But nothing else happened. This virus or biological weapon or whatever it was seemed isolated to just the three of them. A government agency most of the general public had never heard of before shut the theater down and quarantined the auditorium. All of the ticketholders are still being examined at an undisclosed location while biological experts look for the elusive “Gard Factor,” wishing to hell they’d gone to a matinee instead. (The “matinee” thing is conjecture, but the rest—right down to the line about the lobby, which I am proud to say was my own contribution—went directly as written, painted, and painstakingly sculpted over a series of weeks. I kept one of Lee’s fragmented body sculptures . . . like a mini Han Solo in carbonite, dropped and shattered into tiny pieces.)
There seemed to be a lot of mass hysteria going around by that point. You would almost think it was a communicable disease with its own variation of a flu season. The barely repressed panic had returned. I was hearing it in conversations at work while I wrote pamphlets I did not comprehend. I was seeing it in the relief of my neighbors when they made it back to their apartments without being beaten and sodomized by a cartoon. It was in everybody’s sudden mistrust of cell phones (and movie theaters), and the deep reluctance to go anywhere that a lot of people were gathered.
The success of the Gard Incident convinced it was time for our masterwork at last. We started by putting something different on the canvas and in the clay: ourselves.
Section XI
I agreed to go first, and the effect was instantaneous—needle-like punctures over my chest, like a mouthful of extended teeth perforating the skin. It looked like my heart had grown teeth and was attempting to gnaw itself out of me (see figure 11.1), with the ossific slivers simultaneously serving as an alien suture to seal the aperture. Such a disfiguration would disgust anyone who saw it, but Kathaaria changed all that.
Kathaaria was why Ursula wanted my contribution. My fascination with disease had impressed her with a vague poetic passion.
The results we wanted could not be adequately illustrated. Perhaps there could be a view of Earth as seen from space with mushroom clouds expanding all over, but why should we submit ourselves to such a conflagration? You can’t imagine the plans we have for a world running on a different clock. So how do we really draw the rough beast slouching toward Bethlehem for those who won’t be included? Well, along with Lee’s molding of a triple-helix viral cell and Geoff and Ursula’s portrayals of its effects, that is the purpose of this pamphlet. The disease known as Kathaaria has a contagion rate of 100% among people without the deformity described above.
Don’t blame the messenger, but like I said, this never happened. It wasn’t written, and you aren’t reading it. It’s after the end of the world. For those in the next one, though, the suffering we have shaped for you will be very real, as you will see described below in the First Indications of Infection.
A few words about each of the preceding stories, for those with a morbid curiosity.
Bottom Feeder—This was written in January of 2000. If you knew that one of these stories was a tribute to Richard Laymon, you could be forgiven for guessing it was “Bottom Feeder,” which was informed in no small part by “The Tub.” I’m sure many who’ve had a one night stand have had a pregnancy scare—is this story any different? Well, maybe a little.
Damaged Goods—I believe I stitched this together the night before I drove to Atlanta for the World Horror Convention in 1999, where my last minute planning resulted in sharing a hotel room with a couple of guys I hadn’t actually talked to a whole lot before that point—Brian Keene and Mike Oliveri. Such were the benefits of being part of the Horrornet community, where even if you didn’t always know somebody, you may as well have. I’m not sure what I would have come up with given slightly different circumstances, but I had read Lee & Pelan’s Shifters shortly before this, and the whole “pizza cutter” scene communicated to me in no certain terms that I was going to have to go beyond the sensibilities of mere gore and bodily waste to make a real impression. That and a fairly steady diet of the hardcore solo offerings of Sir Lee at the time were integral to this metamorphosis. It was the best reception I ever got from a reading, before or since, and a lot of that was the payoff of no one knowing what to expect from me. The Gross Out Contest is sort of the exception to the rule about making a good first impression, or at least not “good” in the traditional sense. The judges were Richard Laymon, Jack Ketchum (who offered some choice commentary throughout the readings), John Pelan, and Simon Clark. “Damaged Goods” took first place. It is more of a vignette than a short story due to trying to keep time limit considerations for the reading. I have updated this version to adjust continuity of later Von and Greg adventures and lend a bit more gravitas . . . such as it is.