Nest/Infest
by Amanda M. Blake
Horrific Scribes Extremity Rating:
She wasn’t here for love, some lasting connection. She just hadn’t been out in so long. Finally—finally—people were going out, for better or for worse, because there was supposed to be more to life than cleaning dust bunnies from her apartment, and she was so damn horny.
She didn’t know she could get this horny, but put her in a box for three years, it turned out she’d pay five hundred dollars for a foot rub and a pedi, a thousand if they had a decent dick and the barest consideration to go with it, and this dude’s gray sweatpants picture had been enough for her to swipe right in a second.
She wasn’t even sure about his name, if she was honest—James or Jesse or Josh, something with a J or maybe a G if it was creative—and in person, his gray sweatpants and white undershirt read more as lazy than casually confident. She was pretty sure he’d fudged an angle or two, but she couldn’t throw stones.
It was just really nice to go out with someone. To a restaurant. And eat off plates instead of takeout containers. More than made up for the fact that he’d dressed for a fast-food joint instead of someplace where the lights dimmed at six. She’d shaved and chosen matching underwear, black leather pumps, and a nice dress.
But he didn’t slurp his pasta and he was nice to the waitress, even though every time he leaned over, a sour scent hit her that she realized came not from the backed-up sewage near the restaurant but from him.
Nevertheless, his close-cropped hair was tidy, and he had a good smile, even if he looked pale and tired. The white undershirt draped well on his body. She bet if he slouched back in his chair with his legs spread, her mouth would go dry, and he sometimes gazed at her over their water glasses when he thought she wouldn’t notice.
It was hard not to notice every last significant and insignificant detail, though, with the rapid string of inner dialogue telling herself that her standards had sunk. That she was too picky. That she wasn’t the caliber of catch to earn what she wanted. That she should value herself even for a one-off. That he wasn’t that bad, she just wasn’t used to people and had to reacquaint herself to a world with clinking utensils and people chewing and talking too loudly and walking where she wanted to walk. That if she really wanted sex, she had to get used to other people’s ideas about what was appropriate. That if she wanted a perfect man, she had shelves of dogeared book boyfriends she could always go back to. That he had those weird moles under his left ear and down near his shoulder before the undershirt collar started, and she couldn’t stop staring at them, then forcing herself not to.
But he was paying and mostly pretty, and it was good to get out of the apartment, breathe less stale air, hopefully sleep in someone else’s bed tonight. Even though she liked her bed because it was clean and smelled of her fabric softener.
She’d never bring a one-off to her home, though. And she didn’t want to fuck in the car he’d picked her up in because it smelled of old hamburgers, perhaps because there actually were old hamburgers in there, based on the paper bags, cardboard, and foam containers smashed between the front and back seats, presumably in an attempt to crush them out of sight.
She drank another glass of red wine. Maybe if everything smelled of fermented grapes and her vision got blurry enough, she wouldn’t notice those raised moles anymore, with the little hairs poking out.
She was just out of practice. She just needed to get used to people again. Like a sour smell.
He was a good kisser, and only a little of that was from the third glass of wine she’d had before they left the restaurant. The wine did make the car’s smell more bearable. She’d rideshare home; she didn’t think she’d feel quite as sanguine about the stench on the other side of the hangover.
He kissed her up the outside stairs to the door of his second-floor apartment, and God, it felt good to have someone push her up against a door like that. He tasted of the pasta he’d eaten that night. It wasn’t the worst thing she’d ever had on her tongue. His short hair bristled soft against her palm, and she canted against his bony hip. He had other bumps under his shirt, so she guessed he was one of those people—her uncle had lipomas, and she knew someone in college with a bumpy birthmark all over his face—but the only bump she was interested in was presently big enough against her, so she laughed into his mouth as he fumbled with his keys, then dropped them on his faded welcome mat.
Once he managed to get the door open, he didn’t bother turning on the light, which was fine with her. What she could see from the streetlights angled in suggested his home wasn’t any neater than his car, and she didn’t want details. She wanted his mouth, wanted his tongue, wanted his dick, wanted to breathe in the scent of new sweat to cover the sour old.
Whatever cluttered the living room, he knew his way through and drew her into his bedroom. The streetlights angled through blinds enough to illuminate the nest of his bed, but she buried her nose against his neck so she wouldn’t have to smell what had soaked and stiffened in his sheets for God knew how long. He let go of her long enough to grab some blankets out of what looked like a laundry basket. He tossed a blanket on the bed, then another, then another, layers of clean that smelled like blessed detergent, particles unsettled on the air to make it tentatively tolerable.
