Creeptych

“Daddddddy!” she screamed.

I pulled her closer, but the hands gripped the fabric of her shirt and pants and then, next to my ear, the glass exploded. Another hand reached through the broken glass to bat at my head.

“Kara, hold on,” I begged, grasping for her.

But she was gone.

From outside the car I heard her screams. I dove after her to follow, but before I had my feet on the ground a dozen fists pounded into my neck and back and shoved me to the asphalt. Through a field of swaying bodies and limbs I saw Kara raised above the mob, and then Jenna appeared, arms held out to take her.

“Mommy!” Kara cried, arms outstretched.

My wife scooped my baby up, and Kara hugged her tight. Jenna stared at me over our little girl’s shoulders, and a look of victory flickered in her eyes. For the first time in my life, I was sickened by seeing my wife smile. But then, strangely, that smile grew confused, uncertain. It turned to a frown. Her eyes squinted like they did when she got migraines. I could see the muscles on the backs of her arms begin to tense and shiver as she gripped Kara tighter. Then she opened her mouth, not to kiss our baby, but to scream. I heard it clearly over the cacophony of the mob.

That’s when the Luna Roach slid out from the wet cavity between her eyeball and eyelid. Kara saw the bug and recoiled from her mother, but Jenna only held our baby tighter, as the roach walked to the edge of Jenna’s nose and poised there to stretch its wings. Then my wife’s whole face convulsed and began to change. Her skin crawled and swelled; her whole body began to visibly tremble.  Jenna’s face exploded at that moment, as the hive of Luna Roaches nesting and gestating in her brain finally clawed their way free of her flesh and bone and took to the air. A cloud of blood sprayed the sky as her eyes and flesh caved in like undermined sand to the angry mandibles of a thousand trapped and buzzing bugs.  As the first spurts of blood misted, a black and tan cloud of buzzing wings instantly hid the sudden ruin of her features. Luna Roaches lit from her exposed flesh to swarm around the bloody mess of her eyes and the sticky, shredded cartilage of her nose, which hung by a thread down her face.

I launched myself forward to save Kara, but the arms and feet of the mob held me down as my baby beat tiny hands against Jenna’s gore-streaked shoulders, trying to escape. Against all sanity, her blinded, broken mother did not fall or let go. A buzz of wings multiplied in the air, and a cloud of Luna Roaches hovered like a bee swarm around my baby’s screaming, horrified face. I screamed for her, holding out a helpless hand that was quickly stomped to the ground. Something in my arm snapped as it met the asphalt, but louder than my own cry was Kara’s shriek. I swear that she called for me, but the street was alive in screaming and calls for help. Whether she called my name, or something else, in seconds, it was all over. Kara lay quiet and still, limp and blood-spattered in what had been her mother’s arms. But I knew, even if my baby never really did, that those were not Jenna’s arms any longer. Luna Roaches darted across my baby’s face, sampling her innocence with their nervous, hairy feelers.

The crowd drew back from me, setting me free from where they’d pinned me to the pavement and I stood up outside the car, cradling my arm and staring at the crowd of blank eyes that glittered like obsidian in the descending night. Silence fell like midnight fog around us, as the mob grew still, and the moment pregnant.

“What are you?” I whispered. “What do you want?”

One of the men stepped forward, and tentatively opened its mouth. A growling sound came out, and then a word. “Jeessst.” It said in a voice like shifting gravel. Its unblinking eyes fluttered at the sound and it seemed to smile. Understanding dawning.

“Jeessst yur legs,” the man said, the words coming out slowly before it stepped forward. Its face looked pleased. “Jeesst your arms.”

“And what do I get in return?” I asked.

“Us,” someone else growled.

From above I heard the fluttering drone of thousands of translucent wings.

“Where did you come from?” I asked.

“The places you have never gone,” came my only answer, a whisper from the crowd. And then the cool teeth of a Luna Roach settled onto my spine. For a moment I struggled, hoping to throw it off. But then the ice slid through my brain, and I felt the world go quiet.

As I slid back to the ground, I wondered what would become of my body. And of all the bodies that surrounded me. Normally in a symbiosis, the predator used the host to serve as a nest for its offspring.

Oh God, I cried, as my body went numb. What would gestate and grow inside of Kara. What would hatch from my poor, sweet baby?

What would climb out of my own swollen belly after I had been used…and used up? Or would they use me like Jenna?

I prayed that the chittering sounds I heard in my brain would take any knowledge of that away. Already, I could almost understand what the keening, droning noises I’d been hearing now during the nights meant.

Eat. Eat.

Kill. Eat.

Spawn.

Paul Hughes was lucky. His bad day had ended a long time ago now, before things really did get bad.

Mine was only just beginning.

EARDRUM BUZZ

“Join the Misery Machine Street Team!” the ad in the back of the music magazine read. “Inseminate the masses with Eardrum Buzz!”

Wes ripped the page out and filled in the coupon in seconds. The first Eardrum Buzz disc, Misery Machine, had permanently bonded to his car CD player a few weeks earlier. He didn’t leave the driveway without the machine gun attack of their bass drum rattling the dashboard. They remained anything but a household name, but Wes couldn’t get enough of the power saw drone of their guitars, or the manic fever squeals of their singer, Arachnid.

Yeah, they were a gimmicky band—all the members named themselves after bugs. But the fierce mind-drill power of their music was as insidious as a horde of marauding Carpenter ants. And let’s face it—nobody had designed a cooler looking homage to insect life than Eardrum Buzz’s Misery Machine CD cover’s locust orgy—at least not since Journey had celebrated the scarab on multiple LP covers in garish reds, blues and golds. Wes was hooked.

Join their street team and help bring the music of Eardrum Buzz to others? There was nobody more suited to that than Wes. At least, that’s how he felt about it. So he sent in the coupon and waited to hear. Rushed home from work to check the mailbox every day for a week.  The ad had only said that “a few would be chosen” in each city, and that the band would be in touch soon with those who were to be “The Swarm.”

Every day he tossed catalogues and junk mail over his head as he rifled through the pile of mail looking for something that would anoint him a “chosen” one.

And then the call came—but not through the U.S. Post—it was on his e-mail. He almost deleted it as spam. It said Eardrum Buzz was playing a show in a week at the Paranoid Lounge. He was invited to a meet-and-greet party beforehand.

He was in! And he was going to meet the band. Wes ran out to his car, cranked up the volume and peeled his tires with a smokin’ scream as he headed up the street to Rudie’s Tap to share his luck with his friends.

He was “chosen.”

*   *   *

 “It’s not that I don’t like you,” the goth girl said, as she pushed him back two steps. “It’s just that I don’t want to know you.”

With that, a swipe of black hair licked at Wes’s nose and the mini-skirted tramp faded back towards the bar.

It was a swank bar. It was a private bar. The room was barely 20 feet wide…Wes had known friends with bedrooms this big (Not many admittedly. But a couple.) Tucked in the back of the Paranoid Lounge, it put the front, for-business bar to shame. This was clearly the private party portion of the Paranoid, and Wes was at a very private party. There were about a dozen other people in the room, and all of them had shown up within a few minutes of his arrival at the unmarked door behind the club. All of them holding slips of paper that announced “bring this with