DOA III Read online

  Vicki moved a hand under the bleach-smelling covers and ran her fingers up Andrea’s bare leg. Yes, she knew that Andrea would need to feel encouraged and supported. She would need to feel loved. Her fingertips moved up over Andrea’s knee to her thigh. Unlike with her mother, Vicki knew what to do now. She knew how to help. Her hand moved under Andrea’s paper gown and found its way between her legs. Beneath the bandages, Andrea moaned. It was an ambiguous sound, painful arousal.

  “I know,” Vicki whispered. “First it will only hurt. But it will get better. Soon, you won’t even remember why you were so afraid.”

  Vicki worked her fingers. Andrea stirred and moaned louder. She squirmed and tried to pull away. Vicki grabbed her arm, dug her nails in hard and shushed her.

  “I’m right here,” she said. “I’ll never leave you alone.”

  It was true. That was another way that Andrea would not be like Catherine. She couldn’t kill herself even if she wanted to. Vicki would see to that. She would be around all the time and she would give Andrea what all those men, what even her own brother, could never give Catherine: affection without end. Idolatry.

  She leaned close, put her lips to the thick gauze covering what was left of Andrea’s ear and sang softly.

  I can see we’re thinking ’bout the same things

  And I can see your expression when the phone rings

  We both know there’s something happening here

  She playfully licked the fabric cocoon covering her love’s mouth, exploring her own damaged doll. Vicki felt herself getting wet inside Andrea’s stolen, red panties.

  “I’ll help you change,” Vicki whispered. “I’ll take care of you.”

  Luciano Marano is a newspaper reporter, photojournalist and author. His award-winning reporting, both written and photographic, has appeared in numerous national and regional publications. Burnt is his first published work of fiction. A U.S. Navy veteran, he enjoys reading, jogging, craft beer, oldies music, traveling to new places, and would choose Wolverine-style healing abilities if he could have any superpower—or maybe just the ability to grow Wolverine-style sideburns. His favorite movie is Point Break and his favorite book is Something Wicked This Way Comes. Originally from rural, western Pennsylvania, he now resides near Seattle, Washington.

  Get to know him better at www.luciano-marano.com or citmyway101.wordpress.com.

  JUNK by Ryan Harding

  RYAN HARDING

  Nick didn’t know where the impulse came from, but he followed it with vigor. It seemed to have been there as long as he could remember, like a post-hypnotic suggestion. Those moments were the only ones that mattered in his life. All the rest was simply preamble and postscript to the thrill.

  The website was called InterphaZ. Nick thought of it as some kind of glory hole for casual conversation, a way to meet new people from all walks of life and forge some kind of friendship or perhaps even a relationship. A complete waste of time, in other words, but it hadn’t taken him long to realize its potential for his own needs. That’s when the fun began. And it hadn’t let up in the past four months.

  Virgins were the conquest—the ones who just signed up on InterphaZ and were more likely not to have had the random chat experience spoiled for them. New arrival HelKat84 looked promising, an attractive blond with hair tied up in two twists on her avatar. Like horns, he thought at first, but then realized they were supposed to affect cat ears. She must have liked what she saw from his avatar and profile (expertly crafted to present a charming and unthreatening persona after weeks of trial and error), because she accepted the chat request. Her webcam feed sprang up in the left corner of his screen.

  He had it down to a science. As soon she accepted his request, he bolted up from his ergonomic chair and hit his mark like a consummate pro. The view of his maroon shirt and plain face—eyes too close together, nose too thin as if compressed by the nearness of his eyes, his fingers curled over his chin to suggest a pensive harmlessness—vanished in a flash, a smash cut leaving HelKat84 with a window to the bearded thatch of his scrotum. He lifted his shirt to allow her the unhindered view. And of course he was rock hard; how could he not be? This was the pinnacle. He could have run dick-first into a brick wall and crashed through like the Kool-Aid Man.

  “Ugh!” HelKat84 grunted over the computer speakers. She recoiled from the image, eyes squinched shut like he’d proffered a photo of children blown to pieces in a drone strike rather than a pulsing boner. The resolution on webcams always left much to be desired, so it wasn’t like she could see Rand McNally tributaries of veins spreading the good word about his arousal through the length of his girth, but if she wanted to act like it was the first time Cinderella went to ball, Nick was all for it. This was the kind of reaction he relished best.

