Biofire, p.1
Biofire, page 1
BIOFIRE
Author’s Preferred Edition
By Ray Garton
A Macabre Ink Production
Macabre Ink is an imprint of Crossroad Press
Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press
Smashwords edition published at Smashwords by Crossroad Press
Crossroad Press digital edition 2020
Original publication by Cemetery Dance Publications – 1998
Copyright © 1998 Ray Garton
LICENSE NOTES
This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
Meet the Author
Ray Garton has been writing novels, novellas, short stories, and essays for more than 30 years. His work spans the genres of horror, crime, suspense, and even comedy. Live Girls was nominated for the Bram Stoker Award in 1988, and Garton received the Grand Master of Horror Award at the 2006 World Horror Convention. He lives in northern California with his wife Dawn, where he is at work on a new novel.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
NOVELS AND NOVELLAS
411
Bestial
Biofire
Crawlers
Crucifax
Dark Channel
Darklings
Live Girls
Lot Lizards
Loveless
Night Life
Meds
Murder Was My Alibi
Ravenous
Scissors
Seductions
Serpent Girl
Sex and Violence in Hollywood
Shackled
The Folks
The Folks 2
The Loveliest Dead
The Man in the Palace Theater
The New Neighbor
Trade Secrets
Trailer Park Noir
Vortex
Zombie Love
COLLECTIONS
Methods of Madness
’Nids And Other Stories
Pieces of Hate
Slivers of Bone
The Disappeared and Other Stories
The Girl in the Basement and Other Stories
Wailing and Gnashing of Teeth
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Table of Contents
Acknowledgments
Dedication
Introduction
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Acknowledgments
Even though Biofire was published more than twenty years ago, it took some effort to prepare it for publication this time, and I had help from some supportive friends. I’m grateful to Becky Narron, Scott Connors, Randy Eberle, Rhonda Blackmon Walton, Sam W. Anderson, Mickie Caparilli-McGowan, Geoffrey Bergeron, and Erinn Kemper.
My Patreon supporters, who have generously pledged their support to my work on the upcoming novel Foreverblood, were good enough not to mind when I took a break from that book to prepare Biofire for publication. For their kind support, I owe my heartfelt thanks to them:
Andy McCorkle, Angela Exum, Barry Simiana, Becky Narron, Chuck Hartsell, Derrick Woodruffe, Ed Kurtz, Geoffrey Bergeron, Graham Thornton, James Matthew Neeland, John Bender, John F. D. Taff, Kellie Stacey, Ken King, Larry Kinney, Latrice Innes, Laurel Steven, Michael Sauers, Robert S. Wilson, Noel Scott Badger, Wendy Marie Muir, Randy Eberle, Robin Trischmann, Ron Knoblock, Ryan Lieske, Tim Feely, Todd Clark, and Webberly Rattenkraft
Dedication
Sometime around 1980 or so, I walked into a place called Popcorn Video in Napa, California, and made a friend of the owner, Marion Woodside. Best video store I ever walked into. Marion doesn’t own the store anymore, but I’m thrilled to say we’re still friends. Thank you so much, Marion, for keeping my account open all these years. I love you.
Introduction
* * *
Biofire was published in a limited edition by Cemetery Dance Publications in 1998, and until now it had not been published again. It was written at a time when I was between agents and there was no one to shop it around. I moved on to the next book, returned to my former agent Richard Curtis, who then represented the next book, and somehow Biofire slipped between the cracks. I decided it was high time the book had a shot at a wider audience more than twenty years after its original publication.
I’m sure Biofire would not have fared well with New York publishers. It’s one of those books that seems to repel them because it defies categorization (the same problem I had with Sex and Violence in Hollywood). While it has elements of horror, it’s not quite a horror novel. It’s not science fiction, but it features some mad scientists. It has some of the sensibilities of noir, but it’s not a noir novel. The book is full of criminals, but it doesn’t really qualify as crime fiction. It is probably best described as a thriller, although some might object to that label, as well. It is an amalgam of genres, which is the kind of book that drives marketing departments crazy.
