Blow Up the Outside World

  BLOW UP THE OUTSIDE WORLD

  By Ash Lomen and Jordan Krall

  Blow Up the Outside World © 2010 Jordan Krall and Ash Lomen

  Extras © 2011 Jordan Krall and Ash Lomen

  Originally published as a chapbook by

  Bucket O’ Guts Press

  Cover art by George C. Cotronis

  This new electronic edition (with bonus stories) is a product of

  Green Hum Press

  with permission from

  Bucket O’ Guts Press.

  “Man is an artifact designed for space travel.

  He is not designed to remain in his present biologic state….”

  –William S. Burroughs

  PART ONE:

  SUPERNOVA EXPRESS

  I. Cosmic Fistfuck

  Every day was the same: cigarette smoke and movies. Cheap vodka and even cheaper pornography. Andy Oswald was nearing forty years old and his life hadn’t changed for ten years. It was like an eternal bad day.

  At times he felt like someone was watching him and that maybe his life was only an experiment performed by a higher power be it God, a group of gods, or some sort of abstract energy force that held up the universe. He didn’t know if that made him feel better or worse but it was something to think about. Pretending to be a philosopher gave him a distraction from being late on his rent or not having gotten laid in three years.

  He wasn’t completely alone, though. His friend Potter was an occasional companion but they mostly just saw movies together and that prevented any real conversation. That was okay with Andy. He didn’t like to talk much anyway.

  So Andy woke up on that Wednesday morning and began his day like any other. He smoked. He drank. He drearily jerked off to porn. Another bad day in a long line of bad days. By the afternoon he was tired as hell and fell into bed, expecting to experience nothing but drunken dreams. He would be unpleasantly surprised.

  As his head hit the pillow, Andy felt his body go limp. He thought maybe he had drunk too much vodka and spent too much of his semen into his crusty handkerchief. Maybe his body was giving up for the night. He stared at the wall, watching the neon lights from across the street flicker into shapes resembling fishhooks, mushrooms, and cigars.

  Yeah, he had drunk too much vodka. His head was on fire and his body was sinking into the bed. The neon shapes intensified until they covered his room. They combined with dark red tendrils and crept up the walls.

  Soon he felt like a fish in a tank. His walls were shimmering glass and the air around him became thick fluid. He still couldn’t move his body but he continued to blame it on the vodka. Andy learned a long time ago to always blame his problems on alcohol and this time he decided he was justified in doing so.

  He couldn’t have been more wrong.

  II. Captive Flesh Unlimited

  (Incoming Transmission)

  Andrew Oswald lives in a large glass terrarium. He is a productive, well-hung adult human of about forty years. He shares his cage with five females: two pure bred humans, two sub-terrestrials, and an android Oswald refers to as ‘the body beneath’. He prefers his native flesh or metal but will reproduce with any member of his harem without coercion.

  He only kisses ‘the body beneath’.

  He only beats the blond haired human. She is tall and lanky and resembles a past mate from his adolescent years.

  He builds small, complex pieces of art with the spare time allowed to him, and hoards these pieces from the rest of the subjects.

  He is a fascinating study.

  ***

  Everything about them hinted at an ageless and twisted biology. They wore few clothes, displaying their odd deformities with pride. They clanked and slurped at the unbreakable glass of Oswald's cage, phallic eyes bulging when he fucked the women they threw at him. The women were ghastly ones, females with no attributes of beauty but still: Oswald fucked them.

  He learned to tolerate his new life as a sort of oversexed lab rat. He could tolerate a lot… just not their watching him. That was close to unbearable.

  His finished beating Sarah and walked across the terrarium to his bombs. It was still surprising to him how a culture as advanced as the Valdrott couldn't even recognize a simple cluster bomb. The body beneath, the Lifeless One, had let him borrow her parts, and he would miss her the most.

