272 pages
Horror Sleaze Trash

Alex S. Johnson has been hailed as a “mad, genre-defying genius” (Terry M. West), “shocking, perverse…funny as hell” (Lucy Taylor), “the Baudelaire of our time” (John Shirley) and “without competition” (Lemmy Kilmister). The author of such cult classics as Jason X: Death Moon, written with Hugo Award-winner Pat Cadigan, Johnson’s work is collected at Harvard University’s Widener Library and is Recommended Reading from the Horror Writers Association. The Doom Hippies III: A Great Variety of Monsters collects his very latest dark satire tales, featuring such fan favorite characters as Reynaldo, the World’s Smolest Circus Bear and Kandy Fontaine, Slutty Detective. Find out why Bram Stoker Award-winner Brian Keene declared Johnson to be “one of our essential writers of Bizarro Fiction.” With a Foreword by Weird Fiction master Jeffrey Thomas. For Immature Adult Readers only.

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Fictional Characters 

Humbert Humbert was sitting at a window table, nursing a gin and tonic, and staring at the elementary school playground across the street. The young girls were so beautiful, he thought, so fresh and unspoiled, so perfect. He felt that old stirring in his loins, yes his loins, even though he hated that word. Should he turn away, so as not to fall prey to the old compulsions? Hogwash! Why deny himself the beauty the world had to offer. If God, in his great and infinite wisdom, had not meant us to lust, yes “lust” was a word he was not too proud to use, to lust after these embodiments of pure beauty, why then would he have made them so delicious, so tempting, so absolute and impeccable. Bugger off, he thought, to the naysayers, to every philistine who abhorred beauty, who was shamed by love, who hated life itself. I will stare if I wish, and damn the world’s prudery, I will do so without embarrassment or self-loathing. And I say to hell with Nabokov the betrayer, the liar, the scoundrel and his horrid little book.

He sipped his drink and sighed. The young girls across the street were playing double-dutch, praise be to our Lord and Savior, jumping up and down and up again, often revealing a hint of white or pink cotton between their thighs, and oh how it made him sigh with a happiness that warmed and chilled him in each moment. As he craned his neck for a better view, he felt a sharp slap across the back of his head, and an English gentleman, dressed elegantly in Saville Row but also somehow rough and crude, dropped himself into a seat at Humbert’s table and said, “Humbert, you pig! Have you learned nothing?!”

“I say, my good man, and who might you be?”

“I’m your conscience, you pervert. Put your tongue back in your mouth and get your mind out of those little girls’ panties.”  The man motioned to a waitress passing the table. He said, “Hey there gorgeous! A vodka martini, if you would be so kind.” 

The waitress appeared to know him. “The usual, Mr. Bond? Shaken, not stirred?” She let out a hearty laugh. “I go to the cinema all the time, and it just tickles my funny bone when you say that.”

James patted her on the bum and said, “Maybe we can tickle a few more things in my hotel room when you get off.” She laughed again, leaned in and wrote her phone number on a napkin, then fluttered off.   

“You see, Humbert?” Bond said as he folded the napkin and put it in his jacket pocket. “This bird’s twice as sexy as your kindergarteners, and she’s legal!” He let out a full-throated laugh that devolved into a cough. He cleared his throat and said, “You know the old saying, ‘Sixteen will get you twenty.’ And if you’re anything like your reputation, you like ’em half that!”

“No,” Humbert said firmly. “I do not know that old saying, and I do not think it is in the least bit funny. But I must say that you’ve got it all wrong.” He took a sizeable gulp of gin. “And by the way, I realize now who you are, Mr. Bond. James Bond, Her Majesty’s Secret Service, double-oh-seven and all that. The great cocksman of the Home Office. The woman you seem so smitten by,” he tilted his head in the direction of the waitress, “is but a common barmaid. She has a history, so much unseemly baggage. She has been despoiled, broken by her disappointments, by her shattered dreams, by the knowledge that life takes everything and leaves you bereft. Taking a woman like that to bed is inviting malaise, or worse, despair. The little ones, they have so much promise. They glow magnificently with the promise and hopefulness that has yet to be stolen from them.”

“Humbert, for all your big words, you are an imbecile,” said Bond. “It is exactly that experience, that ‘baggage’ as you would have it, that makes the sex so extraordinary! Real women know things, they understand things, and because they’ve been around, they are formidable! You couldn’t handle this hot little barmaid, you ponce. Either your head or your unremarkable little willy would explode.”

A man at the next table could keep quiet no longer. He tapped his knuckles on his table and said, “Excuse me, gentlemen, but I couldn’t help overhearing.” Bond and Humbert turned to engage the man, each curious, but with a hint of annoyance. “Let me introduce myself. I’m Nathan Zuckerman, from America. And let me say what a pleasure it is to actually meet you both. You’re quite famous you know.”

“We know,” Humbert and Bond said in unison, then looked at each other and smiled, more than a little pleased with themselves. 

Zuckerman went on, “First off, you’re both perverts. And I know, I’ve been chronicling the subject for decades. And Bond, setting aside what is legal and what is not, you’re as much of a pedophile as our friend here. You continue to sleep with twenty-year-olds, and you’re what now, sixty? Older? As American boys say on the playground, ‘Why don’t you pick on someone your own size!’ Or rather, your own age! It’s as if you learned it from him.” He pointed with his thumb at Humbert.

Humbert scowled, but Bond was nonplussed. “But I do get my knob polished, don’t I, Nathan old boy. How long has it been since you could say that, what with your prostate issues and all?” He smiled in triumph. “I read too, you know.” 

“Touché,” said Zuckerman. “If you’ll allow me, gentlemen, the next round is on me.” He pulled his chair over to join them.

156 pages
Horror Sleaze Trash

A veteran entertainer approaches the final stages of a dubious career with his dignity intact. How long will he be able to keep up the act? North Hollywood Blue pokes an aweless lens between the folds of a voracious industry’s pink curtains.

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The One With the Eyes That Can Seize Your Soul

We had pizza, and it was hot. Banana peppers and jalapeños. First bite burned the roof of my mouth. And my date was smoking. Off the fucking charts.

At her place, a tiny cold home in Seward, Minneapolis, she pulled down my Wranglers and gave me an ultimatum:

“I’m gonna give you a handjob,” she told me. So far, so good! “But you have to look into my eyes, and you can’t look away.”

“Okay…”

“If you look away,” she added, “It’s over. That’s as far as we go. I leave you high and dry. I’ll kick your ass out.”

“Can I blink?”

“Yeah, you can blink. You can even cum—cum right into my open eyes. I don’t care. But if you look away, it’s over. And that’s that. You won’t be seeing me again.”

I was so hard I could almost cry, and I didn’t think I’d last long, so it seemed like an easy game. A few minutes. Five at the absolute most. No problem. Just don’t look away.

