DOA III Read online

  Edited by:

  Marc Ciccarone

  & Andrea Dawn

  Copyright © 2017 by Blood Bound Books

  “I’d Give Anything For You” copyright ©2003 by Jack Ketchum & Edward Lee

  “Red” copyright ©1986 by Richard Christian Matheson

  All other stories are original to this volume and are copyright ©2017 to their respective authors.

  All rights reserved

  ISBN: 978-1-940250-26-7

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organizations, places, events, and incidents either are the product of the authors’ imaginations or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidential.

  Artwork by Andrej Bartulovic

  Interior Layout by Lori Michelle

  www.theauthorsalley.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  First Edition

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  www.bloodboundbooks.net

  NOTCHES by Sean Eads and Joshua Viola

  THE BROKEN HEARTED by T. Fox Dunham

  N WORD by Shane McKenzie

  SKIPP’S SPLATTERPUNK ALPHABET SOUFFLE by John Skipp

  TAKEAWAY NIGHT by T.M. McLean

  BURNT by Luciano Marano

  JUNK by Ryan Harding

  THE PACKAGE by Kristopher Rufty

  RED by Richard Christian Matheson

  8 OUT OF 10 by Daniel I. Russell

  THE MACHINE by Bentley Little

  POSTHUMOUS by Lloyd Kaufman & Lily Hays Kaufman

  BURY THEM DEEPER by David Sandner

  THESE BEAUTIFUL BONES by Betty Rocksteady

  SUBJECT #270374 by C.M. Saunders

  BEER BATTERED by K. Trap Jones

  L’AMUSE BOUCHE by Hal Bodner

  PROUD PAPA by Adrian Ludens

  CRY THE BANSHEE by C. Cameron Rossi

  TERRORSLUTS FOR ETERNITY VERSUS THE UNGODHEADS OF THE INTERDIMENSIONALS by Alistair Rennie

  WE BELIEVE IN 5B by Airika Sneve

  TAKING ROOT by Christoph Weber

  THE BLISS POINT by Wrath James White

  WOEFUL CITY by Garrett Cook

  RITCHIE by Eric J. Guignard

  I’D GIVE ANYTHING FOR YOU by Jack Ketchum and Edward Lee

  HOSTILE by Jeff Strand

  METAL HEAT by Jaap Boekestein

  REPULSIVE GLAMOUR by John McNee

  THE BITCH by Kristopher Triana

  NOTCHES by Sean Eads and Joshua Viola

  SEAN EADS AND JOSHUA VIOLA

  Alice had never cut herself down there before.

  To judge by their reactions, neither had Jill, Julienne, Mary, Rachel or Olivia.

  And to think, all this time everyone called it a gash.

  That’s what Alice was thinking before the school went into lockdown and Ms. Atta was shot dead right outside the classroom door. Her blood seeped into the room even now, a heavy flow that seemed to skate on the cold, industrial tile floor, vainly seeking some absorbent fiber.

  It was weird to think of Ms. Atta being dead. They’d only just gotten to really know her, despite spending many hours together in this little room repurposed for their counseling sessions. It figured she’d be killed just as their umpteenth meeting had finally resulted in a breakthrough, all of it hinged on Ms. Atta’s dark but intriguing revelation that she’d also danced with the blade.

  No, not just danced with it. Married it. Fucked it. All the other teachers were white bread and butter knives. Alice had always felt like the woman hated the bullshit she had to tell the girls in their counseling sessions. Alice certainly knew she hated it. Sometimes they’d make eye contact and it was like both wanted to cut through the lies, find truth and get real.

  Well, today things had gotten real.

  And then that asshole Tommy Mostow ruined everything.

  Everyone was wearing identical long-sleeved shirts over their regular clothes. The word NeSSIe was embossed across the chest in red. They’d created the shirts two counseling sessions ago, under Ms. Atta’s guidance. The girls all knew what NSSI meant, but Ms. Atta insisted on reminding them one last time in her thick Nigerian accent.

  “Wearing these shirts is an act of protest because, like the Loch Ness Monster, too many people don’t believe non-suicidal self-injury exists. But you exist, don’t you? And your existence is wonderful.”

