by Murr
“I’m sorry… I’m so, so sorry.”
Fitted with the idea that he was just doing what he had to, just passing this on. Then I remembered what I was there for, jammed the needle in the bloke’s neck and depressed the trigger. What followed was…
The blood, the meat. Feeding. Getting rid of those cravings… The evidence.
I felt guilty every time, yet I couldn’t stop. It wouldn’t let me. If there was a way I could pass this on, like he had, I would’ve done it. My life had become a living nightmare, and nobody would understand. Not even Brenda. Definitely not my parents.
But I had to confront them all, sooner rather than later. You see, Brenda had spotted me a few times out in those pubs and clubs. I’d gotten sloppy, perhaps on purpose I don’t really know. It had been bound to happen eventually.
She’d been trying to get through to me, texts, calling all the time, leaving voice messages.
“I… I saw you with yet another guy the other night, Mel. And in your condition… What’s going on? What are you playing at?”
I wasn’t playing at anything. This was no game – I wasn’t a player like most of them out there, I was just getting rid of those urges, those desires. The awful, awful cravings.
I shouldn’t have ignored those calls though, because she showed up at my door one night–
Banging the door down…
–demanding to be let in. And she wasn’t alone.
“Why? Why would you…?”
“Don’t blame your friend, dear,” said mum, “she was just trying to help.”
“You…you can’t help me. No-one can!”
“Sweetheart, please.” That was dad, and when he tried to give me a hug, I shrugged him off. Couldn’t stand it.
“Look, just leave me alone – all of you!” I screamed it at them, practically throwing them out of my place.
Rating and raving… Going mad…
“Don’t shut us out,” my mum pleaded, even as I slammed the door in all their faces, doing just that.
“That’s what we get, trying to look out for you!” snapped Brenda through the wood; the last thing that was said before the voices receded. It was her doing exactly that, supposedly, which had gotten me into this mess in the first place. If only I hadn’t gone that Friday night… If only.
But no. It hadn’t been Brenda’s fault. Not really.
I knew whose fault it really was. So when I felt them again, those incredible deep-rooted aches, I knew where to find him. Find them both. I’d been there before, after all – waited for them, as I waited this time as well.
For Gav and his cow girlfriend. I didn’t care anymore, didn’t give a flying fuck whether the police were starting to string all this together – the disappearances. The fear that there might be some kind of serial killer on the loose targeting young men (just like they in turn targeted young women, hunted them). Let them find me, catch me. But not before…
When they arrived back home, I was there, waiting. I didn’t even bother with any subtlety this time, just came up behind them – rammed that kitchen knife into the slut who’d stolen him, again and again, screaming out loud.
Gavin tried to stop me, naturally, so I turned on him too. Bringing that blade down two, three times. The parasite wasn’t even controlling me then; I wanted this. I was enjoying this. But, in the end, it was to serve a purpose, and so I dragged him into the car with me – I barely fitted behind the wheel anymore, but I only had to get him to the warehouse. My feeding ground.
He moaned and groaned in the seat next to me, bleeding out. The smell of the blood driving me wild, making me so… His words bubbled up through his lips: “I’m sorry… So, so sorry…”
I’d heard it all before.
And I began to wonder, even as I pulled him from the car – dragging him into that run-down building, over into the middle where I began my feasting – sucking, biting, clawing at him… not even bothering to use the knife at all, it would only have slowed me down… I began to wonder, had there even been a guy at all?
Came and found me, said you’d met a bloke and you were heading off.
Brenda hadn’t actually seen him, had she? Had he even been real, or just imaginary like those people I used to see when I was little. Episodes I had…
Going a bit nuts.
I tore open Gav’s throat, ate until he was almost decapitated…
“You know what you need, don’t you?”
“Gav’s head on a plate?”
