by John Everson
“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 you for admittance.”
Wes had brought his, and now he stood, watching the black-haired skank walk away, in the low light of the golden-wood bar. He waited to meet the band.
While the ad had said that drinks and hors d’oeuvres would be served, Wes had avoided the snacks. True to the band’s crawly affectation, the silver trays on the side of the room were brimming with French-fried roaches, candied locust and honey-coated raisins…the raisins each gripped by an amber-coated giant black ant.
Wes ordered a Jack and coke and waited.
The band was fashionably late. But they were also fashionably dressed. Arachnid wore a skintight black body suit, and a web of chains jangled from his arms to his chest. When he held his hands up above his head, it looked as if a web of silver joined him to himself. The other members of the band had their own style; Cicada, the drummer, was literally shellacked in black; Wes struggled to ascertain where his painted skin ended and his shiny black clothing began. He suspected there was very little clothing attached. And the lead guitarist, Scorpion, wore an atomic orange bodysuit, and silver dangled from his ears like wind chimes. When he smiled, Wes could have sworn he saw fangs.
A creepy little man in a Metallica T-shirt slid up next to him, and grinned…with the left side of his face. His right seemed as immobile as granite.
“You gonna spread the word?” he asked. Wes saw a trickle of sweat slip between the kinked and wild hairs of his mutton chop sideburns.
“Word?”
“You gonna sell the Buzz?”
“Yeah,” Wes said, and moved away as quickly as the skank had ditched him just minutes before. “Yeah, I love ‘em.”
“We all do, yeah,” the man laughed, nodding, and flashing a row of yellowing teeth. “Love ‘em to death we do, hmmm.”
Wes slipped back to the bar and ordered another Jack and coke.
Arachnid appeared, as if from nowhere. He put two hands on the edge of the bar and pulled. In a flash he was standing on the bar; he raised a bloody red glass to the room and toasted.
“To the Swarm,” he called, and a dozen glasses raised in answer. “I love each and every one of you.”
Someone yelled back “We love you!” and Wes found himself raising his glass in answer, and downing a cool draught of liquor and fizz. He swallowed and felt the warmth in his gut.
“Buzz,” called Arachnid, holding his glass high.
“Buzz,” answered the small crowd, and downed another gulp.
The creepy little Metallica man—who was also bald as a cueball—sidled up to Wes and held out a bowl of fried bugs. Wes wasn’t sure what they were, exactly, but he noted a lot of crusted golden-fried legs protruding from each of the inch-long, worm-thick forms.
“Brood,” the man said, and Wes raised his hands in passing.
“Naw,” he said. “I’m full.”
“Brood!” the man said louder, as Arachnid raised jangling chains again on the bar.
“Take our communion, if you will, and we will be your sponsors to the church of insectoid. With our music, and these children in your belly….our word will spread for miles and miles and miles.”
“I don’t think so,” Wes waved the offering away. But the man didn’t relent. He pushed the bowl insistently and then the goth-skank came back as well.
“Chow down, baby,” she whispered. Her eyes seemed to glow ice-blue in the dim light of the room. She put two long fingernails into the container and then held a crusted insect to Wes’s lips.
Maybe this was some kind of a hazing. A test, he thought. As the woman crushed a warm fleshy chest to his side, pressing closer to breathe on his neck as she held the French-fried
bug to his lips, Wes felt his jaw drop. She dropped in the crunchy insectoid morsel, at the same time leaning in to whisper, “It only hurts a little,” she said. “And then…you are the music.”
Wes could have sworn she spit in his ear, because he felt a cool slippery feeling in his ear canal as she bit at his lobe and hugged him. But then, as he turned to face her, she giggled, and planted a kiss on his lips, forcing him to swallow the salty bug before she backed away to fade into the small crowd. Wes noticed that the girl made a few stops in the crowd, sidling up to people and then slipping away with a whisper. He didn’t think much of it at the time, only shook his head to clear away the whiskey blur. Shit, he was fuck-faced and the concert hadn’t even started yet. Hell, he hadn’t walked up and introduced himself to the band.
He moved towards the bar and Arachnid, and held out his hand. “Hi,” he said, trying to make an impression on the singer. “I was a fan before you guys even thought of flying.”
