Year's Best Hardcore Horror Volume 1

by Jeff Strand

  Was this death? Wasn't it supposed to be more morbid? She laughed out loud, and had an intense orgasm.

  BORED WITH BRUTALITY

  BY MP JOHNSON

  _____

  Bored with everything, GG Allin decided to take a new approach to life.

  He'd punched. He'd pooped. He'd bled. He'd fucked. He'd fucking rocked. He'd spent a decade outraging to the fullest extent possible, and now it just made him yawn. He couldn't even shoot heroin and shit in some whore's mouth while jerking off two faggots without falling asleep. To be fair, it was really good heroin.

  When being brutal turned boring, he reasoned that the only non-boring thing he could possibly do, the only thing he hadn't ever really done before, was to try being normal for a change. He could just be a regular dude.

  This wasn't going to be easy. He had stains from three separate vomits on his shirt. Driving his pinky finger into his belly button, he scraped out a wad of dried shit. Absentmindedly, he stuck his pinky into his mouth and sucked it clean while trying to remember the last time he had dropped a load. He would definitely need to shower. Yes, step one would be to take a shower and get clean clothes.

  Technically though, he didn't have a home. Shoving aside the cardboard he had slept under, he looked around the alley. He didn't actually know where he was. His last gig had been in Chicago. A week ago? Two? He was probably still in Chicago. Where was the rest of the band? Fuck them. He didn't need them. If he was going to follow his plan, he couldn't turn to them for help.

  They were all fucking nuts anyway. Merle? Dino? They may have had just enough normalcy to hold down places to live, but they were still nuts. Nuts, nuts, nuts. Boring and nuts. "Oh, let's go fuck a prostitute," GG mimicked out loud. "Let's do some coke." The words even tasted fucking boring on his tongue. Fuck the Murder Junkies and their boring, tedious debauchery. Fuck whores. Fuck drugs. He pulled a baggie of dope out of his jockstrap and tossed it in a dumpster. He was on the road to normal now, and it felt so wrong, so gloriously, wonderfully wrong.

  He stepped out of the alley. He walked and walked, trying to figure out what he needed to do to fully commit to normality. Unfortunately, even with his heroin haze fading, he couldn't think of any way to complete the transition without engaging in one last boring criminal act. So he walked all the way to the suburbs, and he walked right up to a nice little house with light yellow siding. Not piss yellow, which the old GG would have loved, but a nice, sunny yellow that totally fit the bill for new, normal GG. He went around to the rear and busted open the back door with a surprisingly quiet and perfectly placed kick.

  The back door led to the kitchen, where he peeled off his shirt and jockstrap and combat boots and tossed his only three articles of clothing into the garbage. There were three bins: recycling, organic and trash. He looked into the one labeled trash. It barely had anything in it, and what was there looked too clean. He was used to trashcans filled with dirty needles and whiskey bottles stuffed with cigarette butts. But he threw his refuse clothes in there nonetheless. Out with the old.

  He found the shower and took a long, steamy soak. The hot water slowly penetrated the layers of shit and vomit and cum and blood. A snake shedding its skin. The detritus pooled in a brown soup around his feet.

  Finished, he shaved off his scraggly facial hair. Without it, without the grime, even with the scars and tattoos, he looked surprisingly normal. Innocent. Perhaps even soft. He had never developed the hard lines that most men did, at least not on his face. He had put on some muscle in prison, so he did have some claim to masculinity. Not that he wanted it. He liked the intimidation that came with strength, but he despised the concept of the man's man.

  He thought back to his high school days, when he wanted to be beautiful, when he wore his hair long and flowing, and he knew what to do with makeup. He'd get called a faggot, and he'd take it, even though he knew the label didn't quite fit. In recent years, he still let his inner femininity out whenever he could steal a miniskirt in his size or convince some cunt to paint his nails. Fewer people called him out on it these days.

  He found the bedroom. A totally normal bedroom. Off-white walls. Nicely made bed. A shelf full of puppets. He picked up one of the puppets. A blue-skinned humanoid with a burlap eye patch.

