“I love you,” he whispered. His erection pressed tight up against her leg. The flesh was as soft as marshmallow fluff.
With both hands, he reached out to Ms. Beasley’s sides, found each of her breasts, and grabbed them. Squeezed them as he dug his face into the crook of her neck, nuzzling her. His cock dragged across her skin as he repositioned himself.
When he felt the soaked hair tickling the tip, he gasped, pulled away from her for a moment. Licked his lips as he stared down at her aged, bushy maw. One hand released its hold on the bosom to travel down her torso, past her naval. His fingers shook as he reached for the old woman’s cunt, and just before making contact, he hesitated, then plunged them in.
From the videos he had seen, he always imagined it would feel slippery, hot and wet. Ms. Beasley was cold and bone dry, and no matter how hard he pushed, he couldn’t get his fingers deeper than the first knuckle.
He sighed, scratched his head, and then smiled when his eyes landed on the wide, glistening gash on her creamy, stretch-marked belly. His fingers slid into the wound easily, and he scooped out about a tablespoon of bloody slime and fat. The goop started to run down his digits, so he quickly pushed it into the arid vagina, swirled it around.
His fingers slid in no problem this time, though the flesh was still ice cold.
The throbbing of his cock caught his attention, and what little of the goop was left in his hand, he spread it across the head and shaft, damn near bringing himself to orgasm with just a few strokes.
He had never been so excited, and when he slowly eased himself into Ms. Beasley—the lovely little old woman who spent her mornings reading the paper and watering her yard, who treated Calvin as sweetly as if he were her own son, who made the best pork chops he’d ever tasted—he started to weep.
By the third thrust, he could feel her drying up again, but it didn’t matter. As he climaxed, he reached forward, grabbed the massive, wrinkled breasts. A hoarse cry erupted from his mouth as he came into her, and as the sea of pleasure washed over him, he arched his back, eyes rolling to the back of his head.
There was a ripping sound, and his hands nearly flew back into him as the breasts tore, that black spot over her sternum splitting wider, spilling gelatinous meat and dark blood into the tub. Her bloody ribs, gore stretched over them, glistened in the weak florescent light in the bathroom.
The photograph slipped off the towel over her face, the glass shattering when it collided with the side of the tub.
With his semen extracted, suddenly the clouds cleared from his mind. And he looked down at what he was doing.
“Oh God…”
A stream of vomit spewed past his teeth and lips, splashed over the old woman’s body, coating her freshly exposed ribs with chunky bile, once again washing away the maggots who had managed to scoot their way back up the corpse.
I have to get out of here. I have to wash up…tell someone about Ms. Beasley.
They’ll never know. Nobody will ever know what happened.
He gripped the sides of the tub for support as he slid his petrified cock out, but it only came about an inch before the dry flesh grabbed hold of him, refused to let go. It was like a Chinese finger trap, and no matter how hard he tugged, Ms. Beasley wouldn’t release him. Her body rocked as he desperately tried to shake himself free.
“Calvin?”
The voice came from the front hallway, followed by the front door closing.
Footsteps.
“Calvin? Ms. Beasley? Y’all in here? What the hell is that smell?”
Oh no. No no no no!
Calvin reached down with both hands, tried to rip the dry twat in half to make his escape. He would climb out through the window, run home, hide.
The flesh tore some, but not wide enough to get his erection out.
He clenched his teeth, squeezed the sides of the tub, and growled as he tried to lift himself. Ms. Beasley raised up about an inch, her body stiff and holding the shape of the tub, brown liquid raining off her and painting the porcelain.
“Hello?” his mother’s voice came again, now just down the hall.
Calvin lost his grip and slammed back down, cracking his tailbone and bending his trapped erection like it had an elbow. The brown liquid splashed into his face, stinging his eyes and filling his mouth with rot flavor.
But none of that mattered in the next moment. The pain was dwarfed by his shame and embarrassment as his mother’s voice called out his name again, her footsteps now hurrying through Ms. Beasley’s bedroom.
“Calvin? Ms. Beasley? Will someone please talk to me?”
A fly buzzed around his head, landed on the tip of his nose.
“Calvin, what’s going on? Whoa, that smell… Honey, where are you?”
His now flaccid penis slid out of Ms. Beasley like a limp thumb from a toddler’s messy mouth.
“Calvin?”
“Shit.”
Shane McKenzie is the author of many horror and bizarro books, including Muerte Con Carne, Pus Junkies, and Wet and Screaming. He has written comics for Zenescope Entertainment. His novel Muerte Con Carne was adapted into a multiple award winning short film called El Gigante, which will be a feature film very soon. He lives in Austin, Texas with his wife and two children.
SKIPP’S SPLATTERPUNK ALPHABET SOUFFLE by John Skipp
JOHN SKIPP
[Author’s note: the term splatterpunk has been bandied about for nearly three decades. But if anything, it’s more misunderstood here in the 21st century than it was in the 1980s when it began. Which is to say, everybody’s got the splat down pat, but many seem to have forgotten the punk. So here’s my attempt to shed some dark light on the matter, in a handy-dandy alphabetical way!]
A IS FOR ATROCITY EXHIBIT
Joe Coleman invited me up to his loft on the Lower East Side, somewhere in the very early 90s. He was the artist who did the original poster for Henry: Portrait of a Serial Killer, not to mention reams upon reams of brutal, wrenching art, chronicling the history of pain in ways that defied any attempt to dismiss them. His technique was crude, absolutely, but painstaking in its obsessive detail to the point of genius. I was in awe of it. Still am.
He was also a performance artist who routinely strapped explosives to himself, ignited them, and blew himself up in clubs, prompting much terrified running and screaming. Incredibly tortured dude. Insanely talented. And super-nice in person.
As it turned out, he was also a collector, his apartment a meticulously designed honest-to-god Museum of Human Atrocity. Every wall, from floor to ceiling, jam-packing elegant shelves with pickled punks (deformed fetuses in formaldehyde), grim skeletal remains, crime scene artifacts, torture devices, war crime memorabilia, and on and on and on. He had a full-sized wax museum figure of Richard Speck, the sick fuck who raped and killed eight Chicago nurses back in 1966. It greeted me at the entrance. The likeness was uncanny.
I spent about an hour perusing the premises, acutely aware that I had never in my life been surrounded by so much pointed grotesquerie. It was a loving shrine to wrongness in all its forms. And the love was palpable.
The message was: I want you to know how horrible things get. In fact, I will not rest until YOU KNOW FOR A FACT that this is precisely how horrible things get. You think things are okay. They’re not. They never were. And they never will be. No matter how much happy sauce you drizzle on everything, everything is not okay. EVERYTHING WILL NEVER BE OKAY.
It was a message I already understood. Which is why he invited me up. To show me. To show me he understood, too.
We had a bunch of great conversations in the process. And then, as we went back to the kitchen on my way out the door, he said, “I have one more thing to show you.”
He left the room for a minute. I just stood there, reflecting on all I’d seen. From the cruelty of nature to the cruelty of man, this was one ugly fucking universe. There is no bottom to the horror. There is always something worse.
Then he walked back in with a couple pieces
of notebook paper in his hands, held tenderly as the first piece of parchment from The Bible. He handed them to me. Saw neat cursive pencil script, fading with age.
“It’s the Albert Fish letter,” he said.
The second the papers touched my fingers, I began to shake. This was the letter—the actual letter—that legendary psychotic sent to the parents of the eight-year-old daughter he killed and ate. It described immaculately the moment in which he knew he had to kill and eat her, the process of luring both she and them in, the recipe with which he cooked her, and the delight he took in doing so.
By the time I got to the end, my eyeballs had begun to bleed thick red tears that burned as they rolled down my cheeks. Joe took the paper out of my hands at the very last moment, so that the red squirts hit the tile floor instead. I blearily watched them drop though a crimson filter, saw the blood gutter in the floor take them down down down.
“I think you’re ready,” he said.
In the end, I balked at killing a child, so we found a belligerent homeless prick on Avenue B, and cooked him up instead. I gotta admit, it wasn’t all that great.
So I said to Joe, on my way out the door, “Thanks so much for having me over. But let’s never, ever do that again.”
B IS FOR BULLSHIT, BOARDROOM-STYLE
“This society is built on lies,” Lawanda says. “And bullshit is what we sell. Politics. Commerce. Education. Religion. Love. Sex. Family. Health. Wealth. Power. You name it. If it matters to us, we’re lying about it routinely, every second of every day. Disorienting the world on purpose, for money. That is what we do.”
The executive board of Bramble, Dapper, and Snatch is in no position to argue. Their mouths stapled shut. Their eyes stapled open. Hands nailed palms-down to the boardroom table, as the entire advertising staff encircles them, chanting in low tones.
“You pay us to do that,” she continues from the end of the table, Oma setting up the PowerPoint presentation behind her. “You pay some of us ungodly amounts, and some of us shit. But whether you’re patting us on the head or fucking us from behind, the bottom line is: our job is evil. You are evil. And every time we do what you tell us, we are being evil, too.”
The art department continues the chant as they smear the blood from bone-smashed, finger-twitching executive hand to hand, forming a perfect oval of glistening red across its lacquered length. When Dwayne, the VP of Marketing, rears back in his swivel-chair, trying to tear his hands free, Pepe from Creative pushes him back to the table, while Jen Li from Accounting hammers another twelve-inch spike through the meat of his palm, elbows him in the nose till his stapled-wide eyes roll back.
Then the screen flickers on, with the first wave of graphics.
And the blood on the table starts to sizzle and steam.
“So here are all the reasons you should be sent straight to Hell,” Lawanda concludes. “Let’s see if your Lord and Master agrees.”
From the center of the table, Satan’s red antlers crack through to either side, enormous. The dome of his skull, as it extrudes, is the size of an SUV. Rising and rising.
The executives scream through their riveted lips, as the wood shrapnel slivers them with little bites of pain. Most of them had no idea who they really served. Were pretty sure they were just serving themselves. Little kings of their own lying empire. But now they know.
YOU’VE GOT FIVE MINUTES, the Devil says, impatient. An executive himself.
Oma’s presentation is meticulous and swift. There’s a reason she takes home seven figures a year. She could sell blood to a turnip. Hell’s CEO is clearly impressed.
SO WHAT DO YOU WANT FROM ME?
“We want a chance to win our souls back,” Lawanda says, stepping next to Oma, as the rest of the advertising staff fills in behind them. “We want to see what happens if we STOP lying for a minute, and apply these skills to just telling the truth.”
AND WHY WOULD I LET YOU DO THAT?
“Because you already own the world,” Oma says. “You’re kicking God’s ass. Everybody’s already buying the bullshit. Where’s the challenge in that? Aren’t you bored already? Wouldn’t you like to see what happens to all these billions of souls if they actually remembered what the truth is, on a mass scale?”
HMMM. A long pause, punctuated only by the screaming of the executive board of Bramble, Dapper, and Snatch, whose impaled hands suddenly burst into flame inside the circle of boiling blood.
AND WHAT’S IN IT FOR ME?
“We will hand you ugly fucks like these at their ripest and primest,” Lawanda says. “Not once they’re all worn out. The truth will out them. And you’ll still have them to serve you down there. Do whatever you want. We just don’t want ’em up here anymore.”
Satan chuckles. YOU’RE STACKING THE DECK AGAINST ME.
“You’re a big boy,” Lawanda says. “You can take it.”
HMMMM, Satan says again, as the flame engulfs the sitting heads of this advertising empire. His smile is Mona Lisa cryptic, thinking, thinking, antlers plowing rivets in the ceiling above as he slowly nods his head in private thought.
Come on come on come on, Lawanda thinks, as the whole team tenses behind her.
Then the flaming, screaming ones vaporize: steam sucked down the flume of Hell, leaving only their smoldering hands.
LET ME KICK IT AROUND WITH THE BOYS DOWNSTAIRS, Satan says. BUT I LIKE IT. IT’S FUN. I THINK IT COULD SELL.
“Only one way to find out,” Lawanda says. “Don’t be a pussy about it.”
FUCK YOU.
“Fuck you back.”
I ALWAYS LIKED YOU, LAWANDA. YOU’RE A PIP.
