Diseased Libido - Deadly Dozen (Collecting Issues 1 - 12)

By Carter Rydyr

Diseased Libido is an anthology of warped speculative fiction stories encompassing horror, science fiction, fantasy, crime, satire and the bizarre ranging from the mild to the extreme. This volume collects all twelve issues and includes:

“Unsafe Sex” It rode in on the waves. Nobody knew what it was. It was small but strong and once it got a hold of you it burrowed deep inside you infecting your mind, body and soul, turning you into a slavering nymphomaniac to propagate its species.

“Wildthings”. An aging alien gangster and his artificially intelligence enhanced ape henchman attend an illegal fighting match where beautiful women who have been lethally enhanced fight to the death in an arena.

“Zombizoic”. In a foreboding forest on a distant world, two stranded men from a highly advanced, spacefaring civilization face the unspeakable horror of a primitive tribe that uses arcane supernatural forces to raise an army of living dead warriors.

“Earth Enslaved” – Earth has been enslaved by a bloodthirsty race of warlike aliens who pit desperate humans against their most popular champions in the arena for a promise of freedom.

“Endangered Species” – The ambitious Lady Judith and her young pledge, Sandra, embark into the untamed wilderness on a ceremonial hunt to acquire a prestigious sexual trophy.

And many more strange and surreal tales - For Mature Readers.

Apart from the Diseased Libido anthology series, other titles by Carter Rydyr include:
Hostile Earth - Special Delivery
Hostile Earth - Recreation & Grorl
Sisterhood of the Serpent
Jungle Ghoul Goddess (Alien Eden)
Attack of the Gorlocks (Alien Eden)
Quahbi (Alien Eden)
Raw Recruit (Welcome to the Hellhole)
Raw Recruit - Operation: Rabbitfire
Pain Pig’s Progress Book One
Pain Pig’s Progress Book Two - Great Expectorations

• Language: English
• Publisher: Storm Publishing
• Release date: Jul 30, 2012
• ISBN: 9781476309026

Carter Rydyr

The strange and bizarre works of Steve Carter and Antoinette Rydyr (S.C.A.R.) incorporates anything from Sci Fi and horror fantasy to surrealism and weird satire. All of it has a strong element of the fantastic and a healthy dose of experimentalism. They create in a variety of mediums – prose fiction, illustration, comic books, screenplays and even music, which they produce with their experimental bands FistFunk Futurists and TeknoSadisT. Their screenplay "Curse of the Swampies" won Best Feature Film Screenplay at the A Night of Horror International Film Festival 2010. Current projects include new comics, more audio experiments and prose stories. There are also a number of screenplays and novellas in the works.

Book preview

DISEASED LIBIDO

DEADLY DOZEN

Collecting Books 1 to 12

by

Carter Rydyr

SMASHWORDS EDITION

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PUBLISHED BY:

Storm Publishing on Smashwords

Diseased Libido - Deadly Dozen

Copyright 1987, 2012 by Carter Rydyr

http://www.weirdwildart.com/

Smashwords Edition License Notes

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DISEASED LIBIDO - DEADLY DOZEN

Table of Contents

ZOMBIZOIC

DEATH ON THE HIGHWAY

WILDTHINGS

EARTH ENSLAVED

ENDANGERED SPECIES

THE BAYING

MUTANT DAWN

THE PROMISE

THE ONE

NOT ANOTHER FUCKING VAMPIRE STORY

A SAFE PLACE

CANVAS OF FLESH

VERTICAL VIPER

NEXT APPOINTMENT

CRASH AND BURN

THE MISTER POTATO HEAD INCIDENT

MOVING HOUSE

JUST DESSERTS

THE INTERVIEW

THE RESTROOM

THE QUEST FOR THE GREAT WHITE QUEEN

UNSAFE SEX

BLASPHERON

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ZOMBIZOIC

Now came the part of the journey Feld was dreading. There was no alternative but to leave the relative safety of the clear ridges and descend into the dangerous forest. Worse still was the fact that half the day had already gone. That meant he’d still be within the forest when night fell.

