When ICFH released the 60th Anniversary Novelization of The Brain That Wouldn't Die in September 2022, we intended to provide a preview chapter to whet readers' appetites for more. The book took off, and we forgot about our fantastic idea along the way.
Now, approaching the Second anniversary of the book's release, we've decided to drag our preview chapter out of mothballs to nudge those still deciding whether or not our The Brain That Wouldn't Die-60th Anniversary Novelization is worth the price of admission.
For your enjoyment, here is the entirety of Chapter One.
Witness for yourself what "42nd Street" Pete Chiarella (Grindhouse Resurrection Magazine) called "as over the top as the actual film was, but with more sleaze, gore and mayhem." Enjoy!
Chapter One
Swede Carlton sat seething in the holding tank. He rocked back and forth on the metal cot affixed to the cell wall. He made tight fists, the knuckles popping. Fresh bruises covered his hands and blood caked the knuckles of both. No one offered him a towel, not even after they printed him, and he did not ask for one.
He sucked great breaths of air into his lungs and exhaled like an irritated bull. He looked like an angry gorilla with a grudge against every living creature at the zoo.
All he could think about was Trixie and that skid-row bum he found her with. The bum’s hot breath blowing on her back, his sweat dripping on her, and Trixie making noises he had not heard in years.
When he first brought Trixie home to meet his mother two years ago, ma’ did not like anything about her. Right in front of them both she warned him about her. “She ain’t no good, Swede.”
Swede’s mother never minced words.
Trixie only laughed it off and Swede flushed with embarrassment. His mother continued to berate the woman he loved, “A woman like this one,” she pointed a wrinkled finger at the redhead, “you don’t make her your wife, Swede. She ain’t for that. She ain’t good for no one’s wife.”
But Swede thought he had the world by the short hairs. Nothing his mother said to him that night or any other night after ever got through his thick skull. Trixie said she loved him and that was good enough for him.
When they first got together, it was nothing but fun, laughs and good times. Trixie had a way of making him feel like king of the mountain. The other bums down at the auto assembly plant told him to watch out for her, but he brushed them off, told them they didn’t know what for. “Trixie’s a good girl,” he said with pride. “She’s special.”
The guys just laughed and whispered among themselves exactly what the girl was good at. It was only news to Swede that Trixie had had a lot of boyfriends before she met him.
Before they were married, Trixie made everything she did about making him happy. She cleaned up around the two-room apartment, she had dinner on the table every night when he got home and in the bedroom, she was a quest that the greatest of the conquistadors would have loved to conquer.
She used her body in ways Swede had never before experienced. Trixie did things no other dame had ever done to him before, things he had never even thought about let alone dream about. Every square inch of her body was capable of pleasing him in some way.
Then they got married. Swede was in it for the long haul: little house, white picket fence, a son named Bobby and a daughter with pigtails named Sue. He bought into all of it. Like he thought a guy was supposed to do when he settled down.
Like a sucker.
Like a dunce.
After they were married, when their bedroom antics bordered on adventurous, daring or “way out there,” Trixie was quick to pull the covers over her naked body and say there were some things that were not proper for a wife to do with her husband. He never questioned this, as she always found something proper for them to do, and it was those things burned into his mind at the moment.
He got off the first shift early that morning. There was not enough work, they were short of parts for his line, so MacGregor started sending everyone home. He thought he would surprise Trixie with a bouquet of flowers. They were not roses. He did not make enough for roses yet, but they were purple, red, and white and whatever they were he thought they were pretty enough to bring a smile to her face. He could use a smile.
The old flower lady had a cart by Quincy’s Tavern. He went in and belted back a few pokes of whiskey with some of the boys from the plant. They laughed and kept the bottle close and before Swede knew it, it was a quarter after two. It was still early, and sometimes Trixie went to the market in the afternoons.
