Doctor Flesh- Director's Cut Read online

  “And?”

  “I rest my case. As you yourself have so self-righteously indicated, we do face an unprecedented crisis, a danger to democracy here and perhaps everywhere democracy can plant its tiny tendrils, and you’ve gone off the rails for pacifistic pilose pussy!”

  “At least I’m not a clown-fucker,” muttered the President under his breath.

  “I beg your pardon?”

  “You heard me. I’m not the only one with microchip-implanting capability. So maybe we both have a little something, some peccadillo, some…weakness…we don’t necessarily want to share with the entire world. And while I’m sure—we’ve done polls on this, actually—that a large number of citizens would be at least sympathetic to my particular vice, yours is different. Nobody loves a clown, and there are many that actively hate a clown-lover. The whole circus enterprise is rotten to the core. Mimes, jesters, jugglers, barkers, acrobats…all except those cute little bears that ride unicycles. They’re cool. But the rest—meh! I ain’t butting heads with no nose-bumper.”

  “So, ahem, to the business at hand.”

  “Yes, please,” said O’Clodder huffily.

  “You’ll observe on the right the live feed from Sugar Valley. Citizens going about their business. Naughty librarians bent over behind the stacks, taking it from firemen. Fires unattended to. Er…panties tangled around the ankles. Freaks driving it balls deep…”

  “None of that circus shit, Charnel.”

  “Oh yes, right, sorry. A pedestrian walking down the sidewalk, humming a little tune to themselves. If we listen in we can hear that the tune is cult icon Nico’s version of the Doors classic, ‘The End.’ ‘Zees ees ze ent, beyooootiful frent, thee ent.’ I actually always preferred her cover to the original. Anyway. Folks doing what folks do, completely oblivious to the gathering storm of genetic materials gone awry. Free-form DNA taking all kinds of awful shapes and configurations. Boobs with insect legs. Necks with heads sticking out the sides. Necro Fanny. And other, more complex forms. Shreck was one of ours, you know.”

  “Anton Shreck?”

  “The very same. We were grooming him for one of the top slots in the organization. Candyman, crucifix-dealer, anything. But he went belly up when we sent him down into the Hondurican jungle to pound some curves into his flat head. Now look at him. An errand boy for a bunch of upper middle class white supremacist wannabes without the sense of a soda straw in a vat of kumquat juice.”

  “I’m afraid…I’m not following you.”

  Charnel gripped the President by the shoulders and shook him like a rag doll. “It’s inspiration I’m talking about. Instinct. The holy fire. Something you lack altogether. Sometimes the only way I can explain myself is by not explaining myself. I work backwards towards the light at the end. Oh, there have been good times, but mostly—mostly the bad has shadowed me like that demon clown I left behind in Delaware. Or was it Ontario? I gorged myself on cherry pie, and look where it got me. A broken-down fool, a puppet-god gone rancid. Ridiculous and artificial. You should just kill me now, O’Clodder. Put one of those Irish-Kenyon bullets in my brain and let me die.”

  “Now you’re just babbling nonsense, Charnel.”

  “That’s what they called it at the university. So I kept it zipped. My genius was not for their ears. But I’m telling you now and whether you believe it later is your own affair, Shreck could have been something very different. I believed in him, his potential, and he let me down. I’m afraid he let us all down. And now, for his, and our, sins, we’ll have to drop it. The UltiBomb. Right now.”

  The President fished in his pockets for a pair of shades. He’d seen tests of the UltiBomb conducted secretly in the Antarctic wastes, beyond the mountains of madness, where all that survived were slithering creatures with the eyes of goats and the souls of seagulls, the mere sight of which was sufficient to drive a man mad. Also, the UltiBomb was very, very loud and extremely hard on the eyes.

  “Do…what you have to do,” he said.

  Charnel depressed a button on the podium, and a blinding flash, followed by a rumble like thunder on meth, filled the room.

  ***

  This was no ordinary cleanup. What had seeped through the lawn, spattered the Death Ball statue that marked the entrance to Sugar Valley High—one hard blond, in perpetuity, with forcible drill-bits for all—and now lay in heaps and piles, landed slowly and softly as feathers from the land of Todd Browning: the terminal logic of all bodily fluids, the quintessence of blood, spunk, shit-slime, urine, bile, vomit-spackled pussy juice, dick cheese and other secretions only a forensic examiner could love.

