In Laymon's Terms

Angie paused and heard the sobs waiting inside this girl, then another series of images flashed through her head. More daddies, more sobs, more rapes, more pregnancies, but...no more abortions. Her own fetus nibbled at her insides even more swiftly. Then it all clicked.

Angie now drooled a foamy blood. Her eyes twinkled yellow and green, and her lips and teeth grew to a snarling, savage maw. Panic dinned throughout the waiting room. The frumpy receptionist tentatively called for both girls to take their seats.

Angie lifted the oversized sweat suit top, and dug hungry teeth into the girl’s belly. Layers of skin and muscle yielded little resistance, and shredded bits of them dangled from her gut. The twenty-something and receptionist fled, squealing. Angie shivered as the girl shrieked with a terror reminiscent of the night her Daddy knocked her up. She ended it quickly, grabbing the incest-fetus by its neck, and shaking her maw until it cracked. The pounding in her skull slammed her like bricks now. “No memory, no memory...no memory...”

She repeated the words. “No memory, no Daddy, no rape.” The eviscerated gut healed, strands of skin reassembling themselves. The girl quieted, even cooed, then slept.

Deadweight looked over at Angie. “What the fuck was that about?”

Angie stood over the girl, mouth crusting with infant blood, her skin flushing with ruddiness unseen since the night she’d turned. In her womb her own infant rested, its thirst quenched by the blood and the healing. That day was the last that Deadweight actually saw Angie. Angie stayed close, though. Watching Deadweight...watching Becky outgrow her awkwardness. Watching her, and waiting, in case she ever needed her.

Weston Ochse

T WAS AT THE World Horror Convention in Denver, Colorado that I met Dick Laymon. One minute we were being introduced, the next minute we were talking like we were old friends. A half-an-hour went by before we noticed that the people around us were burning a pentagram in the carpet.

The next day as we walked across the glassed-in walkway from one part of the hotel to another, we saw a group of protestors down below, decrying the use of animals for medical research.

“I wish I had a poster board,” I said.

“Why?” he asked.

“So I could write on it how we’re dismembering kitties on the fifth floor and quickly running out of them. PLEASE SEND MORE!”

Dick shot me a wide toothy grin. Above that, in his widening eyes as he comprehended the humorous malevolence of my plan, was a look of such childish glee, I knew that given the right tools, we could stir the crowd into such an uproar that the doctors and research technicians would be forgotten.

And their rage would find giggling, our joke lost upon them.

Weston Ochse

OMETIMES DURING THE night I wake to find my body shivering with frenetic memories of the old me. Cocaine and LSD had been my high-octane energy for over twenty years; happy Janus, psychotropic dreams responsible for my best times, my worst times, two divorces, the loss of eighteen girlfriends, my last nine jobs, and the death of both my wife and my son.

Even though I’d been sober for three years now, my body still remembered. I could never be sure whether my spasming muscles were the result of my body begging for another hit or if chemicals were still racing along the closed loop of my system. Whatever the cause, at 4:02 this morning, I awoke on sweat-soaked sheets and tried not to cry. As always. I stared at the ceiling and tried to imagine who I could have been, what I could have done.

And as always, I failed.

The world was filled with too many reminders. Like the white stucco drips on the ceiling, forever dangling above my head and reminding me of my nose and the way it had drip-dripped after seventy-two-hour nights of blurry-faced women, disco lights, and the rugged search for another fix.

I fought but the memories took hold.

The walls closed in.

The ceiling descended until I was tempted to sniff, ready to strip the very paint from it. Shadows reached out and embraced me, crushing, promising serenity within soft, impossible darkness.

Unable to free myself from the paranoia and need, I threw on a gray sweatshirt and a pair of jeans, grabbed a pair of gym shoes and within minutes was walking the early morning streets, trading the monotony of my steps for the nightmares of my life. Times like these were like a hard crash. A body can only take so much. Once the chemicals outnumber the white-blood cells, life signs take a dive and you crash down. Back when I was still tripping, my cure for the crash was a day in the spa, sweating out my addiction while beefy Russians pounded my bones back into a recognizable shape.

Now, my only cure was to walk.

Walk and try not to think.