This odd accident of “mass media humanization” later turned bitter when many in the pioneer study later rejected the programming, complaining bitterly that the imposition of linear neurolinguistic thought destroyed their native preverbal consciousness, which allegedly conferred upon them compensating attributes such as telepathy and photographic clairvoyance. Born-again-feral terrorist groups such as the Quiet Tribe of the Nicaraguan Highlands and La Raza Colmena in the swamps of Honduras waged a bloody insurrection to forcibly regress Latin America into a pre-sentient, pastoral wilderness. The debased caricature of Cody Goodfellow was frequently painted in human feces on the ruins of schools, media and libraries destroyed by the radical subhuman militias.
The Cody Goodfellow who authored this book was a successful early test case with no connection to the lamentable unrest caused by his namesakes. Recovered in Southern California at the age of six, the nameless deaf child apparently lived inside the backstage area of the enormous Campus Drive-In in San Diego, California from the time he was abandoned by his parents. Despite his complete rehabilitation and integration into mainstream society, the author Cody Goodfellow still insists his parents were the green and brown Gargantuas.
skippandgoodfellow.com
perilouspress.com
About the Artist
It’s been said that Mike Dubisch can see into other dimensions, while others say simply that he has an alien brain and a god hand. It has been privately mused that he sold his soul to the devil, and publicly agreed that he made a bargain with C’thulhu. One of the most frequently asked questions about his drawings is “Why does it look like it’s moving?” Currently Mike is creating a universe, sculpting shadows, and soliciting and distributing curses.
http://www.facebook.com/Mike.Dubisch
http://www.facebook.com/MikeDubischArt
http://www.TheMikeDubischSketchbook.BlogSpot.com
http://www.Dubisch.BlogSpot.com
http://www.ThePeopleThatMeltInTheRain.TheWebComic.com
http://dubisch.deviantart.com/
About the Artist
Nick Gucker grew up on the rain forested island of Ketchikan, AK and moved to Seattle to pursue music and art. When he’s not busy whispering to insects or engaged in the taxidermy and mummification of creatures both reptilian and mammalian, he can be found hunched over his art table dreaming up disturbing nightmares and freakish delights.
Nick’s artwork has appeared in the pages of Strange Aeons Magazine and The Magazine of Bizarro Fiction. His illustrations have also graced the pages of the novelette The Eye of Infinity by Sci-Fi mythos writer David Conyers for Perilous Press and the forthcoming Aklomonicon (edited by Joe Pulver and Ivan McCann) from AKLO Press in the U.K. His visions have adorned book covers from Blysster Press authors Clyde Wolfe, R.L. Reeves and M.R. Mitchell and can also be seen in online contributions to Lovecraftzine.com and Thisishorror.co.uk.
More of Nick's art can be found at his secret base:
www.nickthehat.com
Bonus Features
Wet Nurse
Deanna awoke, and the phlegm in her chest was a brittle ceramic glaze that shattered with the first coughing fit. Deanna rolled over in bed and lit a smoke before she opened her eyes. She could finish the pack, and nobody could say shit. She’d paid for her crime, and now, all alone in her body, she answered to no one.
Not that they came to check. They got what they wanted, and she left what they still needed at the door for them to pick up every morning, like a dutiful cow. It was like her mother used to joke after she threw out her husband: When you get the good stuff out, you throw away the wrapper, right?
She found the TV remote bolted down on the nightstand, thumbed it on and flipped through the early talk shows. Prescription bottles rolled off the edge.
She still had plenty of money. She wouldn’t have to do anything harder than phone sex again for a while, if she kept her wits, but she wouldn’t be able to get good, legal shit like this, so even though her womb still oozed blood and her muscles felt like the floor had been torn out of her, she denied herself another pill, for now.
She would get through this. Dr. Ramos said there would be depression. She explained it like Deanna was an idiot, but it made sense. Her body had been put to its ultimate test, the task for which it was made, and for a while, it was going to try to do that job, until it sunk in that there was no baby.
