“They lay their eggs in your mouth at night and when the suckers hatch, they crawl inside your body and eat the juiciest parts of you, your muscle.”

“Stop playin'” the bucktooth man didn’t look like a government scientist to Jay. “You ain’t never lived in Middleton and you ain’t probably never worked in no air force base.”

“I may be shady but I’m not a liar.” Said the man most people called Beggar Bob. The abandoned house was starting to get cold. Jay was starting to get used to the smell but not the smell of moldy milk that Bob gave off. “They eat out your teeth first, probably for calcium, and then go right after your muscles, then your bones.” He smiled his gap tooth grin. “That’s why I pull mine out. Care for another hit?”

Jay took the pipe and lit it without a second thought. Juice was hard to come by and Bob seemed to be the only one holding. The entire neighborhood took a turn for the worst and was practically a ghetto where even the thugs and bums didn’t want to hang out in. “You crazy, Bob. Keep your conspiracies to yourself.”

“You don’t think it’s weird that the houses here are becoming derelict after the meteor hit the Horse Creek Forest? I’m telling you the spiders are infecting people, killing off whole families, and filling up hospitals. Why do you think no one is talking about it? People don’t even know what it is. It’s a spider infestation, from alien origin, that’s what it is.”

Jay looked down at the remnants of a cup of hard noodles. He hoped his family were save if that was the case, despite his father and mother getting on his case about being a productive member of society and stop doing drugs. But his father was alcoholic, so what would he know about being sober. He worried more for his sister, who in the last few months had become scared of him. She would hide in her room whenever he was there. That was a few weeks ago. Jay wondered if they even noticed he was gone.

“The damn bugs are good for one thing. Weight loss.” Laughed Bob through a wade of phlegm. “When you wake up you look like an undead creature, all skin and bone. They call it the skitters because once your infected all you heard are scrapping sounds in her head.”

Jay took another hit of juice to get rid of the hunger pangs, the greenish smoke wafted through the air. “You can knock it off with that crap. You just want the juice for yourself.”

“No, no,” the bum’s lips were cracked and partially bleeding. “It’s true. I got the juice from the same air force buddy from the research lab. Says the government doesn’t want the people to have it because it gets you so high. Leave it to the govies to keep the good shit for themselves. But they also don’t want no one to know it comes from the meteor.”

“Psh, some druggie makes some new strain and you want me to think it comes from alien spiders? Get the hell out of here with that nonsense.”

“It’s true. Whether you believe it or not. Mommy and daddy might already be infected.”

Jay threw the pipe at Bob’s chest and told him to keep the damn stuff. His parents wouldn’t do this stuff, especially if it was so hard to score in the first place. He looked at the sleeping bag and was reminded of how comfortable his bed was back at home. The abandoned, dark house would be cold tonight. He blew the smoke out but couldn’t tell if the smoke was his own breath or the juice vapor in his lungs. “Man, I’m done with this.” And stood to leave.

Bob coughed up a chorus of phlegm as he left, echoing through the broken windows as Jay made his way back toward Clifton Street. It was bitter cold out but he used the time to focus on where his life had gone wrong. The high was hitting him hard and blurred his vision. The school counselor told him to stay in school. His dad told him he should stay off the streets. Everyone was telling him what to do but he never knew where he belonged. Maybe he did belong in jail with the other drug addicts, not getting the real help they needed.

He slipped into the back window of the house and collapsed onto his bed. The idea that alien spiders were being sold on the streets as a new illicit drug was absurd but he couldn’t help but think about it. If only he had some alien chemical to take away the pain, he felt every day, of not knowing who he was or where he belonged. The stuff at least made him feel some sense of joy. When he dropped out of school, he told his parents that he couldn’t focus and the teachers were a bunch of stuck-up white men who didn’t listen to anything he had to say. It was pointless. Life seemed pointless. But with juice he felt alive again. He was happy for those short few minutes, those minutes where the drug would numb his frantic and hopeless mind.

As he drifted off to sleep, he thought he heard the faint echo of scraping in his head. He ignored it and had a nightmare about bugs infesting his body. Blurry creatures, black with many legs, crawling all over and inside. Swarming out of his mouth, his fear of being abandoned, like the house he had stayed in, caused him to scream. It was only till he opened his mouth, when he woke up to the light blurring from the curtains, that he realized his teeth were missing. He curled his body to the floor and lifted his chest, barely able to manage the simple task, and spewed blood and bile onto the carpet. Choking back tears, he tried to focus on the mess on the floor. There were chunks, like when he went on bad benders, and probably blood. But as his eyes adjusted, he also saw the spindly legs of something writhing. Oh god…What the hell was that? A hallucination…Thats all…again he tried to keep himself up but his arms were frail, barely able to hold his torso, which was also empty, a bag of skin. He grabbed his dresser and pulled himself, his arms about ready to rip from their sockets and stared into the mirror.

His mouth dropped. He didn’t recognize the horrifying image staring back as he moaned in disgust. Wrinkles sagged his emaciated cheeks and eyes while bony arms checked his teeth. His front teeth were missing while several more fell and clinked onto the dresser. This was wrong, all wrong! How could this be possible? The bum was insane but now he didn’t know what to believe. Alien spiders weren’t real! None of this could’ve been real!

He ran from the room, crying for his mom, but the word came out jumbled, like his mouth wasn’t working. He screamed out, “hfoophy!” And made it to the living room, barely able to walk straight on his thin legs. Stumbling to the couch he saw his parents and sister standing near the kitchen. “Hfoophy! Pheph phle!” His parents repelled in revulsion and held their own mouths.

Jay’s father had arched eyebrows and shouted, “What the hell have you done to yourself? I told you to stay away from those drugs. Now look at you.”

Blood dribbled down his chin. “Uphm sowwry. Ah dohph knuff phuph to do.” There was screaming from his sister and mother who were holding their mouths. He begged them but they couldn’t understand him and fell to his knees. “Pheph.”

“Did you sell your teeth? The hell’s wrong with you, boy?” Said his father. A bag of dope fell out of his loose jacket and his father grabbed it. “I’m calling the police. You can’t bring this crap into our house. This is our home.”

“Phno!” Jay shouted. “Pheph phhee! Phreaze!” But they only heard a mouth full of gibberish. Jail instead of a hospital? How could they? He was their son. His hands tried to grasp his father’s shirt but he was quickly brushed away and he fell to the floor sobbing while his father phoned the police and ignoring his pleas. The scrapping in his brain became louder, more noticeable than the night before. It clouding his hearing like a rainstorm, deafening, scratching. His parents were prepared to abandon him, disregarding his wellbeing for their own contentment and avoid the truth of his suffering. They didn’t want to see him this way, they didn’t want to understand his pain.

Jay was left there, to weep on the floor in his own bile, blood, and liquefied muscle tissue, eaten alive by small alien insects and a society that never wanted him.