Blood Queen & Other Stories Read online

  BLOOD QUEEN

  &

  OTHER STORIES

  R O B B L I S S

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  Blood Queen & Other Stories © 2020 by Rob Bliss . All rights reserved.

  Cover by: Bookcover4u.com

  http://www.robbliss.flazio.com

  http://twitter.com/BlissRob

  https://www.facebook.com/rob.bliss.779

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  All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopy, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the author, or his agent, except by a reviewer who may quote brief passages in a critical article or review to be printed in a magazine or newspaper, or electronically transmitted on radio or television. All persons in this book are fictitious, and any resemblance that may seem to exist to actual persons living or dead is purely coincidental. This is a work of fiction.

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  Also by Rob Bliss:

  NOVELS:

  [Published by Necropublications.com]

  Cut

  The Bride Stripped Bare

  Widow

  NOVELLA:

  Devil's Note

  STORY COLLECTIONS:

  Black Blood & Other Stories

  Blood Queen & Other Stories

  Index of Stories:

  *

  Blood Queen

  Circus Maze

  Clown Mask

  Foxhole

  Close Cousins

  Limbo

  Nip The Bud

  Pandora's Box

  Sandbag

  Snow Angel

  Snow Cat

  The Cage

  The Knight of Tumor

  *

  About the Author

  *

  Blood Queen

  Jeff didn't recognize the itching blemish for what it was: a bite. Thought instead that it was a hive, a touch of poison ivy (but where would he pick that up in a city of millions?), a zit that had found its way to the center of his chest. He headed to work on the bus, scratched intermittently all day as he poured coffee for bankers and stockbrokers in the core of the financial district. The itch soon diminished and the red blemish faded by the time he went to bed.

  More appeared in the morning, chest, arms and legs – specks of hazy red, not a rash, the skin not broken or bleeding. They itched when he thought about them, but if he was sufficiently distracted, they disappeared. The itch didn't last all day. Some of the grouped red specks stayed on his pale skin longer, but the majority were gone by morning. A hot bath after work always helped.

  On the third night he was awoken to see the source of the itching blemishes. Looked beneath the old t-shirt he wore as part of his pyjamas to see a small red bug latched onto his chest, its back swollen with his blood.

  He sat up in panic and ripped off his shirt. Turned the night light on, but couldn't find the bug. Rifled through the bedsheets, flattened every fold and crease, but it was gone. He got out of bed, picked up the shirt from where it had landed, folded it inside-out.

  Tucked down into the collar stitch was a small red dot trying to make itself smaller. Its back wasn't swollen red, its coloring closer to a dark rust. It was wedged in so well that Jeff's thumbnail couldn't pry it out. So he pressed it and the shirt between thumb and forefinger. A tiny crack popped as the body burst, the slightest smear of blood left in the sewn crease.

  Jeff checked the rest of the shirt, threw it in the laundry hamper. Checked his sheets once more, overturned the pillow, slipped off the pillow case and turned it inside-out. Got a fresh shirt and went back to sleep.

  In the morning, the itch had returned, centering on the tops of his feet. Small red flowers that his fingernails had scraped raw. More nail slices were gouged up his shins and a few across his stomach. He clipped his nails before he went to work, wrote a list of household cleaners to buy on his way home.

  He tried not to think about the bugs, and would confess their existence in his bachelor apartment, on his body, to no one. People would think he wallowed in his own filth. Maybe he did and didn't know it. He would clean the hell out of everything.

  Two filled shopping bags came home with him. He started his first load of laundry, just clothes; the second load would be bedsheets, pillow cases, the wool blanket draped over the foot of the futon. Maybe even the pillow itself, since it was washable.

  He crowded his furniture into the small kitchen – dresser, desk and two chairs, the wooden crate he used as a bedside table, the television which rested on two plastic milk cartons and which could slide easily over the hardwood floor.

  With the main room cleared, he half-filled a plastic bucket he had bought at a dollar store with water and half with bleach. Opened all the windows as he mopped the floor. Went down to the laundry room to get out of the apartment as his eyes stung. Switched the clothing load from the washer to the dryer. Went back upstairs to spray and wipe every piece of furniture.

  The wooden futon frame came in two pieces. He had them leaning up against the kitchen wall, with the mattress folded in half on the floor. He sprayed the mattress, both sides and the edges, inspected the frame, but there were no bugs or smears of red.

  Yellow rubber gloves on, a spray bottle of blue liquid in one hand, a sponge in the other, he looked at the grain of the frame's wood, the knots, and decided that something didn't look right. He had rarely taken notice of the frame, but it seemed as though it had more streaks of wood grain in it. Dark lines through blonde wood, especially where one piece of wood met another, screws attaching slats to the main legs.

  He looked closer, nose almost touching the wood. The light wasn't good in the kitchen with the blinds closed. Opening the blinds, he let in natural sunlight, and looked again at the wood grain.

  And saw bodies crammed into the gouges, holding still, piled on top of each other, every size from pinprick to nail head, the living resting amongst the shells of corpses, those too young or weak to exit their home in the wood to scavenge the blood of the sleeper.

