The Radioactive Bride Read online

  THE RADIOACTIVE BRIDE

  ALESSANDRO MANZETTI

  Translation into English by Daniele Bonfanti

  Necro Publications

  2020

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  THE RADIOACTIVE BRIDE

  © 2020 by Alessandro Manzetti

  Translated from Italian by Daniele Bonfanti

  Edited by Regina Garza Mitchell

  This edition 2020 © Necro Publications

  ISBN: 978-1-944703-84-4

  LOC: 2019958015

  Book design & typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  Necro Publications

  necropublications.com

  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, or his agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television.

  All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

  Ebook formatting & cover design:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  Necro Publications

  5139 Maxon Terrace

  Sanford, FL 32771

  necropublications.com

  — | — | —

  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 please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

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  A WONDROUS WORM

  THE SAINT

  BLOOD ON BERLIN-BRANDENBURG

  THE DWARF

  LIMBUS

  AFRICA

  THE MITHRAEUM

  TWO-THOUSAND-KILO VIVIEN

  DARK NIRVANA

  VIOLETTA

  THE TWO-HEADED CLOWN

  THE CARDINAL

  THE PROCESSION

  LOURDES

  DINNER AT THE DEUX JAMBES

  THE BEARDED WOMAN*

  SANS FIN CENTRE

  About the author

  All new stories *except ‘The Bearded Woman’ published in November 2018 in ‘Splatterpunk Forever’ anthology, edited by Jack Bantry and Kit Power.

  — | — | —

  To Linda Addison, David G. Barnett

  And the Splatterpunks.

  — | — | —

  A WONDROUS WORM

  Chachan4, shantytown just five kilometers from South Paris 5, the district of the damned. Here crashed one of the shards of Uxor 77, the star slut which then—after a curved, crumbling trajectory—ended up right into old India, pissing its purple poison inside of it.

  There are people who even worship the fragment, the rocky Messiah which turned the world upside down, sinister and corrupted. That’s what we needed! Holy urine, burning, reaching everywhere. Chachan4 was born around this apocalyptic totem, a sort of dried-out jellyfish at the center of its fifty-meter-diameter crater.

  Some people say they have seen it moving, that limp creature down there, but nobody ever dared get too close, not even the mutated rats, legitimate children of the new year 0—Uxor Era—by now as big as dogs, beasts that only fear facing a sibling smarter than they are, maybe with an extra row of teeth, and nothing else on the whole planet. When you have a mouth like that, and you wear a boiling-rain-proof skin, you just have to worry about filling up your belly with a certain continuity. Eat and shit, alpha and omega, lair and exclusive hunting ground, you and I, eye for an eye, then only I, belly-up to digest you. Predation algorithms.

  Man, the old master, the demiurge with his golden-painted intellect and his smooth buttocks, has slid rather low on the food chain. You might as well start your countdown, ’cause Uxor 77 is coming.

  ««—»»

  Dawn. Bastien, sitting outside his shack right beside Coltrane’s music—spat out from the mold-covered grille of an old entertainment system—with a bottle of syntequila between his legs, looks at the panorama of Chachan4. The crater on the right: its phosphorescent rim tracing the psychedelic ring of the Messiah’s private swimming pool, half-full of radioactive fluid—a clear sauce, its surface wavering with floating corpses just beneath the skimming flight of the cloacal gulls. It has been raining for five days. Farther, the purple hump of the desert clambers up to Paris, in an up-and-down of infected blisters, crests, and hollows. A fossil tree on the top, its leaves of smooth stone, hiding the graveyard en plein air and the macabre jade of the vacuum-sealed stream which creeps among the wheelbarrows used to carry the dead, left there together with them.

  Madeleine reaches her husband, wrapped in her blue bathrobe; she is losing sleep as well, by now. It is hard even to dream on an empty stomach. What you see, in your mind’s eye, is nothing but a purple interference, purple as all the rest, over the egg-white of memories, like alien truffle grated on yesterday’s hot dish. Forty years ago.

  “Is Dorian still asleep?” Bastien asks, swallowing another spoonful of synthetic shit.

  “Like an angel,” she answers, running her hand through her tousled blond hair. Then she chucks to the wind the lock that has come off, and she looks at it flying away in strange angles, but in the end the route is always the same—like all the pieces of her, dragged every day toward the crater, the great magnet, the obscene mouth sucking in and devouring everything.

  “Are you ready?” the man whispers, without looking at her face, losing himself in the wreck glinting in the distance—a skybus crashed two weeks ago, soon to become the shantytown supermarket, its free butcher shop.

  “Yes, let’s do it,” she answers without hesitating a moment. Madeleine, thin as an aluminum foil, cannot even think anymore; she has not eaten for two days and the cursed red LED of their reader keeps blinking: no credits. “Let’s do it now.”

  The two of them enter the shack like thieves; the telescopic shafts still keeping the roof together creak under the wind, and the pistons, with no longer any oil to drink, puff in exhaustion. It is all going to seize up soon.

  “Let’s hurry,” the woman insists, while she keeps scratching her breasts as though guilt had nettle roots deep inside mammary glands.

