INZEKT FLEZH: LIVE FROM THE EGG-SAC!

            It was early in the night when I arrived to Doc Solomon’s but the moon was already high up above and periodically flickered, looking like a cosmic blinking eye; the pupil pointed directly at me. There was yellow in its sclera. Terrestrial jaundice. I stared on dejected, watching a fat roach-like monster the size of a cat skitter and hike its wiry whip legs swiftly up into the cavity above a car tire. When Barnes arrived I was on a come down, forehead heavy and packed with depression and feeling a little sick. A lone taxi lolled down the street toward me, deposited him under street light, and disappeared among the tall industrial brick buildings and metal scaffold skeletons. He coughed into his fist then nodded in my direction.

            “Ward,” he said. “Anything new?”

            “Well, the world is on fire but I’m sure you know that already.”

            “You know what I mean.”

            “No, the TV show was a dead end. Weasel looked at me like I was crazy for even asking about it.”

            “Damn. So, what am I doing out here?”

            “Seeing a friend,” I held out my briefcase. “I have the notion the good doctor might be able to tell us what these are,” I said.

            “Where is he?”

            “He’s at home. You deal with Avi, you work on Avi’s time.”

            “Speaking of time, where were you? I tried to call and tell you I’d be late but no one picked up.”

            “I was out, seeing Miss Amanda.”

            “The prostitute?”

            “Come on, show some respect, Meathead. She’s part of a biblical occupation, it’s a tradition.”

            “The whore, then. Why does she like that word so much?”

            “Because it makes you uncomfortable.”

            “How was she?”

            “Good. Drunk. This thing she called her ‘dog’, it was a sprawling giant crimson centipede with too many legs, coiled up my entire leg like a snake and licked at my hand with these pink, fleshy antennae and we talked. I told her about the TV. The bugs.”

            “You need medication.”

            “I recited her that little speech from the TV we found as well. The part about ‘new life?’ She said it sounded familiar, like she’d seen it somewhere. A pamphlet, a flyer or something. Something to look out for,” I pointed across the street. “Ah. It appears the doctor is in.”

            Across the street at the foot of a narrow, crooked tenement, a red door opened and out stepped the miniature pyramid shadow of Doc Solomon. Slow, he toed down from the concrete stoop and crossed toward us with his head down, focused and fumbling with a ring of countless keys. He was squat, tiny, a wrinkled ancient scientist old as God himself and a ring of thin wiry grey hair was bursting from the back of his pointy head. He threw up his arms in a brief greeting then passed us up and spoke as he mounted the stairs leading into the factory building behind us and tried to unlock the machine door. “How are you, Harv! By God, you look terrible!” he said, ruthless and to the point as always. “You better have a good reason for dragging an old man out this late!” I grinned and gestured with my suitcase though the Doc couldn’t see, “Trust me Doc. This is a good one.” Finally, the old lock churned with a metal grinding noise and Solomon yanked the door open from nearly being welded shut. “Stubborn fuck,” he mumbled. We followed inside, Solomon holding the door with a smile, Barnes still dragging from a cigarette as he approached the threshold. The Doc put a hand out to stop him, then reached up and pulled the smoke from between his teeth. He tossed it into a gutter down by the street and chastised him, “Not in this lab, God’s sake. Primitive goyim—Harvey! Where did you find this fuckin’ guy!?”

            I set my fedora and black suit jacket aside on a chair and turned in time to see an offended Barnes lean into me and whisper. “Are you sure about this?” He seemed genuinely perturbed. I put one hand onto his broad shoulder and attempted reassurance. “Look, he’s an eccentric, sometimes a lunatic, but he’s the only one I can really trust to tell us what these bugs are. Solomon’s practically a savant, got his hands in every science you could come up with. If he can’t find out, no one can.” The Doctor crossed his arms behind us, eyebrows furrowed with impatience. “Yes, yes, flattering. Now, will you tell me what the fuck you are here for?” he yelled. I lifted my black briefcase and laid it on the table, set to clicking it open. Carefully I extracted the plastic bag I’d transferred the strange dead creatures into, then slid them lightly across the table to Solomon. “We found these on a bleeder; a stabbing. Only a couple minutes after death, these things burst through the stomach and piled out on the concrete. They died not long after. I may not get out much, but I don’t think I’ve ever seen something like these bugs.” Behind his small round spectacles, the Doctor studied one bizarre shelled insect in one gloved hand, bewildered and mouth hanging open. “You said they were found. . . in a human? Was he their nest? They do look quite parasitic. . . “