  Mary raised her hand. “But what do the two e’s stand for?”

  “Not a damn thing,” Ms. Atta said. “Which, in my opinion, makes it all the better.”

  Alice had been the first to take the plunge and put the shirt on, pushing her slightly oversized head through the neckline. It was a bit tight on her and felt like a corset, but she was too excited by Ms. Atta’s enthusiasm to backtrack. The rest soon followed, and Ms. Atta beamed at them.

  “Do you feel empowered now?”

  “No,” the girls said.

  “Of course not. It’s not fabric that empowers you. It’s the blade.”

  Well that certainly got their attention, especially after so many sessions where Ms. Atta had droned on about how the desire to cut themselves was the psychological manifestation of blah blah blah. Mary cut herself because she hated her father; Olivia because she couldn’t handle rejection; Jill because she felt numbed by modernity. Julienne sliced herself over loneliness and Rachel because she was overweight.

  As for Alice, she convinced herself it was the best way to keep track of time. Nobody believed her, of course. And Alice couldn’t blame them. Cutters always made up bullshit excuses for dealing with the pain. But Alice thought hers was the most unique.

  Ms. Atta smiled at them in their matching shirts. “I think we’re finally ready to do something new,” she said. “I want all of you to roll up your sleeves. Show your cuts to each other,” Ms. Atta said.

  “I don’t want to show my body,” Rachel said. “I’m so fat.”

  “Then do you cut because you want to whittle it away?”

  The question may have seemed like Ms. Atta sought understanding, but Alice found no warmth there. She discovered truth in the hardness of the counselor’s tone. Challenging, wonderful truth.

  “You first,” Alice said.

  Ms. Atta looked at her. “Since you need courage,” she said, and her fingers went to the buttons of her blouse. Little by little, the shirt came open. The girls leaned forward with each revelation. By the time Ms. Atta had revealed her perfect stomach, Alice had reflexively jerked both her sleeves up past the elbow. They all did, and the scabs showed in patterns as unique and individual as red frost on glass.

  The moment felt breathless to Alice, yet all she heard was everyone’s panting. She took in the other girls’ cuts and they took in hers as Ms. Atta looked pleased, standing among them with her shirt on but open, her skin so dark and perfect. It was only Ms. Atta’s perfection that blemished the moment, that gave Alice any thought that somehow she and the girls had been tricked into more counseling crap dressed up as something taboo. Hell, most of Alice’s cuts weren’t even on her arms anyway. So if Ms. Atta wanted a true revelation, Alice decided she might as well give them all a real eyeful.

  She pulled her shirt off and stood before them in just a bra.

  There was no mirror in the room, but Alice thought she could see herself through Ms. Atta’s stunned eyes. The counselor came and walked around her, inspecting her from belly button to shoulder. Did the sheer
number of cuts surprise her? Or was it their pattern?

  “Tally marks,” Ms. Atta said. She had such open wonder in her expression that Alice couldn’t help but feel proud.

  “Yes,” Alice said. “I make them with a box cutter. It gives me the precision I like. Four vertical marks and then a slash. Over and over again. One arm, then another. Then the stomach. Funny how the knife tickles the ribs.”

  The other girls swarmed her, their fingertips tracing the lacerations, perhaps finding Braille in the scabs. Alice ignored them. She and Ms. Atta were having a moment.

  “What do you tally, Alice?”

  “Time,” she said. “Loves. Failures. Dreams and crushed hopes. Disappointments. Expectations. The number of butterflies I find struggling in spider webs on my way to school. They all run together in my mind and on my flesh—after the blade.”

  Ms. Atta trembled and retreated two steps. For a moment Alice thought she’d misjudged the woman, mistaking disgust for thrall. But the darkness filling Ms. Atta’s eyes told Alice there was something more sinister to her behavior. The girls weren’t being tricked. She stepped toward Ms. Atta, closing distance, the girls pressing along with her.

  “Show me,” Alice whispered, her gaze roaming over Ms. Atta’s bare arms, her ebony skin perfect over supple muscle. Clearly this flesh had never known even simple blemishes, much less the intrigues of a razor. “Show me the cuts. I know they’re there. You’re like us—I know you are.”

