Do you like special treats? Do you like super-exclusive content? Do you like being the first idiot in your group of idiot friends to discover the next super-hip pop culture sensation?!
You're in luck.
We've teamed up with emerging novelist
Keith Blackwater to give you a sneak preview of his debut book,
Hardcase McDougal and the Huge Fucking Mystery.
The following excerpt is from the chapter "Hot Dog!"
* * * * *
Hardcase
McDougal woke up in a ditch, covered in a thick layer of the
mud-slush-animal shit mixture typical of a Midwestern spring. It felt
like a family of raccoons was having an orgy in his head. He said a
quick prayer: Lord, please let this be a hangover. Because if
there are actual raccoons fucking around with my ear-holes again, I
swear to you I will burn down every hospital and orphanage. Like
literally all of them.
McDougal tried to stand up and
take a few steps: an endeavor which went poorly. He tripped on some
air and retreated back to his starting point in the ditch by way of a
mildly amusing barrel roll.
“Walk much?” Byron mocked.
He was crouched a few yards away, up out of the ditch in the middle
of a dirt road. He appeared to be starting a fire with a small mound
of garbage and dried leaves. He looked like total shit, his eyes
practically swollen shut.
“Suck much cock?” McDougal
shot back, trying again to stand up and faring a little better than
he had on the previous attempt. “What the fuck are you doing over
there?”
“Starting a cookfire. I woke
up with a half package of hot dogs in my pocket and I figured we
should eat them.”
“That's a good idea,” said
McDougal. “But let's smoke a bunch of weed first.”
“The weed is gone,
Hardcase.”
“What?!”
“We've been partying for
three days, dude. Everything is gone. Even the can of Beast Ice.
Don't you remember?”
“It... wait, what? My beer
is gone?”
“Are you okay, Hardcase?”
“I don't know,” McDougal
answered honestly. “I think... I don't know if I'm still wasted or
not right now, and it's weirding me out. Does that make any sense?
Did I just say words or was I mumbling a bunch of animal sounds? Do
you know if I remember what words are?”
“I can't understand a
fucking thing you just said,” replied Byron. “Stop making animal
sounds.”
“Oh fuck,” groaned
McDougal. “It's happening again.”
“No, I'm just fucking with
you. And—if I had to wager a guess—I would say that you are
still wasted. I base this opinion on two factors. One: we stole a
half gallon of gin from the grocery store last night and drank the
entire thing. Two: you've been awake for five minutes and you still
apparently haven't noticed that you're nude.”
McDougal looked down. Yep—that
muddy, haggard tube of flesh was his exposed dick swaying to and fro
in the early afternoon breeze.
“Well, I'll be fucked,”
exclaimed McDougal, and he went about the chore of looking for his
clothes.
He found his fedora, duster,
and badly blood-and-puke-stained Jimmy Buffett t-shirt a few yards
away from where he had woken up. His gun, monocle, and other
valuables were still in his jacket pockets. He never found his pants,
but there was—coincidentally—a family of dead raccoons about
thirty yards down the ditch. It appeared the raccoons had been
sexually active recently—whether before or after dying, McDougal
couldn't say. He removed an eight-inch hunting knife from the nylon
sheath on his otherwise-naked calf, and expertly skinned the slutty,
dead beasts.
He returned to Byron wearing a
fashionably bloody pair of raccoon-skin capris. The mother raccoon's
tail was fastened to the waist of the pants just below McDougal's
belly-button, creating the appearance of a raccoon-tail dick. This
was humorous.
He handed Byron a necklace
made of raccoon intestine that had been shredded into thin strips and
braided. Five hastily-cleaned raccoon skulls were strung on it like
giant pearls.
“I made this for you,”
said McDougal.
“Fuck yeah you did! Thanks.”
“We take from nature only
what we need,” said McDougal deeply. “And we dare not use her
treasures wastefully. The spirits of the animals, the rocks, the
water—even the spirits of this pile of plastic and styrofoam you're
burning—they are here to provide for their human masters, but only
if we reciprocate by serving as their stewards in this corrupt,
modern age, the age known to the ancient demigods as the Fifth
Zarnakkthium. I give you this amulet as a reminder of your essential
role in the delicate realm of nature-spirits.”
“This time I really don't
know what the fuck you said,” Byron admitted. “But I'm keeping
the necklace anyway.”
“What? I didn't say
anything, you creep. Hey, cool skull necklace! What are those, kitten
skulls? Where did you get that?”
“Why don't you just sit down
in this gravel and make yourself comfortable? Come on, have a hot dog
with me.”
After eating two lukewarm hot
dogs, McDougal sobered up a bit... or did he?
