Splatterpunk Fighting Back

by Bracken MacLeod

  Shaking, her hand reached down to her pussy and immediately flinched away as her fingers touched upon what she immediately recognised as the head of a penis.

  ‘Someone help me!’

  The hard cock continued to push through her from inside—each movement ripping her internally—before, finally, it plopped to the floor like a turd from an arse. One final scream from Claudia as the severed cock started to move towards the open window, it’s movement replicating that of a worm: Bend in the middle, push forward, bend in the middle push forward, bend in the middle… Unable to comprehend what she was seeing and losing too much blood, Claudia passed out. Out cold, her skin over her stomach continued to darken, as it did around her groin and thighs. Deep red blood ran from between her ripped pussy lips like water from a tap. She would not wake up. She would not witness the severed cock shoot a sticky trail of semen up the wall before using the spunk as a glue in order to help the dick move up the very same wall, towards the open window. Curtains blowing in the gentle breeze. Nor would Claudia wake to witness the penis drop - unharmed - to the shrubbery below where it could pause a moment before continuing its journey across the garden and towards the road. Bend in the middle, push forward, bend in the middle, push forward, bend in the middle, push forward… Claudia would not see Melvin standing in the tree-line across the road with his trousers unbuttoned and open, exposing where his cock should have been. A smile on his face at the satisfaction of teaching the rude bitch a lesson. Her evening could have been so much different had she just fucked him like he’d demanded. Of all the things that Claudia would miss though, given what had happened to her, there was only one she would have actually been pleased to witness.

  Claudia would not see the van hurtling down the road.

  ‘Fuck!’ The driver’s sudden outburst woke the sleeping passenger, along with the little wriggle of the steering wheel that caused the van to wobble on its continued journey.

  ‘What?’ The passenger sat up bolt-right, worried that they were about to crash.

  ‘Something in the road… I think I just killed a fucking animal…’

  ‘Fuck sake… Just about shit myself. Thought we were about to crash, or something…’

  ‘I didn’t see it until the last minute, fucking thing just moving across the road.’

  ‘What was it?’

  ‘Not sure.’

  ‘Well—fuck it… If it doesn’t know the basics of road safety, it deserves to die.’

  ‘You’re an asshole.’

  ‘Me? You’re the one that killed an animal. Poor thing probably has a family waiting for it at home. They’ll be wondering where daddy is.’

  ‘Fuck you…’

  ‘It was probably nothing, don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Too late now anyway.’

  Claudia wouldn’t see Melvin screaming by the roadside.

  Extinction Therapy - Bracken MacLeod

  1

  The view of the city from the hotel room window was spectacular. Spencer looked down on the reflecting pool behind the Christian Science Center dome and watched the people gathered around it enjoying a sunny day in the park, small and insignificant from his vantage. That was the greatest joy he took from height—the relation of beholder to beheld in its proper ratio. Whether from his office, his apartment, or this room, elevation served to reinforce his vision of where he stood in relation to the city: high above it all.

  Walker beckoned him to the leather chaise. Reluctantly, he parted with the view and joined the man. If one wanted a guided meditation session with Dr. Miah Walker, one had to sign up for one of his expensive week-long retreats at SkinWalker Temple outside of Seattle. Or, alternatively, one could make a healthy donation to his foundation and put him up in a luxury hotel for the week. Walker had explained that he didn’t normally arrange private meetings, but the personal endorsement of their mutual friend convinced him to make an exception in this instance. He’d also told him that a single session wasn’t likely to have miraculous effect, though it would start him on the path toward overcoming his mental roadblocks. “If this is beneficial for you, I’d like to see you at my Dream Dance Retreat in the fall,” he’d said after the initial interview. “It’s very exclusive.” Spencer agreed that if the initial session helped with his problem, then he’d come to Seattle in November for the retreat.

  Dr. Walker’s public bio advertised that he had both Navajo and Cherokee heritage, and had spent many years studying with tribal elders from a number of different North American tribes in both the U.S. and Canada. It explained that he’d learned from many shamen—including his grandfather who’d been a Code Talker in World War II—the ways of spirit healing. Spencer’s private investigator found instead that Walker had come from an ethnically unaware family of Italian extraction in northern Utah, and that his actual grandfather had been an Insurance salesman and 4F during the war. But the testimonials from certain vetted people who’d received direct therapy were compelling.

  Spencer was a skeptic; he didn’t buy into energy fields and chi and other New Age bullshit. But he suffered from a crippling hesitance, and Dr. Walker’s technique, however unorthodox, was highly lauded by trusted friends.

  He sat and reclined in the chair. Walker let his hand hover over Spencer’s forehead as he started to chant in some language Spencer didn’t recognize. Chances were, it was less likely to be Navajo than some made up glossolalia.

  Dr. Walker was supposed to be guiding him in a therapeutic visualization. He thought it’d be more effective if he could understand what the hell the man was saying. Still, Walker’s baritone jibber jabber was relaxing. Other than a little relaxation however, he didn’t feel much of anything else and started to fear that he’d wasted a considerable amount of money. What can it hurt? Spend a little money and see. If nothing happens, then I know. If something changes... if this first session works out, it was money well spent and perhaps worth a trip to Seattle to do more.

