by Brian Hodge
"I can wait all day," said Conor. "I've got gum." From his shirt pocket, below the line of skulls, he pulled a coil of rasp wire, a bit nastier than the kind campers use to saw firewood. He toyed with it, passing one ring through the other, making a little noose in which he trapped his finger. "You're the big deal around here. Mister Fuck You."
Dicky gauged the open door. Getting ready. He could fall against the jamb in a crouch and fire in half a second. He wiped his hands on his black tee shirt, to keep a better grip on the Magnum. His teeth were locked, his lips back in a snarl, and he could now feel the power accumulated within him come rushing forth, to shake him like a climax.
Eyes ablaze, he sprang, twisted, impacted back and down, trigger finger cutting loose, screeching.
Fuck THIS you fucking DIE scumbag asshole–!
His two shots ate dirt. And hit nothing.
The razor noose looped in from behind Dicky's left shoulder and snugged tight with a hiss, trapping both of his hands around the gun butt. Conor, who had deftly circumvented the shack while Dicky was pumping up, wrenched the wire hard, lifting Dicky straight up into his waiting fist.
"Howdy!" Said the man.
When Dicky woke up, he had a hard-on.
When Dicky woke up, he had a hard-on because he could see a blonde woman.
When Dicky woke up, he had a hard-on because he could see a blonde woman masturbating him. She held up her hand to show him: Slick, coated, maroon. She smiled at Dicky and pumped away.
"Don't come yet, honey," she said.
"Howdy again." Said the man.
Conor gave the free loop of razor wire a savage yank.
The incoming pain was astonishing. It arched Dicky right off the table. Now he could see his erect cock, going from crimson to violet, bulging. Painfully.
Dicky found himself right next to Bitch, still unmoving on the brass-topped surface.
"Here's the game," said Conor. "Me and Grace, we don't approve of rape. You understand hydrostatic pressure? You'll stay hard as long as this wire around your balls stays cinched. Your victim here won't stay wet forever."
Conor rolled Dicky over into doggy position and guided him in. It was akin to making two hand puppets copulate.
"The moment you stop–or come–I whip-crack this wire and you're gonna need the world's most absorbent Kotex."
Dicky tried to say fuck you but was not sure whether the words ever left his mouth. He saw Grace kneel at the head of the table and point the Colt Trooper right at his nose, range, less than two feet. She steadied her aim between the girl's shoulder blades as Dicky began thrusting. Grace's hands were saturated in blood; Dicky had no idea whose.
"Shouldn't we take off that tape?" said Conor. "Maybe she can't breathe."
"She's alive so far," said Grace, dead eye-to-eye with Dicky. "I don't want to listen to her carrying on." She held down on Dicky while she lifted Arianne's head by the hair. "You are still alive, right? Don't you know any better than to stop for strangers in the middle of the desert?" She emitted a cluck of disgust. "Sweet Jesus–don't you find all this just a tad humiliating?"
Dicky and Arianne both began voiding fresher blood.
"You oughta be flattered," Conor told Dicky. "You caught our eye. I knew that mess at the Jump Mart wasn't the end product of a buncha ratpackers on the wild. Nope. Just one mind at work, there. Yours, am I right?"
"The son we never had." Grace said it mock-operatic.
"It's sorta like that joke about the minnow getting eaten by the fish. Then the fish gets eaten by a shark. A killer whale comes along and eats up the shark. Your love partner, here, is one of the minnows of the world. Plankton. And, as I know you're beginning to find out, minnows can provide sustenance…but not much in the way of real nourishment, if you follow me." Conor chewed his gum.
"And the people out there …" Grace shrugged. "Nine times out often they confuse carnivores with avengers."
Dicky could no longer pump, period. He sagged. His penis was rigid and well-sunk … but he just couldn't, any more.
Grace backed off, holstered her Colt, and held up a slim, long-barreled rifle so Dicky could see it.
"Now, your sadists and sickos," Conor continued, "would use a scattergun for this sorta thing. Y'know–one kaboom, serious gauge, and you kind of rain down all over the place. What Grace has there is just a plain ole .22."