  "Oh my fucking god," Jeff whispered to the wood.

  He doused the entire futon frame with blue liquid, then reasoned with himself: the futon was one of the few beds that, with such a simple design, didn't really need a frame. The mattress was enough of a bed. So he hauled the infected wood down to the garbage of the four-story, post-World War Two apartment building, left it amongst the other household furniture abandoned by those residents who moved and didn't want to take heavy furniture with them.

  Jeff noticed there was a lot of wooden pieces of furniture in the trash: bookshelves, side tables, desks, towel racks. Did the bugs only nest in wood? Most of his furniture was wooden.

  He checked the dryer, still half an hour to go, and someone else had put their clothes in the washer. There would be a laundry room line-up, and it could take all day to do two loads, trying to sneak your laundry in before someone else tried doing the same to you. There had been laundry fights.

  Back in his apartment, he debated about what wooden furniture he would get rid of. None of it – he would wait and see if they returned. He poured coffee for a living, so his meagre possessions were necessary. Even the television didn't work since he couldn't pay for cable. But he had found a used DVD player that still worked, and he would take out movies from the library. Movies and books were his only entertainment at home. He hadn't watched any of his favorite TV shows for over a year. He always had at least five books from the library stacked on the bedside crate next to the reading lamp. He couldn't get rid of that crate.

  Instead, he washed everything, sprayed it, washed it again. Inspected the corners where w
ood was nailed to wood, couldn't see anything – the futon frame had been the only infected piece. He was relieved.

  His apartment, his sheets, his clothing all smelled of soap and disinfectant. He had to keep the windows open for a few hours to air out the toxic fumes. But he was content that he had destroyed the plague.

  The bugs returned that night.

  Frustrated, Jeff looked them up on-line. They mostly came out at night, and lived in wood, cloth, paper. On hands and knees, he inspected the hardwood floor, the dark grooves between slats. He sprayed the blue liquid along every line, got a screwdriver and managed to dig out a good handful of bodies, as black or dark red as the grooves. Then he decided he didn't need the television, even though it and the crates were largely made of plastic. He was slowly coming to the conclusion that he would need to jettison his possessions, becoming even more poor.

  The bugs returned every night in greater numbers. They woke him up several times per night, exhausting him for work in the morning. He found them holding still beneath his shirt, walking from the bed across his thighs, tucked into his armpits, along the waistband of his pyjama bottoms, in this underwear, under the pillow case, lined across the seam sewing the two halves of the pillow together, once on his forehead.

  Too much money was going to laundry. He threw out the wool blanket, slept with the light on for as long as he could stand it, pulled a toque over his eyes to try and block the light. Hoped the bugs hated light, as much as he was hating it as well. They burrowed into the warmth of his toque. He slept with the windows open to allow the cold fall air to freeze them. They found warmth in his body while he shivered in his pyjamas.

  With a day off, he went to the beer store, bought a twelve-pack. The only place the bugs didn't seem to go (he had found them in the kitchen, the wooden cupboards, along the floor moulding) was in the bathroom. Specifically, the steel bathtub was an oasis. They couldn't cling to metal. Jeff drank in the bathtub, soothing his scratches with hot water, while he read a library book.

  A bug crawled out of the spine of the book, dropped into the water, died as it sank. Jeff began keeping a glass of water on the bedside crate, since the bugs died easily in water. Until then, he had popped the bugs on his shirt and pants and sheets, leaving red peppered spots everywhere. Laundry done every two or three days. Now when they woke him up in the middle of the night, he plucked them off his body and bed and dropped them into the glass.

  In the morning, he would see his night kill, collected in their watery grave. An average of twenty to thirty per night. But those were only the ones he had discovered once awoken. How many came out of the wood when he was asleep would be a secret left buried in the floorboards.

  Finally, he told someone. But only after they had asked. A note was slipped under his door from the superintendent asking if he had problems with the bugs, since other tenants had already complained.

  Yes, he had a problem, and he had saved them in a glass of water. The super came to see the glass, and the next day his apartment was sprayed. But Jeff had no faith anymore in anything man-made to kill them. He was right. They came back that night, he felt their legs crossing his body as though they were crossing a desert landscape. The super had the exterminator spray his apartment again. They came back. The super said it was impossible for them to return after two sprayings. Jeff showed the super a new glass of water of red corpses from only the previous night. The super said it was costing too much money to keep spraying.

  Once, on the bus, taking back his library books, Jeff turn the page of the book he was reading, and found a bug squeezed along the crease of the pages. He closed the book and returned all of the books back through the drop slot. Silently he apologised to the library, wondering if he had just infected it and its shelves of books, and the homes and apartments of those who used the library as much as he did. There was nothing he could do.

  He went home and threw out the wooden crate and the futon mattress. Another mattress was in the garbage, duct-taped together, and Jeff recognized the familiar red smears and shell corpses dotting the fabric. He went to a sporting goods store and bought an inflatable camping mattress made of vinyl, something smooth which, hopefully, couldn't be easily climbed.

