by Alan Spencer
The hammerhead struck his ankle bone. Then his kneecap. He felt shards of bone shift underneath the skin. Larry crawled anyway, using his upper body to propel himself forward.
The hallway closet was kicked open just ahead of him. The person burst forth, clutching a jackhammer. The man looked like a lunatic lumberjack with his thick beard and flannel shirt. Larry spun in place, dodging the jackhammer's blows. Broken bits of boards shattered all around him, obscuring his ability to see through the waves of thick sawdust.
He was deafened by the roar of both jackhammer and chainsaw.
The sharp pain in his feet, that was the moment the chainsaw swiped them clean off. His feet shot across the room as if running away. The claw end of the hammer dug into his eyeball, the crazy bitch drooling as his eye was audibly scooped out. She picked the deflated orb from the claw and played with it, smiling in delight. Before he could do anything else, hammer, chainsaw, and jackhammer turned his world into bone and gristle, horror and pain.
Total blackout.
6
What am I doing?
Larry was standing in front of a washing machine. The building wasn't "Get Loaded." It didn't appear to be a business. He was standing in a giant warehouse. Larry couldn't see from one end to the other. Hundreds of machines were roaring, working like living, breathing entities.
Bang, Bang, Bang Bang Bang.
Bang, Bang, Bang Bang Bang.
Bang, Bang, Bang Bang Bang.
A tall standing plastic bucket was wedged between his feet. It was empty, but it wouldn't be for long. He was doing a job without knowing what the job was. His body acted independently of the mind. Larry demanded his body to up and run. Shout for help. Call the police. Run the fuck out of this dingy warehouse with grit smeared windows. The place that smelled so strongly of lavender, lilac, and sweet fields.
Why wasn't his body obeying him?
Bang, Bang, Bang Bang Bang.
Bang, Bang, Bang Bang Bang.
Bang, Bang, Bang Bang Bang.
The machine in front of him dinged. The wash was ready to be dried. But first he had to clean the trap. Washing machine's don't have traps, he thought.
His hands, his body, his new instincts understood differently. Larry pressed a button next to the glass window. Out popped open a slot that could hold thirty gallons.
The trap.
Larry had to reach in deep to get everything out. Tangles of wet hair, eyeballs with only their outer coatings, and handfuls of guts that were a light pink color. Water poured out the broken ends, sudsy and steaming hot. Then a purple tongue. Fingers. He slopped it all into a bucket.
Larry was sobbing. Others cried too. He turned, seeing other people like him clearing out the traps in washing machines. Digging into the washers and removing body parts. Others walked about the place, in charge, it seemed. He recognized the woman with crazy long black hair. She had demon green contact lenses, various tattoos on her arms, and she wore a tank top that showed off her ample breasts and the bar piercings through her nipples. Her face was minus the morbid pleasure. This was work. Strictly business.
More people were pushing wheel barrows heaped in various pieces that added up to one body. He watched milky white buttocks jut up from a pile of torn arms and genitals.
Where were they taking the parts?
Why were they in the machines to begin with?
Larry worked for hours and hours removing body parts out of different washing machines and cleaning out traps. When it was time to quit, everybody stopped working. Like everyone else, he crawled into an empty washing machine, shut the door, and withdrew into an exhausted slumber.
7
He wasn't in the city anymore. He wasn't home. Far from anywhere familiar. Larry stood on a giant concrete square. Twelve bodies lay across the concrete square horizontally, ten vertically. The bodies were corpses absorbing the sun. They were pale and wet with washer water. The corpses were in many pieces, organized by who owned them. Washed out eyes were stuffed in empty eye sockets that pooled with water. Tongues were shoved in mouths, the whitish purple slabs sticking out to give them a sickly ridiculous expression.
Larry was working again. He couldn't think through his task. His body worked against his mind. He was a machine. A drone.
He was standing outside the giant warehouse of washing machines. Inside, other worker drones like him were tending to the machines, cleaning out traps, or removing the washer's loads by dumping the body parts and organs into wheel barrows or plastic buckets.