Ripped open his stomach, tugging out the intestines with my teeth, pulling my head back until they finally snapped like bits of elastic. Digging out his kidney, his liver, chomping away. Leaving his heart, his bleeding heart, till last. A meal fit for a king, fit to satisfy the thing inside me, nurtured by the food. Moving, swimming around in my swollen belly.
I saw flashes of him again, Mr Right… Mr Right Now. His eyes, what he’d done to me, to those people around me – getting them to see what he wanted them to; a perfect man in my case. The perfect… (Baby on the screen, a healthy baby…With child.)
No, the reality of it! What I’d seen when we were back at my place… Had we even been back at my place? His… face… No, his lack of a face. Wormy, slimy, apart from those eyes, and a mouth filled with row upon row of tiny teeth.
“I’m… I’m not sorry,” he’d burbled as if through thick phlegm, thrusting into me again and again. Putting something inside me that was like him. A baby…him. Mr Right. Mr Right Now.
Mr Wrong, oh-so-Wrong.
I shook my head, the memories unreal. Too horrific to contemplate. Doesn’t really matter, does it? What’s done is done.
And now, as I roll over onto my back, I feel the first of them. Not contractions as such – not that I’d ever had any to compare them to – but something else. Something wanting out (get this thing out of me!), wanting to be free early, much earlier than it should be. Considering a termination.
Followed by the pain, the terrible pain. Not the cravings this time, not mine anyway… if they ever were. But that thing’s, the tiny – not so tiny anymore – wrong thing’s. The cravings, so intense you don’t know whether to laugh or cry. Cry I think, from the agony – of being bitten into from the inside. Of being devoured, one final meal before it emerges. Eating for one. Because you have this thing inside you that’s reliant on you, that’s feeding on you… Starving, ravenous. When you realise you’ve just got to eat, to have it…
Those cravings. That hunger… Believe me.
It’s the worst.
Ross Peterson
Ross Peterson's fiction has appeared in various places, like Strange Behaviors: An Anthology of Absolute Luridity, Hybrid Moments: A Literary Tribute to the Misfits, and Jokes Review. He lives in Montana and stands 6' 3.
RICKETTSIAL ILLNESS by Ross Peterson
Thursday, August 11th, 8:47 a.m.
He takes the serrated steak knife from the drying rack and slices open his hand. The flowing blood feels warm, trickling out the long, deep incision. It doesn’t hurt. He makes a fist and squeezes it over the cat’s food dish, so his blood dribbles all over the little brown Purina pellets. It’s like he’s adding lime to a taco. He squeezes till his blood coats the cat food like maple syrup on a pile of pancakes. Then he sets the dish on the floor and the cat races to it.
Crunch, crunch, crunch, crunch.
She’s come in from outside and sees him standing there.
“Oh my God,” she says. “What happened to your hand?”
She rushes to his side. She sees the bloody steak knife on the counter.
“You cut yourself?” she says. “How did you cut yourself?”
“Huh?” he says.
“Why are you bleeding? How did this happen?”
“I don’t know,” he says. He looks at his mutilated hand. “I guess I . . . sort of did it on purpose?”
“What? Why? Why would you cut your hand open on purpose? Tell me the truth are you on something right now?”
The cat meo
ws at her and she sees blood all over the orange fur around his mouth.
“Sunny’s gotten into your blood!”
“I know. I served it to him.”
“You served it to him? What is wrong with you? What does that even mean you served a cat your blood?”
“I don’t know. It was—it was like a bodily function, or something. I just kind of had to. It was like I had to pee real bad, like I’d been holding it for a really long time, and I finally got to pee. It was, like, a relief.”
“Seriously, what are you on? Ketamine? Acid? Shrooms? Oh, my god. Those things on your back—they’ve poisoned your spinal fluid. We have got to get you to the emergency room right now.”
“I can’t. Not yet, Jess. I’m not going to be able to go to the doctor without my parole officer and the first thing they’ll think if I’m sick is that it’s because of drugs or alcohol and they’ll test me and I’ll fail and I’ll go back to jail. I feel fine. I don’t have a fever. I don’t have a headache. I don’t feel nauseous.”
