The gauzy light brightened and became a substance, bandages winding around her face. She saw nothing, but felt her dream baby gnawing at her breast, felt its silky skin and stolen warmth growing heavier against her belly. Something magical was happening; her dream was birthing itself into the real world.
This time, the hot, hidden parts of her that ruled in secret, the parts of her that knew all along what they were doing when she had seemed most out of control—those parts filled her with the blood-truth that she would never let her baby go, this time—
When the light died out, she felt a flood of unpleasant sensations—the crinkle of stiff waxed paper beneath her, the dull ache in her joints from general anesthesia, and most of all, the mingled relief and soreness of her breasts.
She tried to move, but she found herself restrained, pulled taut against the tattered vinyl examination table.
Dr. Midori Ramos.
This was her office, just down the block from the motel. She wasn’t really a doctor, not in this country, anyway, but in the Philippines, she was some kind of highly respected surgeon.
Her baby cooed as it drank from her.
In the dim gray light that slanted through the blinds, she saw that she was no longer dreaming, and that the thing she suckled was indeed very real, but it was no baby.
No human baby—
A bloated, ghostly lamprey attached to her breast, pulsating with the rhythm of its greedily siphoning sucker-mouth. The turgid thing floated in the air above her, living liquid like a jellyfish or a cloud of semen in white wine, but she could feel it rasping and throbbing and wringing the last drops of milk from her slack, flaccid teat.
Deanna screamed and tried to roll off the table, but her body was bound too snugly to lift her hands, let alone pry off the parasite. As she struggled and agitated it, the thing shivered in sympathy and flushed red, or maybe it was drinking her blood.
She had fed this thing in her dreams, and it had grown fat on the flood of tears her breasts wept, the drainage from the amputation of her child. Deanna howled her throat raw, but the thing kept sucking at her.
The door clicked and opened, and the blast of light dispersed the lamprey. She felt it compress its bloated ethereal mass into her vagina, and the violation redoubled as she realized this was the cause of the orgasmic climax of the dreams, as the sated parasite slithered back to its lair in her womb.
“I’ve seen this before,” Dr. Ramos said. “I am no doctor in this country, but at home, I perform most respected psychic surgery. Nobody believe me, when I try to show them.”
Deanna fought to brake her runaway hyperventilation, tried to ask, to curse, to beg, but all she managed was, “Get… it… out of me—”
“Every life is sacred, Miss Deanna. You did not ask to become pregnant, but the Life Force came into you. We talk about this, and you say you want to be a bearer of life. Your baby is in a better place, but this… is special.”
Only hysteria gave her the strength to speak. “I don’t… want it in me! Get it out, get it out—”
Dr. Ramos’s tiny hand stroked the dome of Deanna’s belly, even as it seemed, once more, to swell. “Life wants to happen, Miss Deanna. It fills all the cracks in the earth, large and small, for its own glorious purpose. Where there is shelter and food, there is life. Even in us, yes, especially, for where is there safer shelter?
“There are worlds inside us, and food of a kind unique in all of nature.” With a soothing touch softer than morning sunlight, Dr. Ramos caressed her heart and head. Deanna felt her runaway pulse slow, and the short-circuited sparks of her thoughts settled into a torpid brownout.
“For if the food and warmth inside us can nurture life, what kind of life could thrive on the heat of our thoughts, our emotions? All hate, all love, all wishes and dread and dreams, come out of us like waste heat, like sweat and milk and soil. These things are as fleeting as the food they crave, born and breeding and dying in hours and days, invisible to us, as they must be, for their sake and ours.
“In Manila, I see a woman whose baby died, who lived on the street and nursed a baby no one else could see, and they thought her crazy. But when they tried to take her to hospital, they saw the ‘ghost-baby’ in her arms. The crowd killed them both.”
Dr. Ramos touched Deanna’s face, knobby knuckles and stubby fingers that looked all the more improper for their slavishly manicured and sensibly glossed nails. “I wanted nothing more than to be a mother, Miss Deanna, but I was born into wrong body. I knew it could never happen, that nothing on earth could make my body become what I was inside. I would never know the kind of joy you saw only as a curse, but in my longing, I became a mother, of sorts, as well.”
