Wet Work: The Definitive Edition Read online

  Table of Contents

  Wet Work

  Copyright

  Dedication

  INTRODUCTION

  ECZEMA

  FLESH

  MUSCLE

  BONE

  MARROW

  ASHES

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  Wet Work: The Original Short Story

  Afterword

  Wet Work

  by Philip Nutman

  Smashwords Edition

  Overlook Connection Press

  — 2011 —

  — | — | —

  Copyright

  WET WORK

  ©1993 by Philip Nutman

  copyright renewed 2005

  Introduction: The Downward Spiral

  copyright © 2005 by Douglas E. Winter

  Cover Illustration © 2005 by John Bergin

  This digital edition © 2011 by Overlook Connection Press

  Wet Work (short story version)

  copyright © Philip Nutman 1989

  copyright renewed 2005

  The Definitive Edition Editorial Consultant:

  Brett A. Savory

  Published by

  Overlook Connection Press

  PO Box 1934, Hiram, Georgia 30141

  http://www.overlookconnection.com

  [email protected]

  Book Design & Typesetting:

  David G. Barnett

  Fat Cat Graphic Design

  http://www.fatcatgraphicdesign.com

  This book is a work of fiction. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, without the written permission of the Publisher.

  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 please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  — | — | —

  Dedication

  To the Memory of My Father

  Elwyn Nutman

  1919-1967

  For my Mother

  Who Knew I Would

  and to

  Richard Matheson

  Who Showed a Young Boy

  the True Dark magic

  of Storytelling

  — | — | —

  INTRODUCTION

  The Downward Spiral:

  Philip Nutman’s Wet Work

  by Douglas E. Winter

  “This is what we’ve become. Meat writhing with maggots.” Apocalypse, then and now: The novel you are about to read had its genesis late in the 1980s, during the halcyon days of “splatterpunk”—a flashfire of horrific fiction that exploited excesses of violence and sex with unrepentant glee. At splatterpunk’s fierce apogee, before its original question (how far could you go?) was replaced by the inevitable one (how low could you go?), writers John Skipp and Craig Spector assembled an anthology known as Book of the Dead. Intended as a celebration of the “living dead” films of George A. Romero—and, in the words of its introduction, the aesthetics of “going too far”—the volume remains one of the more memorable manifestos of splatter. Its stories raged, sometimes merely for the sake of rage, but more often against the Reaganite dream of conformity and materialism—and, indeed, against the increasingly safe and commercial genre that was attempting to pass for “horror” fiction.

  Book of the Dead was published in 1989. Its stories included a gory set-piece by Philip Nutman that traced the lurching path of zombies through the streets of the nation’s capital and straight into the White House. It was called “Wet Work.”

  Although it was Phil’s first published story, he was not an unknown to me, or to horror. We had been introduced years before, by a mutual friend named Clive Barker; at the time, Phil was working at the BBC and pursuing dreams of filmmaking. Soon he was living in the United States, writing full tilt for more magazines and comic books than I could count, and it wasn’t long after Book of the Dead was published that he began talking about the next step—a novel. For a while, we had an informal competition going about who would write and publish a novel first, but it was clear that Phil would win, hands down. Something in that short story possessed him. Using it as inspiration, Phil walked into the shadows and returned with the novel Wet Work—a compact epic of apocalypse that honored Richard Matheson’s I Am Legend while deconstructing Romero’s “living dead” films into a political thriller.

  Although Wet Work is told from multiple points of view, its central character is Dominic Corvino, a member of the CIA’s killer elite—a covert hit team known as “Spiral” whose specialty is tidying up American messes around the globe. Corvino’s life has been one long dance with death; alone and in his forties, he seems defined by the negating of existence: “He found it impossible to believe in anything but himself and his skills as an assassin. There was no God, no Fate, just the ability to kill and survive.” Yet “behind the cold, distant exterior was a conscience and a strong moral code.” Corvino’s murderous skills are exercised with the deeply held conviction that, in a world shaded with gray, there are still such notions as right and wrong. Above all, he has an inescapable sense of dignity—which, perhaps, is the one thing that distinguishes him from his colleagues: “he was still a man, not a machine with a gun.”

  When Spiral is dispatched to Panama, fighting America’s latest war on drugs, Corvino and his cohorts find betrayal, death, and something worse—corpses that walk, seemingly alive. Corvino, the sole survivor, returns to the United States to confront a new world, changed forever by its passage through the tail of the enigmatic comet Saracen. An alien radiation, carried by the comet, accelerates the spread of disease but also resurrects the recently dead, which hunger for the flesh of the living. “From that day on, there would be no rest, no peace… Especially for the dead.”