  Guess this is what normal people have in their pads, he thought, rather than sacks of fertilizer and old drum sets and passed out groupies.

  He returned the puppet to the shelf and started digging through closets. He found the wife's clothes first. Dresses. He was tempted to try them on, but he needed to put that behind him. He was going to be a normal man. So he kept digging until he found normal men's clothes. Black slacks. Polo shirts. A perfect fit too. He looked in the mirror. A perfectly normal man in perfectly normal clothes.

  But then the front door swung open.

  He heard two voices. Two giggling voices. It was time for him to leave. Except he really liked this house, this not-piss-yellow house. He liked the clothes.

  So he let the giggling couple find him. He knew he must have had the normal look down just right when, instead of screaming, the couple merely went quiet for a moment and said, "Oh hello, I think you're in the wrong house."

  They did, however, scream as soon as GG came at them. He started with the man, delivering a perfect blow between the eyes that caused the man to drop to the floor. The success of the punch excited GG. Was this what fighting was like for normal, not-high people? Blows landing where intended, rather than spiraling out into the ether like defective fireworks? Normal people don't fight, he reminded himself. This is just one last dip into non-normality before he fully committed.

  He kicked the woman between the legs and she fell to her knees. He grabbed a picture off the wall and gouged the corner of its heavy wooden frame into her skull, once, twice, three times until she stopped moving and he was sure she wouldn't move anymore. Blood splattered across the shelf full of puppets.

  GG got down on hands and knees and sank his teeth into the man's throat. He tore out the adam's apple and chewed on for a minute. It was like putting an entire chicken wing in his mouth. He spat it out quick. This was not how normal people killed each other.

  He ran to the bathroom and washed his face.

  That night, he buried the couple in the backyard.

  The next day, he proactively stopped at each neighbor's house and gave this spiel, using the name his mother had given him, the name he had abandoned so long ago: "Hi, I'm Kevin. I'm David Bannister's, your next-door neighbor's, brother. He and his wife Jill wanted me to stop by today because they didn't have enough time yesterday. They signed on for a five year mission to help in Nepal, rebuilding after the earthquake, and I'm going to be staying in their home while they're over there. If you need anything, let me know. I want to be a good neighbor!"

  Each time he delivered the spiel, the voice in his head that said "I bet her cunt tastes like salted deli meat" or "I'd like to lick his scrotum clean" got fainter and fainter. GG Allin's voice got fainter and fainter.

  Eventually, Kevin could hardly hear it.

  Within a month, he had a job. He had assumed David Bannister's identity for work purposes, which came with a business degree and a pretty solid resume, so he didn't have trouble landing a six figure salary as manager of customer operations of the local branch of a multinational tech corporation. It was very normal. Most of his work entailed sending emails telling people to check with other people to find out what to tell different people to do in order to get something done. It was easy.

  There was one situation. One day, one of his underlings came into his office and made a blanket statement about how Kevin AKA David didn't spend enough time coaching his team and helping them be the best they could be. Kevin shattered his coffee mug on the desk and pressed a shard of ceramic against the employee's neck, hard enough to draw blood.

  "Be the best you can be or I will peel off your face and use it as a cum rag," Kevin coached.

  The employee ran out crying. Tha
nkfully, Kevin had been doing such a good job of being normal, he convinced the board of directors that the confrontation hadn't happened and the employee was trying to frame him. They fired the employee.

  Kevin got a nice, normal routine together. A morning run. A stop at the coffee shop. Work. An evening of books and television programs.

  During one of his regular pre-work coffee shop stops, he was standing in line when someone tapped him on the shoulder. He had fallen into a daydream about which of the various pastries he should choose: Danish? Donut? And the tap came perfectly timed to pull him out of the daydream just as it shifted into thoughts of shoving these pastries up his asshole.

  "It's your turn to order," the voice said, not rude, not angry, almost soothing.

  "Thank you," he said, without turning around.

  He placed his order and went on his way. As he walked away from the coffee shop, he heard that voice again.

  "Excuse me," the voice said.

  He turned to see a woman. Early thirties. Light makeup. Glowing skin.

