Cuddly Holocaust

  Praise for

  Carlton Mellick III

  “Easily the craziest, weirdest, strangest, funniest, most obscene writer in America.”

  —GOTHIC MAGAZINE

  “Carlton Mellick III has the craziest book titles... and the kinkiest fans!”

  —CHRISTOPHER MOORE, author of The Stupidest Angel

  “If you haven’t read Mellick you’re not nearly perverse enough for the twenty first century.”

  —JACK KETCHUM, author of The Girl Next Door

  “Carlton Mellick III is one of bizarro fiction’s most talented practitioners, a virtuoso of the surreal, science fictional tale.”

  —CORY DOCTOROW, author of Little Brother

  “Bizarre, twisted, and emotionally raw—Carlton Mellick’s fiction is the literary equivalent of putting your brain in a blender.”

  —BRIAN KEENE, author of The Rising

  “Carlton Mellick III exemplifies the intelligence and wit that lurks between its lurid covers. In a genre where crude titles are an art in themselves, Mellick is a true artist.”

  —THE GUARDIAN

  “Just as Pop had Andy Warhol and Dada Tristan Tzara, the bizarro movement has its very own P. T. Barnum-type practitioner. He’s the mutton-chopped author of such books as Electric Jesus Corpse and The Menstruating Mall, the illustrator, editor, and instructor of all things bizarro, and his name is Carlton Mellick III.”

  —DETAILS MAGAZINE

  Also by Carlton Mellick III

  Satan Burger

  Electric Jesus Corpse

  Sunset With a Beard (stories)

  Razor Wire Pubic Hair

  Teeth and Tongue Landscape

  The Steel Breakfast Era

  The Baby Jesus Butt Plug

  Fishy-fleshed

  The Menstruating Mall

  Ocean of Lard (with Kevin L. Donihe)

  Punk Land

  Sex and Death in Television Town

  Sea of the Patchwork Cats

  The Haunted Vagina

  Cancer-cute (Avant Punk Army Exclusive)

  War Slut

  Sausagey Santa

  Ugly Heaven

  Adolf in Wonderland

  Ultra Fuckers

  Cybernetrix

  The Egg Man

  Apeshit

  The Faggiest Vampire

  The Cannibals of Candyland

  Warrior Wolf Women of the Wasteland

  The Kobold Wizard’s Dildo of Enlightenment +2

  Zombies and Shit

  Crab Town

  The Morbidly Obese Ninja

  Barbarian Beast Bitches of the Badlands

  Fantastic Orgy (stories)

  I Knocked Up Satan’s Daughter

  Armadillo Fists

  The Handsome Squirm

  Tumor Fruit

  Kill Ball

  ERASERHEAD PRESS

  205 NE BRYANT

  PORTLAND, OR 97211

  WWW.ERASERHEADPRESS.COM

  ISBN: 1-62105-072-6

  Copyright © 2013 by Carlton Mellick III

  Cover art copyright © 2013 by Ed Mironiuk

  www.edmironiuk.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 photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without the written consent of the publisher, except where permitted by law.

  Printed in the USA.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  I was tasked with writing a title story for my next collection. A title story is the featured story, the one that brings the whole book together. It is meant to be the best, longest, and most engaging story in the collection—one that will make the book worth buying on its own. But most importantly it must have the best title, because it’s the one the book is named after. The title story will make or break a collection, and the title of the title story will usually determine whether it sells at all.

  When I put a collection together, I always write the title story last. It will be a story that rounds out the book and adds elements that I feel are missing from the other stories. The first thing I do is decide what I’d like to title the collection and then base a story after that.

  It took me hours, if not days, of brainstorming to come up with a title for my third collection. The one that finally grabbed me was Cuddly Holocaust. It seemed perfect. All I needed to do was turn that title into a story and my collection would be complete.

  But there was a problem: I can’t write short stories. Ask anybody who knows me. Ask Jeff Burk, who regularly teases me whenever I say I’m going to write a short story. “Yeah, I’ll believe it when I see it,” he always says.

  See, here’s my issue: if I like what I’m writing I never want it to end. So my short stories often become novellas and my novellas often become novels. This only happens when I really like an idea. Of course, I almost always really like my ideas. Why bother writing a story if you don’t really like the idea?

  Cuddly Holocaust was such a case. I liked the idea so much that I couldn’t end it where I originally planned. So it did not become a short story. In fact, it’s too long to even be considered a novella. I just liked writing it too much to finish it. The result is a damn near epic tale set in an apocalyptic world populated by violent intelligent toys.

  If anything wipes out humanity it might as well be toys. Toys are awesome. I’ve always dreamed of what it would be like if all my toys came to life. Either it would be fun and magical or completely terrifying. This book takes that latter idea and puts it on the apocalyptic scale. It ended up being one of the most disturbing books I’ve ever written, especially toward the end.

  So here it is—my 38th book. It is being released side-by-side with my collection, which I did end up completing soon after Cuddly Holocaust. The title story is called Hammer Wives. It proved to me that sometimes I can complete a short story (as long as I shoot for writing a piece of flash fiction).

  I hope you enjoy them both.