  The zombies have only one ambition—to add to their ranks by making more dead; but their resurrection, and their hunger to kill, is also a strange act of revolution. By neglecting what they had been told in life by the authorities—by refusing to behave—the dead prove more alive than the living, who have only petty vices (television, drugs, booze) to distract them from the futility of their everyday existence and lull them further into sleep. The awakening of the dead threatens to awaken the living; and the response from the nation’s capital is, of course, as American as mom, baseball, and apple pie: “The only way we can contain such unprecedented civil unrest is by force.” And the specific solution is time-honored: “The head, aim for the head!”

  This bitter, blood-soaked reality is Corvino’s tormented inner world brought into the light. In the eyes of his masters, the living have little consequence; they are sheep who exist merely to be put to pasture and ruled—and, if necessary, slaughtered. “Democracy had died. . . . Oh, that was rich. Democracy had died. Democracy had been limping along under a weight of lies for so many years he was surprised it had lived as long as it had, only it hadn’t.”

  The dream of democracy, of the sheep choosing whether to be ruled, and by whom, is long-buried—”shot in the head by men like him.” In its place is a nightmare that, with the coming of the zombies, haunts even those who are fully awake. “The country’s dying. The world is falling apart. The old world. But there’s a new world rising from the ashes. A New Order.” Yet when we meet the new boss, he’s the same as the old boss—because the truly ripe and rotting corpse is that of the body politic. “This is what we’ve become,” Corvino
is told. “Meat writhing with maggots.”

  Nutman scatters his text with self-referential asides that evoke the traditions and talents, many of them filmic, that inspired him. The downward spiral that is the reality of Wet Work may parallel the visions of Richard Matheson and George Romero; but there are also echoes of David Morrell and David Cronenberg (particularly when Corvino examines his wound and finds it “sensual in its fatal beauty”). There are other, less serious allusions; among the many characters, you’ll find, by name, two editors of Fangoria, one of Phil’s sometime collaborators, and several fellow writers; and, if you’re attentive, you’ll also find me—I’m the “sad-looking guy wearing a black cotton suit jacket, jeans, and a Skinny Puppy T-shirt.” (Although I still have the clothes, these days I’m smiling.)

  Wet Work differs from its predecessors, however, by taking us inside the minds of the resurrected dead—and offering, in one of its finer moments, the eerie and hypnotic reverie of a dead president, whose brain, despite its misfiring synapses, somehow clings to a stark sense of self-consciousness that is missing from the lobotomized lurchers of the films of Romero and Lucio Fulci. It is here, in the novel’s closing act, that Nutman delivers a final and powerful message about the dark underbelly of the Reagan-Thatcher-Bush era, and its neglect for, and marginalization of, the underclasses: “We are less than human. We’re less than dead.”

  The smug indifference of politics reigns triumphant in the nation’s capital, with power its only pursuit. Despite death and destruction, the one true zombie—that shambling and undying monster known as politics—goes on and on and on:

  Two hundred and nineteen years after its birth, the United States of America had fallen as carrion meat to those with a hunger for raw flesh. And as the sun rose above Washington, D.C. on June 4th, he saw a new nation before him—the United States of Hell. In the Oval Office, there was no celebration, no inaugural speech.

  It was business as usual.

  Now, as liberty, privacy, and individuality succumb to the machinations of another Bush Administration, Wet Work and its zombies are resurrected to offer us that lesson again. We need its wisdom, and so very badly, because we never seem to learn.

  Lock and load. It’s time to get wet.

  Douglas E. Winter

  Oakton, Virginia

  May 2003

  ECZEMA

  “You have no idea how important narcotics have been to the Company. They’ve financed major missions off of drug deals. In the 1960’s they even tested LSD on our own scientists. One guy went crazy and threw himself out a hotel window. The deeper in you get, the more you realize how much it stinks. That’s why I got out.”

  — Ex-CIA Operative

  Pain

  whitelightwhiteheat

  …what?

  ???

  …

  He is dead.

  Yet alive.

  And like Lazarus coming back from the beyond, opening his eyes and looking with confusion into the face of Christ, Corvino is not aware of what is happening to him.

  The first electrochemical impulses dance between decaying synapses. Then, wrapped in total darkness, his body spasms as the second collision of thoughts and memory clips slamdance him into consciousness.

  I am awake, asleep

  swimming

  (drowning)

  dreaming…

  The MacDonald Douglas DC-3 comes in low on its drop towards the tarmac of Washington National as it lowers over the Potomac, the sound of its engines a subsonic scream of metal maintaining space above the ground, the slipstream ruffling his hair as he turns, a voice uttering his name

  muzzelflashpain

  (??aaahhh?—)

  —and he is in his apartment watching TV Dan Rather talking about the unusual phenomena of Comet Saracen strange colored tail debris green blending into—

  —lighblastflash

  (PAIN!!!)

  and—

  I love you she says Vietnam kaleidoscope opium hash acid

  —I don’t do that shit—

  others stoned immaculate Doors Hendrix paint it black

  —black

  black

  (paint it…)

  bla.…—

  asleep

  awake

  swimming

  drowning

  (No!)