  “Not like you,” Ms. Atta said. “I never had the choice.”

  “Choice?” Alice said. “Don’t you mean power? To take the knife and slice open the skin like slitting a cocoon.”

  Alice found herself in a staring match with Ms. Atta, and for the first time wondered just how old the counselor was. Probably not even thirty, and now that she’d dropped the pretense of her authority, she seemed even younger. She was so much like them, fellow sister of the blade.

  “Is it your thighs?”

  “None of those places,” Ms. Atta said.

  “Then where?”

  Only Alice talked, but she knew she spoke for the group. Psychically they demanded Ms. Atta strip, all but tearing her clothes away with their collective gaze. She must have felt the pressure—the sweet call to release herself from secrets, which to Alice was the essence of cutting. Looking toward the closed door, she let her unbuttoned blouse slink off her shoulders.

  Once more Alice verged on feeling tricked. “Where are the cuts, Ms. Atta? Show us.”

  The woman was quiet for a long moment. Alice focused entirely on Ms. Atta’s hands, willing them to move. Then they did. Just enough. Her left hand raised her skirt up as the right pushed her panties down—again just enough.

  To Alice it was like Ms. Atta had the face of God down there.

  “Men in my country did this to me, as they do to most women. These scars are where my clitoris used to be.”

  Ms. Atta’s vagina looked so foreign the sight of it closed Alice’s throat and opened her eyes wider than she’d ever experienced. Such mutilation had never occurred to her. It was something she’d heard on the news as background noise, or in social studies class. But Ms. Atta made it real and compelling. Suddenly Alice saw the counselor as a girl, ten or eleven years old, being forced to the ground as unsympathetic faces gathered to watch some tribal elder come with sharpened flint or ancient ceremonial dagger to hack and scrape some of her away, the flesh shaved back like the rind off an orange.

  Alice touched the base of her throat as a wave of inadequacy washed over her. The cuts across her body, whose thrill of pain and endurance had been a source of pride, felt like some unimaginative stick figure drawing now that she beheld the Matisse of Ms. Atta’s disfigurement.

  There were other cuts across her groin, some as fresh as this morning. Lacerations up and down the inner thigh and across the folds of her labia, which Ms. Atta now brought to the girls’ attention with her fingers.

  “The emotional pain of the violation never ceased. I felt the need to keep going.”

  “You’re so brave,” Alice said, almost breathless. She looked back at the girls, wondering if they shared the same thought.

  Ms. Atta was quiet a moment. “Violence in thought and deed is why we cut. It symbolizes transformation, and each slash is transformative. That is what you tally, Alice: your endless transformations.”

  “Yes,” Alice said, her tone confident.

  Julienne said, “I don’t care about symbolism, I care about how the cut feels.”

  Alice turned wildly back to her, flashing her approval. Julienne was normally so shy, the last of all girls to speak. Already Ms. Atta’s display had worked wonders.

  Transformation indeed. Ms. Atta put her panties and skirt back into place.

  “Regardless, as in all things, symbolism comes first,” the counselor said and looked at the clock on the wall. “There’s enough time for one more lesson.”

  Alice nodded impatiently.

  “Poetry,” Ms. Atta said.

  The girls twisted their faces. Poetry was for the journals they kept in fifth grade. Now they wrote in flesh.

  Ms. Atta laughed. “Don’t be so glum. We’re going to create our poems the way William S. Burroughs did.”

  Alice shook her head, earning an extra twinkle in Ms. Atta’s eyes. “I’m surprised. You of all people should know of the cut-up method.”

  The girls leaned forward, drawn by the phrase.

  “Burroughs would take magazines and newspapers and slice words from them until he had hundreds of fragments. He’d toss them into the air until they were all jumbled together. Then he’d reassemble them into new meanings.”

  “Like refrigerator magnet phrases!” said Olivia.

  Alice smiled. “I want to take the knife, dripping with blood, and slide it into the paper and cut all the words out like little hearts. I want to make a haiku. No, fuck haikus. I want to make a sonnet celebrating the unkindest cut of all.”