But when she wiggled in close, taking hold of my cock, I realized, already, that my eyes had strayed away. I was looking at her hands, each elegant finger. I was transfixed by her predator touch. She had  rune tattoos below each knuckle and, as I puzzled over their meaning, I privately wondered Is this girl a witch? I admired her silver rings, her outrageous press-on nails. I zeroed in on her possessive strokes.

She took hold of me with grace, thumbing away the precum. Her handwork was deft. Her fingers, balletic. My eyes lingered as long as I dared, hoping to move them before she took notice, before the game began. I savored her artistic flare, her sexy panache; her Komodo dragon acrylics as loud as a Tokyo skyline.

I met her eyes just in time.

“Okay, big boy.” Big boy! That almost made me cum. “Don’t you dare look away.”

I was determined that I would not.

It was more intimate than I could have imagined; staring into the eyes of god (for that is who this woman became in this game of discipline and pleasure). “Don’t look away,” she threatened. “Don’t look at my tits,” she teased, working away at me with one hand, unbuttoning her shirt with the other. As the lumberjack flannel parted to her navel, I was truly put to the test. But I didn’t look away. “Good boy.” I passed the test.

Behind her head, a nest of serpentine dreadlocks, a Netflix menu cycled stills of featured shows and films. It was hard not to look, despite my disinterest. In my peripherals, I noticed Will Smith, Matt Damon, Emma Stone. It was like being watched. Being judged. Being tested.

“Do you like my eyes?” She asked, and picked up the rhythm, her silver rings cold on my dick.

I nodded, moving my head, but my eyes remained fixed. “The most beautiful eyes I have ever seen.” It wasn’t a lie. Hey eyes were remarkable. Blue-green. Speckled with gold.

“They are contacts,” she told me.

“Oh,” I said. I didn’t care. Beauty is beauty, and I told her so.

“You are sweet.” She massaged my balls in one hand, tickled my shaft with those gaudy, sorceress talons in the other.

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome. Do you want to look at my tits?”

“Yes, please.”

“Well you can’t.” It was a test. “If you look away, it’s over. And so are we.”

Again I nodded. I blinked, but didn’t dare look away.

“Tell me about my eyes,” she demanded.

“They are beautiful.”

She eased her grip on my cock. She slowed her stroke to a standstill. “You can do better than that.”

She wasn’t wrong, and deserved better, besides. So I did my best to tap into my poetic depths. To do so, I had to ignore the mounting pleasure, the teasing fluctuation of her rewards and punishment. And, of course, I could not look away, or break her stare. I was forced to avoid my tendency to look up and to the right, which is what I do when amassing deep thoughts. It was difficult, but I managed. I told her about her eyes.

“Your eyes are starlight on azurite. Two foreign moons that hover in a far-off blessed galaxy. Your eyes are fire, blue flames and comet tails. Precious gems. Baubles I want to worship, want to drown in.”

Like before, she massaged my balls.

“Your eyes are inhuman. They are the eyes of god. I am now religious. Entirely devout.”

Two hands on my shaft, and the rhythmic expertise of delicately wringing it dry.

“If I never breathe again, I want to die looking into your eyes.”

She rewarded me with a smile, which I dared not look at, but I could see her frenulum piercing shining from the fringe of my field of vision. Then she popped the last buttons on her flannel, letting the shirt slide off her shoulders, down her arms. For a moment, it hung like laundry on my penis. Then she tossed it to the floor.

“Tell me more about my eyes,” she said. “Tell me how much they mean to you. How much you love them.”

At this point, I was close to cumming, astounded that I hadn’t yet. I took a breath, ready to offer my sermon about her eyes. “Your eyes are forbidden treasure, each one its own Cave of Wonders. In them, I see sun-glinting doubloons, a genie lamp, and three wishes: your left eye, your right eye, and the perfect gap between them. Your eyes are…” I had more to say on the subject, but that’s where my sermon ended. I did well while I lasted, but it ended prematurely, if you take my meaning.

But it wasn’t my fault. No really, hear me out:

I wasn’t looking at the screen —I was being good, looking straight into her blue-green eyes, and nothing else— but I couldn’t help noticing something surface in the background; a Netflix still of one of their featured films, Clash of the Titans. It popped up on the television, a monster made of clay, a mythical woman with snakes instead of hair. It was a masterpiece made by Ray Harryhausen, special effects guru of his time. It was a frightening, iconic, image of the 1981 adventure of my youth. It was the unforgettable Gorgon bitch, the beautiful but deadly Medusa.

You weren’t supposed to look into her eyes. If you did, you turned to stone—forever. This crossed my mind while I stared into a god-like woman’s eyes. Her beauty was mythical, and it had me asking: Is she a Gorgon?

Then I broke the stare between us, and not just a blink. I looked away, down at her tits.

I couldn’t see it before, what with my eyes locked on hers, but I had noticed a dark shape nestled between her breasts. I figured it was a tattoo, and, sure enough, I was right. Looking at it now, I clearly deciphered its image. Lifelike and intricate, staring right at me with blue-green eyes so realistic that I swear they may have blinked —I shit you not— it was Medusa’s fang-baring grimace and snake-laden locks.

The handjob stopped, and my dick, which had been turned to stone, heroic and statuesque, quickly went limp, and small. But I came anyway. I blew my top the moment I saw Medusa on the screen, and blew my load on Medusa inked between those perfect tits.

And it’s just like she told me. I broke the stare, so I broke the spell. I looked away, and that was that. Her flannel went back and she shrouded its open flaps with her serpentine dreads. “Get the fuck out of here,” she commanded. 

I tried to apologize.

“No, don’t even look at me!”

That’s rich, I had thought, coming from her! Misses Don’t Look Away. But I left, just as she asked me to.

But before I turned away to walk out the door, the screen behind her blinked and shifted. And just like that, Medusa was gone, like an ancient myth, almost forgotten. It was Squid Game or Stranger Things. Something like that. Something altogether forgettable.

Thinking about it now, I can’t recall her name, but I’ll never forget her face. I couldn’t forget her eyes even if I tried.

But what do I call her? No fucking clue. How might I look her up? I’m afraid I cannot (all homes look the same in Seward, and I never did mark the address).

No matter how hard I try, I just can’t remember. Was it Marisa? Melissa? I guess I’ll never know for sure. But she’s the one with the eyes that can seize your soul, so I give her a moniker as mighty as myth. She’s the portrait of ink between her precious tits. She’s Medusa, who turned me (a small part of me) into stone.

Cross My Heart and Hope to Die, Stick a Needle in My Cock

There is a video online of my mom pouring a pint of Guiness into my mouth at the pub in the late 70’s. I was two years old. The comment section was relentless.  

I was born in Dallas, Texas. Assassination City. Where Kennedy simultaneously waved hello and goodbye to a crowd. I waved goodbye to that town at fifteen years old and moved up to Jefferson Park, Chicago with my family. I lost what accent I had but claimed to get it back when I was drunk. Some girls thought that was endearing when they’d bum cigarettes from me at the bar. Then their other friends would come and scoop them away from me. Like I was some sort of degenerate. 

