Halloween Special Guest Writer - Chris Allinotte.

I've known Chris for around 2 years now and have loved his writing from day one.  He has a knack of turning a normal situation into a good old horror story.  His writing is tight and flows from the first word to the last.

I've always loved reading the late Richard Layman and I personally would liken Chris's writing to that of Layman's.  It flows, it's easy reading and it thrills.

I'll tell you what though, you make up your own mind.  Without further ado...


Sex and Beer by Chris Allinotte.

The brewery had been closed so long, it no longer smelled of sour beer. Joey liked the organic, slightly yeasty odour that remained.  Sam clung to his waist, huddling against the chill that found its way through scores of broken windows.  Their footfalls echoed among the bare girders and abandoned vats.

"Over here, let’s go," said Sam, pulling away and tugging him by the hand.  She lead Joey down a narrow corridor.  He liked her aggressiveness, it was one of the things that had convinced him to leave the bar with her. The aggressive chicks were usually animals in bed.

"I worked here one summer, about five years ago," she said.  Joey hadn’t asked, but if she wanted to talk, it was no skin off his ass.  Speaking of asses, he was relishing the view as she lead the way. He wondered if she was drunk enough for that. A thrill ran up his spine and he shuddered a little. This was shaping up to be an epic night.

"This was my boss' office," she continued, as they passed an otherwise ordinary looking door. Sam’s tone had cooled, and carried an edge that hadn't been there before. Joey didn't push. Something had obviously happened, she didn't want to talk about it. Fine. The last thing he wanted to do was spoil the mood. The large pane of dusty glass had a spider web of cracks around  a large jagged hole in the centre. On the ground were shards of glass and the remains of a broken bottle. Someone got bad news, he thought, and chuckled a little.

"What did you say?" she asked.

Joey hadn’t said a word. Before he could answer, she continued, "Nothing. Never mind. Later."

She wasn't talking to him.

Alright, he thought, that's a little crazy.

Sam took off her jean jacket, exposing her naked back. The skin was creamy-smooth and perfect below the thin black neck of her halter top. Joey smiled. What did it matter if she was a little “off?” Look at her, he thought. She had no idea of the things he wanted to do to her; the things he was going to do to her. He tried to remember if he’d brought a rubber. He was supposed to wear one now. Every time, the doctors said. If not though, he wasn’t going to worry about it.  He got along fine. She’d be fine too.

It was uncomfortably dry in the office, and the smell of long dead yeast and hops was making Joey want a beer in the worst way, though he'd had several at the bar already.  His tongue felt like sandpaper in his mouth. After he thought. Yeah. After we fuck. Thinking the word excited him. They were going to break into the shitty, dusty little office of this old brewery, and fuck.  He tugged at the leg of his jeans, which were getting tighter.

Joey tried to calm down, it wasn't cool to look too eager. He thought of the beer again. That would be the best damned beer of his life. Sam was easily the hottest girl he'd ever seen – there was no way she was getting away.

"What's in here?" he asked, moving to a plain grey metal door set in the back wall. 

"This is what I wanted to show you," said Sam. He saw that her smile had returned. She was meeting his gaze with her own large black eyes.  In the darkness, they were so wide the whites were almost gone. The naked hunger he saw there was more than enough to rekindle his excitement.  She turned the knob and revealed a room not much bigger than a closet. There was a small cot in the corner with a yellowing, tattered sheet stretched across it. He checked his pockets again. No dome. It was no big deal. He’d pull it out and pop on that perfect back of hers, or something. Another shiver rippled through him. What’s with me? he thought. You’d think this was my first time, or something.

"Shall we?" asked Sam.

"Yeah," Joey agreed. He stepped forward to push her into the room and was surprised when she grabbed him instead.

"Wonderful," she said, and threw him roughly to the bed.  Her manic energy was what had set her apart from the other bar rats and trailer trash. Now, that same energy was getting him so worked up, he began to worry about not being able to last.  Sam spread her legs and dropped heavily onto his bulging jeans.  Her coal coloured hair draped in front of her face. Without brushing it aside, she leaned in and began kissing his neck.

Joey moaned. Sam ran her hands under his shirt and scoured his chest and stomach with her nails.  She yanked down on his pants, and then she was riding him. Her body was a taut, dancing live wire. His hips bucked.  He was way too close; but couldn't think of what to say, or what to do.  She was all over him; so absorbed in the moment that she'd given up all pretence of delicacy.  Her lips smacked as she kissed him harder and longer. 

"Not yet," she moaned.

"Alright... alright," he grunted in return, willing himself to keep control.

"Soon," said Sam. Her voice was distant again, and he had that same feeling, that she wasn't talking to him. It was weird, alright. At the same time, the distraction was helping fight off the point of no return. He took the game to her and scoured her back with his nails. She threw her head back and laughed. Joey threw his back and moaned.

Suddenly, Sam pulled back, and sat on his thighs. She was staring him in the eye.  If her attention had ever wandered, it was all the way back now. Her black eyes gleamed behind the obsidian curtain of her hair.  The sudden withdrawal of her attention made Joey's body cry out. Everything was tingling and throbbing.

"Are you having a good time, Joey?"

He tried to speak, but could only gasp for air.  He nodded.

"That's good, Joey," she moaned. "My turn now, 'kay?"

He nodded again. 