Feld carefully edged his way down the incline of loose rocks, sliding part of the way, near falling the rest. It was an exhaustive and hazardous descent and at the end of it he was grazed and shaken. He stood amid the cool shadows of immense trees. Their snarled roots were semi-obscured by stenching clods of grey turf, patchy with moldering lichen.

He was at least three hundred feet below the jutting peaks. On gazing upward he was unable to see the top of the ridge he’d been walking along an hour before due to the sprawling, knotted branches and vibrant explosions of enmassed herbage.

There were no trails, only underbrush, fungi, and the occasional flash of grey silt and soft, pulpy rock. Feld moved off into the thick of it trying his best to keep to a vaguely northerly direction, eyes and ears alert, machete slashing away at the numerous tendrils of vine and cluttered undergrowth. It was tedious, tiring work beset with countless detours.

Feld estimated that at least nine miles of this tangled forest lay directly between him and the encampment and that at the rate he was progressing he wasn’t going to get back until well into the night. As he plodded along, Feld thought about how he’d gotten himself in this predicament.

It had certainly been a rotten day, starting out as it had with an argument with Blake over who was going to do the reconnaissance and who was going to erect the safety-field around the perimeter of the encampment. In fact, since the two men had been confined in a tiny spacecraft for such an extended period while travelling through deep space, such trivial arguments had become common. Over the long time they had been flying missions together they seldom, if ever, bickered and had become close friends. But this trip had been by far the longest and most arduous, despite the valuable time that had been gained by jumping through Null-space, which presented additional and unique problems of its own.

On finally reaching this distant outworld, the quarrelling hadn’t stopped. The men desperately needed a break from one another. Feld wound up on recon duty with the grav-boat. It was a relief – some solitude at last, along with a golden opportunity to do some brief surveying on a completely new, mysterious world.

He’d been less than an hour out when he was knocked out of the air. The creatures had come up from the forest canopy unbelievably fast. A swarm so dense they obscured all. A crash was unavoidable and Feld had been lucky to survive, let alone walk away from it. The grav-boat was totaled along with everything in it including the com-unit, so there was no possibility of notifying Blake.

It had not been until he’d crawled from the wreckage that Feld actually examined one of the creatures he’d flown into. He’d crouched down close but did not touch it. It laid contorted, feathered wings outspread. Its head was a cross between a toad and a lizard’s with horny plates atop set like louvers and extending down its wide back. It was the first of this planet’s fauna Feld had seen up close. As far as he was concerned it was a gross and ugly thing.

Feld had only a machete with which to lug it back. The trek had gone on well enough while he’d been travelling over relatively high and uncluttered terrain but now that he was in the forest it seemed as if he’d come to a stand still.

There was a sudden rustle of vegetation and scant seconds later Feld found himself surrounded on all sides by human figures. He knew that to attempt to fight them with only a machete was senseless. They not only outnumbered him, they were also well armed.

They were men not unlike him but their skin was discolored, graying, and spotted with infection. The odor of putrefaction exuded strongly from them. They held their stone-tipped spears scant inches from his face and throat while their unblinking eyes coldly held his. The silence was mind-numbing,

Feld had a good look at them. They stood perfectly still and appeared to not breathe. Some of them had ghastly wounds upon their bland faces and gaunt bodies, unhealed wounds that had turned into great open sores like tropical ulcers.

A female voice rang out. It was high-pitched and carried a note of arrogance. The spearmen parted as a woman shuffled through their ranks, squeaking in a language Feld found incomprehensible. In her thin hand she carried a whip fashioned from plaited vines and spoke in an imperious manner as she checked him over with amber eyes. Her voice grated on his nerves.

Feld found little that could be considered as alien in her very human physical appearance. She was small, agile and not unattractive, with wild hair framing her face. However, the woman’s demeanor was particularly dour and her lips appeared to be bent into a permanent sneer.

Feld knew from experience that First Contact with new sentient species was always a sensitive issue and it was always fraught with difficultly. His intuition told him that this encounter certainly wasn’t going to be a smooth one. The alien woman was now standing uncomfortably close to him. As he further studied her, Feld braced himself for the worst and took a cautious step back, giving himself some space. The woman stepped forward, closing the gap.

