HOW MUCH IS SHE?
Ash Lomen
"How m-m-much, like, is she?"
Granwell asked in a shaky voice, viewing the shivering naked young woman with wide eyes kneeling before him in a transparent hovertube. Her modesty was long gone, slaughtered along with her innocence. She barely attempted to conceal her breasts before the two visitors, one of them probably the first human face she had seen in ages.
"A million. Exactly," said the Valdrott, its form hideous beyond description… it was a swelling mass of perversity-made-flesh.
"My G-God, that’s all… I mean …look, I c-can’t… fuckin’ do this," Granwell stammered.
"God doesn’t exist and you humans have been keeping slaves for millennia."
"We’ve stopped. We’ve e-evolved."
"Bullshit… as you so often like to say. Slavery is still very common on earth… your Global Capitalism simply froths at the mouth for it. It just goes under a different name." The Valdrott’s English was perfect, without any discernable accent, even puckered out of its anus-like mouth.
"One million," it continued, "I’ll even throw in her mother for free."
The mother. Granwell’s perversion went into overdrive.
"D-D-Deal,” Granwell managed to choke out.
Later, Granwell realized how strange the idea of handing over a leather briefcase of Global Credits to an otherworldly alien was…. but he didn’t ask questions. The Valdrott had always provided him the same courtesy.
…
After the human male had departed with his two new slaves, the females just happy to be together once again, having no idea of their new master’s perverse intentions, the Valdrott disposed of the briefcase in the incinerator and began to make notes on the study it had just conducted.
BODIES DOMES LIGHTS
Jordan Krall
Collapsing solar lodges in his lungs: they pop, then implode, then explode, and paint the black mist sky with pale dots. Roars of engines and the pitter-patter of miniscule experiments glistening in universal afterbirth of foreign galaxies.
His whole body is a black hole.
He stumbles through town, a beatnik sleazoid/paranoid/schizoid writer all mixed up on pills and other chemicals he found in the pocket of a thrift store army jacket. Notebooks full of abduction stories: in between the accounts there are blurry photographs of UFOs attached crudely with Scotch tape. In his head, he imagines red city walls and sparkling subatomic glamour. It points him in the direction of Newark. He fights the urge to buy a bottle of cheap vodka and a suit to be buried in. The thrift store had some cheap suits. Ugly and old, sure, but cheap.
He ribs sing like tuning forks. His organs pulsate and purge. His brain bubbles like melting cheese. He stumbles along the streets, spitting and babbling into the solar anus that has appeared in his soft white underbelly.
Those fucking things changed him. Those things made him into a wanderer and now he hasn’t got a home.
He looks up and thinks: there’s my home.
But the stars blink with obscenities. They want no part of him. Not anymore.
A silver disc appears near the moon. It scraps the lunar surface and spreads dust into the air. He chokes. He feels it all and knows it’s worse than the pills and the chemicals and the long nights of shooting up and fucking off.
The lunar dust fills his lungs and recharges the microscopic battery. His whole body is ultra-alive with pain and newborn nerve endings.
He explodes into pieces of flesh/metal/celestial junk. His last remaining bits of consciousness hope his remains will be ingested by all his fellow beatnik sleazoid/paranoid/schizoid writers.
He wants to give a good trip. He wants to be forever.
At least the pain is over.
A TINY WAR
Ash Lomen
Two men faced each other in the center of an ornate metal ring.
One was big, white, dumb and bald.
The other was short, stocky, brilliant and black with long dreadlocks that hung past his knees.
Despite all outside appearances, the two men were brothers. They had both watched in chains as the big blue eyed mother they shared was torn apart in the cruel gears of some Valdrott steam machine just days before their minds were sufficiently warped, pumped, and prepared for the gas.
Hundreds of cramped and creeping spectators surrounded the ring in a living, purple-black mass of phallic eyes, malformed tentacles, and other writhing, groping, oddly malformed limbs. A musky chemical smell like stale semen seeped through their alien pores as the tension built.
The big white man looked down to his brother, “I love you, Charlie.”
Charlie never had the time to respond. The gas was soundlessly released.
The white man dove into his brother before he could even think about his first move. He picked Charlie up and slammed him down upon the cold metal floor with a sound like a sledgehammer meeting a side of frozen beef. Charlie attempted to roll and minimize the assault to his spine while simultaneously locking his ankles around his brother’s midsection, taking the giant down with him, on top of him.
The big man continued his assault, pummeling Charlie’s head against the floor. As Charlie’s face slowly begin to dissolve into pulp beneath his brother’s heavy fists, the smaller, beaten man shifted his mass, and in a flurry of unseen movement it was now Charlie atop and then behind his brother…..ebony arms locked around his thick neck, bleeding crimson upon his pale face.
And just like that… it was over, the snapping of the bigger man’s neck punctuating the lustful hiss of the Valdrott mob.
Charlie dropped to his knees and draped himself across his brother’s naked, lifeless body.
It was then that the assembled Valdrott were informed over the mothership’s telepathic communication system that males with darker skin pigmentation, such as those descended from Middle Eastern, Latin, Asian, or African stock, had become resistant to the effects of the Valdrott gas due to an unknown genetic anomaly.
The circle of Valdrott erupted in a burst of maniacal, alien laughter.
Charlie, now prone over his dead brother, let loose a bloody sob.
FREAK FUCKER
(white god/white subway)
Jordan Krall
Bulbous heads expanding into weaponry. Celestial bones bleached into oblivion, pick-pocketing solar systems. Picking up teeth that have been lodged in the sidewalk cracks. Some blue-breasted cunt is selling crack and she tells me to shut my fucking mouth. I tell her to shut hers first or I’ll fist-fuck her esophagus until it’s hamburger for the wild boys. She smirks, burps, and walks away.
I’ve installed listening devices in those buildings over there-there-and-there. I’ve even installed them in the junk-blobs and now they’re paranoid wrecks, not knowing who the hell is listening in on their shadowy deals of chemical transformations.
Making my way down the street, bumping into pimps, rat-addicts, and suicide queens. Fuck this shit, right? It’s not like I ain’t got nowhere else to go. I’ve got hidden apartments and tree houses and caves and shit all over the place. I’ve even got a farm in New Jersey just in case. And a hole in the clay pits, too.
I sneak into the backroom of a skin flick shop and watch some perverts jacking off over a donkey flick. The animal looks pretty pleased with itself while it sodomizes a pair of emaciated twins who look at least fifty-years old. Their teeth grind deeply into ugly totem poles that look like blue-veined rockets. Shit, the stuff people will do for food, for fame, for everything fucking thing their childhood didn’t give them.