            “I’m of the impression that they were planted inside of him. They hatched from his body; they were born from it.”

            The Doctor flexed and articulated the creature’s legs with his finger, examined the texture of its shell with a thumb. “Bizarre. This looks more like a fossil than anything living. Its biology. . . it’s primitive, almost brutalist in function. All teeth. Nothing suggesting any higher functions. How long did you say you monitored this?”

            “About a minute. All of them died only a few feet from the bleeder’s body after we saw them hatch.”

            “They don’t seem too long for life,” Barnes added in.

            Solomon took the dead bug and splayed it out on a small examination display over in his doctor’s station, pinning its legs and bits out in full articulated positions then reached for a fine scalpel. Patiently and steadily, he slid the blade about its segments and held them open slightly, peering at the thing’s innards. “It seems to be of typical makeup, chitin, hemolymph; but every thing is damaged. Organs are all malformed or ruptured, the muscles are burnt. It would seem they weren’t done cooking yet.” We cocked our heads in confusion and the Doc looked up at us. “Premature,” he said. Barnes leaned over to me with a fresh look of terror in his blue eyes.

“Do you think this could be the new life?” he said.

“God help us if it is,” I told him.

            Solomon peeled one glove from his hand with a heavy sigh. “I’ll be honest Harv,” he said as he pitched the glove into a trash can. “This thing is like nothing I’ve seen. I mean—the closest known relative would the half-formed larvae of some tyrannosauric wasp. It looks like there are sacs of venom stores near the tail but there’s no stinger to be found. It’s a mystery, Harv. This thing should not have lived. Its physiology is nonsense.” I scratched at my temple and coughed into a fist. “Wasp, huh?” I said. Barnes cut in with a sardonic flat tone. “I guess the wings come in later.” Solomon appeared to have had a revelation, a shocked look over his face as he froze where he stood, then rushed to put another glove on and then to his desk. “Harv, do me a favor. Grab my forceps.” I glanced about the scattered tools on the doctor’s table, recognizing every piece but failing to find any of the small metal pincers. I called back. “Any idea where you left them, Doc?” Solomon stomped over to the table, scattering papers and pieces and cursing underneath his breath. “Ah,” he said. “Two nights ago, I was in a mood. Righteously angry, and I cast the fucking thing across the room.” He walked back to the partially dissected creature. “I think it fell in one of the specimen jars. Be a dear, would you?” At the opposite end of the room there stood a great iron rack of shelves piled high above, each full of ominous wide jars of green-yellow fluids and the dreamlike blackness of blurred distant shapes suspended within. Against the inside glass of one of the jars leaned the pair of steel forceps; a shadow in the green. I slid this massive jar from its place and into my arms and cautiously waddled back to the table. Careful not to drop it or spill its noxious smelling inside, I set the wet specimen jar upon a table adjacent to the doctor’s station and began rolling my sleeves to dip into the foul embalming fluid. Slow, I lowered my hand past the wrist into the yellowish liquid and felt something I couldn’t see scrape against my fingers. On reflex I pulled away and then groped at the thing until I got a secure hold. It wasn’t until my hand left the jar that I realized I didn’t feel metal in my palm, it was fleshy; meat. I looked at the lump in my hand, it was a round mass of sloshing wet muscles with faint purple veins tracing around the curves of its muscle and a sludgy outer layer. I turned the thing against my own instincts, foolishly, and saw there was a face; empty and cavernous sockets of eyes and a set of bared yellow, chipped fangs snarled at me. It was like the flayed skull of a cat still coated in meat, clutched in my wet fist. I panicked and dropped the head back into the jar.