It still hadn’t sunk in to her mind, either. She was free. She had money, more than she’d ever make at any kind of real job. And all because she’d sold something that she would gladly have paid someone, anyone, to scrape out of her. Dr. Ramos, who steered her away from the door of the Planned Parenthood clinic, had shown her a better way.
It hadn’t been easy, but Deanna had made the most of the time. As she sat in this room for six months, she’d worked as hard as the baby inside her, to grow and change. She had made plans, but she couldn’t remember them right now. All she could think of was sleep, and the dream.
She rolled over in bed and muted the TV, treated herself to a bonus pill she found in the folds of her pillowcase. It stuck and dissolved in her throat and made trippy haloes around the pharmaceutical nativity scene on her nightstand, and she melted with it.
“Oh, it’s beautiful,” everyone said, and they were right. She could see the baby rising like a bloody sun from the valley between her legs. Her vision was all oily trails from the tsunami crash of pleasure-in-pain, flying high above her body, and then her baby was in her arms, and she glowed in that eternal, perfect moment, anchored for the first time to her own life, to all life, to the wisdom that ran in her blood, that told her just what to do. She tugged down her hospital johnny and lifted the baby’s mouth to her nipple.
Her beautiful child sucked eagerly, and she gave a sigh of relief as the unbearable pressure in her turgid breast gave way to a tickling of pure contentment, as all that she was, and all who came before her, flowed into her newborn. She forgave the world and all those who’d made life hard on her—from her stepdad to JT Barnhardt, and all the other boys and men who might have fathered her child, then drove her out of town. She forgave them unconditionally, and begged the pardon of all those she’d ever hurt, and knew true peace.
Her heart’s desire fussed and nibbled at her drained breast, twisted in anticipation as she lifted the hungry newborn to suckle at the other one. Eagerly, tiny jaws working, it fed, and all the pain and promise stored up in her flowed out.
She floated out of herself again. Light gushed out of her, and she had one of those things like an orgasm that saints had in those paintings, where they looked like God was goosing them up the ass with an electric toothbrush—but these were only the words she tried to use to describe it afterward. For now, she was transported, transformed, into a mother. And she would be a good one, she would clean up for good, she would change—
Cold rubber hands lifted the baby out of her arms, and she was like smoke trying to claw at the nurse who turned and presented her baby to the skinny lady and the balding man who talked on his cell phone throughout the birth. They thrust a pen into her crabbed hand and she made a mark on some papers, and then they were gone. Tears smeared the ink on her check.
She rolled out of bed, arms reflexively cradling her deflated belly.
Dr. Ramos said she’d have dreams. Postpartum depression. Pills. Her hand went up under her sweat-slick T-shirt. Her breasts were slack, not engorged like they’d been for months. She hissed in surprise and pain as she touched her outraged nipples. They felt chewed, but they resonated, rang like nervous chimes with the echo of feeding her baby. It had felt so right, so real—
In real life, she never got to touch it. She did not know its sex, had never seen a sonogram. They told her only what she needed to eat or avoid during the pregnancy, and trained her to pump her breasts and leave milk in a Styrofoam cooler outside the door.
She only saw its shadow as they lifted it out of her, heard a single thin wail as they took it to be weighed. But when s
he touched her nipples, she knew that somehow, somewhere, it had been real. She hugged herself, to hold in the last fleeting traces of joy.
Deanna’s mother taught her smart from stupid, and she didn’t raise an idiot. Her father kicked in little of value to her blossoming maturity, though he did nothing to queer it, either. She knew him as a nice but busy man who worked hard to pay for a house he didn’t live in.
A talk show therapist would zero in on Deanna’s slut act as a function of Dad’s absence and Mom’s indifference, but her motives were simpler. She just enjoyed sex as much as boys did.