Seeing this, he desperately wanted to escape. Across the open field, he could run into woods, maybe reach a highway, civilization, other people, and blow the lid off of this insane operation.
His feet wouldn't work. He imagined escape, how easy it would be. Nobody was in his way. Nobody supervised him like inside the warehouse.
Larry's body worked against his will once again. He held a box that said DETERGENT on its front label. No name brand. Generic. He filed between the open aisles of the corpses with faded, cheesecloth flesh. He dumped the white flakes of detergent over their bodies generously. Fifteen detergent boxes later, the corpses looked like they were covered in snow.
The snowflakes fizzled, melted into the skin, and when they vanished altogether, body parts were grafted back together with a sizzle and boil of flesh. Eyes filled with fluids, growing plump with a squeaky rubber sound. Flesh regained its lively pigment. Tendrils of meat soldered themselves together, blood audibly pumping again. One by one, the bodies stirred awake from death. They rubbed their sore limbs and stared at each other in horror. Some knew what was going on, and others were clueless. They soon issued frantic screams. Many reached out to Larry, seizing him by the ankles and knocking him to the ground. Disjointed voices, throats puking up washing machine water, shouted for help:
"You've got to help me/they're going to kill us/nobody can stop them/why won't they let us die/will they ever kill us/is there a way out/I don't want back in the machine/they have us where they want us/this is their sick fucking game/I don't know what death means anymore/are you here to kill us/please kill me/kill me now/kill me fucking now!"
A rifle went Thoom. The crowd of resurrected persons scattered. Bodies in tattered clothing fled into the woods, racing across the open field and darting for the shelter of trees.
The hold over Larry vanished.
He too ran with the terrified horde of people.
8
Larry was winded by the time he hid in the thick set of dense trees. What were miles and miles of woods with no end. There had to be a way out of this situation, Larry stayed optimistic. He called out to others for help, but they didn't listen. Everybody was fighting for themselves.
Another gun blast. A chainsaw revved. He smelled burning hair. A lunatic shouted promises of pain and bloodshed. A huge blast like a bomb went off. He watched a woman erupt into pink mist. Her legs remained standing, though they were on fire. An old man was tied up against a thick tree with barbed wire. Every inch of his body was covered in barbs. Screwdrivers were wedged into his eye sockets. A stick of dynamite was stuck to the side of his head with duct tape. A red dot blinked on a square of black plastic.
He bolted the opposite way, knowing a great explosion was inevitable. Tearing the ground beneath him, what was wet with mud and decaying leaves, he didn't make it far before BOOM! Donkey kicked in the back, he was flung forward, colliding into the ground so hard his lungs seized. Gasping for air, he crawled, trying his best to escape who was capable of this cruel brand of killing. As he crawled on, he uncovered partial human skulls, broken rib bones, and parts of the skeletal system too broken down to identify.
Larry half-turned, eying the trees. People were crawling up them. Gunshots picked them off one by one. Everywhere people were dying. Wooden pikes shot out from the earth, ejected. A poor young woman was hit in the heel of her foot. Shot up so fast, the pike exploded through her leg, splitting it like a log right down the middle. Her song of agony was drowned out by
more explosions.
This was war.
This was a massacre.
Up from one of the trees, a person was dressed in all black with a stocking mask. The cloth at the eyes was jaggedly carved out to lend the appearance of wicked lacerations. They snuck up behind a running person and slit their throat. They kept slitting, and slitting, and slitting with the knife that owned ridges deep enough to saw through bone and turn flesh into string cheese. The poor victim was decapitated.
Larry feared moving another inch. No choice. No fucking choice. Death was everywhere. If he didn't move, it would catch up with him.
There had to be a way out of these woods.
An elderly woman was on her back. She had been shot three times through the middle. The gaping wounds were see-through. Her hands were going through a series of spasms. One of her shaking hands tripped a mechanism. A giant metal bar shot up beneath the dead woods floor. Like a mouse trap, the bar snapped down and smashed her through the middle. Guts blasted out her mouth and shit squirted out the other.