  HelKat84 finally realized she had the power to disconnect this live feed to genital horror, and she groped for her mouse with one hand. The other she kept in front of her eyes to block him, like he could glaze her face through the computer screen. E-facial, the next stage of human evolution.

  “Sick bastard!” she shouted.

  HelKat84 has disconnected this chat.

  Nick sat down again, grinning ear to ear. Would she report him? It wouldn’t be the first time. Nick changed his ISP address like some people changed their Facebook status. There were always ways around banishment.

  He went ahead and blocked her. The prospect of a sequel down the line was amusing in theory—just when you thought it was safe to InterphaZ...—but it gave them time to process the encounter and reflect on what they should have said for maximum damage, a tirade against him and his ilk. They could run these little mental fire drills and assure his surprise reappearance (with a new name and profile) displayed the law of diminishing returns. Better to hit and run.

  “Cock and awe, bitch.”

  This had been a good night with consistently satisfying reactions—disgust, horror, anger. Some nights were less fulfilling, prompting only indifference, boredom, and sarcasm. Is that all you’ve got? My webcam doesn’t have a microscope feature, little man. Not tonight, though. They cringed, they shuddered. One even shrieked. The cross in her avatar suggested big time Christian beliefs. She was probably kneeling in broken glass and flagellating herself. Nick’s personal project tomorrow during the misery of the call center would be to craft a more religious-friendly profile. That would be fishing with dynamite, something he should have considered long ago. Few were more predisposed to be forever haunted by the specter of Nick’s throbbing gristle.

  It was funny to think he would never have done something like this in different circumstances. On a crowded bus or in line at Starbucks, never. There were real world penalties for that, jail time from the cops, pepper spray, and sharp fingernails from the civilians. Doing it online in the privacy of his own apartment, though, it may have been unwanted, but it was tolerated, the same as someone texting at a movie. You go to a theater, you expect to see the glowing screen of a smartphone during the feature presentation. You go online, someone’s throwing a dick in your face. That was just the way of the world now.

  He hadn’t been thinking of doing it when he bought his webcam. He just expected to chat with different bitches who would get naked on their own cams every week if not every night (law of averages), but it hadn’t worked out that way. When the familiar disappointment shadowed his latest attempt to escape his incessant boredom in life, he was inspired by a new idea with a different objective. This one was working. He was winning.

  A chime played through his speakers. New email alert. He clicked over to the tab. Another InterphaZ notification of his latest expulsion. Failure to uphold community standard… conduct unbecoming... violation of membership agreement… blah, blah. It meant about as much as dying in a video game. It was a fine paid with Monopoly money.

  He frowned at the subject line of another new email: SAVAGE YOUR PENIS B4 ITS 2 LATE! That was a far cry from the usual promises of genital size enhancement and aphrodisiacs. Maybe it was s
upposed to pique his curiosity enough to read it (fail). It must work on someone out there, maybe the sort of person who thought they’d been personally selected to play cash mule for the Prince of Nigeria.

  Nick marked the junk mail as spam, for all the good it would do, and closed the tab.

  His preferred notification of a chat request from InterphaZ—the quaint sound of a ringing phone—brought him back to the mission at hand. This was surprising since Nick was supposed to be locked out again and had expected the need to switch to a new ISP and profile, presto-change-o, before another chat encounter. The notification came from user nerXam83, the avatar a photo of some primo jailbait. She might have handled more dicks than a porn set fluffer or maybe the only cramming she did was for the SATs. (Or as a popular meme once said, why not both?) It was hard to tell these days. The 83 was questionable, but it didn’t necessarily mean year of birth. If it was just some creepy guy, he could pull the plug easily enough.

  Nick accepted. The window appeared in the same sacred place where so many InterphaZ users of yore found themselves blinded by a wall of his junk.

