Splatterpunk Fighting Back

by Bracken MacLeod

  Long days, pleasant nights, as a lost man once promised. We dream, after a time; not of what our sub-conscious might vomit up, none of that necessary now, but of the world outside; of the wailing, the wars; the starvation on the streets. Of those still bound, unborn, still praying that they never will be. Greyness and rain and concrete. Coloured glass and plastic. What we were all once urged to love.

  The one inside...the one we give ourselves to, in our love making, in our pain; the gestating child, whose name will be Legion, who we love and will love us all...I feel him wake, as does all the world. The meat, the ones who've slit and sewn it as one; who've nurtured it this far, falling apart, sucked dry in his hunger, his desire for us...we go, flowing into him, his adoration and ours co-mingling, made one there, the soup of our separate lives becoming I within his body, within his myriad memories.

  Birth...the first trauma, that none recall, but which echoes with us, through our every thought, our every living instant. I'll never forget, because I've learned to love; pain and transgression, rawness and rupturing. My parents, my lovers; all that I once was, sloughing away. Others wait, stepping back as I emerge. The air...the stink and noise of it; of my own solidifying body. Blood beginning to flow, intention forming. What did I hope, as the author of this? That it would be an art to mark the age, that would echo down all that followed? Yes; I hoped that, in the beginning, when I still knew no better; still raw and only half born. And these? The ones who've facilitated the art that remade me? I smell them; their sweat and soil, the sour dreams they exude...only this one realised, come to fruition, in me.

  Their love...like sunshine, warming me, quickening the blood in my veins. Animal prayers, moans of adoration, as they turn their instruments -the saws, the scalpels, the hypodermics- on themselves. The ones who survive...the strong and inspired enough, will follow, out into the abandoned world, where we'll paint the grey red, spread our message; where no meat or bone or brick will divide us.

  You know, because you've seen, no matter how much they've tried to conceal it from you; our work, that they call everything from mutilation to terrorism, madness to anarchy. We are not what they proclaim or what you believe; psychopaths and sadists, monsters and mutilators. We are Legion, the born in blood, as you will be, in our embrace, where you will celebrate, and learn what it means to be loved.

  Limb Memory - Tim Curran

  They kept telling Will Shenard how lucky he was—how very, very lucky—and he smiled politely and nodded his head, forever reassuring them that they were indeed right… even if he didn’t believe one word of it. Getting your ribs broken, one lung punctured, and your left arm torn out of the socket didn’t seem like such good luck to him. In fact, it seemed like lowdown dirty shit luck. The sort of thing Fate or God or providence did to you when they really hated you and wanted you to suffer.

  “I know it doesn’t seem all that great,” Dr. Whiply said in his most understanding voice, “but you came out of it with your life and your faculties intact. Don’t sell that short. You’re lucky you’re even alive and functioning.”

  In other words, after that semi crossed the centerline and crushed your metallic silver Volvo like a fucking beer can, sending it careening over the embankment where it rolled no less than seven times, consider yourself lucky not to be in your grave or wearing diapers and sucking oatmeal through a straw.

  There was logic and common sense to that, Will knew, but in the first few weeks after he came out of his coma, he was feeling far too sorry for himself to even consider it.

  The only thing that alleviated some of his despair was that Kim stopped by and she actually seemed glad that he was still alive. In some purely selfish, purely small and hateful corner of his mind, he was suspicious of her. She was the reason he had been out driving that night in the first place. For the third time in as many months, she had dumped him. He had sat with her by candlelight while she gave him the big shove and said corny shit like, “I’m just not feeling us anymore, Will.” and “We’re like strangers moving in different directions.” Hackneyed I’m OK, You’re OK head candy she’d picked up from Dr. Phil or one of those other drooling idiots on the tube. It had pissed him off, of course, and mainly because she had given him the boot three times and he kept taking her back like a pathetic lovesick puppy.