  One thing was clear: the usual protocols of Hazardous Waste management would have to be scrapped, perhaps entirely rethought.

  “Ain’t seen nothing like it before,” said Jeb Smith, scratching his head and tugging down his sweat-soaked Dodgers cap. “Sure, kids today is strange, but there’s strange and then there’s this…looks like a whole lotta bukkake dip with maybe some gummy bears laced in there for flavorin.’”

  The cleanup crew labored vigorously to separate the strata. Before any proper operations might proceed, there was the business of analyzing the task. Demarcate it, delimit it, sponge off the edges and finally, with careful and deliberate boots, wade in for the major mop job.

  The top layer foamed with semen. Then came the blood plasma. After that, the mystery sauce, composed, as later discovered, of maggots whipped to the texture of churned butter, bone shards, the kind of fruit found preserved in the bellies of mummy whore rectum, phlegm, butt paste, glube, Grandma’s false teeth, a formula for world peace crunched into an Origami bong, a well-read copy of the Cultes De Goules annotated by Bloch and Kiernan, the final integer of Pi (lightly dumbed down), a grey market VHS dub of the Joe D’Amato film Porno Holocaust, a packet of dried vomitus ‘a la O’Neill,’ the true Aleph, and a pair of filmy, cum-stiff panties.

  This river of odium coursed through the gym, the cafeteria, a main hall and the room where detentions were held before halting before a black velvet painting of Death Ball Jesus and genuflecting in its own inimitable way.

  Carlos Gutierrez crossed himself, made one final prayer to Santa Muerte on behalf of the cohort of cab drivers he’d worked with in TJ, clamped on his helmet and fastened it securely to the uniform, then plunged into the mire.

  Random vortices corkscrewed through the hell-muck surrounding him. Gutierrez felt a strong urge to investigate, recalled too late Nietzsche’s injunction about the abyss, looked long and deep, and saw reptile eyes blinking back at him.

  What seemed at first like a rubber mask with a blonde wig surged to the surface. The mask’s mouth opened and a piteous whine—something about small salads—tortured his ears. Ignoring this, he moved forward, pulling ahead of whatever was trying to seize his ankles and pitch him head-first into the soup. The briefing he’d been given on the operation was garbled and elliptical, interrupted by phone calls from mysterious authorities and lightning-like amendments to the plan in progress. Not that it mattered in practice—he’d seen some things back in TJ that would wither the brain stem of your average gringo, and was confident that nothing he encountered in the halls of Sugar Valley High was beyond his capacity to cope. Although he didn’t care much for tentacles, by themselves or otherwise.

  A bubble popped in the seminiferous blood bouillabaisse. Then a nude cheerleader whose head had been replaced by the spike-studded Death Ball and tits swapped for pompoms shot up and moved rapidly towards him. Gutierrez patted his utility belt for something he could use, or transform into, a crude makeshift weapon, found only a pair of gardening shears and assumed a fighting stance. The cheerleader’s movements were jerky and erratic.

  He feinted, ducked, then opened the shears as wide as he could and closed them quickly on the cheerleader’s neck. The Death Ball quivered as he cut, then rolled off and sank into the muck. The neck stump squirted a fountain of green goop as the cheerleader collapsed and joined her second-generation head.

&
nbsp; Then: the flutter of bat wings. Shadows swam down the walls. His heart began to pound, faster and faster, as he felt claws sink into an unprotected swatch of neck, followed by a sharp biting sensation. A familiar odor, pungent and musky, filtered up into his helmet.

  Gutierrez blindly swatted at the bat-thing, which was now joined by its compatriots. His vision blurred, returned in crystal-sharp focus, scattered into fractal hieroglyphs and imagery from the Mayan codices. He felt an atavistic surge in his blood as the Vampussy injected him with a soothing opiate nerve agent. So this was to be his fate—a human sacrifice.

  “Carlos, wake up! Wake up! You’re having a terrible nightmare!”

  Gutierrez opened his eyes. His wife Alicia was shaking him by the shoulders. With tentacles. He fainted again and found himself back at Sugar Valley High.

  The pussybats were gone, scared off by a sound that came from the gymnasium.

