Really can’t stand freakin’ bugs…
Giles splashed cold water on his face in the cavernous marble washroom. The attacks were getting worse.
He patted his neck and hands dry, then pulled a bottle of pills from his carefully creased khakis, trembling. A perfect storm, Dr.Struss called it. Between this new project at work and the divorce, his nerves were frazzled, fried, kaputski.
“Calm down. We need this one.” He straightened his short blond hair in the mirror, and the panic slowly passed.
Down the hall, his boss was briefing him and a colleague on their next mission. One that could have great implications in the field of mind control, with a massive financial upside. If successful, it would stamp the Department’s seal on fringe politics.
“Could put the Department on the map, my boy,” Max Stien; friend, mentor, and currently, divorce court lawyer, told him over lunch earlier that day. Max was fresh from the jungle and still wearing his signature safari hat and muddy boots.
Although a chance for a promotion, it involved bugs. Very big, dangerous bugs that had already maimed one company man. Trying to hide his disdain, Giles was overwhelmed during the video presentation and asked to be excused. Watermelon-size beetles with fangs like garden shears…
Hadda be freakin’ bugs.
He let out a shriek as he felt something brush against his leg. Startled, Giles jumped out of his new leather shoe, and an obese albino weasel now had his head stuck in it. It was one of two ferrets under the care of his boss, the Director. The frantic vermin scratched feverishly at the polished gator skin. Giles felt his stress rise with the animals’.
“C’mon Phobos, Dei-Deimos…” The ferrets were twins, and it was hard to tell them apart. “C’mon,” He nudged it with the big toe of his striped sock. “C’mon, you stinky freak, you.” It was well known that the twins were products of genetic experimentation and official property of the U.S. government. There was even a rumor that the Director was pushing to get them recognized as full-time agents.
The Director’s musky minion finally tired of tormenting Giles and scatted down the hall.
“What next?” he asked the heavens, slipping his footwear back on. It was still warm from the ferret’s fury. So far, his career with the Department of Trivial Affairs had been a strange
grind, but this was a new low. Taking orders from a man who spent most of his time talking to lab-enhanced weasels…A real life mad scientist.
As the head chemical engineer of a secret government agency, Giles’ days were rarely ho-hum. His last job, in Baltimore , involved a writer that was close to exposing their work. The job was simple, the nightlife was not.
Max was on a rampage the week of the job, indulging in all the city’s vices. He took full advantage of Uncle Sam’s robust per diem, getting thrown out of several bars on their first night in town. He danced on tables, threatened to stab patrons, and left spilled drinks in his wake wherever he stumbled. “I’m a respected biologist, you fuck!”, He shouted, while being dragged out the door of “Neon Leon’s”, wiping cocaine from his face. Not exactly what Giles considered blending into the background.
The writer had proven to be quite elusive; never sticking to a schedule, moving around as a paranoid conspiracy nut would, no trail or pattern (other than a weakness for Chinese food). “Subliminal Criminal”, as he called himself, was on the road. Until his return, Giles had to keep his colleague from landing them behind bars. Or worse, blowing their cover.
Max’s wild antics were often the talk of the office, every story crazier than the last, and
some just plain absurd. Baltimore, however ,was Giles’s chance to showcase his talents. Recently, he’d gotten approval from the board to use a drug of his own design, Zombicillan, for official Department business. He wasn’t gonna let his fellow agent steal the spotlight with his depravity.
Zombicillan almost hadn’t made it out of the test phase, some subjects having a gruesome reaction to the experimental compound. He shivered, recalling one particular case; a woman, so tired of dragging her engorged vulva across the ground, had resorted to carrying it in a bucket. The floor-burned lips spilled over the sides, still spackled with gravel from that morning’s travels. The rest of the fleshy blob was covered in sharp pubic hair, resembling a pinkish porcupine. She groaned, straining under the weight of her own vagina bucket, swatting gnats away from the grotesque growth with tears in her eyes.
“Fascinating!”, The Director said upon seeing the bizarre affliction. He quickly snapped some photos as the poor woman looked on, horrified. “For the Christmas card. Nice work, Agent Scott.” Twisted son-of-a-bitch…
Now perfected, Zombicillan offered a less-messy alternative to the Department’s portable home lobotomy kit, a kind of “liquid lobotomy.” Anyone given a dose of the current concoction would be permanently compromised. Signals scrambled, they would drool and babble incoherent word strings, unable to complete all but the simplest of thoughts. Harmless, except to themselves.