When he said he had to get home he dropped two bits on the bar top and grabbed up the flowers. They looked grubby in the dimness of Quincy’s, not as pretty as they had been when he bought them from the old lady in the sunlight. They smelled of cigarette smoke too.
Then Mikels and Steckler started in on him. They were two roughnecks from his shift who liked to give hell to the other guys.
“You think Trixie wants you home early,” Steckler asked. He wore a stupid grin a mile long. It was the kind of smile that made Swede want to knock his teeth down his throat.
“If I know Trixie, she don’t wanna be bothered until after four,” Mikels added, pointing at his watch. This got all the men at the bar whooping it up again.
“What the hell does that mean,” Swede shouted. His outburst just made the men at the bar laugh harder.
“To hell with you rummies,” he said and cursed as he pushed through the tavern’s glass doors, clutching the flowers in one big hand.
Sunlight burned his eyes, but it did not slow him down. He stormed down the street with purpose and a bad feeling eating at his guts.
He would never forget what he saw when he arrived at their little two-room apartment in Tarrytown.
Shock seized his heart.
A man only sees something like that once, and he never forgot it till the day he died.
The flowers hit the kitchen linoleum as soon as he heard them. His heart thumped as loudly as Trixie’s cries of ecstasy.
It would take a fork to scrape the memory of that afternoon off his brain. He could never unsee it. The two sweaty bodies. The bum, whoever he was, dominating Trixie, his wife, taking her from behind. Trixie crying out for the Lord to take her, screaming that she had never felt anything so sweet before in her life.
They were doing one of those things Trixie always said was not proper for a wife to do with her husband. She must have figured it was all right to do it with the bum, since he obviously was not her husband.
His mother’s shrill, unkind words suddenly cracked like thunder in his head.
“A woman like this one, you don’t make her your wife, Swede. She ain’t for that. She ain’t good for no one’s wife.”
At that moment, ma’s voice so clear in his ears, something snapped in Swede. It was like a circuit board shorting out in a flash of sparks and smoke. All he saw was red.
He raced toward the crumb-bum and pulled him off of his wife. The man was sweaty and covered in hair. He tossed the stranger to the floor and started stomping on him with his big work boots. He hoped the creep could taste the factory floor in the shoe leather he was pounding into his face.
Trixie screamed for him to stop, but Swede was not listening. His initial shock had transformed into white hot anger. Rage consumed every part of him, boiled throughout his body.
Swede was on the bum like stink in an alley. He pummeled the guy, driving his fists into the pug’s head over and over again. He hit and hit and heard bone and cartilage shatter under his fists, but he did not let up on his assault. He refused to stop even when he felt one side of the guy’s head cave in. He just kept hitting him over and over again.
Trixie was hysterical. She pulled a bed sheet over her naked body. Like it was a time for modesty.
She screamed curse after curse at him, but he refused to stop his assault. To tell the truth, there was nothing that could stop Swede in the moment. Not even if he wanted to stop. But he did not want to stop.
Swede had been an amateur boxer in the Army. Those old moves came back to him like reflex. It was like he was in the barracks again, in that smoke filled tent, surrounded by the beer-soaked screaming bozos yelling at him to clobber Tony Rico or Jake Connors or some other clown.
He continued beating the man. He would take care of Trixie when he was finished. God as his witness, he would fix that two-timing hussy.
He stomped the man’s chest, and the worst kind of sound came out of his throat. Swede did not like it, so he stomped on the rummy’s throat again to make it stop. The man could not defend himself. He had no idea what hit him.
Swede noticed Trixie run out of the bedroom. She nearly slipped, her bare feet splashing in a puddle of the guy’s blood.
She ran to the phone screaming.
Good. He did not want Trixie seeing this.
It was just Swede and the bum, the guy, some Big Daddy he had never laid eyes on before.
Middle aged, he was bald and carried a gut like he was trying to hide a basketball under his shirt. His suit and tie were draped over the same chair back where Swede threw his work clothes when he got home in the evening.
