Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut Read online

  “You guys are bad sports!” whined Gooch. “Just ‘cause Sugar Valley kicked your ass at Death Ball, you don’t have to get all ‘in my face’ about it. We dominated, fair and square. You lost! Man the fuck up, bitches!”

  But they were not having any of it.

  ***

  This was pain quite unlike anything Gooch had ever experienced. Relentless, remorseless suffering.

  Like the time—but his life had been so adversity-free, so charmed, that he couldn’t remember a time like it.

  Except, wait, the time he’d been rejected by that little Hollywood slut in biology class when he tried to copy her notes.

  The one he’d wanted so badly to pee on. Stream golden showers over. Dazzle with Gooch’s special lemonade.

  Nobody had ever rejected Sugar Valley High’s Death Ball hero, denied him a reasonable request, even the smallest favor. Who did she think she was, anyway? She wasn’t that special. But she’d made him burn. And nobody burned the Goochman.

  That was the closest Gooch had been to a real setback in 18 years. Until now.

  Now was living death. Castrated, headless, and set loose in a dense, humid jungle only to be captured and roughly used by zombies with appallingly large members.

  Treated like a little bukkake boy. Made to do unspeakable things with unmentionable commie liberal foreigners in a setting his favorite Hot Fox pundit, Fran Cooter, would describe as “fucktarded.”

  And then released again, slathered with zombie spunk, crashing through rubbery foliage that had its own will.

  At least they’d left him his other limbs. He imagined himself on the Death Ball field and took the special Berserker stance that always drew gasps of amazement, wonder and toxic shock from the stands, his elbows punching laterally like pistons, shredding leaves and vines and finally, with a sense of huge relief, bursting out of the jungle.

  He could smell the ocean very close.

  And heard the zombies tromping through the jungle right behind him.

  Gooch estimated that the ocean was about 15 yards away. If he ran very fast, he might be able to get to the water before the zombies got in their sloppy seconds. And thirds. And fifths. And…

  “Fuck this shit!” screamed Gooch.

  It then occurred to him that he didn’t have a head.

  So how was he screaming? And thinking? He had a vague sense that his head, wherever it was, had been manipulated, scrambled, digitally patched into another narrative, rejected, set aside, replaced with a succession of unwieldy proxies, flash-frozen, stored in a man-sized fridge with an Irish-Kenyan U.S. President, taken out, used for masturbation by an 8-foot-tall glam rock hermaphroditic somnambulist trance-killer, patched into a Death Ball game, bounced around in a locker room, had pictures taken with it wearing a frilly pair of undies, kicked into a corner to gather dust, and then transformed after unquiet dreams into a special cockroach-sconed dildo.

  It was ever so slightly exciting. And if Gooch still had his 12-inch, he might have had wood. But the zombies were gaining. There was no time to reflect, head or no head, cock or no cock.

  Stripped of pride, dignity, self-assurance and even the last vestige of Death Ball attitude, Gooch paddled out into the blood-warm ocean.

  The zombies followed.

  ***

  Now that he was one of them, the zombies left Gooch alone.

  To say he was traumatized would be the understatement of the millennium. Treading water and leaking a steady stream of blood from his ass, Gooch could barely summon the energy to struggle on.

  His wood was missing, his head had been replaced with a girl’s, and though the girl’s head in turn still held Gooch’s brain and thought Gooch’s thoughts, these were of an inferior quality. Not that he had prided himself on his thinking skills.

  No, that was for the nerds, who couldn’t get a date and thought an evening watching reruns of Dr. Who on the BBC and writing fan-fic about Harry Potter characters was about as exciting as life ever got. Gooch liked to spend his evenings being serviced by the entire Death Ball cheerleading squad—go Aryans!—while watching videos (featuring himself) in which he led the team to blood-spattered victory. Now, he had been reduced to nothing. Less than nothing.

  He would be lucky if he got a gig as a water boy for a freak show. He would be lucky to consider himself one of the 47% of gay retards driving around in their womb-mobiles. He would be lucky to be anything other than he was, which was a horribly fucked-up mutant.

