phone into his face until the glass snaps and tries to start his truck.
Two of the litter crew are still standing. Clinging to the wall like piglets on a tit. A big bald asshole, Pike thinks he’s named Larry—yells for Jesus. Bigot and a prick, but he was the one who smuggled the rubber douchebags of vodka on the van. The black guy next to him, says fuck this noise, let’s go home.
None of them have phones. Chuy and the deputy took them before they got on the van. This stretch of freeway has twelve-foot barricades enclosing it on both sides. The nearest off-ramp is directly across from them, on the northbound side. The nearest offramp on the southbound side is a half-mile south of where Pike is basting in his own flop-sweat.
Head swimming, heaving down the front of his vest. No cars are coming now, but he’ll have about three seconds to cross all four lanes to the offramp, or he can stay here on his island, with its patchy wall of parched xeriscape shrubbery.
Three out of four southbound lanes are blocked. He screams at Larry and the black guy to get off the wall. The sound of his own voice in his head is like a splitting maul right into the cleft between the hemispheres of his brain. Next to it, all this cars-crashing-shit could go fuck itself.
He pushes himself upright, stumbles away from the median. It hurts less if he covers his right eye with his hand. He crosses the fast lane and stops short when he hears the honking horn. Pitch rising, the dove gray BMW coupe eats up the world. Tires scream as it navigates between Pike and the ski boat. The driver’s on her game today, but comes up short when she passes the Windstar, butt-end up against the center divider.
The Windstar’s driver runs out in front of her with his phone in his hand, his mouth a huge empty O. Aerosolized on impact, he throws the BMW into a power slide that turns into a tight barrel roll, shedding glass and chrome like an animal shaking off water.
Fuck it. Nowhere is safe. They’re all trying to die today. Stealing my only thing. Again. Keep moving.
He passes the boat in the #3 lane, keeping it between him and the next two cars. The cars keep coming in the southbound lane like an artillery salvo. Something hits the pickup, and a big gas can for the lawnmowers in the bed goes up in a whooping roar of daisy-cutter shrapnel.
The next one, a PT Cruiser filled with hungover Marines, threads the gaps, then pulls over on the shoulder to call 911.
Pike keeps walking, staggers, realizes he’s gone in a circle. Throws a leg over the concrete barrier, thrusting an arm through dry, filthy brush. Big stalks of jimson weed disperse seeds in his face like giant dandelions. He heard in county lockup that you could smoke it and see shit like opium, except it paralyzed you. He feels like that now. Breath won’t come in his chest. His heart wants out, a cat in a box, forcing his brain out his eyeholes like juice from a lemon.
Pike’s headache gets ten times worse. The Marines in the PT Cruiser take off, swerve out onto the road in a boomerang loop across all four lanes to kiss grills with a highballling Volvo semi that smashes right through them like they’re made of glass.
Pike falls over the barrier and curls up around his angry, empty gut. The phones, it’s the fucking phones—
He hears the black guy coming and makes himself peek. The black guy overtakes him and mounts the barrier.
Larry is up against the county van, trying to pull something out through a broken window. It’s the bag with their phones in it, or maybe the amnesty bag for the booze and joints half of them tried to smuggle on the van.
Pike throws a leg to come back over the barrier for Larry, or
. . . fuck Larry, there’s his fucking flask in there. Maybe if he had a taste, he could see through his right eye without throwing up.
The black guy says, You dumb mother—
Red Camaro swe
rves into sight weaving like the driver can’t decide which side of the van to pass on. Atomizes Larry like a doggy bag of shit and bones, smashing him into the van and decorating the next quarter mile of roadway with him before coming to rest against the Windstar, which wreck is by now maybe ninety seconds old.
The black guy jumps off the median and passes Pike, who clings to the pitted, cracked concrete like deadwood in a flood even as an SUV comes and the driver is crying as he swings the car to line up Pike in his sights like a kamikaze pilot.
Pike hugs the concrete barrier like his opponent in a twelve round heavyweight bout. Toothless Stu got clipped so fast he didn’t even scream. A sure end to this shitty cycle of binging and purging and falling apart and pissing himself at the first sign of trouble.
His muscles fail and he falls just before impact. Pike rolls into the planter between the barriers, sucking dust. The SUV slams into the barrier, knocking it off its anchors and cracking the concrete like stale bread off its rebar skeleton.
Pike screams so loud he can’t feel his headache. He’s just a bug crushed between rocks. His bowels and bladder let go into his crappy county jail jeans. He doesn’t even want to die anymore, he just wants to make it stop.
The SUV’s cabin collapses around its human cargo in a marvel of automotive origami. Nothing disrupts the maxed-out good-news gospel oldies on the sound system until the violent advent of the front suspension and red hot engine block to the spacious genuine leather climate-controlled front seating. Safety glass buckshot and scalding coolant wash over him as the sun goes out. The careening vehicle rears up on its back wheels, grinding sideways along the top of the barrier, then rolls onto its roof like a comically dead dog.
Pike jerks up and flops over the barrier onto the northbound side, thinking yellow pigdick cunt can’t even die right—
Strategies Against Nature Page 1