Asskickers of the Fantastic Read online

  A Rex Havoc Novel

  by

  Jim Stenstrum

  REX HAVOC:

  ASSKICKERS OF THE FANTASTIC

  © Copyright 2014 by Jim Stenstrum

  All rights reserved. No portion of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, except for brief quotations in reviews, without the written permission of the author.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and events are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, places, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover background by Eky Studio/Shutterstock.com

  Asskickers symbol by Jim Stenstrum and Mark Lewis

  Formatting by Polgarus Studio

  To contact Jim Stenstrum, please go to:

  thevaststenstrumempire.com

  or

  [email protected]

  To Susie Q

  My sun, my moon, my stars

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  Chapter 1 The House of Pain

  Chapter 2 “Papa Zomba kill you soon!”

  Chapter 3 The Monster Rights Bill

  Chapter 4 Nocturnos, King of Witches

  Chapter 5 The Asskickers of the Fantastic

  Chapter 6 Danny and Naomi

  Chapter 7 “You weren’t out sleep-killing again, were you?”

  Chapter 8 Dementia Sabbath

  Chapter 9 Joey Clawhammer

  Chapter 10 “Werewolves, you say.”

  Chapter 11 “Oh baby, are we not having fun?”

  Chapter 12 Vargos Spiderback

  Chapter 13 “I hate moose and squirrel.”

  Chapter 14 “That grenade will only mess up your apartment.”

  Chapter 15 “Jump!”

  Chapter 16 “Maybe if I was a space zombie.”

  Chapter 17 The Vault

  Chapter 18 “Guess I can forget about prom.”

  Chapter 19 Saturday

  Author’s Note

  About Jim Stenstrum

  Chapter 1

  The House of Pain

  Beyond the city limits, far from prying eyes and God’s intrusive mercy, concealed behind a towering barbed wire fence choked with weeds and twisted briars so thick and thorny only a magic spell could have constructed them, stood the strange orange house. A thing of rotted wood, vermin and sun-baked shingles, the house had stood here for more than a century — neglected, unrepaired, a garish pumpkin-colored eyesore in need of a bulldozing.

  Bent, broken, and cruelly used, the house waited to die and it knew death well. Over the years it had hosted incredible scenes of horror and bathed in the blood of countless innocents.

  Here was a house of torture, madness and death.

  Here was the House of Pain, where the Devil lived and his children played.

  The sun grew red and distorted as nightfall approached. A battered ‘63 Dodge pickup, loaded with a grisly assortment of slaughterhouse tools, was parked in front of the house. A sign on the truck, painted in a deranged hand, read:

  LOOKY KIDZ!!

  FREE JUSTUN BEEVER TICKUTS!!!

  There was blood, dried now, frantically smeared on the inside of the truck’s windshield and passenger window. A flurry of footprints in the dirt made it clear a struggle had occurred near the truck and continued all the way to the open porch, where a gruesome wind chime made of human bones rattled hollowly from an overhead beam. Beneath the chime, a dog's skeleton still kept taut the chain holding it tantalizingly away from its food dish.

  A wicker chair was overturned on the porch, and there were furious scratches in the paint of the heavy steel door. All hope must have ended here, for beyond this point lay only a black hole of inconceivable terror.

  Inside the house, the stench of blood, urine, and decaying flesh assaulted the senses, so overpowering it could bring a Russian weightlifter to his knees. Shrill laughter echoed from an upstairs room, and from somewhere else came muffled, heartrending sobs.

  The stench came from something cooking in the kitchen. A thick black soup, made from bladders and human faces, was simmering in a huge kettle on the stove. Hellish instruments of torture were carefully laid out on the kitchen counter, ironically the only sanitary things in the whole house. Taped to the refrigerator door, next to the diet hints and an autographed photo of Top Chef’s Tom Colicchio, were recent news clippings. The headlines read:

  “CANNIBAL FAMILY CLAIMS ANOTHER VICTIM”

  “ALDENTE CLAN STILL AT LARGE”

  A trembling hand reached out, smearing blood across the articles. A desperate girl, 17 or 18 years old, leaned against the refrigerator door, trying to steady her balance. Her clothes, what remained of them, were tattered and blood-soaked. She pulled the remaining lengths of clothesline off her wrists as her tormented eyes urgently scanned the room.