An informant discovered their target was meeting his agent in Chinatown, at a hole-in-the -wall noodle joint, “Lo Tso’s”. Giles made sure a proper dose of the home-crafted liquid lobotomy made its way into his soup.
Case closed, Giles loaded Max into a taxi and fled Baltimore before his cohort’s trail of
terror caught up to them. At the time of the last update, the “Subliminal Criminal” was arguing with squirrels in the park, eating one on occasion if it got too close. Strange but effective…certainly not writing anymore.
He’d only been back in town a few days when he got a call from the Director himself, a first. He sounded crazy on the phone, babbling something about giant beetles with psychotropic digestive fluids.
And I thought the boss had got into some vials at the lab…
Yet, here he was, getting briefed on the Atlean Bungle Beetle, its intoxicating effects, and the new chemical age of politics. Doping the populous to rig elections, sway markets, eliminate enemies…real cutting-edge stuff. The possibilities had the Director even more manic than usual, promising huge bonuses to all who saw the vision through. Before he reached the boss’s office, he could already hear Max’s booming voice.
“…heard the horror stories, of course. Never imagined it’d come to that. Shame, such a pretty girl.” Max had his feet up, examining a clear-cube display case. From this angle, Giles saw Max through the jumbo brass looking-glass. It was one of the many oddities littering the boss’s office space that he kept around for amusement. The massive antiquity was perched atop the back of a bronze demon.
Through the thick, sinister lens of the ancients, Giles contemplated the brutish biologist. The speed-sniffing sadistic scientist ranted at the Director, bullshit pouring from his distorted, magnified mouth. Beyond the hair gel and dry-cleaned tweed hung a hint of caged animal, a mad-house mirror of potential dismemberment.
Glad he’s on my side…
The twins leapt out of nowhere, coming to a sliding halt on the Director’s large glass desk. The boss was wearing his D.T.A lab coat, square spectacles on his hairless head. He
pulled a couple of peanuts from his pocket, tossing them to the awaiting twins. They were standing on hind legs, sniffing the air suspiciously. Giles would have sworn the ferrets had grown a couple of inches just that day.
The Director pulled some more peanuts from his lab coat pocket, offering them to Giles. “Wanna feed’em? Positive reinforcement, Agent Scott. Works on all animals”
“Oh, uh…no. No thank you, sir. Allergies.” Giles tugged nervously at his collar. He looked over at Max, who was still spinning the display case in his hands.
“Peanut? Or Mustela Furo?” The Director stared at him with buggy, bloodshot eyes. His pointy, rodent-like head was void of hair. Sometime last week he’d shaved the eyebrows, and now his eyelashes were all but missing.
“Huh? Uh, both. I think.”
The albino weasels still stood at attention on the desktop, looking at Giles. Phobos (or was it Deimos?) shook his head in disapproval. Giles thought he noticed a peculiar gleam in his eye.
“Nothing personal…” Giles added, feeling the ferret’s burning stare.
“He doesn’t give a damn about your weasels, Vic,” Max cut Giles off, finally setting the display cube on the desk in front of him. He adjusted his hat and scratched his black beard. “He’s young, he wants to get outta here.”
Thank God for Max…
“Your right, of course.” The boss returned the peanuts to his pocket, wiping his hands on the front of his lab coat. “Down to business it is.” He dabbed his forehead with a white kerchief. “You see the newest entry in my collection, Agent Scott?” He pointed to the display cube, which Giles could now see held a perfectly preserved human finger.
This guy’s frickin’ insane. “How did…I mean…whose?” Giles stammered.
“Agent got careless. Leave it at that. You don’t want the details, trust me…” The Director answered, still wiping his hands on his lab coat. Max chuckled. “… no small mistakes in our line of work, Agent Scott.” He picked up a remote from the desktop. “Why don’t you grab a seat…somewhere, over there… so you can see. Show you what I mean. Haven’t got to the good part yet.”