  "I've seen you before," she said, with a sly smile.

  Kevin's stomach sank. He thought of all the talk show appearances, preaching his vitriol, preaching his truth while clad in a military helmet. He should have known this would happen. He should have known he could not just be normal.

  "Yeahhhhhh," he said, shrugging.

  "You come here every day, don't you?"

  The relief felt wonderful. He would not be torn out of normalcy today. "Yeah, it's my normal pre-work routine."

  She offered her hand to shake. "My name is Deb."

  Deb. Deb. Deb. Sounded like a drug, he thought. Mainline some Deb. He shook her hand. It was soft. Softer than most girl hands he had touched. No calluses. No cuts. Just a soft, warm hand pressed against his. She smiled when he didn't let go in a reasonable amount of time. He smiled back. "I'm Kevin."

  And then a dinner date.

  At El Rancho, one of those Mexican restaurants that seemed to have zero Mexicans on staff. Deb lied to the waitress and said it was Kevin's birthday. The waitress brought out the rest of the staff, slapped a sombrero on his head and sang "Happy Birthday" before shoving a bowl of fried ice cream in front of him. He had never seen fried ice cream before. He couldn't even remember the last time he had eaten unfried ice cream. He went at it with his hands and Deb giggled, handing him a spoon. She showed him how to crack the shell and get a good spoonful of fried goodness along with the ice cream hidden within.

  And then sex.

  After their fourth date, she took him back to her place, a fancy apartment on the edge of downtown. She had vases. Art. She kiss-shoved him all the way to her bedroom and then pushed him onto the bed. She was still wearing her dress suit because they had met up right after work. It made her look powerful. So powerful.

  "Punch me in the mouth," he said.

  She screwed up her face and raised an eyebrow, but then made a fist and gently rapped her knuckles on his jaw, laughing.

  Maybe normal people didn't do that when they fucked. He suddenly became super nervous, wondering what other stuff they didn't usually do. There was only one way to find out. He kicked off his slacks and waited.

  Deb said nothing about the size of his penis. He knew it was small. Some girls liked to comment about it. They would say it was cute, or they would belittle him. Deb just dropped her skirt and lunged, face-first. She took it in her mouth and it went hard instantly. Then she climbed on. She rode him.

  They maneuvered so he was on top. After she came, he squatted over her chest. He grunted, trying to squeeze a shit onto her boobs, but without his usual pre-fuck laxative, all he got was a turtlehead.

  "What are you doing?" she asked, perhaps a little frightened.

  That was all he needed to hear to know that shitting on a girl's tits post-sex wasn't the usual thing. "Just kidding," he said. He supposed that meant she wouldn't be shitting in his mouth either. Bummer.

  Then he jerked off into her mouth and for some reason she was totally okay with that. Wasn't cum grosser than shit? He was going to have a hard time understanding normal versus abnormal when it came to sexy stuff, he realized. He decided to forego cutting open his scrote for now.

  And then marriage.

  They dated for nearly a year before he proposed. Although there was still part of him that just wanted to go on an endless fuck-spree, eating up every dick and pussy he could find, he was getting way into this monogamy thing. It was weird, having consistently good sex once or twice a day. It was exciting.

  There was also an emotional connection. Deb would ask him questions he had never answered before, like "How was your day?" or "What are you thinking about?" or "What do you want the future to look like?" She seemed to legitimately care, and not in the way that his brother Merle had cared enough to pay for whores and heroin once in a while, but in a sort of normal way that he could barely understand and it made his heart race like he was on speed.

  So he proposed and they got married in a small ceremony in Grant Park. He invited a couple co-workers who he had started hanging out with for football games and normal guy stuff, and she invited her sister and mom and a few friends. It was nice. It was so fucking nice.

  And then kids.

  They moved into Kevin's house, which had remained more or less unchanged since his arrival. Deb liked the exterior color, but required a fresh paint job. She bought a bunch of new furniture too. She made him throw out all the bedroom puppets. Turned out that was actually not super normal.