  —reach for the …

  surface

  (float)

  so cold

  cold here—

  …in your arms

  (???)

  rise …to the…

  (surface)

  Corvino

  (who?)

  swimming, drowning, reaching, climbing, reaching…

  (WHATTHEFUCK?!!!)

  He opens his eyes. Sensory awareness kicks in.

  Blackness.

  (I’m blind)

  Panic surges through stiff muscles, cold body jerking against freezing metal.

  (I’M BLIND!!)

  Get a grip. Control the fear. Keep it together. Old habits…die hard.

  In this case they haven’t died, have just been in hibernation for a short taste of eternity.

  Where am I? What?—

  All he remembers is a small flash of light, then nothing.

  He lifts his arms and touches icy metal. Pushing, he realizes he is in a confined space. A box of some kind.

  A coffin?

  He pushes downward and there is slight movement. Pushes again. Bright fluorescent light explodes, his eyes squeezing shut as the shelf slides open.

  So. At least he isn’t blind.

  He counts to twenty, allowing his tortured eyes to adjust beneath the lids, then slowly cracks them open. Realizing he is in an institution of some kind, he struggles from the shelf suddenly aware of his nakedness and the white sheet covering him.

  And sees the blood.

  On the walls. The ceiling. The floor.

  Then the bodies.

  A doctor, his white coat gore-soaked, bullet holes peppering his torso. A headless naked man lying across the doctor’s legs. And the blasted body of an E.M.S cop who looks as if he’d blown his brains out judging by the position of the M-16 lying beside him.

  Reality

  —flipped, decaying cells trying desperately to recall what has happened.

  A dead woman. Naked, peeled of flesh.

  Panama…

  — | — | —

  FLESH

  Before the city drops into the night,

  Before the darkness, there’s one moment of light,

  It’s when everything’s clear,

  The other side seems so near…

  — Jim Carroll

  “You can’t say it’s wrong to kill.

  Only individual standards make it right or wrong.”

  — Executed killer Melvin Rees, 1959

  — | — | —

  PANAMA CITY, PANAMA.

  SATURDAY, MAY 27, 1995.

  8:47 P.M.

  It’s a good night for a kill.

  Dominic Corvino stood on the balcony of the two-story stucco house, smiling tersely at the thought as he savored a cigarette.

  Twilight in Panama City blazed unusually bright with the glowing orb of Comet Saracen hanging heavily near the horizon. The emerald luminescence of its long tail bleached the magenta sunset an eerie hue, casting traces of shadow on his deep-set features.

  He admired the comet’s unearthly allure. The celestial body’s presence felt both ironic and appropriate. In ancient times, men hailed comets as harbingers of doom; they imagined the tail to be the shape of a sword, the circle of haze to be a decapitated head. That grotesque image seemed an apt metaphor for what, in just over fifteen minutes, would happen in the house across the street.

  Corvino stretched back against the wall. His lean body bristled with a familiar, comfortable tension as he anticipated the scenario. On one level every assignment played the same: get in, hit the target, get out. Each sortie was planned to create a T’ai Chi-like effect—minimum force to achieve m
aximum effect, manipulating your opponent’s strength against him. A short, intense burst of the killing art and a swift, silent departure. Poetry writ in bloody motion. Still, on another level, every hit was unique. Each location proved problematic in its own fashion.

  As usual, he arrived a stranger in a strange land, but masquerading as a local came with the territory. Sometimes—like that KGB defector mission in Sweden, back in the mid-eighties— physical attributes made it more difficult, but, in this case, his dark Italian features blended ideally into the Latin American environment.

  A pang of apprehension gnawed at him though. Why? His imagination? Yet he could sense an undercurrent of electricity in the air, like the sharp taste of ozone before a storm, and the feeling had dogged him since his arrival four hours ago. Caution came with the job. Maybe it was just the comet. He shrugged unconsciously. He wasn’t superstitious, yet his instincts tingled. Still, there was nothing he could put his finger on.

  He glanced at the identical house on the opposite side of the street, taking a final drag on the cigarette. Though they’d held the house under constant surveillance for seventy-two hours, and he didn’t need to observe the target location again, the comet’s incandescent beauty had drawn him outside one more time. The color of its tail was a breathtaking shade of pale green, making the twilight look like a cheap movie—day-for-night photography shot by an inexperienced cameraman. When he’d seen the return of Halley’s comet in 1989, he’d been disappointed. Just a faint dot in the night sky. According to the experts, Saracen was an anomaly. Since the start of contemporary records, astronomers had never had the opportunity to observe a comet so close to earth. But they could have a field day with their observations and theories: he had work to do.