  Behind him, the water was boiling with zombie-shark action. Through Tiffany Tiffany’s eyes, Gooch watched unlikely penetrations and awesome acts of swallowing. A cloud of mingled zombie/shark spunk, rotten zombie jissom horribly swapped together with shark essence, blossomed like a corpse-born flower.

  Taking advantage of the distraction, Gooch summoned all his strength and began to swim away from the scene. He dove beneath the sperm cloud and then up and around in a wide sweep, heading back to land.

  He could almost believe he was back on the Death Ball field, bearing a rival’s head for the pike. He could hear the crowd’s roar, practically taste the percussive impact, the wet “sploot” sound as neck stalk met metal and he raised the gory trophy high. Every yard gained from the zombie/shark orgy took him further and further away from his pain. So he had a girl’s head now. So what? At least he was still blond.

  IX.

  “Crap!” said Brittany, shaking her cell phone. Maybe it didn’t work in the movie world. But how could that be? Unless it was a movie prop, in which case she hoped the audience heard her having a long, sophisticated convo with her analyst about her Daddy issues. Brittany was pretty sure they added stuff like that in post-production. The whole scene was so sketchy, all she could be was pretty sure about a lot of things.

  She hated not being in control. Or having a nice, strong, blond guy who had all the answers, like Daddy. Granted, Daddy didn’t have many answers, but he did have strong family values, for which Brittany was super-grateful. She was so proud of her dad. Unlike some others she could mention, he had never put out his hand and asked for a government handout once. And he refused to pay for the support of people who didn’t want to work, who sat around on their stoops and drank malt liquor all day and whined that the government should enable their crude and despicable habits. Like some of the characters around her, on the street, in the alleyways, perched on top of buildings, scratching themselves, covered with insects. Drooling. Indolent.

  And everywhere.

  Brittany was also proud that, thanks to her Daddy, she had never been forced to ask for help either. She hoped that when she was way older a guy exactly like her Daddy, strong, commanding and sure of himself, would keep her in the lifestyle she was accustomed to, and give her tons of presents, and leave her alone when she felt like being a bitch. And treat her like a princess. An old-fashioned, brutal guy with a six-pack, short hair and a nice car.

  That wasn’t asking too much, was it? Brittany didn’t think so. She would be happy to spend the rest of her life in her pretty pink bedroom, with the posters of hot guys and pumped-up cars, listening to Lash Rumble on the radio, secure in her safety from any dependence on big government, which according to Daddy was way, way too big and needed to be slimmed down.

  Daddy would know how to handle this situation, keep his princess safe, and give a mighty ass-kicking to all the dusky, stinky, sweaty, grotties she kept seeing. It was almost like they ran the country. The whole country, not just a well-fenced part of it. Something was very amiss at the Circle-K.

  She looked around for an Ahab’s Coffee. Even in a movie, or especially in a movie, there had to be an Ahab’s. After all, weren’t they everywhere on the planet? And a movie set was no exception. Only maybe this wasn’t a set. It was—she wrinkled her brow in an unusual attempt to concentrate—an alternate dimension. Ugh. That was so nerdy. Like those gross boys of size that hung out at Zapple Comix and shouted about dragons and hit points. They were so immature. She hated even thinking about them. But at a t
ime like this she almost wished she knew one of them, at least well enough to ask him about the alternate dimension thing. Nerds could be useful in a very limited sense, if they knew things like math and science and didn’t bore her too much with their weird, lame, boring socially inept babble about vast Cyclopean cities beneath the sea.

  The nearest thing to an Ahab’s looked more like an Arab, which scared Brittany, because Daddy said they were all terrorists and prayed to something called a Gee Hod. It was a little hole in the wall—actually, literally a hole in the wall. Brittany told herself to be brave and investigate. She needed an espresso and to get her bearings.

  “Is anybody, like, there and stuff?” she asked, peeping through the hole. She caught a flash of very tall non-blonds shuffling around. There was a group of them in the corner chanting words that sent a sharp tingle of fear through her skinny, stacked, super-hot bod. She smelled smoke—evil, acrid, cancer-causing smoke, and her boobs felt like they were crawling with the “C” word. Maybe this was a bad idea.