“Thanks,” he said to
Byron. “I needed a good home-cooked meal.”
“You're welcome, pal.
Hey—what is that on your forehead?”
McDougal put a greasy hand up
to his head and fondled the shrapnel wound. The healing process had
begun over the last few days, but had been retarded somewhat by a
lack of R.E.M.-cycle sleep and a steady diet of cheap drugs and
cheaper liquor. The gash was still fairly sticky.
“I already told you,” said
McDougal. “I got cut when I exploded a robot.”
“No, I mean there's
something inside the cut. It's green.”
“Shit, is it infected? I had
a bet with my cousin Jerry... whoever gets an infection first has to
pay the other one twenty bucks. Damn, I made it almost a week.”
“Jerry? Dude, I bonehawked
him at Curly's the other day. And if a chunky, foul-smelling
discharge has anything to say about it, I think Jerry already lost
the bet before you ever injured yourself fighting that robot—much
less before the injury got infected.”
“No,” McDougal said sadly.
“We both agreed that dick infections don't count.”
Byron nodded. “That's fair.
But I don't think this thing on your head is an infection anyway.
Hold still.” He pulled a pair of rusty tweezers from a small pocket
on his safari jacket.
McDougal protested, “You're
not putting those things inside an open wound.”
“Don't be a pussy,” Byron
said reassuringly. “Besides, I use these to smoke roaches all the
time, so they get pretty warm on a regular basis—probably sterile
as shit.”
“Hopefully even a little
more sterile than shit.”
“Right. Now don't fucking
move.”
Byron began extracting the
foreign object from McDougal's injury with hands that were as calm
and steady as a well-beaten chihuahua going through alcohol detox.
“Fuck!” screamed McDougal.
“That fucking hurt, you dumb pile of fuck!”
“Almost got it,” said
Byron, deciding to take the high road and ignore the name-calling.
But then that's just the kind of guy Byron Wilson was. That kind of
guy, and also an emotionally-crippled drug abuser kind of guy with a
badly-damaged sense of morality, and also, by a lot of folk's
accounts, a dumb pile of fuck kind of guy. Yeah, he was that kind of
guy all right... or was he?
“There!” Byron exclaimed,
holding up the tweezers triumphantly. They were tweezing a flat piece
of bloody green plastic about one-inch square.
“Oh my stars! What is
that?” asked McDougal, taking the object in one hand and flipping
his multifunctional spy monocle into place with the other.
He turned the magnification on
the monocle up to maximum and examined the plastic shard carefully. A
roadmap of thin gold lines on one side told him that it was most
likely a broken-off corner from a circuit board. White lettering was
visible on the other side.
UNDIK
USTRIES
McDougal removed his monocle
and asked Byron, “Do you know anything about Undik Ustries?”
Byron thought for a moment.
“No, I don't think—aww, man! Wait a minute. Isn't that the
Russian mail-order bride I knocked up? Did she fucking hire you to
find me and make me pay child support?! I thought we were friends,
Hardcase.”
“No,” said McDougal. “Her
name was Undiknia Ustrivicanavic. And she was my Russian
mail-order bride. Friend.”
“Oh, shit, yeah. Whatever
happened to her anyway?”
“I delivered your baby
myself, sold it to a barren jew woman for fifty thousand dollars,
then shot her.”
“So what happened to the
baby if you shot this Jewish lady? And I know its not my place to
tell you what's what, but I'm pretty sure it's called armed robbery
when you take fifty thousand dollars from somebody and then shoot
them.”
“I didn't shoot the jew
woman, dumbass.”
“Oh, you shot the baby?! Did
the woman want her money back?”
“Of course she wanted her
money back; she was a jew. But no, I didn't shoot the fucking baby. I
shot Undiknia because I had an anger problem in those days and I was
upset that she had taken your boner and put it inside of herself.”
“Oh, right. Yeah, I guess
that makes more sense.”
“More sense than Undik
Ustries,” McDougal grumbled, handing the jagged piece of circuit
board to Byron. “It looks like some of the letters might be missing
along the left edge where it broke off.”
Byron examined the item for a
couple of seconds. “Roundik Industries?”
The two men looked at each
other and said, “Fletcher Roundik!” simultaneously.
“Maybe we should pay our old
pal Fletcher a visit,” said McDougal.
“Yeah,” agreed Byron. “But
we need to get back to town first. Where the fuck are we anyway?”
“Why y'all is out in the
gaw-damn woods!” shouted a zany hillbilly voice.
“Who said that?” demanded
McDougal. He reached for his gun.