  Sure, fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me. But fool me three times and somebody ought to bitch slap me for the gutless, pussified snotworm I am.

  Indirectly, Will believed, Kimmy-baby had caused the accident. If she hadn’t dumped him again—dumped him? Hell, she evacuated him like a brown smelly turd into the great stink bowl of life—he wouldn’t have been out on the highway in the first goddamn place.

  He knew that wasn’t fair, but laying there in the hospital bed, he wasn’t feeling so fair. Kim came by to alleviate her own guilt and they both knew it. True to form, as the days turned into weeks, he saw her rarely until not at all.

  “Thanks, Kim, thanks, my love. The next time you’re on fire, honey, I’m not going to be feeling the need to empty my bladder on you to extinguish the blaze,” he said to himself one night. He was being a prick and he knew it. He was hoping that callous disregard for her would make him feel better, but when he thought of her at night he sobbed like an infant pulled from its mother’s teat.

  The scariest part was that he was alone.

  He had absolutely no one in his weak little orbit he could depend on. His friends were mostly drunks. Great to drink with, bowl with, and watch the Final Four with, but pretty much useless beyond that. Kim was history and he had no family to speak of which pretty much meant he was flying solo. He kept telling himself that adversity would make him stronger but he didn’t believe it for a second.

  Through those many weeks of recuperation and grueling physical therapy, there was one bright spot. Her name was Erin McComb. She was an occupational therapist with short, spiky red hair and a summer tan that made her looked bronzed. Whenever her violet eyes were on him, he felt weak and fluttery inside and was certain he was in love…at least until he remembered he was a freak missing an arm. Erin was pushing hard for him to accept a prosthetic limb, which would be his first step, she claimed, to complete recovery.

  She kept at it and at it. “Let me ask you a question,” Will put to her. “If I get one of these arms, will you go out to dinner with me when I get out of here?”

  “I would, but my fiancé just wouldn’t understand.”

  He looked away. “Ah, I see. Whether you’re engaged or not, I wouldn’t blame you. People would stare. They’d wonder what an attractive woman like you was doing with some one-armed weirdo. And they’d wonder why I didn’t accept my station in life and sell pencils on a street corner.”

  That made her sigh. “You really have to quit feeling sorry for yourself.”

  “True…but if I don’t, who will?”

  “The future is only as bright as you want it to be.”

  Will laughed. “You mean well, Erin, but you’re not very realistic. I have no family. My girlfriend dumped me. I’m missing an arm. My boss has been kind enough to keep my insurance rolling for another three months, but we both know I’m not going back to work and I’m basically a welfare case. End of story.”

  “Getting another limb could be a new beginning, you know.”

  “Sure. I like being stared at just a little more than I like the pity in people’s eyes.”

  “Will, please…”

  But there was no pleasing him. He knew, on one hand, that he was being an insufferable asshole; but on the other, he seemed to believe that he had every right. He didn’t. He knew he didn’t. Just as he knew there were people out there in a lot fucking worse shape than him. There were people dying of cancer. There were children for christ’s sake dying of that horrible, dread disease before the haunted eyes of their parents. There were quadriplegics and multiple amputees. God, the list went on and on. But every time he told himself to man up, to act his age and face the facts, to make lem
onade from lemons and play the hand he was served, to blossom where he was planted and that what can’t be cured must be endured (one of his mother’s favorites next to you can polish shit all day but it’ll never shine), something would hold him back. He’d feel momentarily empowered and toughened…then he’d backslide. My girlfriend dumped me. I have no job and no left arm. How’s that for piss in the punch and doggie doo-doo for dinner?

  He didn’t say these things to Erin who was young and fresh and healthy. She had all her limbs and they were smooth and tanned and well-sculpted. What did she know of his loss?

  “Listen, Will. It’s not unusual to feel sorry for yourself. Everyone goes through it. There’s a period of adjustment and you have to fight your way through it. I can give you pep talks all day and I can even bring in dozens of people who’ve gone through what you’re going through and some of them with much, much worse stories than yours…but you know what? They can’t help you. Only you can help you.”