The singer opened his mouth to laugh, revealing a row of jagged, jewel-crusted teeth. “And I sucked blood before I was a vampire,” he laughed, leaning forward to stare eye-to-eye with Wes. “Bring me more Brood,” he whispered.
“I’ll spread the word,” Wes assented, nodding vigorously. “I have been already.”
* * *
In just minutes, the private party was over, and a door was opened to the main floor of the club. Wes pushed for a spot at the front of the stage and held it, turning to put his back to the stage monitor as he watched the club fill. The alcohol settled in his eyes, and the room swirled for a moment like a bad ride on a merry-go-round as he, and the crowd, waited for the band to take the stage.
By the time they did, Wes was slumped against the black fuzz of the monitor. The liquor had hit him harder than he’d expected, and the vibration of the lead guitar jolted him upright in surprise. He hadn’t even registered the cheer of the crowd as the band strode onstage. But with the jolt of electricity in his spine as Scorpion chimed out the intro to “Fly For Your Life,” Wes threw himself into the frenzy and jumped up and down like a pogo stick. The band accommodated, dealing out one manic anthem after another.
Wes sung…or screamed…every word for the next hour and a half.
At the end of the night, Wes went outside of the club to hail a cab. He hadn’t driven; he knew that it was likely to be a buzz night, and he lived close enough that a cab ride was far more desirable than the chance of a DUI.
When he climbed into the yellow car, the cabbie asked “good show?” and Wes could only mumble, “Yeah…it’s all a blur…and a buzz.”
“A buzz?” the cabbie asked.
“Yeah…my ears feel like they’re in the middle of a hive,” Wes grinned. “Everything’s buzzing.”
The cabbie grinned. “You better get some sleep.”
In moments they’d pulled up to the curb of his place. With an unsteady gait he approached his front door and remembered the cabbie’s advice. “I intend to,” he mumbled. “I intend to.”
* * *
What he hadn’t intended, was to be awoken by the buzz in his brain. He’d barely gotten his clothes off before falling onto the sheets, but within minutes the alcohol blur shifted, and Wes found himself staring at the ceiling as in his head, a drone whined like wind through a tin whistle. The noise in his head shimmered and buzzed like a living thing, sinuous and insistent. It didn’t let up. And it wouldn’t let him fall asleep.
At one point he rolled over and stared at the blue LED of his clock radio. 3:34. “Fuck,” he moaned, rolling over and punching a pillow over the offending ear canal. “I’ve gotta be up in 3 hours.”
* * *
“How was the show?” his workmate Trent asked, as Wes slouched down the hallway to his office.
“Loud,” he complained, holding a palm over his ear. “I can still hear it.”
“Kiddin’!” Trent laughed. “Oughtta wear earplugs to those shows.”
Wes nodded. “I know.” He stopped a moment at Trent’s doorway and shook his head, trying to clear the still annoying hum from his eardrums. “I’ve woken up with my ears buzzing from a show before, but never this loud still. I should have stuffed some cotton.”
Trent shrugged. “Hindsight and all that.”
“Yeah. Ears are old. Can’t take rock and roll the way they used to.”
“You call that rock ‘n’ roll?” Trent shook his head. “I call that shit…shit.”
“Bite me,” Wes said and stepped past the doorway and into his own cube. He punched the computer on-switch, and almost sighed with relief when the machine whirred to life; its hard drive spun at just the right rpm to whine a sympathetic tone to the one frying Wes’s brain right now. The effect was that he didn’t notice the buzz in his head as much, since the same sound was sawing away outside of his head as well.
He did his best to ignore the steady drone in his ears that first day, but when it kept him awake again that night, and was no better the next morning, Wes began to seriously worry. He knew the story of Pete Townshend and how he had to live with tinnitus, a constant ringing in his head from loud shows. His stomach turned cold and hard at the thought of permanent hearing damage, and he did searches on tinnitus on the Internet, praying that he just had gotten what one Web site called “temporary threshold shift (TTS)” from the overexposure to the Eardrum Buzz’s amplified guitars. His life had become a fuzz of constant humming distortion.
