The Tick People, page 1
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
Cuddly Holocaust
Hammer Wives (stories)
Village of the Mermaids
Quicksand House
Clusterfuck
Hungry Bug
ERASERHEAD PRESS
205 NE BRYANT
PORTLAND, OR 97211
WWW.ERASERHEADPRESS.COM
ISBN: 978-1-62105-145-9
Copyright © 2014 by Carlton Mellick III
Cover art copyright © 2014 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 wrote The Tick People earlier this month when I needed to step away from a larger project to write something shorter. It seems all of my books keep getting longer and longer these days, so it’s good to focus on something of novella size for a week or so in order to get a boost of confidence from completing something new. If I’m not finishing projects on a regular basis, I tend to go a little nuts. It probably stems from my deep irrational fear that I only have a few months left to live and need to accomplish as much as possible before I die.
Right now, I’m going between smoking e-cigarettes and real cigarettes—the e-cigarettes are for when I don’t want to go outside—reflecting on why the hell I wrote yet another weird sex book. If you didn’t notice, my last six or seven books didn’t include much (or any) sex at all, so maybe it was past due. I knew I wanted to write about a man’s struggle against his own sexual urges. I wondered what it would be like if a man’s carnal desires were warped. What if, instead of being sexually drawn to women, there was a guy who was drawn to something repulsive and inhuman, something his mind knows is utterly disgusting but his body can’t resist. I wanted to explore the absurdity of sexual desire. Sure we humans might seem like sexy nubile creatures most of the time, but when you think about it, we’re really just sweaty blobs of gross. Why the hell do we bother having sex with each other? There’s creating children, sure, but how many kids do we really need? Two or three? Couldn’t we just divide like amoebas or something?
Perhaps this theme is important to me because I have recently discovered that I have a deep instinctual urge to mate with McDonald’s McRib sandwiches. They’re only two for three dollars right now. I think I’ll have a threesome.
—Carlton Mellick III 3/11/2014 12:14am
CHAPTER ONE
THE SADDEST DOG IN GLOOM TOWN
There was once a dog named Old Gloomy who was so big, so mind-spinningly enormous, that he was mistaken for a mountain top. Nobody ever suspected the soft, fluffy mountain peak to actually be a living animal, despite the fact that its soil was abnormally warm and grew fields of fuzzy brown fur. If the people of Fluffville would have known the mountain was actually alive, they never would have built their city around the massive canine. And if Old Gloomy would have known he would be mistaken for a mountain top, he never would have taken such a deep long snooze.
It was quite a surprise to the citizens of Fluffville when the massive beast awoke after its century-long nap, sniffing at the delicious meaty aroma billowing out of the mutton stew factory that stood on the tip of its nose. It licked its school-covered lips and blinked away the suburban crust that had collected in its eyes.
The town was immediately evacuated in a quiet, tip-toeing panic. Everyone thought their beautiful city would be destroyed by the waking behemoth as they waited outside city limits. But days passed and nothing happened. The weight of the city’s architecture was so heavy that it pinned Old Gloomy to his spot. And no matter how much his howls and whines rumbled the countryside, the dog could not break free. He was forever trapped beneath the great city and forced to spend the rest of his days as a living mountain top.
Life was not easy for the citizens of Fluffville once they went back to their old lives knowing full well their homes were built on top of the giant dog. They could hear the thunderous heartbeat pulsing through their walls at night. On the drive to work, they could feel the ground swelling up and down beneath their cars as the earth breathed. The air reeked of wet dog whenever it rained. Their livestock was blown out of the pastures whenever the dog coughed or sneezed.
But the worst part of living on Old Gloomy was the sadness that lingered in the air. The melancholy radiated out of the giant dog all day and all night, hovering over the city like a cloud of emotional pollution. This was how the town earned the nickname Gloomville—the gloomiest of all gloomy places to live in the world.
But it was very important to keep Old Gloomy as sad as possible. You see, whenever the dog was happy he wagged his tail with excitement. This caused a tornado of destruction, smashing apart the downtown shopping district and toppling high-rise apartment buildings. So in order to prevent this disaster from continuing, it became every citizen’s duty to keep Old Gloomy’s spirits as low as they could possibly go.