  He drank more frequently to keep himself asleep while the bugs bit his skin. They hadn't allowed him a single night's uninterrupted rest in over six months. He was too poor to move, to get enough rent money together to pay first and last for a new place, and even then, he was now suspicious that a new landlord would never admit to having bugs. Which buildings had them, which were still unmolested? Where to put money so that it wouldn't be wasted?

  The intoxication helped. He slept deeply, only woken once in the night while drunk, killed a few bugs, rolled over to sleep until morning, measure the damage done when the sun rose.

  But on one of his drunken nights, he woke up, dressed in his street clothes, got on a late-night bus leading to the downtown core. A person's musical ringtone blared him awake from his sleepwalking trance. He blinked, looked around, saw the cell phone (he didn't own one, wasn't accustomed to their ever-changing music), peered out the bus window to see which street was coming up next to know where he was. Then he exited, crossed the street, got on one heading back in the direction of home. Back in his pyjamas, he sat cross-legged on the air mattress, balancing himself on trapped air, as he stared at where the television used to be. Thinking. Wondering. He told himself to go easy on the beer, especially on a work night.

  The next night, without alcohol, Jeff slept soundly.

  Nothing itched him awake. The bugs had an enzyme in their bodies which they secreted to numb the skin as they bit and burrowed under the epidermis of their host, and further into the veins and muscles. Through the veins they travelled throughout Jeff's body, nesting between muscles and into organs without disturbing their functions.

  For the next week, Jeff assumed that he had conquered the plague, since he no longer needed alcohol, and never saw a bug again. He bought a few cheap pieces of furniture, metal or plastic just in case, to replace the crate and the dresser, the important pieces, so that he didn't have to keep his clothing stacked high on the closet shelves. He stopped obsessively doing laundry.

  At work, he didn't notice a bug slip out from his sleeve into a cup of coffee he was pouring for a customer. After work, he saw a sign for blood donation, and felt it was a good idea to give. Only once on the bus home did he notice a small lump under the skin of his forearm. He didn't want to accept what he thought it might be, his mind ready to blacken out the memory, so he pressed the small lump with a thumb and it was gone.

  At night, the bugs bit open tunnels into his skin and walked long lines from his feet, spreading up his legs, across his stomach and down his arms, while another branch pushed their trek up his neck to nest under his cheekbones and into his sinuses.

  When he awoke, he thought he was getting a cold. Called in sick, took some medicine that knocked him out early, kept him asleep for most of the night.

  That night he rose, got dressed, took the bus downtown to the subway. He didn't get on the train. Instead, he stood on the platform staring front as the silver snake of steel slid into the station, opened its doors to the few people riding it so late, people heading to their night shifts, people starting their weekends parties early.

  The train slipped away and Jeff stood on the silent platform alone. Then he turned and walked to the farthest end of the platform, lifted his legs over the low gate with a metal sign reading 'Authorised Personnel Only', and walked down the few steps into the subway tunnel.

  He was not awake during his journey along the darkened rails and signal lights. Nor did he wake up when his steps turned his direction down a broad tunnel that led to a steel ladder bolted to the wall. He climbed down a concrete shaft lined with trickling water. The smell of rat and sewer gas didn't wake him.

  His hypnotic steps trekked down a tunnel of color-coated electrical cables as thick as a man's leg, and rusted water pipes. The roof s
hook as a subway raced high overhead, behind layers of concrete. The tunnel branched off at many right angles, and Jeff's steps chose the ones he needed to get to where he was going. Another ladder of blackened wood descended his passage deeper into the city's subterranean self, where the storm of subways could no longer be heard.

  He walked through a tunnel of earth bored out by insect teeth over millennia, his rubber-soled shoes crunching stones and dirt, the bugs beneath his skin rising from their flesh nests through his epidermis, swarming across his body, over his open eyes, in and out of his hanging mouth, roiling on his tongue.

  A cave was just ahead, glowing red by a pulsing light. The center of the carved-out space was filled with the body of the Queen. She had an immensely bloated body that undulated like an almost burst balloon on her back; the ribbed, plated shell of her thorax was dotted with sixteen elongated nipples of cartilage, onto which were attached ten people suckling.

  The floor and walls and ceiling of the cave were thick with a writhing swarm of bugs of every size, some as large as small mammals. Among their swarm was an occasional flash of bone – human shins and ribs and skulls. But only flashes of pink in the red light before the ocean of bugs swallowed the bone with their bodies, climbing over each other, insects nesting in the warmth of themselves and of their mother.

  Jeff's steps led him to the belly of the Queen, where he attached his mouth to a vacated nipple. The nipple extended as a tube down his throat and drank from him instead of him drinking from it. The bugs within him were regurgitated into the nipple tube and then into the body of the Queen. The bugs travelled through their mother's body to deposit their host's blood into the bladder of her back. Imperceptibly, the bladder grew by small degrees with each bug returned to the main nest.