They made a nest of the blankets—an oasis of clean, if not neat. Nothing about them was neat or tidy or clean after they were finished anyway. He was messy in bed, too, but in the best way, and he didn’t mind making a mess of himself to ensure the best mess from her. She hadn’t planned to fall asleep with him, but laughter and a good fuck were better medicine than the melatonin she’d grown dependent on the last year or so. She usually cocooned rather than nested, but maybe she ought to try this in her own bed, grabbing whatever corner was closest and covering herself when her sweat-sticky skin cooled.
Despite a deep sleep, she awoke while it was still dark. Disoriented, she lay twisted diagonally on the bed, curled with her arms pressed to the back of his shirt, her face against her fists.
He’d pulled his boxers back on and had never taken off his shirt, mostly because she hadn’t taken it off of him, and she’d been quicker getting him out of the sweatpants. She’d also subtly and sometimes not so subtly insisted that he keep the shirt on because the bumps on his back kind of weirded her out, and they’d been having too good of a time for it to matter in the end. She could’ve sworn his bumpy moles were on the other side of his neck, but she’d just switched which side she’d bitten and held him closer.
Artificially laundered clean mingled with the body scents of old and new sweat and the sour that lingered on him, more pronounced in the womb of blankets. It wasn’t the scent that woke her, though, and she was nice and pocketed and comfortable, so it wasn’t from an awkward-angle muscle spasm.
She twitched and cried out at a sting on her leg, there and gone in less than a second. She shifted but didn’t feel it again. Just a random twinge. But now she was awake, sticky, and needed to pee.
She threw back her section of the blankets and carefully crawled over him to pad to the bathroom, keeping her hand on the wall and shuffling forward until she found the bathroom, where mildew and another musty, unpleasant smell made her wrinkle her nose.
She found the bathmat with her feet, then lowered herself to the toilet.
She flailed for purchase as she fell into the bowl.
He lived alone, so she couldn’t get too mad at him as she desperately clung to the counter and the side of the bathtub to keep from sinking into the foul, cold bath of the toilet bowl.
After managing to find her feet, she grabbed fistfuls of toilet paper to dry herself off, then put the seat down like a civilized human to sit in peace, her heart thudding rapidly against her breastbone. She was too out of it to be annoyed or frustrated for long. She was just so relieved not to have touched the bottom of the bowl with her butt and that she was finally able to pee.
She closed her eyes in the darkness and slowed her breathing, already drifting in and out of consciousness although she shifted and clenched against little tickles that made her think she needed a shower, sooner rather than later if she could wake up properly. Maybe just skip breakfast and leave now so she could take a shower at home without having to see the guy’s living space in the sobering light of day, when her hangover would solidify and the endorphins crash.
Something skittered over her foot. At the same time, something skittered under her inner thigh, not just tickling but prickling as it gripped her skin.
She shrieked and leaped from the toilet, hitting the shower curtain and pulling it down as she stumbled over the edge of the bathtub. She struck ceramic hard enough for the jolts to shoot from her ass and her shoulders to her head, which stunned her but didn’t knock her out as she could still hear with almost deafening clarity the multiple crunches beneath the shower curtain.
When her brain could finally communicate with her limbs beyond useless flailing, she pulled herself out of the bathtub, screaming. She didn’t bother closing the lid, flushing, or washing her hands. Outside the bathroom, she tripped over something that felt like shoeboxes. Shuffles and chitters from within the boxes and emerging from them made her skin crawl as though covered with honey and ants.
Whimpers leaked out of her as she pushed herself off the wall and into the bedroom. She snatched her dress from the floor, then felt around for her underwear. Her fingertips brushed something flat, smooth, and cool that moved when she touched it.
“God, fuck!” She flinched back, hitting the blinds as both feet tried to get away from the floor at the same time. But no matter how much adrenaline flooded her this time, it wasn’t enough to make her fly.
The lump under the blankets hadn’t moved, despite her screaming, shrieking, whimpering, and cursing. No one was such a heavy sleeper. Now she was completely awake and completely angry because this situation went beyond sloppiness and bad hospitality. This was fucking disgusting—she didn’t even know how much but knew enough—and he had actually intended to bring a girl home to this, hadn’t thought there was anything wrong with having sex with another person in this. It was absolutely unacceptable that she had to be awake and gross all over and fleeing for what felt like her life, every part of her itching like crazy, while he just slept there, blissful in his ignorance or indifference.