  “Hello?”

  For some reason her ass-tat was pulsing, even though she’d had it done a year ago, secretly, while Daddy was away on a business trip. The ass-tat told her things, not always coherent or reliable things, but at least it didn’t just sit there on her lower back like a useless welfare queen. It was weird to think of her body parts that way, but she tried to be scientific and rational and believe in miracles. Which was also weird. She wished she were back in Sugar Valley and if Godaddy granted her super-special wish she would never, ever, ever, binge and purge again, would listen to Lash with renewed fervor, and try to emulate the flawless girls on the Carpathians.

  But she’d been spotted. It was too late for denial or pretending. She would actually have to interact with one of them. Or several. A whole pack of them.

  ***

  “Where am I?” asked Brittany. She found herself on a lab bench, strapped down tight. She vaguely recalled that the Arabs had given her something to drink, which must have been laced with goofy powder, because there was no way she had volunteered to be the girl who gets experimented upon, least of all by some horrid dyke-domme like the one who was palpating her tits.

  “Hello?” she asked. “Could you give me, like, some kind of explanation? What am I doing here?”

  “Solare, the needle—quickly. This one needs to be put down like a five-legged puppy.”

  Brittany felt a sudden sting in her arm, and then everything went blurry.

  When she woke up, she was lying in a strange bed. Across from the bed was a mirror. Looking herself up and down to see if anything was different, she satisfied herself that she was the same hot, pretty girl who had arrived at the theater hoping the movie wouldn’t be totally lame. But it was worse than lame. It was a nightmare she couldn’t awaken from.

  Her head was completely wrapped in bandages. She couldn’t figure it out. Unless—unless the bitch had done heinous, wrong, gross plastic surgery on her! Part of her wanted to go back to sleep and hope that the movie would change into one of those nice chick flicks with the handsome vampire guys who don’t really want nooky because they’re more gay than anything, and then she could have a nice small snack—maybe just a little salad—exfoliate, and go back to sleep.

  The other part was curious beyond anything. Tugging a flap from the mummy wrap, Brittany loosened the cloth gradually, then faster, as she saw some very familiar features arise before her.

  And gasped, and screamed, because the features were not her own. They belonged to her arch-rival, Tiffany Tiffany St. Tropez.

  All of a sudden she felt a thick pressure against her ass. At the same moment, her head vanished.

  X.

  Viola Flesh sat down at the editing bay and reviewed her options. The randomizing feature she’d built into the sims had generated so many choices it made her head spin.

  Making her head spin was also among the choices at her fingertips, but there were more delicious options available.

  She could dial into the narrative at the point where the headless, castrated body of Gooch, newly zombified, awoke in the water to find itself being sodomized by a shark. Although a head was not strictly speaking necessary for Gooch to experience all the horrors attendant upon this multiple violation of his manhood—consciousness being non-local, and a phantom, proxy head would always do—Viola considered patching Brittany’s head into the mix.

  Currently Brittany was wandering through a hallucinogenic dreamscape in Room 666, her hair on fire and her ass tat leading the way through a forest of Surprise Pussy dolls in domme dress. Were she to suddenly awaken as a male torso only to be cruelly fucked by a shark, it might unhinge what was left of her sanity. Or not.

  There were certain inherent limits Flesh was forced to observe. Limits framed by the relative psychic evolution of the guinea pigs. Although she could stretch their minds like taffy, she couldn’t necessarily put them back intact.

  And then there was Tiffany Tiffany. Poor Tiffany Tiffany, the girl so nice they’d named her twice. The sufferings of that one that had been so extreme, complex, perplexing and ghastly, even Viola felt a twinge of guilt as she rehearsed the things she’d done to Ms. St. Tropez.

  Dr. Flesh plucked another opium-tainted cigarette from the packet of Egyptian smokes, lit it and sucked the smoke deep into her lungs. She was so restless. And bored. She needed very badly to have an orgasm.

