A Boat Ride on the USS Frankenhooker and Other Near-Death Experiences

Streams of thick goo – yellow, white, and bloody – oozed out of the front door to 26 Hemlock Drive, a 32-suite apartment home to prime beef detectives, armchair quarterbags, and unemployed superheroes like the Delivery Boy. 

You know, perverts.

The goo filled the street, covering everything in sight: people, cars, and the carefully manscaped pubic hair trees and mustachioed, pedophilic bushes running wingman for the residents’ white unmarked vans.

There was a reason 26 Hemlock Drive sprouted up from the cracked asphalt in this part of town.

A very good reason.

And an even better one for why there was ooze in the stairways and the streets.

But this wasn’t judgment. 

It was an infection.

Inside the building, everyone who hadn’t been swept into the street by the noxious wave was dead. 

Or hoped to be soon.

Pressed up against the glass, a few bodies could be seen through the windows, swollen and ready to burst. 

Thanks to the undulations of the pus as it flowed through the rooms and halls, the bodies waved and danced, like inflated car lot spaghetti people drunk off Mary Lou’s Prom Night Punch, emasculated premature ejaculation apologies, soured hype, and a few other probiotics.

Standing on a stoop across the street, Buck Sparkman smelled tangy carpets, skid marked staircases, and rancid, rash-ridden sheetrock walls. 

This wasn’t squalor as much as it was reliving a past.

And if there was one thing Buck hated, it was nostalgia. 

A redo.

Four days ago, he’d been hired to come to this very building to take down the Delivery Boy.

When Buck left 26 Hemlock Drive with the Delivery Boy in the van, the entire building was covered in mozzarella and marinara. 

Apparently no one bothered to clean. And the whole place had gone septic. 

The gravedigger’s Tomstoned XIII, 2b.R0.2b, cracked. 

It was Sasha: “Checked with work. I’m free on Friday night. Date night?”

Buck: “Awesome. Argento’s Pizza? Then cocktails at the Grand Guignol?”

Sasha: “Great. My ballet shoes will be at the ready.”

Buck: “I’ll put on my witch’s hat and robe.”

Sasha: “I ⛧ U.”

Buck constructed a raft out of four trash can lids, four Hefty bags worth of refuse, and a once resurrected, now dead, stitched together clone of Mary Shelley, tricked out in fishnets and fishhooks, and crossed Hemlock Avenue. 

In rhythm with each stroke, Shelley eked out, “Wanna party?”

Buck did not. In fact, he knew the U.S.S. Frankenhooker would not survive her maiden voyage. 

Loose stitches sink ships.

But still he rowed, getting closer to the building despite the strong current. 

Buck spotted a red-eyed house mouse riding a cross-eyed calico cat, floating toward the sewer, its maw wide and hungry. Sparkman saluted the duo. They wave back.

Shelley was jealous.

“Wanna date?” she asked. “Wanna date?”

She didn’t stop.

Annoying, yes, but at least it was better than the theme to Star Cars.

And if the gravedigger could stop Star Cars – mostly – he could clean up the mess at 26 Hemlock Drive. 

This wasn’t his first job taking on an entire building,

Then again, this was his first time taking on, well, a building. 

People?

Yeah.

Mall Walker Texas Rangers. 

Sure thing.

Golden Ghoul cosplayers with a penchant for Pirates of Penzance, rum, sodomy, and the lash.

Begrudgingly. 

But here, now, he was at a loss for ideas.

Even the bad ones.

The closer he got to the building, the worse the stench became.

The entire block was already septic.

Or soon would be.

And without a clue about how to stop it, Buck knew that the infection would soon spread across all of Hellsboro.

For a second, he paused, debating whether to paddle back to the other side of the street. 

He didn’t.

The vessel began to take on pus.

Even worse, the stitches were starting to unravel.

So this is my fate, Buck thought. Drowning in pus aboard a sinking clone of Mary Shelley. 

Sparkman reached into his pocket to grab a vial.

Make that two.

As the pus rose to his ankles.

***

Buck Sparkman didn’t drown.

He made it out alive of 26 Hemlock Drive.

But not with his sanity.

Or what the idiot had left him with.

Buck opened the front door to the house and walked in. 

Terry was sleeping on his bed.

Sasha was asleep on the couch. 

The Lifescrime channel was on the boob, and the remote control was set on vibrator. 

The gravedigger walked into the kitchen, opened the fridge, grabbed a bottle of Dead Man’s Party, and sat down at his desk in the alcove of the kitchen. 

The unpaid bills scattered when Buck turned on the light and crawled behind the walls.

He laid his Tombstone on the table, tipped back the bottle, and read. 

Obama’s birth certificate was on the run again. 

Leonardo di Bonneville was dating his granddaughters. 

All five of them.

Fido Castro had been castrated. 

OJ’s killers had been found. 

The ghost of Charles Manson had remastered the White Album. 

And Poland was victorious at Eurovision but had come home with a nasty STD, making life miserable for all the mapmakers who had to apply lesions to the former Soviet Bloc nation. 

It was all old news, so Buck turned to the ODs. 

They were just as creaky.

Sixty-four-year-old mother of four and grandmother of 11 Gloria Tenenbaum had passed over the weekend. 

She died when a brawny highlander with a mysterious past and a heart of gold ripped her bodice and played the bagpipes until she was nothing more than a quivering quim and he was an empty bag. 

She was found on the sofa surrounded by bonbons, cat hair, and a deflated set of bagpipes. 

The public is advised to be on the lookout for a sentient kilt with a hobbled gait.

And then there was Josiah Applegate, a long-standing member of the Temper Tantrum Temperance League.

He had a fairly nasty run-in with a gang of newsboys from the golden age of journalism who chased him down the block and into a dead-end. 

Which is exactly what Josiah had hoped would happen. 

But unbeknownst to him, the newsboys were having a turf war with a gang of chimney sweeps. 

Papers were thrown.

Paupers were pounded into the ground.

And broomstick splinters were left in places only a doctor could retrieve. 

Buck was jealous, his attention now focused on Sasha sleeping on the couch.

For a second he considered it. 

For a second he wanted to. 

But he was tired. 

And hadn’t yet washed the bits and pieces of Mary Shelley out of his hair.

He turned his attention back to his Tombstoned XIII, 2b.R0.2b.

The chimney sweeps and news boys weren’t enough for Josiah. 

He needed something with an edge. 

And so he sought out a gang of skinheads.

He found some.

Unfortunately, the only edge these skinheads possessed was a straight one. 

For the next two hours, Josiah was subjected to a brutal lecture about the dangers of eating meat, smoking cigarettes, drinking alcohol, and paying too much for concert tickets. 

This morning, the Hellsboro authorities found him in the gutter of the Dead Light District fully clothed and unharmed. 

It was a horrible sight.

The photos even came with a trigger warning.

Sparkman read on.

The bits and pieces that were once former security software exec-turned-international fugitive and whale rider Ikaika Quezon were found scattered over a half-mile section of the shore. 

According to Ikaika’s Tombstone, which had washed up on the beach and had summarily made a home inside a Coca-Coca can, the software exec had finally caught the big one. 

Unfortunately, the big one in question was the vagina of a sperm whale. 

He was crushed upon entry. 

And then there was Barbara Ann Mallory and John Denver Devereux, two students at the Prostrate and Grovel Academy for Young Believers. 

The pair had been promise-ringed since first grade.

They fought tooth and nail to contain their urges. 

For years, if not a lifetime.

Eventually, the pair snapped. And they did what lovers often do in these situations: 

They went on a killing spree. 

Not that Sparkman had gotten to that part.

He was asleep at his desk, face down on this Tombstone.

And so, the bills emerged from their hiding places and turned out the lights.

They preferred to work in the dark.