Was it voluntary blindness that made his intolerable life tolerable, the way dishes could build up in the sink and laundry could build up on the chair in the bedroom and recycling could build up in the bin and you just ignored it until when you saw it, it was no more important than the texture of the wall? She couldn’t imagine, just couldn’t fucking imagine. She sometimes let mail pile up on her counter, but she sanitized her kitchen and bathroom every day, washed her hands every time she used the bathroom or touched something wet or sticky, and God, was it too much to ask for an air freshener?
A good screw wasn’t worth this, and if she had to go through it because of him, he needed to share in her misery. “Hey, asshole!”
He still didn’t move.
She yanked the blanket back. He was curled with his legs tucked up, arms crossed over his chest as though clutching himself against cold. He didn’t respond to her yelling, and his face seemed gaunter, somehow, in the indirect streetlight.
She blinked. The bumpy moles were back on his left side. She’d kissed him there, hadn’t she? She’d remember if there had been such a change in texture, which was why she’d avoided the moles in the first place.
She tiptoed closer, then touched the two rough, bristly moles.
They scurried under the collar of his shirt.
She jerked her hand back and stifled her scream with her fist. Then she ran to the doorway and slapped the side of the wall until she found the light switch.
Cockroaches great and small skittered in surprise toward the edges of the room, under the bed, under the piles and piles of dirty clothes. And they were dirty, with smears of food and chip dust and things that didn’t look like dirt or mud or chocolate, speckled with bug feces and eggs. Cobwebs silked the corners, holding dead bugs, dust, filth, and emptied egg sacs suspended.
Moths fluttered on the lightbulbs. A wolf spider froze on the top of the dresser, another on the pillow next to the guy’s head. A huge cockroach nestled into the black of her strappy shoe. Tiny nymphs crawled all through the carpet pile, too small for her to feel and possibly too small for her to crunch. She’d just press them deeper.
Underneath a starker glow than the streetlights or dim ambient restaurant light, she could too clearly discern the shadow of the lumps under the guy’s white undershirt. And they were moving.
Her whimpering filled the room like a tea kettle, but she barely noticed. Her hand reached as though it wasn’t her own toward the bottom of his shirt to lift it away from his back.
Bedbugs, ants, and tiny house spiders dashed over the blankets. His bare skin was a rash of bites old and new, and some of the bugs were still feeding. Not just bedbugs, but singles and clusters of ticks that had latched like leeches upon his thighs, his back, and near his armpits. The creatures that looked like moles were jumping spiders that had found an ideal hunting ground on the guy’s body, so much so that they’d joined him all the way to the restaurant and back, and the guy hadn’t even fucking noticed or cared.
Bites bubbling with pus boiled over his back, staining his white shirt yellow where he seeped. She’d stroked over those places on his shirt. He probably brought a cadre of bedbugs wherever he went, a one-man plague, and he’d said nothing, invited her in, pulled her close, been inside her, held her while they slept. Whatever was on him had crawled over her. Whatever he housed in his apartment, in his carpet, on his bed, on his body, was all over her now.
She could feel them, every last little insect and arachnid leg, crawling on her, covering her, smothering her, but you see a bug on the floor near your foot, and you think there’s one on your shoulder, so you brush it away, but there’s nothing there. Then you think there’s one on your leg, so you brush it away, but there’s nothing there. And you’re like that for a while, but there’s nothing there. Surely she would know if there really was, because she’d been feeling all right before until the prickly legs on her skin in the bathroom. It couldn’t be everywhere like she was feeling now, but she didn’t want to look down…
A large, shiny brown cockroach crawled over her foot.
She screamed bloody murder to the guy who’d brought her into this hellhole and to everyone else in the apartments around him that had to know about the infestation. If they’d called the landlord, either the landlord or his exterminator was incompetent, and she hoped her screams reached them, too.
When she tried to kick the cockroach off, it clung to her with its thick, prickly legs, and instead of running away, two more cockroaches ran straight for her.
Her thighs, sides, and abdomen were dotted with clusters of small reddish bites from the bedbugs that had gotten her while she’d slept, and two smaller, lighter cockroaches clung to her hip and one on her shoulder. She batted at them, then abandoned all attempts to escape the ones running at her, instead slamming her bare heels down on them. It was like stomping on brittle paper filled with lymph. Yet despite the destruction of their brethren, the pounding of her heel seemed to call more toward her, and the one on her foot refused to let go.
“Get off, get off, get off! Go away! God, fuck!” She slapped the giant one on her foot off. It finally let her go with a flutter of its wings.
