The Tick People, page 6
The rest of his house was in even worse shape than the bedroom. The sliding glass door was shattered. The walls were covered in some kind of black fluid that had hardened into a cocoon. And the living room floor was gone. The tick woman had ripped away the carpet and cracked open the concrete foundation to expose a patch of dogflesh where she could feed.
When Fernando saw the tick woman with her head buried in the floor, her abdomen in the air, he thought he was going to be sick again. He sat down on the couch, trying not to get any mucus on his clean pants, and just stared at the creature until she was finished with her breakfast.
“Are you done?” he asked.
She replied with a burnt sugar odor.
In the daylight, the tick was even more grotesque than she was the previous night. Even her human parts, her face and large breasts, were ugly to Fernando.
“Good, because we’re leaving.”
The tick woman went to him and wiggled her antennae. She placed a blood-wet pincher into his hand and stared at him with her big brown eyes. Then she sprayed a baked bread odor at him, which Fernando translated to mean that she was happy and never wanted to leave him.
“I’m taking you to your mother today. She agrees with me that we don’t belong together. Hopefully she’ll be able to talk some sense into you.”
But she had no idea what she was saying. She was convinced that she had finally found her mate and would live there with him for the rest of her life. It wasn’t going to be easy to get rid of her.
There was a knock at the door and Fernando leapt from his seat, pushing the tick woman away from him. She sprayed him with three angry odors as he shoved her into the bedroom. He thought for sure it was going to be the media again, assuming one of his neighbors had to have seen the Ectoparasite around his house and called the press.
But it wasn’t the press. It was even worse. It was his sister.
“Fernando?” Bethany said through the door. “I know you’re home. Open up.”
Fernando couldn’t let his sister know about the tick woman. He couldn’t let her inside. But he knew her. He knew she would push her way in if he opened the door. So he left through the backyard and walked around the house to greet her out front.
“What are you doing here?” he asked, walking through his furry lawn toward her.
“I came to check up on you. What were you doing in your back yard?”
Fernando shrugged. He didn’t have time for a good lie. “I was about to do some yard work. Pull weeds.”
“You? Do yard work?”
“I don’t have anything better to do,” he said.
“That’s actually why I’m here,” she said, coming toward him with an envelope. “I’ve been worried about you ever since this matchmate business. I have no idea how I would be able to cope if I were matched with one of those disgusting things. It’s just terrible.”
Fernando nodded. She didn’t know the half of it.
“It must be so lonely knowing that you’ll never have a mate,” she said. “I know you said you never wanted to get married, but I always figured that someday you’d change your mind. Now, even if you change your mind, you’ll never have a matchmate.”
A strong pine odor flowed out of the front door and filled the yard. The tick woman was yelling at him, trying to ask him what the heck he was doing outside with that other woman. Fernando moved his garbage from his garage down to the end of his driveway, leading his sister away from the front door before she could smell the tick’s language or hear the scratching noises coming from within.
“So I want you to meet a co-worker of mine,” she said, forcing the envelope into Fernando’s hand. “I think you’ll like her.”
He opened it up to find pictures of a stocky red-headed woman with a mousy smile. He already didn’t like her. “Are you serious?”
“Her matchmate died in the earthquake last week. The one you caused by getting Old Gloomy too excited.”
Fernando froze. “What are you talking about? Nobody died in that earthquake last week…”
“One person did.”
“How?” Fernando couldn’t believe it. He had no idea he’d been responsible for someone’s death. Nobody had told him. “It was hardly even an earthquake. There wasn’t even any property damage.”
“He was driving to work at the time. When the ground rumbled, he thought the dog’s tail was about to wag. He panicked. He tried to flee the area, going ninety-eight miles per hour. Then he lost control, crashed into the back of a garbage truck, and died in the hospital a few days later.”
“But… But that wasn’t my fault!” Fernando cried. “He’s the one who crashed his car.”
“If you hadn’t messed up at work that day it never would have happened,” Bethany said. “Mary, the girl I work with, was supposed to meet him the same day of the crash. She was devastated, as you can imagine.”
“So you want me to meet this woman? Why? So she can tell me how I ruined her life?”
“No,” Bethany said. “I want you to put her life back together. I want you to fill the void you created in her life.”
“Are you saying…”
“I’m saying that I want you to marry her.”
“Marry her? Why? What would be the point if I’m not her matchmate?”
“Neither of you have matchmates, so you should be together. It’s better than spending the rest of your lives alone.”
“But we can’t have children. We don’t love each other. It’s stupid.”
“Actually, you can have children together. And love can come later.”
“How the heck can we have children together?”
“With an insemination device,” she said. “Before her matchmate was taken off of life support, they made a silicone replica of his key and saved an ample amount of his sperm. She can use the replica like a dildo to unlock her womb and spray the semen inside. Getting pregnant won’t be an issue. But she needs a father for her children.”
“And you want me to be that father?”
“Yes,” she said. “You caused the problem. You’re going to fix it.”
