A sequel to Taco Tim, which appeared in Carnage House Issue #7.

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“FUCKIN’ HELL JUS’SIT down ‘n shut up. How many times’ve I gotta say it?” The Nurse pressed her thick breadstick fingers in a fan across Fred’s chest, forcing him to lie still as she shouted above the blaring, incessant beeping from one of the piece-of-shit monitors hooked to the tubing that was shoved too far up his ass or down his throat or both. It wasn’t wholly obvious where the caterwauling commotion was coming from, just that Fred knew he was hooked into it via a tangle of wires, IVs, and electrodes as well as the intubation violating his throat and whatever was up his ass, and that it signaled something unsavory was happening. He had only a vague idea of what that might be—something related to some pandemic going around—and he wanted as much to do with it as a lobotomy by brick. But apparently, he didn’t have a choice in the matter. His autonomy had been stripped bare the moment he turned up at the urgent care clinic with chronic constipation.

After a couple days at this shithole of a containment clinic or whatever the hell it was—strapped to a steel slab with its too-thin pancake of a mattress and being forced to watch bad daytime grandma soaps on the too-tiny television which hung off the wall in the corner cattywampus to the bed where its angle guaranteed yet another crick to his already crooked neck—Fred just wanted to be home in his threadbare, half-broken armchair watching reruns of Crime Spree. But apparently that really was too much to ask. Hell, he’d have settled for reroofing the house in ninety-eight-degree heat, or babysitting twelve two-year-olds at a sugar-rush-themed coffee house birthday bash, or even getting a root canal at the dentist sans novocaine. Something, anything, other than being trapped in this place.

Because as soon as the masked figures barged into the urgent care and hauled his ass into an unmarked van in what amounted to the worst ambulance ride ever, Fred lost any say in what was happening to him.

Since then, he lay tethered like a waterboarding victim to this lumpy rock-hard gurney that reeked of shit and piss and vomit and death, with its tangle of hookups and monitors. And to top it all off, he was drugged. On what, he wasn’t sure, but he guessed his captors had souped him up on some kind of complacency serum, probably the date rape drug or the like, administered through a port into one of the new bodily holes where no holes naturally would have been. And though he could feel every bullshit sensation that crossed over and under his skin—from the repulsively, indescribably sticky and stained hem of The Nurse’s sleeve scraping over his arm, to her obscene girth spilling sloppily over his thigh—he couldn’t raise so much as a finger in protest.

From the get-go The Nurse had ordered him to “Jus’sit down ‘n shut up!” No “How are you feeling?” or “What hurts?” or “It’ll be okay.” No empathy, no concern, no do-no-harm Hippocratic hypocrisy…just a giant Fuck You. She never even offered her name, so he could only identify her as The Nurse. And when Fred finally managed to open his mouth to speak, she forced some plastic toilet-roll tube device down his throat in a sort of sick sadomasochistic foreplay routine so she could throat-fuck him into next Sunday with whatever else she’d shoved in there, then do the same via his ass to really drive home the experience.

Fred’s mind reeled as he relived the torturous treatment, one PTSD-inducing memory at a time. If I ever get out of this shithole I’m gonna leave a bad review, he thought. Though first, he would have to figure out just what this place, which he’d come to think of as Hell, was called.

0 stars, would not recommend. Worst vacation ever.

As that thought settled, something snapped inside Fred’s gut like a rubber band giving out after being pulled too taut. He scrambled to sit up on the gurney, straining so hard against the restraints that they cut deep slices into his arms and chest, leaving lacerated valleys of blood and torn flesh in their wake.

“Oh, no you don’t!” The Nurse said as she pushed him back down, tightening the thick leather straps on his biceps, wrists, ankles, and chest. “Get ready,” she said with a sneer, and flipped a switch on one of the machines. It gave off an audible click, and the incessant beeping stopped only to be replaced by a faint glug-glug-glug gushing sound as the contraption whirred to life.

Before Fred’s eyes, his belly rose as if he were being inflated like a basketball. He looked at The Nurse pleadingly, certain this had something to do with all the mechanizations he was hooked up to, the pump shoved up his ass, and whatever she had just turned on. He opened his mouth to scream but all that came out was a noxious taco belch. Tears welled in his eyes, hot and salty, then brimmed over and down his cheeks, but to no avail. The Nurse ignored him as his gut ballooned larger, his body swelling like a Thanksgiving Day parade blimp. He felt everything ripping inside, his organs tearing free of his internal structure. One. Pop. After. Pop. Another. Pop.