“Often TTS dissipates within hours or days, as the ear re-acclimates itself,” one page read. “But in full-blown tinnitus, the patient can suffer the constant ringing and buzzing sound in the brain for the rest of his or her life. This can often lead to depression and, sometimes, suicidal impulses.”
Wes thought about the latter idea as he tugged hard on the skin of his earlobe, trying to open his ear canal wider, and perhaps “pop” it so that the sound would go away. Nothing happened, except for the feeling of a bruised pinch on his already sore-from-pulling lobe.
“I can’t live with this,” he whispered, staring at the words on his computer screen and not comprehending them. “I can’t concentrate.”
He put both palms against his ears and pushed, toilet plunger style. Maybe he could push air into the ear to stop the buzz.
The result was a pressure pain in the bowels of his brain and he reluctantly gave up. Placing both palms on the desk, Wes took a deep breath and forced himself to stop focusing on the problem. He needed to forget the locust hum and read the words on the screen.
“Fly with the swarm,” he read, and shook his head to clear his vision. That couldn’t be right. He stared harder at the lease paperwork. “Fryer with warming console,” it read. Wes put his head on the desk and closed his eyes. He needed sleep.
And silence.
* * *
On the fourth day after the concert, Wes yawned ceaselessly. His eyes were shot through with red and his head lolled periodically, as his body tried to shut down, regardless of its position.
“You need sleep, man,” Trent observed. “Tried taking any sleeping pills?”
“No, but that’s a good idea.”
“Remember, if the dose looks like it reads 22, that’s just because you’re seeing double.”
“Thanks. I think 22 might be the only thing that could put me out.”
After work, he stopped at the supermarket to pick up a frozen dinner and some sleeping pills. The buzz had subsided some, but it was still there, coiled and hissing in his brain. It had snaked into his consciousness like a viper and it would not leave its lair.
“I can’t live with this,” he mumbled in the analgesics aisle, and his eyes welled up. He was at his end. “I don’t want to live with this,” he whispered, and read the back of the bottle to see if it warned against a lethal dose.
When he looked up, the piercing icy eyes of the skank who’d blown him off at the Eardrum Buzz party were staring back at his over the low aisle shelf.
She looked startled when he caught her glance over the top of
the Bufferin boxes and turned away.
“Wait,” he said. “You can do that to me once, but not twice. I’m Wes.”
“Jen,” she said. Her voice was brittle, with a melting point that Wes wasn’t likely to reach.
“Sorry I spooked ya, Jen,” he said. “But I saw you recognized me.”
“We’re both part of the swarm,” she nodded. He noticed that her eyes looked as bloodshot around the edges as his own. And her perfect gloss hair from a few nights ago had a frizzy, static-cling look to it now. She was windblown, or buzz-blown, around the edges.
“How are your ears?” he asked, not knowing quite what to say.
She jerked. “What do you mean?”
“Mine are still buzzing from that show last weekend,” he complained.
“I’m fine,” she breathed and pulled something from the shelf to throw in her cart. “Spread the word.”
And she walked away.
* * *
The next day, Wes saw the grizzled, mutton chop Metallica guy from the Eardrum Buzz party standing around the newsstand he stopped at each morning. As Wes paid for his paper, he saw the guy staring at him from over the top of a newspaper he was pretending to read.
Two in two days, he thought. Some coincidence.
Normally Wes did all he could to avoid trouble. But over the course of this week, his patience had grown thin. He didn’t care about consequence anymore.
“Why are you spying on me?” he asked, walking up to the older man. From where he stood, the man sidled backwards, as if trying to be unseen.
“I know you from the concert,” Wes said, unconsciously pulling on the edge of his earlobe. The sound seemed to be growing as he remembered the night he’d first seen this loser. And now the guy was spying on him.
“You know nothing,” the man hissed. As he approached, the man threw down his newspaper on the pile and darted away, melding into the crowd of briefcase-toters and disappearing into the glass door of an office building.
In his head, Wes heard the buzz grow like the keening call of a locust swarm on a hot August night. He grabbed the light pole at the curb and held on as if he were on a ship in hurricane season. When he pulled his face away from the cold gray steel, its surface was wet and the locusts laughed and buzzed behind his eyes.