DOA III

by Bentley Little

  The crowd roared in approval.

  “Leadership!”

  “Let’s cut his balls!”

  Panicked, Hadley glanced toward the door, which was now guarded by three half-dressed men. Matthew turned to her. “I wasn’t planning on revealing Phase Two of our leadership journey quite this early, but due to unforeseen events…”

  He nodded to the goons who restrained her. They tossed her roughly onto the table, where she collapsed on top of the stripper.

  Right before Hadley’s eyes, Matthew shed his human form and fleshed into a throbbing monument to vasodilation: a six-foot column of fully erect penis. He lumbered forward on an enormous, rolling base of hairy balls, using his gonads like wheels, bending slightly to point a mouth-like gash where the urethra should be. Snapping spikes of teeth filled the gash, and it grinned at her. It actually grinned.

  The half-naked businessmen “oohed” and “aahed” as if they were at a spectacular fireworks display.

  “We BELIEVE in 5B, and soon you will, too,” said Matthew. “Repeat after me!”

  The room burst into chorus: “WE BELIEVE IN 5B!”

  The prostitutes stampeded from the room like a herd of shrieking antelopes.

  “We pump our hips at convention and embrace the conqueror within!” The cock screamed, pulling itself up to its full height. “DEVOUR!”

  Half-dressed men with snapping jaws closed in on a screaming Hadley and the stripper from all sides.

  Suddenly, a noise erupted from nowhere. It sounded again; it was a woman’s moan.

  The businessmen froze in their tracks. Flaccid penises stirred like gently awakening doves.

  “Hey, putos!” Raymundo shouted from where he stood next to the door. He held a boxy object up. From her prone position on the table with four men pinning her limbs, Hadley raised her head to make out the sound dock Raymundo held with his cell phone cradled in its port. On the phone’s screen, Hadley saw fleshy forms bucking and writhing.

  It was a porno. Raymundo had YouTubed a dirty video on his phone and was broadcasting the audio from a portable sound dock.

  Another shuddery female moan ululated from the speakers.

  Pelvises shot toward the source of the sound. Penises rose mightily to point one-eyed accusations at the fluorescent lights overhead. Grunting, half-dressed businessmen couldn’t yank their pantsuits down quickly enough.

  The goons held tight to Hadley’s limbs, grinding her wrists and ankles painfully onto the table. She dodged a rigid penis swinging dangerously near her hair.

  Another moan sounded. A man and a woman engaging in vigorous coitus materialized on Matthew the Dick’s purplish-pink shaft. Its toothy gap curled into an O of surprise.

  Raymundo had pointed the sound dock—and his phone—straight at Matthew, projecting the porno onto his body.

  “Google Projection,” said Raymundo. He tipped a wink at Hadley. “My cousin, he’s executive. Ees not yet released.”

  “What are you doing?” Matthew’s urethral mouth-maw shouted. “Stop!”

  Hairy hands swam over the warm, towering pillar of Matthew-phallus and smoothed his pulsating veins. An account executive began to grind against the rigid midshaft. Matthew bumped him away, shouting. With that motion, Matthew’s coarse curlicue pubes snagged in the corporate pile carpet and he fell forward, little bursts of precum spurting as he bounced. He hit the conference table and smacked over onto his side.

  Someone else shoved into a table and sent a coffee machine tumbling down right next to Matthew. He screamed as scalding coffee droplets sizzled the velvet tip of his glans. Spare tape rolls and boxes of paperclips showered down onto the carpet.

  “Stop this nonsense! It’s just a damn video!” cried Matthew. Apparently, however, these men hadn’t received the complete sexual satisfaction promised in Phase One of his business plan.

  “Booooobs,” panted a man craning forward to lick the bouncing breasts still projected on Matthew’s midshaft.

  Matthew tried to writhe away, but the man grabbed a staple gun and swung it upside Matthew’s glans. His fanged jaws gasped open. Blood poured down a yawning gash running like an open stitch on the side of his penile physique.

  As the blood rushed out of him, Matthew began to deflate. His balls darkened to pale cobalt.

  Another man took a three-hole puncher and smashed it across the parachute of Matthew’s nutsack.