  He sighed, knowing he was being a baby but, Jesus, he couldn’t seem to help himself. “I know. I guess it’ll take some getting used to.”

  “Sure, it will.” She produced a business card. On the back, she wrote her cell number. “Call me. Day or night, call me. If you need to talk. If you need some support. Hell, call me if you feel a need to talk dirty to someone at three a.m. I’m here to help. I’m here to steer you through this. Okay?”

  They chatted some more and he felt a little better about things. Then Erin said she had to leave and something in him deflated, a blackness that was ominous and infinite filled him.

  “Thanks for stopping. Now get out of here and go enjoy yourself. Say hi to your fiancé for me. And if you can, drop a nickel in my tin cup on the way out.”

  “Will, Will, Will,” she said as she left.

  Again, Erin did mean well but she honestly had no idea what she was talking about. And it was at that juncture in his wonderful new life that Will decided he wasn’t going to talk about any of it anymore. The therapists didn’t understand what he was going through any more than the doctors or nurses or the whole slew of others. This was his personal horror. His trauma. It was a private hell, a tailored cage and he wasn’t going to share his dirty straw with anyone.

  A few nights later, he woke up some time after midnight to a sensation of coldness. His missing arm was cold. They had already told him all about phantom pains and the like, but this was different. It did not seem illusionary. In fact, it seemed almost organic as if his arm was really there, living and functioning, only he could not see it.

  He tried to talk himself out of it because that was the only logical, sane thing to do, but still the certainty remained.

  It’s there. Dear God, I know it’s there.

  The moonlight came in through the hospital window, frosting the bed an even pale yellow, and there was certainly no limb there, yet he could feel it and it was part of him.

  Just calm down. You’re having a panic attack or something.

  But the most disturbing thing was that he felt perfectly calm. He knew he should have been filled with terror, but the idea of a ghost limb being attached to his stump was almost soothing. And, boy, there was one for the therapists. Is it normal to be haunted by a dead limb…and comforted by it? He could just imagine their response to that.

  He lay there another five, then ten minutes.

  He still felt the limb.

  It was still cold—God, it felt like it had been pulled from a meat locker—and it made him shiver, yes, but now there was a prickling pins-and-needles sort of feeling like it was not a ghost at all but merely a limb that had fallen asleep.

  This was not only absurd, it was downright silly. He was tempted to ring for the nurse, but there was nothing she could do. He tried to relax, to be logical and reasonable…still, the chillness of the mystery limb persisted, as did the prickling.

  Christ, he could almost feel the dead weight of it. He sweated. He thrashed under the sheets. His teeth chattered. He shivered uncontrollably.

  Then, needing to prove to himself that it was just a side effect of medication, he reached out to touch it. But as his fingers got close, they retreated…retreated from a barrier of grave cold. He tried again and this time he forced his fingers to comply. When they contacted the phantom limb, he let out a little cry because it was there.

  It was really there.

  Cold and fleshy and firm.

  He shook for another few minutes then he thought: What are you afraid of? Even if it’s a ghost, it’s still part of you. The logic of that made him laugh, only his laughter was a shrill cackling that he did not like.

  “You’re dead,” he heard his voice say. “You’re not real. You’re dead.”

  The arm’s physical reality persisted.

  “Go away. Go join my arm. You’re part of it, not me.”

  Now the ghost arm moved.

  The elbow flexed. The forearm slid across the sheet with a subtle swishing sort of sound. As it did so, his guts seemed to tighten in snakelike coils. The terror he felt was like a chill that started at his scalp and spread right down to his toes.

  The hand moved now. The fingers scratched against the bed.

  Then—

  There was a strange feeling of release at his stump, a detachment, and he heard the arm moving down the bed, slinking away like a rejected puppy.

  “Go away,” he managed. “Just go away. Go find my real arm.”

