Feed the Machine, page 26
Feed the Machine
A Short, Gruesome Horror Story
Erica Summers
Rusty Ogre Publishing
Copyright © 2023 by Erica Summers
Published by Rusty Ogre Publishing.
All rights reserved.
Edited by Mark Anthony.
Cover Design by Christy Aldridge of Grim Poppy Designs
No portion of this book may be reproduced in any form without written permission from the publisher or author, except as permitted by U.S. copyright law.
All characters in this work are fictional. Any likenesses to real persons are purely coincidental.
Contents
. Chapter
Feed The Machine
A Note from the Author
More by Erica Summers
Feed The Machine
Stuart pinched a cigarette between thin lips and sucked back the last shreds of thick tobacco it had to offer. His bony hand trembled as he flung the spent butt into a bed of crimson petunias against the brick building. His face was milk white, making the reddened rings around his eyes stand out. Despite the nausea, his callous wit was still present. "Rollin' ‘ose pants up makes 'ew look like the fuckin' chimney sweep in Mary Poppins." His thick London accent laced every word as he playfully indicated Dash's calves with a sharp nod.
"Please, mate. Not now." Dash's cadence and pronunciation was similar to Stuart’s but the words, thick with guilt, fell cold from his colorless lips. He squatted on the steps and sucked slow drags of air to soothe waves of sickness pulsing through him. He glared at the biohazard dumpster tucked against the building, imagining the soup of sun-marinating ichor and shredded tissue dwelling within. It was a simmering kettle of once-bloodshot eyes and frail, carpal-tunnel ridden arms. His face, damp with sweat, grew colorless as he wretched loudly over the side rail, tasting his morning snack of brie and crackers for the second time.
"'How a' you not frowin' up too? Fuckin' sociopath." Dash stared in horror. Stuart remained unfazed by the traumatic events of the morning. He was not without sympathy. He’d simply had months more experience with the bloodshed.
Dash’s childhood friend had always gotten him into seedy situations but this…
This took the cake.
Stuart shrugged. "Eh, gets easier, bruv."
Dash glared up with two hazel orbs infused with disgust. Of all of the sleazy schemes for a quick buck Stuart had involved him in over the years, his friend always had a way of normalizing the trauma and making everything seem like just an average day. Nothing ever seemed to rattle Stuart Campbell.
"It's like ‘ey say, video games desensitize." Stuart managed a smile, flashing a dingy row of abused English teeth. "Seems fucked now bruv, but trust. Friday when we get paychecks, you'll wanna kiss 'is geeza's feet." He thumbed himself proudly in the chest. "Couple months 'a this shite, we go back to Mayfair, go find 'at West End bird 'o mugged you off at Berkeley Square--"
Dash dabbed his bile-covered lips with the back of his hand. "Saundra."
"Saundra! 'At's it." Stuart laughed, exhaling smoke out in rapid puffs like a chugging locomotive. "By June you’ be able 'a flaunt enough quid 'a buy 'at daft slag's flat outright, if you wanted to."
Dash managed to stand, weakly dusting off the knees of his rolled pants.
"'At'll be the life. You an' me, downin' top shelf bevvys til' we're absolutely pissed, 'avin' good laugh and watchin' all the birds graft for Dash Pritchett's attention. You'll 'ave your pick of any. Money's 'ee ultimate equalizer, bruv. You’ll see."
Stuart motioned to the door and Dash nodded reverently. It was time to face the gruesome scene inside.
The room was wall-to wall gore, worse than any crime scene photo Dash had ever stumbled upon, even as a morbid teen questing for the most vile sites the internet had to offer. The Faces of Death VHS he’d stolen from his father’s bureau as a teenager couldn’t compare to this.
This was real. In the flesh.
Death, up close and personal.
He felt sickness wash back over him and feared his own vomit would only intensify the already intense cleanup and sterilization regimen. This morning, the walls were arctic white, reflective as a mirror. Now, those same walls were caked in copious amounts of rust colored arterial spray, like a cursive love letter written in ruby ink, punctuated with knotted hunks of tissue and a shredded organ post-script in the puddle on the floor.