  Dorian—the child, six years old—is on his bed; perhaps he is dreaming in purple as well, like them.

  “Hurry up…down there, where the belly is softer…no, no, higher!” Madeleine stammers, while her husband awkwardly handles an old Mallarmé epidermal injector, looking for the right spot to narcotize his son, piercing through the blue cuirass formed by the genetic LSD traveling in the layers of Chachan4, giving birth to delirious mutations—freak-virus. Uxor 77 has an increasing number of stepchildren, here and elsewhere, even though the slut from space gladly leaves to human and animal wombs the last link of the apocalyptic chain—the link of flesh.

  Two weeks ago, in order to afford the tool—together with an imitation Metzelder laser carver—Bastien sold his mother’s body to his neighbor, right after strangling her. She’ll become pig fodder, the matricide thought, that old grey meat, already stripped and dried by hunger: what else could he need it for? But it doesn’t matter: Death would have come anyway, perhaps a few weeks later, riding her black limited-edition road
car, leaving a dead-end track on the desert dust and a plastic poppy on her pillow.

  “I warned them, they’re coming. We’ve got less than half an hour. Cut, now, come on,” Madeleine urges, “we have to cauterize before Professor Nasdhorian sees him.”

  Dorian is unmoving. His breath, quick as a hyena in heat, has now suddenly slowed down; the scales covering him slightly rise, offering glimpses—through creases in that mosaic of slimy lozenges—of the live flesh beneath, candy pink. The flesh of a real child singed by a midday too bright. Madeleine watches him with her last drop of tenderness, of what maternal instinct her psyche could preserve…but then the creature opens its jaws to yawn, spreading the upper, darker end of its continuous cylindrical body, articulated in earthworm rings; and it wags at the proximity of her motherly smell which the boy inhales through the primitive holes on his forehead—or whatever it is. And she feels disgusted. She grabs her husband’s hand, tentatively holding the laser carver with his shirt soaked in sweat and adrenaline, and she forces him to sink the blue blade into the excess limbs of her son: those small fingers jutting out, like human stars, from the middle section of the elongated body.

  Burnt stench, thin columns of smoke fluttering away just after grazing, with their imaginary question marks, the thermodynamic walls of the shack in salvaged plextek. And yet the kid, now looking even more like a worm, gives no sign of life; the peyote baby bottle they shot into his green blood has kept him wedged inside his limbo, where maybe he is pedaling full speed on a rusty bicycle—“Hi-yo Silver!”—to reach his schoolmates. It must be like that. Or is he maybe dreaming about a nice hole to crawl into, in the damp ground? A lair all his own. Who knows?

  ««—»»

  Professor Nasdhorian, strutting in his texturized linen suit with a strawberry lollipop sticking out of the chest pocket, gets off his sharp 24-cylinders with the glittering Suprême logo on sides and hood: a gigantic naked woman with stroboscopic diamonds for nipples, who, posing as Atlantis, holds the circus marquee on her back among flesh stalagmites and deep crevasses of cellulite. The performance of the Fat Woman is always the most anticipated, especially since Vivien joined the circus: the first two-thousand-kilo of the world.

  “Take me to the subject,” the Professor begins, without even introducing himself to Bastien and Madeleine; his driver follows two meters behind—a golem without eyebrows busy chewing something, at least so it seems. That guy looks more like a gangster, and not only because of the too-large striped suit and the heavy dilitium Virgin Mary hanged to a two-kilo golden chain, appearing and disappearing among the folds of his coarse-cloth inmate shirt. Miracles and apparitions. Lots of those, around Paris—and of freaks.

  “What terrible stench,” the specialist adds, before entering the crumbling shack, turning 360 degrees around—only just lingering on the crater, its malodorous bladder full of rain—then to lower his gaze toward expensive Italian shoes soiled with mud. “Umph.” Only Coltrane’s music, which keeps pouring out of the grille, manages to get a smile from him. But perhaps it is only a nervous tic.

  “Come in, please,” Bastien invites them, motioning at the door with a stretched arm, like a traffic policeman. “The subj— The boy is sleeping, we had to give him something, sometimes he fidgets for no reason.”

  “Mmm, mmm,” the Professor comments, approaching the worm-boy; at least, that’s what they told him. A rarity, your excellence, you must come to see it. Bastien was very convincing when he contacted him.

  Nasdhorian, a celebrity in his field, is Strategic Consultant at the Suprême, the Circus of Wonders, and he can sign contracts for thousands of credits. A talent scout of the horrid, the admiral of the disgusting and revolting, always greeted in the hungry outskirts of Paris like a pre-Uxor Pope visiting earthquake victims’ camps—throwing holy cards like confetti, blinding people with his glittering cherub dental plate, then to rip some tensile structure with the switchblade of his crucifix. Touching a finger or brushing a foot of the Suprême generalissimo, like slipper-shoed tourists in front of Michelangelo’s Pietà, could mean a big break, the reverse side of bad luck. Bread, or whip lashes: the risk is worth it. Die-hard superstitions, even here, where everything lives with a kilo of C4 taped to its ass.