  ***

  We will continue to study the groups of collected humans over the next several life cycles. In roughly five years we will introduce a stronger male into Oswald's group which will establish----

  (Transmission Error)

  III. Silent Glass and Bilocation

  Large, bulbous sacs of blue milk grew on the walls of Potter’s cage. He poked them every morning though he didn’t know what he expected to happen or how it would help his situation. Maybe deep down Potter hoped the sacs would burst open and send a cascade of milky salvation over his body. Then he could stare at the liquid as it dried and cracked like the paint on the walls of the movie theatre he used to go to back when he was on earth. Unfortunately, the sacs were never close to bursting; their tough membranes acted like impenetrable walls around a fluorescent-blue liquid fortress.

  Through the frenzied haze of captivity, he imagined the sacs as enlarged breasts that looked like they had been bruised and battered during a violent bout of sex. These milk mounds soon morphed into giant blue testicles that jiggled with each poke of Potter’s finger. He got close to them and sniffed. They had no scent.

  Shouldn’t they have some aroma? Potter expected a sour milk or crotch smell. He dug his chin into his chest, raised his arm, and sniffed his armpit. The stench of his body odor was potent enough to convince Potter it wasn’t his olfactory sense that was failing.

  Potter wanted the sacs to smell, wanted them to smell like anything just so he’d know they were something natural, something based in his old reality. He would have been happy for them to smell like anything but preferred if they possessed the aroma of a woman. He was honest with himself and admitted if they had that musky scent, he would’ve attempted to make love to the sacs in hopes of penetrating the membrane and burying his cock deep into the blue milk. His eyes fluttered while his mind spat out freeze-frame images.

  An ejaculation into blue wetness. Sperm mixing with milk. Membrane stretched and broken like deflated balloon. Glass melting from scrotal heat exploding into a sour orgasm.

  Hours later, Potter came to his senses. He looked down at himself and saw that his stomach had become one of the sacs: a translucent membrane surrounding blue milk that swished with every one of his breaths. The round glob of gel that was formerly his belly button jiggled as Potter inspected it.

  What had the Valdrott done to him? Were they expecting him to go insane? If so, he wouldn’t give them the satisfaction. He’d rather live out his short, captive life with this monstrosity of a stomach than to give them any sort of contentment. Their experiments would not be successful if he had any say in the matter.

  Potter continued poking at his belly, somewhat enjoying the movement, the milk swishing like polluted ocean waves. He thought it was getting bigger though he hadn’t eaten a thing in days. Perhaps that was why he had tried poking the sacs open, to eat what was inside. It would give him sustenance or it would kill him. Either way, he had to try.

  The membrane on his belly seemed weaker than the membranes on the sacs. He poked his finger into his gut, pushing his fingernail into it until he was convinced it would pop open, spilling the contents all over. Potter wanted to drink what was inside. His thirst and hunger were now overwhelming him. The sight of his swollen abdomen made his mouth water. He kept poking and poking until he heard the Valdrott outside of his cage.

  They were ready for him aga
in.

  (Potter’s Transmission)

  They gave me another exam: four rods inserted into my brain that made me see sparks of bright colors that looked like scratchy Technicolor on a torn up movie screen. I was swept up in them and couldn’t escape their blinding effects for days. My stomach is giving me hell. It won’t let me inside but I keep trying as I am now immune to self-inflicted pain. I want to eat and drink. I am starving. I am beginning to think the Valdrott have won. I am beginning to think that even though they are more advanced than us, they are nothing more than bloodthirsty butchers.

  (End of Transmission)

  Potter closes his eyes, the darkness of his eyelids transforming into a point-of-view showing him constructing a bomb out of spare android parts. He had the knowledge of having savagely fucked the machine. He had dismembered it immediately afterwards in order to build the mechanism that would hopefully tear down the Valdrott mothership. Or at least he hoped it was the mothership. If it wasn’t, he knew there were scores of other humans who were going through the same torturous experiences.