He wondered how life's path had led him to this morally-perverted moment where the disregard for human life, in a quest for personal home entertainment, had become so normalized.
Stuart, now clad in a stark white, disposable, protective painter's uniform and gray ventilation mask, rolled a canary-yellow bucket into the gore-spattered testing room by the stained mop, sloshing amid a pungent industrial-strength cleaning solution. The wafting stench of bleach and lavender seeped through the mask, overpowering the room’s coppery penny scent.
Muffled by the filter, Stuart's accent drifted through the stillness. "’Is like being inside the microwave after some bloke’s jus' nuked a kitten on high for ten minutes."
Dash didn't laugh. He imagined humor helped Stuart cope with the bloodshed, and allowed him to detach from the weighty guilt and moral ramifications of the job. Dash peered down at a lonesome hunk of human skull with a bit of scalp and full eyebrow still attached, along with the detached remnants of ocular musculature. He scooped it up in a gloved hand, accidentally smearing viscous brain matter across the fingers of his yellow rubber gloves. Disgusted, he slid it into a plastic rubbish bag and winced at the wet thunk it made as it smacked against the tile beneath.
"Remember mum's second husband?" Stuart asked out of nowhere, mopping up a lake of dark brown blood.
"Johnny?" Dash breathed slow and deep through his mask and attempted to calm himself before the onset of anxious hyperventilation. "Swell geeza'."
"Remember, when we lived at 'at flat on Wardour Street an' John had 'at little room upstairs wiv' all the arcade games?"
Dash nodded, numbly locating the remainder of the cratered, dismembered head of the deceased. Clawed apart, the male subject's youthful flesh was ripped into the fragmented pieces of a gory puzzle, impossible to reassemble.
"Remember 'at one summer, we were up 'ere for the betta' part'a two weeks playing 'at Queen's Quest game where you ‘ad to jump through the castle dungeon and collect all 'em gemstones?" Stuart chuckled.
Dash remembered alright. Suddenly, he found he could breathe again, immersing himself in childhood memories to escape the surrounding horrors.
Stuart regaled. "'Member, at one point, Johnny caught us? 'E was so mad, but when 'e found out how many pounds we'd put in that thing, he changed 'is tune!” Stuart’s mask-muffled giggle rang out through the room. It reminded Dash of Stuart as a younger boy, jovial at even the darkest times. “Geeza'd made a fortune off us!"
"Remember what 'e hollered at us the next day?" Dash yelled. “Best get upstairs…”
Chuckling, both howled into the air in unison:
“It's time ta' feed the machine!"
Dash emitted a belly laugh and approached the subject slab, the obvious epicenter of the pints of spilled blood and gruesome, fleshy carnage. With a gloved hand, he tugged a hunk of human trapezius from the leather neck restraint, the musculature still attached to a gleaming, exposed collar bone, and dropped it in his trash bag with a thwack.
He watched his best friend work diligently, chipping away at the lumps of stomach-turning ichor as if picking up roadside trash for community service. All he needed was a blinding neon vest and a spiked gig to complete the look.
Concentrating hard, Stuart coiled a graying pile of soft lower intestines into his sack as if wrangling a muddy garden hose. The subject’s muddy bowel contents oozed through the claw marks in the shredded tissue. Leaking like a sieve, the revolting gore slopped against the thin plastic of the bag. No longer even wincing, the repugnant stench permeating into his suit was something he had strangely come to terms with.
Dash had long-ago taken anatomy and physiology at uni, but the mangled state of scattered organs, splintered bones, and frayed musculature made identification of the mutilated mess difficult. He found a wet hunk of something, shredded like slippery pulled pork, only darker, and slid it gingerly in the black plastic. He wondered what it was.
A liver, perhaps? Kidney?
Dash escaped back into the nostalgia of days long gone in John's forbidden home arcade. The dust. The cluttered, cramped space where two kids could squeeze in and forget about life for a few hours. The dilapidated wooden housings. The graveyard of broken screens and chipped joysticks…
It was bliss.