There was even a team of professional sadness-makers, paid by the city, who were tasked with keeping the dog in a state of constant depression. All day, they would call him a bad dog and scold him for things he didn’t even do. They would feed him only the blandest, driest, most sorrow-filled kibble. Then they would show him videos of happy dogs, running and playing in the sunlight, reminding Old Gloomy of all the things he couldn’t possibly do in his condition. A working day wasn’t over until the old dog’s eyes opened up into thick salty waterfalls.
Fernando Mendez was one of these sadness-makers—officially known as Stressmen. He took pride in his job, just as his father had when he was a Stressman, and his grandfather before him. He enjoyed the respect he received from his neighbors whenever he was out mowing his brown-fur lawn. He was treated like a hero whenever he went down to the pub for a dog-tear brew after a long day of work.
But something had changed in Fernando after his tenth year on the job. He started feeling sorry for Old Gloomy. Instead of depressing the dog, he found himself yearning to cheer him up. He wanted to see a happy expression spread across his face just once. Sometimes, he lay awake at night dreaming about what would happen if he bought Old Gloomy a giant rubber ball to play with or gave him a great big doggy treat for him to munch on. But Fernando knew this could never be. He had to keep his community safe.
“Old Gloomy’s suffering must never end.” That’s what was written above his locker when he arrived at work every day.
Fernando looked at himself in the mirror, placing the saddest frown he could muster onto his face. His uniform was
A plump man with long fisherman whiskers appeared behind him in the mirror. “You’re late, Mendez. The third time this week. What’s gotten into you? You’re supposed to be my top Stressman.”
It was Mr. Olsen, the boss—an old bastard who’d been a Stressman for as long as anyone could remember. He worked with both Fernando’s father and grandfather. When he came to work, he didn’t have to put on a frown to start his day. He had a natural talent for being miserable.
“I’ve been feeling under the weather,” Fernando said. It was clearly a lie, but he could never admit the truth to his boss. He couldn’t tell him that his heart just wasn’t in the job anymore.
Mr. Olsen didn’t buy the excuse, but let the issue go. “So what did you come up with? It better be something good.”
“This one will work.”
“You said that last time.”
“This will work better than last time.”
One of the jobs of the Stressmen was to come up with new and creative methods for depressing Old Gloomy. They couldn’t use the same techniques time after time. When overused, the dog would become numb to their sadness treatments and they would no longer be effective. So they had to continuously brainstorm new ideas each year in order to keep the mutt down in the dumps.
“The lives of thousands of people are at stake, Mendez. That dog better be crying by lunchtime or it’s your ass.”
Fernando deepened his frown and nodded softly. “This will work. I’ll stake my career on it.”
“You’re damn right you will.”
Then the miserable old man poured himself a cup of oily, flavorless coffee and stole the entire plate of cake doughnuts before Fernando could claim one.
Fernando stepped outside of Stressman Headquarters onto the platform below Old Gloomy’s massive left eye. When the dog saw him, he let out a deep sigh that vibrated through the facility. The old boy knew what was coming next—something dismal was about to be forced upon him. The dog immediately closed his eyes so that he wouldn’t have to watch, but they both knew his efforts were in vain.
“I’ll take care of it, Mr. Mendez,” said a voice from the control tower.
It was Johnson. Fernando’s young assistant who started last year. The kid was bright, but not too good at his job. Like many young people, he was a bit too optimistic and enjoyed life too much to be an effective Stressman. He knew how to operate the equipment and assist Fernando with adequacy, but he needed his dreams crushed and his heart broken a few more times before he’d be capable of performing a professional-level sadness treatment on his own.
“Take your time, Jake,” Fernando called up as he climbed the ladder to the control tower. “There’s no hurry.”
Fernando’s father taught him that a good Stressman always worked at a lethargic pace, with no excitement, no energy. His job was not just to keep the animal sad, but to keep him bored and without stimulation.
“Yes, Mr. Mendez.”
In the control tower, Jake Johnson pulled levers and tapped buttons, listening to mournful violin music as he operated the cranes that pulled open Gloomy’s left eyelid. They wouldn’t be able to show the dog sad things if the beast kept his eyes closed all day. Not only that, but they didn’t want Gloomy falling asleep before he was sufficiently depressed. They couldn’t allow an opportunity for good dreams.