She reached down to where Dicky and Arianne were joined, and used a handful of blood to lubricate the barrel.
"We've been waiting to find someone like you for a long time," she said, almost lovingly.
Dicky got out a scream when the sight on the barrel tore his rectal tissue. When Conor worked the bolt, Dicky could feel the click in his throat.
The first shot ripped sideways, tumbled, skinned a lung, cracked a rib, then lodged dead to bulge Dicky's right nipple from beneath the skin. The second shot made it almost all the way to his shoulder socket.
Conor was nearly gasping by now. "Waiting. A long time."
The third shot imploded Dicky's left lung. He could feel the barrel inside of him, choosing targets, and his penis inside of Bitch, formerly Arianne, as useless as his empty weapons.
Grace collected Dicky's face into her hands. She looked right on the teetering brink of orgasm, herself. "Come on, baby–you hate us. Fight it. Fight it. You're one of the bad guys, you hate us, fight it, fight it, you're a fighter–"
Dicky, the fighter, lasted nine rounds.
"You don't want to look at this," said the highway patrolman. He spoke to a middle-aged man who had entered the Jump Mart parking lot on foot.
"It looks like some officers died." Concern colored his tone.
The patrolman was a kid, twenty-three, tops, with no war time or street experience to compare with the shock sight of so many corpses in uniform. Two fellow hypos, Nick Bonaventure and Dallas Reese, blown down by an assault rifle. A deputy sheriff, Billy Simons, face-down in his own brains, most of his head gone.
And what had happened to Carter Strawn … Jesus fucking Christ. He had been hit in the chest so hard his Kevlar had ruptured, his internals mashed to chunky pudding.
And that wasn't even counting five dead civilians inside the store. Including a baby.
The stranger had a kind face. Mild prescription glasses. Graying hair. Fatherly. He read the patrolman's nameplate. "Officer Fremont," he said, "would you like a smoke?"
"Yeah. Thanks." Fremont was having trouble working up spit. Talk was okay. "You are…?"
"Pike. Are you okay?"
Fremont sniffed. "Yeah." Then, a vast exhalation. "First, we hear it's four raiders. Blitzkriegers clipping a convenience mart. Then we hear six. Then we hear nothing, because all the responding officers have been capped. Then we hear three perps and two vigilantes … shit, I sure can't tell you what happened here, Mr. Pike."
"It's going to start raining," said Pike. "Summer monsoons are rolling in." He pondered a moment, scratched his upper lip. "You know what we need, officer, is like in those old Westerns. A way to tell. White and black. Good guys wore white. Bad guys wore bad guy hats."
"It's not that simple anymore."
Pike arched an eyebrow at the carnage all around. "You're telling me."
"Sir, they killed cops wearing bulletproof vests. They killed a fucking baby. Whoever they were, they were maximal bad asses."
"It could have been worse," said Pike.
"I don't see how. How much worse could this get?"
Pike patted Fremont on the shoulder; he rather liked this naive and idealistic child. "You'll make out okay, I think. I'll just be getting out of your hair."
"Thanks for the smoke."
Pike acknowledged by making a little pistol of his thumb and forefinger. Then he strolled out of the parking lot, his running shoes crunching gravel softly. He turned his nose south, toward the rising storm front. He smiled. He always smiled when he felt good, and he always felt good when he knew it was close to feeding time.
For
BR
ANDON LEE
Though now
I am more alone,
still you soar,
my friend
Perps
During collation, this volume of short stories was originally titled Headshots. My primary intent was not divined by those upon whom I test-marketed it; everybody thought I meant 8x10 glossies, which I also intended–although subordinately to the bullet-in the brain image I thought gave the title its kick.
During the preparation of a column titled "2 Stupid 2 Live," one wacky acquaintance of mine noted, "You mean they did a live album?"
Language is confusing more people these days, and more citizens than ever are frightened of language, of its portents and nuances and hidden booby-traps. Thanks to various recent excitements within the US Postal Service, the word "disgruntled" has come to mean gun-toting psycho teetering on spree. Use a word, go to jail.
