The January Selected Story is by Nathan Witkin
Please feel free to email Nathan at: ndwitkin@gmail.com
THE CONSUMER BECOMES THE CONSUMED
by Nathan Witkin
“Not a lot of folks out late in this sector,” hisses the unseen mouth under the swaying hood.
Unflinching silence from the shorter, barrel-chested man across from him.
“Dangerous area,” the taller hood observes, stating it as an accusation.
After a deliberate pause, a simple “Hmmm” from the quiet man acknowledges the statement but does not nearly acknowledge the danger.
Eyes, nostrils, teeth, and tongue swim across the face, rearranging themselves like confused actors taking their places before the curtain opens. But the draped hood of his sweatshirt does not lift as the play begins, keeping out the luminous yellow fog that drifts from distant street lamps.
His audience, another blackness filling a hooded sweatshirt, hides in similar obscurity across a stretch of rubble that used to be a concrete wall. Glimpses of its once-sprawling graffiti mural, now reduced to pieces of a disassembled jigsaw puzzle, give hints to the wall’s prior form.
Considering the extreme danger involved in buying “the Bug,” the epidemic spread of this substance is a testament to the intensity of its addictiveness.
The one named Jacob clenches his unseen fists, squeezing out sweat like a sponge. His loathing of this process is not what makes him unique—no one wants to be a slave to uncontrollable urges or trapped in an economy that is as much a web of murder and coercion as monetary incentives. Because Jacob was fond of the world before the Bug, its extraterrestrial origins make its grip on his life all the more revolting.
The life and fate-worse-than-death guessing game continues.
“Are you a cop?” the taller hood asks as if feigning small talk—an undercover officer would not be the worst thing to encounter in this kind of deal.
“No,” comes the seemingly bored response.
“How can I be sure?”
Wide shoulders shrug on the shorter man, followed by an equally lazy drawl. “They don’t make not-a-cop badges.”
Creaks of decaying metal echo in the distance, coming to life in the wind. In daylight, a flood of the sick and fatigued will hemorrhage and clot in the streets, massing like an army to overcome any war, plague, or famine their overpopulation will incur.
If the addicts didn’t sleep through the day, they would find the night’s sterile silence to be otherworldly.
The two figures resonate this quiet. Obscurity is the only known defense to attacks from the Consumed. Their ability to reshape their flesh to hide among their prey is so advanced that they do not even seem to be able to immediately recognize each other.
“So how do you want to do this?” the taller hood asks.
After a moment that hangs as long as its desperation will allow, the shorter replies, “You can start by asking a different question.”
The taller sneers, “How about this—why are you in the habit of talking or, rather, not talking to complete strangers alone, in this neighborhood, at night?”
The shorter casually offers the threat with inhuman callousness. “Maybe I’m one of the Consumed. You wouldn’t know until I was snorting the Bug from your blood.”
“Unless I’m Consumed too. Then we’d both be in trouble,” the taller snaps. “Plus, I hear dealers will pay a high price for live specimens of the Consumed.”
“Are you a dealer?”
“Wouldn’t an addict want to know?”
Waiting for the silence to settle, edging the fear in like a pack of stalking carnivores, the shorter man finally suggests, “How about we just have a conversation. Normal people still do that, I think.”
Nodding his entire body up and down on the balls of his feet, the taller hood asks, “About what?”
“Let’s talk about the Bug.”
With his heart pounding like fists against a brick wall, Jacob wonders whether the figure across from him is an addict, a dealer, or one of the Consumed. A part of him thinks, We always expected an alien invasion to descend in armed star ships. We thought a killer epidemic would be spread by conventional coughs and bites.
So much about the Bug is beyond human understanding; perhaps it is fortunate that its destruction would spread through anything as knowable as the illegal drug trade.
*****
Jacob remembers the resounding anticipation when the substance was first lifted from the meteorite—how it held such potential for our understanding of the origins of life and the nature of mortality.
During the initial experiments with the substance, all anyone seems to care about is its ability to encode itself into organic material, keep it alive, and even regenerate damaged cells. The key to eternal life. Rained down like fire from Prometheus.
Soon after health benefits of the Bug are recanted, Jacob comes home to find his wife passed out amid syringes with a needle still in her arm. While the world watches news reports of frantic discoveries into the side effects of the Bug—that overuse would either liberate each cell of the addict into a pool of organic matter or replicate itself inside the addict until it had taken over—Jacob is hearing this directly from the doctors, sitting next to his wife with his hands clutching in and around hers.
Jacob holds and even drags her hands through every possible treatment. When she finally asks for mercy, he seals her in their bedroom, unable to let her go.
She can’t die, he tells himself. Not with the Bug. She just needs to get away from the dealers and the injections and the outside world gone mad.
She’s secluded a full week before he notices the regular thumping sound coming from the room. It’s another five days before he gathers the courage to go in.
Aside from shattered light bulbs and the four-post bed tilted against its missing leg, the room is serenely clean and orderly, indicating that his wife has not moved from the spot in the middle of the floor where she now sits, cross-legged and facing away from the door. Jacob locks it behind him.