“That’ll do,” Fernando said behind the assistant, once the eyelid was propped all the way open. “Now raise the screen.”
As Johnson hit the switch to raise the movie screen, Fernando looked up into the colossal orb before him. The eye was like a murky brown lake, so big that Fernando could jump inside of it and swim across the ever-moist pupil. Whenever he looked at the giant dog eye-to-eye, Fernando always wondered what the dog thought of them. They were merely fleas to the massive beast; fleas that he could never scratch away.
“So what have you got today?” Johnson asked.
Fernando opened his briefcase and flipped through his data disks, each one containing a different sadness treatment.
“Put this one on first,” he said, handing his assistant a disk.
When Johnson put in the disk, a movie was projected across the screen. It was a short film of a dog that resembled Old Gloomy. He was having a birthday party, sitting beside a cake with a party hat dangling off the side his head. But it was not a happy party. Nobody showed up to the dog’s birthday because he doesn’t have any friends. The doggy made the cake for himself and was celebrating his birthday by himself, lying by the cake with a lonely expression on his face, jowls drooping against the floor, too sad to even take a lick of the frosting.
“Is it working?” Johnson asked.
Fernando looked at the monitor and shook his head. “The readings show no change in mood.”
“But the loneliness theme usually works,” Johnson said.
“He’s tuning it out. We need something sadder.”
They tried another film. This one was about a puppy who gets separated from his mother. He spends days searching for his family, wandering through the desolate wasteland, being as lonely as a pup could be. But then it turns out that the whole area is highly radioactive and the dog gets really sick. His skin falls off and he drags his body across the desert like a living skeleton.
“Geez, Mr. Mendez,” Johnson said as they watched the film. “This one’s pretty dark.”
When the puppy finally reaches his mother, the momma dog doesn’t recognize the puppy and growls at it, threatening to rip his throat out. No matter how much the puppy begs and pleads with his momma, she refuses to believe it’s her son. She abandons the pup in the barren landscape, leaving him to die a long, painful death. Alone.
Johnson was tearing up by the end of the film, but Old Gloomy’s mood did not change. The dog just let out another long sigh.
“It didn’t affect him,” Johnson said, wiping his tears away.
Fernando said, “He’s just getting bored.”
“I thought bored was good?”
“Bored is okay, but we don’t get paid until he cries.”
“Do you have anything sadder?”
“Not really.” Fernando looked through the disks and grabbed one at random. “Just put this one on.”
The film they played featured a dog that discovers a mountain of food filled with giant bones, hot dogs, and slabs of meat. The dog happily runs around the food with his tongue dangling out, salivating all over the place. But as soon as the dog takes a bite of a hot dog, it turns to ash. The dog goes after a juicy steak, but it’s the same result. Everything he tries to eat disintegrates in his mouth before he gets a chance to taste it.
“Something’s happening,” Johnson said, examining the monitor.
But Fernando didn’t have to look at the readings to notice the change in Old Gloomy’s mood. He could see it plain as day. The dog’s massive eye quivered. His breathing became heavy.
“Is he about to cry?” Johnson yelled, turning around to the control panel that operated the aqueduct. “Should I open the flood gate?”
“No...” Fernando could tell something was wrong. The dog wasn’t getting sad. He was getting hungry. “Quick, turn off the film!”
“What?”
“The food’s making him excited!”
“But it’s not real food. It turns into ash before the dog can eat it.”
“Just turn it off!”
Fernando hit the switch himself, removing the film from the projector, but it was too late. The dog was panting heavily, excited by the images of all those bones and meats.
Mr. Olsen’s voice came over the intercom system. “What the hell is going on up there, Mendez?”
Fernando ignored his boss. He went to the monitoring station, looking at the video feed from the tail-section of town. The ground was beginning to quake. The buildings in the shopping district shuddered and rumbled. He could see people running for their lives.
“His tail’s about to wag,” Fernando said, trying to keep calm.
“What do we do?” Johnson cried.
Although the movie with the food was turned off, Old Gloomy held onto the memory of its images. Fernando could see it all over the dog’s face. He could tell it was imagining what it would be like to eat all of that delicious food. Old Gloomy drooled into the canal below its jowls, then licked its lips with its massive goopy tongue.