A dark, roughly trimmed and stitched animal pelt hugged her body from neck to knees. About her wrists and slim biceps were bracelets of bleached bone and feathers. Tiny birdlike skulls decorated her hair. She became incensed when she realized that Feld was unable to understand her.

Feld just stood there shaking his head and babbling in what he hoped was a friendly sounding voice. The alien woman barked more orders and cracked her whip. Immediately, a spearman tied Feld’s hands behind his back while another claimed his machete. After an angry shout and a sharp whip-crack Feld’s machete was given up to the woman.

The group set off in a westerly direction. Feld and the woman walked in the centre of a circle of spearmen. They weaved their way among clusters of fungoid pods, dangling vines and dank clumps of stenching vegetation following a confusing labyrinth of tree roots. Often, only about three people at a time remained in sight and Feld contemplated escape; but the thought of being crippled by a hurled spear quashed any serious plan. At irregular intervals the party was bombarded by small flocks of the things that had knocked Feld and his grav-boat out of the air. They were deftly fought off by the spearmen, some of which received horrible new lacerations to their faces and arms. Feld observed that they bled very little, if at all.

One of the more heavily wounded spearmen collapsed. He was left groaning by the lichen-encrusted rock where he fell. The woman persisted in attempting to communicate with Feld. She got nowhere. The language barrier was vast and she was too impatient.

Mercifully, the forest began to thin out. The trees became sparser and the undergrowth non-existent. The ground was covered in a carpet of brightly hued spongy moss interspersed by irregular patches of grass and weathered boulders. There was a gentle downhill slope to the terrain and the slanted light of late afternoon threw long shadows. The barest hint of mist lay low across the moss.

A loud predatory hiss issued from way off, behind the party. All heads turned but nothing was visible. A second, longer hiss issued forth, followed by a deep bellow. Something appeared among the distant tree trunks, its form made indistinct by haze and foliage. It was moving rapidly and without doubt, approaching them.

The spearmen had barely organized their defense when the alien predator threw itself among them. His aggressive female captor dragged Feld well away from the action. As he staggered backwards his terrified eyes caught snatches of a frenzied, confused flurry of bodies and limbs. Finally, he was able to watch from a safe vantage behind a huge fallen tree. Ferocious growling filled his ears and a terrible slaughter held his eyes.

Two minutes later it was over. The fearsome attacker was dead. Feld gazed at it in awe. It was a mammalian quadruped, stocky and hairy and around the size of a lion. Its powerfully muscled jaws opened up into a gaping maw full of triangular teeth. The creature vaguely reminded him of several different types of predators but was primarily unlike anything he’d ever seen. No less than six spears, mostly snapped and jagged, protruded from its blood-drenched corpse.

Four spearmen laid mangled and dead, viscera and limbs flung hither and thither. Of the survivors, eleven were more or less unscathed. A further five presented a gruesome collection indeed. Intestines dangled from huge rents, broken ribs jutted out at all angles, portions of skull and mashed flesh showed through pulped faces. Fingers and hands, feet and toes were twisted, crushed and missing.

They stood silently, awaiting orders as though nothing had happened. The woman eyed the five mutilated spearmen briefly, and then ordered them to stand away from the others. With quick, ruthless and expertly aimed strikes she decapitated each of them with Feld’s machete. Their carcasses were left where they fell.

Before leaving, the remaining eleven were ordered to gather up what spears were still useful. Back in formation, the party continued onward, with the woman and Feld in the centre of a defensive circle of spearmen.

They came to the shore of a small freshwater lake. Strangely, Feld was unable to place it in his mental image of the terrain he’d covered earlier that day when flying over in the grav-boat yet felt certain that he’d flown over this region. Here the land was grassy and flat, petering out into flat sandy banks that ran onto the lake. Prominences of dark basalt projected out of its still waters and formed a ring of weird islets near its centre, giving the area a distinctly macabre aspect. Contributing to the overall eeriness was the haze, which crept low about the grass and sand, drifting in ghostly veils off the water.

They walked on the sand near the water’s edge and followed the lakeshore northward. Dusk dulled the land into a brooding twilight. The stone walls of a primitive village became visible through the rolls of fog accumulating with the advance of night. Alien constellations twinkled in a blue-black sky, then faded as the fog rose, growing denser. The lake was near obscured by swirling vapor.

