Seeds of Fear

'What's horrible is the way Nick treated you. That wasn't so long ago. Do you want to go back to that?'

'No.'

'We all pay the price,' Helen said, leaning close. 'Look at yourself, Agatha. You're a new person.'

Agatha left the office with Helen, followed her outside. A car was waiting.

'There's only one other thing we ask,' Helen said. 'That you bring us some interesting recipes. Something simple, something that will camouflage the required ingredients. All right?'

Agatha nodded, numb.

'You won't have trouble finding men, will you?' Helen said.

Agatha didn't answer.

Helen slid into the car. The man driving was named David. Helen had met him only a week ago, she'd said. Sweat glistened on his forehead. His fingers were plump worms. She kissed his cheek. David looked up at Agatha, smiled weakly. As the car pulled away, Helen waved.

Agatha thought of Dr. Binder. The way he had looked at her.

No, she wouldn't have trouble finding men.

GRUB-GIRL Edward Lee

Lemme guess. Head, right? Ten bucks a pop is what I charge. Cheap.

That your car there, the blue Metro?

Huh? You wanna talk a little first? Oh, okay, I get it. You don't know the full scoop about things. Okay, fine.

But. shit, look, see that fat guy in the red Escort right there by the Exxon station? He's one of my regulars. Hang here for ten, okay?

I'll be right back.

Okay, the full scoop on me? Sure. Shit, I got time. You've heard about the grubs, you must've. Probably just haven't heard that some of us are hookers. Not the kind of thing the state legislature wants getting around. Bad for tourism, you know?

Average john, all he wants is head. No mess, no fuss, just a quick suck in the car, parked in some dark cranny off West Street at three in the morning. Look, I'm just your average garden-variety alley pross, not some fancy streetwalker or stuck-up call girl. Standard price on the street is twenty for head, thirty for a straight lay, and forty for an ass-fuck, but I can charge half that and pull twice as many tricks 'cos, well… 'Cos I'm what you might call special.

They call us 'grubs.' Nice, huh? Well… I guess we are a little on the pasty side. But, look, don't get freaked out. I heard somewhere there are over ten thousand of us total. It all started with that ramjet thing, I don't know, a couple of years ago. Christ, I'm sure you heard about that. NASA and the air force were testing some new kinda plane, remotely piloted, they called it, flying it a hundred miles off the coast over the Atlantic. It was a nuclear ramjet or some shit, could fly indefinitely without fuel, no pilots, ran by computers. The idea was to have these things flying around all the time real high up. Cheap way to defend the nation. 'The ultimate deterrent,' the president said when they announced that they were gonna spend billions developing this thing. What they didn't announce was that plane kicked out a trail of some off-the-wall kinda radiation wherever it flew. The government wasn't worried about it 'cos it flew so high, the shit would go right out of the atmosphere. Well, something fucked up during one of the test flights, and one of these things wound up flying up and down the East Coast at treetop level on something they called an 'emergency urban alert bomb mode' for something like five days before they could veer it off course over the sea and shoot it down. Thing was flying over cities, for shit's sake. And I was one of the ones lucky enough to get pissed on by it.

I'd just come up from the docks down there, you know, by the Market Square, and I was walking up toward Clay Street. 'Rome, my man, he usually picked me and his other two girls up at about four A.M. Best time for us alley girls to turn tricks is after two, after the bars are closed, 'cos then the cops stop buzzing the street to bust our chops. Fuckin' cops, nine times outa ten when they catch you, all they do is make you give 'em a quick blow job, then let you go. Anyway, here I am, hoofing it up to Clay after turning about five tricks, and then there's this rumble way down deep in my belly and this sound like slow thunder, and I look up and see this ugly thing flying about hundred feet over my head. Didn't know what to make of it. It looked like a big black kite in the sky, and when it passed, I could see this weird blue-green glow coming out of the back of the thing, its engines, I guess. I died a couple hours later, and the next day I woke up a grub.

There was a big whupdeedo for a little while. All of a sudden there were ten thousand dead people walking around and not knowing what the fuck hit them. President called an emergency meeting or some shit. Oh, you should've heard all the fancy talk they were spouting. At first they were gonna «euthanize» us 'to safeguard the societal whole from potential contraindications,' until some egghead at CDC verified that we weren't psychotic or contagious or radioactive or anything. Then some asshole Republican senator made a big pitch about how we should be 'socially impounded.' 'Protean symtomologies,' see, that's what they were worried about. These shitheads wanted to round us all up and put us on an island somewhere! It all blew over, though, after the activists started gearing up, and they let us be.

After all, grubs are people too.

* * *

It didn't hurt really. Just felt sick for a few minutes, got a headache, and died. Woke up the next day feeling pretty much the same as I always did. Woke up a grub. We call live people «pink» or 'pinkies,' and they call us grubs. Only fair, they got names for us, we got names for them. 'Rome didn't get it, the prick, he stayed pink, and so did his other two hookers. The shit from the plane wouldn't get you if you were in a car or under a roof. About a dozen other hookers got it, though, 'cos they were out on the street just like me when that fucked-up plane flew by, and now every pink hooker in the city hates us. See, johns want grubs more than pink girls 'cos we're cheaper and we ain't got diseases. AIDS, herpes, and all that shit, I had it all when I was pink, but not no more, and a john knows that if he buys himself a nut with a grub, he ain't gonna catch nothing.

Here's why I killed 'Rome, though. After 1 got grubbed, he got this brainstorm that he could really cop a bundle off me with the kinks. He'd work me right out of his crib, hitting johns up for a couple hundred bucks an hour! These sick fucks'd come in and do anything they wanted, and I mean anything. Bondage, S & M, scat, that sort of shit. 'Rome's only rule was that they weren't allowed to break any bones or cut off any parts. These kinks were a trip, let me tell you. You'd be surprised how many really sick motherfuckers there are in the world. They'd tie me up, jack me out, stick needles in my tits, shit in my mouth, you fuckin' name it. Grubs don't feel pain, so 'Rome figured it didn't matter. Anything goes, you know? Then he gets this bright idea about how he's gonna start his own video line called 'Grub Paradise' and how I'm gonna be the star. The fucker wanted to film me while these kinks were working me over! Well, I started to get sick of this shit real fast. Grubs don't gotta sleep, so 'Rome figures he can turn me into a twenty-four-hour-a-day enterprise. Here's this scumbag making cash hand over fist offa my ass, and I don't get shit out of it. So I…

Well, if you wanna know the details, I busted a toilet tank cover over his head one night, cut his belly open, and ate his guts.

Hell. Sometimes a girl's gotta do what she's gotta do.

See, grubs can only eat raw stuff. You eat regular food like the pinkies and the shit don't come out, you bloat up. There was this one gal named Sue who got grubbed just like me — blond, kinda heavyset, really big tits — and she just goes on eating the regular shit that the pinkies eat, and one day I saw her walking past the hotel and, I swear, she's big as Jabba the Hut, and before she could make it to the bus stop, she, like, exploded right there in the street, made one holy hell of a mess.

And this shithead Republican senator I was telling you about, you should've heard the guy, like because we can only eat raw stuff, that means we're gonna go on some zombie rampage eating people in the streets like some horror movie, so that was his case for 'socially impounding' us. Glad that asshole's shit didn't fly. Of course, it