D.O.A. Extreme Horror Anthology (33 page)

“I wish I could see that son of a bitch today,” Billy explained to the newest little Ralph, sitting quietly and patiently, awaiting dinner. “I’d show him the difference between an asshole and a human being.”

Billy turned from the infant back to the pot of rain water he was heating over a stove fashioned out of a broken, twisted shopping cart. A small fire heated the wire meshes of the shopping cart and, in turn, brought the water to a boil.

“Almost ready,” he assured the little girl.

Billy should never have made it to college. He was a D student at best, usually passing because the coach at Beaumont High frequently threatened to beat the crap out of any teacher who might fail his star center. The University of Texas ignored all the rules governing who was eligible to attend and recruited Billy on a full scholarship.

Ralph’s middle school prediction that Billy would never get laid was put to rest the moment he told girls he was going to play football in Austin.

“Coach says I’m gonna start right away.”

And with those simple words, he managed to sleep with a dozen different young women his freshmen year all while knocking defensive linemen five yards backwards every time the Longhorns ran the football.

“Where’s Ralph when you need him?” he had joked to his friends and parents as TV cameras showed up after games to ask him why he was so brilliant.

“Well,” he’d smile, thinking how far away that toilet in the sixth grade was, “I guess I’m just good at what I do.”

The Longhorns almost won a national title his freshmen year. The quarterback and running backs and wide receivers got most of the attention, but it was Billy’s punishing blocking that brought the team to the edge of glory.

“You shoulda’ seen me,” he said to little Ralph, “girls, media, they all loved me.” He beamed as he dropped some old, dirty vegetables he found in a dumpster behind Von’s Supermarket into the stew he was preparing.

His professors were forced to pass him despite the fact that he never studied and never came to class. He met June Walker, the daughter of a state congressman. She was proper, beautiful and dutiful, and promised to make him happy once he made it to the pros and brought in healthy million-dollar paychecks. They were going to be married and create babies and visit relatives on holidays and live out Norman Rockwell’s wet dream.

His face soured. He thought about summer camp, just before his sophomore year. A freshmen named Barry Brown hit him square on the head in a downhill drill. At first it was diagnosed as a concussion. When Billy tried to stand up after the hit, the world spun around him and he fell back down. He was out for almost a minute.

As camp continued, Billy’s performance on the field deteriorated. His memory began to vanish to the point that he often had to ask June who she was in the middle of a date. Medicine at the time managed to deduce that he had suffered severe brain damage.

Billy picked up an old salt shaker and seasoned the broth. “You’d be amazed,” he explained to little Ralph, “how quickly life will take everything away from you.”

Within a month, he lost his girlfriend, his scholarship, and was sent back to live with his parents in Kansas.

“We can’t afford to mind you,” his father announced one day, and then allowed Billy to pack a suitcase full of his clothes, dropped him off at the bus depot with three hundred dollars and wished him well.

He rode the Greyhound to Los Angeles simply because the road ended there. He lived on the streets from that point on. Alongside veterans and drug addicts and other unfortunate folks who had made the trip to the land of gold only to be disappointed by the reality that those who had the wealth weren’t giving it away.

The house he currently squatted in was a rundown number on Serrano, just above Fifth Street. The Korean owners had given up on trying to restore it as the wood was rotted beyond repair and rats and mice nested by the thousands in the walls.

Billy had learned how to digest rodents long before he moved in, so they didn’t bother him. If he saw a rat waddle across the floor he would catch it, kill it and cook it. Soon they figured out that he was the most dangerous predator they had ever encountered and stopped showing their tiny snouts when his scent was in the air.  It was about this time that Billy took to saving discarded infants.

When he had pulled little Ralph out of the dumpster, she was covered with grime and filth and grease and cried non-stop.

“It’s alright,” he had assured her, “I’m gonna make things better for you.” It broke his heart every time he found a baby like that.

