Blood Samples
BLOOD SAMPLES
TALES OF HORROR, CRIME, AND DARK FANTASY
By Jay Bonansinga
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Copyright 2012 / Jay Bonansinga
Copy-edited by: Darren Pulsford
Cover design by: David Dodd
Cover images courtesy of:
http://mariamurphy.deviantart.com
http://forsaken-resources.deviantart.com/
http://ecathe.deviantart.com/
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
THE CHICAGO TRIBUNE says, "Jay Bonansinga has quickly and firmly established himself as one of the most imaginative writers of thrillers. His twisting narratives, with their in-your-face glimpses of violence, are set in an unstable, almost psychotic universe that makes the work of many of his contemporaries look rather tame."
His novels, which include THE WALKING DEAD: RISE OF THE GOVERNOR (2011), PINKERTON'S WAR (2011), PERFECT VICTIM (2008), SHATTERED (2007), TWISTED (2006), and FROZEN (2005), have been translated into 9 different languages. His 2004 non-fiction debut THE SINKING OF THE EASTLAND was a Chicago Reader "Critics Choice Book" as well as the recipient of a Superior Achievement Award from the Illinois State Historical Society. His debut novel THE BLACK MARIAH was a finalist for a Bram Stoker award, and his numerous short tales and articles have been published in such magazines as THE WRITER, AMAZING STORIES, GRUE, FLESH & BLOOD, OUTRE and CEMETERY DANCE, as well as a number of anthologies.
Jay also proudly wears the hat of indie filmmaker: his music videos have been in heavy rotation on The Nashville Network and Public Television, and his short film CITY OF MEN was awarded the prestigious silver plaque at the Chicago International Film Festival. In 2008, his feature-film debut, STASH (based on his short story of the same title collected in CANDY IN THE DUMPSTER), won the Gold Remi at the Houston International Film Festival and Best Comedy at the Iowa City and Queens International film festivals. STASH was shot in Evanston and stars Tim Kazurinsky (POLICE ACADEMY) and the late Marilyn Chambers (INSATIABLE), and will be available On-Demand nationwide on Comcast in December of 2009. Jay has also worked as a screenwriter with horror legend George Romero, Will Smith's production company Overbrook Entertainment, and Dennis Haysbert (THE UNIT).
Jay also is a top corporate media writer.
The holder of a master's degree in film from Columbia College Chicago, Jay currently resides in Evanston, Illinois. He is also a visiting professor at Northwestern University in their Creative Writing for the Media program, as well as the Graduate Writing Program at DePaul University.
Book List
Blood Samples
Bloodhound
Frozen
Head Case
Oblivion
Perfect Victim
Shattered
Sick
The Black Mariah
The Killer's Game
The Sinking of the Eastland: America's Forgotten Tragedy
The Sleep Police
Twisted
Your Blue-eyed Boy
The Walking Dead Series
The Walking Dead: Rise of the Governor
The Walking Dead: The Road to Woodbury
http://www.jaybonansinga.com
jaybona@aol.com
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BLOOD SAMPLES
"Animal Rites" originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #22, (C) 1995 CD Publications; "Necrotica" originally appeared in GRUE Magazine #17, (C) 1995 Hell's Kitchen Productions; "Big Bust at Herbert Hoover High" originally appeared in It Came from the Drive-In, (C) 1996, Daw Books; "Obituary Mambo" originally appeared in GRUE Magazine #13, (C) 1991, Hell's Kitchen Productions; "Glory Hand in the Soft City" originally appeared in Future Crime, © 1999, Daw Books; "Deal Memo" originally appeared in Candy in the Dumpster, © 2006, Dark Arts Books; "Mama" originally appeared in Blood and Donuts, © 2001, 11th Hour Productions; "The Panic Switch" originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #39; "There's Somebody Down Here Wants to Talk to You" originally appeared in These Guns for Hire, © 2006, Big Earth Publishing/Bleak House Books; "Due Date" originally appeared in Flesh & Blood Magazine; "Stash" originally appeared in Cemetery Dance #44; "Black Celebration" originally appeared in Miskatonic University, © 1996, DAW Books; "Burdette Steagal's Barber Shop and Smoke Emporium" originally appeared in Amazing Stories – February 2005; "Mole" originally appeared in Shivers 6 © 2010 by CD Publications; "The Beaumont Prophecy" originally appeared in Spooks © 2004 by 11th Hour Productions; "The True Cause of the Great Depression" originally appeared in Die Spannendstein Weihnachtsrimms, German edition only, 2008, Wunderlich Books; "The Butcher's Kingdom" originally appeared on line, © 2006, Amazon.com, Amazon Shorts; "The Miniaturist" originally appeared in Hardcover, 2011, CD Publications, Signature Series #8: The Miniaturist; all other text © 2012 by Jay Bonansinga/BonaVision.