He recalled how the dank room effused potent wafts of cedar mixed with hot, ancient plastic. He could still hear the delirious repetition of the Queen's Cave theme song as it beeped on a melodic loop like bizarre techno music. He hummed the tune. The quiet, muffled notes wafted from his mask.
As soon as Stuart heard the melody, he joined in, crescendoing until their muffled voices bounced off of every gruesome surface of what remained of the carcass of subject #482.
"Relax. The topical takes a moment to sink in," Dr. Angus said, the tone of her voice caring as she patted the young man's arm. Her thick Tennessee accent was unmistakable, despite her attempt to mask it, and the honeyed color of her silken hair glimmered beneath the luminous fluorescent overhead lights.
"Sorry, I’m just stoked." Anthony's voice wavered, his throat wriggling anxiously against the neck res
"It really is. I’m glad you see that. Not everyone appreciates it the way you do. You're part of ground-breaking work, Anthony. Thanks to you, when Verity launches world-wide, this technology will make the PS and PC virtual reality machines of the past look like the Atari by comparison." Her pearl-white smile disarmed him.
“Jesus, I forgot Atari was even a thing.”
“I’m sure it was before your time.”
“Slightly, yes.” He grinned. His smirk was smug, cocky. "But, I mean, if anyone should be a part of this, it's me.”
In the privacy of the observation booth, Dash rolled his eyes.
Stuart laughed aloud, kicking his feet onto the control panel. “Fuckin’ wanker, this one.”
Back in the room, the smug American prattled on. “Seriously, you don't want some scrub rating the quality of your system. You want a discerning gamer, like moi.” He tried to press his hand to his chest, forgetting it was bound to the sterilized patient lounger by a leather strap, sending a jiggling shock-wave through the rest of his doughy chest. Though appearing slender overall, the young man was soft, with little muscle definition beyond his yammering jaw and two strapped, sinewy forearms.
“My Twitch channel's hella successful. I'm no idiot. Million-and-a-half followers there. ‘Nother half-mil on Tiktok. Discord’s blowin’ up. Sponsors out the bung-hole begging for some word-’a-mouth exposure and some fuckin’ ad space on my sites. So this could be pretty big for y’all… if this thing don’t suck.”
Dr. Angus clenched her jaw subconsciously, pretending to listen as she finished connecting the wires and receptor units. “I assure you, you’ve never experienced anything like this system before.”
“Cool. ‘Cuz I don't push games and systems I don't believe in. Y’know, people in the community value what I have to say. So,” he tried to shrug, but only shook the table, “blow my mind and this could be huge for you. Give me perfect optimization or... something over 150 frames per second. Or a storyline that’s fresh as hell. Or, ya know, lemme see something I'd need a graphics card built by NASA for and then I'll sing your praises all over the internet."
A dark mess of unkempt hair framed his angular face, unbrushed like a youthful, crazed scientist. One of the attached wires dragged a lock of it across his face. He tried to raise a thin, bony wrist, but remembered he was locked to the slab by restraints around his elbows.
"Can you scratch my face for me?" Anthony winced and wriggled his nose, tickled by the scraggly strays.
She obliged. He couldn’t have been more than twenty-three, but he had an air of self-congratulatory immaturity like that of a stunted teenager.
"I'm glad I get to be first." He beamed.
"Oh,” She chuckled coyly. “Lord, no. You're hardly the first."
"Hmm. That so?" His demeanor, crestfallen.
"You're actually subject..." Dr. Angus looked at her metal clipboard "Number 483." A grin crept across her attractive face, silently celebrating that this encounter was more than likely the last time she'd ever have to deal with the insufferable incel.
At least… alive.
"Stuart, is all of 483's paperwork in order?" Dr. Angus peered up at Pritchett, gorgeous in spite of her thick-framed glasses.
He leaned into the microphone and spoke, the London accent boomed through loudspeakers overhead. "Affirmative. Contracts were all digitally signed half ‘n hour ago. Dash filed all the health, hazard, and liability waivers wiv’ legal. We’ve got the green light. Good to go." Through the window, he gave a bony thumbs up and kicked back again.