  —Carlton Mellick III, 12/15/2012 4:07 pm

  CHAPTER ONE

  The doctor peeled off the last layer of human skin on Julie’s arm and replaced it with a strip of soft black plushy fur.

  “Panda bear, panda bear,” the doctor sang to his patient, his scabby lips so wide Julie could see his crooked bronze teeth filled with grit and gum-blood. “Cute baby panda bear.”

  The doctor could spare no anesthetic on the operation, so even the air touching her skinless arm felt like serrated knives sawing at the exposed tissue.

  The doctor continued singing in his raspy voice, “Eating up bamboo with the momma panda bear.”

  The young woman’s screams reverberated through the metal halls of the underground bunker as the doctor sewed the piece of stuffed animal skin over the bloody patch of raw muscle. This was the sixty-seventh operation she had endured of this kind. Each one had been more painful than the last.

  The doctor tossed a cotton panda arm over his shoulder, adding to the mountain of stuffed animal scraps behind him. They had gone through so many toys in order to transform her. It took her sixteen months of scouring the wasteland to find all of them, searching through the rubble of every crumbled building for miles around. There probably wasn’t another stuffed panda toy left in the entire city. If the doctor didn’t have enough plushy fur to finish the job, Julie didn’t know what she would do.

  “The momma panda bear loves the baby panda bear,” sang the doctor. His eyes were far too big for his head, bugging out of the sockets at her. “And the baby panda bear loves the momma panda bear.”

  Julie couldn’t take his raspy singing any longer.

  “Could you shut the hell up?” she said in a high-pitched electronic voice. “Yo
u creep the hell out of me when you sing.”

  “My voice creeps you out?” said the doctor. He giggled. “Listen to yourself.”

  One of the first operations the doctor performed on Julie was to remove her human voice box and replace it with that of a smart-toy. She hasn’t had the voice of a human girl since that day.

  “You sound like a child molester singing that song,” Julie said in her inhuman tone.

  “And you sound like a demented cartoon character,” said the doctor. “You’re giving everyone nightmares.”

  When the procedure was over, Julie rushed to the mirror to investigate her new black fluffy arm. It matched the rest of the fur covering her body. Only a few more operations and she would finally become a real plushy panda bear.

  “Beautiful,” said the doctor, admiring his work. “You look just like one of them.”

  “I don’t want to just look like one of them,” she said. “I want to become one of them.”

  She stripped off her raggedy clothes to see how she looked as a whole. Her skin was a patchwork of black and white fuzz. Her paws were firm and squishy. Her breasts were white puffy balls. The plushy skin had been grafted to ninety-three percent of her body. Only her face and some sections of her chest and armpits were left to go before she would be complete.

  The doctor cleaned his tools in a blackened coffee can on the stove. “We’ll start on the face next,” he said. “That will be the most difficult part. It will require at least a dozen procedures.”

  “That many?”

  “If you want to skip your face, I still have the mask,” said the doctor. He opened a screeching metal drawer near the stove, revealing a panda face mask he had constructed months prior.

  “I told you,” she said, pulling her overalls back on. “It’s not worth the risk. If I’m going to infiltrate them, my look has to be real.”

  The doctor tossed the panda mask back into the drawer. “Whatever you say, crazy girl.”

  She glanced one last time in the mirror and rubbed the fuzzy panda ears on the top of her head. It still hurt after the doctor scalped her last month, replacing her human head of hair with a hood of black and white fuzz.

  “By the way,” the doctor said. “You never told me…”

  “What?” Julie said.

  “Of all the stuffed animals you could have become, why did you choose a panda?” he said.

  Julie bit into her blackened lip.

  “I’ve always liked pandas,” she said.

  “But when’s the last time you’ve seen a panda smart-toy out there?” he asked. “You would have fit in better as a teddy bear or bunny rabbit.”

  “Sometimes standing out is the best way to fit in,” she said, rubbing sweat from her armpits with a handful of ashy cotton fluff.

  Julie crawled beneath the Christmas tree to find her last present—the one with fairies and snowflakes on the wrapping paper.

  “What did Santa bring you?” Julie’s dad asked, standing behind her in his pine-scented pajamas.

  Young Julie didn’t respond, tugging at the heavy package, trying to get it out with all her might and nearly knocking the whole tree down in the process.

  “Santa worked hard to get this one,” said her father. “It was really expensive.”

  He held a reindeer-shaped mug of hot cocoa to his chin and blew at the steam rising through its antlers.

  “Get me out of here,” said a high-pitched voice from the package.

  “What?” Julie said as she heard the voice, her eyes lighting up. The package began to move and shake on its own. “What!”

  “Come on,” said the voice. “I’m getting claustrophobic in here.”

  “What!” Julie screamed with excitement.

  “Hurry up and open it,” said her dad, sipping his cocoa.

  “What’s taking so long?” said the voice in the box. It had a cartoonish 1930s New York accent. “Are you slow in the head or something, kid?”

  Julie ripped open the wrapping paper and saw a stuffed animal inside the box. It was alive and slapping at its plastic encasing, desperate to be freed.

  “What is it? What is it?” Julie cried.