Thump
She hits herself on the crown of the head with the freed bedpost. The strength and speed of her movement would make you think that her physical condition was unaffected by the blow. Jacob deludes himself with this illusion.
She is slouched over. It’s difficult to judge her condition from the threshold. Only razors of light cut through the dank air from the boarded windows. Tensed and clutching the baseball bat, he creeps forward, his body more appropriately aware of the situation than his sleep-deprived mind.
“Honey, are you okay?”
Thump
“Do you feel better? Are the cravings gone?”
Pause…
Thump
As he nears her spot on the floor, his concentration is affixed in a vice grip to carving out her defeated form against the slits of light. In fact, he is too focused on her outline to notice the slurping adhesion between his shoes and the carpet that increasingly accompany each step.
“Honey, you know I kept you in here to protect you from yourself,” he tells her. “I didn’t know what else to do.”
For days, he was dreading the moment when he would have to face her. But now his sloshing steps seem to be carrying him on their own accord, and when he sees her, he doesn’t scream. Every other scrap of matter in the universe seems to scream instead.
The back of her skull to the top of her mouth is a crater. With nothing holding it up, her jaw lies slack against her throat, and her tongue thrashes around the carnage in desperate confusion like an oversized worm reaching up out of Hell and finding our world to be worse.
She has been trying to work back to the brain stem, the seat of life at the base of the skull, but between each bludgeon, Jacob can make out the cells regenerating—the insufferable cancer of life.
When the shock wears off an indeterminate time later and recedes into the worst kind of hate, he loosens his grip on the shattered bat handle.
*****
“What, just have a casual conversation? About the Bug?” the taller hood seems to stretch up in tittering laughter and condescension of the barrel-chested man’s impatience. “Aren’t you afraid of what you could reveal?”
“Nothing will happen until something is revealed,” the shorter hood replies with such stillness that the words seem to float up from nowhere.
Eagerness to discuss the Bug could be a novice mistake. Or it could be an attempt to taunt an addict into losing control.
“Let’s talk about the Bug then,” the taller gives a determined nod. “I hear that the first injection feels like your blood cells have become alive—that you become aware of them on a conscious level.”
After a thoughtful pause, the shorter responds, “I hear it’s liberating, makes you super-perceptive and heightens your consciousness. That, once it gets into your brain, that you can control nerve impulses, navigate your every memory, even master the secrets of the universe.”
With a detached evenness, the taller takes up the call-and-response. “I hear that the crash after the high feels like your body is dying. That each of your cells is crying out in pain.”
“But your body is always dying. Cells are constantly withering and being replaced.”
“Yeah, but you feel it,” the taller one emphasizes and adds, “I hear.”
“Sounds agonizing,” the shorter figure says.
“What is the scariest thing you’ve seen that came from the Bug?” he taller asks.
“What’s scarier that being face-to-face with a Consumed?”
The taller fires back indignantly, “What’s scarier? How about the unquenchable desperation of the addicts? Watching a single person being ripped apart by the Bug isn’t nearly as devastating as watching society being ripped apart by its runaway need for the Bug.”
“Society was screwed up before the Bug. What’s changed?”
Swept up in the debate, the taller continues his rant. “Look at the decay around you. Look at the rates of theft, prostitution, and murder-for-hire—they’re the engine driving and driven by sale of the Bug. The madness of addiction is what makes us less-than-human, not being dissolved into the Consumed.”
The short man indicates that this comment is only worth a one-shoulder shrug. “People have always and will always want more than what they have. It’s the ultimate end of human progress: substituting one addiction for another. When you get depressed and drink yourself into a coma, you are replacing your addiction to happiness with alcohol. When you feel lonely and pay for a diseased prostitute, you are replacing your addiction to human connection with sex.”
“So dealers are selling distraction, and these addicts are gladly selling their less vital organs to pay for it?” the taller sneers.
The shorter hood lowers slightly with a leveling stare. “What would you pay me to take away your obsession? Not the thing you’re addicted to, but the obsession that can only be avoided by drowning yourself in life-consuming addiction? What is that worth to you?”
Silence shrieks chills into the air.
The taller meets his acquaintance’s intensity. “You tell me what you’d be willing to sell to someone. Would you sell death? Accept money for killing off a civilization?” he asks with a tremor like the drag of a serrated blade.
“No one sells anything. Everyone simply consumes.”
“So, what is it that the dealers do?”
“Feed the consumer.”
Pause.
“Who’s the consumer in that statement,” the taller asks, “the addicts or the Bug?”
The passing seconds grind on exposed nerve, torturing the figures into confessing any ounce of humanity they have left.
“Freeze!” the shorter man booms, whipping out a shaky handgun. “Take off that hood or I’m shooting off your head!”
*****
It looks like a drug house, but feels like a quarantine, Jacob thinks as he stumbles with cold-blooded determination down a dilapidated hallway that seems to be getting narrower with each whining step. The air is thick with body odor and ripples to life with a broad range of groans and screams barely obscured by makeshift doors.
A thick pile of ratty clothes at the end of the corridor suddenly becomes animated, rising against the milky back-glow of a newspaper-sealed window.