  She wondered if the present course—endless, extreme, surreal revenge against her perceived enemies—wasn’t merely the function of an unhappy childhood. First her crazy mom, then the priest, then the discovery of Chaosian porn, then the delvings into forbidden books of Dark Magick, her brief relapse into a guilt-soaked private version of Catholicism, rereading the books, finding even greater solace in those passages that dealt with the summoning of the Gods of Gokkun and the Rites of the Bowl, then finding the old Super 8 camera in the attic and making her dolls do terrible, perverted things with stop-motion animation, and her resolve to become a medical deviate slash occult film-maker, bloggers be damned.

  She needed more opium-tainted cigs. And she really needed to get off. Meanwhile the guinea pigs were still battling invisible enemies.

  Maybe she should just cut them loose. Let them return to their mall-crawling lives, their small salads, their triumphs on the Death Ball field. What did it matter to her if they remained shallow xenophobes with all the intelligence of faux fur? She might exercise a little compassion. Or pity. Take up Zen. The dharma path. Dissolve her ego into the white radiance of nirvana. Do some Pilates. Adopt an African child. Get more cosmetic plastic surgery.

  Or she could just say fuck it, flip the switch, link the sims directly into the narrative, put the Randomizer on Fully Fucked Up Scramble Mode, surprise Solare in its sleep and get some hermaphrodite action.

  ***

  Dr. Flesh strode through the theater, noting the distinct, wet details. You complete me, she thought. Quite literally. For had her life not become a movie? A movie without a plot, with total unknowns as actor, incorporated, sucked into the wet innards of a biological machine: a camera, projector and film in one. A Camjector.

  It was unfortunate that her audience had been plucked from their seats and sewn into the fabric of the Reality Stack, because that left her with nobody to hear her triumphant speech. The one that began “they called me mad at the university.”

  The Eyeball Bondage headsets were all that remained of the audience. Their essence had been captured and transferred to the biofilm, leaving hunks and smears of glop on the seats. Some residual slime covered the floor of the theater and she nearly slipped several times as she surveyed the scene.

  The Reality Stack had delimited the contours of the electrical body and boiled down the flesh to a convenient packet that could be transformed into discrete streams of bioessence. Perhaps some day she would figure out a way to eliminate the waste, the reek of putrefaction, the rotting lumps, gobbets and nubbins to which her machine had reduced them.

  But th
e process had been mostly smooth. Most important, it had worked. Every truly genius innovation in science and technology had its casualties, and if this was the worst of it, she had triumphed indeed.

  But something was missing. Solare.

  Which led to her first moment of doubt. It wasn’t possible, no, she couldn’t have been so caught up in the movie that she had allowed her somnambulist hermaphroditic assistant/sex toy to be consumed, subsumed into the ravening maw of the biomachine.

  Or had she?

  Loud rumbling noises came from the speakers. Static twined with something deeper, lower, a subliminal killkillkill message that repeated at different speeds and resolved into a high-pitched whine that had Dr. Flesh clutching her ears in pain.

  On the screen, terrible things were happening. Key scenes, taken at random, trotted through variations of stunning complexity. A tall woman in a laboratory coat strode towards the camera and winked. It was her, Dr. Flesh’s doppelganger, the proxy she had placed in the narrative stream to direct the movie from inside.

  Which seemed like a good idea at the time. Only it raised several questions: first, as she herself had stepped out of the movie, what did that make her? Was her doppelganger the real Dr. Flesh? Or had it transformed into her while she was nodding off at the wheel? Was all of this still a movie, in which case another Dr. Flesh sat yawning at some fantastic editing bay, avoiding work with SexyFandom.com and subtly jacking it? Moreover, with all the egg-born doppelgangers sliming around, would she ever be able to distinguish between the original, the original duplicate and their kinfolk?

  And who was thinking these thoughts—her real self, the movie proxy self, or the other, lazy, masturbating self, the one who had created this monstrous scenario in the first place?

  The Camjector was rising on new, wet legs and screaming the scream of the mandrake, as it burst through the projection booth and fell into the last seats, still smeared with collapsing cells and the rot with no name. It wore cowboy boots, a tall black hat, a duster, clutched Hitler Youth daggers in its black leather gloves, and was growing steadily in width and height.