She looks at him with a scowl that bespeaks: you stupid miserable self-destructive fuckup.
“I . . . I don’t know, my brain just frizzed out for a couple seconds with the cat, and it’s probably due to a lack of sleep and all the stress I’ve been under. I’ll go to the doctor in a couple days, Jess. Just as soon as it clears out of my system.”
She huffs and storms out of the kitchen, then out the front door.
“Jess!” he calls after her.
Thursday, August 11th, 2:11 a.m.
He sits on the side of the bed, chain-smoking some cigarettes his aunt left in the nightstand drawer of her guest bedroom. Jess sleeps next to him, under a framed Blue Hawaii lobby card (his aunt Vickie, who he housesits for, collects Elvis memorabilia).
He watches Jess’s chest rise and fall under the pink comforter. She looks peaceful, the woman who bailed him out of jail the time his mom refused (he blew three times the legal limit after crashing into a stoplight at closing time), the woman who cleaned up his mess after he shit himself in the shower blacked out, the woman, now, who picked unidentified parasites off his back.
He is a parasite. Jess picked parasites off a parasite. He supposes he attached himself to her when she was a waitress and he was a dishwasher. This was when they’d go on dates after their shifts ended, both of them still smelling like fry grease. Their parasite-host relationship must be symbiotic, right? He is a great cook. She loves his lasagna and chiles rellenos. She laughs at a lot of the things he says.
He crushes the cigarette in the ashtray on the nightstand. He lies down and his ravaged back smarts. She has taped paper towels all around his torso so he doesn’t get any blood on his aunt’s bedding.
Hopefully nothing is infected. Hopefully those bugs didn’t dump some flesh rotting disease in his bloodstream. He can’t help but see himself in the four white walls of a doctor’s office with some shitty whale painting or some such thing hung up. He’s sitting there, with lesions and sores covering his body and aches and pains wracking his muscles, waiting and waiting and waiting. Jeremiah, we have the results of your blood test. We’re very sorry to inform you . . . your results came back positive.
Wednesday, August 10th, 11:34 p.m.
He shuts his eyes and cringes before picking off yet one more.
She says, “You know you said you learned your lesson after you got busted at the hotel, Jer. You said it’d be the last time you fucked up.”
“I know—I’m just . . . weak. I need to go back to rehab. It didn’t take, so I’ll try it again. Look, we can discuss all this, have a real dialogue, when there aren’t parasites all over my skin.”
“No one likes the self-destructive you, Jer. That’s all I’m saying. Self-destruction is as boring as it is ugly and all it does is piss off and sadden those of us who love you.”
“I know. Please, can you just get this last one off me?”
With a grimace she grasps the last of the parasites with her gloved (Aunt Vickie’s yellow Dawn dish gloves) thumb and index finger and tears. He cries in agony.
His back dappled with innumerable red bites, he feels like someone’s been scraping at his flesh with sandpaper. She flushes the remaining parasites down the toilet and squeezes the last dab of Neosporin out of the tube.
“This really doesn’t look good,” she says. “It’s turning yellow around some of the bites. I don’t know if the Neosporin is working.”
Wednesday, August 10th, 11:02 p.m.
“Okay, try ‘tick species of the Northwest.’”
She types his words into her phone. “It’s just the same stuff coming up.”
“Images. Try Google Images. Maybe it’ll have a picture of them and we can go from there.”
She scans through little rectangle after little rectangle of small, fat-with-blood, hard exoskeletoned, eight-legged bugs. She passes through entomological diagrams, through sad looking dogs with black insectoid balls latched to their ears, through pictures of rashes and suppurations on human arms and necks.
She says, “I’m just not seeing anything that looks like what’s on your back.”
“Well try ‘leech species of the Northwest.’ I mean they did technically come out of the water.”