“Let’s get you washed up.” He had jumped the Red Line to McArthur Park and dunked the infant in the lake until the dirt was gone. He held her under water, waiting for her to stop crying and fidgeting, assuring him she was ready to be saved.

“Looks just about right.”  He smiled at little Ralph, still staring blankly at him from the table. He picked up her purple, stiff body, and put her in the pot for dinner.

About the Authors

Stacy Bolli
is a busy single mother to three incredible children and hails from the beautiful sun soaked state of Florida. Stacy has several works published in anthologies and on-line magazines including: Bonded By Blood II: A Romance In Red, Best Of House Of Horror: 2010 and Sins & Tragedies, to name a couple. She is also a proud staff member to the on-line magazine “The Dark Fiction Spotlight.”

Uri Grey
is a game writer, translator, humanist, twitterist and storyteller from Israel. A D&D instructor by day and a freelance writer by night, Uri has written games and short fiction for numerous publications, including Wizards of the Coast, Paizo, Mongoose, Bull Spec and Brain Harvest. He lives in urigrey.com and rather enjoys the view, particularly during the sunrise, to which he likes to refer as ‘bedtime...’

Quinn Hernandez
hails from the Quad Cities where he is a full time family man.  His work has appeared in the anthologies, Through the Eyes of the Undead, Back to the Middle of Nowhere, Oh, the Horror!, and Dark Things 3. Upcoming publications include, Shadows Within Shadows and Fearology: Terrifying Tales of  Phobias. He thanks you for reading his bio, and he hopes to see you again.

Adrian Ludens
is a member of the Horror Writers Association. He will have a story in the upcoming HWA anthology “Blood Lite 3: Aftertaste”, edited by Kevin J. Anderson. Look for other stories by Adrian in the Blood Bound Books anthologies “NightTerrors,” “Unspeakable” and “Seasons in the Abyss.” Visit his author page on Amazon or find him on Facebook for updates and links.

John McNee
is employed as a reporter for a local newspaper on the west coast of Scotland. In his spare time he writes horror fiction. He is a firm believer that the maxim “truth is stranger than fiction” only applies to those suffering from a severe lack of imagination. His work appears elsewhere in the anthologies Ruthless and Gospels of Blood, Psalms of Despair, as well as in the online and print versions of Sex and Murder magazine.

A. R. Braun
has eleven publications. His short works have appeared in Horror Bound, Micro Horror, Downstate Story, the Vermin anthology; the Heavy Metal Horror anthology; Bonded by Blood 2: a Romance in Red, and the up-and-coming Complete Guide to Writing Horror. He has been published three times in SNM Horror. A. R. lives for death metal and records with a studio project where he performs everything but the drums. He also records audio comedy for fun, but will release professional podcasts later. A. R. just finished his first novel and is looking for an agent. Contact him at http://arbraun.com.

Somewhere in southern California lurks a creature by the name of
Robert Essig
. This beast is known to have a macabre fascination with horror and is fortunate to implore an imp of whom whispers dark delicacies to him in the night. Robert’s fiction has been in over 30 publications including Bards and Sages Quarterly, The Scroll of Anubis (Library of the Living Dead), Tales of the Talisman, Everyday Weirdness, and Withersin. He is the editor of the anthologies Through the Eyes of the Undead (Library of the Living Dead) and Malicious Deviance (Library of Horror).

Calie Voorhis
has over 15 short story publications, including stories in Ray Gun Revival, Beyond Centauri, Fusion Fragment, Andromeda Spaceways Magazine, and stories in the print anthologies Anywhere But Earth, Dead Set: A Zombie Anthology, Farspace 2, and Space Sirens. She holds a BS in Biology from UNC-Chapel Hill, an MFA in Writing Popular Fiction from Seton Hill University, and is an Odyssey workshop alumnus. She lives in North Carolina, where her official “day” job is at Thalian Hall Center for the Performing Arts as Assistant Technical Director.