When her period went missing, she could only curse her mother for telling her always to be smart, and not forcing her to be good. When JT Barnhardt dumped her by way of punching her in the mouth, she stole money from Mom and ran away to the next state to get an abortion on her sixteenth birthday.
She told herself she was not only smart but brave, taking care of it before she started to show and the procedure got even more expensive and gross, but then the little Filipino lady doctor from the adoption agency bird-dogged her and made her an offer.
The clients set her up in the motel room and paid all of her expenses, but she socked away a lot of extra cash doing phone sex. It kept her too busy to fall back into doing speed, and the damned hormones had her masturbating all the time, anyway.
Fuck it. Fuck him or her, and fuck you, too. She had done a job, the finest form of piecework, and she got paid. She could afford to lie back and wait for something to tell her what to do with her life, and until then, there were plenty of diversions to numb the nagging ache inside her that tried to tell her life had just passed her by.
She wasted half an hour trying to squeeze milk out of her breasts. The cold plastic suction cup wrung her out, but collected only a few drops of white-gold Deanna-juice. Had she milked herself and forgotten about it? Stupid cow…
The Styrofoam cooler was empty. Dr. Ramos was going to be pissed. She scribbled out a note and left it on the door, changed into fresh clothes, and went outside.
She went to the bank and deposited her check, pulled back cash for snacks and smokes. As she walked down the sun-blasted sidewalk, she avoided the stares of street trash, dirty old men and tattooed weirdoes ogling her angry tits and flabby ass, hid her flushed face that betrayed how badly she longed to take one or all of them home.
She had to get off the street and fill some bottles, lie down and rub one out; she had a hole burning in her, and if she didn’t get to safety, it would suck someone in with her.
By the time she got back to her room, her billowing, maternity-sized T-shirt was plastered to her chest, and not with sweat. She peeled it off and wrung it out over the sink. Cloudy mother-of-pearl rivulets of oily human milk dripped from her fingers and circled the drain.
She got a paper to look for an apartment—she hoped the clients spoiled their new baby with all the money they’d saved keeping her in this shitty motel. Poring over the classifieds, she found and circled an interesting ad. MOTHER’S MILK: HIGHEST PRICE PAID. SOPHISTICATED CONOSSIEUR SEEKS ENTERPRISING DAIRYMAIDS.
She turned on the TV as she set to work with the pump, settled on a Mexican talk show. For extra flare, the first row of the jeering studio audience was packed with circus freaks. An obese mongoloid cyclops thumped his chest and pawed his mate, a giggling pinhead girl, as the platinum blonde hostess harangued the caged transvestites onstage.
Deanna stared, transfixed by their deformities, thinking of all the drugs she did before she found out. Shit, she thought, maybe you dodged a bullet. But she knew her baby was perfect.
Her fingers absently tweaked and twisted her nipples, still engorged after six bottles. She only felt wired after masturbating, so it took two pills to knock her out and deliver her to the dream.
She found that when she tried to put it into words, the whole thing squirmed away. What little she knew about brains and how they worked was gleaned from late-night study-sessions in the badlands of basic cable, when nothing better was on.
When things happened all at once, like a car crash or a slew of unfamiliar names at a party, the brain sucked it all in like an airliner’s black box, raw experience sloshing around until you tried to pull a thing out and name it. The brain could capture it all, but the mind, the invisible man at the switch, could only hold onto a few things—four, in most gray matter—and the moment those things were named, the rest dried up and blew away, maybe to return in a moment of reflection someday, or maybe just bulk-erased by a tiny magnet in the video library behind her eyes.
Deanna could build a bridge of words pretty far across the chasm between herself and her dreams, but even with better than the standard four-cylinder brain, she only knew that she dreamed of feeding her baby, and it felt so divine as to make everything else she could do, drink, snort or smoke in this life seem like a waste of time.