  Nick’s eyelids vanished in comical surprise. NerXam83 was definitely a man, a man who had bested the master of Cock and Awe at his own game. There was a twist to his version of surprise scrotal maneuvers, however. NerXam83 was afflicted. Like something out of a medical textbook passed around in a macabre parlor game to see who puked first. Pustules spread across the shaft of the dick filling his chat window in a formation like bubble wrap. Perhaps it was the delay from the feed where a second here and there was lost, but Nick would swear the fleshy growths pulsated as he watched. Unfortunately, the resolution of this window to repulsion seemed mysteriously like Blu-ray quality to better disgust him with its palette of moist reds and yellows. Some nodules were blood blister-like, while others oozed with a custard syrup in milky tributaries he could see gradually advancing over and between the protuberances of inflamed skin like time lapse photography. NerXam83’s presentation front and center on the world’s sharpest webcam opened the coral reef of penile rot currently festering inches away.

  In Nick’s shock he looked far longer than reason dictated, both grossed out and engrossed by this abomination the same as he would have been by an animal with two heads. Perhaps more so because this was the same species… someone who even shared the same pastime.

  “Ugh!” Nick finally groaned and disconnected the chat without looking directly at it another second, lest he turn to stone. He needed his own eye wash station.

  Some distance from the computer seemed like a good thing, so Nick made his way to bathroom down the hall. An afterimage remained. What could have caused that? Did he bang some leper whore with syphilis near Chernobyl? Nick didn’t think he could have shown his face to the world after contracting something so hideous, much less the spoiled genitals that were part and parcel of it.

  It had to be fake. Dude could just be some special FX wizard looking to freak people out, that was all.

  Sicko.

  Mystery solved, he intended to relieve himself and then get back to the business of flashing his junk in the faces of unwary women on InterphaZ.

  Another bone strike of Cock and Awe, that’s the ticket.

  He unzipped his pants, then forgot all about his special FX theory and plans for scrotal domination as the burst of pain ignited at the release of his bladder.

  “Ow, fuck!”

  He twitched like a frog hooked up to a car battery, the entirety of his world condensed to an inch of blazing fury at the tip of his organ. It was like pissing napalm and he had failed to fireproof his dickhole. His keening wail accompanied this slow eternity of urination, unselfconscious about the thin walls between him and his neighbor. Right now all that mattered, all that existed, was the geyser of molten lava. The last drops singed as well, as if they had claws slashing through membrane on the way out.

  Nick had shut his eyes tight against the onslaught and now opened them to a world blurred by tears of pain. His aim was scattershot from the spasms, leaving splashes of red across the seat of the commode, the roll of toilet paper, the floor, the wastebasket. That’s blood, he thought dumbly, cold sweat beading in his scalp. All of that was blood.

  He tenderly shook off, grimacing at the wetness on his fingers. He already dreaded a couple of hours when the call of nature forced him through this process of torture again. The first time might have only been a warm-up—

  His train of thought derailed.

  Wetness on his fingers? He didn’t think he’d somehow sprayed himself even with all of his cringing a moment ago, but expected to see the same bloody excretion when he examined his hand. It wasn’t, though. It still had traces of blood, but more suggestive of pus. A runny wax not unlike what he saw on the computer a moment ago. He laughed with barely suppressed hysteria because the cause and effect was so impossible. Even if nerXam83 was one apartment over instead of another state or continent altogether, it was no more logical. Nick only looked at a computer screen.

  It went viral, he thought and almost laughed again. It made an ominous sense, however crazy it was, especially when he considered the circumstances. Banned by InterphaZ but still able to receive that one request from the site. Now this.

  Nick’s guts double and triple knotted as he stood in front of the mirror and examined his penis. Perhaps it was largely psychological, but now that he knew the infection was there, his shaft felt tingly and hot, as if he could sense new pustules forming on a microscopic level. He held his length gingerly by the head, inspecting the column with mounting horror. Several sores had burst already from his tightened grip during the throes of anguish. A cobweb of stringy flesh dangled on the underside, having peeled off from the base. The layer revealed was raw, crustacean red.

  Nick met his own stricken gaze in the mirror, mouth agape, his sickly pale reflection commiserating: Are you seeing this?

  Unfortunately he was, and no reset from a universal do-over restored the integrity of his genitalia.

  He had some gauze in one of the bathroom drawers. He didn’t know what else to do but wrap himself up. Smear the bandages with some triple antibiotic (assuming quadruple antibiotic didn’t exist) and pray for a miraculous return to its pristine state while he went through life in the meantime looking like a stunt dick for Claude Rains.