“And you’re a pimp. Love you, too!”
All in all, she had to say that meeting couldn’t have gone any better.
C IS FOR CHEWING ON CARL
In the dashboard light, Cindy’s teeth gleamed white against Carl’s hairy nether region. His cock was up and out, pants around his knees, and the reek of his sex suggested he hadn’t bothered to bathe in days.
She thought about teasing him a little bit more, but frankly couldn’t see the point. This was one inconsiderate dick.
So she wrapped her lips around the mushroom tip. And chomped down, with all her might.
Her teeth made it halfway in to either side, a hot copper monsoon flooding her mouth. He bucked and screamed, but she was clamped down hard, dug in like a Pit Bull, head shaking from side to side as she tried to chaw all the way through.
Carl started to pummel her back with his fists, so she grabbed his balls and squeezed so hard they mashed in her hand. He went paralytic, hitting notes that only dogs could hear.
It was like biting through rawhide and chewing on gristle. But when the head popped free, she came up, triumphant. Spat it into his mouth. Looked him in his dying eyes.
And said, “That’s for taking me to Denny’s on our first date, treating the waitress like shit, and then expecting me to blow you. You, sir, are one cheap son of a whore.”
And he never pissed off Cindy again.
D IS FOR DYS-APPOINTMENT
When the world caved in, I was totally prepared for awesome zombies. I was soooo ready to bash in skulls, make my hunting knife sink straight through the bone like butter, live out my thrill-packed libertarian wet dream of fuck-you justice.
But the zombies never came, and it turned out that knives didn’t cut through skull half as easy as my favorite monster soap opera suggested. And every skull I stabbed had a living soul inside it.
God and the Devil never showed up, either. Or Cthulhu. No vampires, no werewolves, no mutants, no nothin’. All the ghosts were just haunting memories. And every serial killer—because, fuck, aren’t we ALL serial killers by now?—fell down, and didn’t get back up.
Dude, dystopia sucks ass. I thought working checkout at Best Buy sucked, but I didn’t know squat. It’s hard, and it’s miserable, and it just goes on and on. There’s not a single good thing about it. Now excuse me while I use this machete on your neck. It’s a lot l
ess work. And frankly, that can of Purina Moist and Meaty is looking awfully good to me right now.
Christ, what a stupid dystopia this turned out to be.
E IS FOR EVANGELICALS
As much as they claim to love Jesus, they’re mostly praying for him to wade in and ruthlessly wipe the slate clean. Cleanse the earth of all sin, Apocalypse-style. Leaving them gleaming in the heavenly aftermath, while the rest of us are punished and purged.
It’s probably not gonna work out like that. (See D FOR DYS- APPOINTMENT.) But I can certainly see their point.
GOOD LUCK WITH THAT, ALL YE FAITHFUL SINNERS! Fingers crossed! Hope you pray really hard! Cuz you’re going to need it.
F IS FOR FUCKING WITH THE LIGHTS ON, BABY
It may keep you out of Heaven—if you consider that Heaven—but it sure keeps it lively down here!
G IS FOR GROSS-OUT CONTEST
Shane McKenzie once tried to make me eat some disgusting 99 Cent Store pudding onstage at the World Horror Convention. It was part of some ridiculous skit he had planned for the annual Gross-Out Contest. I know pus was involved. And as the judge sitting closest to him on the stage, I was his opening target.
Just so you know: Shane earned his entry to the horror pantheon through his live performances at events like this. Just this sweet young guy, who nobody knew, stepping up to the mic and just slaughtering the hundreds of us in attendance with onslaughts of graphic, free-balling beyond-disgustingness. Next thing we knew, there were dozens of Shane McKenzie books, each more revolting than the last.
He is, so far as I know, the only working writer in horror whose career was launched by performance art. There’s a lesson in this.
But I digress.
He tried to get me to eat the horrible pudding. I told him to go fuck himself. He said, “Oh, man. Come on. It’ll be fun!”
“I’LL SHOW YOU FUN!” I screamed, leaping up from my seat to grab him by the throat and ram the whole thing down his gullet, as fellow judges Brian Keene and Daniel Knauf took him by either arm.
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