Donut Does It Read online

  PRAISE FOR NIGHT WALK

  by David Hudnut

  “In NIGHT WALK, author David Hudnut creates a familiar, cozy, suburban environment, drawing you in with every page. Then he smacks you with an avalanche. You hear the rumble and two seconds later you are swept away in fear…”

  —Jon Chiappa

  "Set a new place at the Horror Masters table for David Hudnut. The visceral terror of NIGHT WALK grabs hold of you and doesn't let go; balancing gut-wrenching thrills with true insight into believable characters, who you will stay with every step of the way."

  —Steve Curcuru, Author & Illustrator of the online comic SAVAGE PARADISE

  “Like staring down the barrel of a loaded gun…Too scary by far. Not for the faint of heart. Read with caution.”

  —Rich F.

  “FIVE STARS! David Hudnut winds his fingers around your heart strings so expertly you won’t even know he’s playing your emotions until you are literally weeping tears onto the pages.”

  —George L.

  “A modern classic. NIGHT WALK goes beyond skull-shattering horror. The characters are real, they are your friends and neighbors…you won’t believe the things they do. Plan on sleeping with the lights on for at least two weeks.

  —Susan K.

  “NIGHT WALK will chain you to the front of a rocket sled and shoot you into a cement wall at 180 m.p.h. It transcends conventional horror and delves deep into the twisted heart of human experience.”

  —Mark Butcher

  “FIVE STARS! [NIGHT WALK] is relentless, nail-biting, pulse-pounding terror. This book will keep you up late at night turning pages…I couldn’t put it down.”

  —Nichole D.

  . . .

  PRAISE FOR HANDS OFF

  “HANDS OFF made my heart hurt.”

  —Tara Youmans

  “The ending of HANDS OFF punched me in the jaw and knocked me into tomorrow.”

  —Sandra J. Martin, author

  “FIVE STARS! ‘Rock and roll storytelling’ is right! I DARE you to dive into this horror and to try and come back the same! A must-read for any fan of Stephen King's older works. I can't wait to read more of David Hudnut's work!”

  —Kristen Shull

  PRAISE FOR DONUT DOES IT

  “I don’t know if I’ll ever eat another doughnut after reading DONUT DOES IT. If you need a good reason to avoid eating more doughnuts, read this story. It’ll keep you on your diet for sure.”

  —Elizabeth M.

  PRAISE FOR THE NOSE KNOWS

  “FIVE STARS! David Hudnut weaves a seemingly light and funny story about being a young man in Venice Beach, California, but the plot takes a dark twist, becoming nightmarish. It's both funny and scary, sweet and twisted. And it's definitely a roller coaster of fun, fun, fun!”

  —Melissa Kojima, bloggist and designer for Artist in LA LA Land Illustration

  . . .

  BY DAVID HUDNUT

  HANDS OFF

  DONUT DOES IT

  THE NOSE KNOWS

  NIGHT WALK

  THE HITLER MACHINE

  Illustrated by DAVID HUDNUT

  Owie-Cadabra’s Verbal First Aid for Kids

  DONUT

  DOES IT

  a story

  by

  David Hudnut

  . . .

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places and incidents are a product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.

  Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2012 David Hudnut

  Cover Art Copyright © 2012 David Hudnut

  All rights reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, or otherwise without express written permission from David Hudnut.

  To find out more information, visit the author’s website at:

  www.DavidHudnut.com

  For regular entertainment, visit the author’s blog at:

  http://davidhudnut.blogspot.com/

  Table of Contents

  Donut Does It

  FREE BONUS STORY!!

  Hands Off

  Preview David Hudnut’s Ultra- TERRIFYING new novel:

  NIGHT WALK

  . . .

  The ragged Mazda hatchback limped out of the midnight darkness, its engine knocking feebly. Its peeling paint was a faded milky red and its fenders were rusting through. It leaned to one side, straining under the weight of its considerably massive driver:

  Randy McArdle, age thirty-five, and far too wide.

  Randy drove the tiny car into the parking lot of Hole Donut, a 24-hour doughnut shop, and parked.

  Creamy, yellow-orange street light dribbled through the windshield onto his knuckles and the cracked dashboard, in buttery contrast to the immaculate white lights shining inside the Hole Donut, which made the shop look like a pristine surgical theater, or perhaps the foyer to heaven.

  Randy was well overweight, and tonight was on a mission to increase the distance between himself and a healthy Body Mass Index by a more comfortable margin.

  Sure, he was still belching up the second dinner he'd eaten two hours ago in hot burps, but there's always room for dessert, right?

  He felt a sharp moment of doubt about his intention to buy a dozen doughnuts and eat them all.

  Randy couldn’t recall how many times as a teenager that his parents punished his caloric transgressions with strictly enforced diets that never seemed to work, or nagged him for hiding emergency Ho-Hos or boxes of Fiddle-Faddle in various corners of his bedroom. They were relentless and didn’t understand him in the least.

  He needed to eat, and if that meant a little extra sugar every now and then, so what?

  Early on, Randy had turned to food for the comfort his mother could never give.

