Stevie Bishop, on the last day of his short life, squatted in the middle of the Woolworth parking lot and stared at the fish. He reached out a small hand slicked with strawberry ice cream. The silver and gold scales flickered as the fish jerked and burped. Its turgid belly split open in a wide grin and a slow fumbling of green and pink tubes spilled out onto the ground. To Stevie, they looked like those party sausages his auntie served to guests. An impossible number spewed into the space between him and the fish and Stevie fell onto the hard asphalt.
“Ew! Gross!” he cried and scuttled backwards. More green sausages–Stevie couldn’t think of them as anything else now–spilled out like a jackpot and the summer sun baked the slime off their bodies. They seemed to plump and stretch, getting slightly bigger with each exertion. Their pink counterparts lay still, stewing in a pool of fish guts and blood.
Stevie caught his breath. He didn’t know what these things were, but they were obviously dangerous. Some sort of disease, he thought, or virus. He’d seen pictures of viruses at school. Or was it bacteria. Either way, they were both bad and scientists were working hard to stamp them all out.
“Ah,” he said after realizing what to do. He stood slowly as not to alarm the green sausages–he didn’t think the pink ones even noticed him. The whole weird group seemed to have reached their final number, but when Stevie counted, he gave up at thirty. “Too many, no matter,” he said and shoved his hands in his pockets. He lifted his right foot, ready to do his part.
The green sausage closest to him shuddered, turned over, and sprouted legs. Then the one next to that one. Then another. Soon, all of the green ones, and Stevie couldn’t think of another word for it, had ‘evolved.’
He reconsidered his stomping campaign and backed into a long black car. Stevie chirped a “what” since this whole end of the lot had been empty when he came over. Less than five minutes ago he’d gotten that snot-faced Randy Gormondson to buy an ice cream cone for him. The little wuss bought it without question, thinking that this made Stevie his friend. A well-placed Ked in the weakling’s backside made it clear that he wasn’t. Still, the ice cream had been good, but it melted too fast. He was about to get Randy to buy him another when the fish caught his attention. It had glimmered in the empty lot, calling to him.
Stevie blinked, which he sometimes needed to do to think properly. No, he thought, blinking, there wasn’t any car here before.
Stevie felt something nudge his foot. A group of the green guys had backed into him. They formed the outer part of a growing circle of the footie sausages. He stepped to the side and blinking furiously, tried to make sense out of what he was seeing. The green guys surrounded the unmoving pink guys–were they guys, Stevie blinked, probably–and bounced side to side on their little legs. He tried to count them–the legs–but there was no consistency in design. Some had ten, other seemed fine with four. Stevie wondered if you could evolve in ways that are different from everyone else. Like, could you pick your own eye color, he thought. Stevie wasn’t the best student. He blinked.
The greens shrunk the circle, closing in on the mound of pinks. Nearly three times the size of their prey, the greens rocked back and forth and side-to-side, like country dancers. They took little scittering steps forward until the innermost greens were just touching the pinks at the bottom of the pile. At once, they stopped and Stevie leaned forward, entranced. A car door opened behind him.
“You’re a lucky kid, Steven Bishop,” a man said as he walked around the car. It was a Pontiac LTD like his uncle drove, but all black and so low that it seemed to just barely hover over the asphalt. The mirror finish of metal showed a kid with a dirty face and strawberry stains on his shirt. He could also see the strange assembly behind him, like looking through a window into another world.
“You see, Steven,” the man continued. “This is what we call Nosivious Balantius.” The man dropped a navy blue duffle bag on the ground and squatted down next to it. He wore a navy sweater and navy slacks, underneath which he wore navy socks. The entirety of the man was navy aside from his shoes. For some reason the man wore bright red patent leather loafers. Stevie furrowed his eyebrows and blinked.
The navy man pulled a long metal rod out of his bag as if unsheathing a sword. Instead of a sharp point, the end split into two prongs, each one flaring out from the rod at strange angles. To Stevie it looked like a broken grilling fork, the kind his father used on weekends. Was the navy man going to grill the green guys? They did look like hot dogs. Stevie wondered how they would smell as they burned and his stomach did a little flip. He couldn’t tell if it was nausea or hunger. He searched the man’s face for a clue. The navy man smiled and pointed his demon fork toward the pile.
The greens descended upon the inert pinks. Masses of the tubes shuffled and skidded across each other, each one grabbing onto the pink bodies with their various numbered legs. As they pulled their prey close and each green guy split open, just as the dead fish had done to disgorge them in birth. Stevie gagged as the green tubes fed themselves their pink kin. Soon, the chittering fell from the high pitch of their feeding frenzy to the soft murmur of mothers to babies. Each green guy, sausage, tube, whatever, Stevie thought, lay fat and still in the hot sun.
The navy man touched them one by one with his fork, the green guys jumping as their skin sizzled. They rolled away from the electric prod, but the fork pistoned fast hitting one after another until, under Stevie’s watchful eye. The whole batch became burnt, crispy and smoking. He saw the legs of those closest crack off the charred body and turn to dust. A low gray cloud floated above the corpses and the air filled with a smokey scent. Stevie’s stomach lurched, then growled. He’d felt hungry before, but never so heart-breakingly empty. His body took a step forward toward the alien bodies, but his mind made him stop.
“Go ahead,” the navy man said, watching.
Stevie Bishop had gone without dinner plenty of nights when his father came home drunk and beat his mother useless. He’d sit in his bedroom, trying not to hear her pathetic cries for help. With each passing year he grew angrier and more resentful. She knew his father well enough to avoid his wrath, but she still managed to set him off, and then Stevie went without dinner for a few days until she healed. That emptiness was less about missing dinner than missing empathy, but Stevie never understood empathy. He understood emptiness, though, and this was the mother-load.
“Go on,” the navy man whispered. When had he gotten so close?
Stevie knew what he had to do.
He lunged forward, slipping around the lanky form of the navy man and grabbed the closest charred corpse. His mouth seemed to suck in the empty air until Stevie brought the green body to his lips. The crispiness of the charred skin reminded him of a particularly good chicken wing he’d had at a friend’s house last month. His friend’s father never drank and spent time cooking and laughing with his boys. Stevie hated the man and called him names behind his back, but he fell in love with that chicken. His eyes rolled back in their sockets and he blinding reached out for another.
This one popped between his teeth and the sweet juice trickled over his chin. It tasted like the sharp orange flavor of the orange drink he’d swiped from his father one day when they were enjoying a holiday meal. His mother hadn’t upset his father yet that day and they were all sitting around the TV watching The Wizard of Oz. His father had been in good spirits and even laughed as Stevie coughed out the stolen sip. His throat burned now just as it had then.
One by one, Stevie Bishop grabbed and gulped up the cooked bodies strewn among the gravel and spilt oil of the parking lot. After a time, he leaned against the side of the Pontiac and slid down to the ground. His mouth twisted into a grimace of disgust and his stomach bulged above the waistband of his shorts. Tear cut paths on his face, and, eyes open to the sky, Stevie Bishop died.
Mostly.
“Am I gonna have trouble with you?” The navy man, his weapon and bag stowed away during the feast, leaned forward, hands in his navy pockets. He stared into the empty eyes of the boy.
“Not today,” something said with Stevie’s mouth. It tried to open Stevie’s eyes wide, but only blinked.
The navy man opened the door and the boy, unused to having only two legs or any concept of a Pontiac LTD, stumbled inside.