CONTENTS
FOREWORD
I. THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC
ANIMAL RITES
BLACK CELEBRATION
STEAGAL'S BARBER SHOP AND SMOKE EMPORIUM
II. THE DEVIL MADE ME DO IT
THE PANIC SWITCH
DEAL MEMO
MOLE
III. KINK
NECROTICA
BIG BUST AT HERBERT HOOVER HIGH
STASH
IV. HAUNTED
THE BEAUMONT PROPHECY
OBITUARY MAMBO
DUE DATE
V. NOIR
MAMA
SOMEBODY DOWN HERE WANTS TO TALK TO YOU
GLORY HAND IN THE SOFT CITY
VI. NOVELLAS
THE BUTCHER'S KINGDOM
THE MINIATURIST
THE TRUE CAUSE OF THE GREAT DEPRESSION
NOTES
FOREWORD
"I didn't have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead." The words are Mark Twain's but they get at something I have always felt down to my bones. The novel is my home. I feel most comfortable inhabiting its 75 to 100 thousand square word domain. And we're not talking mansions here. Most of my novels are modest ranch homes with maybe one and a half baths, a fireplace perhaps, some decent paneling in the basement, and perhaps an above ground pool in back. Some of them are sleek and well built, like a sturdy Frank Lloyd Wright prairie special. Others are as awkward and wobbly as an old double-wide trailer. But they're all my natural habitat. I can spread out in them. Walk around in my stockinged feet. Rest easy most nights.
Short stories, on the other hand – not to mention poems — are small, handmade shelters in the wilderness. Tepees on the edge of the frontier. Bivouacs on the side of dangerous cliffs. They're small and lean and spare, and geared toward the rugged individualist. Perhaps that's why I so deeply admire those outdoorsy types who brave the elements in their Spartan little strongholds, making very little money, building it for the sheer joy of the medium — especially those authors who are seasoned explorers in the territories known as The Genres. I think some of the best writing in the English language has been done in the short genre story. From Shirley Jackson's "The Lottery" to Poe's "The Telltale Heart," the short horror story pushes a button in the ps
yche unlike any other medium. The short horror tale is designed for the campfire, the wee hours of night, the lizard's ear.
From H.P. Lovecraft to Ray Bradbury to Harlan Ellison to Clive Barker, these pioneers in the speculative frontier have been at their most eloquent and powerful in that taut, clean, sharp-as-a-diamond area between about 2 and 7 thousand words. Their works have shaped my life as a writer, influenced me beyond words, and can be found coursing through the DNA of the following short tales in this collection.
Are my little puppies in this same league? Not hardly. But many of the stories you are about to sample do answer the one question that I've always felt defines good short fiction: How personal is the writing?
The answer in the case of this volume is, Very.
Consider this foreword your invitation to crawl inside my little pup tents and spend the night. But watch out for bear traps. And stay away from those spiders. And don't mind those distant howls. They're just coyotes... I think. In any event: Welcome to my little shadowy homes-away-from- home.
I hope you enjoy your stay.
Jay Bonansinga
Evanston, Illinois
I. THAT OLD BLACK MAGIC
"Black magic operates most effectively in preconscious, marginal areas. Casual curses are the most effective."
— William S. Burroughs
ANIMAL RITES
Stirring awake, Daddy Norbert found himself tied to a moldy Lazy Boy in the tool shed out back of the garage. Head felt like a rusty nail had been driven into it. Something sticky was digging into his belly. Would have rubbed his pus-bleary eyes, but he found his big calloused mitts hog-tied to the springs beneath him.
