Caleb leaned against the bar with his martini in hand, staring at the stage. The condensation on the glass dripped over his fingers, so he wrapped a napkin around it and took a sip. Radical Raymond was putting on quite the show. Caleb could only dream of being as good a flesh-bender as him. He’d known he was meant to be one for a few years, but never had the guts to actually show off his Talent. Not that his Talent was anywhere near Raymond’s. None of the flesh-benders he’d seen over the years were as good as Raymond.
Caleb jammed his hand into his pocket to feel for the cube of flesh again. He knew it was there, but his obsessive compulsions guided his hand into his pocket every few minutes or so, just to get that reassurance it hadn’t fallen out or that he hadn’t been pick-pocketed. His fingers collided with the firm, cold flesh cube, and he fondled it for a moment as he downed the rest of his drink.
“Another martini, friend?” The bartender looked more like an overgrown boy than a man—mid-twenties, gelled hair, tattoos covering his neck and forearms. Caleb nodded and set his glass down. The bartender watched the stage as he prepared the drink. “He’s damn good, ain’t he?”
“He’s amazing.”
Radical Raymond sat on a stool at the back corner of the stage, shadows covering him like a second skin. Some of the less Talented flesh-benders held their hands up to their foreheads; some had their digits digging into their temples, trying to look dramatic. But not Raymond. His hands were folded in his lap, one eyebrow raised as he bended the flesh in the middle of the stage, in front of the awestruck crowd.
“He’s the best there ever was,” Caleb said in a dreamlike state. He turned to find a new drink in front of him and that he’d spoken to himself. The tattooed boy-bartender was flirting with a girl at the other end of the bar, paying no attention to Caleb.
Raymond stood from his stool and plucked his piece of flesh from the stage floor, then bowed to the crowd. They erupted with applause, whistles, stomping, and shouting, all praising the man that had just wowed them with his unequalled ability. Caleb was still reeling from the beauty of the man’s art.
The host jumped back on stage, his portly belly stretching his Ritz t-shirt, a mustard stain just above his belly button. His labored breathing was obvious when he spoke. It made Caleb uncomfortable just to watch him.
“How bout that Radical Raymond, huh?” His sweat gleamed under the stage lights, and he took deep breaths to recover from his previous sentence while the crowd gave another round of applause. “And now my friends, we open the stage to you aspiring flesh-benders out there. Don’t be shy now.”
Caleb willed his legs to move, but they refused to cooperate. They were pillars of stone, bolted to the ground, refusing to obey his brain signals. But to Caleb’s relief, an attractive, petite Hispanic girl got on stage.
She bowed to the crowd and stretched her mouth into a smile that dug into Caleb’s chest and tunneled to his heart. The girl was breathtaking, intoxicating to look at. Caleb was more than impressed, not only with her beauty, but with her courage to get on stage and follow an act like Raymond’s. She’d really have to do something special—none of the old clichés he’d seen a million times. Flesh-bending was an art, and too many wannabes figured they could jump on stage and do it without putting enough thought into it; this wasn’t something that just any Joe Schmo could do. You’d have to have the Talent, of course, something given to those special few at birth, but along with that, you had to have creativity, inventiveness.
Caleb’s mouth hung open as the girl peeled her shirt from her torso, wearing nothing underneath, and shook her tits at the crowd. Perfect roundness with big, dark nipples, swaying as she tossed the garment into the audience. She bent down and her breasts hung, and when she stood back up, she held a silver knife that she’d unsheathed from her knee-high leather boot.
Then she plunged the blade into her chest. She sawed at the flesh, cutting around the left breast until it ripped free and plopped to the floor, jiggling like molded Jell-O. Blood pumped rhythmically from the gaping wound, yet she only smiled. A real pro, this girl. The crowd reacted with applause, and Caleb wanted nothing more than to be engulfed by her body, swallowed whole by her sex. And not just because of her beauty, but her genius. She was going to bend her own flesh, something Caleb had never thought possible. His pain tolerance was that of a child’s, but this woman, half his size, had severed her breast and hardly flinched. She began working at the other.
“Not bad, huh?”
Caleb jumped at the voice beside him, but couldn’t peel his eyes from the girl mutilating herself in the name of her Talent.
“It’s astounding,” he answered back.
“You can say that again.”