  He opened his eyes and noticed he was still staring at the sacs hanging on the glass like fungi. The sight startled him and he closed his eyes again, seeing the construction of the bomb as almost complete. He opened his eyes and saw the sacs which seemed bigger this time. Potter closed his eyes and saw the end result of his bomb-making: a mess of electrical wiring, metal, multi-colored Semtex-glass, bits of biomechanical jetsam all fused together with translucent android-secretion.

  The bomb looked complete but Potter couldn’t be sure. He looked up from the bomb and expected to see the milky sacs on the glass wall of his cage. They weren’t there.

  He opened his eyes and the bomb disappeared. In front of him were the sacs, pulsing like furious blue hearts. What was going on?

  Closing his eyes again, seeing the bomb.

  Opening his eyes, seeing the sacs.

  Both views were vivid and as real as anything else Potter had every experienced. When his eyes were closed, he felt the bomb. His fingers were able to caress the smooth Semtex-glass and twirl the wiring with his index finger. When his eyes were opened, his fingers touched nothing, the smooth sensation of the bomb absent until Potter closed his eyes again.

  What was going on?

  He opened his eyes, stared at the sacs. My name is Potter.

  He closed his eyes, inspected the bomb. My name is Oswald.

  And keeping his eyes closed, Oswald/Potter looked around his cage for the perfect spot to place the bomb. He settled on the corner closest to the Valdrott observation deck.

  Don’t open your eyes, he told himself. Keep them shut and set the bomb.

  ***

  (Oswald’s Transmission)

  Whenever I close my eyes I see a grotesque cluster of sacs filled with blue milk. My stomach has also turned into one of these sacs but only when my eyes are closed. I feel like I’m in two places at once. I wonder if the Valdrott have anything to do with this. Now I remember something else, I remember that

  (Transmission Error)

  Oswald thought of the Lifeless One who was now just a wreckage of spare parts, many of which he had used in the construction of the bomb. He closed his eyes, shuddered at the sight of his ugly sac-stomach. Opening his eyes, he looked at his handiwork. He pushed any thoughts of his women to the back of his mind and ignited the fuse of the central bomb.

  Regret was instantaneous.

  IV. Blowing Up Right

  Potter looked past the blue sacs, past the glass of his prison, past the Valdrott observers. He was able to see out a window and into the dark void of space and watched as a Valdrott ship exploded.

  Don’t close your eyes, don’t close your eyes, he told himself.

  He closed his eyes anyway. The temptation had been too strong.

  On the dark screen of his eyelids, he watched shards of broken metal, glass, Valdrott flesh and wiring envelope him in a blazing orgy of fiery destruction. He could feel his flesh being ripped from bone.

  He opened his eyes and drooped to his knees on the cold floor, crying. In a torrent of tears and blurred vision his eyes shut again. Potter saw other cages. Things he didn’t want to see… feelings he didn’t want to experience.

  A young woman being raped repeatedly by a gang of hideously deformed semi-human beasts while her lover was forced to watch, held in place by chains of dripping energy.

  They would probably dissect his brain later… to see if anything was different.

  Potter could feel the pain of this poor man’s every emotion. He saw another cage, fit with reflective mirrors and housing a creature that must have at one time been a man, deformities spouting from every miserable inch of its skin, covered in blue, pulsating sores. It was begging for death in vain.

  He could feel its pain as well. He begged with the creature.

  Potter finally forced open his eyes, threw back his head and screamed with such force he thought his lungs were oozing out of his throat.

  His bloated stomach began to split open, blooming slowly and painfully into a fleshy flower oozing a blue milky secretion. The sacs around him began to bloom too… but their secretion was more akin to the blue of the diseased New York skyline (oh, how he missed the earth).

  When the two milky chemicals finally made contact on the cage’s metal floor they began to give off an odd red glow… and a strange odor… something familiar and welcoming… like female musk.

  The Valdrott, his silent watchers, were gathered all around his prison.

  And then everything exploded… again.