"Whylmmmphrump?" Daddy's query was sabotaged by stupid lips.
"Good!" The voice popped out of the shadows like a firecracker. "You're comin' awake."
"lllliihhsh?" Although Daddy's mouth was still asleep, his eyes were sharpening, beginning to make out a faint figure before him.
"Takes it a spell to wear off," the voice said.
Daddy Norbert blinked. "Lizzy... ? That you?"
"Yessir."
"The hell is going on?!"
Stone silence.
Daddy Norbert blinked some more, and started putting things together. His teenage stepdaughter Lizabeth must have slipped him a mickey back at the house and dragged him out here to the tool shed. Girl was seriously wrong in the head. Been that way ever since her mama died. Getting skinnier and skinnier, messin' with that faggotty colored boy up to Little Rock.
Now the girl must've gone stark raving screwy. Crouching in the shadows across from Daddy, fiddling with something that sounded like a tin cup with a nail in it. Girl was crazy as a cross-eyed loon.
"Almost ready," the voice finally said. "Just hold your horses."
"What in the wide friggin' world of sports is going on?!"
"Be still."
"What did you slip me, girl?"
"Called Tranxene. It's temporary, so just shut up and sit still for a minute."
"Don't you sass me!"
Skinny little bitch didn't even react, just kept on working with that rattling box of metal. Daddy's eyes were adjusting to the dark. He could see strips of old duct tape wrapped around his massive girth. Something leather was holding his head in place like blinders on a plough horse. Smelled like wet dog fur.
Daddy swallowed hard. "Lizzy why you doin' this?"
"It's a secret."
"Whattya mean, secret?"
"You'll see."
"I'm sorry," he told her all of a sudden. His bowels were beginning to burn, his mouth going dry as wheat meal. It was dawning on him, this girl could very easily hurt him. Maybe hurt him a lot. "I'm sorry for what I did to you and your mama. You hear me? I'm tellin' ya how sorry I am."
No answer.
"Lizzy?"
She switched on the light.
The sudden glare of an old aluminum scoop light exploded across the shed. Blinking fitfully, Daddy saw the shriveled carcasses splayed across his work bench to his left. His future projects. Parts of a rabbit, a young fox, the hind end of a bobcat. Rusty traps were arrayed across the walls. Behind him, mounted on a shim of hardwood, a deer looked on, its lifeless eyes glimmering.
Daddy looked down at Lizzy and drew in a sudden breath.
She was on the floor, securing one of Daddy's favorite guns, a custom Roberts rifle, into a weird contraption of metal and wood. Looked like a spring loaded skeet shooter. The rattling sound that Daddy had heard must've been the bullet. Lizzy was loading a .219 Zipper into the gun's chamber. The Zipper was Daddy's favorite brand. A 90-grain, heavy powder compression load, the bullet would take down an adult Elk bull at two hundred yards.
The barrel of the rifle had a bead drawn right smack dab on Daddy.
"Now hold on, child!" Daddy Norbert started breathing hard, fighting his restraints, electric current shooting up his spine. Fear made his sphincter contract. "Yyyyyyyyyyyou ain't gonna shoot me just simmer down now!"
"There," Lizzy said softly to herself, finishing the load as though she had just put a cake in the oven. She stood up and gazed at Daddy emotionlessly, her eyes rimmed in dark circles. She looked like a person who had just come home from a funeral. Drained and wrung out. She was holding a jury-rigged triggering device the pull-string from an old push mower. It was tethered to the Roberts. Underneath Lizzy's sleeveless blouse, a tank top had the letters P.E.T.A. imprinted on it. People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.
Daddy had never seen that before.
"Taste it?" she calmly asked him. "The fear?"
"Let-let-let-let-lllet go of that thing," Daddy stammered, "we can talk this out."
"Like the deer?" She bored her gaze into him. "You talk things over with the deer?"
"Wwwwwwaitwaitwaitwait! Just tell me wwwwwwwwhat you want me to do? You want me to say I'm sorry? I'm sorry!