Caleb had to tear his eyes away from the stage, like a Band-Aid from a festering wound. His level of frustration was on red as he turned, ready to show his displeasure with a hard scowl. But he didn’t want to miss a moment of the show; he wanted to continue his gluttonous drinking-in of the gorgeous female bleeding before him. He spun to face the voice, and found Radical Raymond leaning against the bar beside him, sipping the last of a drink, sucking in an ice cube and chewing on it. He turned to Caleb and held out a hand.
“Raymond, nice to meet you.”
Caleb almost buckled under the pressure, but he threatened his hand—in his mind—that he would cut it off and bend it on stage if it didn’t do his bidding. Thankfully, the hand cooperated and clamped around Raymond’s.
“C—Caleb. I’m a huge fan, Mr. Raymond.”
“My name isn’t ‘Mister,’ okay? And don’t call me ‘Radical’ either. I didn’t come up with that stupid fucking name, the Ritz did. Just Raymond if you don’t mind,” he said, slamming his empty glass on the bar.
Caleb felt his face glowing like a Christmas light. “Sorry. Can I buy you a drink, Raymond?”
The man raised an eyebrow, one of his signature moves, and looked Caleb up and down. “Just so you know, I like pussy, okay?”
“Yeah, good…I mean…so do I. I’d love to meet that girl,” Caleb said as he shifted his attention back to the stage. The girl sat on the same stool that Raymond had, blood still pumping from the open wounds, covering her body like a crimson jumpsuit. She’d bended the flesh of her breasts into a full-sized man and a woman, and her nipples became their sex organs. The man’s dark, hard cock pointed at the crowd and they shouted their approval. The other breast, now a woman, lay on her back, the place between her legs as dark as the man’s dick. She grabbed her ankles and spread her legs so wide, she could have ripped herself in half. The man reached down and stroked his hardened member, which began sprouting arms and legs as he rubbed it. What was a bulging vein a moment before peeled away and became an arm, sprouting a tiny hand on the end.
Raymond laughed. “Yeah, I’m sure you would, Caleb. She’s damn good.”
Caleb heard Raymond talking, but his eyes were moths to the bright light on stage. This girl could flesh-bend as good as Raymond, if not slightly better.
The man on stage had a full-blown fetus for a penis, and he got on his knees and plunged it into the woman who shouted her pleasure with each pump. Her stomach began to bulge, more and more with each pelvic thrust from the man. And when her belly was to the point of bursting, the man pulled out, a dark void where the baby-dick once was. The woman reached up and grabbed his head, then shoved it into her sex, all the way to the shoulders. The man’s body went limp as she stuffed him in further, opening wide to take his body into hers.
Caleb was speechless with the beauty of it. He glanced toward Raymond to get a glimpse of his reaction.
“She’s very Talented, huh, Caleb?” Raymond said, sliding his tongue across his teeth.
“Oh God, yes. I’ve never seen anything like this…no offense to you mister… uh…Raymond.” Caleb shot Raymond an apologetic look. But Caleb’s eyes were sucked back to the stage. “You’ve always been my favorite. I could never bend flesh like you…or her.”
Raymond emptied his drink,
and as he set it down, the boy-bartender had a fresh one waiting. It seemed as though Radical Raymond was a vodka tonic kind of man, and Caleb pointed to the bartender. “That’s on my tab as well.”
“You got it, slick.”
“So, Caleb. You’re a fellow flesh-bender, hmm?” Raymond grabbed the drink and reached into the glass for a cube of ice, which he tossed into his mouth and rolled around before chewing it. “Why haven’t I seen you here before?”
The left breast devoured the man with her vaginal maw, but had doubled in size. She stood, facing the crowd, the size of a Sumo wrestler. Dark brown udders ran down the front of her torso, squirting milk at the crowd in pearly streams. They loved it, every one of them, some opening their mouths to catch the precious liquid and taste the art.
“Oh, I’ve been here before. Lots of times. Just don’t think I’m good enough to actually get on that stage,” Caleb said, glancing at Raymond. “Especially not after someone like you.”
Raymond laughed, slapping the bar and knocking over some of the other patrons’ drinks. But none of them noticed; they were hypnotized by the artistic smorgasbord before them.
“Let me see it,” he said, slamming his drink in a single gulp.
“I’m sorry?”
“The flesh, give it here.”