  In lieu of the gestatorial chair and castrated footmen with strong shoulders, the Professor contents himself with the red armchair of his sports roadcar and a mafioso as a driver—who is still chewing the ear of the shopkeeper who did not pay for protection. That’s what it was, Jesus! poor Bastien thinks, as the golem in confirmation outfit finally spits the mouthful on the floor.

  Dorian, the worm-boy, is still sleeping, his tail coiled around a skycar model. The Professor puts on his glasses and bends over the creature, immediately pinching his nose because of the stench exhaling from the cauterizations. Thick yellow liquid is dribbling from the wounds, grainy, like paint in a Van Gogh sunflower work under a flamethrower.

  “What are those burnings? They look recent,” Nasdhorian asks the couple, perched in a corner of the shack inside a cone of shadow.

  “Yes, I used a Metzelder carver, to remove extra appendages…groups of fingers, there on the side,” Bastien points with his index finger, while his wife looks at him sideways as she keeps touching and withering her hair.

  The Professor roars, “What boor! Ruining this wonder like that…what the fuck for?”

  “Because…so that it looks more like a worm…we didn’t want to let you down…” the man stammers, his hands sweaty as though he dipped them in a bucket of hot water.

  “For God’s sake…unbelievable, what’s this place, a village of idiots? Where did those excrescences end up? Perhaps we’re still in time to fix this…” the holy man replies, motioning at the brawny driver—moving circles in the air with a finger—to have a look around.

  “I threw them away, into the bucket next to…” Bastien has not even time to spit the last words out: stepping slightly back and casting a look outside, through the elliptical window on the small porch with crater view, he frames the hunched figures of two dogs fighting for their meal, their snouts stained in yellow. “Damn mangy motherfuckers!” Bastien yells, exiting the shack in a fury, armed with old pitchfork and bloodshot eyes. He runs after the two beasts, but they get away—ears down—too quickly for his legs, toward a six-p.m. horizon jagged by the wrong geometries of a one-eyed sun. Greenhouse effects.

  Bastien falls on his knees, stabbed by that purple and orange scenario getting darker and darker around him, black dot on the hump of the desert while the dead stink of the night already stagnates along the ditches where the mutated rats are setting their ambush. That so-temporary sky looks as though it trickled from the palette of a Turner who has just finished screwing his Dutch maid and is painting with suspenders still hanging down on his hips.

  Bastien’s luck has gone forever, run away on four paws.

  The Professor lays his strawberry lollipop on the bed of the worm-boy and ventures outside, leaving his Al Capone with Madeleine, who is holding herself to a telescopic shaft to avoid melting on the floor like a sip of water, losing herself once and for all and evaporating among the plextek boards.

  Nasdhorian reaches Bastien, dusts a rock with a handkerchief, and sits beside him.

  “What about the woman…” he whispers, his reptile tongue wiping too-dry lips.

  “Madeleine…she’s my wife,” Bastien answers, with an effort to raise his mug.

  “Yes, I figured that out,” the Professor goes on. “She…we can take her: three thousand credits, right now.”

  “But Paris is full of three-breasted females, and then…she’s all skin and bone, didn’t you see?”

  “I noticed, of course. But we can always use those at the circus. And we have a new show for which we’re searching skinny triremes like her—they’ll have to go into the slut-shooting tube: fireworks of fresh meat for the twenty years’ anniversary of the Suprême. Worm-boys, or stuff like that, you can find them in droves. But not with those int
eresting excrescences…too bad. Well, take your pick, three thousand for the woman, not a credit more. A thousand a tit,” Nasdhorian remarks in a chuckle; then he gets up and back to the shack, hands in his pockets.

  Inside, he already knows he will find today’s loot.

  — | — | —

  THE SAINT

  Everybody in South Paris 5 talks about the Saint, the whore dismemberer. It is turning into a real business problem for Big Blue and his organization of jackals.

  His stable of sluts and t-girls keeps thinning. Just yesterday, the Saint has torn apart two of his most sought-after whores: Patma—five-star altar of flesh, her third tit turning over as much as a small bone-grinding factory—was found in a flat on Rue Saint Colombe where castrated Catholic priests who survived the final purge panhandle. Her guts dangling from the dilitium chandelier, transformed into soft, dripping meat stalactites; her legs as organic support of a salon table, carefully affixed to the smooth plextek surface with pressure clamps grafted in the flesh; her cut head on the balcony, its skull top precisely carved, rubber geraniums sticking out among her hair. Her blue tongue jutted out of her mouth like a snail—porous as the giant antimony-rich syn-strawberries of the Rambuillet market—looking as though it were miming and nibbling at the words of her last thoughts, those you blow out when you pass on the other side, stuff like holy shit, Hell smells worse than the sewers of this district. And finally, the famous third tit: deftly removed, now listlessly lying in a dish, in its silicone-and-blood water. It looked like mozzarella soaked in its stuff. And then the usual ritual of the Saint: the whore’s uterus, ripped away and plunged into an aluminum bucket, half full of water and synthetic ice cubes, where the bastard finishes the slaughter by pissing inside of it. On the bucket, as always, the motherfucker had written PARADIS in blue felt-tip.