Glug-Glug-Glug.

“Get set,” The Nurse said, her voice lilting with anticipation. She licked her lips, held up an empty horse-sized hypodermic needle, her eyes crazed, pupils dilated to levels of near-sexual arousal, and sneered again.

Fred could feel his arm being sucked into itself as his body continued to swell. At first there was numbness, then the unfeeling gave way to an excruciating roar of an overzealous emptying sensation—like when you have diarrhea so bad that nothing else will come out because there’s no more to purge, but your hyperactive sphincter keeps contracting as if to turn itself inside out. Which is essentially what his arm did as it imploded and was absorbed into the distending hull that had once been his body.

The machine continued to whirr, the glug-glug-glugging joined by the shrill, high-pitched squeal of a motor being pushed to its limits, and Fred hoped the terrible contraption would break. But it kept plugging away as his skin and musculature grew transparent, stretching even tighter over his burgeoning form until he could see the network of veins and arteries and internal organs floating around underneath. It was a vile, terrifying vision, turning what was left of his bloated carcass into nothing more than an amniotic fluid-filled sac. Fred could feel and see something moving in there, bumping into what was left of his floating flotsam. A shadow strained and pressed forth from the remains of his stomach then shoved past his spleen, stretching and adjusting itself. He blinked. Inside his abdomen, a shape began to form. A question came to him, so ridiculous he tried to voice it aloud, but his mouth had ceased to function, so all that came out was a whoosh of air and the thought.

Is that a taco?

The taco materialized slowly at first, collecting detritus pulled together from his body by some internal electromagnetic current. Like a sculpture forming itself, the taco filled with ground beef, sizzled to perfection. Then came the sprinkle of melty cheese, and the taco spun around to form an outer husk of a yellow corn shell. A realization dawned on Fred.

Taco Tim.

Yes, this looked exactly like that taco he’d gotten off that greasy street rat Tim. And, in spite of his ravaged body, damn—did it ever look good enough to eat—the taco was mockingly tempting to him, even amid his current predicament.

“Go!” The Nurse shouted gleefully. She plunged the oversize hypodermic needle into Fred’s gut and wriggled it around until it made contact with the taco. Snarkily, the schadenfreude joy rising and falling in her sing-songy voice, she warned, “This might hurt a bit.”

The pain was excruciating. Fred wanted to scream, to pass out, to curl into a ball, to wither up and die already… but his body was no longer under his control and instead he just lay there, violated and betrayed, strapped to the gurney and fully conscious. Mercifully, though not mercifully enough, the rest happened quickly. His other arm and both legs slurped into the imploding mass, leaving the leather restraints to fall loosely where they had dug huge ruts into his chafed raw and bleeding flesh only moments prior. If only his inevitable death would come sooner. The machine, to which he was still hooked up, continued to whirr his eulogy, its glug-glug-glugging slowing to near nothingness. In the end, all Fred could do was watch his own destruction, until his world finally went black and he was, at long last, released from the anguish.

In death, his contorted face resembled the famous Munch painting, The Scream, frozen in the silent ravages of a horrific demise, of a body pulling itself into itself.

The Nurse pulled on the syringe stopper and suctioned up the fully formed taco, which transformed into a sort of strange golden, glowing goo that, even in its liquefied form, radiated a craving vibe, almost like a pheromone, to be snarfed or inhaled whole. She flipped the machine switch to “off” and it stopped on a dime, returning to its stoic silence, hibernating in wait for its next victim. She then yanked the horse-sized hypodermic needle out of Fred’s bloated corpse which deflated like a tire that had rolled over a traffic spike in the wrong direction.

A crooked smile wormed its way across The Nurse’s face as she held the syringe aloft to study the liquid taco-substance. “Worth more than’yer weight in gold,” she trilled before glancing at Fred’s flaccid husk. “That pharma company pays top dollar, and y’all’re gonna die anyway, seein’ as there’s no cure as of yet. And I may as well make the most of yer situation… Mama’s gonna be able ta move ta the Bahamas after all.”

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