Caleb already had his hand in his pocket, flicking the cube back and forth from nervousness. He pulled it out and handed it to Raymond.
“You see, this is the problem, Caleb. I can smell the damn thing a mile away. Dead flesh is no good.”
The massive woman on stage reached behind her head and unzipped herself, splitting her front wide open. The gorgeous girl on the stool, the genius at work, scrunched her brow, causing the breast-woman’s entrails to burst out and whip around like streamers caught in a strong wind. The chaotic flailing ceased as quickly as it began, and the intestines reached out to the crowd, tickling the people in the front row under their chins.
“But…I’ve always been able to bend it at home…I mean…when I’m practicing alone.”
“Yes, Caleb. And I could buy any old cheap pencil for a dime and still draw a picture, right? It’s all about the flesh, my boy.”
Caleb grinned so hard he nearly tore the corners of his mouth. His idol, the great Radical Raymond, giving him flesh-bending advice. “Thank you so much! But where do I—”
The crowd burst into deafening applause, and when Caleb turned to face the stage, the flesh had morphed back into the severed breasts. The gorgeous artist walked forward and plucked them from the floor, then twisted them back onto her body as if they were jar lids.
A firm grip took Caleb’s shoulder and he turned to find Raymond staring intently at him. “All in the flesh, Caleb.”
As he said the words, his mouth oozed from his face like melting candle wax. The rest of his body began to liquefy and pool onto the floor, his sparkly stage clothes floating on the surface. A few people in the crowd noticed the commotion, mouths gaping, gasping and murmuring to one another.
Caleb tried to explain that he had no idea what had happened, but his jaw moved up and down with no words to accompany it. He turned to the bartender, ready to accuse him of poisoning the vodka tonics.
But his eye caught the Hispanic female on stage, the girl who had outdone Raymond in her flesh-bending, outdone any person Caleb had ever seen with Talent. She grabbed the skin of her face, wadded it up in her fist like silk, and pulled outward. The crowd turned their attention away from Caleb to witness this miracle of artistic beauty.
She pulled away the skin, discarding it on the stage floor, piled up like soiled linen. And Raymond stood there, stark naked, facing his adoring fans with open arms.
“Amazing,” the boy-bartender said from just behind Caleb on the other side of the bar. He’d been slicing limes as the miracle of flesh-bending had unfolded.
Caleb was proud. He knew Radical Raymond was the best there ever was or ever would be. Caleb’s smile never left his face, only stretched wider, and he caught Raymond’s eye—just the quickest of glances—and he winked.
“He’s the greatest,” Caleb said, and then reached across the bar to seize the knife from the bartender, pulling it from his slack fingers as he continued to gawk at Raymond, who took his well-deserved bows.
Caleb couldn’t let him down. He had to go on stage. Show Raymond that he had true Talent. That he was a flesh-bender. Caleb slammed his hand on the bar and severed his left thumb at the knuckle.
The pain was beautiful.
Footprints Fading in the Desert
by Eric J. Guignard
The footprints in the sand should have been impossible.
And yet they weren’t. They were the imprints of bare feet, and Lisa shook her head, groggy and perplexed at their appearance.
She first thought it must be a hallucination, an early morning dream or desire for rescue projected onto this desolate land. But then she crouched down and ran a slender finger through one of the shallow marks. The soft ravine her finger carved in the sand crossed over the footprint, disrupting the indentation of its heel, and then curled up to each toe print, remarkably preserved in that coarse, white grit. The tracks were of human feet, just a little bigger than her own. The left footprints stepped in a normal linear direction, but the right footprints had an odd angle, with slight drag marks at each step, as if that side were lame. The prints were fresh, and she scanned the wide desert for their source, but the steps only shrunk away from her, fading into the soft line of the horizon. Conversely, searching for a destination in the other direction led to the opposite horizon.
Lisa’s vision had never been strong and she normally wore gold-rimmed glasses, which were now gone. Her view, already fuzzy, was further hampered by the constant blowing sand, tossed howling and furious through the sky by a hot wind that rarely lulled. Could there be refuge nearby? Some place just beyond her field of vision, close enough that someone could romp about this expanse of barren earth without shoes? She couldn’t fathom that was possible, yet those footprints came from somewhere and led elsewhere, against all common sense. Lisa considered the chance of those tracks passing by and then wondered if it were not just someone else stranded in this wasteland as she herself, a misplaced socialite plucked from hotel-top cocktail parties in an irony of the cosmos.
