Our old comic book editor Zac Thompson hasn’t been with us for a fair bit of time but he’s certainly been making a lot of strides since his departure. He’s now writing for VICE and HuffPo and is also continuously hard at work on his comic endeavors. But what’s most important to him right now is the completion of his body horror novel “Weaponized“, which he explains is, “…an insane blend of ideas echoing the early works of Clive Barker and David Cronenberg but set in a modern era that’s obsessed with guns and weaponry.”

Blending It Follows with Tokyo Gore Police, “Weaponized” follows a young gay man who contracts an STI after sleeping with a stranger. The STI manifests itself as a weapon, a living gun, on the young man instead of killing him, as it has done with countless others beforehand. As Thompson explains, “…sexually transmitted infections are secretly responsible for the world’s entire supply of weapons. The remains of the infected dead are used to create guns, until one young man becomes the exception.”

Below is the first chapter. If you dig what you read, you can pre-order your copy via Inkshare.

I – THE STALK RETURNS

Cron reflected on the erotic nature of his weaponized flesh. He now knew the secret. It had been stewing his mind as he sat patiently on the piss-stained floor of a disgusting concrete boat. He’d been there for three hours now. Between musings, he watched as the walls wept with brown stains. The place seemed alive as it rocked its way across the dead ocean. It made Cron’s brain feel exposed. It had been six days since it happened and his whole body hadn’t stopped throbbing. His feet were steadily losing feeling from the pulse coursing through him but he could still feel the cold water creeping up through the soles of his shoes. That was at least something.

This was his time, he reassured himself, he had become something more. He was sure of it.

There were men at the door. Beating on it. Cron had no fear of them, of course, because they had no idea what he now was. His hands balled into paws as the men outside kept hurling themselves at the door. The old boat wouldn’t hold for long.

Wood splintered as the door flung open. A pale rendition of what used to be two men stepped inside. These men were creatures that looked as if all their internal organs were decoratively rearranged on the outside of their bodies. Their eyes were lidless, their jaws were broken – hanging agape, their ears were torn off, and their spines were snapped. They hung in the doorway like broken marionettes obliging a swelling silence.
They were armed. The bones in their fingers were wrapped around swords made from sharpened spinal cords. A noisy and aged weapon, thought Cron. Cron had seen spinal swords as long as twenty years ago. The things were nearly archaic by today’s standards. All the same, these creatures pointed their weapons steady handed. “You’re an illegal,” they said in unison.

They crossed the room suddenly. They were certain in their head-on assault as they swung at Cron. It seemed like the most foolhardy tactic imaginable.

Cron pulled his fingers across the floor, shouting obscenities at these creatures, an endless stream of them, he flowed across the room like the stink of the rancid ocean water. He wouldn’t succumb to these inside-out men. Knowing that thought made what came next easy. He sprung onto his feet. The creatures stood agape. Cron watched as the air crossed the bridge between their stomachs and throats. He reveled in this eager moment, planning his counter-attack.
Cron gasped. He thought he was ready for this but his wasn’t. An otherworldly will touched him. It snaked its way down his throat through his stomach and into his pelvis. A terrible pain came with it. It stopped his defiant voice dead in its tracks. A disgusting beast moaned to life inside of his arm. The hot pain in his pelvis disappeared and was replaced by a violent gag. Fragments of bone broke through the skin on his wrist. The inside out men were about to see that there was something hidden beneath his flesh. He couldn’t wait to show them his secret.

Cron’s fingers clicked and waddled out of their usual places in a beautiful choreography. Three of them flicked onto the back of his palm. His index and middle fingers remained behind. Even though the pain was immense, nothing felt wrong. Everything happening was in the spirit of a defiant beauty — a higher purpose. A new form of being. Cron knew he was stepping out of the comparative safety of his old life in this moment.

Cron stood there for a long while basking in his pain. Staring at the new configuration of his mutilated hand brought him a great pleasure that he wasn’t previously aware of. This was the agonizing presence he had waited for. The thought made his cheeks flush with excitement. This was his infection, it had taken hold. He longed to be dying like this, he longed to become a weapon. Seeing his new hand, his Aard as they called it, made him weep. He counted his tears amongst the enlightened. He had become a walking weapon, he had taken to the infection and survived, he had become a Stalk.

Each of the weird men standing before Cron took a step back.

“He’s matured,” they said in unison.

Cron’s heart was fit to burst. He was near death, of that much he was certain. The squalid interior of the boat felt empty in that moment, but Cron raised the new rough post he called an Aard and pointed it at the decorative men. The biological nakedness of their construction was unflinching under Cron’s aim.