“But I can’t be a father. I don’t even have a job.”
“There’s a position opening up in the shipping department at my company,” she said, handing him a card for the hiring manager. “Call this number. He’ll set you up.”
“No,” Fernando said. “I’m a Stressman. I’m not working at your company.”
“Wherever you work, it doesn’t matter. You could be a stay at home dad for all I care. But you’re meeting Mary. You’re going to set things right.”
“This is insane, Bethany. Even for you.”
“I’m bringing her here next Thursday at seven. Be presentable.”
“No way. Not going to happen.”
“You said you had nothing better to do.” Bethany turned and walked back to her car at the end of the driveway.
“I don’t care. Don’t bring her here.” Fernando raised his voice, but she didn’t look back. “Are you listening to me?”
Before she got in her car and drove off, she said one last thing:
“You should go take a shower. You smell like a sewer.”
She was gone before he got the chance to tell her that he just got out of the shower.
When Fernando went back inside, the tick woman was spraying the house with some kind of raw hamburger odor. It was like she was leaving a warning message for all other women who entered the home. The message read: stay away.
“We’re leaving within the hour,” Fernando said to her.
She didn’t look back at him. She seemed angry.
Fernando smelled his shirt and realized that he did smell like a sewer. He removed his clothes and took another shower. But when he smelled himself again, the tick woman’s stink still saturated his skin. He took three more showers, used bar soap, dish soap, and rubbing alcohol, but nothing could remove the smell. It was like her odor penetrated his bloodstream as they had sex the night before, and now he was sweating the stuff. He wondered if it was a way that Ectoparasites tagged their mates.
Fernando waited until there was nobody outside who would see him with the tick woman. Then he left, heading in the direction of The Cluster. At first, his matchmate didn’t want to leave his house. She wanted to stay, probably to mate again. So he left without her. It only took a few minutes of waiting outside before she followed.
“Let’s move quickly,” he said, leading her shuffling arachnid body through his neighborhood, watching to make sure nobody was looking.
When he saw a car drive by or someone in the neighborhood looking out of their window, he’d put as much distance as he could between him and the insect, ignoring her, pretending as if she was just a random Ectoparasite traveling in the same direction as he was.
“Mentis…” she said, catching up to Fernando.
She tried to open up a dialog, even though they couldn’t understand each other. Based on the pine smell in the air, Fernando assumed she was confused about where he was taking her.
“This needs to end before it goes any further,” he said to her. “I don’t know what we’d do if you ended up getting pregnant.”
As they walked, Fernando thought about the idea of impregnating a disgusting creature like the tick woman. He imagined her insect abdomen swelling with his child, then giving birth to some strange half-tick baby. The concept horrified him, yet at the same time it made him aroused. He found himself trying to cover his erection as they walked down the sidewalk.
“Mentis…” she said to him, wrapping her pincher around his waist.
The pincher was cold and hard, but somehow soothing against his skin. He wrapped his fingers around the top of the claw, feeling the smooth texture.
Her other insect appendages wrapped around his hips and stopped him in his tracks.
“Home,” she said to him, peering into his eyes.
The buttery smell filled his nostrils as his penis grew even harder, digging into the shell of her lower abdomen. As her breasts squished into his arms, her lips widened with rapid breaths, Fernando couldn’t control himself any longer.
“Let’s go,” he said.
Then he led her back to his house, snuck her inside, and took her into the bedroom. They made love for hours, oozing into each other, covering each other with stink and slime. Fernando wanted to resist. He wanted to kick her out of the bed, shove her out of the house, but something inside of him wouldn’t allow that. It wanted nothing more than to be inside of her, to be covered by her creamy eggy fluids.
They weren’t meant to live together, they weren’t meant to be a part of the same society, they weren’t even meant to communicate, but there was one thing they were meant for. And as the tick woman squirmed and clawed at his flesh, pumping in and out with gooey squirts, Fernando realized that he couldn’t get enough of it.
That was, until they finished. Then Fernando hated himself, and he hated her, with all of his soul. He wished he never would have brought her back. He wished he could have taken her to The Cluster and ditched her there for good.
CHAPTER EIGHT
HIVE
For several days, Fernando gave up on the world and allowed his instincts to take over. He made love with the tick woman many times a day, not bothering to even take a shower anymore, allowing her cream-colored mucus to harden across his chest and legs. Immediately after orgasm, he’d always push off of her and run to the bathroom to throw up, then he’d curse himself in the mirror for being such a disgusting pervert for enjoying it so much.
His house didn’t look like the same place anymore. It had been transformed by the insect woman. Without the flooring in place, his living room was beginning to grow fur between the mounds of scab left behind after his matchmate’s feedings. The ground was covered in her black, charcoal-like shit that Fernando had to scoop out with a shovel every morning. The walls and ceilings became covered in a thick cocoon, transforming the appearance of his house into the domain of an insect. Fernando felt as if he was now living inside of a giant beehive.
