Perhaps the cruelest aspect of Charlotte's fate was the fact that this horrible and seemingly brainless mass of foul slime had some sort of terrible and sadistic intelligence to it. It truly seemed to know exactly how much of her, and exactly which parts, it could digest away from her without letting her die, it was becoming clear that it would not deliver death until it was ready.
Her screams were now turned into a sick gurgling sound as more blood and half dissolved chunks of her stomach and intestines were regurgitated in between desperate attempts at screaming, along with strands of hungry ooze clinging to those now expelled slabs of Charlotte. The slime quickly began eating away at the skin of her face as it was vomited up from her own half-digested bowels. She was still managing to shriek out that pathetic, half gargle half squealing sound as she was twisted around until she was facing the large mirror above the bathroom sink, forced to watch as the corrosive mass pulled the skin completely away from the area surrounding her mouth and nose, leaving her with a terrifying skeletal grin, the sight of the bone from her teeth and nasal cavity completely exposed was followed by the sight of her long grey hair twisted in a knot of swirling grey ooze until her whole scalp came from her skull with a wet, ripping sound, like pulling a band aid off an infected wound. The lower end of the slick made its way all the up her torso, eating the soft flesh of her breasts away, leaving her bloody rib cage exposed. The slime was weaving its way in and out from between the exposed ribs as it ate away at the gooey morsels inside.
The film that was forming along its surface was now a thick, amphibian looking skin. The whole creature made a sort of fleshy seal half way up her body and then peeled open in a circle around her half-digested body, exposing row after row and razor sharp teeth formed in full circles like the mouth of some giant, mutated lamprey eel. The slime that was digesting away at Charlotte's frame was now coming from within this huge mouth, pulling her in. The life finally left her body just as the mouth closed around her face, the last thing she felt was its teeth slicing into her eyeballs. Then it simply slurped her gangling arms, both extended out the creatures mouth above her head, in like someone would slurp up a dangling spaghetti noodle. One of Charlotte's hands was severed off when the newly formed huge, pulsating maggot creature closed its circular jaws around its prey.
The hand flopped down the side of the tub onto the wet tile floor. The creature rose up like a snake preparing to strike. It had a small bulge inside of it where Charlotte had been swallowed, and it was shrinking rapidly. The thing had the form of what could best be described as a giant grey maggot, with a circular, puckering mouth in the center of its bulbous, eyeless head. It opened its mouth and a long, thin tentacle wriggled its way out and squirmed down toward the severed hand, which had begun leaking a small pool of blood from its stump, the blood quickly spread out on the wet tile floor. The tentacle wrapped around the severed hand and brought it up towards the huge mouth as another tentacle made its way out of the mouth and down toward the red puddle on the bathroom floor. It opened up on the tip, like it was forming its mouth only this one contained no teeth, and it slurped up every drop of blood and water on the floor. As the thing drew its foul appendages back into its mouth, the bulge in its gullet shrank down to nothing.
The beast opened its circular, razor tooth filled mouth once more and let shrieking roar, something like the sound of a thousand eagles and a thousand lions all calling out at once, it rattled the entire house. The giant grub-thing then began to slither its way up to the window above the tub and nudged it open. Then it began squeezing its gray, pulsating body through the small opening of the window and making its way down the side of the house. It grew as it did this. By the time its tail end made its way through the window its nose end was already touching the ground three floors down and it was beginning to burrow its way underground, beneath the house. Not a single trace of the digested mass that was formerly Charlotte Henderson, nor of the strange abomination that had so mercilessly consumed her remained in the third floor master bathroom.
Unless you count her phone. Across the bathroom her cell phone began to shout out a ringtone, the song "Don't Worry, Be Happy", called out to the now empty room.
The caller ID on the screen read, "Carla" next to the name display was a little emoticon smiley face. :-)
THREE
It was the Friday before Labor Day weekend and Charles Henderson sure as shit had every good god damned reason to be on a real fucking natural high just right about now. First off, it was fucking Friday before a fucking three day weekend and he should be looking forward to an entire seventy-two hours of...well...pretty much whatever the fuck he wants. He was thirty-four years old, newly single, and closed six motherfucking deals this week! By all rights and privileges, he was the shit. How can a dude bring in the type of bread he does, what was it? Like Thirty G's he closed in business last month? Anyway, how can he be that bad ass of a fucking closer, not taking no for an answer, money stacking mad man and still get totally fucked for Labor Day Weekend?
There were very few things in life that Charlie would admit he actually hated. To admit you hate something is totally putting negative shit out into the universe and a true salesmen, a real closer, did not let negative vibes fuck with his state of mind. That shit was for fags as far as Charlie was concerned. This is a dude who read "The Secret" cover to cover multiple times, shit, he swore by that book like it was the god damned holy fucking grail! He was totally down with all that "perception is reality" and "don't talk about it, be about it!" shit! He knew he was the shit, plain and fucking simple, and if that was hard for anybody to get then he just did not have time for their negative bullshit. You don't become top salesman four months in a row at the fastest growing search engine optimization company in the country by having a bad attitude, right?!