Sam leaned in again, and this time, instead of kissing, she opened her mouth impossibly wide and bit deeply into his neck at the shoulder.  Joey tried to scream. She clamped a hand like a hydraulic press across his windpipe, and only a gurgling wheeze came out.  The other hand, that had been exploring and teasing the hairs on his stomach grew hard, and dug deeply into the flesh there.  There was an awful feeling of being entered.  The world started to swim in front of his eyes and he welcomed the coming blackness.  He remained aware long enough though, to see four triple-jointed legs erupt from the back of his would-be lover.  The hairy black appendages stretched and flexed in the air. Her skin peeled away in thick bloody strips to reveal a bulging black abdomen with the clear bloody imprint of an hourglass in the centre.

The Samantha-thing lowered thick black mandibles to his gushing shoulder.  An all-too-human tongue ran out between them and lapped at the blood. Underneath the monstrous castanet clicking of the spider, Joey could still hear the girl he'd met a million years ago at the bar. Incredibly, she sounded pissed off.

"Stupid, stupid, stupid! How are we going to get anywhere if you won't let us mate first?"  The mandibles seemed to click in reply, holding up their end of this obscene conversation.

"Yes, I suppose," said Sam's distant voice, "Better luck next time, then."

Mercifully, he didn’t see what happened next. Spots bloomed in front of his eyes. As he slipped away, he thought he heard screaming. The swirling colours widened briefly to a grey test pattern, and finally everything went black.

***

Joey woke up. That in itself was a surprise. His shoulder, which had been spouting a generous helping of his blood, had become a churned, purple clot beside his neck. He couldn’t feel it; he couldn’t feel anything in his extremities. On the other hand, his insides felt like they were burning up. His stomach was roiling, and he felt vicious cramps throughout his chest and bowels.

Also, he seemed to be dangling.

Long ropy strands of white web radiated out from him in every direction. The same stuff bound him in a loose cocoon. He followed one sticky cable to the curved edge of the wall. The sick-sour tang of beer, absent in the building, was overpowering in here.

From the darkness somewhere below, he heard Samantha’s voice.

“What did you do to us?” The spider’s clicking was gone, and only the voice of a sincerely pissed off woman remained.

At the limit of his vision, two obsidian legs appeared from the shadows. As the shape climbed higher, Joey began to scream. Samantha had partially re-emerged from the body of the spider. The torso and head were the same woman he’d been drinking with just hours ago, but her arms and legs were those of the spider. She scaled the wall until she was level with Joey, then turned to face him.

She was naked, and despite the multiple horrors of the situation, he still had a faint thrill at the sight of her. Something was wrong with her though. An ugly deep yellow stain was spreading across her chest.

“What did you do?” she repeated. Her voice was almost a scream, and her lips were pulled back from teeth that now tapered to gleaming points.

Joey was breathing hard. The pain in his guts and his brain’s attempts to reject what he was seeing had kept him from answering immediately. He took a good look at her. The spider’s second and third legs were starting to curl in towards Sam’s body. They were twitching. While he watched, the deep yellow patch on her ribs deepened, and spread. Something clicked for him. He knew what was going on.

She started to shout at him again, but he didn’t listen.

He was laughing. It felt awful, like he was about to shit out his insides. Still, there was nothing for it. She’d done something to him already; he was going to die. But the thing that made her so powerful, made her overly vulnerable to his own special problem. He was glad that he hadn’t worn a rubber now. That made him laugh harder, and now he tasted blood.

“Stop laughing!” she screamed. “You, your blood...”

“It’s... it’s just the Hep, babe,” said Joey. Knowing she was dying too had driven the terror from him. “Hep B, to be exact.” He laughed again. “Ah. Shit. That hurts. You... you should go see a doctor. He’ll clear you right up.”

With a primal shriek, Sam lunged forward on her remaining legs, and drove her topmost legs through his chest. It hurt like nothing he’d ever felt before, and the sensation of the legs as alive within him was somehow even worse.

Samantha’s face was now right in front of his own. Surprisingly, her tone had dropped to normal, but the spider’s clicks were very noticeable behind her words.

“You bastard,” she said. “You were going to have sex with me and leave me infected?”

He looked her squarely in the eyes. “Pretty much, yeah.” He smiled. “It’s not actually that bad for me. But I understand if you don’t do anything about it, it can get pretty serious.”

The spider-woman grit her teeth together, and drew back. In a single fluid motion, she ripped his body wide open as the legs jerked free.  The cocoon fell free from the web, and Joey tumbled to the floor of the vat. There, he found himself atop a pile of similar spun shells, dozens of desiccated corpses, and the stinking reek of sour beer.

As his consciousness retreated for the last time, and high above, he watched the spider-woman twitch in her own death throes, he wished once more for a final brew. He was just so damned thirsty.

Sex and Beer had no real clear origin, other than one or two rather disturbing dreams Chris had after finishing Starcraft in early 2000. Many of Chris' stories tend to involve terrible things happening to perfectly mundane people, and finds that his "monster" tales are the literary equivalent of playing with LEGO and ketchup.

He is also the editor and co-author of "Eight Days of Madness", a short anthology about horrors of the mind, available as a free download at Smashwords, featuring seven other completely demented authors. 

Chris lives in Toronto with his wife and children. He blogs about his writing at The Leaky Pencil.