  Gutierrez fought the sudden urge to peel off his protective uniform and face the white man’s ghosts in balls-out Aztec warrior mode. But that was just what the white man wanted, he reflected—trap him in one of their secondary institutions with Frankensteined creatures eager to turn his head into a hood ornament, then spike him with horrible claustrophobia and render him completely helpless. The green spew from the cheerleader’s neck was still crusted on his helmet, making it hard to see whatever awaited him in the swamp-fog. What Would Quetzalcoatl do?

  He forged on towards the source of the noise that had driven off the pussybats.

  ***

  Inside the gymnasium, the muck changed color to an indifferent green glaze, on which floated bats, balls, racquets, scraps of net, helmets, mitts, wholes and portions of Sugar Valley High’s athletes, complete baked elbows, partially cooked assholes skewered on sticks like kebab meat, and a few random deflated breasts. The basketball hoops on either side were stuffed with quantities of oozing genitalia, male and female, stuck together and slathered with weasel grease.

  Howls, whoops, grunts, sighs and wails came from a living island of Death Team members fused with one of the coaches, Chuck Gebhardt—a mass of congealed pink flesh, like bubble gum cooking for days under a desert sun. The sounds made Gutierrez think of the creatures mired in the La Brea tar pits, moments away from oblivion and immortality as museum exhibits, their last, despairing death-cries as the hot tar sucked them under. Now, as then, denial reigned supreme.

  “Sugar Valley has never lost a Death Ball match and we’re not gonna start now, right guys?” Every fine, tawny hair on Gebhardt’s closely-shaved head was bristling. His jaws chattered and his teeth ground together like a speedfreak in the grip of some final, apocalyptic tweek.

  His pale, blue, bloodshot eyeballs slithered out on the optic nerve and shot back, like one of those ping pong paddles with the ball attached by an elastic string. His neck was sunk deep in his chest, veins throbbing and twitching. Each muscle group was defined, and tumorous clumps of sinew rose to the skin surface every few seconds.

  “Right?” he roared. Then his eyeballs popped in a shower of clear gel. The coach’s massive hands clawed at his sockets. A few of the team members began to sob.

  “Don’t be pansies! Okay, so Coach is blind. You gonna let a blind Coach set ya back? What’s the matter with you? I’ve seen girls with more balls than you wimpy puddings.”

  In truth, Gebhardt had seen girls with balls over the past 48 hours, and a whole lot more. The sights had unsettled his sanity, which slunk for cover and safety in an endless, slow-motion replay of Sugar Valley’s triumph over Mohammad Bin Ali High—the trophies taken, the noses and ears chewed off and swallowed, the surprisingly sweet taste of blood sipped straight from the source.

  But the team was begging for a quick death. Gutierrez trembled as his hands slid over the utility belt, now discovering the blowtorch and the 9 mm. Steeling himself for the task, he administered the coup de grace, squirting jets of fire across every inch of the flesh island. The players and their coach set up a high, keening wail as the flames licked at their bodies, driving Gutierrez to pity and the squeezing off of a few terminal rounds from the pistol. At last, silence reigned in the gymnasium. Except for a fluttering sound. The Vampussy had returned.

  He does not resist as they cluster at his neck, ripping the protective shield from his head and sinking in their claws and tubes. As he too drops into the mire, Gutierrez has a brief, prophetic flash of an afterlife. He smiles grimly, then slips out of sight, leaving only bubbles.

  II.

  Viola Flesh smiled as she wiped the glass countertop of the concession display case with a moist towel. The reception for her follow-up to Reality Stack, Ledger’s Jizzlobber Vs. The Sultan of Weird in 4D, had earned epic acclaim from everybody except Nathan Bilge, whose snarky, vindictive critique of Reality Stack only served to maximize sales of the home version. Now housewives in Middle America were getting a taste of the ultimate interactive cinema experience, their copies of 500 Shades of Man Gravy gathering dust. Time magazine hailed Dr. Flesh as “the new queen of avant-garde film,” and her work was a surprising smash at every level. Bilge flatly turned down Flesh’s offer of a cameo in Ledger’s Jizzlobber, and a Twitter war ensued.