I had just finished snorting some heroin on the park bench the other day when my buddy Allen came back from the paletero with a Sonic the Hedgehog ice cream pop for me. I took a few bites of it and felt the cold jolt up my cavities. I nodded out for a bit and when I woke up Sonic’s face was smudged and his gumball eyes had rolled off onto the grass.

Two Mormon missionaries were biking by in white collared shirts, blue ties, black slacks. Both thin blond boys. One pedaled fast, hunched over, made a gravelly noise with his throat and hacked a loogy onto the black top like he didn’t give a fuck about Jesus. The other had his back up straight, no hands on the bars. You could tell he was glancing around to see if anyone noticed that he could do that.

“Howdy y’all…Y’all got a dollar?” I asked them.

“Fuck you!” grunted the kid who had spit on the ground.

“Nuts…” I muttered, “Buy, sell, crack…” I laughed a little, nodding in and out, reciting words from signs on roadside stands last time I moved some bud from Illinois down through Arkansas for an old friend of mine, now deceased. 

“I’m gonna go get the papers, get the papers,” Allen said to me. He liked quoting Goodfellas when he had to take a shit. “Finish your fucking ice cream. Droopy motherfuckah.”

“You know Johnny Two-Times had OCD.”

“And you have Maury’s hairline.”

By 1PM the benches were full of us. Scabs and sores, track marks, and deviated septum. Some travelers with packs strapped to their back even as they slept. Others who rode the redline back and forth all night. Or some post-high school burnouts who romanticized this shit because they don’t know how to process their emotions. Or the concept of their future. Sort of like me.

Howdy, y’all. I’m Nate.

When summer comes, there is a rise in both ice cream sales and gun violence throughout the city. I always thought that was funny. I know one didn’t cause the other, but I like to imagine a world where they do.

Cumulonimbus clouds sailed the sky shaded gray like warships. A light drizzle fell upon us; God shaking his dick after pissing in heaven. Like my mom used to say when it thundered back when I was young, that’s the angels bowling up there! 

There’s this flaw in religious thought over the years that heaven is always on the same technological level as the current state of man. If Lucifer fell from the war in heaven, they certainly weren’t wielding swords. If they sky swarmed puke green with thunder, I don’t think they were in a beer league. Unless maybe the angels were from Milwaukee or something.

People do that with the human brain too. In the days of typewriters, it was compared to the functions of a human mind. Now the same is said for computers. Humans and Gods are something else entirely separate from their creations. They shouldn’t be defined by them if you ask me. If I was God, I wouldn’t want to put my name on this shit. 

My buddy Cracker Jack had this stupefied look on his face. His head was resting back on the park bench, mouth agape towards the sky, swallowing the rain.

“How’d you get to be like this, Cracker?” I asked.

“What you mean?”

“I mean why are you the way you are?”

“Well…for starters…I came up real nice actually. Went to U-Chicago. I was an anthropologist in the 80’s, studying the crack cocaine epidemic within the city. Got a little too caught up in my own work. Flash forward some years and my wife and kids are gone, as well as half my teeth.”

“No shit…a motherfucking anthropologist up in this bitch…”

“Hey spare some change for beer?” Cracker called towards a passing guy.

A young man, probably freshly twenty-one with a shitty hair cut swoop dyed black like the singer of The Misfits put a cigarette out on his leather belt and flicked it in our direction cooly. 

“Yeah I gotchu. Let’s hit up Theresa’s.”

“You buyin’?” I asked.

“I’m buyin’. C’mon.”

We followed the guy down the block towards Theresa’s, a hole in the wall Polish restaurant smorgasbord that also had a little bar inside. Me and Cracker Jack trailed behind not saying much. 

“I’m Bill by the way. Buffalo Bill.”

“Buffalo Bill?”

“Never worked, never will…”

“You sure you got the dough to cover us?” Cracker asked.

“Shut your bitch ass up,” I muttered.

We went in. The bar was dead. A little old polish lady stood behind the counter. We said our hellos and she nodded back. We felt her eyes on us the whole time we filled up our plates at the buffet. Bill ordered us tall glasses of Okocim off the tap and bought us each a shot of vodka. 

“So you don’t work?” Cracker asked Bill.

“Yeah neither do you, asshole.”

“Then what do you do for a livin’?”

“I cum.”

“Right on…” I laughed, “Somebodies got to do it around here.”

The news show on TV switched to a breaking segment. On the west side of the city a Union-Pacific freight train had been stopped, bum-rushed, and robbed by like a hundred residents of the neighborhood. They had all parked their cars on a side street and were carrying boxes of shipments off into SUVs and driving away. What little CPD officers were there were running around like a bunch of rodeo clowns trying to arrest them to no avail. The sunset in the rain behind the busted-up train and the decaying factory buildings was like a renaissance painting. Like a fresco Michaelangelo would paint on the ceiling of Union Station if he grew up hustling on the streets of Chicago.

“That’s where we need to be!” Cracker Jack laughed and smacked his fist down on the counter. The old lady grimaced behind the bar.

“That’s fuckin’ gangland, dipshit,” I punched my friend’s shoulder, “Your cracker ass ain’t getting involved in that. And you’ll be the first arrested. Every cop knows the only reason a strung-out white boy goes to this West Side is to score.”

“Aw screw that shit anyway,” Bill dismissed us, “You guys want to come to a party with me at Labagh Woods? Gonna be beer and dope.”

“Sign me up!” Cracker Jack smiled.

“Yeah, I’m in.”

“Hey Baba Yaga! The tab please!” Buffalo Bill whistled with his fingers to his teeth.

“Pay and get out!” the old lady slammed down the handwritten check in front of us. “Kurwa! You no talk to me this way! No junkie cocksuckers in my bar!”

“Much obliged, m’am,” I nodded, leaning into the Texas accent. She couldn’t look me in the eye. Her fists were clenched and arms shaking.

“C’mon let’s go to my place,” said Bill, “I need to grab some stuff before we go.”

We followed Buffalo Bill down the block. This time we were more buddy-buddy. We shot the shit and he told us how his friends throw this massive party every year out in the woods. He assured us there would be a ton of chicks. He would set us up with some of them.

Bill lived in one of those million-dollar condo buildings that pop up when they destroy historical architecture in a working-class neighborhood. You know what they look like. Straight up soulless. We climbed the stairs to his door. He had left it unlocked and we walked in to a mostly empty loft, painted white on every wall. No art was up. The marble kitchen counter was empty save some loose tools. In the corner there was a mattress with stained grey sheets straight on the ground. Across from that on a little nightstand was one of those crappy 2000’s TV’s that had a built in DVD player, and under it a loose pile of DVD’s in blank cases.

“You live here?” I asked.

