about the apocalypse. Distorted frames of bombed-out buildings and quick flashes of old nuke films I’d seen were warped behind the CRT bubble-screen of my mind. Radioactive war would certainly solve my problems. I was wholly consumed by a nuke fantasy by the time I heard the digital chime of the bar’s door and the heavy stomps of Barnes approaching me. He was angry again. A thick hand gripped the back of my shirt’s collar, and he spoke in a growl.
“Get up. You got work,”
he said.
“Go away,” I groaned back at him.
My suit twisted up inside
of his fist, and Barnes tore me away from my seat, sending the stool toppling
and skidding across the floor. I nearly fell flat on my back but was yanked
upright onto uneasy legs. My head did flips. Turning to stare into his raw meat
face, I stuck my cigarette back between my mandibles and studied the texture of
his gristle. Barnes was shorter than myself by half a foot, but was a hulking
sculpture of exposed red muscle as most fighters are. He made his scraps of a
living at bare knuckles fighting in ring setups hidden away in old empty
factories. In a sense it was noble, illegal boxing was at least more admirable
in my mind than my own chosen career. In one hand he lugged a black suitcase
full of my tools and shoved it hard into my chest. I wasn’t in too much of a
state to argue and shamefully surrendered. “Fine. . .” I muttered. “Let’s go.”
I don’t like to tell
myself I had a future. Really, when I would think of my possible lives as a
younger kid, it was all a mess of static: an unknowable abstraction. There was
little to say of my own potential. I had spent a few years in a medical college
with the intent of going into surgery. Endless nights awake and sweating over
obscene images of slit appendages and opened cavities with the organs still
wet; I was more committed than I’d been to anything in my life, until I had
learned it was all a cosmic joke. It started with diagnosis as a clinical
maniac. I grew increasingly panicked and developed a belligerent distaste for
the pompous airs of my superiors. I began lashing out, I had strange waking
dreams, fell into pills as a way to cope. One night I’d heard my name brought
up across the room and beat another student in the skull with a steel rack of
glass tubes. That was the first of my arrests. Another night, I got into a
barfight, took it out to the parking lot and got hit in the eye and ribs with an
aluminum baseball bat. My right eye has been blind ever since from the blunt force
trauma. Eventually I’d been caught lifting valium from one of the school’s labs
and was excommunicated the same night. Total failure.
After I left, I pushed my
luck as a petty thief so I could still afford to eat. Plenty of close calls and
jail stays would follow. I still applied all I’d learned about medicine, over
time I’d built up a small reputation for patching up thieves I’d been friends
with, plucking out bits of glass, bullet fragments, searing shut knife wounds.
One day I’d realized I’d become a “street surgeon” of sorts. When the victim
wanted a low profile, to keep the cops out of it, they came to me. They paid
well. That money would go toward finding tools like scalpels, forceps, or wound
fluid, and it kept me in pills for both jobs and personal abuse.
We’d been walking a while
wordlessly before I’d sobered up somewhat and started asking questions. I
turned my head to Barnes. “Who’s the bleeder?” I asked. My vision was still
blurry. He glared my way with cold eyes. “Oh,” he said. “Now you’re awake?
Great. Guy got poked up outside of a punk club. Pretty bad too, according to
his friends. Said they saw the stabber poking his tongue around in the holes
when they chased him off.” I coughed up a burst of smoke. “Christ,” I said. We
were greeted in the parking lot by two cyber-crusties with horrified faces, a
guy with bleached hair, and a blue haired girl he was attempting to console.
The blonde was called Toad, and he wore a cicada’s face. I could see my own
buggy features shining off his reflective eyes. I didn’t catch the girl’s name
but the stubs of her antennae and purplish face felt familiar, she was a
caterpillar.
They led us to the
‘body’. It was a wide fat cockroach near death and breathing heavy on the
gravel close to the building. There were fat pulsing stabs flowering blood down
his chest and his stomach, and long defensive wounds in his arms. He moaned
harshly like a waterlogged zombie. He was in bad shape, but he could have made
it. I started with cleaning the gashes, sterilizing, stapling, but a real
horrorshow was made of his gut. I prepared the wound fluid, the small cannister
full of a teal-colored liquid, and started to apply it over the stabs; its
acids searing and closing the split skin.
“This is going to hurt a
lot,” I told him.