  Deb vaj-blasted out kid number one within a year of tying the knot. It was a boy. A totally healthy and normal boy. Kevin and Deb agreed to name him Grant, after her deceased father who was a veteran. A year later came kid number two, a totally healthy and normal girl who they named Vanessa, because Deb thought that sounded like a model name and Vanessa was so pretty she was going to be a model for sure.

  Kevin almost got derailed from normalcy watching Deb shove her milk-tits in the kids' mouths for them to slurp on, but he held it together.

  He was good with the kids. He quit his job and became a stay-at-home dad, because Deb's salary was enough and the house was paid for, sort of. Grant's first word was "Daddy," which was about as normal as Kevin could have dreamed.

  When they learned to walk, he played games with them in the backyard, trampling over the ground where the rotting corpses of the past homeowners were buried just a few feet deep. He played normal games with them, games like tag and soccer, games that didn't involve any measure of urine or blood. Actually, Vanessa fell and scraped her knee once, and not only did it bleed, but she got so worked up over the wound, she lost control of her bladder and piss shot out of her shorts. It was like old times, but Kevin did not smear any of the fluids on his face or his sex nub. He lovingly took Vanessa inside and washed her off. Grant watched, exclaiming how "Totawy gwoss and awesome" the mess was, because for some reason it's normal for young boys to be excited about that stuff, but not adults.

  One sundrenched summer day when Grant was four and his Allin genes started to show through to the point of annoyance, he slapped Vanessa and dragged her by her hair across the backyard because she wouldn't let him play with one of her dolls. Kevin had become strangely protective of his brood, and it actually hurt him a little bit in the pit of his stomach to see either of them injured. The feeling was confusing as hell. One of those unforeseen excitements of normalcy. He tried hard to understand it, and kind of reveled in it. He sent Grant to the basement on time out, because he did that sort of thing now.

  When time out was over, Grant emerged from the basement with a massive old garbage bag. Kevin had seen that bag before. He couldn't quite remember though. Had he killed a whore and put her, or him, in there before he had fully committed to normality? Shit, that would explain the smile on Grant's face.

  "Daddy! Wook! Wook!" the kid exclaimed.

  Vanessa fluttered around him like a butterfly, drawn to the excitement.

  "I, uh, have never seen th
at bag before in my life," Kevin said, as if talking to police officers, although he had never said anything more than, "Fuck off you fucking pig cocksucker motherfuckers" to law enforcement before.

  Grant reached into the bag, but instead of pulling out a severed slut limb, he retrieved a puppet—a nappy, blue-felt puppet with a burlap patch over its eye. Kevin remembered the puppets that had been in the bedroom. Deb had hated them. He wondered if she'd be pissed off that they got dragged out, but it made sense to Kevin to let the kids play with them. Shit, less money to spend on new toys.

  "Oh yeah, my old puppet collection," he said, swiping One Eye from Grant. He looked closely at the puppet. It didn't look right. In it's one black eye, it held a lot of … He wanted to say hate. He wanted to say self-loathing. He wanted to say the stuff he used to see in his own eyes when he looked into the mirror, but that didn't make sense. This was a fucking puppet and that was a goddamn button, not an actual eye, and it couldn't hold emotion any more than the grass below his feet could.

  He dropkicked it across the yard as Grant and Vanessa tore into the bag, pulling out dozens of ridiculous puppets. Grant shoved his hand into a furry red one wearing a tinsel boa around its fat neck. The boy held it up to Kevin and said, "This one wants to chew off your ears!"

  Vanessa waved around a dragon puppet with a large, cotton-spewing gash across its belly. "This one wants to chew off your penis, Daddy!"

  Kevin clenched his teeth. Where was this violent talk coming from all the sudden? He thought of the look in the one puppet's eye. Was it the puppets? Were they influencing the kids somehow? Ridiculous. These kids probably just really did have the Allin family genes. "Don't talk like that, kids. It's not normal."

  Grant and Vanessa frowned in tandem for a second before giggling and going back to the business of sorting through the puppets. Kevin wondered why he hadn't thrown them away. Wait, hadn't he? Well, obviously not.