Kenneth Yu
is a writer from the Philippines whose work has seen print in his country’s various publications, including the Philippine ezines Usok and Best Of Philippine Speculative Fiction 2009, and in the anthologies Philippine Speculative Fiction IV, V, and VI. “Cherry Clubbing” placed 3rd in the Neil Gaiman-sponsored Third Philippine Graphic Fiction Awards in 2010. Elsewhere, his stories have been accepted in The Town Drunk, AlienSkin, and Innsmouth Free Press. He also won Fantasy Magazine’s 2009 Halloween Flash Fiction contest. He also has fiction podcasts due out in 2011 at Pseudopod.org and at Dunesteef Audio Fiction Magazine.

Teaching prose at a university in the sleepy Costwolds,
KJ Moore
is equally grateful and surprised to be employed, published and read.

Glynn Barrass
has been writing fiction and poetry for just over four years. His favorite genres being zombie fiction and the Cthulhu Mythos, he intends to write a lot more of both in the future. Glynn apologizes if upon reading Plague Hulk you develop a strong aversion to eating either mushrooms, or apples, but secretly hopes the story has just that effect. Hailing from the North East of England, he shares his home with his cat Sisko, and a few friendly ghosts he’s met over the years.

C.M. Saunders
began writing in 1997. His work has appeared in numerous magazines, newspapers, ezines and anthologies, including Fortean Times, Enigma, Urban Ink, Nuts & Record Collector. His latest novella Dead of Night  is available now on Damnation Books, along with his critically-acclaimed Apartment 14F: An Oriental Ghost Story. When not writing he teaches at a media college in Hunan Province, southern China.

James L. Grant
is currently a computer tech for a major company by day, cartoonist/novelist by night. His best-known work is Two Lumps, an online comic about cats that has resulted in 7 collections published by Stonegarden Books. His short fiction has appeared on Gothic.net, Bloodlust UK, and Weird tales, as well as various other magazines. Grant lives in Dallas, Texas, with his wife and conspirator, Mel Hynes.

Matthew Keville
is thirty-four years old and lives in New York City, where he spends his time reading, writing, watching creature features both old and new, sublime and ridiculous, and exploring those parts of the city that tourists usually can’t find. His favorite New York activity is watching midnight showings of cult movies at

arthouse theatres. 

JW Schnarr
is the evil mastermind behind Northern Frights Publishing. He currently resides in Champion, Alberta Canada with his daughter and a grumpy turtle. When not writing, editing or publishing, he can be found scheming. And watching sports. A member of the HWA, he is the Editor of Shadows of the Emerald City and War of the Worlds: Frontlines. Look for his Short Fiction collection Things Falling Apart as well as his novel Alice and Dorothy, a fairytale of sex, drugs, and murder. Both will be available in 2011.

JW Schnarr wants to be your friend on Facebook.

Tonia Brown
lives in the hills of North Carolina with her fantastic husband and an ever fluctuating number of cats. She has an identical twin sister, who also happens to be her bestest friend. She likes fudgsicles and coffee, though not always together, and has probably seen more corpses in her lifetime than she cares to admit in certain company. You can learn more about her and her moniker, Regina Riley, at www.thebackseatwriter.com

Craig Saunders
lives in Norfolk, England, with his wife and three children. He used to have three black cats, but they were unlucky. Craig started out writing fantasy, followed by science fiction, then humor. It took eight novels before he figured out that he was a horror writer, but Craig hasn’t wasted any time since, with thirty horror shorts and four horror novels under his belt.

When he’s not writing, Craig pretends to listen to his family while making up stories on scraps of paper. Follow his blog at www.petrifiedtank.blogspot.com.

Forrest Ingle
is twenty-four years old. He currently lives in Shelby, North Carolina. He is a graduate of Cleveland Community College. His fiction has previously appeared in Twisted Tongue and Rage Machine Magazine.

R. Warren Smith
lives in the Flyover Realms (aka Missouri), loves to read and write and read and write some more.