  Matthew Train screamed and was promptly taken down by a mob of turnt-up businessmen like a lone elk in a pride of lions. He disappeared in a blood-smeared flurry of pumping butts, penises stabbing the open air and fists white-knuckling office supplies.

  Hadley heard “Nooooo!” wail out of the vortex. It quickly spiraled away into nothing.

  She was free. The businessmen were all-in preoccupied with humping the remains of Matthew Train’s limp, blue-balled phallic form. Cheap moans continued from Raymundo’s device.

  He stood holding the sound dock, grinning. “Chivalry,” he said. “Ees not dead.”

  Hadley hesitated. “Thank you.”

  Raymundo turned to watch the porno he was now being projecting onto the bloody, bucking, biting businessmen. “I’m a leader. A leader is meeee.” He chuckled lasciviously.

  “I’m going back to school for interior design,” Hadley muttered. “Shit on this.”

  She left 5B behind as fast as her sensible flats would carry her.

  Airika Sneve is a writer, musician, and University of MN psychology graduate from Minnesota. She enjoys ham, cats, and the infliction of nightmares upon unsuspecting readers. Her stories have been published by Weirdpunk Books, Crowded Quarantine Publications, Pill Hill Press, Horrified Press, Issue #3 of Nameless Magazine, Strange Musings Press and more.

  TAKING ROOT by Christoph Weber

  CHRISTOPH WEBER

  I bend over, place my palms on the cold tile wall, and close my eyes.

  “You ready?” Dee asks from behind me. Swallow. Nod. Bend deeper.

  She squeezes the inside of my naked leg, slides her hand up my thigh. When her fingers close around the plant growing from my ass, it tickles.

  When she pulls, it does not tickle—the roots shred my colon. I arch my back and scream so loud she stops.

  “Keep fucking going!” I cry, slamming my forehead against the tiles.

  Lightning branches through my guts as the roots tear through my intestinal wall. I vomit. Blood runs into my eyes. I want to pass out, but I can feel the roots, almost free now, coming together and swimming out my colon like a squid. When they finally evacuate, I collapse to the floor and add tears to my own puke and blood and shit. Dee lifts my head up, wipes my face with a towel. “You did good, Jimmy.”

  “Did you get it all?”

  She says nothing.

  “Dee?” I turn to look up at her, gag at the pain.

  She bites her lip.

  “Show me.”

  She holds up the tickler. It’s a bit like a horsetail plant. Or a pipe cleaner. The joke is not lost on me. A fresh white rip marks where one of the roots broke free. My heart sinks.

  “Round two.”

  “You can’t, Jimmy,” she says, her eyes welling. “Take some time, recover.”

  I shake my head, swallow. “They grow too fast. I’ll rest when it’s all out.”

  Her chin trembles as she squeezes my slick shoulder, turns, and walks to the kitchen. She comes back wearing elbow-length rubber gloves, a bottle of lube in one hand.

  “You know, you look sexy in those,” I say, trying to lighten the mood, trying to get my mind off the fact that I’m probably going to die tonight with my wife’s arm up my ass.

  She laughs. Or sobs. A bit of both, I think.

  “Should we light some candles?”

  She blinks a tear away. “Shut up, babe.”

  “Yes, my dominatrix, I will assume the position.” I kneel on the floor mat, ass in the air. “Safe word is Rumpelstiltskin.”

  She kisses my ear, whispers, “I love you.”

&n
bsp; Then she proves it. One finger. Two. I gasp as she forces her hand in to the knuckles, stretching, sliding deeper, wrist-deep now, fingers probing for the root.

  When she’s nearly elbow-deep, she finds it. “Here.” She reaches around me with her free hand, gives me a fresh hand towel. I bite down on it, and she pulls.

  When I was a kid I choked on a piece of prosciutto and when I reached into my mouth I found the long string of fatty meat stuck on a molar, so I just pulled the thing out and I could feel its entire length as it moved up my throat. It was a visceral, almost ticklish feeling that I can only compare to this. Of course, this is a wee bit more painful, as the prosciutto hadn’t bored through the wall of my esophagus and rooted itself in my flesh to obtain nutrients from my blood.

