I cringe. “And you’re going to have Andrew eat it?”
He nods. “And not only that, but we’re going to have him climb into the creature’s ass and harvest them himself. It’s going to be great television. I bet it will be one of the best episodes of Bizarre Foods yet.”
“Do you think he’ll really go through with it?”
“Of course. He’s Andrew Zimmern. He’ll eat anything.”
“How is he able to do it anyway?” I ask.
“Who?” Mick asks.
“Andrew Zimmern. How is he able to eat all those weird alien foods? I wouldn’t be able to do it. I’d puke all over the place.”
“You don’t know?” Mick asks.
I shrug.
Mick explains, “Andrew used to be a heroin addict. For about a year, he was homeless and eating out of dumpsters. He grew a tolerance for eating disgusting food. I guess once you’ve lived off of rotten meat and molded bread for long enough, you come to appreciate all kinds of foods, even stuff the average person wouldn’t be able to stomach.”
“I didn’t know he was a heroin addict.”
“Well, he’s not anymore. He’s been sober for years. That’s why he won’t drink alcohol or do substances of any kind. He really turned his life around. Going from a junkie in the gutter to a world-famous celebrity, the man is an inspiration. A hero for recovering addicts.”
I nod my head, finding a new admiration for the star of the show I work on.
Then Mick chugs his drink as the waitress brings him two more.
After dinner and a few more drinks, we take a drunken stroll through the Kynarian city, following the road of slug-vehicles, admiring the iridescent lights that radiate from the giant mushrooms around us. The place is even more beautiful at night. Everything glitters with blue and green light. There are three moons in the sky, one of them so big and bright and red that it could be its own sun. Glowing butterflies the size of eagles flutter overhead, shimmering like fireflies, filling the night like stars.
The air is also thick with spores. White fluffy mushroom dust floats down on us like snowflakes, covering the city in powder. The smell is pungent and earthy. When I inhale the spores, my throat becomes itchy and raw. It’s becoming difficult to breathe.
“Is this stuff toxic?” I ask Mick, as I cough on the descending spore cloud.
He shrugs. “I was here for two weeks and never had any problems.”
“It’s hard to breathe,” I say.
I also realize that my skin itches and my eyes are watering.
“It’s probably just this planet’s version of allergies,” he says. “Did you have bad seasonal allergies back home?”
I nod at him, keeping my nose and mouth covered.
“Then maybe we should get you some antihistamines. I’m sure they have some in Earthtown.”
“You think that would be enough?” I say through my fingers.
He nods. “Of course. Allergies are the same on every planet.”
As we walk down the sidewalk, an alien woman grabs our attention. She’s not wearing any clothing and looks like no woman I’ve ever seen before. She has large gemstone eyes and her blood glows with blue light, radiating beneath her paper white skin. Her hair is energy, like purple fire. And her flesh is as smooth as jellyfish skin.
Just one look at her and I find myself becoming erect. When she passes, Mick turns around to get a look at her back. He licks his crusty lips and doesn’t remove his eyes from her for a second.
“Oh, man…” he says, moaning with lust. “I love alien women that don’t bother with clothing. Makes it so much easier to size up the goods.”
“What planet is she from?” I ask.
Even though I constantly try to avoid ogling sexually attractive women in public, I can’t stop myself.
“Manticore,” he says. “I’ve never been there but it’s definitely on my bucket list.”
The woman looks back at us, noticing we are staring at her. I doubt she can speak English, but it definitely seems like she knows we’re talking about her.
As I divert my eyes, Mick says, “Don’t look away. In their culture, it’s rude not to admire their bodies in public.”
“Are you serious?” I ask.
The woman gawks at us with her gemstone eyes. Her face is expressionless. I can’t tell if she’s annoyed or pleased with our behavior.
My penis becomes more erect as she looks at me. It’s even worse than it was back at the transport station. I’m not sure, but it feels as though her species has this effect on males.
When the woman turns back and walks away, Mick groans and kicks the glassy sidewalk.
“Damn it, she’s not into us,” Mick says.
“How do you know?” I say.
“In Manticore culture, it’s proper etiquette for males to stare down females they’re attracted to. If the females share the attraction, they let you know immediately, usually by grabbing your dick and pulling you back to their home. If they’re not interested they’ll just look you up and down, then move on.”
“So why is it rude to not admire their bodies in public?” I ask.
“Huh?” he asks, still staring at the woman as she walks away from us.
“You said not to look away from her,” I explain. “Why would that be rude?”
Mick snaps out of it as the woman turns a corner.
“Oh, it’s basically like calling them ugly,” he says.
I nod, then cover my erection with my hand.
When I look down, I notice Mick has just as big of an erection as I do. Only he doesn’t try covering it up. He sees me looking at his dick. Then looks at mine, then looks at his, then we have the most awkward moment of silence I’ve experienced in my life.
Mick laughs and points at my dick. “You must be thinking what I’m thinking!”
I have no idea what he’s thinking and I really don’t know if I want to find out.