“How did you find me so soon?” Cron asked.

“We track all beings, living and dead.” The men replied.

They had somehow heard Cron’s voice, despite their lack of ears. Cron made note of this. Each of them cranked their head with some difficulty and attentively stared at the door. Cron’s body seethed. Despite the situation, he couldn’t help but stare at what used to be his hand. A new opening had bloomed in it’s place like some exquisite plant. He loved his infection. He loved what it made him — dangerous.

“The Stalk is insatiable,” one of the men said to the other.

A key turned in the lock of Cron’s new hand. He felt his entire body cross the room. He strained as the veins in his arms pumped something down to his wrist. He felt heat flush its way across the back of his palm. He watched as white liquid shot out from somewhere within his deformed hand. It flew across the room in milky strands boring a hole through the first attacker’s face.
Despite appearing to be inside out the man was all real flesh. The milky strands of liquid hit with a sickening splash. A putrid smell burst from the hole like rancid chicken thighs left in the sun. Either the flesh was rotting or Cron’s attack made it that way, he couldn’t be sure. After a few seconds of watching in awe, the sunken form of the attacker melted into a mess on the floor.

The next execution was much less spectacular as he hit the fleeing inside-out man from behind. Again his arm pulsed and popped like a cherry and celebrated with white strands of liquid. Cron couldn’t be sure if this animated act of death was one of gestation or maturation but it didn’t matter. The weird creature sputtered from the impact. The shot caused the inside-out man’s chest to hit the disgusting wall of the boat. The sound of his lungs popping from the impact was unmistakable. The man slumped against the wall like a heap of rancid meat. His form was left smeared across the stained concrete.

In his innocence, Cron thought this was all just another bad dream, but his artful execution of these decoratively rearranged men felt too fatal to be whimsy.

Cron’s joints were stiff, his movements were painful, but still he swam into the early morning daylight. My god, he thought, keep going. He was exasperated, as he plodded along in the water toward some deserted beach. Humid air, wetness, and the stink of manure stretched in every direction. He couldn’t believe he had finally made it.

He pulled himself onto the shore and narrowed his eyes on the pale horizon in the distance. This was a feeble attempt to fix his focus on something other than his throbbing hand, but the humid haze only obscured his vision. He hunched over his knees threw up in the sand. This all meant something and nothing at the same time. A few hours before, all of this would have frustrated Cron. Now he felt like a messiah. He felt as if he could do something here. He felt compelled to free the people of this remote island.

On the mainland Truog Island was a known as a lifeless mound of stone. Calling it a shit pile in the middle of the dead ocean was a compliment. Most people had no idea it was actually a backwards oasis nestled in the armpit of the mainland. In fact most people thought it was nothing more than a glorified weapons warehouse but it wasn’t. It was a god-loving place where faith and fear were abundant. Truog had plenty of fish in the sea around its shores, and bountiful crops in the dirt. Cron could think of no use for a place like this, except this strange rock held the heart of The Human Registry.

It wasn’t any more glamorous than it sounded. It was supposed to be a giant place that held information of every living person on the mainland. Nothing more than a server on a rock. It merely existed to “add context and information to everyday acts of humanity.” Which basically meant, they control all information pertaining to social, scientific and sexual facts of the residents on the mainland. Now Cron couldn’t help let the images of The Registry’s propaganda flow around him like canal water past a stone. What was happening to him, it certainly wasn’t part of this context and information tracked by The Registry, and this place, it certainly wasn’t abandoned.

Coming here meant Cron could better understand his new condition. He heard the island held the truth to all infection. Infection and industry were synonymous there, but the stalk, the stalk was extinct. Cron was a living exception to a deadly virus. He’d be hailed as a hero from a bygone era. A legend in the new flesh. He seemed to feel instantly exonerated for his crimes against nature, although he knew the same perennial demons would soon try to kill him.

The borders of Truog were tightly patrolled but he heard rumors of an underground railroad for infected like him. A triple triangle symbol meant he was safe. It was as vague and stupid as it sounded. He couldn’t help but picture the Legend of Zelda, but his mentor told him to take things more seriously. Whatever.

He was desperate for clothing, and the weird consignment shop on the edge of town had a sandwich board sign with this coveted token of safety he was taught to seek. He entered the store seeking the vintage clothing he needed to fit in on Truog.