  The girl, small and frail, looked across the kitchen table. There she saw a ghastly meal set for three: skin salads garnished with fingers and eyeballs; spaghetti made from entrails and meatballs obtained from god-knows-where; and Jell-O with bits of pineapple. She shuddered at the sight.

  Gathering her wits, the girl made for the silverware drawer. She yanked it open and snatched up every sharp object in sight, filling her arms with them. Then, from behind, she heard his heavy breathing.

  The Chainsaw Maniac filled the kitchen doorway with his enormous bulk. He wore a hockey mask and a chef's hat, and an apron that said: “Kiss the Cook.” In his hands he held the biggest chainsaw in the world.

  “Not gonna bleed and run, are yuh?” asked the madman in a voice as deep as a West Virginia coal mine.

  He yanked the starter cord on the chainsaw, so startling the girl she dropped all her weapons. Then the maniac attacked, swinging the chainsaw wildly, ripping up a lot of the kitchen as he went. Gas and noise and fury filled the room. Frantic, the girl upturned the table on him, allowing her to escape in the confusion.

  Flying down the corridor, the girl ran smack into the Power Drill Maniac, an even bigger man wearing an Alfred E. Neuman mask and brandishing an enormous power drill.

  “Drill, baby, drill!” he exclaimed, pressing the trigger on a power drill big enough to take arctic core samples. He lunged at the girl, just missing her head and lodging the huge drill bit in the wall. She scampered away, leaving the madman to curse up a storm as he tried to wriggle the drill free.

  At the entranceway, the girl struggled to open the front door. It was barred and padlocked from inside, with a little gold chain guard thrown in for laughs. She ripped down the drapes covering the windows, only to find the windows bricked off. Then she heard the snap of an acetylene torch igniting.

  The girl turned to see the Oxyacetylene Maniac, looming ominously, wearing a welder's mask and clutching a nasty cutting torch. Bigger even than the others, weighing in at a frightening 400 pounds, he carried oxygen and acetylene tanks strapped to his back like a skin diver’s air supply.

  “Oooh, baby — have I got the hots for you!” he said, adjusting the flame of his torch to a white hot column. As the maniac drew the flame closer to the girl, she instinctively kicked him in the balls. She ran, leaving the fiend to stumble about, knocking into walls, setting fire to the furniture, nearly blind behind the welder's mask.

  Finally, in utter desperation, the girl made her way down a pitch black stairway to the cellar, the last place on earth she knew she should go. But her tormentors had left her no other place to run. She pushed open the heavy cellar door and bolted it behind her, and then collapsed into a frightened, tearful heap.

  Alone, in the darkness, she began to pray.

&nbs
p; Upstairs, enraged by the girl's disappearance, the killers vented their anger on each other. Like a grotesque version of a Three Stooges routine, they sawed and drilled and torched each other like idiots, getting nowhere fast.

  In the dark and awful cellar, the girl rose to her feet, shaking uncontrollably. The stench down here was even worse than in the kitchen, a noxious cloud of mold, rot and putrefaction. The heat was suffocating, and she could hear flies buzzing all around. Only the flickering pilot light inside the oddly shaped gas furnace offered any light down here. She took a couple steps, feeling the walls for a light switch with both hands. The floor was wet and sticky, and her bare feet stuck to it briefly in spots. At last she located the light switch and clicked it on.

  In an instant, all her courage and all her hope evaporated as she screamed herself raw.

  The atrocities the girl saw in that cellar cannot be overstated. All about the frightful crypt were human carcasses hanging on metal hooks, headless, gutted, and stripped of skin. Occupying a shelf against one wall were a dozen human heads, all missing brains and eyeballs, some still with flecks of meat fresh enough to attract flies and feed their maggot young.