Larry kept moving forward on the ground. Then his hand touched the top of a boot. He faced the killing end of a blow torch. A hulking figure wearing a burlap bag over his eyes with two eyes cut out pulled the trigger. Fire melted the features right off his face.
9
Larry's head wasn't burning to a charcoal crisp anymore. He was safe, as far as he could tell. He was standing in a room. The door was closed behind him. The sound of humming washing machines was muffled behind that door. In this room, there wasn't any washing machines. No running, frantic people being brutally picked off one by one in the woods. Ahead of him, standing there, was his daughter, Norma. She had long blonde hair. She kept it in a ponytail. She wore white pants and a white shirt. She looked like she belonged in a laundry service sweat shop. The only difference, blood caked that white uniform in high pressure spatters. Norma's face dripped with the red stuff.
Norma smiled at him, seeing her father. When her lips opened into a wider smile, greenish blue detergent flowed from her mouth. Her words were wet and bubbly.
"Daddy, you know you can't play into their game. You're doing exactly what they're wanting you to do. You can't be afraid of them. That's how they win. You have to fight back. You're going to have to kill them if you're going to escape, or you'll be trapped in their game forever."
Larry couldn't respond. He was speechless. Norma was working over a large steel table. Corpses were piled one on top of the other. They were alive, but they couldn't move. Stunned moans and soft mewls of pain droned continuously.
Norma had her hands on a naked man. Norma bent him in half, folding him over like a sheet. Every bone breaking inside the man, he screamed in horrific pain. Then she picked up a woman and did the same with her, folding her like laundry.
Splinter-crack-pop.
Splinter-crack-pop.
Splinter-crack-pop.
"I love you, Daddy. I don't want you to suffer. You can't let them win. If you're going to escape, you're going to have to kill them. Each and every one of them. Fear not life. Fear not death. Fear the washing machine."
Larry was on the verge of words, his body covered in blood and shards of bone, when he woke up.
10
The mud pit was nine feet deep. He woke, not knowing how he got there. Larry was thrashing in reams of barbed wire. It was a sea of jagged steel. Many bodies were caught up in the mesh bleeding out. Topside, a group of masked individuals were shooting nails guns at them. Larry caught one in the eye. Then the throat. A body wrapped so tight in the barbs that it was cutting him in half lengthwise seized Larry by the arms and shouted, "This will never end!" Right after his words, three nails punctured Larry's skull and each one hit home in his brain.
11
The world was spinning. Constant movement. Sloshing water. Foaming suds. Lilacs and summer fields and sunflower scents. Larry's limbs clashed in the spinning, dark waters of the washing machine. Cleansing him of death. Cleansing him of his wounds. Rebuilding his nerve endings. Sharpening his senses. Washing him clean of death. He was semi-lucid during his time in the washing machine, but only for a few seconds. Only long enough to remember how he died, but now how he originally got to be inside the washing machine.
12
The concrete was hot with the sun. His flesh was burning. Larry imagined himself to be as red as a lobster. He was laid out in pieces. A woman who had a numb expression on her face poured "Detergent" flakes over his body. She was a worker drone. The flakes absorbed into his skin. At first, it was a rush of hydration. Then his heart pumped, sending nail bombs through his arteries. His body was an engine being jumpstarted in the frigid sub-zero cold. Shrieking in pain, he was coughing up soapy, nasty water. Some of it was detergent blue, some of it was black. He was bubbling and foaming at the mouth, ears, and nostrils. Coughing and gagging it up.
Ba-BAM!
A woman with black duct tape over her nipples, leather pants, and chains around her body fired a shotgun in the air. It was the gothic chick from earlier. Like the starting shot for a race, the corpses on the concrete shot up to the ground, scrambling towards the woods.
I'm not playing into your game.