There are other pitfalls.
It is with no small degree of personal amusement that I report that "Bad Guy Hats," the final story in this volume, was recently solicited (enthusiastically), then rejected (vehemently) by the publishers of a German splatterpunk anthology because it was "too violent and sexual." Think that one over for a gentle moment; let it tickle your irony bone.
Pursuant to Section 58 of the Canadian Customs Act, a magazine featuring "Pitt Night at the Lewistone Boneyard" was confiscated from the malls by Revenue Canada because officials adjudged that the story "advocated necrophilia."
"Life Partner," on the other hand, was bought by Weird Tales for exactly the same reason. As editor Darrell Schweitzer put it, "I think it's just right for people who think the magazine is too tame."
In the minefield of language, the short story is the battleground where everything is happening.
If there's a golden rule governing short fiction, it goes like this: Nobody, but nobody, writes short stories for a living. The demographics are against you.
Short stories are the shadow warriors of prose. They are invisible…particularly to book publishers who consider them only as a bargaining chip, as in we'll do your story collection if you give us a hammerlock on your next real book, meaning novel. No matter how much an editor just loves your short fiction, inevitably they force you to "graduate" to real books. After all, don't novelists really want to write screenplays? Don't all screenwriters really want to direct?
Invisibly, short stories dash past in magazines and anthologies with the pro-rated lifespan of a TV commercial, or a WWII tail gunner in aerial combat (about nine seconds). If a writer is favored, a story will be singled out for reprint in some best-of annual or themed book. Those outlets are available mostly to those readers who take the extra pains to seek them out–the faithful, who already know how to look out the corner of the mind's eye for things not visible. No short story, no matter how excellent, will ever reap enough attention to detour the buying public from the cheesiest rack of subpar novels.
Novels have weight; maybe that's why they're called volumes. Short stories are ghosts, too skinny and ephemeral to make the weight requirement in the real world of fiction-by-the-pound.
Yet, nearly every writer I know does them. A few excel at them. And some of the best and most illustrative moments I have experienced while reading fiction have occurred while I was inside of a short story. Sometimes the story itself was as perfect as a showroom gem. Sometimes it was okay or mediocre, bulb served as a cargo bay for an image or thought or sequence that just nailed me, dead chill, to whistle quietly in admiration at what had been evoked there, right before my eyes.
Most often, this epiphany sparks because some writer has miraculously managed to express, in words, a feeling or emotion inside the reader. A thing that moved you, or summed up for you; something that made your blood jump or heart ache with the notion that a stranger out there understood some caprice that befell you, some lost love or ancient pain, some unthinking hurt or fresh, smarting wound you haven't quite been able to snap into focus and identify for what it is. The same goes for small, private elations (the kind which, in retrospect, usually form turning points in our lives), or the broader range of upside human feelings.
Literary pyrotechnics are okay, too, as is sheer style without apologies. Every writer begins with a voice; sometimes purloined, sometimes imitative, some other times a casserole of favorites. Luck and talent can combine to help a voice laden with attitude to mature into a recognizable imprint, a personal quality that can unify wildly divergent subject matter. Joe Lansdale's got it. Richard Christian Matheson's got it. Well-developed literary signatures, tailored to fit only one person. You know other writers you feel wear that suit, too.
After style comes ideas, and ideas can come from the goddamnedest trivia. Dreams. Waking life. Extrapolation. Mental fission. Occasionally, ideas are borne by the looming specter of Commitment: You agreed to write a story for that anthology about haunted stoves … now whatya gonna do?
When I finish reading a crackerjack short story, my respiration amped, imagination adrenalated, governors slamming in to slow my speed because I don't want the story to end…well, it's invigorating. It lends a note of hope to the tragic state of fiction in general. And, worst of all … gasp …
… it makes me want to write stories myself.
Which makes writing like a weird venereal disease. Or the most lurid form of safe sex.
Once you've published a number of short stories, nearly everything you read shears off into one of two camps: I can do better than that vs. I sure wish I could accomplish that. Reading degenerates into market research, the way life itself becomes "material."