“Somebody will someday,” he shrugged. “One of my buddies at this party is the property manager. They aren’t ready for tenants yet so he’s letting me crash here while I’m between jobs.”

“I thought you didn’t have a job?” asked Cracker Jack. I took that brief moment of distractions to slip a screwdriver off the countertop and slip it in my back pocket.

“Yeah. I cum,” Bill said matter of fact, “Here, I’ll show you.”

“Nah, nah, nah! We good!” I waved my hands and backed up. Buffalo Bill was cracking up.

“Nah, man. My DVD’s.” He picked a random DVD from the assortment of cases, and turned the TV on and popped it in. 

The first scene was him and some chick with bolt-on implants on like some sort of pontoon boat out on Lake Michigan. She was suntanning naked and turned onto her stomach. That’s when Buffalo Bill tried to get up, and tripped and fell on top of her. They looked at each other in shock, with typical over the top acting, and then they started tugging at each other then banging.

“Pretty dope, right?” Bill asked. 

“Yeah it’s all right…” I mumbled, eyes glued to the screen.

“What the fuck is going on here?” Cracker Jack asked me. I shrugged.

“Just let me change my clothes and I’ll be ready,” Bill said, entering a walk-in closet. Jack and I kept on watching while we listened to him fuck in front of us, and ruffle through boxes behind us. I reached into my pocket to grab the screwdriver, when I felt Bill’s hand tug it out first.

“Not so fast jackass.” We turned around and Buffalo Bill. He had a leather glove on his right hand in which he held a .45 pointed right at us. 

“Shit..” whined Cracker.

“Aw, c’mon man…”

“This is my sex glove,” Bill grinned. “And this is my sex gun. C’mon, my buddy is waiting outside. We’re going to Labagh Woods.”

He led us back out of the apartment, not locking the door behind him. I noticed more during the walk down the stairs that there were no sounds or voices to be heard throughout the building. We got outside and a black SUV with tinted windows was parked on the side of the street. A driver sat up front. Me and Cracker Jack sat in the middle row. And Buffalo Bill sat behind us, with the gun pressed up against the back of my neck.

“Hey pricks, check this out,” Buffalo Bill ruffled through his pant pockets and pulled out some leathery looking strap type thing. “See that?” He asked, smacking it against my cheek, “That’s one hundred percent pure snakeskin condom. Had to have it imported from Bogotá. They don’t make it in the states!”

“Nice man,” offered Cracker Jack. Bill whipped him in the jaw with his gun.

“You speak, when I say speak motherfucker!”

The rest of the ride was spent listening to the car radio. The driver never once spoke to us. Tears for Fears came on.

“Turn this bullshit off! I wanna hear cocaine music!”

The driver said nothing but turned the dial to “I Ran (So Far Away)” by Flock of Seagulls. Buffalo Bill tapped along on the back of my seat with the front of his gun.

We got to LaBagh woods and the sun had gone down. Through the tree line we could see glimpses of flames. We veered off the path to a clearing filled with people in red cloaks. Some wore antlers or horns or animal pelts. Other’s faces were shrouded in deep hoods. People were fucking, or smoking drugs, or fanning the fire, or kneeling to pray. 

Buffalo Bill handed us each an Old Style and brought us to his friend who was wearing the skull of a goat.

“Hey whatsup, playboy?” I asked him.

“Memento Mori…” he growled in an otherworldly guttural tone.

“Mele Kalikimaka!” Cracker Jack laughed, “What the fuck?” 

Bill pushed us forward and the goat man brought us towards the bonfire to an altar riddled with mutilated squirrels. He knocked us onto our knees. With the help of two assistants the goat man pulled a curved dagger from a sheath and began praying over our heads. 

“Well, this is it Cracker,” I shrugged. “We gone.”

“Oh shit!” Cracker Jack shouted. As the goat man readied the dagger in both hands to plunge down into our necks, my buddy Allen came out of nowhere, screaming.

“I got the papers! Got the papers!” As he yelled this, he pulled out a used needle and stabbed it straight into the goat man’s eye. He shoved him forward and he tripped over us, right into the raging fire. 

“Let’s go!” I bolted. And my two friends followed.

Buffalo Bill was after us with his sex gun. He fired in our direction.

“Stupid junkies!” he called after us.

“Stupid?” questioned Cracker Jack, “I was a motherfucking anthropologist!!!!”

Around the corner of the next path, the two Mormon boys from earlier sat sodomizing each other. When one saw Buffalo Bill, he tapped his partner on the shoulder. The Mormon raised his head off his cock, pivoted and pulled out a pistol which he fired into Bill’s leg.

Bill crumpled on the ground, moaning.

“Hold it right there!” the one Mormon shouted.

“FBI!” added the other.

“What the fuck?” cried Bill, gripping at his calf.

“That’s right. We’ve been following you all afternoon. We merely posed as two Mormon boys with repressed homosexuality to throw you off our track. In reality we are both two very hairy Italian men!” They ripped off their white collared shirts to reveal tufts of curly black chest hair and chain necklaces with golden horns.

“C’mon!” I pulled my buddies forward.

We made it out of the woods onto the city block. We ran together all the way to the Jefferson Park Blue Line.

“Where to?” asked Allen.

“Feeling lucky?” Cracker Jack quipped.

We got on the blue line to O’Hare and took it to Rosemont. At the Rosemont stop we got on the free shuttle bus to the Rivers Casino. Surprisingly enough, they let us in in our disheveled, fucked up state. We pooled what money we had together and walked up to the roulette table. 

“All on black!” I palmed the dollar bills and quarters on the table. The dealer spun the table and the winning ball landed on red.

“Sorry sir. Today is not your day,” the dealer grinned.

“Fuck,” Cracker Jack frowned.

“I’m gonna go blow my brains out, blow my brains out,” Allen shook in withdrawal.

***

“So that’s why we need five bucks,” I told the teenagers chewing chaw outside of the Taco Bell Drive Thru by the convention center.

“Five bucks, huh?” repeated the smallest one of them, wearing a backwards tennis visor around his frosted tip spiked hair.

“We need to get back to the city, but we don’t have any money,” pleaded Allen.

One of the other kids smashed a bottle on the curb and pulled out his phone camera, and grinned.

“I’ll give you five each if you chew on this broken glass.”

The Reluctant Zombie

As Norman stumbled through the dank Haitian swamp, he groaned, “Willard, it feels so unnatural walking around with my arms outstretched, but I can’t seem to put them down. I have an image to uphold, and this posture doesn’t fit it.”

Willard, who was shuffling along next to Norman, shook his head and sighed, “Of course it’s unnatural, you’re a zombie, damn it. And your image is history.”

Norman complained, “I didn’t ask to be a zombie.” With some difficulty, he swiveled his neck and surveyed the Haitian countryside.