  He reached for the drawer, and that was the point when the corona of his cock seemed to lose solidity and adopt the texture of a sponge. His index finger and thumb pushed trenches into either side instantaneously. He shrieked and withdrew his pincer grip, but the caverns remained. A piece dislodged within the crumpled pillar and dropped to the counter.

  Nick looked around frantically, as if a bottle of Acme Dickhead Skin Regrowth Ointment™ would magically appear somewhere. It didn’t.

  The impulse now was to call for an ambulance, but what would he say? My dick is rotting before my fucking eyes because of some freak’s webcam. Hurry! When they finally accepted it wasn’t a crank call and actually sent someone, what could they do?

  SAVAGE YOUR PENIS B4 ITS 2 LATE.

  Yes, that was what the strange email said. It seemed no more coincidental than nerXam83’s request. He gingerly walked back to the bedroom, stripping off his shirt so it didn’t catch his groin and exacerbate the damage. He launched his email again, heedless of the rancid juices left behind on the mouse and keys and the pitter-pattern of droplets on the carpet from his sores, like melting icicles. The nausea in his stomach churned with greater urgency.

  At last he found the email in his spam folder and opened it. The sender name contained the word InterphaZ (and “no-reply”). There was no text, only an embedded .GIF file of a man with his sex organs on a flat table surface as he swung a meat cleaver at the scrotal pouch, an unsettling smile on his face. An animated balloon obscured the actual hit, filled with the word THWACK!

  That was savage, all right. Not exactly the most tempting prospect for a potential cure.

  B4 ITS 2 LATE.

  2
late for what?

  He looked forlornly at the disgusting thing attached to him, which had been perfectly normal not ten minutes ago. The disease progressed like an old school werewolf transformation with superimposed special FX, a process rapidly achieved.

  “No,” Nick said. “Oh God, no.”

  The sac of his scrotum showed burgeoning, bloated pearls emerging between the furrows. Hundreds of them, like mutant spider eggs primed to hatch an adipocerous offspring. The burning, tingling sensation erupted in full, with tiny needles prickling every millimeter of skin. The sensation was maddening.

  There could be no doubt—it was spreading. Within minutes it had already done this much to him. By the time paramedics arrived, it could be far worse.

  B4 ITS 2 LATE.

  Nick hurried to the kitchen, the droplets now more poignant against linoleum. As he reached for the electric carving knife, he assuaged himself with the countless miracles of modern medicine. People lost body parts all the time and had them sewn back, although Nick of course didn’t want his “gangroin” reattached. But with practical advances in technology, they could basically spin straw into dick, couldn’t they? He wasn’t out of options, as long as he survived this. The solidity of the carving knife handle reassured him. It featured a slide button rather than a trigger, so it would keep cutting if he passed out.

  He called 9-1-1 first for an ambulance, reporting massive blood loss from a carving knife mishap. He claimed it was his fingers since they probably wouldn’t get here any faster anyway. They assured him someone was coming and he hung up, his eyes blurry again.

  He revved the carving knife as he took hold of everything in his other hand, cupping beneath his testicles with the palm, his fingers and thumb forming a C-shape. Any doubts about the necessity of his course of action were neutralized in short order with one last humiliation of the flesh. The patchwork of pustules slipped beneath his fingers like some kind of revolving cylinder, both on his dick and the sac beneath. Skin barely adhered to the organ now. It pulled loose from the stalk with ease, lasagna-colored meat beneath. The loose rope of dangling flesh slid away, abracadabra. It sloughed as a shed snakeskin, popping and bursting in the few places still attached, liquid tendrils stretching like taffy to reveal shimmering tissue. The underside tore with it in a burst as if something had detonated beneath. The sac detached in tandem like a wet rubber glove in his palm. The testicles and cords dropped like dead jellyfish, oysters in a Jell-O mold upon his quivering hand. The emptied pouch hung limp like a flap of torn curtain, the penile skin like the empty husk of some insect draped in his palm. It all clumped wetly to the floor. He watched it go like a wounded soldier unable to hold in his own intestines. There was curiously no pain, other than the trauma of the sickening sight, the nerve endings perhaps jellified now. Clinging contents of the pouch sagged like syrup, halfway to the floor. His actual penis was but a strange glistening tendril apart from the head, which still had its skin and something of its shape save the trenches left from his fingers. Otherwise he beheld something virtually skinless, corroding.