Biofire contains gangsters, mad scientists, an abused wife who finally rebels, a man who has messed up his life possibly beyond repair, a lot of homeless people, a friendly iguana, and an affectionate nod to noir writer Jim Thompson. None of these things are necessarily grounded in any time period. I considered moving the novel twenty years ahead and having it take place in 2019 and even began the process of updating it. I decided, however, to leave it right where it is, partly because I realized it worked perfectly well in 1998 and there was no reason to change it, and partly because I have a lazy streak. I did some tightening and polishing, but the story has not changed in any way.
I read a lot of noir fiction in the 1990s, more than horror. I fell in love with it. David Goodis, Cornell Woolrich, Jim Thompson, James M. Cain, Gil Brewer, John D. MacDonald, and others—I spent a lot of time with those guys and soaked up their work.
I think I needed a break from the supernatural. That’s mostly what sets horror apart from something like noir. Both are dark and full of dread; one involves otherworldly forces and non-human creatures that we sometimes use to interpret the ugly aspects of being human, while the other focuses quietly on that ugliness and uses it to interpret us. I think I turned to noir to remove the buffer of the supernatural. I began experimenting with the genre in my own writing. One of the results was Biofire.
If you’ve read any noir—and if you haven’t, I recommend the genre and all of the writers mentioned above—you know that the city in which the action takes place is itself often a character in the story. Cornell Woolrich used this especially well in novels like Deadline at Dawn, in which the city is a dark, oppressive presence throughout, impossible to escape. I like that particular trope because it rings true to me; every big city I’ve ever been in has felt like a character with its own personality. I ended up marrying that to an idea I had been kicking around for a horror novel about a secret, government-funded project that’s turning people into weapons. The city in which Biofire takes place is big, unnamed, brooding, and, I hope, ominous.
Secret government projects pop up occasionally in my work. I keep returning to the subject because it’s real. It feels like horror fiction, we’ve always associated that sort of thing with horror and science fiction, but far too many times in American history, the United States government has treated this country like a big lab full of rats. It’s happened often enough to go beyond being a pattern; it’s a routine practice. And yet there are still so many people unaware of it. They still see it in movies and TV shows—sometimes even movies and TV shows attempting to expose the fact that it goes on—and it still
Wrong.
Let’s travel back a couple of decades to 1998.
That was the year White House page Monica Lewinsky claimed to have had sex with President Bill Clinton nine times from 1995 to 1997, launching a scandal that hungrily consumed countless hours of TV airtime and seemed unwilling to die. Every newspaper published editorials on the subject, every comedian did bits on it, and parents expressed outrage that they would have to explain to their children what a blowjob was and why the president was getting them from a woman who was not his wife. It was a different time. A time when the behavior of a United States president actually mattered. A time when parents still believed their kids didn’t know what a blowjob was.
I seem to remember turning the news off more often than turning it on back then, which is something I’m still doing today. The signal-to-noise ratio is all messed up, especially now, when the noise is deafening.
Hit movies playing in theaters that year included Saving Private Ryan, Armageddon, There’s Something About Mary, Mulan, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, Rush Hour, and a movie that would later achieve cult status, The Big Lebowski. James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster Titanic won a record eleven Oscars in March at the 70th Annual Academy Awards.
Dawn and I still went to the movies pretty regularly in the 1990s. These days, it’s rare that a movie comes along that we want to see enough to pay the exorbitant theater prices and endure crowds of people who seem to think they’re sitting in their living rooms. The experience has decomposed into something that’s more often unpleasant than enjoyable, so we just don’t do it very often.
Among the bestselling books in 1998 were Cold Mountain by Charles Frazier, The Long Road Home by Danielle Steele, You Belong to Me by Mary Higgins Clark, and The Street Lawyer by John Grisham. I was too immersed in noir to have time for current bestsellers.
It was the year Kasey Casem returned as host of American Top 40 after a decade-long absence. The Top 40 of 1998 list included songs by LeAnn Rimes, Savage Garden, Boyz II Men, Chumbawamba, Metallica, Mariah Carey, Will Smith, and Sara McLachlan.
I think I stopped paying attention to Top 40 songs sometime around 1990. An occasional song still got through, but mostly I listened to other music. While I was writing Biofire, I was starting to get into jazz. Oscar Peterson, Erroll Garner, Miles Davis, Dave Brubeck, Vince Guaraldi and others made up the soundtrack as I wrote.
The year 1998 saw the launch of new TV shows like Dawson’s Creek, Celebrity Deathmatch, Sex and the City, Whose Line is it, Anyway?, The King of Queens, That ’70s Show, and Charmed.