“We need to get laid!” he says.
He pats me on the back and waves down a slug-taxi.
“Let’s hit up a whorehouse,” he says. “I’ve been dying to hit up a Kynarian whorehouse all week.”
The idea of going to a whorehouse turns me off. I even lose my erection a little.
I shake my head and hold out my hands. “No, it’s okay. I think I’ll just go back to the hotel room.”
He points at my dick again. “Not with that boner you’re not. You need to relieve that tension. It’s unhealthy to ignore it.”
A slug-taxi pulls up next to us on the side of the road, waiting for us to board. Its massive blubbery flesh pulses and oozes at me, strangely bringing my erection back up to full standing.
“I’m fine, really,” I say, my face growing red with embarrassment. “This is nothing.”
He shakes his head. “I don’t see it going away. You’re going to have to come with me. I insist.”
“Do you even know where to find a brothel?”
“No, but the taxi will find it for us. The thing is telepathic. It will know exactly where we want to go.”
Before I can think of a good enough excuse, I find myself crawling up onto the slug’s back with Mick. Then we take off. A part of me is worried. I’ve never even wanted to go to a brothel on Earth, let alone one on an alien planet. And Kynarians are ugly and smell bad. I have absolutely no desire to have sex with one.
Chapter Three
“This is going to be fun,” Mick says along the way. “My favorite part of visiting alien worlds is sleeping with the native women.”
I nod, but do not agree with his words one bit. I’m not at all excited about going to an alien brothel. I’m terrified.
“Are they safe?” I ask him. “What about sexually transmitted diseases?”
Just the thought of what kind of crazy STDs exist on Kynaria sends me into a panic.
He frowns at me and waves my words away. “Don’t be such a wimp. Just wear a condom.”
“But didn’t you just tell me earlier today tha
t you had a friend whose dick melted off by having sex with an Oolvan woman?”
“Yeah, but there probably won’t be any Oolvan women. It’s a Kynarian brothel.”
“Well, what if Kynarians have weird penis-melting diseases you don’t know about yet?”
“Look, I’ve slept with dozens of aliens on dozens of different worlds and never once have I gotten anything more than a cold. All you need is a condom and you’ll be fine.”
I stare out the window, watching the mushroom buildings pass us by. I don’t bother arguing with Mick anymore. There’s nothing he can say that will ease my worries.
Mick says, “If you want to play it safe, just get a blowjob. You’re always safe with a blowjob.”
The cab leaves the city and takes us deep into the mushroom forest. There aren’t any buildings or lights out here. We’re riding the only slug on the road.
“Where are we going?” I ask, trepidation rising in my voice.
Mick stares out the window. His voice expresses just as much panic as mine, but he doesn’t show it.
“The place must be out of town,” he says. “It’s okay, though. All the best stuff is off the beaten path.”
“Do you think it got our destination wrong?”
It’s a terrifying thought to be at the mercy of a telepathic slug. It could take us out into the middle of nowhere and die. It could think we wanted to go to a city on the other side of the planet.
“No, I’m sure it’s taking us to the right place. These slugs have always been accurate every time I’ve ridden them in the past.”
“So you’re not worried?”
He rubs his gray whiskers and shakes his head. “No, of course I’m not worried.”
But he looks obviously worried.
An hour of back roads and trails of unpaved soil that slows the slug-taxi down to a third of its speed, and Mick finally admits he’s worried.
“The Kynarian wilds aren’t anything to fuck with,” he says. “We definitely don’t want to get stranded out here. They’ve got spiders that can eat a horse.”
I look out the window and see nothing but mushrooms and packs of wild snails out there.
“How do we get this thing to turn around?” I ask.
He shrugs. “You just think about wanting it to turn around and it turns around.”
“So should we think about turning around?”
But just as I ask the question, lights appear up ahead. We pull up alongside a mushroom house that is much smaller than those in the city but still enormous by Earth standards. It looks kind of like the Kynarian equivalent to a roadhouse bar.
Mick wipes his brow with relief and says, “We made it. We actually made it.”
We jump out of our seats into the thick soil and take a few steps toward the door, stretching our legs and backs. The front of the building is filled with half a dozen slug vehicles that slither around each other, waiting for their riders to get back.
“This place looks perfect,” he says, breathing the fungal smells into his nose.
I look back to see the slug-taxi slithering off, leaving a slime trail in its wake. Part of me wants to jump back on the thing and return to the city. But even at a third of its speed, the slug moves far too quickly for me to catch up.
After it’s gone, I look back at Mick and ask, “Is that thing coming back to pick us up later?”
Mick shrugs. “We’ll worry about that after we’re done.”
I translate this to mean: “If we have to stay here all night, I’m perfectly fine with that.”
The inside of the brothel is quiet, like a library. Old, blobby Kynarian men sit at a bar, drinking sludgy brews. They don’t look at each other or say anything. They just drink and stare. I wonder if this actually is a brothel at all.
“I don’t see any women,” I tell Mick.