  PART TWO:

  LAST HOUSE ON 42ND STREET

  I. The Blast Picture Show

  So I’m sitting there, taking in a movie at the Times Square Theater, and trying to mind my own business when the guy two seats to my right starts jacking off.

  Once I saw that, I knew I should’ve gone to the Lyric and watched that Andy Milligan double feature. Sure, I had seen The Ghastly Ones three times and The Body Beneath twice but it still would be better than sitting there with the wet sounds of masturbation in my ear. And why the hell was the guy jacking off in the first place? We were watching Mondo Magic and it was far from arousing. Well, at least for me. Who knows what people found sexy nowadays?

  I had to piss, too, which made me want to just get up and leave the theater altogether. To reach the less than adequate facilities in the Times Square Theater, you had to go through a dank labyrinth of trash and darkness full of potential danger. That danger could be junkie-thieves or angry transsexual hookers who won’t take no for an answer. They’d want your wallet or your ass. Or both. Even if you made it to the bathroom, you still have to worry about walking into a drug deal or blow-job. Trust me, those things did happen.

  The urge to piss wasn’t overriding my desire for safety. I’ve heard stories about straight guys like myself being orally and anally raped by angry crack addicts or bi-curious pimps. Don’t get me wrong – I have nothing against fags – but I have no desire to experience any penis other than my own. And I only call them fags because all the ones I’ve ever known always referred to themselves as such so I don’t feel like I’m overstepping any bounds of decency at all. In fact, one guy I used to work with actually introduced himself as Frank the Fag. I’m not kidding. That’s what he liked to be called.

  So anyway, there I was watching the movie and holding in my piss, trying not to hear the guy next to me going to town with his palm.

  Then from behind me a voice said, “Hey, you got peanuts?”

  I ignored it. I didn’t think he was talking to me. People usually kept to themselves in a place like this.

  But then there it was again:

  “Hey, you with the beard. You got any peanuts or what?”

  I looked over at the masturbator to make sure it wasn’t him speaking to me. Maybe the pervert knew how to throw his voice. Who knows what he was capable of, know what I’m saying? But it wasn’t him, thank God. He seemed oblivious to anything else but his
cock and the action on screen. I turned around and saw a guy two rows behind me. He was looking me in the eyes, nodding.

  I said, “What?”

  “Peanuts,” he said. The guy bore more than a little resemblance to a young Klaus Kinski, that is, if Klaus Kinski was black and sporting a huge, glistening afro.

  “I have no idea what you’re talking about, man,” I said.

  Black Kinski got up from his seat and jumped over the seat in front of him so that he was in the aisle directly in back of mine. He said, “You thick, man? You have a bag there. I’m asking you got peanuts in it. Can I have some?”

  I looked down and realized that yeah, I had a bag on my lap I had bought at the concession stand but it wasn’t peanuts.

  “It’s popcorn,” I said. It was weird. I didn’t even remember buying any popcorn.

  “Now, was that so hard? All you had to do is say that in the first place. Man, you had to make things so difficult.” He leaned back in the seat and watched the movie.

  I watched, too, but also kept my eyes on both the masturbator and Black Kinski. For all I knew they were some sort of gay rapist tag-team ready to strike. Mr. Jerk-off never stopped moving his hand up and down like he was churning butter or something. I was starting to wish I’d gone to the Lyric to see The Ghastly Ones. Not only would I probably not have to worry about these two guys but the seats were more comfortable in that theatre, too.

  Five minutes went by.

  Again, the voice from behind said, “Hey, can I have some popcorn, man?”

  “Jesus Christ.” I handed him the bag. “Keep it.”

  “Nah, I just want a handful. This shit gives me gas.” He dug his hand into the bag, grabbed some popcorn, and then leaned back again. “Much obliged, man, much obliged.”

  Then I thought I knew what was happening. I was getting fully prepared to be offered some crack or junk at reasonable “deuce” prices but the guy just sat there watching the movie.