I was a TV kid growing up; I told time by what was on TV. I memorized the TV Guide at the beginning of every week. We only had three networks, so the shows were much easier to keep up with than they are now, with the galaxy of TV stations and networks we live in today. I think it was in the ’90s that I started to lose interest in TV. Oh, I still watched, don’t get me wrong—Seinfeld, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The X-Files, Frasier, and Law & Order were among my favorites. But TV lost its importance in my life and I no longer felt the need to schedule my time around what it had to offer. If I missed something, I missed it; I could catch it during the summer reruns, if at all. These days, I watch little broadcast TV. Like everyone else, most of our home entertainment comes from Amazon, Netflix, and other streaming services. But to be honest, I’d rather be reading a book.
As of January of 2019, according to Wikipedia, there were 4.39 billion internet users. But in 1998, the internet had been in the general public’s awareness for about seven years and people did not yet understand it, therefore they didn’t trust it. The biggest complaint by users at the time was slow connections. The obnoxious screech of a dial-up connection being made was always followed by excruciatingly long waits for a single webpage to open. Search engines were in their infancy, and social networks simply did not exist as we know them today. According to Pew Research, 57 percent of non-users in 1998 never worried about what they might be missing online. Can you imagine that today? People don’t stay off their phones long enough to wonder what they might be missing on the internet. It seems to drive everything today, but back then, the worldwide web had not yet become a big part of American life.
I approached it all with caution and slowly made my way to the internet. I’m not happy about it. The internet has devalued everything, and we have made ourselves so dependent on it and on computers that when the lights go out—and they will someday, for whatever reason—people will be eating each other in the streets within twenty-four hours.
While cell phones existed in 1998, they were not nearly as prevalent as they are now and were prohibitively expensive, with some costing thousands of dollars. No one had ever heard of a “smart phone” yet, and the idea of a phone having intelligence probably would seem creepy—as it should. Today, cell phones have become an extension of human beings in a decidedly Cronenbergian way; it’s unlikely that you’ll find anyone without his or her cell phone at any given time. But if, say, you found yourself in imminent danger and were being pursued by people who want to kill you in 1998, then you probably didn’t have a cell phone on you to call for help. For situations like that, people still relied on pay phones—if you could find one that worked. While they were commonly in poor repair, they were pretty easy to find back then, on most street corners, in most businesses, and in metropolitan areas they could be found in long banks on the sides of buildings.
Dawn and I each have a small flip phone and our provider is the pay-as-you-go TracFone. We’ve both watched people walking around with their heads down, eyes on their phones—alone even in a group, isolated even while surrounded by people—and decided we did not want that to be us. Cell phones have created a pretty creepy transformation in people. They cannot be without their phone nearby so they can check it regularly, again and again, to make sure they’re not missing anything. The way we see it, they’re missing a whole lot—but not on their phones.
I hope you enjoy your time spent in 1998. And while you’re there, beware the Laughing Man.
1.
Pillow Talk
* * *
Emma watched as he floated slowly down from the peak of his pleasure. It always took him a while, because she made sure his orgasm did not come easily. She made him teeter on the edge for what must have seemed to him forever, just as she used to do to her husband, Landon, in those early months of their marriage. Back when they had sex and spoke to one another, even showed affection on occasion, back before they took separate vacations, and separate bedrooms. Now, she straddled her lover, not her husband, watching as he lay exhausted beneath her, drained, even stunned, still inside her but small and shriveled, used up.
Beneath her, Leo sparkled with sweat, as usual, and it wasn’t very flattering, because somehow it made him look even fatter. It didn’t bother her, really; it was simply an observation she had made during their numerous assignations, always in that same enormous penthouse suite at the Olympus Towers. The room was held for him alone. Normally, that would not be an easy thing to acquire at such an enormous and exclusive hotel as the Olympus, in the middle of one of the biggest and busiest cities in the country, the world. But it was easier for him because he owned the hotel. It was one of the two places where they regularly met; the other was an intimate restaurant on the marina near Greyton. Leo did not own that particular establishment, but the owners treated him as if he did.
Emma reached down and ran a hand over Leo’s enormous, sweat-slicked barrel chest, passed her fingers through the glistening, curly patch of black-and-silver hair that formed a perfect V before it ran down his belly and then spread out again.