  “It’s a smart-toy!” said the father.

  The toy crawled out of the box and shook out its fur.

  “Ohmygawd! It’s a panda! I love pandas!”

  “Thanks, kid,” said the stuffed animal, stretching its fluffy little limbs and taking deep breaths. “One more minute in there and I would have suffocated to death.”

  Then Julie swiped the panda into her arms and hugged it as tightly as she could.

  “Hey wait a minute, what gives?” cried the panda bear. “Out of one prison and into the next!”

  The toy flapped and wiggled in Julie’s arms.

  “You didn’t actually get her one of those, did you?” said Julie’s mother as she appeared behind them in the room. She was rubbing her head, way too hungover to be awake that early in the morning. “Jesus Christ…”

  “It’s what she wanted,” said the father, smiling at his daughter’s excitement.

  “She’s ten years old,” said the mother. “She’s too old for stuffed animals.”

  “But look at how cool it is,” said the father. “I kind of wanted to buy another one for myself.”

  The mother shook her head. “Yeah, you would…” Then she went toward the kitchen to make another pot of coffee.

  “What’s its name? What’s its name?” Julie asked.

  “Don’t ask me,” said the father, pointing at the ruffle-faced toy. “Ask him.”

  “What’s your name?” Julie asked the panda.

  “Let me go and I’ll tells ya,” he said.

  Julie let him go.

  “Call me Poro,” said the panda, wiping the girl’s stink from his fur.

  “Hi Poro, I’m Julie!”

  “Yeah, great,” Poro said.

  Then the panda mumbled to himself, “I knew I’d get stuck with a flat chick…”

  “I’ll love you forever, Poro!” Julie cried, swiping the bear back up into her arms.

  Young Julie played with her new friend nonstop the entire afternoon. Her parents sat on the couch and watched with amazement, bewildered by the advanced technology of the toy.

  “How the hell is it able to talk like that?” Julie’s mother asked her father. “It’s like a real person.”

  “It practically is a real person,” said the father. “It’s programmed to have the intelligence of a human. It even has emotions.”

  “How can it have emotions?” she said. “It’s just a computer program.”

  “Emotions are just programmed responses in both humans and computers,” said the father. “If she’s mean to the toy it will get sad. If she’s nice to it the panda will love her back. She’ll learn valuable social lessons interacting with it.”

  “I wish you would have talked to me before buying it,” said the mother. “I don’t know if I like the idea of that thing running around our house.”

  Poro tossed a pillow across the room at Julie. It missed the girl and stuck into the limbs of the Christmas tree. Then he laughed and pointed.

  “It’s going to be like living with a strange tiny man,” said the mother.

  “He’s perfectly safe,” said the father.

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “What’s the worst that could happen?”

  As Julie chased her new toy around the room, Poro tripped into an end table and knocked a goldfish bowl onto the linoleum floor. The glass shattered and sent the family goldfish flying.

  “Say, who’s the bozo who put that there?” said the panda, brushing the goldfish water from his fur.

  The mother didn’t have to say it, but she did anyway. “The worst that could happen?” She gave Julie’s father a look. “Where do I begin?”

  Then she rolled her eyes.

  As Julie left the doctor’s cabin, wiping blood and sawdust from her plushy coat, an explosion rumbled the bunker and knocked her of
f balance. A bolt of pain raced across her fur as her freshly-sewn arm slammed into the wall.

  “What the hell was that?” Julie asked a soldier running past her in the corridor.

  The young man turned back to respond but didn’t stop moving, heading in the opposite direction of the noise. “They’re here. They found us!”

  Julie gripped her arm and pulled herself down the hallway toward the stairwell. There was a commotion up above—people screaming in a panic, running for their lives. Then the sound of gunfire.

  “You bastards,” she said, her electric voice echoing down the hallway. “I’m not ready yet. I was so damned close…”

  She walked back toward the medical station. The doctor peeked his head through the door.

  “You don’t think you can finish the job in five minutes do you?” Julie asked him, pointing at her face.

  The doctor shook his head.

  “They’re inside?” he asked. His face was even creepier when he was afraid.

  “Yeah, sounds like it,” she said.

  Three soldiers fled down the hallway, away from the stairs. Two of them bled profusely. Judging by the expressions on their faces, they wouldn’t have looked more traumatized if their foreskins had been split open by jagged rocks.

  “How many of them?” Julie asked the soldiers.

  “Too many,” one of them cried, staggering as fast as he could.

  The soldiers left a trail of blood so thick that Julie wondered how they could still have any remaining in their bodies.

  Another said, “They’re coming. Get out of here.”

  The doctor jumped back into his cabin.

  As Julie followed him, bullets zipped past her shoulder. She looked back to see the soldiers torn to pieces by machine gun fire. They fell to the ground screaming, splashing into a puddle of their own blood.

  The enemy marched down the steps into the corridor, led by a snarling tiger with an oversized terrycloth head. Just before closing the door behind her, Julie locked eyes with him. He was a seven-foot-tall stuffed animal walking on his hind legs, a demonic Tigger the Tiger with a bloodthirsty glare in his beady, black, ball eyes.