He nearly cried out,
contorting his body and cringing in pain. His face twisted up. Hands became
white-knuckled and strained to grip something that was not there. I worked down
to his stomach and found the wide gash cut out of its surface. I tried to clean
blood from the surrounding flesh but for a moment I was distracted, as a
strange color caught my eye. In one of the larger wounds, there shined clumps
of yellowish bulbs that entranced me and stopped my hand for a few seconds. They
were as luminescent orbs piled one upon the other like fish eggs under a reef. I
snapped out of it and into a sort of mania, realizing the roach wouldn’t last
much longer. With a cokehead’s speed I closed and cleaned and sewed and sprayed
and once I’d been done, the roach stared me in the face as he whimpered and
hissed off the pain. My hands shook all the while. Eventually the noises
stopped, but his stare never would. He gazed at me until he died, and long
after that. I stood and rejoined the living.
“About
my pay,” I said.
“What?”
the girl said.
“What
do you mean, pay? He fuckin’ died, I’m not givin’ you shit!” said Toad.
“I
can’t eat a clean conscience. You pay me, or your dead friend will.”
“Fuck
you!”
I
walked back to the roach’s body and rifled through his pockets. In his jeans I
found his wallet, smeared from previously flowing blood. Before I could empty
it, my eye was caught by a strange bulging in his stomach like fingers poking
through from the inside. Ignoring it, and assuming it was only another strange
glitch of the brain, I stole the cash from the dead’s wallet. Eighty bucks. I
slipped the money into my pocket, then something infinitely stranger than a
delusion splayed itself out. The bulges in the roach’s gut pushed harder
against the flesh and rose a few more inches then burst with a gush of obscene
red. It exploded with gore and a spray of things. In the bloody mess swam an
army of little white-grey insect life that was malformed and seemed doomed from
birth as they flooded out around my feet. I stumbled back in a frightened
panic, attempting to flee their range. The bugs on the outside of the swarm
began to die or wither only a few feet from the body and the others crawled
violently over them then tumbled and died as well. Progressively most of the
horde fell dead until only a few flopped around atop the mound of the
stillbirth creatures. Once they’d all died, I pulled a rubber glove from my
suitcase and dropped two of the insects inside it then tied its wrist in a
knot, and tossed the thing back into my suitcase. Barnes walked up next to me
and crossed his arms.
“What
the hell are those things?” he asked.
“Some
kind of arachnid,” I told him.
“They
look like mealworms to me.”
We
should leave before the spiders get here,” I said.
“What?”
he asked, furrowing his brow.
I
looked up, puzzled that he did not understand. I hated when he played
difficult. “Police,” I said.
“Don’t
start that bug shit again.”
The
moon flickered on-and-off like an old dying parking-lot light overhead as we
made our way toward home. Barnes didn’t say much, but his pissy attitude was
palpable, it could be picked up on a Geiger Counter. I tossed away a dead
cigarette then pulled another from the pack immediately. Barnes turned down a
complimentary smoke, though I could tell he was stressed. “So,” I said,
stopping to light my smoke. “What’s eating you, meathead? I do something
wrong?” The flood gates then broke open.
“Real
fuckin’ tired of playing secretary, bug. Two or three of these tweakers in my
ear at a time, it gets real old, real fast. And when I finally get something
coherent out of them, you’re nowhere to be found. You know I spent an hour
looking for you? Kid coulda died in the time. And you? I gotta scrape you off
the floor of some piss-stinkin’ dive where you’ve been sulking, talking about
bugs.”
An
argument built up in my head, an instinct to deflect blame and accountability.
I decided to play it safe, though. As we rounded the great stucco block
entrance gate of the apartment complex, I spoke up again. “I’m afraid I can’t
account for my own tardiness. You know how brown liquor can take me. I
apologize.” We set upon the rickety metal-and-stone case of stairs leading to
the second floor. Barnes stopped and turned to face me midway up the steps,
gesturing wildly with his hands. “It ain’t about an apology, it’s about
responsibility. Get your shit in order or put me on payroll, huh?”
“Tough
but fair. . . “
“You
make me sound like a teacher,” he said.