  Against another wall, rows of wooden shelves were crammed with brains, tongues, breasts, genitals and internal organs, sealed in jars like strawberry preserves. On those same shelves were also ordinary household seasonings, like salt, pepper, cumin, fennel, even curry, should some tasty young lad from Mumbai end up down here in the future. The sheer volume of the killers’ gruesome handiwork was astonishing. It was a fully-stocked gourmet pantry for the criminally insane, meticulously cataloged by the victim’s age, sex and fresh-until date.

  Human skins, expertly shorn from their previous owners in a single piece, hung from clothespins on a line like flesh-colored long johns. A crank-operated meat grinder, still containing ground-up flesh and fat, was fastened to a large workbench in the corner, where a variety of butcher knives, cleavers and bone saws were kept. Above the workbench was a worn poster taped to the wall, with diagrams showing the choicest cuts of the human animal. Next to the furnace lay a pile of skeletons, every bit of usable meat flensed from them and waiting to be burned to ash in the crematory the girl had mistaken for a house furnace.

  A chainsaw began to cut through the door. The terrified girl jumped away, screaming hysterically, looking frantically about the cellar for any exit.

  But there were no other doors, no windows, no escape.

  The three brutes crashed through the door, cornering the girl against a shelf full of pickled eyeballs. She looked up fearfully, cowering from the madmen as they drew closer with their weapons.

  Laughing insanely, the Chainsaw Maniac raised his chainsaw, about to slice the trembling girl in half. The other two killers watched on, cackling with morbid glee.

  From out of the shadows, a muscular hand struck out like a cobra, grabbing the chainsaw by its spinning chain and stopping it cold. The hand bent the chainsaw blade back like soft taffy, causing the chain to flop about impotently. The killers watched with astonishment.

  A strange, powerfully built man entered the light. He looked like a god of vengeance, dressed entirely in black. His ferocious red eyes looked upon the fiends with little pity.

  His name was Rex Havoc, and these villains were about to make his acquaintance.

  Explosively, the man in black kicked the Chainsaw Maniac in the face so hard that his head flew off his shoulders. The headless body stumbled backward a couple steps, dropped the chainsaw and collapsed like a Jenga pile. The other killers, horrified for an instant, turned their weapons on the intruder.

  The Power Drill Maniac attacked first, his drill chewing into the sleeve of Rex's leather coat. Rex backhanded the villain, who flew across the room, slamming into the workbench. The killer made a wobbly attempt to stand, and then flopped lifelessly onto the floor, several butcher knives, cleavers and a circular saw blade protruding from his back.

  The Oxyacetylene Maniac moved in, trying to push his torch into the stranger’s face. Rex parried the torch and twisted the madman's arm backward, until the flame touched the tanks behind his back. The bottom of the oxygen tank began to melt through, to the killer's rising horror.

  Next moment, the tank fractured, launching the villain like a V-2 rocket through the ceiling and far above the treetops.

  The killers dispatched, Rex walked over to the girl to check her condition. As he bent closer, she cringed, for he looked at least as fearsome as the fiends who just tried to kill her.

  A butcher knife flew between their faces, biting into the wall beyond them. They turned to see the Power Drill Maniac, back on his feet, glaring insanely at them from across the room. Deranged laughter rose from the madman as he pulled two meat cleavers out of his own back and clacked them together.

  “The show… ain't over… 'til the little girl screams!” said the Power Drill Maniac between gulps of blood burbling from his mouth.

  Rex reached inside his coat and produced a silver crowbar, his weapon of choice in most situations. He stepped in front of the girl and prepared to face the killer. It proved unnecessary, for the next moment the burnt remains of the Oxyacetylene Maniac crashed back to earth, creating a second hole in the ceiling and landing squarely on top of the Power Drill Maniac, breaking his neck.