            “What did you say this specimen was, again?”

            “Wha—Ah, that one,” he stuttered out. “A giant hornet I found, already dead a while by the time I discovered it.”

            “Oh,” I groaned back, still trying to collect my breath. I stepped toward the table again and peered over the jar, and found the strange new life that filled the glass. There was no longer any liquid in the jar, but an ocean of writhing things, maggots swimming about each other and dancing a grotesque St Vitus. I stared, eyes wide with shock. “Hurry up, boy!” yelled Solomon. “It’s only ethanol!” I stepped toward the maggots once again with reluctance and dangled my hand over the mass. I thought to count to three and mentally prepare for the plunge but the impulses of my panicked manic state dropped my hand into their midst before I could start counting. I didn’t feel the cold alcohol wetness then, but the writhing suspension in life that made the flesh on my spine crawl to the point of nearly tearing itself away in horror. I gritted my teeth and felt the larvae wrapping about me and tucking between my fingers while I groped about. Eventually they began biting. Sharp pinches and stabs, enough to break skin eventually. I started to panic to my core. If I was to bleed into these corpse eaters then I’d be done for, they would have burrowed into me, blocked and corrupted my veins, eaten me away slowly from the inside. I pressed my hand further in, groping, and felt in the warm soup of bugs the faintest cold tinge of steel on my fingertip. I swiped for it, and caught the metal with my thumb, then whipped my hand fast from the biting maggots, expecting to see a few trickles of blood or bite sores but only the alcohol dripped from my unharmed hand. Silently and quickly I dried the forceps and passed them off.

            “Funny you find that thing, Harv. I’m startin’ to think he may be related to your boy,” said Solomon.

            “You didn’t think to mention that?”

            “You didn’t tell me what you had here.”
            “Touché, Doc. So what is it?”

            “Mouthy little bastard—Ah! Just as I thought. The organ systems are all primitive. There wasn’t much this thing could do but eat, reproduce, and die. But the reproductive system is malformed. Sealed off.”

            “These things really are doomed from birth,” commented Barnes.

            “Completely averse to living,” said Solomon. “It’s nearly a crime to curse such a thing with such a life. If you and my eyes are telling the truth these things lived a minute of real hell.”

            “Damn. Is there anything else you’ve picked up on?” I said.

            “No, no, leave them with me. I will pick the study up tomorrow. Maybe if I compare it with my specimen we will learn a little more.” Solomon removed his glasses and tucked them away into his coat, heavy-eyed and tired. “I’ll need to see it with fresh eyes.”

            “Understandable. Thank you, Solomon.”

            Barnes and I collected our things. By my count Doc Solomon was seventy-three at the time and we both knew he’d have to tap out eventually. Rest is vital to a man of such age and shortness of temper. We stepped out and stumbled through our farewells and as Solomon disappeared into his crooked building we both pulled and sparked cigarettes simultaneously. Barnes turned to me, a quizzical look on his face. “You know—What I don’t get about you and Amanda. . . “ he said.

            “That’s what your mind is on?”

            “Well, you spend so much time with her, but you never thought to get some service? It’s not like you’re getting laid often, exactly.”

            I laughed sarcastically. “It wouldn’t feel right. You can be close with a woman without fucking, you know.”

            “Bah, says you. I got to piss, Bug. I’ll be right back,” he said and disappeared into the darkness.