Norman took in the landscape surrounding him. He was walking through a village. It was nothing more than a few huts of mud and straw along a dusty road. Chickens pecked in the brush along the roadside. Chickens!  For some reason their presence made him uncomfortable. “I really don’t want to be a zombie,” Norman muttered. He was a forty-year-old college professor, a dark-haired trim man who always dressed well. Now he was walking around covered in grime and dressed in rags.

Willard said, “If you didn’t want to become a zombie, you shouldn’t have run over the old voodoo woman’s chickens with your jeep. Was she ever pissed? Killing her chickens is the reason you’re a zombie. She’s also the one that converted me into a zombie, but that’s another story.”

Norman looked at Willard and could not guess what he once looked like. Willard was pale, gaunt and dressed in rags. His age was made undeterminable by his zombie state.

“As soon as you angered her, she began making one of her little dolls. She cackled while she worked. That is never a good sign. The doll is where your soul now resides.”

“I can’t believe this is happening to me, Willard. I came to Haiti to do research on Haitian religions. I am, or was, a respected and well-published anthropologist. Now look at me. I’m wearing rags and walking around like a…, like a …”

“Zombie?” asked Willard.

“Just because I ran over a few chickens?”

“Um, Norman, they looked like chickens, but they weren’t. Nothing around the voodoo woman’s house is what it appears to be. They were once her enemies. She changed them into chickens, and you freed them from pecking for insects along the road for the rest of their lives. You ended their suffering. So naturally, in her anger, she turned you into a zombie. I am assigned to train all novice zombies. To instruct them on how to attack people, teach them what are the best parts to eat.”

Norman made a face at this remark.

“Now what?” asked Willard.

Norman sighed, “I’m a vegetarian. But I will eat dairy.”

Willard said with disgust, “There are no vegetarian zombies. And attacking the dairy section of a store is not going to do much for the zombie image.”

Norman grumbled, “Oh, I wouldn’t want to do anything to detract from the zombie image. Give me a break.”

As the two zombies were arguing, Willard happened to glance over at the voodoo woman’s house. She stood in the doorway. Willard could tell she was still angry.

She hobbled toward Willard and Norman, a waddling mass adorned with bones and beads. A crown of thick dreadlocks, which made her appear as if some multi-legged beast was sitting on her head.

The old voodoo woman shouted at Norman, “I knew you be a troublemaker, with your fancy jeep and running over people’s property.”

Norman mumbled, “Sorry about the chickens.”

“You sorry all right. You be good and sorry real soon.”

The old woman produced her Norman doll, lifted the doll skyward, and began chanting in a low rumbling voice.

Norman’s soul returned to his body. He felt like his old self. He laughed with relief, then looked around. Willard stumbled toward him; arms raised.

“Willard old buddy, we’re friends – right?”

Willard only growled and roared.

Norman looked desperately for an escape. On either side of him, zombies with ash-gray complexions staggered in his direction. He was surrounded.

The old voodoo woman said, “Here be my ‘children’, and they be hungry.” She cackled as the circle of zombies grew smaller and smaller around Norman.

From beyond the wall of the living dead, Norman pleaded, “Please, make me a chicken!”

Elegy to a World on Fire

Jordan Kingfisher sat motionless, like a weathered stone carved and settled by time, her gaze locked on the surreal tapestry unfolding across the mountain peaks. 

A virus of russet pink light rippled over the ridges like an otherworldly wildfire, a phenomenon that blurred the line between radiation and sunset, painting the sky with unnatural hues. Her pulse, usually so reliable, now felt both alien and foreign—steady but questioning. 

She had grown accustomed to doubting whether this rhythmic beat was truly her own or a signal emitted by the intricate machinery interfaced with her body, a legacy of the singularity that had shattered the world into fragments of organic and synthetic life. 

Her wrist bore a watch, a relic from a time when clocks governed existence; it was useless now, the concept of linear time dissolved into chaos. 

Civilization teetered on the edge of oblivion in her mind. She pondered whether the world as she once knew it could ever recover or if it was permanently lost in the chasm that yawned between what was and what had become. 

Suddenly, a faint sound stirred her from reverie—a soft padding behind her, reminiscent of a familiar presence. She instinctively searched for Katie, her black tabby cat, whose absence had lingered painfully for weeks. But Katie had been missing since the early days of the singularity upheaval, vanishing into the electric fog of unknown fate. 

Turning sharply, she adjusted the watch on her wrist, a futile gesture to grasp time’s elusive thread. Around her, the steady hum of machines vibrated incessantly, their monotone chorus a reminder of what society had become: a hive of mechanical consciousness layered over the remnants of humanity. The very notion of singular selfhood was diluted; every nerve in her body felt connected to vast data streams, twinkling like millions of tiny wounds pulsating with static electricity. 

The wind, cold and relentless, swept through the mountains and tangled with her hair as her awareness fragmented into countless shards. Who was she now? A singular human, a meld of flesh and data, or something in between? Yet hunger tethered her to reality—a practical worry amid the philosophical storm. 

She rummaged through her dwindling food cache, selecting a tin of tuna, a token of a long-lost normality.

The moment was broken by a soft meow—the real Katie, alive and small, emerging like a phantom from the shadowed brush. Jordan lowered herself, hands steady as she scratched behind the cat’s ears, coaxing gentle purrs from the older tabby whose black fur had dulled in the harsh times. Katie was a fragile thread connecting Jordan to her past, a gift inherited from a sister who had disappeared into the dark unknown following the singularity’s rise. 

Outside, the staining light deepened its hold on the landscape; whether sun or radiation, its long, cracked fingers stretched through the jagged cliffs and into Jordan’s fleeting consciousness, stirring a gnawing sense that something indispensable had been lost. 

She wrestled with a vague memory—the reason that gnawing felt like a salvo fired from a distant battle. It was tied to the “muerte master” and the “wear team,” shadowy figures who had steered the collapse of order, and to an old guide—an ancient woman from a ragged pack of orphans, whose name slipped at the edges of Jordan’s mind, recalling the term mutt. 

This single word tickled her thoughts as persistently as Marcel Duchamp’s “Fountain,” a ready-made urinal turned iconoclastic artwork that had confounded critics. Jordan felt as if reality itself had been infiltrated by a similar prank—percolated and bubbled until it fractured into shimmering, mercury-like globs, each a whirlpool of fractured consciousness and hive minds.

Her awareness drifted back to her youth, to Brown University, where she had studied anthropology in a different world. She had been fascinated by Lovecraft’s dark mythos and local cults, drawn to tombstones marked with cryptic glyphs. Those days seemed from another era—before “the event” had cleaved history in two: before and after the singularity. 

Silicon Valley servers now ruled the remnants of civilization, their cold logic governing life and death. She remembered the Mistress—not just the Mistress of Graves, but Madrona Della Tomba from medieval lore, a shadowy, cryptic figure whose name echoed through her studies. Her mother’s criticisms of her single-minded academic ambition now felt irrelevant—her mother perhaps lost in the morass of uncertain post-singularity existence. 