Naked, he speared the shotgun woman in the chest. They both went down. Before they touched the ground, he was already battering his fists into her face. Bone pounding flesh, blood spurting up from her nostrils and her broken up teeth, he channeled every ounce of fear, terror, and sheer insanity into every blow.
The woman went limp against the ground. Crimson kept burbling free from the broken orifices of her face. Her features were tenderized meat. Stricken by the horror of his actions, he apologized. This grotesque face horrified him to the core. This is what he'd done to another human being.
"I, I didn't mean to kill you...I didn't mean to kill you...I, I didn't mean to kill you..."
Was she really dead?
Larry grabbed the shotgun next to her body. It was self-defense, he told himself. He had to do what he did. Adrenaline was surging through his body. Rational thought was impossible. These people, these killers, these murdering freaks, were responsible for his temporary insanity.
He was no murderer.
He only wanted to live outside of this nightmare. He would go on unemployment. He would take a shitty job getting paid nine dollars an hour. He would find a way to make it work. Anything was better than this kind of life.
From behind him, an arm seized the shotgun, pressed the nozzle up to Larry's chin, and pulled the trigger.
13
"I got you back."
Larry was sprawled out against the ground. Cold concrete kissed his back. He was paralyzed by pain.
"I got you back, motherfucker. I fucking got you fucking back, you motherfucker."
The brick halls were spray-painted with graffiti. He was in the basement of a bigger building. Everything was silent, except for the crazy bitch who straddled his chest. Bricks were duct taped to her hands. She was swatting him, punching him, driving the bricks into his face. One blow alone shattered his bottom set of teeth.
God the agony!
"I like it when they fight back. But I can't tolerate them killing me! You die, I don't! Motherfucker!"
Larry blinked the blood and broken pieces of brick from his eyes. It was the woman he beat to death. She had died her hair a darker shade of black with pink highlights. Black lipstick. White foundation. Studs in her lips and nose. He couldn't count the number of piercings in her face.
Lust for death flashed in her eyes.
She was alive. Not a single bruise or scrape. How was this possible? He beat her to death. She was dead!
She drove the bricks into his face until his features caved in, turning it into a soup bowl of broken teeth and brain blood stew.
Before he died, he heard the distinct sound of washing machines spinning.
14
This was a safe place. The sheets smelled of sex, sweat, and champagne. They were on their honeymoon. Larry was spo
oning Paula, his wife. Their naked bodies were so warm and spent. The sex was damn good. They married six months ago and were enjoying their time in Cancun, Mexico, living up the high end resort treatment. Paula's parents paid for it. They were so young. So free. Their lives were ahead of them.
Larry enjoyed the fragrant concoctions in the room. The sweet memories. Paula loved him for the fact he wasn't an overachiever. Work was work, and outside of work, living was living. Don't mix the two. That was Larry's motto. That's what Paula loved about him. He could unplug at the end of the day and treat his free time as if he didn't have a job at all.
Paula struggled with a mild form of social anxiety, and being a nurse, that was a great hurtle to overcome. She called him "The human Valium." He could talk her into calm. Ease her tensions. He was a dose of don't take life too seriously. Because Larry didn't take life seriously. He took buying a morning newspaper and a coffee at the local gas station deadly serious. But work, that was small stuff.
He did her dry cleaning one day, back when "Get Loaded" did dry cleaning. He hand delivered the clothing to her apartment. They lived right next to each other. Handsome young man and appealing young woman hit it off from there. The story didn't have to be any more complicated than that. He didn't need the storybook romance. Two people enjoyed each other's company. Their sexual parts fit together well. The spark was there. It was more than a spark. It was a plume of sparks. They had sex five times a week in their twenties. They were fucking rabbits. When the sex was good, he supposed, nothing else mattered, because two people couldn't have that good of sex unless things were the way they should be. Life was good.
Everything was perfect in this moment, this memory, until Paula turned around in the bed to face him. He expected her to shower him with loving words. Her lips were raw from kissing and biting. The sex was wild.