Wednesday, August 10th, 10:53 p.m.
Still dripping, he bends his torso so he can see his back in the bathroom mirror. He recoils at his reflection. There must be a hundred of them stuck to his skin. They’re not quite ticks and they’re not quite leeches—at least, they don’t look like any leeches or ticks he has ever seen. They’re reddish, the size of pencil erasers, and clustered on his flesh like barnacles on a whale.
“Oh shit oh shit oh shit,” he says. “What do I do?” He touches a clump of them and they feel hard like little pieces of gravel, but slick too.
“We should take you to the emergency room,” Jess says.
“I can’t go to a doctor. I’m fucked up right now and that’s a big ass violation of the terms of my probation.”
“We can wait till you sober up, then.”
“I don’t want to risk it. I’ve got . . . just a tiny little bit of glass still in my system.”
“Ah, Jer, Jesus!”
“I’m sorry.”
“Well you’re—right around your spine . . . it’s all purple.”
“Get ‘em off me, will you?”
“I am not touching those things. And you better hope that shit is out of your system before your next P.O. visit.”
“Jess, please! I’ll piss clear by then, I promise. My aunt—she’s got some gloves. Up in the kitchen. I bet there’s some rubber gloves under the sink. Please, help me.”
“I don’t know why you had to swim in that dirty ass disgusting pool in the first place. These things spread disease, Jer.”
“What things? What are these things?”
“I don’t know.”
“Then how do you know if they can spread disease or not? Please, baby, can you get some gloves and help me get them off my back?”
“Fine,” she says with a huff and leaves the bathroom.
Disease. His mind has already gone there. He remembers Dan from his wild lands fire crew, which is the last job he held down that paid above minimum wage. Dan couldn’t stand insect repellent, so he never wore it. He got ticks all summer. On the ride to Northern California, toward the end of the fire season, Dan said he was having the worst headache of his life. Nonstop, he felt like he’d puke; he said every muscle in his body felt sore and weak. He showed Jer his palms in the truck. Incredibly swollen. Covered in bumps and dark red and purple spots. The rash spread, to his arms, onto his chest; it climbed up his neck till he looked like a live body in livor mortis. His fever got so bad he couldn’t even tell you who the President of the United States was. Dan got helicoptered off the fire soon after they arrived at the job site. They rushed him to the hospital in Redding, where they barely saved his life from Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever.
Jer takes a deep breath and reaches
around to pull one of the little clay colored peas with antennae off his skin. He won’t get Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, because these aren’t ticks. They’re more like leeches than they are ticks, seeing as they live in the water.
He digs his fingers in and remembers a story an old weed dealer told, about the girl who went swimming in Frenchtown Pond. Leeches attached themselves to her—leeches that’d sucked on someone infected with AIDS.
Jer rips the first one off. He hears a squick as it comes off his skin and he flings it in the toilet. He feels a stinging sensation where the insect was attached seconds ago. Looking into the toilet, he sees its miniscule legs scurry in the water. A small red swirl dances around the parasite, which is swimming back towards him—it wants back on; it wants more blood.
“Jess!” he cries, flushing the toilet.
Wednesday, August 10th, 10:39 p.m.
“Jer! Jer!”
He opens his eyes and sees the sun has gone down. He’s freezing.
“What? Jess! Where you been?”
“I texted you. I had to stay late because the new kid no-call no-showed. Jesus, Jer. How long you been asleep in this filthy ass pool?”
His teeth chatter and he paddles the inflatable chair to the ladder at the deep end. He looks at his wrinkled fingers. “What time is it?”
“Almost quarter to eleven.”
She sticks out her hand and helps him out of the water. “You’ll catch hypothermia. Where’s your towel?”
“I forgot to get one on the way out.”
“Oh, Jer!”
She walks him across the patio. She’ll pretend like he isn’t drunk off his ass.
In front of the sliding glass doors, illuminated by the motion-sensor light, she shrieks.