"Yeah, I peeped the contracts. They all looked fairly standard," Anthony said confidently.
In the observation booth, Stuart burst into laughter. “’Is fuck is right stupid, he is.”
Dr. Angus rolled her chair behind the slab and pulled a sterile probe from the small tray beside Anthony's head. "Number 483, do you feel this?" She pressed her thumb up into the base of his skull through a gap in the headrest.
His black, beady, ferret-like eyes locked with Stuart's through the window as he shook his head. “Nah.”
Dr. Angus activated a lever. The hydraulic slab raised like a car on a mechanic's lift. She slid her rolling chair beneath him, palpated his vertebrae, and pressed the needle end of the probe deep into the tender flesh of his neck. "You might feel a slight pinch."
"Jesus CHRIST!" Anthony wailed in pain and heaved against the restraints. His words were drawn out in his southern accent, whiny.
“Alright. You’re doing great, 483.” Angus lowered the chair and rifled through the contents of the tray. She squeezed a metal clamp and its hardened jaws opened wide. She latched it down over his face.
Anthony began to pant, claustrophobia creeping in on him. “Wait, what?”
"Next, we must insert both ocular probes." She pulled a needled pair of cables which hung from the cords connected to his spine.
"Awww, hell no!" Anthony's breath reeked foulness upward into her face as he hollered. He thrust his arms against the restraints. His legs quaked, bound tightly by both ankles. Panic steeped into his racing heart. Reality set in.
He had no recourse.
He could do nothing.
"Don't worry, this process was fully explained in the paperwork." With care, she clamped another contraption on one of his eyelids and pinched the eye closed. He cried out.
"Stop! Bitch, that form was like...26 pages long! How was I supposed to read it all?"
"Like you said, 483. You're no idiot. There was no time limit."
"No one reads that shit!" Anthony jerked his clamped lid as she clamped his other eye.
The reverberations of Anthony’s screams vibrated the viewing booth. The shrill wails sent an empathetic shiver through Dash like a rush of icy slush though his veins. He longed for the moment when the screaming stopped.
The subject's voice, laden with childlike terror, bounced around the echoing, sterile chamber and the muted cries seethed into the booth.
"I gotta get some fresh air. I still don't think I can handle this part yet." Dash's look was apologetic as he squeezed through the door and exited into the hallway. Stuart returned his eerily calm gaze back to the monitors.
Back at the subject slab, Dr. Angus had finally clamped Anthony's second eye shut. "Relax, 483. You opted for our most terrifying game. I’m afraid this is the easy part." She patted his shoulder in a phony attempt to comfort him. Secretly, she’d begun to feel nothing about this process. In fact, she thought, there were worse ways to make a buck.
Anthony grew quiet, paralyzed with fear. Bright overhead lights bleakly blurred through the blood vessels and veins in his eyelids, obscuring his vision to a murky amber glow.
"What... what are you doing now?" He fearfully uttered the words.
Without further explanation, Dr. Angus skillfully slid the sharp, hypodermic end of the first thin, metal probe through the fleshy corner of his left lid, careful not to puncture the eyeball itself and ruin the experience. She’d done that with Number 12 and beat herself up about it ever since, reminding herself constantly:
You were new. You were learning. Nobody’s perfect.
Anthony shrieked like a braying donkey as the needle slid into his face, nestling against the bones of his skull. His cry was pure, chilling.
"Make a note, Stuart. Next time we need a clamp for the lips too." Angus chuckled and looked toward the window. But Stuart didn't laugh. She'd made the same joke several times before.
He thought about holding down the intercom and telling her to get some new material, but he opted against it. She was normally so straight-laced. He’d let her recycle her stale material. No harm in it, he thought.
Dr. Angus inserted the second probe stealthily and Anthony screeched again. "Stuart, ocular probes, successful. Eyeballs need no re-inflation." She turned back to Anthony. "Alright, 483. Are you ready to start the game?"
Terrified silence from the pinned, penetrated patient. Tears squeezed out of the tugged slits near the probes, which made him feel like one of the splayed open, dissected frogs he’d abused in high school biology.