  In the moonlight, he saw an ethereal, almost vaporous image of the ghost arm. It was raised up in the air, elbow bent, fingertips supporting it like the legs of a spider. In fact, it and the hand formed a perfect three-point football stance. This was the stance used right before a lineman or running back charged into action.

  “Go!” he said.

  Amazingly, it did just that.

  It pushed open the door and retreated into the midnight corridor beyond.

  Will lay there, breathing hard as the sweat dried on his skin and frantic thoughts flew around in his skull like caged birds. It hadn’t happened. It couldn’t have happened. These were the things he told himself and these were the things that failed to reassure him. As he mellowed inch by inch, pretending he could not still feel the tomblike cold of his significant other, he began to see images in his head that at first made no sense but soon became alarmingly clear.

  He saw the corridor outside and then he saw the wispy image of the ghost arm moving up it, sort of tip-toeing along or (more accurately) tip-fingering. It moved down the corridor until it reached the nurse’s station and there it paused as if it were trying to find its bearings. He could see two of the nurses chatting away, another typing on a laptop. The arm moved past them, sneaking down the corridor. It peered into the staff break room where an intern was sleepily munching pizza and perusing a large hardcover book. It turned away. Back into the corridor, around the corner to the bank of elevators. It waited and waited. A maintenance guy pushing a cart showed up. He pressed a button and entered the car and so did the arm. He went down to the lower level and the limb joined him. He never saw it, of course.

  The maintenance guy went on his way.

  The limb moved off until it reached one of those secret hush-hush sorts of places in the hospital that patients and visitors never got to see: the incinerator room where infected dressings and medical waste were disposed of. The limb studied the incinerator which was like a huge belt-fed aluminium cylinder with metal piping and conduits connected to it. The waste was placed on the belt and cycled into the burner. All of it was secured in sterile plastic packs. The guy who ran it wasn’t in the room. The arm climbed up onto the belt and then began sorting through packages of tissue and bloody dressings, fleshy masses and unrecognizable things. It found what it wanted.

  That’s my arm, Will thought. That’s my fucking arm. They’re going to burn it.

  Well, of course they were going to burn it…what else could they do with it? Only in movies were limbs actually buried. The idea disturbed him in ways he cou
ld not properly understand and he willed the ghost limb to rescue it. But that wasn’t necessary because it was doing just that. Nimbly, carefully, it opened the package and revealed the arm, which was blotchy gray and bloodstained, the pinkie torn away to a nub. There were dark whorls of something like fungus growing from crusty gashes and missing sections of skin that almost looked like they’d been peeled. His arm was crushed, torn open, the fingers nearly fleshless.

  It was a horror.

  What happened then, was that the dead limb and the ghost limb were joined again, spirit welded to flesh. And right away, Will felt the agony of the arm and its injuries, the tortured nerve endings. The pain was intense and overwhelming. He cried out and the nurse came and gave him some medication.

  Slowly, thankfully, he slipped into oblivion.

  He woke up around five, groggy from the Demerol, disoriented, and thirsty. He poured himself some water from the pitcher and guzzled it down. He settled back into bed feeling a bit woozy…and it all came cycling back into his head. Loopy, delusional stuff about a ghost arm finding his dead arm down in the incinerator room.

  “You’re out of your fucking head,” he whispered to himself, because that was the only thing that really explained it all.

  Then he heard something.

  At first, he thought it was from out in the corridor. Maybe he wanted it to be from out in the corridor. But it wasn’t. It was coming from outside the window.

  Something bumped into the glass.

  He refused to look.

  There was a tapping, then a sound of fingers drumming impatiently. He knew what it was because it couldn’t be anything else up here on the third story. It thumped the glass angrily now. It had physical reality and it wanted him to see that, to confirm its presence.

  This is a psychosis or something, a frightened voice in his head told him. Ignore it and it’ll go away; validate it with fear and you’ll never get rid of it.