Fernando had seen the nests the Ectoparasites made on the surface, which looked very similar to the cocooned walls of his home. But they were very small, the size of a garbage can or a tractor tire at the biggest. He’d never seen an Ectoparasite nest as large as the one that was being built inside of his home. Because of this, Fernando refused to believe the tick woman was actually building a nest at all. He kidded himself into thinking it was what tick people did to the insides of their homes. He’d never actually been inside of an Ectoparasite’s hair-hut before. It would make sense they would want to cocoon the interior of their huts in order to keep out the rain and insulate for warmth.
But Fernando realized he was just deluding himself once the tick woman began laying eggs. One morning, he saw a pile of the mucus-covered white orbs in the corner of the living room, but thought nothing of them at first. He assumed they were just some kind of strange insect discharge. But then he saw the insect woman in the bathroom, squatting over the bathtub, squirting out the same gooey eggs into the basin. A putrid fishy odor filled the bathroom as the tick stared blankly at Fernando, squeezing out egg after egg.
“Eggs?” he cried. “Are you fucking serious?”
She didn’t respond. Her lower insect limbs twitched and quivered, rubbing a yellow pudding across her lower abdomen to lubricate the birthing process.
Fernando ran out of the room and fell to his knees on the hairy living room floor. He looked at the egg pile in the corner. It made him so sick he was shaking. Reality came crashing in. Although he was having sex with the tick woman, which was disgusting enough on its own, it didn’t really dawn on him that he’d been breeding with her. He kept telling himself that he could get rid of her at any time, that he didn’t have to marry her, that he could just have sex for a while and then his life would one day go back to normal. But these eggs… These were his children. These were permanent. If he allowed the eggs to hatch he would never be able to go back to his old life. He would have to tell his sister about his relationship with the tick, the news stations would eventually find out, his boss, his neighbors. His life would be over.
When he was a kid, he had friends who would sneak into Ectoparasite nests and steal their eggs. Then they would smash them against walls, throw them at cars, stomp on them until they were chunky pools of goo. Fernando knew it was cruel, but it was something that most human kids did when they were at that destructive age. It wasn’t exactly illegal to smash tick eggs. The reason they laid so many was because tick mothers expected to lose the majority of their young, since the eggs were often destroyed by seagulls, rats, stray dogs, and even other Ectoparasites who saw neighboring nests as competition.
Fernando didn’t have a choice. Deep inside of his soul a part of him cried out, begging him to stop. But his logical brain knew this was what had to be done. He couldn’t allow the freaks to be born. He smashed every egg in the living room with a shovel. Then he went in the bathroom, locked the tick woman out, and destroyed every egg in the tub.
Google cried, filling the air with a desperate vinegar scent, furiously trying to scratch her way through the door as her babies were smashed to a pulp. She couldn’t understand why her mate would do such a horrible thing. She wondered if she’d done something wrong.
Fernando hated himself for it. He screamed with every strike of the shovel, cursing himself, fighting every instinct in his body in order to get the job done. When it was over, Fernando opened the bathroom door and pushed his way past the tick woman as raisin-scented tears flowed down her cheeks. He didn’t care if she hated him for what he did. If she hated him maybe she would leave him, then all of his problems would be solved.
Google began hiding her eggs from Fernando. She’d lay them in secret, while he was sleeping. He’d find small piles of them in his closet, under his bed, beneath his kitchen sink, in his backyard. Whenever he’d find them, he’d smash them, not allowing a single one to survive. His entire house was filling with a rotten egg smell so pungent that he had to spend most of his time in the backyard.
One day, while sitting on a lawn chair, hosing off the after-sex stink from his body, somebody came to his door, banging and yelling to be let in. It was the voice of some woman. He didn’t bother answering it. Such an issue was better left ignored. But the person at the door did not give up. She went around the side of the house and entered the backyard. She knew he was there. She could smell him.
“You filthy defiler!” she cried, shuffling across the yard toward him.
It was Google’s mother. She’d discovered that her daughter had left her old home and had been missing for days. She knew exactly what had happened. It wasn’t difficult to track them down.
“You said you had no intention of being with my daughter,” she said, standing aggressively with her pinchers out, scuttling side to side like a beach crab. “I knew I shouldn’t have trusted you.”
Fernando jumped out of his seat and got behind his lawn furniture, using it as a barrier as she closed in on him.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean for this to happen.”
Google stepped through the broken glass of the sliding door, twitching her antennae at her mother, spraying a pine scent into the air. The mother oozed smells back at her daughter as she spoke to Fernando. It was like she was having two conversations at the same time.
She said, “Maybe you didn’t want to marry her, but you still wanted to have sex. Men are all the same, no matter what the species.”
She tried to get around the lawn furniture, but Fernando circled to the other side to avoid her pinchers as they snipped the air at him.
“If you don’t want us to be together, then just take her and go,” Fernando said. “I don’t want to be with her. She’s ruining my life.”
“You’re ruining her life because you have no self control, you disgusting pig.” She snapped her pinchers at him. “I’m going to cut off that thing so that you’ll never defile her again.”