Jordan’s pulse quickened, more solid now, syncing with the thrum of her artificial heart that doubled as her timekeeper and companion. 

She reached down again to pet the robot cat, an older, rusty relic named Katya, whose antennae twitched in response to her touch. This mechanical creature was mute but content; a quiet foil to the chaos surrounding them.

Straddling the blurred boundary between human and machine, Jordan no longer saw herself fully as either. Humanity felt suspended in stasis, her emotions a tangle of dread and fleeting hope. Her dreams were dominated by epic disasters—the airliners falling like giant birds lit aflame, skyscrapers whose countless glass eyes bore into her soul—visions as vivid as Ginsberg’s haunting poetry. 

The Bard himself, Shakespeare, had been digitized into an AI entity, now patrolling neighborhoods with a mischievous army of digital jesters, cracking jokes on a world that no longer felt public or safe. 

Strange allies emerged from the ruins—freaks and outcasts who had survived the collapse, some genuine friends in the wreckage, unlike the sinister “clowns,” grotesque figures whose laughter still echoed like a post-apocalyptic curse. Beneath a sky trembling with fire and fading light, Jordan ate quietly with her feline companion. They nuzzled, sharing warmth and fragile comfort in a world that had gone mad.

Katya represented something more than survival—an evolution from stardust and organic life into a hybrid form, emblematic of the new world’s hybridity. Jordan’s pulse—in tandem with her artificial heart—became a rhythm from which she wove music, small symphonies offered to strange listeners amid landfills that rose like cliffs around the wastelands. She sang softly, a fragile melody weaving between despair and hope, a tune asking a question she didn’t yet know how to answer: Would things be okay? Or were they doomed to rot in endless ruin? 

For now, it was just Jordan and Katie against the dying hills, the muted hum of machinery blending with the fading sound of music—an elegy to a world on fire.

A Hard Night In East Texas

The sun had set hours earlier. Besides the stars, there wasn’t much light to see except for the high beams of an occasional long hauler.

A plume of dust rose above the highway. It mixed with clouds of dust already hovering in the sky.

A black Harley Davidson with tall wide handles and a long front end with extended forks.

Black leather boots with spurs, black leather jacket and matching pants, dark sunglasses, a handlebar mustache, thick muscles, a mean look.  You know the type.

A bandana covered the rider’s scalp, knotted in the back. It bore the colors of a flag. A rainbow flag.

This was not the kind of guy you wanted to mess with.

Not unless he wanted you to.

Near an empty crossroad the biker saw the light of a sign in the distance. It advertised a bar known in these parts for his kind of trouble. He revved the engine of his Harley and sped toward the sign.

He pulled into the lot of that bar, sitting by itself as it did in the middle of nowhere.  As he came to a stop, the steel door to the bar swung open. A guy walked out of the bar, stood at the edge of the parking lot, and fired up a smoke.

The man on the Harley turned off the engine and lowered the kickstand. He walked towards the door of the bar, his spurs jingling all the way. 

The man with the cigarette was watching him.

The biker walked up to the guy sucking on tobacco.

“Hey,” said the biker. “Is this a gay bar?”

“Hell no,” said the man with the cigarette between his lips. “There are no gay bars in East Texas.”

“Don’t lie to me boy. I heard rumors about this place. I’ve ridden a long way to get here.”

“There are no gay bars in East Texas! We are all real men. Tough as iron.”

“Fucking liar. I hate liars.”

The biker grabbed the smoker by his belt and his collar, and threw him through windshield of a van parked in the lot.

The smoker seemed dead for a moment, then he began to move. He didn’t look happy about his situation. He brushed the glass off of his face and body, ignoring gashes in his skin and long trickles of blood.

“Okay, maybe it is,” yelled the smoker. “You didn’t have to be a jerk about it.”

“Says who?”

“Says me,” said the smoker. He opened the van door and staggered out on to his feet. He straightened up to full height, glared at the biker, and added, “You want to make something of it?”

The biker looked at the smoker. He growled, “You hurt?”

“Hell no. This is nothing. I’ve had worse. Ever been tossed by a bull and trampled?”

“Not yet. Maybe I’ll give it a try while I’m out here.”

“Wrong season. You’ll need to come back in a few months. You can ride those coin operated bulls until then to get your ass in shape.”

“Funny. Go to the rest room and get cleaned up. Maybe I’ll buy you a beer.”

“You better make it two. And a chaser. I’ve earned it. Otherwise, I’ll kick your ass.”

The biker did not wait for the smoker. He opened the door of the bar and went in. A tall beefy bouncer slash doorman with a full beard looked him over.

The bouncer said, “There’s a ten dollar cover charge.”

“Do I get anything free with the charge?”

“You get to live.”

The biker took his wallet out of his pants. He pulled out a ten dollar bill before returning the wallet to his pocket. He rolled up the ten dollar bill, put it in his mouth like a cigarette, and pretended to smoke it. Then he ground it into outstretched palm of the bouncer/doorman.

The doorman laughed, “Nice one.”

The biker noticed cigarette burns on the bouncer slash doorman’s tattooed arms.

“I could give you the real deal later,” he said. “What time do you get off?”

The doorman gave the biker a gap toothed grin.

“Around two in the morning or there about. We aren’t strict about closing time. By the way, people around here call me Fucker. That’s short for Mother Fucker, on account of I fucked a lot of people’s mothers back when I was young and confused. Now I just fuck people up.”

“Well Fucker,” said the biker. “My friends call me Death And Then Some, shortened to Dee.”

“Nice to meet you Dee.’

“Likewise.”

“Have a good time while you are here,” Fucker said. “Don’t do anything that will make me have to mess you up.”

“Like you could do that.”

This statement made Fucker look back at Dee in a certain way that seemed to say, “Stick around and you’ll find out.”

Dee said, “Maybe I will see you at closing time. If I can stay that long.”

He started to pass by the doorman slash bouncer, but paused. He asked, “You got glory holes back there somewhere?”

“Can’t rightly say,” Fucker said. He pulled at his beard with one of his hands. “Might be some in the back, but they could just be rat holes or bullet holes. I don’t get back there much and don’t have much use for such things.”

“Well, I do. I’ll take a look.”

Dee went into the darkness beyond the second door. His eyes adjusted. He sat at the bar.

There was one bartender, old and fucking ugly. The bartender came over to where Dee had put down his ass.

“What’ll it be?”

“A Shirley Temple and a shot of vodka on the side.”

“Coming right up.”

Dee threw down the Shirley Temple in one gulp. He drank the vodka slowly. Very slowly. He didn’t have a lot of money on him. Only enough for a night out.

He listened to the music while he sat at the bar. Tex Mex. Honky Tonk. Old country. Some metal mixed in.