“Hey,” the voice coming from under the baseball hat warms with slow recognition, “Jessica’s husband. How’s she doin’? I haven’t seen her in a bit.”
“She’s been killed,” Jacob cuts in, making it clear that he’s not here to reminisce.
The dealer tenses. “I’m sorry to hear that.”
“Only sorry to lose a customer,” Jacob steps forward resolutely. “You killed her.”
The dealer raises his hands conciliatorily, “Hey man, I didn’t give her the first hit. I only gave her what she needed to . . .”
A silenced gunshot hushes him, and a few more whisper him to the ground like a soothing lullaby. Jacob would prefer the typical roar of his hand cannon to this deceptively peaceful sound, but an explosion strong enough to scatter this tenement building across the ghetto wouldn’t do justice to his rage.
“You profited from her suffering,” Jacob manages through clenched teeth, “and now you pay back what you took.”
“I don’t profit,” the dealer replies with impossible composure as he continues to slump down, “I only sell to treat my own addiction.”
He’s sinking further and further as if swallowed by the rotting floorboards. Despite this, he is still speaking. “I’m a middleman. A link in da shain,” his diction slurs as his mouth falls apart.
But the dealer isn’t simply a plastic figure melting in an oven—his features are scrambling over and away from each other like a vat of various critters and slugs suddenly set free. Watching the individual organs skittering toward him, Jacob feels his own guts doing the same thing in revulsion.
Shit shit shit, Jacob thinks, his mind kicking into a sprint slightly ahead of his retreating feet.
The dealer’s smaller muscles and bones are pouring out of his clothes, tossing and flipping each other like a circus of tiny acrobats spreading out. Jacob is still facing this abomination when the confusion of organic matter launches itself upward, a creature hurling up from the depths.
All but the necessary senses becoming a blur, Jacob scrambles down the hallway as the monster jumps from wall to wall, a loosely organized mob of muscles and organs wielding bones like weapons. And while this frenzy of lunging tissue is practically tearing itself apart, it is clearly closing in on Jacob faster than the hallway is opening up. When a section of exploding plaster shouts impending death into Jacob’s ear, he throws himself against a door on the opposite wall. It shatters mercifully and, with a few deft movements, Jacob tosses off his overcoat and positions himself in front of the small room’s single, open window.
It could be his confident stance or the body armor with “Officer Sessions” on the name plate, but eyes somewhere in the knot of organic matter are given pause for thought as the mass thrashes in internal debate.
Jacob knows that there is a thirty story drop at his back, and he has witnessed one of the Consumed throw himself from such a height in what was likely a suicide attempt. It looked like the sidewalk was the surface of a pool of chunky red liquid and the jumper did a belly-flop, splashing it everywhere.
Still alive, the liquefied remains had writhed and vibrated with its owner’s scream. It might have reconstituted itself if there weren’t addicts around to snort it up.
Reaching for the clasp of a small package strapped to his chest like a rip cord, Jacob says with almost friendly confidence, “Trust me: you do not want to follow me out here,” and leaps backwards.
*****
“I said, take that hood back slowly, Shithead,” the shorter man growls.
Raising his hands carefully, the taller says, “You don’t want to do this, man.”
In the escalating fuss, a number of statements are shouted in a swirl: “Get on your knees!” “Drop the gun!” “I’m not kidding!” “I said get down!” “I’m a cop!”
In the heat of this chaos, the taller figure draws back the hood with a flick of his wrists.
Immediately, the gunshot rings out and his head bursts apart. The taller man’s head is torn apart before the bullet reaches it, passing harmlessly through empty air. Fragments of the exploded head scatter into the night’s haze and converge on the shorter man like a raging swarm of insects.
A small hurricane whips searing fragments of bone and flesh through the space occupied by the two men. The violence of this vortex swells with the scream ringing from its center and wanes in the eventual silence.
Chunks of organic material reconvene haphazardly into the form of a tall, lanky man.
I hate the dealers, Jacob thinks to himself. The rest of the world may see me and those like me as monsters, but we’re not trying to spread this disease—the dealers are.
With cells from the dealer’s body sloshing through his system, Jacob stretches his now-wider shoulders and considers the distinction the dealer had made between addiction and obsession.
Glancing at his naked arms, he notices that that the track marks pocking his skin are wriggling.
He reaches for the package that was strapped to his chest, pulls out the vial of incandescent hazel liquid, and prepares a syringe. When the alien substance swarms into his bloodstream, it triggers the memories of introducing his wife to the Bug and helping her shoot up for the first time. Gripped by the worst kind of hate—the hate you can only have for yourself—Jacob decides that the dealer was right.
He realizes that addiction to an outside substance can be all-consuming and enslaving, but it can never be inescapably part of you like obsession. And coming to terms with his obsession doesn’t set him free.
Nathan Witkin is a small-town criminal defense and custody attorney in Marion, Ohio, an MMA cage-fighter, and an innovator in the field of alternative dispute resolution. His fiction has appeared in Exiles Magazine and Black Petals and his non-fiction has appeared in The Middle East Journal, Conflict Resolution Quarterly, and Harvard’s Negotiation Journal.