She held all that was good in the world in her arms, and it was entrusted to her to nourish and nurture it, but something had torn her away from her charge, something—
The phone. She rolled over and rubbed her chest, her nipples tender and sore, her fingers wringing them as they must have done all night. Torturing herself, her body trying to drive her crazy. A sob choked out of her, but she bit it back, as if to keep herself from hearing it.
She had to stop being stupid. She could face anything. She had gone clean when she knew she was pregnant, had not, even then, succumbed to the dumb drives of her drug-hungry flesh. A voice inside her had told her to get clean and do right by the thing inside her, even as she stole the money to scrape it out.
“Hello?” she asked the phone, but only then remembered to pick it up.
Sniffling breaths and a thickly accented voice from a mouth tinier and tighter than an Amish asshole. “Deanna, I came, and there was no milk. The baby needs milk, Deanna…”
She tried to explain, but only a strangled sob got out.
“Deanna, you sound upset. How are you feeling?”
She tried to speak, but her eyes and sinuses clotted up with tears, and nothing came out but a sob of, “Uh-huh.”
“This is a difficult time, Deanna, and you shouldn’t be alone. You haven’t contacted your family, have you?”
“I—” she gasped, throat clamped shut, “I’m all alone, Duh-duh-Doctor—”
“No, you are not alone, Deanna. I’m coming over. I want to help. You let me help you, okay?”
“Okay,” she said, and hung up. She drifted off, forgetting who called.
She had to break this cycle. Hormones and pills weren’t the boss of her. She was rich and young and free. She could jump on a plane with just the clothes on her back, fly to New York and shop for a new wardrobe on 5th Avenue, go to a posh nightclub and dance alone until the finest guy in the place fell under her spell, go back to his place and fuck his brains out, get knocked up and start all over again—
Her vagina still throbbed with dull pain, but it had to be taught a lesson. She slipped two fingers into her panties and kneaded the hood of her clit. It was dry and sore and dead as a wart to pleasure, but she licked her fingers and kneaded herself into a grudging semblance of arousal. It had to learn what it was for. I’m not just a chute for strangers to slide in and out of. I’m not a fucking farm animal!
At last, some spark of desire kindled inside her, the merest mote of light, and she thrust herself at it, plunging three fingers into herself and throttling her clit with her thumb.
The hot, soft hell of her womb opened up, cervix dilating down to meet the eager spears of her fingers, nails gouging divots of velvet meat out of her uterine wall. Her hand spasmed, wracked with cramps, but she twisted it further, probing the ticklish pucker of her asshole with her pinky, driving all four rigid digits into her holes like the torrent of swords in the coup de grace of a bullfight.
A wounded gasp ripped out of her. The impending orgasm teetering overhead like lightning gathering to strike her down, but then it melted away like an unanswered prayer. She worked even h
arder, and at last, there was lubrication in abundance. She didn’t care if it was blood.
She had brought a child into the world just for money, she could take anything. This is what you are for—
Her fingers touched something that was never, ever there, before. Never, except when—
Something brushed her still, stiff fingers. Something inside her grasped them.
Deanna yanked her hand free and screamed. She was careful when she played with herself during the pregnancy, but there was nothing like that in there—
She rolled over and vomited all over the nightstand. Her pill bottles and People magazines washed over the edge on a pink wave with little Oxycontin icebergs in it. Her stomach rolled and wrung itself dry, but in the basement, her womb rumbled and quivered like a clogged volcano. She did more than hurt herself, down there. She woke something up.
The neon light for the Cash Fast place outside her window came on, drenching the dark in epileptic red and gold. She lay down on the bed and prayed for sleep, prayed for the dream. And this prayer, at least, someone saw fit to answer.
She held her baby, and everything was fuzzy and heavenly white, bathed in that flattering, Vaseline-filtered light the movies used on aging actresses. She knew this moment could go on forever if she just let it, a perfect closed circuit of need and nurturing, a universe unto itself.
All-Monster Action! Page 25