“Why, I done said it!” A
zany hillbilly sauntered out of the woods. He was barefoot and dirty,
with a red flannel shirt and a long-ass white beard crusted with
animal shit and old tobacco. He grinned broadly, showing what was
left of his teeth: a single, brown nub on the bottom gum.
“Okay,” said Hardcase
McDougal.
“Y'all ain't with the
police-law, is ya?” asked the grimy old retard.
Byron bluffed, “What if we
are?”
The old thing cackled
demonically and performed the faintest hint of a jig. “Why, if you
was the police-law, me and my boys'd hafta kill ya dead into the
ground like a bear-hound that done turned queer!”
“We aren't police,”
McDougal assured him.
The old man cackled again.
“Well that's fine! That's just fine!” Suddenly the man was
playing a fiddle; McDougal couldn't guess where the instrument had
come from. He played it rather poorly and it was out of tune besides.
McDougal began to lose the
little bit of patience he hadn't realized he possessed to begin with.
“What are you doing out here, old man? You making moonshine?”
“Who's askin'?”
“A customer, maybe.”
“'Fraid I ain't. Truth be to
Jesus, all I'm's doin's out here's cookin' a little bit o' crystal
meth. You boys wouldn't wanna buy a little baggie of ice, would'ye?”
“No,” said Hardcase
McDougal. “We certainly wouldn't.” He glared at the hillbilly and
shook his head in disgust. “And by the way, I find it pretty fucked
up that you would insinuate it's okay to kill a hunting dog for being
gay. For fuck's sake, man, it's... Byron, what year is it?”
“I have absolutely no idea,
dude.”
“It's at least the nineties
probably,” McDougal said with a degree of confidence. “So either
grow up, or go die somewhere because decent people in the modern
world aren't going to tolerate your intolerant bullshit.”
“Well, shucks,” said the
hillbilly. He looked down and kicked a tin can sadly as if to admit
that he knew, deep down inside, that his entire existence was a
mistake. Then he vanished back into the woods, as if he had never
been there at all.
“Wait a minute,” said
Byron. “Why didn't we get some meth?”
McDougal chuckled at his naive
friend. “Call me a snob, but I don't buy meth that's been cooked
outdoors. They use creek water in these backwoods operations.”
Byron's dumb stare said
plainly that he didn't see the problem with that.
McDougal lowered his voice to
a whisper and explained, “Minnows poop and fart in those creeks.”
He tried not to giggle when he said it, but a little titter slipped
out around the word fart.
“Oh, okay,” said Byron.
“Well anyway, that was pretty weird. And we're no closer to getting
back to town.”
McDougal just grinned. He put
two filthy fingers inside his mouth and let out a loud and distinct
whistle; it sounded like a cross between a post-hibernation bear
queef and the murderous scream of a falcon with nothing left to lose.
“Cool whistling skills,
dude,” said Byron. “But what exactly—“
Suddenly, Boy trotted out of
the woods. The bastard mongrel was riddled with ticks and lice, but
in good spirits, and almost certainly drunk.
“Good Boy!” said McDougal,
affectionately punching his dog square in the snout.
“Cool dog trick, dude,”
said Byron. “But what exactly—”
McDougal shushed Byron with a
gentle slap and unzipped a vinyl satchel attached to Boy's collar.
The first thing he took out was a pint of whiskey. He chugged half
and handed the rest to Byron. He reached back into the satchel and
began to pull out a series of collapsible aluminum rods and assorted
plastic fittings.
Byron sipped on the whiskey.
“Cool tent poles, dude, but what exactly—”
“It's not a tent, fuckdick,”
interrupted McDougal with great wit and precision.
“Cool ability to call
someone a fuckdick, dude, but what exactly are you doing?!”
The detective continued
assembling the aluminum rods until he had fashioned a structure that
looked like a dog sled, more or less.
He removed the last item from
Boy's satchel: a length of parachute cord. He used it to hook the
sled up to Boy's collar, and then he stepped onto his contraption.
“All aboard the Boner
Express!” McDougal announced gleefully.
“I have no idea why I'm
friends with you,” Byron muttered. He stepped onto the ridiculous
dogsled behind McDougal and wrapped his arms around the detective's
chest out of necessity.
“Probably because you want
to fuck me,” quipped McDougal expertly. “Mush! Mush, Boy! Mush!”
Boy galloped majestically down
the dirt road, the sled skidding along the gravel and mud behind him,
just like on a Christmas card.
* * * * *
Yeah. You're right. This book
is going to change the world.
To keep up with all things McDougal, connect with Mr. Blackwater on his
Facebook page (
http://www.facebook.com/Hardcase.McDougal.) And watch out for
Hardcase McDougal and the Huge Fucking Mystery on Amazon this spring!