  Returning the crowbar to the inside pocket of his coat, Rex turned back to the frightened girl, helping her to her feet.

  “Can you stand?”

  “I… I guess so,” the girl replied.

  “Don't worry. These men won't be bothering you anymore.”

  The girl looked at the awesome carnage at her feet. The understatement of his words was not lost on her.

  For the first time she got a good look at the stranger’s face. Dark, tall, a long scar at the hairline, and intense blue eyes that moments ago blazed like fire pits. Handsome, actually, in a silverback gorilla kind of way.

  “Who-who are you?” asked the girl.

  Rex cocked an ear. “Sirens. The police are here.”

  “I don't hear any –”

  Then she heard the wail of police sirens, approaching rapidly.

  Outside, a SWAT truck crashed through the front gate, followed by five squad cars and two FBI sedans. They pulled up to the house with lights flashing and sirens screaming. A SWAT team in full tactical gear stormed the house, smashing down the metal door with a battering ram. Other cops took positions behind their cars with guns drawn.

  In the cellar, Rex and the girl heard the sounds of the front door being broken down, followed by loud voices and scrambling footsteps on the floor above. This was Rex's cue to exit. He stepped over the killers’ bodies and walked toward the cellar door.

  A flashlight glared in the girl's face. On the floor above, a SWAT officer trained the light on her through one of the holes created by the Oxyacetylene Maniac's wild rocket ride.

  “Hold it right there, sweetheart,” ordered the cop, drawing a bead on her with his submachine gun. He yelled to the others. “Downstairs! I've got somebody!”

  More noises were heard as the SWAT team hurried down the cellar steps. Rex, hanging in the shadows out of view, took a moment to glance back at the girl, who shivered helplessly in the beam of the cop's flashlight.

  “Wait. Mister. They'll want your name,” she said urgently, but not loud enough to alert the cop standing just above her. The faintest of smiles crossed Rex's lips. Then he turned, and melted silently into the shadowed doorway leading upstairs.

  Something very eerie happened then: the same instant Rex walked into the shadows, the police rushing down the steps emerged from the same shadows, as if they had just passed through each other.

  The SWAT team, followed by uniformed cops, swarmed into the cellar, finding the girl standing over the remains of the three killers. They also saw hanging cadavers, human hides and jars of jellied entrails.

  “Oh, sweet Jesus!” said a young, uniformed cop, blanching at the horrific scene. He turned away to vomit but didn
't quite make it.

  “Hey, goddammit! My shoes!” howled the female SWAT officer standing next to him.

  An older man, Jack Chaney, wearing an FBI windbreaker over his street clothes, walked into the cellar. He stood for a moment, looking over the scene, taking in the spectacle at a pace his sanity would allow. Stepping over the headless corpse of the Chainsaw Maniac, he made his way past the hanging human skins to one of the pantry shelves.

  He looked at a big glass jar and blew off a coat of dust. The label read: “Finger, Ear and Carrot Medley – Enjoy By 7/2018.” Next to that was a jar labeled “Beans and Weenies,” and this contained, predictably, beans and severed penises. This jar had a thick layer of dust as well. Obviously, thought Chaney, these boys have been performing this horror show for quite some time.

  One of Chaney’s guys, Agent Theilen, approached with a notepad.

  “What do you have?” asked Chaney.

  “Three recently deceased males. And… whatever the hell all this is.” He gestured to the hundreds of body parts on display throughout the cellar.

  Chaney shook his head. “I thought I’d seen everything twice. But this is a brand new category of fucked-up shit.”

  The still trembling girl, being looked after by a female cop, caught his eye.

  “Who’s the girl?” asked Chaney.

  “Calls herself ‘Crayon.’ Local hooker. She’s a regular at the precinct, apparently.”

  Chaney approached the girl, and the female cop gave him room.

  “Crayon, I’m Jack Chaney with the FBI. How are you feeling?”

  Crayon’s teeth chattered. “I’m okay, I g-g-guess.”