  Then, he felt it.

  It was just a tiny push at first and then a little harder, right in the center of his forehead, like Walker was pressing the tip of a finger against his skin. He resisted the urge to open his eyes. Walker had assured him that at no point during the session would he physically touch him. Anything the patient felt was the power of his spirit being channeled through healing hands. Spencer played along and thought of the endorsements from people he respected. People who said that Walker had unburdened their spirits and set them free into a world they’d never known was so ripe for their appetites.

  The pressure on his forehead increased and began to feel hot, like Walker wasn’t touching him with a finger but with the melted end of a candle. Spencer shifted in the chaise. Walker said, “Shh. Let your body go, and become a being of pure thought.”

  When had he switched back to English?

  “Be mind, be spirit, be the eternal consciousness that can travel through time. The self of your mind is energy and cannot be destroyed. Since Creation it has existed, and you have been traveling through the ages from body to body. You have already been there. Go back now.” Spencer felt the wax finger burn and pierce his skull, probing deep into his brain and sending sharp spikes of hot pain through his whole body. He jerked up from where he lay and opened his eyes.

  He looked around the dark, low-ceilinged room in which he found himself. The hotel penthouse high above the city with the comfortable chaise lounge and the R. Carlos Nakai flute music on the sound system was gone. A fire pit built close to a far wall sat unused, blackened char piled in the center. A few clay pots lined another wall and a blanket made of some kind of tanned and bleached hide was laid out with what looked like the remnants of a hastily abandoned supper. Through a doorway in a separate partitioned room, he could see the bare legs of a woman lying on her side on another treated animal skin. The bottom of her ass was visible through the door, and Spencer felt a stirring in his abdomen. Discomfort and desire. Repulsion and longing.

  He stood and, ignoring the woman lyin
g still in the other room, walked toward a hanging cloth haloed with bright light like a rectangular eclipse. On the other side of it, he could hear the distant sounds of people. Shouts and chatter. Calls of panic and screams of terror. His anxiety rose. He hesitated. But then the voice of Dr. Walker came drifting down to him from above, saying, “You are a consciousness which has lived a thousand lifetimes. You have always been welcome and will always have a right to live whenever you choose.”

  Spencer rubbed at his eyes. When he opened them again, he was still standing in the low, primitive pit house staring at a cloth door separating him from the world beyond. He grabbed the tapestry, pulled it aside, and stepped up and out into the daylight.

  2

  Doug walked along the bike path beside Cary listening to her chattering about the mess that waited for her at work. He listened, occasionally expressing his sympathies. “How does someone get fired from that lab?” Cary groaned, “Right?” and went on with her story while they moved around slower pedestrians, and dodged bicyclists flying by in neon spandex racing gear imagining themselves in the Tour de France and not on a two lane pedestrian path to the subway. Despite the discomfort of walking in the early summer heat in a suit—it was already seventy degrees and humid—their time together on the bike path and riding the subway in the morning and the evening were his favorite parts of the day. There was nothing to distract them from one another—not work (though they talked about it), not dinner or the dishes, or work they’d brought home. It was just the two of them in a bubble of togetherness where no obligation or chore could distract them from each other. So, he walked, sweating through his sport coat, and listened to his wife talk about the day ahead of her.

  At the station, Doug held the door open for Cary. She smiled and drew a finger along his cheek as she slipped through, followed by two other people who didn’t acknowledge him or say “thank you” for saving them the second it would have taken to let him follow his wife in instead of barging on through. The sound of a train arriving at the platform below sent several commuters rushing for the escalator, furiously digging in backpacks and briefcases for their fare cards, risking injury on the slick escalator stairs for the sake of catching this train instead of waiting five minutes for the next. Doug and Cary kept their normal pace, stepping to the right side of the escalator steps as people flowed past them. What’s the hurry? He knew none of them were hurrying because they loved their jobs so much they couldn’t stand to lose five minutes of the work day. Maybe a couple of them did. But he saw the faces around his office. He knew his colleagues came to work for the same reason he did: to earn a paycheck. His salary paid the rent and his student loans and allowed them a little money left over for fun. But after only a year as an associate in the firm, he realized he was merely a billing unit doing document review, and work for Baylor, Hansen and Aaron LLP was no more than a way to finance his real life. Being on time was merely a step taken to keep a job he tolerated. And five minutes was nothing that would cost him. Not as much as he billed for the firm.

  Unlike him, Cary enjoyed what she did. Not so much that she was willing to cut their daily walk short by running for a train, though.