He looks around the room and nods his head. “They’ve got to be somewhere.”
We see a shriveled toadstool man enter from the back room and step behind the bar, wearing what appears to be a burlap sack with holes cut into it.
“I’ll go figure it out,” he says.
Then he leaves me standing by the entrance with the old mushroom men glaring at me. I wonder if this place was a brothel at one time, but is now some kind of drinking hole for the local forest hermits. Or maybe it is a brothel, but they’ve just got a single prostitute in the back who’s so old she looks like a sagging, withered oyster mushroom.
But as Mick attempts communicating with the bartender using an outdated translation device that doesn’t seem to be working, I see something out the back window. Three women are outside on the back porch, peeking through the windows at me. They have pink and blue skin with flowing tentacle-like hair and long pointed ears. They don’t look anything like the Kynarian women I’ve seen so far. They are much smaller, at only about five feet in height at the tallest. But they’re more attractive and more human than any other creature I’ve seen on this planet so far, despite their bright colored skin and floppy hair.
I was wrong. There are women here. They must be out on the porch for a smoke break, or whatever the Kynarian equivalent to a smoke break might be. With all the boring disgusting old clientele in the bar, I completely understand why they’d want to hide outside for as long as possible.
One of the women notices me, her red beaming eyes lock on me like she’s trying to seduce me. I have no idea if they’re actually Kynarian women or women from a different world, but I do know that Kynarians come in all sorts of varieties. This variety could be the one that’s actually beautiful. Or perhaps they are considered ugly by Kynarian standards, which is why they have to work in a rundown backwoods brothel like this one.
My erection is back in full force just by making eye contact with the woman outside. I wasn’t actually planning on going through with having sex with any of the women at this place, but after seeing her I don’t know how I’ll be able to resist. Perhaps it’s just the fermented frog semen talking, but from this distance she looks prettier than the prettiest girls back on Earth.
“Come on,” Mick says to me, snapping his fingers to get my attention. “They’re upstairs.”
I nod my head and follow him toward the stairwell. Looking back at the window, the women are no longer there. I hope they’ve gone to meet us on the second floor.
“You’re in room two,” Mick says, pointing at the door next to his. There are only four rooms, but I would have preferred the one on the other end. Nothing is a bigger turn off than hearing somebody you know having sex on the other side of a wall.
He disappears into the first room and leaves me standing there in the dark mold-scented hall, staring at the faded-orange door. I don’t hear anyone on the other side. If it’s not the girl with red eyes that I saw outside, I hope the girl is one that is just as attractive. It better not be one of the large blobby toadstool Kynarians I saw in the city.
“Hello?” I say, knocking on the door.
I’m not sure why I speak. It’s not like a Kynarian would understand me.
“I’m coming in…”
The door takes all my strength to open. Since nothing is constructed from wood, it appears to be made of rock and clay, so the door is heavy and difficult to open. Or perhaps it’s just heavy for me because humans aren’t as big and strong as Kynarian men.
Inside, the room is just a closet and bathroom. I close the door behind me. Standing there in the dark room, lit only by blue glowing worms that wiggle up the walls, I realize this is some kind of changing room. I undress and put my clothes on the shelves. My penis is so hard with anticipation that it pokes into the door as I try to get it open to enter the next room.
“Hello?” I call out again.
The bedroom is similar to our room back at the hotel, only far grungier. It’s just a pit of black mud that appears cold and diseased, probably hasn’t been changed out in months. Nobody is in here with me—not the girl from outside, not even a blobby toadstool woman. I probably have to wait here un
til she comes.
There’s nowhere to sit, so I just lean my bare butt against the cold mushroom wall, staring into the black muck.
“Shit…” I say, once I realize that I’m going to have to enter the disgusting pool of mud.
I didn’t think of that before coming. If Kynarians sleep in the mud they surely fuck in the mud as well. I’m probably supposed to get inside and wait for the woman to come.
“This is a horrible idea…” I say.
But I don’t know what else to do. The room is too cold to just wait here naked. The mud will probably give me some kind of warmth. Besides, it’s possible the woman won’t come unless I’m in the mud and ready to go.
I dip my toe into the black sludge and it cracks apart like the skin on chocolate pudding. But the mud isn’t warm at all. It’s freezing. There’s no way I’m going all the way in.
Something moves within the mud and I pull my toe out. Then a larger blob of flesh explodes from the black pool at me. I fall onto the hard floor and crawl backward. The thing oozes in my direction.
“Are you kidding me?” I cry.
This is the prostitute I’m supposed to sleep with? It’s not the girl from outside. It’s not a blobby toadstool woman. It’s some kind of freakish slug monster.
The thing lunges at me like it’s trying to mount me, crawl on me and rape me against the floor. The massive muddy worm opens a slimly hole on its abdomen, aiming it at my erection. But before it can get me, I crawl back into the bathroom and kick the door shut with my foot. The slug slams against the door once, then twice, then it goes quiet. I hear it oozing and pulsing, then sliding back into the muck.
Parasite Milk Page 3