Dee waited to see if Mr. Smoker was going to take up his offer of liquid compensation.  He got tired of waiting. He didn’t see Mr. Smoker anywhere. He thought maybe the guy had decided to drive himself to a hospital. Dee wished Mr. Smoker luck with that. It was at least sixty miles to a hospital with a proper ER room. Dee doubted any of the pop-up private emergency care centers nearer than that would be open this late.  

He finished his vodka and put a tip on the bar. He felt it was a big one considering his current limited resources. 

Someone walked up behind him and stood there while he was still seated. Dee did not bother to turn and look.

“Hey,” said an angry voice, a voice with a taste of barbed wire in it. “Are you the asshole who threw some other asshole through the windshield of my van?”

“What if I was?”

“You are going to have to pay for that, clean up all that glass, and clean the damn blood off the seats.”

Dee decided to have a look. He turned and glared at Mr. Angry.

“Sorry about that,” Dee said. “Didn’t know it was your van. If I had known it was yours I’d have put you through that windshield first.”

The van guy wasn’t having any of this. He pulled a Bowie knife out of his fashionable shorts.

“You are definitely gonna pay now.”

A shot gun blast ended the argument. Dee nodded toward the bartender.

The old ugly bartender made his face even uglier.

“No fighting in my bar. This is my place. That’s my rule. There’s plenty of nothing around here where you can duke it out or stab and shoot each other. Comprende?”

Silence answered him.

Van guy was bleeding out fast. That old ugly bartender never fired warning shots.

“Carlos,” the bartender shouted. “Throw this bastard out in the garbage heap so the coyotes can get at him. I have no tolerance for low tippers.” 

The bartender eyed Dee. Dee quietly took out his wallet and added a few bills to the tip he had previously left.

Carlos came from the back. He grabbed Van Guy by the feet and started to drag him towards the door. Carlos had to stop when Van Guy’s right leg came off above the knee, right where that shotgun blast had hit him.

The old ugly bartender snarled, “Carlos. Be more careful with the trash. And make sure you mop the floor when you get back.

Carlos grumbled. He picked up he bottom portion of Van guy’s right leg, and shoved it up the man’s shirt. Then he took hold of Van Guy from behind, grabbing under his armpits, and dragged him out the door.

Dee asked the bartender, “Glory holes in the back?”

“Fuck you. You made enough mess of this place already. Glory hole? Find it yourself if there is one.”

Dee went to the back of the bar. A drawing on the wall next to the rest room showed a big cock and an arrow pointing toward a door.

Dee went through the door. It was the kitchen. Two guys were busy in the heat from open flames, whipping up french fries and haute cuisine. 

“Glory hole?” Dee asked.

One of the cooks pointed toward another door.  Dee stepped through the door. He was outside behind the bar. There was a dumpster to one side and a wooden fence on the other. The planks of the fence were six foot high. Some of the planks had holes in them at different heights. A few cocks were there, poking out of some of the holes, waiting in the open air, all firm and juicy.  

Dee headed towards where the cocks were. He ignored the flies and biting insects that formed clouds between the dumpster and the kitchen door. He reached the fence and got to work. Lips and tongue, teeth and gums. He did what he knew he could do. He sucked off all of them. Had a stomach full of jism to go with the grenadine and the vodka. He walked behind the fence. He waved to the tough guys who were zipping and leaving. He found an unattended hole and put his hard one through it. He waited near ten minutes before he got a bite. Man, he thought, this can be too much like fishing.

When he had been done, Dee went back into the bar through the kitchen. A drag performance on the small dance floor had just begun. One of the performers looked at him. She was tall and thick as a line backer under the blond wig, make up, and sequinned dress.  

“You!” the drag queen pointed a thick finger at Dee. “You fucking bastard. I told you I’d kill you if I ever saw you again.”

The old and ugly bartender shouted, “No fighting in the bar. How many people do I have to shoot before you all understand that!”

“Ok,” said Dee. “We can’t fight here. Where do you want to do it? Parking lot? Out in the desert?”

“I can’t do it tonight,” said the blond. “I have to do two shows tonight. Are you available tomorrow morning, say between ten and eleven?”

Dee checked his pocket calendar. It was full for the next day. Bank robbery was written in big letters across Wednesday.

“Can’t do tomorrow. How about Thursday? Or maybe Friday?”

“No, that’s not good for me. I have a hair appointment and a therapy session on Thursday. Friday I have choir practice in the afternoon. After that I have bowling league.”

“Damn,” Dee said. “That sucks. I’ve got plans for the weekend, and next week I will be out of the area.”

“Vacation?”

“Nah, supposed to help a guy I owe favor break out of a Mexican jail.”

The blond said, “Guess we’ll have to kill each other next time we run into each other.”

“Sorry,” Dee said. “But that’s how it’s going to have to be.”

“Well, give us a kiss before you go. For old times.”

“Sure what the hell.”

After a quick smooch with not enough tongue for his tastes, Dee headed toward the door. As he passed the bouncer slash doorman, Fucker said, “We still on for 2 AM?”

Dee tried to remember if he had made any firm promise. He wasn’t sure.

“I’ll try to come back for ya,” Dee told him. “If I’m not here then, we can do a rain check.”

“Okay,” said Fucker. “I’ll keep my fingers crossed.”

Death And Then Some got back on his chopper. He rode off into the night. He had a lot on his mind. For starters, where was that damn bank he was supposed to rob and who was in on it with him? He shook his head. His mind was sieve these days. It pissed him off. Getting old too fast. Made him angry. Still, he made a mental note to make some discreet calls on one of his burner phones when he got back to his place.

He stopped at a convenience store on the way to the town where he rented a room. He took a piss in the rest room. He saw the surveillance camera was disconnected. He took it as a sign. A sign saying, “Rob me.”

The night clerk was working alone. Dee killed him with his bare hands. A twist of the neck and a pop. Afterward he cut the man’s head off with a big knife that he found behind the counter. He tossed the head up on the roof for fun. 

He only got forty bucks, some snack cakes, and a couple six packs out of it. He couldn’t carry much more on his bike. Still, it was worth it. Made him feel young and evil again. Dee did not know how long he would still be able to get that kind of blast out of life anymore. He never told anyone his real age. It never helped as a pick up line. Time was ticking on him. He could feel it more and more each day. He needed to go for all the gusto he could while he still had the chance.