  In second grade, when he’d told pretty Sally Linnett during morning recess that he loved her, and she’d made a nasty face and called him ugly, the pain he’d felt in his stomach had been intense: a sharp, jagged, rusty blade of shame.

  He’d moped around the rest of recess by himself, attempting to consolidate this unwanted surprise into his limited world view.

  An unexpected solution had presented itself in his young mind. Something about the vanilla-frosted Dolly Madison’s Zinger waiting for him in his brown paper lunchbag called to him, creating a vivid picture in his head that shimmered with the promise of salvation.

  Even though his mother always gave him strict orders,

  (Randy, don’t eat your dessert until AFTER you finish your lunch!)

  as soon as recess was over, back in Miss Graves’ classroom, he’d unwrapped the Zinger clandestinely under his desk and began plucking frosting-covered morsels from it during class.

  Eating that yummy vanilla Zinger had made the pain go away. He’d forgot all about what Sally had said.

  He had a new love.

  In junior high school, he’d received his very first big-kid report card during home room and discovered a D minus and two Fs on it. He’d re-read it several times, hoping the bad grades would somehow change if he wanted them to badly enough.

  But they’d stood their ground defiantly, shining brightly in vibrant red ink, bombarding him with a fusillade of hot shame.

  When the brunch-break bell had rung, he went directly to the cafeteria and used his precious allowance money to order himself two slices of french-bread, dripping with warm butter, AND a sugared doughnut.

  After he was finished with his feast, he’d sat alone contently, his face pleasantly slick with smudges of salty butter and flecks of granulated sugar, while all shameful thoughts of his bleak report-card soothingly digested in his stomach, tucked-in be
neath the comfy blanket of his carbohydrate-rich snack.

  And he still had a delicious vanilla Zinger waiting for him in his lunch sack two hours later.

  When Randy had started getting pudgy at age 13, his mother had quickly noticed.

  “Don’t be such a Porky Pig, Randy,” she had taunted. “Do you want everyone to call you fatso?”

  Her main weapons of manipulation were always grade-school insults and good old fashioned shame.

  She had also told him to stop eating so much, get off his fanny, and go outside to play with the other kids (which created further public embarrassment and humiliation for Randy, who was always picked last for games and sports because of his sluggishness).

  And she’d immediately stopped putting Zingers in his lunch, replacing them with an apple a day instead.

  Randy’s eating had never been the problem. His parents were always the problem. Both of them got what they wanted in life all the time.

  How could they possibly know how he felt?

  Mom had always been so thin and beautiful and was always saying she had “the PERFECT house and the PERFECT husband.”

  Never any mention of a PERFECT son.

  Not once.

  His dad, who looked like a movie star and ran a successful real-estate company, was long, lanky and further proof that in no way could young Randy be passed off any longer as ‘big-boned’ to their friends and acquaintances.

  Any time his parent’s friends came over for dinner parties or poolside mixers, and Randy happened to be standing next to his mother while she chatted with the guests, she would joke:

  “Randy is adopted.”

  She would nervously watch her friend’s expressions closely, her eyes darting rat-like from face to face, cackling shrilly if they didn’t join in with her on the joke quickly enough.

  Once laughter erupted, she would pat Randy on the head or pinch his chubby cheek vigorously.

  “Isn’t he HUGE?”

  This sort of behavior from his mother did nothing to help Randy’s self-esteem or nurture in him the feeling of being loved.

  But doughnuts did.

  By the age of 14, Randy was plain and simply fat.

  He’d gone well beyond any possible genetic predisposition to lankiness, which concerned his level-headed father:

  “I believe we have a serious problem on our hands,”

  and horrified his anxiety-prone mother:

  “You look absolutely DISGUSTING Randy, look at how your jello-belly jiggles!”

  That was when the onslaught of despotic diets had begun for Randy, all of them devised or implemented by his mother.

  Starvation diets. The grapefruit diet. The South Beach diet. The high-fiber diet—FART!!—and a host of other innovative gastric tortures dreamed up by dear old mom, the ulcer-inducing tomato-juice diet being by far the worst.

  Sitting in his Mazda, parked in front of the Hole Donut, Randy could hear his father’s voice echoing back in his head from many years ago:

  “Randy, you've got to stop eating, you don't want to be a fat kid, do you?"

  His mom’s caustic voice followed, far worse, a shrill echoey ringing in his head:

  "My sweet little Randy isn't so little anymore. He’s been eating too many sweets!”

  Ha ha, mother, adult Randy mused, very funny.

  “No one likes fat people, Randy. They’re lazy low-lifes. You’re going to kill yourself with those doughnuts some day."

  In response to that, a dark voice in Randy’s head spat out the following:

  “I should kill YOU with all these doughnuts, mother.”

  He imagined himself—in High-Definition Widescreen—with one hand theatrically raising up a huge platter, piled high with doughnuts, as he hovered over his mother, dressed as a vicious black-tie waiter with a score to settle.

  Payback time.

  She was strapped down in an elaborate, gothic dentist’s chair. He mounted the chair, knees straddling his mother’s chest, sleeves rolled up to his elbows, and he began to shove one frosting-covered doughnut after the other down his mother's throat like he was a human pile-driver.