  The special effects for the new movie involved a literal materialization, and the theater floor was thoroughly spattered and smeared with globs of jissom, which had begun to rot—a sickly-sweet protein-bleach odor that permeated the building. Flesh made a note to either hire a cleanup crew or advertise for spunk fetishists that might be willing to do the job for free, and pay her for the privilege.

  After wiping the countertop, she opened the display case to check on snack levels. There was wicked candy in profusion, edible replicas of Harry O’Brien, aka Jizzlobber, and his arch-enemy, The Sultan of Weird. Crunchy, tangy, zippy, sweet n’ salty, stretchy, chocolaty, gooey, sour, in tubes and boxes and bags and other delivery systems. By far the runaway audience favorite was the Jizzlobber in a hard candy shell with a creamy center that kind of spurted in your mouth. Flesh made a mental note to restock that one. When suddenly there came a rapping, as of something gently…busting some rhymes.

  “We’re closed!” she shouted at whoever or whatever had chosen this moment to interrupt her work. Then she saw who it was: Death Cat and Storm Crow, both standing outside the theater. Death Cat had gone to seed, packed on the pounds, and his mariachi jacket didn’t quite fit him any more. Storm Crow had some kind of VR goggles on and was reacting to invisible stimuli, flapping her wings and hopping up, down and sideways. Sighing, Dr. Flesh unlocked the door and let them in.

  “You might have at least texted,” she said. “I didn’t expect you guys till next month, when we start shooting your movie. What’s up with you two?”

  Death Cat scratched his armpits, sniffed them and shrugged. “It’s her,” he said. “She’s got a bad Tide habit. She doesn’t even like to do the old flesh and feathers roll. Just look at her.”

  Dr. Flesh observed that Storm Crow’s feathers were fuzzed, cracked and split along the cartilage, sparse to the point of balding in some places. “All she does all day long is log on to her RPG and shoot Tide,” Death Cat added plaintively.

  “And this involves me how, exactly?”

  “We thought maybe you could shoot us a little advance, get the old girl on her claws again.”

  “What happened to the money I gave you last month?” asked Dr. Flesh primly. “I’m not a charity foundation, and I’m not doling out funds just to keep your girlfriend in narcotics. She needs to get clean. I can always hire actors to play your parts. Neither of you even look like yourselves.”

  “Price of fame?” mewled Death Cat.

  “Ok, look. I might have a few packets of Tide in the back, but this is the last time, understand? To tide her over, so to speak. Laundry detergent ain’t cheap. As for you, you need to go on a diet.”

  “Does that mean you’re firing us?”

  Dr. Flesh softened. “You know I love you two, but you have to take care of yourselves. It�
��s a tough business. And I get that you might have gone off the rails a little bit since your memoirs became an instant bestseller. But you can’t use that as an excuse indefinitely. Look at me. I’ve got back-to-back smash hits with Reality Stack and Jizzlobber, but I’m not letting all that go to my head. Stay even and you’ll be all right. You’re the same endearing pair I met back in Texas when I was doing that show at the cantina. You haven’t changed inside, but Lord, do you look gruesome on the outside.”

  “Then you understand,” said Death Cat, batting at Storm Crow’s goggles in an attempt to bring her back to open mode and some semblance of consensual reality.

  “Huh, what…” sputtered Storm Crow. “Did you get the stuff? Where are we?”

  “See what I’m working with here?” said Death Cat.

  ***

  “Phone call for Dr. Shreck!”

  “Can’t it wait? I’m oper—I mean, I’m directing. This is a crucial scene.”

  “It sounds serious,” said gopherfluff gal Sally Mae Ducasse, who also played a Naughty Nurse in the film and was dressed accordingly in a white vinyl uniform with a stethoscope swinging between her twin peaks. “I really think you need to take the call.”

  Shreck turned around, took one look at her globes, her full, fleshy lips, the corner of her mouth smeared with walrus gravy, hoisted the megaphone and said, “muffin break.” Ducasse handed him the cell phone.

  “Hello? I’m sorry, I don’t know a Father Mallardy. A duck priest, you say? Is this some kind of fucking joke? Who is this? Oh, ok, so it’s critical. I don’t know who you are or what this is in reference to, but I am a very busy man and this is not a good time. Huh? What do the Karpathians have to do with it? Oh, trauma triggers. Perhaps total recall. Gotcha.”