EXACTLY! And that is precisely why homeboy did not take his eyes off the muthafuckin prize! He had everything a top salesman needed; books by all the greats from Zig Ziglar to Tony Robbins, a sick ass Beamer, pure pimp sense of style, seriously! Like Men's Warehouse advertisement shit! Not to mention being the leader of the top fucking sales team in the company. Charlie led a team called "Tha Bill Stackas", at an internet technology company called VisibilitySEO.com. Get it? The SEO is for "search engine optimization", it's some fancy tech shit you probably wouldn't understand so you just need to know that they were fuckin unstoppable! For real though, Charlie made real moves day in day out.
They would slang these online marketing packages to these old ass fuckers who bought web site business off these stupid ass commercials that played late at night and during the day time, ya know like when the geriatric crowd was most likely to be viewing. Anyway, these old fucks buy these e-commerce "businesses" because the commercials feature the old guy from some 70's sitcom so they're all like, "sound trustworthy to me!". So long story short these fools bought into an online business, selling some janky-ass products that were basically worth fuck all on the online market, and at the end of the day they had absolutely zero chance, what-so-fuckin-ever, of anybody coming anywhere near within a thousand pages of any major search engine. Might as well be trying to sell a product nobody wants in a store out in the middle of the freakin desert with no signs telling people how to find your store!
So all Charlie Hustle, that was his nickname at work, taken from an old E-40 track, had to do was teach his crew how to tell these fools what they wanted to here, while ensuring them that they were "telling them what they needed to hear, not what they wanted to hear". You see, they were already sold on the idea of owning an online business, they were already invested. Some of them had spent few bills and some had spent a few g's. In the end they all got the same bullshit. Some template website that was identical to literally hundreds of thousands of other template websites with the exact same products with the exact same keywords and descriptions for each dumbass product. When there's a million other stupid fucks selling the exact same dumb fuck tiffany style lamp as you on a website that looks exactly
the same as yours, what the fuck makes you think you'll just wake up one morning and the fucking e-commerce fairy will leave a first page ranking on Google under your fucking pillow?
That's where Charlie Hustle and Tha Bill Stackas came in. See, these fly-by-night companies would put their leads up for sale to the highest bidder. Not that VisibilitySEO.com was the highest bidder, but they did have a rather decent tech team, of course they were much more practiced at finding ways to get these valuable leads, sans payment, than they were at building actually decent search engine marketing programs that could actually benefit these poor old marks.
Charlie was a sure as shit, pure blood closer. He lived, breathed, and ate that shit. Yes, ate that shit. You can laugh but it's how he paid his god damned mortgage so fuck you. All they had to do was show these poor old fucktards that they understood why they were hesitant to buy into his company's SEO packages, the whole "fool me once shame on you, fool me twice shame on me” bullshit. Whenever one of his Bill Stackas had a fish on the line that they just couldn't real all the way in, that's when Charlie Hustle worked his fucking magic.
Honestly, just between us right here, Charlie's favorite part of his career was the fucking mute button on them phones!!! No joke! Okay now, so here's how it typically went; one of his guys has this old fucker on the phone for, I dunno...let's say 'bout an hour and a half or so, follow me? Good! So anyway...let's just say that said "business owner" is hesitant to be closed by one of his crew (mind you, Charlie has been listening to the entire conversation via the muted split line headset or by patching in on his wireless headset, ever since the call made it past the ten minute mark, henceforth, making it pretty much already a done fucking deal. The prospect, or victim, as they called them, had no idea that Charlie was feeding the "marketing consultant" lines that were setting the call up to be "turned over to a technical consultant".
Usually the first he'd say after taking over the call and assuming the role of "technical consultant" was something along the lines of, "Now, you sound like the type of business owner who doesn't need to know how the car is built, you just need to know that it's going to get you where you're going, am I right?!" He'd force out a fake little laugh to lighten the mood and say something like, "I could talk for hours and hours about all the technical details of e-commerce and search engine optimization (always say the long version, make it sound complicated), we could go into all kinds of tech things like HTML and XML code, RSS feeds, and binary-digi-code clouds (that last one isn't even a real thing but how the fuck are they supposed to know!). But you seem to me like a really savvy and down to earth business owner who doesn't need to be oohed and awed with all these fanciful industry terms. I know you've already been through plenty of sales pitches, everyone and their grandmother is just calling you out of the blue and telling you that every other company is wrong and they're right and they have the magic potion to get you to the first page of Google, does that sound about right?"
By this point it's pretty much a fucking given that whatever dumb old twat is still on the line is probably just going to nod along and agree with every stupid ass, happy sounding line of bullshit you spit at them just so long as you empathize. It's human fucking nature and these poor old bastards need any sort of human interaction they can get, right?! So you just say something like, "Exactly! Everyone who calls you just wants to sell you, but I want...no, I mean I'm going to, help you, not just sell you."
This is one of the best parts of the conversation for hitting the mute button.