She lifted the front of Deanna’s gown. Her hand became a blade and slid, without friction or effort, into Deanna’s gut.
It was a repulsive parlor trick, yet Deanna felt the insane violation of the hand passing through her until it seized on something that was not her, that clutched her vitals in its desperation as Dr. Ramos began to draw it out.
It slithered between her fingers, and kept coming and coming out of the hole Dr. Ramos bored into her. It writhed in and out of her, wafting up on the stale stirrings of the air, spilling out like smoke from burning plastic, mute witness to the vastness of the void inside her. It wound round and round Midori Ramos’s arm, a serpent eating itself, but even to Deanna’s fear-widened eyes, it was little more than a shimmering shadow, an unborn ghost that would never yield detail to closer study.
Now, Deanna at last understood the strange smile that Dr. Ramos always had for her. It was admiration and hope, but mostly envy.
She let the thing squirm off her hand and retract like a molested octopus back into Deanna’s womb. “I can almost give it true life, but not flesh. In you, it found a home.”
“Get it out of me!”
“When it has finished gestating, we will see. No specimen has ever been brought this far, so who knows what we will discover? Perhaps they will give the species a name. I think it only fitting that it be my name, since you care only for money.”
Deanna subsided in her bonds, and if something in her mind finally snapped, it was a welcome reprieve, and all she lost was a skin that no longer fit. If this was what Deanna was meant to be, then she could still prove Midori Ramos wrong.
Dr. Ramos went to the freezer and took out several bottles, dropped one into a silo that swung into place, like a hamster feeder, above Deanna’s face. Golden droplets of milk—her own—drizzled into her mouth. “We see what refining your diet does, shall we?”
Deanna eagerly gulped it down.
Her child would thrive and grow in the security of her womb. It would come out to be loved and to feed on her tears of joy, and then go back inside her, where no one could ever hurt it or take it away…
She would be a good mother, and her baby would be perfect.
We Need to Make Things More Repulsive: The Early Sketches of Nick Gucker
WINNER OF THE 2009 WONDERLAND AWARD!
“This is high-end psychological surrealist horror meets bottom-feeding low-life crime in a techno-thrilling science fiction world full of Lovecraft and magic...”–JOHN SKIPP, NY Times Bestselling author of The Bridge and The Long Last Call
“Cody Goodfellow's work is '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. Silent Weapons for Quiet Wars is anything but quiet: it announces Goodfellow's continued presence among the leading cohort of modern horror with a thunderclap.”—LAIRD BARRON, author of The Imago Sequence & Other Stories
“Cody Goodfellow is a force to be reckoned with. There are things within these pages with teeth on `em. You've been warned...”—NORMAN PARTRIDGE, author of The Man With the Barbed-Wire Fists and Dark Harvest
“This is Lovecraft after a smack bender in Tijuana, one where he wakes up handcuffed to his bed and covered in someone else's blood. Goodfellow's fiction has the
otherworldliness of Lovecraft, the sarcasm of Joe R. Lansdale, the mojo of a Motley Crue tell-all and best of all it's wrapped together with prose that would satisfy fans of high literature in horror.”—MONSTER LIBRARIAN
“One of the best writers of our generation.”—BRIAN KEENE, author of The Rising and Darkness on the Edge of Town
“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 Long Last Call and The Bridge
“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, World Fantasy Award-winning author of Nifft the Lean and Copping Squid
“PERFECT UNION is a weird masterpiece. Influences ranging from Cronenberg body horror, Evil Dead-style gore comedy to a fascinating political dissection of Marx and Thoreau make this a genius horror novel destined to be loved by the readers ready to get in the ring with Cody. An intelligent socio-political dark Bizarro masterpiece and one of the most original horror novels in years.”—MONSTER LIBRARIAN
“Cody Goodfellow is untouched as a breathless reporter of violent action, relating it in hurtling prose full of striking and sometimes hilarious metaphors. The author has hybridized Splatterpunk with the techno-thriller, and the result will not soon leave your memory.”—STRANGE AEONS
WINNER OF THE 2011 WONDERLAND AWARD FOR BEST COLLECTION!
“WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is fucking terrific.”—JACK KETCHUM
“A haunting collection from a wildly talented author, WE LIVE INSIDE YOU is composed of nineteen perfectly-wrought nightmares, every one of which will stay with you long after you've finished reading.”—PETER CRAIG, author of Hot Plastic and Blood Father, co-screenwriter of The Town
“The people populating these stories are real and vital and you WILL care, deeply, about what becomes of them...and in JRJ's harsh universe, baaaaad things happen. Often. Prepare thyself.”—CRAIG DAVIDSON, author of Rust and Bone, The Fighter, and Sarah Court
“Favorite collection for 2011: WE LIVE INSIDE YOU.”—STEPHEN GRAHAM JONES, author of The Ones That Got Away and It Came From Del Rio
Now available in a 2012 Author’s Preferred Edition. Includes a fully revised text, 20,000 words of bonus content, and an Introduction by Stephen Graham Jones. Only $2.99 for Kindle!
“A dazzling writer. Seriously amazing short stories—and I love short stories. Like the best of Tobias Wolff. While I read them, they made time stand still. That’s great.”—CHUCK PALAHNIUK
“Johnson weaves vivid and fascinatingly grotesque tales regarding such things as a group of extreme body modification addicts (one of whom is pretty much made out of vegetables) to a cockroach suit that helps its maker survive WWIII. These stories have been given serious treatment and emerge as fantastic and often graphic scenarios full of characters you hate to love.”—BOOKGASM
“Angel Dust Apocalypse hits the reader in the gut and goes to work. Within these pages the dark underbelly of the human subconscious is captured: those things that people think about but never mention...I could not put this book down...”—RAZORCAKE
“In its most twisted moments, Johnson’s writing is too gleeful to pigeon-hole as strictly ‘horror,’ and when he steps outside the gross-out game, he transcends most other straight literary writers. Angel Dust Apocalypse is every bit as smart as it is gut-churning, and every bit as moving and introspective as it is horrifying and humorous.”—VERBICIDE
Newly revised 2012 digital edition includes "The Sharp-Dressed Man at the End of the Line," the classic short story explaining the origin of the world's weirdest post-nuke survivor. Only $2.99 for Kindle!
“DUCK AND COVER, BITCHES! Jeremy Robert Johnson answers the call to glory with his intimately insectoid mini-epic of apocalypse, Extinction Journals: a trip far weirder and more fucked up than it has any right to be. Just like these times.”—JOHN SKIPP, author of Conscience, co-author/editor of The Scream, Mondo Zombie, and Book of the Dead
“Extinction Journals is like a Twilight Zone episode made without Standards & Practices telling Serling he couldn't feature any human/insect love scenes. Move over Chris Genoa—there's a new sexy genius in town.”—CHRIS GENOA, author of Foop!
“Has more weird, fresh, mandible-imprinted ideas per page than you can poke a Twinkie at.”—21C MAGAZINE
“Equally profound and hilarious, Extinction Journals contains not only some of the most thoughtful examinations of humanity's need for companionship to come along in several years, but also some of the best descriptions of loneliness and thanatophobia, the pervasive human fear of death.”—THE PEDESTAL
“Absurd, silly, yet ultimately important. There are overtones of Aqua Teen Hunger Force. There is a sense that Vonnegut could have written this. It mixes the sublime and the ridiculous superbly.”—I READ ODD BOOKS
“Johnson excels at pathology and perversity...A confirmed weirdo and authentic writer of uncommon emotional depth who deserves to be watched.”—CEMETERY DANCE
Table of Contents
Doorway to the Sky
Venus of Santa Cruz
The Wage of Dinosaurs
The Care & Feeding of Sea Monkeys
Episode I—Kungmin Horangi: The People’s Tiger
Episode II—The Island of Dr. Otaku
Episode III—All Cities Attack!
Wet Nurse
We Need to Make Things More Repulsive: The Early Sketches of Nick Gucker
All-Monster Action! Page 26