  Also, I didn’t have a fist in my ass.

  I arch my back and squirm, thrashing my head from side to side, the hand towel flapping like a dog’s chew toy.

  The wet smack as Dee’s lubed hand leaves my ass is the sweetest sound in the world.

  I just remain there on my knees, chest like a bellows as I suck in deep heaves, my forehead leaving red streams in the tile grout.

  Dee throws her arm around me, pulls me close. “We got it, babe.” Her smile is incongruous on her tear-streaked face. “Let’s get you in the shower.”

  “You know what I love most about you?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Your tiny hands.”

  “How do you think you got it?” Dee asks the next day as I lie in bed, feverish, unable to get up.

  “Spores must’ve gotten into the water cistern somehow.”

  Dee bites her lip. “You don’t think…”

  I shake my head. “No. We’ve been so careful. I don’t know how I got it, but we have to leave. The water’s suspect and I’m going to clean us out of antibiotics. Food’s running low, too.”

  Dee nods, snuggles up to my side, puts her hand on my chest. “Get better. Then we’ll find a new home. You were lucky, you know.”

  “I don’t feel very lucky.”

  “I’m serious. If that spore had germinated higher up, or even at the bottom of your esophagus, you’d be dead.”

  “I’m not out of the woods yet. And if that spore had just made it a couple more feet, I wouldn’t have needed your arm up my ass.”

  “When you’re better, please bring back the old Jimmy—he was an optimist.”

  “I’ll try.” Though it’s not yet clear that I’m going to get better. “Thank you, Dee, for sticking around through that. For everything.”

  “I’m with you always.” She kisses my cheek and grins. “Unless I find a man with shredded abs. You know I’m a sucker for those.”

  “Give me five minutes. Then I’ll do some sit-ups.”

  Dee tends to me as I drift in and out of fevered nightmares. After a week I’m able to hobble around a bit. After three we’re out of antibiotics and nearly out of bottled water, so we pack some supplies, don our hazmat suits, and say goodbye to our home of the past year. I walk like a cowboy on his horse too long, my legs bowed to ease the ache in my colon. Real pain in the ass.

  The first woman we find is more plant than person. Bristly green shoots grow from her rotted eyes, her mouth, and judging from the tail emerging from her skirt, one other place, too.

  Women had it the worst. My best guess is something about the Y chromosome gave a handful of men a fighting chance, because the few survivors I’ve met have all been dudes.

  Except for Dee. The possibility that she’s the last woman might have played a teensy role in my asking her to marry me, but she really is special. Hot as hell, and crazy as me.

  Downtown, we scavenge. At one time it bothered me to loot the dead, but when the world fucks you this hard you can’t be squeamish. You have to be like the ticklers. You find a niche, however repulsive it might be, and you do what you must to survive.

  I find a pack of gum, which will be a nice treat after I sterilize it, but most everything’s already been pilfered.

  Dee stares down at a large squishy man with ragged holes in his stomach. A decomposing dog lies atop him, muzzle half-buried in his gnawed belly. I almost make a joke about Dee finding her man with shredded abs, but the sight of his entrails scattering the sidewalk like withered roots sucks the humor from me. Thick green ticklers grow happily from their hosts—out of the man’s shredded stomach, out of the dog’s mouth and nose. I think of Ollie, my old Labrador, and shudder. “Think it was his dog?”

  “I hope not. It’s all backward. Man becomes dog food, dog becomes plant food.”

  “Let’s get out of here.”

  We walk from downtown to a residential area, where weedy, overgrown lawns rise up like they’re trying to devour their homes. Just more plants trying to take over.

  One lawn is freshly-mowed.

  Dee and I just stand there for a moment, blinking. Then we scramble back behind the corner home, my ass flaring up like it’s full of magma.

  I peek around the bricks, scratch my ass, and eye the home’s door. It looks pretty serious. Like a metal blast door. “What do we do, knock?”

  “Could be booby-trapped. I say we wait, get a look at them when they come out.” She laughs. “They have to mow their lawn, right? If they don’t look like they’re going to kill us, then we talk to them.”