By the time they reached the walled village the fog had lifted and the night was crisp and clear. At first only a dim smear, the swirling Corkscrew Nebula soon bloomed into a glowing smattering of spiraling stellar dust hundreds of light years distant yet taking up a considerably large portion of the evening sky. Night on this as yet unnamed and unknown planet was the equivalent of a dull day on Earth, Feld’s home planet.

Now, Feld wondered if he was going to live to see his home world again. Along with Blake he’d ventured into this island universe that was Sargos Space on a commission for the Interstellar Federation of Colonized Worlds to survey SS-365-4, or, the fourth planet of the 365th stellar system observed and chronicled in Sargos Space. The journey had required three extensive Null-jumps. The pair of them had spent twelve months out of an eighteen month long journey through previously uncharted space confined in Null-space going stir crazy. SS-365-4 was located way out on the dark side of the Corkscrew Nebula on the fringes of a truly unknown frontier.

The inexplicable conditions of Null-space did strange things to the human psyche, especially over an extended period, not to mention the isolation of deep space and the cramped confines of the average long-distance spacecraft. Even fully trained and experienced professionals like Blake and Feld were not immune to its effects.

Neither of them had ever experienced such extensive periods in Null-space before. It had an accumulative effect, the true nature of which was yet to be fully understood even by those scientists who had been analyzing it since it had initially been implemented in space travel.

However, using Null-space saved substantial time. A journey through the void that might take a thousand years now had a duration of only two years. But at what cost to those who undertook the journey?

By the time planetfall had approached, Blake and Feld were both close to burnout, their nerves fried, their long friendship literally fraying at the seams. They hadn’t been on the planet a day when Feld had gotten himself knocked out of the sky by those toad-headed bird beasts.

***

Pallid and silent men stood as still as the dead at the top of the steep village wall. Sentinels. There were more men inside. All were scantily clad, if at all. They were like the spearmen who protected Feld and his captor, expressionless, soulless, pitted with decay and stenching of death. The women in the village all looked alike to Feld, variations of his captor. They behaved in the same way as well, haughtily. They were angered by Feld’s inability to grasp their language, to understand what they required of him.

Their interrogation failed miserably. After a lot of shouting and cursing they ushered him to a huge enclosure in the heart of the village. At the front of the enclosure stood an arc shaped gateway constructed of mud-bricks inlayed with the bones of humans and unknown animals. Within the enclosure were rows of stone cubicles and pits, which encircled a clearing paved with crudely hewn flagstones. The pits were in front, the cubicles to the rear. Prison cells - each one barely larger than the man it held. Feld was thrown into one of the stone walled cells. Its bamboo-like cage door was secured with a simple latch. Two mindless men armed with spears were posted nearby.

Feld peered through the bars of his cell, over the tops of the rows of pits in front of him, across the paved clearing to the pits and cells opposite and to either side. In some of them were other men. Like him, they didn’t fit in with the rest of the weird tribe. Intelligence and fear lay behind their eyes. Judging by their appearance, Feld assumed that they represented a small cross-section of members of other tribes. There were differences among them such as race, dress and manner. They, along with him, would all share the same fate. Of that, Feld had little doubt.

He looked beyond the cells opposite, back the way he’d been led, through the arched gateway and into the village beyond with its huts of mud-brick and bare plazas lit by fiery torches. Out there, solemn men busily swept and scrubbed, constantly attended to all manner of menial tasks. They never stopped. One of them, a horribly wasted and overworked individual, simply dropped where he worked. At the cracking of a woman’s whip and the banshee shout of her voice two other automaton-like men carried his body off and away. Feld shivered.

He awoke to the sound of excited voices, surprised that he’d fallen asleep. The western sky was pale. Upon the paved clearing in the centre of the cells stood a pair of gigantic flaming torches, twin beacons blazing so brightly that dawn paled by comparison. Between them, meat and vegetables simmered in huge pots heated by hot coals. Women danced, tended to the cooking food.

The dancing women worked themselves into a frenzy, vigorously gyrating and chanting obsessively. Two men were taken