We
reached the peak of the stairs, that LED lighthouse hanging over our shadowed
front door in the midst of never-ending ghost-blue walls. For a second both of
our hearts froze, as our eyes fell on the silhouette of a large, strange black
cube sat firmly at our doorstep. It had a thick cable jutting from its back
that wrapped serpentine around the base, and a glint of a silver antennae
pulled high, catching the starlight. A television, an old box TV and built-in
VCR, with a message in crude spray paint on each side: JUST WATCH. I scraped up
the machine silently, looping the cable around my fist , tucking the box under
an arm. Barnes shouted at me, bewildered. “You’re not taking that thing inside,
are you?” I brought down the corners of my mouth in an ‘oh well’ frown and
shrugged as I pried open the door to our apartment and stepped in. The living
room was small, cramped and held in its center a square wooden coffee table. I
tossed my suitcase onto a couch and set the strange TV onto the coffee table.
Barnes continued his protest. “There could be anything on there. Hell, it could
be 24 hour nonstop snuff playing. You sure want to see something like that?”
“What,
scared of a little blood? Probably just porn anyway,” I said. He rolled his
eyes till they nearly fell out. “I just don’t trust when something shows up on
our porch in the middle of the night covered in creepy fuckin’ messages,
alright? Forgive me my suspicions, bug.” I took the looped cable and started
unraveling. “Well, I guess we’ll find out what’s on there soon enough,” I said.
I reached to put the cable into an open socket and before connecting, a shock
like shorthand lightning burst from the plug’s metal end in a thick zap. I
slammed the plug in, and stumbled back as the TV kicked on immediately. First
there was blue static, with transparent dark bars rolling down the screen.
“Shit,” I groaned and smacked the side of the box. Then, suddenly, the sinister
old box sprung alive. White pixel text appeared in a rolling, looping drone of
endless words. “Do not adjust tracking,” it read, then followed by a short
static spasm. Its next message built up in layers of overlap and distortion for
minutes: “JUST WATCH.” The text overflowed into a choppy and illegible storm,
then abruptly cut away.
There
was a face. Pale and warping with the shape of the bubble-screen with small
flecks of static fizzling against it. It was a man’s face. Human. Grotesque,
stretched, contorted in strange ways like a hydrocephalus under a neon blue
glow. It grinned and bulged its eyes, swaying and smiling and glitching, then
scowled before it addressed us. “TIME IS UP,” it said and laughed. “YOUR TIME
IS UP.” It was talking to us, vague as it may seem. “MAKE WAY FOR THE NEW LIFE,
WITNESSES. INZ-Z-ZECT F=F-FLESH. THE STILL MEAT. THE NEW HIVE.” We both stared
with wild, wide eyes as the TV began to chant feverishly. “DOWNWARD,” it said.
“DOWNWARD DOWNWARD DOWNWARD DOWNWARD!” Barnes pursed his mouth, preparing a
demand, “Turn it off!” he might have said, though another noisy spasm of static
cut him off before speaking.
The
picture changed to a shaky camcorder feed, an alleyway under dim light and a
haze of VHS visual artifacts. In an upper corner of the screen there was a
garish bar of red pixels which carried the word LIVE in yellow text. It was
grungy, the footage carried a gut wrench aura like it was cursed long ago. A
green title card revealed it to be a show called BUGMAN, which I’d never heard
of yet was caught off guard by the name. Insectoids were a peculiar delusion of
mine. It felt like a wave of synchronicity hit. Its star and titular character,
the Bugman, was a human in a green unitard and helmet with yellow gloves and
boots done up to look like a fly. The show itself was more hideous than its
goofy mascot let on. The human fly delicately stalked his live prey, mostly
hobos and winos, and cornered them in dark, damp alleys. The Bugman slashed at
the poor old bastards. He had trapped them and sliced, stabbed, and defiled
each of them. He went for the chest, arms, neck, gut, or face; you could see
the desperate fight for survival die on each victim’s face and it sank my
stomach. The fear spread as each was reduced to smoldering red craters. They
never stood a chance. At the end of the episode, from an alleyway teeming with
a river of flesh, the Bugman leapt. He dripped with grimy sweat and gore as he
addressed his audience. With a cartoon green and a warm joyous screech, he
spoke. “I’ll get YOU next time!” he said. Riveting stuff. The picture swirled
in on itself, as the TV hit its own offswitch, then closed in spiraling black.
Soon as the screen went dead, the TV’s cable seemed to explode from the wall.
It was expelled from its socket and lie in its own red heat, twisting with
black smoke.
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