  “I’ll get some magazines from the library. You all have your razors with you, right?”

  The girls feigned innocence until Ms. Atta shot them an arch look. Then they opened their purses—all but Alice, who really was a purist for box cutters. But those were too hard to sneak past the school’s metal detectors—which were going off now, a distant siren down another long corridor.

  “Good,” Ms. Atta said. “I’ll be back in a few minutes.” She opened the door and stepped out.

  A gunshot cracked in the distance, sending the girls shrieking back. The impact punched a hole through Ms. Atta’s chest and dropped her in the doorway. Blood gushed from the wound and swam across the floor. Ms. Atta’s eyes were still open and fixed upon their final vision.

  The twinkle Alice saw a moment ago was gone now.

  There were more shots and screams, and then Tommy Mostow stepped into view, his back to the girls, checking his weapon’s magazine. He was sixteen but looked thirteen, and his baggy camo pants and black t-shirt did nothing to age him. Even the assault rifle in his hands just made him seem like a little boy playing war in his backyard. Except this wasn’t his backyard, and Ms. Atta was dead.

  Alice barely heard him say, “Dumb bitch,” over the screams and alarms. He put another burst of bullets into her body. Students charged out of their classrooms and through the hall like a herd of frantic animals. Tommy snapped up the gun and fired at them. The chaos must’ve entranced him, because he didn’t seem to be aware of the girls gaping through the open door.

  Alice slowly crept toward Tommy, flinching each time he pulled the trigger. The girls followed.

  “Five more dead fucks,” Tommy said, ceasing fire. Alice watched him take out a small pocketknife and make notches on the gun’s barrel. Four hash marks and a slash.

  “You tally, too.”

  Tommy sprang back and dropped the knife. Alice stared into his eyes and found a dark, kindred pain, but no understanding of it. He’d have learned a lot from Ms. Atta, but instead he had to ruin it for everyone.
On a much more significant level, of course, Alice realized she’d found and lost her religion in the space of ten minutes.

  The girls charged before he could take aim. They came slashing, dicing him across the forearms. Blood pulsed in spurts from the wounds. Tommy howled and dropped his precious toy as they drove him down, one of the girls kicking the gun away. The principal’s voice echoed through the PA system, urging the students to stay inside and barricade the doors. The alarm was still blaring, but the hallway was empty now. True to what she’d heard, Alice saw five bodies a few rooms down.

  Alice dragged Ms. Atta’s body into the classroom. “Bring him here!” she shouted.

  Completely overpowered, Tommy was pulled kicking and screaming through Ms. Atta’s blood and into the room. Alice shut and locked the door, then turned to study their captive. His face was wet, his eyes puffy and red, snot bubbling in his nose. He looked like a kid brother bullied by an abusive older sister and her friends. His shirt and pants had been gashed, revealing scrawny, bald flesh. Crimson oozed from several cuts to his forearms.

  “You killed Ms. Atta, asshole,” Alice said.

  “I—I’m sorry.” His voice was as whiny and weak as a first grader’s. No wonder he preferred the speech of guns.

  Alice scrunched her face. “No you aren’t. You’re about as far from sorry as anyone can be.”

  “I just wanted people to stop making fun of me.”

  The girls stood watch over Tommy, razorblades in hand, while Alice contemplated the spread of Ms. Atta’s blood. It was heavy and dark, almost menstrual. Alice thought again about the sheer pain of genital mutilation and cutting herself down there. What courage would that take? She almost wished there could be someone to hold her down and remove her clitoris, her labia, her everything, enshrouding her in a pain surpassing death. Surely she would transform into a being of light.

  Alice’s eyes widened. She held her breath and stared down.

  Ms. Atta laid there, naked and much younger now—not quite a teenager. Her legs were splayed, her clitoris freshly shorn away. Blood streamed from the wound, with the arc of a water fountain. It splashed over the toes of Alice’s sneakers and she hurried to kick her shoes and socks off and slick her soles. Ms. Atta’s youthful, glossy eyes stared at Alice. She spoke, but her voice came from her mutilated groin, a chant as sure as a tribal drum beat: