The more humane colonists took a cue from Seabrook’s The Magic Island and capitalized on the risen as labor. They don’t have to be paid and only need occasional feeding (a good use for criminals). And, once conditioned or trained, they can work ceaselessly until body parts fall off. The damaged dead were cycled into other uses: crash-test dummies, subjects for bioagent experiments, targets for SWAT or urban intervention units, and so on. Reuse until head injuries, immolation, dissolving by bioagents, or being shot to pieces was common.
Remember, these doers were the human capitalists. There were others, lots of others, who grabbed opportunity by the balls or pussy and squeezed.
One thing that we collectively learned during the dead uprising was to be less morally judgmental. Hell, folks had to come to grips with killing their parents, siblings, wives, kids, and close friends, to say nothing of offing former people from outside their social orbits.
Next to go were moral standards regarding monogamy. The world needs repopulating, right? This new morality fueled an adjustment in attitudes toward kink and its presentation. Venal capitalists saw money to be made in the delivery of fantasies and perversions. The necessity for sexual activity had deadened the desire for traditional vanilla sex, and the general public started demanding more exotic flavors.
Thus came the resurrection of the XXX surname on the reborn World Wide Web. Think of this new domain as a twenty-four-seven-three-hundred-sixty-five virtual adult toy store with loops and peep shows for purposes of entertainment, instruction, or inspiration. The variety was astonishing: the vilest of degradations, animal exploitation, the disabled and abled, the disabled and disabled. If you could think of it, you’d find it.
As these situations flourished, breathers saw opportunities to get in on the capitalist game. All it took was imagination, a partner, and video equipment, and poof, instant DIY weird-shit porn. The streamers drank it up like desert survivors. And if audiences couldn’t find what they were looking for, there were companies and people all too willing to take commissions, which let the average joe schmo experience the thrill of directing a porno.
With the public involved in the creation of commercial content, shit by degrees got weirder and darker. Since a lot of stuff far exceeded the remaining narrow boundaries where sexual content was concerned, the Dark Web clawed its way back from the precipice and reclaimed its place in the wild west of the new-media world.
I really shouldn’t complain, or judge, since this new development got me gainfully employed. It’s my job to explore and navigate these rabbit holes, cataloguing and promoting what’s there. I find shit, watch it, and figure out how to make the algorithms like it. Basically, I make hype videos or trailers of the shit I find on the way down and at the very bottom.
It’s a job I probably have in my genetics. My parents were librarians—Dad at a university, Mom at the local public library. They managed to survive the uprising, and were prized for their ability to locate and teach useful information like gardening, basic repairs, bushcraft, off-grid living, all the skills people need to survive after the collapse of civilization. That’s where I get my intellectual ability to find shit.
The other part came from my paternal grandfather. He was among the last U.S. troops sent to Vietnam, and he had one of those jobs that, if you came out in one piece physically, you were probably shattered mentally. Grandpop was part of a crew of guys called Tunnel Rats. He managed to survive that war, though he came back damn near deaf—grenades exploding in the confines of a tunnel, the gift that keeps on giving—and with a near-manic case of claustrophobia. Grandpop had a ton of stories. Later in his life, he began shedding them, and I’m blessed, or cursed, with remembering them all. Maybe someday I’ll write them down. The stories stopped when my father had him committed. Grandpop lasted a week in that place. Dressed himself as best he could in his uniform, knotted three American flags together, duct-taped his arm into a salute, and dove out his third-floor window, hanging himself with the flags.
I’ve got my grandfather’s talent for exploring tight, dark places, and like him, I’ve come away with some suppurating psychological gashes. In the world after the uprising, post-traumatic stress is so commonplace that if someone doesn’t have it, they are ostracized.
Fighting zombies will do that to someone.
So, I work a job that requires me to watch stuff I can’t unsee, copy it, and publish some of the most vile shit ever committed to personal or corporate media.
Let me give you an idea of how things have advanced. It started with perverts who wanted zombie porn. That was simple. Pull all of a zombie’s teeth, cut off its hands and feet, render it incapable of infecting someone. Give the other participants a neoprene sheath for extra protection and let the “slicks”—that’s what we call breathers wearing neoprene—have at it. Necrophilia for fun and profit, lots of profit.
The porn scenarios started simply enough—raping the undead, triple penetrations, videos to see how many people could fuck a zombie before it came apart. Pretty much the same shit old-school porn provided, just swapping the barely living for the living dead. But necrophilia and traditional porn ain’t enough. Let’s add torture to the mix. Cut off a zombie’s limbs, no matter if it’s male or female, and bingo—that kicked off a whole film series called “getting to second base.” How many swinging dicks can fit inside a zombie? Step right up, split that taint, and line up shoulder to shoulder. How many cum shots does it take to blow out the back of a zombie’s head? We got that covered, too. How about interesting implements used for penetration? Pick your poison—zombie limbs, kendo sticks and pool cues, Rube Goldberg mechanical dildos, taser leads, exhaust pipes. If you can ram it, we can film it.
We even offer revenge porn. Take a criminal, cut off his body parts and make him watch while a zombie eats them. Big market for sex organs there, and if you’re really evil, you get secured to a chair with a barbed metal dildo up your ass, and a zombie will have at you for the pleasures of the viewing public.
And there’s more. Say someone who did you dirty got turned. How many creative ways can you think of to send them out with one last good fucking?
It was one of those days when I was scrolling through all this shit—when you can’t unsee something you become very contemptuous at the familiar. I’d call it hackneyed, but that would be an unfortunate pun considering the dismemberment stuff that’s out there—and I had trouble keeping my eyes open. I was yawning nonstop, and it wasn’t even time for my mandated morning break. So, I decided, I was gonna be a suck slog. I knew I’d struggle to sell most of this garbage. There’s only so much burnish you can put on a turd and it’ll still stink. I was just thinking that very thought, about burnishing turds, when something scrolled past announcing, “you ain’t gonna believe this.” And I just happened to stop.
Now I’ve done this shit long enough to know that’s old-school hype. Rarely does it deliver. Most people with less time down rabbit holes than me don’t fall for it. But I was bored, and feeling generous to the old-ass cuss who posted it. Though I did I swear to god if it was another “stuff the rat up the cunt or ass and watch it eat its way out” video, I had pledged to go looking for whoever posted it, old-ass cuss or not, and lock them in a closet with a zombie.
I clicked, watched a few seconds, and picked my jaw up off my lap. The fucking video delivered.
It was called Two Ghouls, One Cup.
To be fair, it’s more of a mug bowl than a cup, a pristine piece of china salvaged from some mansion or exclusive restaurant. I didn’t know they made vessels that large out of china, so maybe it was commissioned. With its blue patterns that look like calligraphy, swirls and lines connecting in the shape of flowers and birds all set on a white background, the piece reeks of class.
These two dead chicks are shitting into it. Their aim isn’t great, but I don’t think that was the videographer’s intent.
First of all, I’d never pondered the question of whether or not zombies took dumps. Maybe it’s just me, but biology was never a favorite subject of mine—human anatomy, yeah, I’m all over that. But the mechanics of evacuating my bowels was not something that I needed to think about. Truth be told, it only crossed my mind when I didn’t do it regularly, and it certainly wasn’t my cup of tea (or feces) when it came to video entertainment. I’ve seen scat vids shot from the bottom’s perspective, so I know how the anus works and what different kinds of shit look like on the way out.
Yet there I was, logging the latest set of images that I’ll never be able to unsee, and I couldn’t look away.
~~~
The shit itself has the consistency and color of tar that’s been warmed and mixed with paraffin. It’s a slow, continuous stream from the asshole duet, not huge amounts, but enough to get close to filling the cup. The shitters were probably lookers at one time. I could tell they had been enhanced when alive, because one has a completely deflated breast with its mate still pendulous and perky. The other’s ass cheeks leak clear fluid, with the shape of her ass going from prominent to flaccid during the course of the video. Their teeth are broken, but still look white. One has lost an eye—the optic nerves are still dangling down her face. Neither has lips. One’s hair is buzzed, like the fuzz of a tennis ball. The other’s is long enough to have her shit drizzle through it—the flow adds black to the faded color-spectrum dye job that probably cost thousands of dollars.
They’re doing this in the middle of what looks like a restaurant, and it’s filled with breathers in evening wear. Not a one looks at the spectacle. They engage in small talk, laugh, toast, and eat exotic food brought by servers dressed in tuxes. I don’t hear any of this. The only sound comes from the ghouls, their grunts, the enhanced flatulence that accompanies their eruptions, and the plop of misaimed dumps on the floor surrounding the “cup.”
I couldn’t look away.
Whoever made this knows how to use a camera, and how to edit video. It’s a professional presentation complete with zooms, pans, overhead and floor-level shots, and with some decent tricks thrown in: slow motion, rewinds so we can see the shit re-entering, color exchanges so the shit takes on different hues—the tie-dye version is really creative—and the freeze-frame on the dribble that misses the cup and slowly makes its way down the side of the receptacle, a sickly-looking black drop standing out against the delicate white and blue.
It’s some scat fetishist’s take on an art film. And it’s mesmerizing. A masterpiece. A brilliant commentary on class structure and the new privilege. Something that definitely needs to be noticed and appreciated.
~~~
I paused the video and messaged my most jaded friends who also happen to live in the same building and do the same work. Max and Millie are not a couple, but they are two of the most connected people I know. They’re usually the ones who summon me to see the next big thing—a new show where naked survivalists are pursued by zombies and zombified animals, a game show involving extreme dares like snorkeling through semen or cooking and eating one of your own body parts, extreme wrestling pitting breathers against zombies, pay-per-view public executions of criminals. I vividly recall one execution where the criminal was suspended over a pit full of zombies and slowly lowered into it. They’d put a cage around his head to protect it, and had pulled out a completely denuded skeleton with its face intact, the twisted terror and bulging eyes freeze-framed at the end.
It was my chance to return the favor.
Max and Millie entered my apartment, each wielding partially consumed forty-ouncers. Max handed out a cold, unopened one for me. I took it, and we exchanged pleasantries.
“Watch anything good lately?” I asked.
Millie looked at her nails, sank into my couch, and took a drink. She swallowed and belched. “Nah, been kinda quiet in my neck of the Dark Web. Lots of DIY sci-fi with shitty special effects. Most inventive thing I’ve seen is this show where breathers are fucking fucked-up hybrid experiments. It’s like The Fly with money shots, triple penetrations, and bestiality.”
“How’s that?” I asked.
“Some of the hybrids are conglomerations of animals. One part-squid dildoing ten women, one for each arm. Its body was just jelly, and guys were gangbanging it. It popped like a balloon when they were done and slimed everyone.”
“So, what happened?” I asked. “Huge-ass lick fest?”
“Nope. Hardcore wrestling with the fluids as lube.” Millie yawned as she said this.
“How ‘bout you, Maximus?” He hates it when I call him that—reminds him that my dick is bigger than his.
Max glared at me. “I’m gonna fucking kill you sometime, you know that. I just got switched to a darker corner and was overlooking a lot of stuff that didn’t rev my engines. The content creators started complaining, so the overlords shuffled me to the torture wing of the Dark Web. It’s kind of stimulating, but the videos are loooooooong because they try to draw things out as slowly as possible.”
“So?” I said. “The great snuff-film resurrection.”
“True that,” Max said, chugging from his forty. “But there is some creativity. I just pushed this one. A bunch of time-lapse photography, testing bioweapons on fresh zombies that haven’t had time to rot. I’m thinking they’re fresh killed. Not a mark on them, just wild eyes and snapping teeth restrained to metal tables with little troughs on the sides. What happens is that someone in a biohazard suit says tonelessly what chemical they’re testing, and what body part they’re testing it on. They use as much of the zombie as possible, kinda like those old allergy tests you used to take where they punctured your back to tried and figure out what aggravates you.”
“What kind of shit do they use?” I asked.
“A lot of shit I can’t pronounce, or shit that’s still top secret, and they only refer to that by numbers. I recognize a few things, different acids, for example. They’re trying to develop a fast-acting acid mix that can instantaneously dissolve zombies. Hoping to attack hordes with fire trucks and firefighting helicopters. They have this one thing they call Zombisol. They demonstrated on a zombie kid, put a drop on his shin. Bloomed out like a ripple in a pond. You can see it work its way through the flesh layers as the ripple spreads. Poor Z’s skin sizzled like bacon, and the flesh just turned to water. When it ate through down to the bones, they collapsed and crumbled to powder.” Max described this video in a complete monotone, yawning when he finished.
“How about you?” Millie asked. “You mentioned something in your text.”
“I found this today, and I’m gonna push it forward and hype it as far as I can. It’s, as far as I can tell, a new frontier of scat filmmaking, and it’s got a connection to life before wartime.”
“An informed scat auteur? You’ve got my interest,” Max said. Millie yawned and chugged the rest of her forty.
“Scat work is pretty much the same shit, pardon the pun. You’re producing it, making someone wear it or eat it, drowning someone in it, or worshipping it. How is this next big thing all that and the colostomy bag full?
“Feast your eyes!” I loaded the video to my big screen and hit play. Max and Millie leaned forward.
“Christ, that’s a title I haven’t thought of in a while.” Millie said as Two Ghouls, One Cup flashed across the screen.
“You seen the original?” Max gaped. Millie responded with a what-the-fuck eye-roll.
“Not only did I see it—I tried to repeat it with my roommate,” Millie said, pride in her voice. “It was a popular college dare. Ours made it to the top one hundred. Almost got us expelled because we were wearing logoed gear from our college in the vid. We had to go back and blur all references to good old U. That knocked us out of the top one hundred.”
“How about you two quit jawing and watch this,” I said as the credits finished and we were treated to a close-up of the black, toothpaste-like shit stream.
“What the actual fuck is that? Cancer shit?” Max asked.
“Just watch,” I answered.
The camera slowly pulls back to take in the opposing squatting asses extruding the black sludge. The camera lingers on the down-flow.
“Neat effects,” Millie said. “How’d they do that to that ass on the left of the screen?” I noted she was no longer yawning or examining her nails, but looking with interest at the suppurating slits oozing milky fluid.
“They’re not effects,” I answered.
“How do you know?” she challenged.
“You’ll see,” I said.
The camera shifts to the shitter on the right of the screen and starts the slow rise.
“Oh, gnarly,” Max said, gaping. The camera lingers on the deflated breast, its mate still full and plump. A bead of something—I’d missed that before—escapes from the nipple.
“Okay, so it’s not effects, but how the hell can you train Z’s?” Millie asked. “And how is this the first time we’re establishing that zombies take dumps? Wouldn’t we have known that? Wouldn’t the science shows have picked that up?”
The scene shifts upward, providing a first look at the two stars of this production. They’re not fresh dead given the ravaging of their bodies, but they haven’t yet begun to rot.
After asking me to pause on the face of the zombie with half a nose, Max pulled out his phone, looked at something, then signaled for me to rewind it. I did. Seeing the breasts, he hollered, “Stop.”
“Can you zoom this shot?” he asked.
I obliged, noticing a dark spot on the undamaged breast.
“Zoom in on that,” Max said.
“What the fuck, dude? It’s a mole,” Millie said.
“No, I don’t think it is,” he answered. “Go closer.”
I did.
In the video, something was beginning to take shape. The tighter I zoomed, the clearer the shape appeared. I stopped when it resolved into a Celtic rune, looking like the trunk of a tree with two branches on the right, facing upward.
“Either of you know what that means?” Max asked.
Millie shook her head. I reached for my phone to do an image search. Max stopped me with a gesture.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” Max said. “It means wealth. And it’s actually a pretty famous tattoo, given who it’s attached to.”
It dawned on me. Noting my burgeoning recognition, Max nodded solemnly.
“You mean that’s Tracey South?” I stammered. “The pop star? I thought that she went into the bunkers with all the other rich bastards.”
“You have to admit, there’s some evidence,” Max said, pointing to the image. “The tattoo, the hair—even with the color changes—the slightly crossed eyes.”
“Wow, you’ve come a long way baby!” Millie snarked. Her dislike of Tracey’s musical stylings is legendary. Millie had even gotten her own fifteen minutes by dressing up in knock-off-DIY Tracey-wear and performing parody songs based on the singer’s hits. I have to admit, Millie’s version of “Take the Time” isn’t half bad. She turned it into “Take Me Naked.”
“Wonder who the other one is,” I pondered.
“If I were to bet, I’d put money on it being Lexis Laroo,” Max said. “Tracey’s frenemy rival.”
And it made sense. Lexis and Tracey were constantly sniping at each other over social media—before, during, and after the uprising. A duet at some music award show became a pissing contest over who could sing higher. They actually took that into a pay-per-view contest, each challenging the other to reach higher and higher notes. The first challenge ended at a draw since neither wanted to jeopardize their upcoming competing tours. A rematch was scheduled, but never happened because of the Z-War. They’d gone underground, literally, doing concerts from the safety of bunkers on different sides of the world. Eventually both branched out into activism. Tracey embraced the zombies with love and understanding, even writing and performing a mega hit, “They Were My Children.” Lexis went for annihilation or exploitation of the undead. Her foray into rap, “Mow ‘Em Down,” replaced Tracey’s ballad at number one.
And now it looked like someone else was getting the last laugh. Here they were, performing together in an obscene duet.
This realization added a whole new layer of brilliance to the auteur’s work, reminding us that even the most untouchable or unattainable still must allow for rectal relief. The perfect commentary on past, present, and future. Socioeconomics, privilege, star-making, civilization’s end, our final coalescence after we’ve been masticated and processed by the various systems we labor within—all compressed into a seven-minute video of two zombies struggling to fill a receptacle with their own tarry waste, and doing a nearly competent job.
We watched the rest of the video in silence, golf clapping when the bowl fills to nearly over flowing, its intricately etched outsides spattered and slimed with wayward drops. The zombies are led away by offscreen handlers who control them with nooses on poles. They are docile, no struggling or lunging at each other.
We scrutinized the end credits, looking for a mention of a trainer or wrangler, but the credits only listed the producer (Bartram Layne), the director (Layne Bartram), the cinematographer (Barten Tramlay), and the editor (Laytram Barne). At the very end, before fading to black, the video offered a final teaser in ballyhoo font: “Coming Soon: The Breathing Bowl.”
“Wonder what that means,” Millie asked, but she seemed to be talking to the ether. “Hey,” she said finally, her attention back on me. “You got any beer in this shithouse?”
“Fridge is full. Help yourself.”
She rose and moved into the kitchen. We overheard her grumbling about the beer selection and its cheapness.
“Got any complaints about the price I’m charging you?” I hollered.
She returned with three of my “top-shelf” brand and handed bottles to Max and me. We settled back and toasted the film and each other.
“Gotta hand it to you,” Max said as he sucked down half his beer. “You do deliver on your promises. Zombie scat porn. Think of the possibilities.”
“Did you even notice the subtexts?” I asked, incredulity nearly moving me to screaming.
“Subtexts, schlubtexts, who cares?” Millie said, taking up for her colleague. “It’s a well-shot video of two formerly famous hotties taking public shits into a cup. You really think anyone is gonna care about the filmmaker’s messaging?”
There are days that I love my job. This wasn’t one of them.
But I’m glad, at least, that my film studies degrees finally paid off.