  On the landing halfway down, they scanned their passes and the Lexan doors slid open, letting them through. The couple walked down another flight of stairs instead of taking the escalator. The departure warning bell dinged and the subway car doors slid closed. Watching a train leave, Doug always thought about those plastic canisters and vacuum tubes people used to use to send their bank deposits to the teller at the drive-through, before direct deposit and online banking meant he never went to a local branch to do anything more than get quarters for the laundry. He watched as the train pulled away, leaving him and Cary and a few winded commuters who weren’t quite fast enough standing on the platform waiting for the next train. The pre-recorded female voice of the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority above them announced that the next Red Line train to Braintree was now approaching. Not even a five-minute wait, he thought, feeling cheated at its early arrival. The train arrived, brakes screeching, cutting off their conversation. Together, they stepped into the car and took seats next to each other.

  Cary pulled a book out of her bag and gave Doug a big smile. Her daily acknowledgment that she was not ignoring him, but was now going to read. It was too noisy aboard the train to keep trying to have a conversation. He nodded and put his earbuds in and rested his hand on her thigh. He leaned back, closed his eyes, and listened to Freddie’s trumpet drown out the sounds of the subway. Before he knew it, Cary’s hand patted the back of his to let him know they’d reached her stop. She was getting off to transfer to another line that would take her to the lab. He took out one of his ear buds and said, “Think about what you want to get for dinner.”

  She winked and put her finger beside her nose. “Not it! I picked last night.” She leaned over and kissed him. “Off to the arena!”

  “Fight well,” he called after her as she stepped through the doors. They closed behind her and he was swept off to help move money from one rich person’s bank account to another. Hardly the glorious career of dragon-slaying he’d envisioned in law school.

  3

  Climbing the rock hewn steps out of the low house, he looked across the red sand and rock yard of the pueblos carved into the side of the cliff. The morning sun shone in his eyes and he raised a hand to shade them. A shrieking man rushed past, naked and bleeding. He stumbled and tripped and another man fell upon him, swinging a rock maul down on his face again and again until the man’s head was bloody, muddy pulp. The man with the maul grinned with excitement at Spencer and held up the dripping tool in acknowledgment before returning to his victim.

  The mud and wood roofs of the other pit houses smoked and smoldered as more men war-whooped and swung clubs and axes at people trying to escape. A woman crawled through the rocks, her intestine dragging out behind her like a wet tail. She wept and her head lolled as her blood dripped out of her mouth and her stomach, splashing in black beads onto the dirt. She stumbled on her hands and knees, falling on her face. Behind her, a man followed, his weapon hanging lazily at his side in a loose red fist. He grimaced as she pushed up, and kicked her in the back. She fell again, her breath heaving up a cloud of dust. She coughed and lay still, not dead, but waiting. Her tormentor obliged her. He began to bash her like his compatriot had done to the other man.

  “What is this?” Spencer said. His words sounded foreign, but familiar all the same. He reached up and touched his mouth, shocked at having spoken in a language he’d never heard before. His unanswered question was lost in the cries for mercy and whoops of ecstatic savagery. He looked down at himself. The familiar paunch he hid beneath his tailored Gitman Bros. shirts was bare and significantly reduced. His gray-haired, fish-pale belly replaced with a flatter, hairless, tanned midsection. He moved and felt the body he inhabited. It was energetic and powerful. Young and beautiful and vicious. A woman ran up and fell against him, smearing her blood on his smooth belly and begging for mercy for herself and her children. Behind her, another man stopped and waited, staring at Spencer, waiting for his answer.

  “Please stop! Please don’t hurt my children!” she begged. Spencer grabbed her arms and pulled her to her feet. He looked into her dirty tear-streaked face and listened to her plead for mercy a moment longer. He spat in her eyes, shoving her back toward her pursuer. She screamed as the man caught her. “Why?” she screamed. Her pursuer answered with a stone knife.

  Two men held another in place as a third beat the soles of his feet with a club. Beyond them, a group dismantled the roof of the largest pit house in the center of the development, casting aside mud covered branches to expose the shallow, round hole dug out as a community gathering place. As fast as they could remove the roof, other men pitched the remains of their victims into the hole. Spencer’s mind raced as he tried to absorb all that was happening around him. He stood in the center of a village being razed, heart pounding and short of
breath with the excitement of it. He watched as people were torn from each other, from themselves, from the world and thrown into a mass grave to lay together forever in their silence. The people killing them screamed “Witch!” and “Devil!” Their words fell on the bodies like rain on rocks. The smell of slaughter flew on the breeze and slipped into his body with every breath. He inhaled the scents deeply, imagining ghosts seeking to escape the horror all around penetrating him, coming to live in his heart where he could love their dying forever.

  The odor of blood baking in the dirt under the scorching sun made him feel dizzy and he turned from the mass grave. He stepped out of the heat into a pit house to find more men working, removing limb from body, flesh from limb, breaking bones against stone anvils before scorching the ends in a hearth fire. They worked in silence while the screaming outside continued. Shoving past him, two more men arrived bearing corpses. They sat down in the dirt to set to work performing the same processing ritual. “What are you waiting for?” one asked as he hewed a hunk of meat from a slender thigh. He cut it into two smaller pieces and shoved one in his mouth, blood running down his chin and dripping onto his bare chest. The men pointed and laughed at Spencer as he turned and rushed out of the house back into the light. He ran for the house in which he’d awoken.