  I agree and we loop around to the cover of some overgrown shrubs across the street. I pull a can of beans from my pack, stare at it longingly.

  “It’s breezy, Jimmy. You can’t open your suit here.”

  I groan. “I’m sick of canned food, anyway.”

  “I know. But it’s better than anal fisting.”

  When the sun’s about to set, a young man in a hazmat suit walks out the blast door, grabs an old-school push mower and starts to tidy up his lawn, whistling so loud I can make out the tune through his suit: the Bee Gees, “Stayin’ Alive”.

  “Are you fucking kidding me?”

  Dee laughs. “Nobody who likes disco can be that bad, right?”

  “I say we take our chances.”

  We stand up together and shout, “Oi!”

  The man drops the mower, spins around and pulls a pistol, shouting into his radio.

  We put our hands in the air and shuffle slowly toward him. Two more heads appear above the edge of the roof, silhouetted against the setting sun. It’s hard to make out much except their outlines, but they look like they’re aiming things at us. “Things” almost certainly being those tubes that shoot chunks of lead at supersonic speed, but for some reason I think how awesome it would be if they were holding pool noodles.

  We get close enough to see the man behind his faceshield. He’s twenty, tops, with clear blue eyes and a nice face. When he catches sight of Dee, his mouth drops open. “You’re a woman.”

  Dee nods.

  “Didn’t know if any of you had survived. And you?”

  “Her husband.”

  “Armed?”

  “Yes. But we will gladly check our weapons with you, if you’re willing to let us in for a bit. It’s been a long time since we talked to anyone.”

  The boy whispers something into his radio. “Put your packs on the ground. Slowly.” He gestures toward the shooters on the roof.

  We do as we’re told. A second man emerges from the blast door, assault rifle trained on us. Late twenties, maybe, with the same clear blue eyes and even stronger features than the other boy, who appears to be his younger brother.

  “Sorry about all the precautions,” the newcomer says, glancing at Dee. “It’s good to see that humanity might still have a future. But we haven’t made it this far by being careless.” He rifles through our bags, takes our pistols. “Any other weapons?”

  “Well, there is one more,” I say, trying to ease the tension, “but you don’t want to see it, and it’s really only for my wife to handle.”

  After a moment the boys laugh, flashing bright smiles. The older one pats us down. “Well, now that’s out of the way, join us fo
r dinner?”

  My mouth waters its opinion.

  We go through a sterilization chamber on the first floor, then drop through an airtight floor door, down a set of stairs, and into what looks like a bomb shelter.

  “How’d you find this place?” Dee asks.

  “I built it,” the boys’ father says, beaming with pride. He’s fit, bearded, and says he’s in his fifties, but looks younger. “My father raised me to be prepared, and I raised my sons the same way.” He points to the array of pipes and ducts lining the ceiling. “We have a rain collector and solar panels on the roof, which run our air and water purification systems. And we’ve stocked enough dry food for years. Plus fresh mushrooms growing on the lower level.”

  “There’s another level?” “Two more, actually.”

  “This place is incredible,” Dee says.

  “It’s nice to have someone to show my work off to,” he says, grinning. “You want to see some more?”

  He leads us through another floor door and down to the next level, which has several video screens on the wall. A joystick juts up from a table below them. “Each level serves as a safe room. If anyone’s ever stupid enough to storm our castle, we can retreat downward and lock them in the floor above us.” He hits a button. The metal door overhead clangs as bolts slide into place.

  “And then what, you just wait for them to die?”

  “The locks cut them off from our food and water, but I have a few cards up my sleeve to speed things up.” He winks at us. “I’m not going to show you all my tricks, though. Why don’t we eat, then maybe I’ll give you more of the tour.”

  The eggs are powdered, but they’re topped with fresh, sautéed mushrooms. It’s been so long since I drank anything but water, the orange Tang tastes like fresh-squeezed OJ.

  “Why do you mow your lawn?” Dee asks.

  The father wipes his mouth. “Just a little gesture to the plants, show them we haven’t given up. Plus, we were hoping some survivors might see it. It’s been a while since we heard from anyone.”