At this time the team all buzzed in to the conference call so they could all listen in while the fucking pro worked with pimp ass mojo, Charley and his little team of paper chasers would mock hump their phones, crudely gyrating their loins against the muted receiver while Charlie would say into the muted line, "That's right, you dirty lil' slut, you fuckin lil' ho betta bring a pimp his paper!!!" in the best urban accent a rich boy raised in Bellevue could muster while the phone was muted and the "victim" thought Charlie was "grabbing a quick drink of water because he's been busy helping good people on the phone all day and hadn't even had a break in however long", he then unmutes the phone while waving an authoritarian hand across the room, silencing any laughter, there was money to be made here.
"Now tell me this...and you are the boss here so if you want to end this call after this then your word is the law!" another muting would now occur while the room quickly erupts in laughter until another wave of the hand silences the mob, "So, I'm assuming that you don't want all the confusing, tech talk...you just need to know how this investment you've already made is going to turn into a profit, sound about right?"
"That's right!" the mark would almost always reply, "I don't need to be given the run around, and you're right! Everyone keeps calling me saying the same thing as you, that everyone else is wrong and they're right. So, what makes you any different?"
The typical rebuttal to this expected objection was something like, "I totally understand! You bought this website from someone who promised you the world and it didn't happen, and then you keep getting calls from all these companies, like I said earlier, who say that they are the ones who can get out on the first page for X amount of dollars, right?"
"Right!"
"Now here I am, just another salesman from another company calling you out of the blue saying that I know what it takes to make your online business successful. But, naturally, you're sitting here thinking 'what makes this guy any different from everyone else who's been after my money'. Sound about right?" He'd always add a fake laugh after this part just to show them that he totally understood where they were coming from and that he was a good guy, on their side, not just trying to close a deal.
One of his favorites was the "bad movie" rebuttal. "Mr. (Mrs.) E-commerce Business Owner, I completely understand where you're coming from,” at this point he'd let out a long, dramatic sigh, then proceed with, "You spent all this money on this online business that someone sold to you promising it would get on the search engines and make you not only a return on investment, but help you make a decent living on top of that, right?"
"Right." Fucking lemmings.
"So now here I am, calling you out of the blue, just another guy trying to sell you a dream so he can make a commission off you, sound about right? Ballpark?" Always end with fake chuckle, these marks need a friend to laugh with and relate to.
The sucker would usually reply with something similar to, "Ha, ha yup! You pretty much hit the nail on the head there, son. Now, don't get me wrong, you seem like a genuinely nice person and I'm trying to make you think that I got the impression you're being dishonest here...you seem trustworthy to me, it's just that..." More laughter at the go ahead of that awesome mute button!
Although this was the point where Charley would cut them off and say, "Hey now! I already know what you're going to say and let me stop you right there and say that you shouldn't trust me!" Another quick ripple of soft laughter winds through the room, "I mean really, you don't know me from Down the street and at the end of the day I do work for a company and I am a salesmen, but you should know, I don't make a commission off this, (100% bullshit!) I'm paid a salary so whatever you do here today I'm still putting food on my table, okay?"
"Well, I truly appreciate your honesty but..." He'd cut them off again.
"Let Me ask you this, have you ever gone out to the movies and saw a movie that you just didn't like?"
"Uh, well sure..."
"And after you saw that bad movie I bet you didn't swear off ever going to the movies again, right? This is pretty much the same, just because your previous investments haven't had a return doesn't mean this one won't either!"
Of course by this time they are just nodding along like good little robots so he has them get on their home computer and direct them to some website with an official logo of a major search engines that lists off a bunch of techno mumbo jumbo that they only pretend to read but don't want to seem ignorant so they tell him they get it. Then, he has
them log on to VisibilitySEO.com that has its own special "website analyzer tool". They enter the URL address of their hopeless website and the analyzer tells them all the problems with their site, which just so happen to contain a lot of the really confusing, newfangled technical terms for all that programming code and site map meta keyword mumbo jumbo they read about in those totally official "webmaster guidelines" that he swears are written by the search engine guys themselves. Of course with two clicks away from that page they get to the marketing program page that tells them which program, based on their budget (which should have been qualified by the first guy on the phone before he turned the call to Charlie) will bring their stupid-ass dreams to fruition and make them the one out of a million who actually becomes rich selling generic home decor online. It helps that the list of technical features listed in the product description contains a lot of those same confusing techy sounding words they kind of read about in the search engine webmaster guidelines.
But hey, they were stupid fucking old-ass retards who didn't do their research and if making scratch off their pathetic ignorance and pipe dreams was wrong, then Charley just don't wanna be right. That's just real talk so fucking deal with it! He was a natural born closer! Motherfucking thoroughbred! If you want something for yourself all you had to was visualize that shit!
So basically, his current conundrum was more or less centered around the fact that his old lady was being a serious fucking cunt about this whole child custody bullshit right before he was about to go down to kick it in Vegas for his buddy's bachelor shindig. He could close six thousand dollar deals just to get his dick wet and busted nuts over thirty-G deals at least twice a fucking week just to keep the job interesting, but this dude couldn't even close the ex-bitch/baby momma on keeping the two little shits for one extra weekend just because, "they wanted to go see grandma Charlotte and cousin Bethie". Selfish little fucks. Like he didn't have shit that he would rather be doing.
Becoming the Gateway Page 5