            Beside my relationship with Amanda, I had my own hang-ups about sex anyway. At the time I couldn’t stomach the thought. When I was active, I wasn’t particularly picky and it was easy to come by. One night I’d come upon this twink with the head of a cricket dancing in a fag bar downtown. I was already hard in my pants when we got to the car and he reached for it as soon as my front door closed. Things got heavy and I was left speechless once we’d undone his jeans and he slid them down to reveal his cock. I was gripped in a revulsed, stomach-turning paralysis. From his crotch rose an unfolding phallic spear like a seven-inch-long grasshopper’s leg; barbed on its back and webbed across its soft reptilian underside. Clear ooze strung down messy from the swollen pulsing head. I vomited on his cock and haven’t attempted since.

            I huffed on my cigarette and ruminated on the fact for a few seconds before something flew from the night and leapt on me. My head hit the wall of the alley and bounced off, then a cold sharpness pressed hard to my neck. “You move and you’ll be dead before your dick hits the dirt,” the attacker hissed at me. “Thought you wouldn’t get caught alone or what?” I could see that he looked human, head full of ragged blonde hair and face tattooed. “You are fuckin’ with things you do not understand. Turn your back on the new life. The Hive won’t abide by nosy junkies, got me?” He slid the knife gently and split the outer layer of skin on my throat in a thin thread. “The Hive comes to you.” Off in the distance, I heard something. It was like the sound of stones scraping. “Don’t bother screamin’ for your friend, huh? I’ll be gone and your head’ll be off by the time he gets here.” Again in the far dark, a sound. Something like a glass bottle ricochet, bouncing lightly off stone. The tattooed man whipped his head away and studied the dark with a snarl. His eyes darted back to me and I could see the uncertainty in them. Once more, the sound. For a while after the third sound, things went silent and all that could be heard was breath. He looked at me again. “Maybe next time I’ll take that eye. . . “ he said and tapped the knife’s edge to my cheek, just under my dead eye, pinning me to the wall with his arm.

            And again, we heard that glass sound and before either of us knew it, Barnes was at the tattooed man’s throat, crushing a glass bottle against his head. Shards burst out in a violent cloud and Barnes took him to the ground; the tattooed man’s knife sliding off into the street. There rained a holy hail of fists onto him for minutes until Barnes deemed him subdued enough to question. “Want to explain yourself?” he asked.

            “Talk about the New Life,” I commanded.

            “New Life is a gift!” he shrieked. “It breeds in the underground and grows fat on death!”

            Barnes pulled the stranger up from the ground, then slammed him into the alley wall and hit him again. “Try again.”

            “I’m going to drag you into the Hive, boy. . . “ he said and then too fast to perceive he thrust into Barnes’ face with a headbutt and staggered the man of raw meat. Dazed he stumbled backward; I charged at the bastard but was thrown into the wall, crashing my skull against the brick. I turned and with blurry eyes I saw him. Metal teeth gleaming in a malefic grin, green blood smeared all around his nose and mouth. Then, he disappeared in the night. I chased after and found nothing. Empty streets. Cold cars. Barnes held his head as he approached. “Little cocksucker—What was that about?” he growled at me. I drew a fresh cigarette and collected my hat, my briefcase, and the stranger’s knife from the concrete. Slowly, fire ate the cigarette’s end and smoke danced from its wounds. “I don’t know,” I exhaled. “But I think I know where to look. He mentioned the underground. Sound familiar?” He shook his head. “There are subway tunnels all over beneath the city. Most of them, abandoned transit projects and public pats on the back for the billion-dollar vampires. You remember the War on Homelessness? They attempted to exile the hobos from the city under a guise of social reintegration. Anyone that wasn’t caught, jailed, or left the city, went into those tunnels. The state must have figured it was cheaper to let them get eaten by rats down there. Only problem is, it’s a well kept secret. Only the hobos know how to get in, it’s only written about in code, all the entrances are hidden.”

            “You’re saying we’re looking for an urban legend?”

            “In a sense,” I replied. “We just need a way in. Or to find someone who knows the way.”

            “Sounds easier said than done.”

            “Follow me.”