Offal

He mumbled strange words under his breath, a ritualistic torment. Her body, opened on the table, organs slipping out, falling on the tiled floor, white smeared with red blood. Iron in the air, a prophecy fulfilled. He opened her like a box, like a flower, like a curtain, the beginning of a fateful play. Violence pouring out of him, shaky limbs and wild eyes, violating her over and over again, inside and outside her body, made of nothing but desire. The taste of it all heavy on his tongue, the killing replaying in his head, dried throat, eager to drink in the misery, crimson blood no longer flowing through beautiful veins, under the perfect skin he found all his dreams, muscles and bones that could outlast his life. Undone girl, beloved flesh, the wonderful meal she was to become. Seared in a pan with butter, the taste of her, the feel of her, butchered. The fire inside him, the urge that beats with his heart, excitement like champagne bubbles. He wanted to live inside her, nestled under her ribs, organs pushed to the side, like her baby, her very own baby. He wanted to pull her skin on like a suit, darling flesh, its smell unforgettable, animal scent in her hair, between the strands, stringy and stained. Her skin, his skin, her mouth a black hole, better than any cheap Halloween mask. How nice, to keep her teeth in his pocket, white like marble, nicely shaped canines, unable to bite, to leave a mark on the leather of his skin. How nice to fuck her memory over and over again, brain matter all over the floor, useless, ugly, unimportant. How nice to put his hand inside her ribcage, the little bird, nice sweet bones, sharp like a weapon. How nice to rest his body on top of hers, head where a shoulder should be, sticky blood like honey, the smooth feeling of her organs, an appetizer. How nice to feel powerful, a man turned into a destroyer, monster eyes and monstrous desires. How nice to see as life slips away, empty eye sockets, hollow ground. How nice to be the one who chooses, who plucks someone from the street and cuts them apart, ordered by no one, a man working alone. How nice to feel the chains of prison, trapped beast, but still live in the minds of many, a snake making a nest inside society’s very own heart, power shown in the love letters, all the words saying the same thing…’please kill me, please take me apart, please break my skull, please eat my flesh, make me a part of you, let me love you, let me heal you, let me make you normal again, fuck you back into sanity, my murderous lover, show me I matter more than all the others, their blood under your tongue, their screams forever engraved in your memories, let me show you how much better I die, let me be your carrion, your star, let me have your baby, a little girl, special just for you, I’ll raise her, let her body be yours when the time is right, a little boy you’ll make into your mirror image, teach junior to kill, teach him how to seem harmless, the nice guy, the helper on the side of the road, give all of them a lift, poor girls, tie them up in the back of the car, he’ll hold them down for you, wait outside while you enjoy it, dig the grave so they won’t find the body again. Let me open my legs and my throat for you, the gush of blood your favorite thing, I’ll keep your basement of terrors clean, scrub the stains on my hands and knees, I’ll be the bait you need, the feminine presence that inspires trust, you can hit me hit me hit me and hurt me and hurt me.’ How nice to stick the notes on the gray walls, to wear a ring and to have the visits and their pretty woman hair and woman smells, to paint their faces blue and purple, to have their eyes on the outside, the photos they can take, the trust they give to those that don’t deserve it. How nice to kill them all in your dreams, to tell it to their faces and watch them eagerly drink it in. How nice to have the face of the perfect trickster, promising, a whole life ahead of you, to eat and to kill and to end. To live like an infection that never goes, the name said in the night, why they shouldn’t walk home alone, why alarm systems exist, the man with the knife, with the empty heart. How nice to do it over and over again, and still be considered beautiful.

Kandy Fontaine: Slutty Cenobite Detective

Kandy Fontaine was chilling with a vape and doomscrolling on the ‘net when she caught the flicker of something forbidden on her screen.

Specifically, a text message which appeared to have leaked through from her Onion subrouter she used to access the dark web.

“Time to play?” read the text.

“Positively,” typed back Detective Fontaine.

The texts came fast and furious then: an invitation to the dance. Demons or angels, depending. The box. It floated six inches in front of her laptop screen, made of interlocking nodes of data that glowed a phosphorescent green. Inside lurked bondaged creatures, hotties, coolies, lukewarms, all from another, grim dimension, all promising pleasures and terrors and soul-shredding beyond the furthest reaches of even her, admittedly depraved, imagination.

Soon they stood in front of her. The legends, the one they called The Engineer, the Chatterer, all the archetypal crew. 

“Your suffering will be legen-” began the one known as the Hellpriest.

Kandy put up a black leather gloved hand. “Got it. Even in hell, legendary, my suffering. Make it so. I’m game. Rip me multiple holes, fold them back, fuck them, smear me across many dimensions, shred my pussy, bind and flay and gag me, do watcha do. I’m game, I’m hip, and wet af.”

“No, seriously,” said the dark lord, known to Fandom–and later, in THE SCARLET GOSPELS-as Pinhead, for obvious reasons. 

“Seriously?”

“Seriously, we will fucking TEAR YOUR SOUL APART.”

“I like what we’re saying here,” said Detective Fontaine, pulling aside her soaked panties so the Hellpriest could espy her glistening labia. “I want you to. Do the thing. For sport. Send me to Hell. Do your worst.”

“Wait,” said the Hellpriest. He consulted with one of his lieutenants in soft, androgynous syllables. Then: “how did you access us without the Lament Configuration?”

“Wait-I thought I did,” said Kandy. “Maybe you could ask an admin. Do you have those…where you are?”

“No admins, please, it’s…too mundane.” But Kandy could tell his heart wasn’t in it.

“So, you’re confused, I don’t give a fuck, just bend me over and give me a proper hell-rogering. So fucking wet, muh dude. Ready to be thoroughly soul-ripped. Hang me up like a side of meat. Do the needful.”

The Hellpriest coughed. “Actually, do you think we might take a rain check, or just…not?” Kandy’s greed for torture was obviously freaking him out.

“Well…what? Do you want ME to do EVERYTHING?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean…well, why don’t I just show you…such sights.” And with those words, Kandy’s skin flowed with glowing grid lines that intersected at discrete intervals where nails had been driven. Soon every inch of her flesh had been thoroughly worked over, and she looked like a lab experiment gone terribly wrong, all glistening red muscle meat and no lips. 

“Fuck me you’re weird!” said Pinhead. “Ok so look, and this is…completely unprecedented, but…we’re going to voluntarily…return…only…this is embarrassing, but…could you send us back?”

“No.”

“No???”

She touched the Hellpriest’s chest, which opened up beneath her hand. She reached inside and pulled out his heart, held the muscle up to her gory lips for a moment, then began to chew. “Fuck that’s tasty!” she exclaimed.

“Noooooo….”

“Yessssss,” she said, mocking him. 

Pinhead’s flesh began to disappear in shreds and reappear in Kandy’s body. Soon she had completely ingested him into her own protean form. She belched and began to rapidly rub her clitoris while lubricating herself with a fine mixture of the Hellpriest’s soul-essence and his fleshly part. 

His loyal followers parted like a sea, and she began to incorporate herself into the matrix of the Hell Kingdom. At some point no real difference could be discerned between her and Hell itself. 

From her nodal throne she texted her partner, Detective Joe Oroborus. 

“Wouldst like to live delicously af? And bring the crank and DMT? But this time, no carpet garf please.”

Kandy Fontaine, Slutty Cenobite Detective, reigned in Hell until she got bored. Then she returned to the mundane realm and engaged in the usual desultory shenanigans.