Lisa decided that whether the person was lost, crazy, or just enjoying a midnight stroll while she had slept, she must find the walker. Anything was better than withering away alone under the wreckage.
Fifty feet away lay the twisted and burned remains of the Cessna 172 aircraft. The shattered rear fuselage, resting underneath the shadow of one severed wing, had been her home for the last three days. Away from that (not far enough away, though she had been too hysterical to go any further) were two mounds, covered with sand and rocks, each projecting a pair of feet like grim armaments. One grave contained the Cessna’s pilot, a salty old redheaded man with bristly whiskers and stagnant breath. He was brought on as a replacement for the regular pilot, who coincidentally also crashed in the desert just the week before; a bad omen indeed for Lisa’s flight. The second grave contained her husband, Phil Strancell, entrepreneur and owner of Strancell Technologies. The impact of the crash had split Phil nearly in half, from crotch to neck. Somehow, he lived for almost a full day after the accident, strapped into the co-pilot’s seat looking like a snapped turkey wishbone, his organs and arteries held together miraculously by the same portion of torn fuselage that had also performed his grotesque bisection.
Lisa knew she was in the Great Basin Desert, somewhere between Idaho and Nevada or, as Phil likened it, halfway between Hell and Hades. The Cessna had nosedived into an ancient fissured lakebed, blanketed under wind-swept sand. There shouldn’t have been a mark of civilization for hundreds of miles around to disturb the dotting sagebrush and rolling dunes, yet, looking down at those footprints, Lisa saw hope. Whoever left those tracks came during the night, walking obliviously past the wrecked plane. The desert night was a
s dead-black as the Cessna’s melted tires, and it was impossible to see more than a few feet away.
Within that forsaken land, she’d discovered that another person existed; one who limped past while she fitfully slept. Each night since the crash, she’d rolled back and forth in haunted slumber, dreaming of rescue from her worsening nightmare…though the actualization of her dreams had all the substance of a mirage: The trail of a barefoot man or woman wandering the desert through the dead of night? But the prints were fresh, and they led away from her aircraft crypt. To Lisa, that was motivation enough, and she knew she must follow them.
The morning was young, but time was against her. Lisa would have only a few hours to pursue the tracks until the summer sun began to crush her with its choking, heavy heat. She lacked a thermometer but guessed the daily temperature rose above one hundred ten degrees, and her only comfort was to curse each searing day with a creative lexicon she didn’t know she possessed.
She dashed back to the mangled Cessna and packed to leave. Fashioning a hobo’s knapsack by looping a cloth seat cover around two broken poles and tying it in place with electrical wire, she filled the sack with the meager food and clothing she’d been able to salvage. She also carried a thin blanket and, most importantly, two plastic eight-ounce water bottles, the last of her one-a-day rationing.
By the time Lisa returned to the footprints, they were already beginning to fade, melting to ghostly imprints that cut into the flat, gritty earth. Wind blew a steady mist of sand, covering the line of tracks as it covered everything else. Lisa jogged quickly along the trail, each of her footfalls leaving marks that mirrored the ones she followed. She looked back only once at the wrecked aircraft, bidding a silent farewell to the graves she was forever leaving behind.
It had been only three days since Lisa’s life was split abruptly apart, much as her husband’s body had been split. Three long and desolate days of cooking under the desert sun, her skin once moist and fresh, now turning brown and cracked like dried jerky. Before the crash, she’d been napping quietly in the rear passenger seat until a sickening drop in the plane jolted her awake, and her face slammed against the metal ceiling. The plane fell, and she bounced backwards behind the seat in slow motion while trying to remember how to scream. She saw only the backs of Phil’s and the pilot’s heads. Like Lisa, Phil was silent. He was frozen, and his hands clenched into claws upon the armrests of the co-pilot’s chair. The pilot screamed into the radio, “Oh crap, oh crap, oh crap,” as if that were the latest lingo for a mayday request. The plane shook apart as it fell from the blue sky. The pilot pounded on dials and struggled with the throttle and almost seemed to bring the craft under control, just before it slammed into the sandy earth below. Lisa blacked out.
The Best of Horror Library: Volumes 1-5 Page 31