            We walked west for a near silent fifteen minutes, interrupted when Barnes burst out from deep in his broad chest. “Are you at least going to tell me where we’re fucking going?” I adjusted my hat, drew from my smoke. “There’s only one known entrance to the underground. It’s guarded, cops, but the hobos seem to slip in and out unscathed. We can stake it out,” I said. Barnes rubbed his rough chin, the only way I could tell he was anxious. We passed beneath an overpass beyond where down a hill across our path, there was a massive apocalyptic terror of a hole with jagged teeth blown in the side of a hill, a chasm deep into the city’s heart. About five years earlier, the police had gotten wind of the underground in rumors they beat out of drunks but one day, they dropped a catastrophic event on the underground’s heads. The police used explosives to open a way in, and to organize their raid on Rat City, the underground’s capital. The Tesla Banking Plaza was turned to a scene from a war movie. Just under forty were killed, double as many wounded. We were approaching a vantage point overlooking the torn plaza when both of us spotted the standing far shadow of a person not too far away. Near a pile of dislodged rubble; it menaced us with thoughts of our earlier fight, the man with the face tattoos. We each gave our best attempts at stealth but only a few feet away from the shadow, it turned and it spoke. “Oh, it’s you.” The darkened shape left the rubble pile and was washed over in moonlight. I recognized her instantly as the purplish caterpillar girl from the night prior; my stomach went weird. She appeared on edge. “What are you doing here?” I asked.

            “I have questions to ask down below. Jake lived here. Someone must know something,” she said.

            Jake. Died in my arms and I didn’t even catch his name. I caught a shiver. “We got questions too, any chance they’re related?”

            “I came to ask about the New Life. . . “

            “What a coincidence. Why?”

            “Why are you interrogating me?”

            “Guy from New Life tried to cut my head off, excuse the caution.”

            “Look, I just want to know what’s going on. I don’t want to end up exploding on a sidewalk and bleeding out flies. It’s not like the cops are going to do anything about this and you know it.”

            “You know how to get in?”

            “Sure. I was planning to go in through the plaza but it looks like they doubled the police patrols. There’s another secret entrance not too far from here, I can take you, if you’re not a creep.”

            “Mind meeting us here, tomorrow? Been a long day.”

            “It’s not safe to meet here. . . If you want in, meet me at Big Blue’s, on Third.”

            “The bar? I thought you looked familiar.”

            “So it’s a deal?”

            “Sure.”

            We stared over the rubble toward the hellmouth for a few silent seconds then ducked as a blinding white flashlight beam flared and burned in our eyes. The shadow of someone in a helmet and a thick vest stirred toward us and the three of us fled into the black, rounding corner after corner until things grew quiet. It was an empty street, all lined with glass windowed storefronts and darkened displays. Banners hung in windows. In one of the cramped doorway nooks, a human moth craned his neck, tucked away sleeping under one arm. I donated a cigarette to the girl and the meat then sparked one of my own while we all caught our breath. I threw one hand into my jacket and fished a few Xanax from my work stash. Often a bleeder who’s freaking out or thrashing under the scalpel can make it all more work than it’s worth. My own sanity had been chipped away for two days, so I told myself I’d earned it.

            There was a storefront full of TVs along our path where a single box-backed CRT screen lit up with a burst of rolling static as we walked past. I jumped at the sound, then flooded to the glass to see what had happened. Over the invisible waves, in the looping bars of bad tracking and the fuzz distortion there was a looped broadcast that must have come from an ancient camcorder, straight to VHS. On the screen there was a fleshy yellowish white blur and as the camera zoomed in on the surface, the image grew more clear, and showed that it was a wall of maggots or fat larvae. They twisted and swam about eachother until the scene cut and started over. The video played on a static loop for just under a minute until the screen cut to black. On the third loop, grainy pixel text appeared. “LIFE BEGINS,” it read. When the screen went black, in the few seconds before the TV’s bulbs burnt and the screen flickered to death, all of the screens in the window roared to a hissing new life and all of them bore the same message:

 

NEW LIFE IS A GIFT.