Great, more of the giant bug video…
Giles sat down at a small round table with a myriad of scorpions swimming in its resin
top. Thankful for Dr. Struss and the magic pills, he rested his arms on it, careful to avoid the
claws and stingers. “Lux!” The Director shouted. Giles jumped. Phobos pushed a button on the desktop, dimming the lights. Max applauded, and Deimos cleaned his paws.
The clip started, and Giles could see the reflection of Atlea’s sheer cliff shoreline in the Director’s glasses. The camera struggled, rocking heavily in the offshore chop. It attempted to follow a helicopter landing in the thick jungle world far above.
Jumping ahead, two lantern-wielding explorers dove into the deep cave system, home to the Bungle Beetle. The echo of the lantern’s creaking careened from cavern to cavern. An underground stream could be heard in the distance.
“Whoa! Here we go.” The lead spelunker shined his light on the wall in front of him. There was a glittery trail of blue cave phlox pollen leading off into the darkness. Its luminescence was unmistakable, and it meant their brutal quarry was likely near.
They followed its tracings to a lurky cavern crevice, where the opening gave the explorers some pause. Heavy breaths could be heard, and water dripping, followed by a scittering sound scattering towards them with unholy speed. Something could be seen on the edge of the light, just inside the opening, a contrast in texture against the rock. The brave man drew his light closer to the crevice.
Briefly, the scinting of moist fangs could be seen, followed by blood misting the camera lens. His lantern was sent flying, still gripped by a severed hand. Cries of agony faded with the picture.
Giles managed to close his eyes before the worst of it, but the screams haunted him for days.
“See, careless,” the Director said, laughing hysterically. “That’s why you need to keep your head on a swivel tomorrow at the breeding center,” he continued, after regaining his composure.
I need a raise Giles told himself, walking out into the parking lot. His head was still swimming with images of giant beetles and his boss hackling like a madman, dabbing his buzzard-like cranium, spittle in the corners of his mouth.
“Oh Carlita, what happened to our love?” It was Tonya’s ringtone. “Call me when you get home, G. It’s important.”
He eventually fell asleep trying to call her back. Tomorrow he would face his biggest fear. Giles passed out on the couch, clutching a bottle, still in his carefully creased khakis.
The sun was rising when he arrived at the Atlean Bungle Beetle Breeding Building. Outside, it looked like another vacant warehouse on the waterfront. Inside, it was a state-of-the-art chemical collection lab the Department brass had dubbed, “Beetle Bunker”. His phone vibrated on the seat of his rebuilt pickup. A text from Tonya.
G, need to talk about Luke’s medical bills. He sighed. She gets the dogs and I get their bills.
Thinking about the video from yesterday, he greedily gobbled down some of Dr. Struss’s pills. Then, taking a deep breath, he approached the crumbling brick structure. Waiting to get buzzed in, he imagined the horrors it might contain.
Once inside, Giles was overwhelmed by the hoards of Bungle Beetles crawling on top of each other, gnashing their fangs, trying to climb the walls of the glass enclosure. That glass isn’t strong enough. Too many of ‘em. It’ll never hold…
His ears started to ring as his blood pressure skyrocketed.
The electric hum of the green flourescence was all Giles remembered. Now, slowly coming to, he found his hands bound together. Max was holding a newspaper up to his face. He could feel a knot rising on his head, his brow wet with blood.
What the hell, Max? His eyes struggled to focus.
The robust bearded biologist pulled a wooden pipe from the pocket of his safari pants. “Subliminal Criminal writes again. Thought you scrambled him, took him out of the game?”
“Balt-ti-more,” Giles managed to utter, despite his bruised ribs. He had a sinking feeling in his gut. The chemical lobotomy didn’t take.
“Gottin’ careless, agent. Little distracted by Tonya, perhaps? Here’s a tip, genius. Dr. Struss isn’t who you think.” The room smelled of sweet vanilla pipe-smoke and opium.
Giles was still woozy from the blow to the head. It was the pain that convinced him he wasn’t dreaming.
“Dr. Arte Struss, pen name ‘Subliminal Criminal’. He’s been workin’ us from the inside.” Max puffed his pipe. “Seems like something our head chemical engineer might have seen coming.” It was then Giles realized he’d never actually seen the good doctor himself, only his assistant.