So, Swede thought, he was a businessman, a pencil pusher. Someone who did not sweat to make a living. Why would Trixie be spending time with this guy? How would she even know him?
Standing over the man trying to make sense of everything, Swede noticed the man’s wallet on his dresser. Beside it was a bottle of rotgut whiskey. Beneath the bottle was a crisp twenty lying on the stained mahogany dresser top. A new rage boiled within Swede.
He felt like a fool, a real dope.
This is why the guys from the factory were making funny and laughing at him. This was what his mother had warned him about.
For a moment, Swede was no longer Swede. He was an animal, a beast not capable of rational thought.
He continued to hit the man over and over again. The bum cried out, but Swede tried to stuff his screams back into his mouth with his boot heel. He stomped the man’s face and stomach, dropped a heavy heel on his throat again.
He never heard the rotary phone dial the operator in the front room. Swede’s entire world was the man he had found making time with his wife and trying to beat him into nothing less than a shadow.
It seemed like the bulls were suddenly just there, like they had been waiting in the hallway to kick the apartment door in and raid the place.
He heard Trixie scream, “He’s killing him,” and then two burly bulls in blue were on him. They wrestled him away from the bum and onto the floor.
A knee dropped onto the back of his neck and Swede cursed, tried to push himself up to get back to business, but the bulls, O’Mally and Kirkpatrick, held him tight. They pulled his arms behind his back and slung cuffs. They damn near broke both his arms at the shoulders and the elbows, but Swede would never have felt it. He was running on pure rage. The world around him was red. When he saw Trixie standing there, crying, holding the stained sheet around her, her bare feet poking out the bottom of the sheet, he lunged at her from his prone position.
O’Mally did not hesitate to bring his billy club into play. He swatted Swede across the back and a jolt of pain shot down his spine. When he continued to squirm, O’Mally smacked him again.
Once he calmed enough for them to jerk him to his feet, they pushed him past Trixie, out the apartment building and onto the street where they slung him into the squad car.
Swede kicked out one last time and connected with Kirkpatrick’s forehead. Both bulls were on him again with their sticks.
Kirkpatrick called the meat wagon on the radio to come scrape up the guy stomped into the bedroom carpet.
The man lay in a pool of his own blood, Trixie weeping over the body. As far as Swede cared he hoped the bastard died.
When they got to the precinct, Swede Carlton was hauled in and booked for assault. They informed him that his wife, Trixie Carlton, wanted to press charges. He told the booking officer he had no wife but that he would see that whore Trixie paid for what she had done to him before it was all over.
It took four men to get him into the holding cell. Swede gave them a fight but somehow they managed to get him locked up.
Now he sat in the cell. The anger continued to rage throughout him. He wanted to bang his head against the iron bars, punch the concrete walls around him. Whenever the opportunity presented itself, he would drag Trixie to Hell by the hair on her head if he had to.
His mother had been right. Trixie was nothing but a whore bitch, street meat that laid with one man after another. She was only good for one thing, and had no business being married.
Kirkpatrick, a lump on his forehead from the one good lick Swede got in, said, “If Tank Green dies, you’ll be up for manslaughter. No way you’ll beat that rap. I’ll be happy to watch you fry, Swede.”
The cop smiled a greasy smile and Swede wanted to jump up, grab Johnny Law by the throat and pull him through the holding cell bars, watch his skull shatter and eyes pop out.
Swede knew he would fry. He was not afraid, he just wanted a chance to get one last lick at that bitch Trixie. He wondered how many other bums she had been with since he married her, and the thought made the rage inside him boil like lava from a volcano ready to explode.
To hell with all of them. Especially that bastard that he found with Trixie. Tank Green. He hoped he would have the opportunity to meet him again in Hell. That son-of-a-bitch would really get what was coming to him then.
The Brain That Wouldn't Die- 60Th Anniversary Novelization is available everywhere quality books are sold.
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