A dysrhythmic whir awoke fears that surpassed shark attacks and nuclear winter as she ran into the door frame, disturbing the cockroaches on the plaster and triggering one of them to fly at her face. She flailed, but the roach evaded her hands with drunken precision and landed on her cheek.
She slapped herself, smashing the cockroach against the makeup and tear-smeared press of bone, then sobbed and screamed in a hysterical combination and prayed for some neighbor to have called the police because sirens would be more welcome than the flickering buzz all over the room.
Her dress over her arm shifted on its own. Three smaller cockroaches fell out of the armhole.
She threw the dress to the floor, into the seething pestilence in the shadow under the bed. Nausea spun her head, tilted reality, and she stumbled from the bedroom into the bathroom. Even though she dimly knew it was a bad idea, she fell to her knees in front of the open toilet and violently expelled the dinner, dessert, and wine that remained in her stomach.
The light from the bedroom reached far enough into the bathroom to show some smaller cockroaches floating amid the vegetable chunks and red staining. She couldn’t tell with any certainty whether they’d already been in the toilet water or whether she’d vomited them up, too.
But large, dark cockroaches and more of the smaller cockroaches lined the edge of the toilet bowl, crawled through the bathmat at her knees, dove over the side of the bathtub.
She coughed and sobbed, clutched at the counter, but dozens of little somethings darted over her fingers, and the sink seethed with tiny sugar ants and nymphs fighting for the grime coating the marble and lining the mirror—like it piled all through his bedroom and probably his living room, another minefield she had to cross before fresh air and freedom.
Except she’d only bring the pestilence with her because she kept slapping more cockroaches, adult and nymph, off of her legs, bedbugs from her back, and she was pretty sure that clump of gray bumps behind her armpit and at her hairline under her ear were ticks and that there were more at the top of her inner thigh.
But she wouldn’t—even on the worst day of her life when all she wanted to do was scratch her skin off and set fire to everything around her, with her still in it—absolutely wouldn’t leave naked.
Even so, she nearly couldn’t step back into that room of brightly-lit horrors, where the guy entombed and enwombed himself in his own filth, fed his hoard until ghostly pallid and shadowed in his hollows, a sheen of sweat on his forehead although he shivered.
New roaches, spider babies, and a wolf spider had claimed her dress, but she forced herself to run in on the carpet pile stippled with nymphs and probably ants she couldn’t see, then grabbed the dress from the floor. She shook it out as well as she could, dancing madly away from what fell out, although of course they followed wherever she went.
She flipped the dress inside out to make sure all the bugs were out, but she didn’t have time to check every seam and fold. As she pulled it over her head she shuddered helplessly, unsettling spiders, bedbugs, cockroaches, and—for all she knew—lice in her hair. She hadn’t known she had any more screams left; she scared even herself with the blood-curling shrieks that raked through her throat as she combed her fingers furiously through hair she’d spent an hour on before the date and that had been destroyed in a thirty-minute session of two orgasms, which didn’t begin to pay for the cruel and unusual punishment of this entire fucking date as all sorts of creepy and crawly things rained down from her head onto her shoulders and feet.
And still the guy didn’t wake up. She didn’t think he was going to.
Bugs that might have been on the dress or already on her back crawled down her spine and onto her ass. She had to reach up under the skirt to brush them away. Even where her skin was clear, she swore things crawled over her, in her, under her skin. She didn’t have time to extract the ticks, just pulled the bundles off her head, armpit, and thigh. They probably still had their little mouth parts buried there, but she didn’t care anymore, just wanted them off. Then she zipped the dress up as far as she could reach without effort, which left the top flapping open, and grabbed her clutch from the dresser.
She left her shoes behind and hoped the roaches liked leather. The moths and silverfish would make use of her underwear.
Massive shadows hulked in the denser darkness of the living room—boxes unpacked, the gleam of hundreds of beer bottles, the uncanny movement of plastic bags and more clothes hilled around and on the sofa.
At the exit, she jerked the deadbolt, then swung the door open so hard it struck the jamb and bounced back. She sprinted onto the walkway, then braced herself on the metal railing with a shout and a sob, her face a mess from tears, snot, and bug guts. She used the hem of her skirt to wipe most of it away. Thinking about what had been crawling on her dress and where those things had been made her retch again, but not much was left in her stomach. She spat out thin liquid threaded through with yellow bile.
She turned back to the open door and the darkness on the other side, with the light from the bedroom a mile away.
She didn’t want to go back in. She didn’t need to go back in. Yet with her feet firmly planted on the faded welcome mat—which was probably cleaner than anything else she’d touched all night—she fumbled past the doorframe for the light plate.