“Fitting end, in a way. Agent Scott, meet your replacement.” Giles gathered the strength to raise his swollen head. “Phobos!”
Through his hazy vision, Giles could make out the ferret agent, oddly resembling the Director in his lab coat and specs. He had grown to a full 6-foot, and in an odd twist of nature, now stared Giles directly in his face. Giles could smell peanuts on his breath.
That’s it huh? I’m out, weasels in…
Phobos looked down. In the reflection of his glasses, Giles could see his new leather shoes on the ferret’s gross genetic feet. He pulled a handful of peanuts from the pocket of his lab coat and stuffed them in Giles mouth. Phobos checked his gold wristwatch.
“Positive reinforcement, Agent Scott,” Max added from somewhere.
“Oh Carlita…”
Before losing consciousness again, Giles saw Phobos answer his phone, thrusting
his hips to the beat of Tonya’s ringtone. Stay the hell away from her, weasel-dick…
Outraged, he fought his chemical captor with all the strength he had left, but in the end his eyelids surrendered to a colorful, if hellish, dreamscape. Has it been days? Hours? Seconds? Suspecting he’d been dosed with the beetlejuice, he tried to take mental note, his scientific mind taking over.
Miniature mongloids streamed seamlessly across his mind’s eye, taunting him as they
danced. Randomly and feverishly they fucked, shitting from the mouth, while others gave birth to quivering veiny sacs. He witnessed one of the vicious critters extracting fluid from a freshly-
laid vein sac with an alien urgency, hands still wet from the orgy. Filling his filthy syringe with viscous pus, he looked at Giles and winked.
Giles thought he saw a peculiar gleam in the demon’s eyes as he slowly approached, slobbering and cackling. Oh no…don’t do it…keep that thing away from me!
A disembodied voice spoke to him from nowhere and everywhere. It was Max. “Just go with it, son. This has to play itself out,” he kept saying, in a calm voice. The smell of infection grew stronger as the needle was almost upon him.
“Fuck. You. Max!” I’m gonna kill you slowly for this, old man.
Bacon was burning in a kitchen similar to the one of his youth. Although visually identical, it felt like a decoy placed with sinister intentions. Despite having the organic quality of a staged play, Giles marveled at the detail, down to the old wall clock his great-grandpa had built. The white oak coffee table with glass chess- board and…a gold wristwatch? Someone else is here…
Leaving the fake bacon fire burning on the stovetop, he headed down the hall, ignoring the blaring smoke alarm, to a cracked door. Along the way, he noticed the family photos littering the papered walls had been replaced. Surveillance from the time he got caught shoplifting. His father, shooting up in the tiny trailer he resided in after the split, before his inevitable overdose. In the expensive brass frame, at the end of the hall, was a moving photo. Brian Boyd, the boy
he’d blinded by accident with a pellet gun, in his family’s two- car garage. He was rigging a rope to the rafters, on the night he hung himself. I can’t be blamed for that, can I? That kid was always a little off. Wasn’t he?
Giles knew he was now deep in the bowels of the beetle, and soon should be out the backside. A little shittier for wear, of course, but with most of his marbles still. Low voices were coming from the bedroom. Blocking out the corner of his brain that screamed against it, he carefully opened the door.
In his old room, a bueatiful woman was being pleasured by the ferret twins. Heads leaned back in ecstasy, they seemed not to notice him watching. Strawberry hair, vanilla perfume… Tonya. Her big hoop earrings jingled as she rocked back and forth, between Phobos and Diemos. The gentle motion put him in a trance, and he couldn’t move his eyes from the surreal scene.
The sound of a typewriter brought him to his senses. At the old desk of his schooldays, a man pounded away at the keys, glancing up occasionally, searching the sex-and-ferret scented
air, where lost words often materialize. Giles turned his attention back to his soon-to-be ex-wife, who was still riding the twins with enthusiastic synchrony. Soon, the typewriter fell into rhythm.
“How could you? I work with these guys…err ferrets. Uh… agents. These agents are property of the government, for Christ’s sake! Have a little self-resp…”
He was interrupted by the man at the typewriter. “Keep it down, buddy, would ya? Doin’ a story on the twins and ahh, what’s yer name honey?” A muffled murmur from the fur. “…Tonya over here.” Annoyed, the man got back to his work.