Awright? I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry!"
Lizzy didn't answer. Instead, she closed her eyes, bowed her head, and began mouthing a secret litany. Daddy Norbert started to say something else, but he stopped abruptly when he saw the objects in her other hand. Lizzy was grasping a handful of objects twined together with string. Sprigs of herbs or weeds or some other kind of nonsense that her Jamaican boyfriend had probably given her. Strands of hair, human hair maybe. A silk ribbon, a bookmark from Lizzy's old Concordance bible, and some other strands of unidentifiable fabric. But none of it currently seemed as important, or made as much of an impression on Daddy Norbert, as the tiny black objects hanging from the bottom of the thing.
The broken beads of her dead mother's rosary.
"Hold the phone!" Daddy Norbert barked at her. "You ain't mad about no deer! You're still steamed about your goddamned ma! For God's sake, it ain't my fault she up and died! Already told you a million times, I'm sorry I hit her! You'd think I planted the goddamn cancer in her goddamn cervix myself! It weren't my fault! Now Lizzy, just stop it! STOP IT RIGHT NOW!"
Lizzy kept gazing at him.
"YOU SKINNY LITTLE HALFPINT, PUT THAT GUN AWAY 'FORE I GIVE YOU ANOTHER WHOOPIN'!!"
Lizzy gripped the cable and smiled. Her face was a rictus of pain. "This is for you, great white hunter," she uttered. It sounded rehearsed.
Then she pulled the cable.
"AAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!"
Eyes slamming shut, Daddy Norbert winced. Matter of fact, he winced so hard a little squirt of shit spurted from his anus. He thought he heard the pop. The sharp blast of the hammer hitting the pin, and the bones shattering in his face. But he must've imagined it. Actually, he felt nothing. Just the warmth in the seat of his pants and the painful throb of his heart.
He opened his eyes.
At first, he figured the gun must've misfired. There was a thin veil of smoke rising in the light, and Daddy thought he smelled the oily aroma of gunpowder. Lizzy was backing toward the door, her gaze still riveted to the man. What the hell was going on? Why was she looking at him like that?
"For you...
" she whispered as she slipped through the door and into the cool Arkansas night.
"What the?" Daddy looked down at the gun and studied it for another moment. The black hole of its barrel was staring at him, the smoke diffusing, the silence like a block of ice over Daddy's head. Daddy blinked again and suddenly there were tears in his eyes. All at once, he realized just how lucky he really was. "I'll be a sonoffabitch," he muttered, grinning to himself in spite of his frayed nerves. "Twenty-three years in the woods, and not one dud, and tonight the god damned thing decides to misfire!"
He began to giggle.
"I'll be a swivel-hipped sonoffabitch! Goddamned misfire! GOD DAMNED MISS-FUCKING-FIRE!! WHOOPTY-DO AND FUCK ME BLUE!!"
Daddy laughed and laughed and laughed, and then he looked down at the gun.
His laughter died.
Something had appeared in the mouth of the barrel. Something round. Just barely poking out, the light shining off it like a tiny planet. At first, Daddy wondered if it was an obstruction, an odd fragment of metal that had gotten wedged in there during his last hunting trip. The thing looked familiar, the blue steel gleam winking in the dim light.
The .219 calibre Zipper.
"Holy fuckin' shit," Daddy uttered, staring at the bullet peeking out of the barrel. He'd heard stories of freak misfires, bullets getting lodged in barrels and such. But he never really believed them. Always figured it was whiskey talk, nothing more.
Grin widening, he closed his eyes. "Sweet Jesus, Lord in heaven, I realize I ain't been to church in a month of Sundays, but I wanna thank y'all just the same."
A chill breeze wafted in through the half-ajar door, and it cooled the beads of sweat on Daddy's forehead. He opened his eyes, grinning like an idiot. He could smell the surrounding farms, the sorghum, manure and wet hay. The odors never smelled so good to Daddy Norbert. He was alive, and that was all that mattered. Next step was to figure out how to get out of this fucking chair. Glancing down at the rifle, he took one last gander at the bullet.