The old woman working at the store was sympathetic to his condition. She was kind enough to take him past the guarded borders in her state. She drove him into an area of the island outgrown by the middle-class seasonal workforce. The other more utilitarian states were quickly becoming the hipper parts of town. The old woman told him to avoid the buzz of gossip in the interior, he had to blend in, no one came on or off the island and his secrets wouldn’t be safe anywhere else but under the cover of quiet. She found him a room in an old apartment complex teetering on demolition.

Cron was not all that surprised by the reluctance of his new island landlords. These were strange circumstances and they were surely in the pockets of The Registry. Everyone was here. It took a measure of imagination – a faculty not very abundant on Truog Island – to look past his weird situation. He was a muscular, single, black teenage kid. No one knew his father or his mother so he couldn’t use social currency.

He tried to rent his own apartment, and his strange hand had to be concealed at all times. He hadn’t stopped transforming and his mutation was becoming much more complex than he originally envisioned. After a fair deal of convincing he landed an old run down bachelor in Stratford Heights.

Once settled Cron was eager to off-load his old personality as speedily as possible. He enrolled in Sherwood Hills High. Happily meeting Principal Anson who had told him that his “family situation” was regrettable, but fate had brought them together. Anson was a plain man, ordinary in his grey suit appearance with a floating drone camera hovering over his shoulder as the only exception. He took great pride in running the only High School on the Island. It was a position of great importance that allowed him to sit on the local board of government as a “Permit.” This was something Cron only knew a little of, but enough to know there was 12 of them, each assigned to a different state of the strange island, and each with their own role to play in some ongoing reality television series. He gave Cron a glowing look of appraisal above the facade of his joyless features. The roughly cyclical little camera floated above them, intending to be an objective lens of observation, but clearly controlled by Anson. Such was the majesty of “reality television,” Cron thought.

“Welcome to Sherwood Hills High. I’m Permit Anson. But you can call me Principal Anson. Or just Mr. A.” Permit Anson said with a forced smile. He looked over his shoulder to the camera flashing the lens a thumbs up.

“I’ve only got ten minutes,” Cron said.

“Fine,” Anson replied. “I just want you here on Monday. You’ll be assigned a career, and given a home room based on your assignment.”

“Thank you. I’ll be here bright and early,” Cron responded.

That was a lie.

Cron spent his nights bathed in the darkness of his new apartment. He didn’t have time to buy furniture or turn on the lights. He was too preoccupied by a thick tapping in his skull. It crept up on him in the last few days and bore into his being.

In the thickness of this sourceless rhythmless tapping, he tried to learn more about the disgusting strong-arm he had been developing since arriving on the island. The bones in his hand creaked and clattered around the tile floor of his shitty apartment. He knew this misshapen husk was called an Aard, and he knew that his gestation made him inhuman. It made him the most profound type of creature there was, something not usurped by the past, but a clumsy term, he was a living weapon.

“Open sesame,” he murmured with some satisfaction as he hauled his deformed stump from its gloved prison. The sick sound of the wet mass slinking out of it’s glove lingered in his deserted bedroom with globs of fluid. He looked down at his remaining fingers. They had collected into an inhospitable design and had become hollow. They now looked like the weird barrel of a flesh pistol.

Every night he thought of looking inside his now hollow fingers but it could be no more than a morbid curiosity. He was too fearful of what he might find.

As the first months of school went by so too did Cron’s metamorphosis. The skin on deformed his hand had since lifted with the damp onslaught of winter. Beneath the skin there was a pattern of new white ceramic looking bones, arranged in the intricate and complex shape of the triple triangle. Every night he returned home from school, he learnt more about this weapon, about his evolution, and it ruined him. There was an air of destitution to his existence now.

The tapping in his head became too much. It had crippled his curiosity and the striking hole in his fingers glistened with the allure of reprieve. It was too much to handle.

He finally looked into the barrel of his hand. Inside his Aard was a collection of shining tiles, and cunning mosaic that were worked into his form, and spirit. He didn’t quite understand it all, but the echoing mausoleum inside his hand was atmospheric when viewed through his white skin. Inspiring. In a moment, the tapping in his ears matured into a calling.

He paused after a long night in front of his palm. The tapestry of kaleidoscopic imagery inside his deformed hand had shown him his place in the world. He had quelled the rhythmless tap. This infection in his hand had showed him horrendous scenes from history – hollow humans, weaponization of organic remains, and a race of people waiting to die. Cron grunted appreciatively. His young mind had been given a fickle sense of purpose. He would help spread the infection, and connect more people to his cause. He would lead a rebirth of the Stalk.