“ There’s our target right there. The writer? Baltimore? Why aren’t you two doing anything? He’s an enemy of the Department, the boss won’t be too…”
The typing man, finally having enough of Giles’ interruption, pulled out a blowgun he always carried when doing a piece on bestiality. He buried the fouled tip of the dart into Giles jugular with pygmy precision.
Legs wobbly, and ego shaky, he exited the room that was his, but wasn’t, ready to leave the madness behind. The skin of this bizarre brainscape was slippery, and he couldn’t feel its edges anymore. Giles worried it would wear him down before it wore off. This substance had a heartbeat of its own, throbbing soothing sorrow, and its pulse was only growing stronger. He could hear it breathing deeply.
This right here’s a whole different animal…
Giles memory took the subway back to his first lab. He slid in through the wall cracks, like a lab rat, into the abandoned shack that frothed the virgin batch. Here, insanity was décor. No way in hell some beetle spit gonna do me in.
“Beetlespit, eh? Oh yeah, you got it bad.” The woman from the company Christmas card was laying on the shed floor, scraping residue from a discarded beaker and licking her finger.
Vaginally, she could no longer walk with the slop-bucket, as it now took up most of an eight-by-eight shed, and still swelling. “Gotta be something. Here. Where’s my doctor!”
Giles didn’t have the balls to tell her he was the cause of her genital swell, and it was irreversible. “Doctor!” He shouted, deciding to help, however he could. There was no time to waste; the sweat bees were swarming, sensing a hot feast. “Can we get some help in here, please?” Dirt dropped from the dilapidated roof as he banged the walls frantically.
“I’m sorry Carol,” He rubbed her arm. “Helps on the way. I work here. Trust me.” Giles tried his best to keep the sweat bees from the bulbous blob, but they descended like fruit flies on rotting melon. She won’t survive much more of this…
“Doctor please!” Beating on the walls of the condemned urban outbuilding, he realized there probably wasn’t a medical team on site.
“Hey, asshole. How do you know my name? I’m talking to you!”
Giles was distracted, pulling a syringe out of his tightly clenched fist. Somehow, during all the banging, he’d stuck himself.
“It was the heat,” Carol Christmas Card explained, with a newfound calmness, ignoring the growing number of insects hovering like carnivorous helicopters.
“What… heat?” Giles was still monitoring the puncture wound for any allergic reaction, not knowing the contents of the wayward needle.
“The heat from the soup. Baltimore?” She paused to pick some lint from the large (and still growing) leaking labia lips. A couple ants walked past, unphased by the new developments, only focused on collecting the noxious nectar.
“It compromised the formula. Lo Tso’s… hottest soup around. Right on the sign. Seems like something our head chemical engineer mighta seen coming.”
Swarming still, the buzzing of the sweat bees grew to a deafening pitch, leaving Giles question unheard, but confusion intact. Their numbers overwhelmed the shack shortly after, blacking out his vision completely.
When he awoke, she was looking down at him.
“Tonya, how did you…?”
“Your boss called, said there was an accident at work. Still your emergency contact.” Tonya tucked her strawberry hair behind her ears, like she always did when she was nervous. She held up her bandaged hand, middle finger missing from the knuckle up. “Got careless, I guess.”
The gold watch on her slender wrist looked strangely familiar, a single white hair stuck in the band. “ Luke really needs his meds. Maybe tomorrow, when you get released…”
Probably just a hair from one of the dogs…
“Yeah, about that. I just don’t think I should be on the hook…” Giles noticed a vase of yellow flowers on the windowsill. The card attached read: No small mistakes-Director.
“If it’s a matter of money, you could always work evenings with my uncle. Got that exterminatin’ business. Busy seasons comin’ up.”
He thought he noticed a peculiar gleam in her eye.
Really can’t stand freakin bugs…
Fringe Fiction, a new genre created by the phonetics felon known as B. Felony, is a celebration of the realistically absurd. A consonant crook of the vowelist kind, B. Felony is hell-bent on returning danger back to the printing press, and is also the founder of the Riverside Liberation Front, a political party petitioning for presidency presently. Enjoy the steamy feastings of the literarily insane; Fringe Fiction.