Sometimes, stories are born of greater or lesser stories by other writers ("Kamikaze Butterflies," q.v.). This is not plagiarism, unless you thieve another writer's situations and characters outright, then do a bad makeover on them–like slapping rouge and pancake on a corpse and expecting mourners to take it for "natural." Or chewing someone else's food for them. Twice. I detest the obvious; every reader who grew up on syndicated Twilight Zone reruns already possesses an adequate alarm for a twist-ending punchline, so why pour your heart into writing updated O. Henry? As Bob Bloch might opine, that would be like studying to become a phrenologist.
Of course, there's always the great gambler's temptation to, ahem, transcend the cliché.
Then again, many readers prefer a diet of same-old, seeking comfort in familiarity. Some people eat only fast food. And there are plenty of writers who flip those burgers, redressing last week's bestseller list from book to book, until the original will no longer produce legible copies. They are echoes in a void, a pop trend that distills down to a mathematical formula: Choose a category, and use that category's star-of-the-moment as a template for your own output. Some writers are so adept at this, their body of work can be entirely about characters who are writers.
At best, that's a stolen voice, nowhere near style, and a big step backward for anyone who aspires to be more than a competent mimic. Not only is Rich Little not John Wayne; he's not funny, either. It's a pet trick with an extremely low ceiling, one that recurs way too often in the small pond of writing scary stories.
Besides, all that imitative hysteria happens more frequently in novels, and weren't we talking about shorter stuff? Starting today, you could spend the rest of your reading life pounding through paint-by-number novels if that's your idea of a tickle. Despite statistics that claim the publishing industry is kept alive by a mere two per cent of the population (i.e., people who purchase more than a single book per year), there are more books being published now than ever before. Even if you concentrate on a pre-sifted subset, say, vampire gothics or noirish tomb-thefts of Chandler and Cain, there's still no way you can hope to stay comprehensively current.
No such problem with the beleaguered short story, which can provide a safe harbor for any reader who feels under siege in the tortuous 1990s. A collection is perfect capsule reading for an age of time crush and urgency addiction. You can work your way through one story while waiting on the dry
er at the Laundromat, another while your plane sniffs its way to the gate, and one more before you drop off to sleep.
(Short films suffer similar unfounded prejudices. You know, those things that get Academy Award nominations, but no one ever sees? Those clippets that just might snare the director a possible video gig or first feature?)
With the commercial odds so stacked, why write short fiction? There is no honest answer save love for the form itself. I genuinely love 'em, and make sure to keep writing them no matter how busy I am in other media.
I hope others can't not read them, for whatever justification works. If you beg to differ, blame Mark Ziesing.
Many learned readers with time to burn have expended numberless conversations and column inches attempting to fathom a seeming bifurcation in my body of short work, depending on whether they got to "Jerry's Kids Meet Wormboy" or "Red Light" first. Both are about extremes, and there's no reason any number of extremes can function within the same story. This confounds people keen to label, the folks Harlan Ellison has called "deconstructionist academics." That's okay; all those Fiction Writing 101 instructors need some agenda on which to hang their tenure. Let 'em label away, seeing trends where there are none.
Good readers transcend easy–rather, lazy–genrification (and if that isn't a word, it ought to be. The word "splatterpunk" got me into a few dictionaries, and that's a weird form of immortality. I blew it with the word "flobulent," but I keep trying to crack Webster's … arguably the toughest market of all.) Good readers and genuine editors have a healthy disregard for trends, which exist for no other rationale than to benefit advertisers and sales soldiers. If you write for only that army, your soul will petrify. Or putrefy.
Write what you want. That sounds suspiciously like Aleister Crowley saying "Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law," but for a writer it's still the best course to follow, provided your interior sextant doesn't blithely dump you off the edge of the world. I don't believe in workshops, or "writer's groups." As far as I know, Beaumont and Matheson and Bloch aren't much being taught. Few people I know have heard of Gerald Kersh (successful and popular in his day) or Larry Brown (another nimble short story writer with one collection out for each of his novels). If they've heard of John Sayles, chances are they haven't read his superior short story, "I-80 Nebraska."