When the light came on, the nightmare illuminated a complete, thriving ecosystem of corruption that spilled from landfill mountains in the living room—the bugs that ate the food, fabric, cardboard, and glue, the bugs that ate those bugs in turn, and the bugs that fed on the remains of both. Strips of flypaper covered with flies like fungal corn kernels swayed from the ceiling. A mouse trap had caught a rat. A lizard ran over the walls to grab a cockroach bigger than its head. A black widow stood poised at the brim of a beer bottle on the coffee table, another at the opening of a soda can. A giant red-headed centipede prowled a mound of towels after a spider, which stalked a smaller cockroach. All through the dropping-dotted carpet, clothes, and upholstery seethed dull and gleaming arthropodic bodies.
She kept the lights on and the door open, regardless of what might spill out. Someone needed to know what was in there, and someone would look. She had, and she’d already known what she would see, although seeing it couldn’t compare to actually being in it. She felt unclean, tainted on a cellular level, as though she hadn’t just fallen in the toilet bowl but marinated in it.
While she waited for her rideshare to pick her up at the entrance to the apartment complex, she typed in an anonymous tip to the police to do a welfare check and recommended that they bring an exterminator for an apocalyptic infestation.
She twitched with every tickle, every itch, every imagined wing and leg fluttering on her skin. When she crawled into the back seat of her rideshare, she didn’t care that his music was too loud and the car smelled like mustard. She kept checking all around to make sure nothing came off of her. When it did, she smashed it with her hand and used one of the complimentary napkins in the compartment between the front seats to wipe herself off. The driver probably thought she was on something or coming off something, but she didn’t give a shit. She tipped him extra for not asking where her shoes were or insisting that she detox in another car.
At her own apartment complex, she ran up to her unit, but she didn’t enter until she’d opened her purse and felt through the whole thing to make sure she wasn’t bringing any of the huge cockroaches in with her.
Taking advantage of the late—or early—hour, she removed her dress entirely and left it outside before entering her home. She’d throw it in the dumpster or burn it on one of the grills tomorrow. Inside, she switched on all the lights, almost afraid that from the darkness would come the same scene, her pristine apartment covered in feces and too many legs and wings, that she would hear them in the walls, hear them chewing through her own ears to get at the meat. But it was as clean and organized as ever, with the air freshener spraying joy as she passed by.
She burst into tears again, this time from relief.
With antimicrobial wipes from the entryway table, she washed off her hands, her feet, and the tile itself multiple times, until her skin felt brittle under the drying alcohol. Then she ran to her bathroom—her beautiful, clean, brilliant white bathroom—and twisted the shower on hopefully too hot for anything else to tolerate.
After scrubbing her skin raw and shampooing her hair so many times that she practically pulled enough of it out to make a wig, she stepped out into the sauna of the bathroom. She used a towel to wipe condensation from the mirror so she could look at her back and find the last persistent ticks and mouthparts. She used a hand mirror to get the ones on her groin. More tears streamed over her cheeks, but there was an end in sight—with bites marring her skin but invasion well and truly averted. The gluttonous gray bodies burst red on the white marble of her bathroom sink before she washed them down the drain. She poured in some drain cleaner for good measure.
After brushing her teeth, eliminating the sour vomit from her mouth, she finally felt not just clean but cleansed, although she continued to twitch from phantom bugs as she pulled on a new pair of panties and a sleep shirt. That and new sheets helped.
She kept a lamp on as she curled under cool covers.
Despite the creeping of the darkness behind her eyelids, she’d almost drifted to sleep from utter exhaustion when the itching and tickling on her legs became unbearable and her insides cramped, as though she was about to be sick again. She practically felt the prickling of cockroaches crawling through her gelatin brain. Although she knew it was just her imagination making the sensations real, she pushed her blankets back to check.
Dozens of cockroach nymphs crawled down her twitching thighs. She backpedaled up her sheets, over her pillow, onto her headboard, but the nymphs continued to emerge from the leg holes of her underwear.
She clawed her panties down her legs, then screamed the shattering of sanity as hundreds of cockroach babies poured out of her from the warm darkness into which the small mothers had laid eggs ready to hatch into a bright, new, shiny, clean world.
Want another gripping story by Amanda M. Blake? Read “Weed Killer” in Horrific Scribes February 2025.
| SPECIAL EXHIBIT FOUR: Return to “Introduction and Guide“ | Continue in Gallery One: Growths and Infestations with “Marmite and Mushrooms” |