  Gaining speed, Randy became a man possessed, dominating his long-burdensome mother, making her eat eat EAT.

  In his fantasy he was sweating, hair wild, eyes crazy like a rabid dog, cramming the growing, worming mass of spongy fried dough into her face. Runnels of frosting leaked out the corners of her mouth, ran down her cheeks and dripped onto her blouse in glazey trails.

  He was putting it to his mother and her thin little in-shape body.

  Putting it TO her, yeah, take that you exercise loving bitch. I hate you!

  An exasperated Fantasy Mother, covered in the garish clown makeup of colored frosting, her cheeks bulging with gooey dough, said:

  “Ramby, you're doigg it wrogg! You’re geggig dough-gut all ober my clodes!” Crumbs sprayed out of her mouth as she spoke. “You’re supposed do gib me one of da bibs like Dodder Spencer ahways uses, da kind wid da clib-cord! Ramby, ad leeb gib me a momend do chew."

  She seemed not at all horrified or intimidated or scared by his furious thrashings. She still saw him as nothing more than a pudgy little boy.

  With dawning horror, Randy sensed control of his late-night daydream start to slip away from him. The intoxicating feelings of victory and self-righteous release faded.

  He panicked.

  I’M NOT I’M NOT I’M NOT A BADBOY!

  “Ramby, do you deed me do do id for you?"

  His Fantasy Mother was calm and stern, her look suggesting the intention of further mothering.

  Fantasy Randy started to grow smaller in the dream, shrinking from a robust six-foot, three-hundred-fifty pounds to now three-foot, one-seventy-five.

  What was happening?

  He was losing control of his own daydream! And Fantasy Mom was growing, starting to burst out of the dentist's chair, trebling in size to a redwood-tall eighteen or more feet, so tall that she had to bend over at the waist and go down on one knee to prevent breaking through the ceiling of the dentist’s office.

  She looked like Atlas holding up the world. But she was no monster, just a giant mother.

  She spat out the wad of dough clogging her mouth and shook her head with a grimace.

  “Randy, poor little thing, you're so fat and cute, like a little FAT bunny!" she said in a condescending tone of cutesy superiority.

  "No mom NO! I'm not a bunny!!" Fantasy Randy screeched in a high pitched helium-sized voice.

  He was continuing to shrink faster, now only six inches high, a chubby pink action-figure; now three inches, a tiny scale-model of flab and fatness with a tiny church-mouse voice.

  “i’m not a bunny!!!!!”

  . . .

  Back in his car, the real Randy snapped himself out of his daydream-turned-nightmare, before it shrank him completely into oblivion.

  He slapped his face with both hands simultaneously and repeatedly, as if splashing himself with bracing cold water.

  "Get out of my mind you bitch!"

  Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap! Slap!

  Hot angry tears flowed down his fat cheeks. He threw his head back and wailed loudly—fully shouting—his body shaking liquidly as years of emotional pain assaulted his heart. His plaintive cries filled the tiny car.

  Randy began pounding the steering wheel with closed fists.

  “I HATE YOU MOTHER! HATE YOU HATE YOU HATE YOU!!!!”

  An observer might have thought Randy was losing his mind.

  Randy hurled the car door open and levered himself out of the restrictive hatchback, as if he could escape his foiled fantasy—and thoughts of his mother—and leave all of it behind in the car.

  The straining suspension squeaked in protest as the leaf-springs relaxed.

  Once on his feet, Randy slammed the car door shut, elbowed his way through the doughnut shop double-doors, then commandingly ordered a colorful array of TWO dozen doughnuts from the lone bleary-eyed guy working the night shift.

/>   One dozen wasn’t going to be enough to force back the pain of angry guilt Randy felt at that moment, thick in his throat.

  But TWO dozen might just push that lump down into his stomach where the acid would eat it right up.

  Normally he would eat his doughnuts alone in his apartment. If he couldn’t wait to get home to begin, he would sometimes eat them in his car, parked on a random dark side-street, hoping to avoid any scrutiny or judgement from passersby.

  He hated doing that because it always made him feel the most guilty, as if he were doing something illicit, like paying for a deviant sex act with a minor, or something even worse. So he avoided such scenarios as best he could—which was only about half the time.

  Sometimes, he simply couldn’t help himself.

  On those occasions, he had to get the comforting doughnuts inside of him as fast as possible, and waiting until he got home to the safety and anonymity of his apartment was not an option, no matter what other people might think of him.

  They didn’t have to endure his

  (mother)

  pain.

  And once he tasted that first doughnut, he would forget all about what other people thought of him. They ceased to exist. He disappeared into the most loving place in the universe.

  Tonight, there was no way Randy could wait to get his doughnuts home.

  And having narrowly avoiding sudden mutinous insanity in his own traitorous mind mere moments ago while sitting inside of his car, driving to a dark alley wasn’t an option either. The idea of eating his doughnuts in the Mazda made him very uncomfortable. It might be safer to consume them in this bright public location.