Creeptych Read Online Free Page B

like a bee swarm around my baby’s screaming, horrified face. I screamed for her, holding out a helpless hand that was quickly stomped to the ground. Something in my arm snapped as it met the asphalt, but louder than my own cry was Kara’s shriek. I swear that she called for me, but the street was alive in screaming and calls for help. Whether she called my name, or something else, in seconds, it was all over. Kara lay quiet and still, limp and blood-spattered in what had been her mother’s arms. But I knew, even if my baby never really did, that those were not Jenna’s arms any longer. Luna Roaches darted across my baby’s face, sampling her innocence with their nervous, hairy feelers.
    The crowd drew back from me, setting me free from where they’d pinned me to the pavement and I stood up outside the car, cradling my arm and staring at the crowd of blank eyes that glittered like obsidian in the descending night. Silence fell like midnight fog around us, as the mob grew still, and the moment pregnant.
    “What are you?” I whispered. “What do you want ?”
    One of the men stepped forward, and tentatively opened its mouth. A growling sound came out, and then a word. “Jeessst.” It said in a voice like shifting gravel. Its unblinking eyes fluttered at the sound and it seemed to smile. Understanding dawning.
    “Jeessst yur legs,” the man said, the words coming out slowly before it stepped forward. Its face looked pleased. “Jeesst your arms.”
    “And what do I get in return?” I asked.
    “Us,” someone else growled.
    From above I heard the fluttering drone of thousands of translucent wings.
    “Where did you come from?” I asked.
    “The places you have never gone,” came my only answer, a whisper from the crowd. And then the cool teeth of a Luna Roach settled onto my spine. For a moment I struggled, hoping to throw it off. But then the ice slid through my brain, and I felt the world go quiet.
    As I slid back to the ground, I wondered what would become of my body. And of all the bodies that surrounded me. Normally in a symbiosis, the predator used the host to serve as a nest for its offspring.
    Oh God , I cried, as my body went numb. What would gestate and grow inside of Kara. What would hatch from my poor, sweet baby?
    What would climb out of my own swollen belly after I had been used…and used up? Or would they use me like Jenna?
    I prayed that the chittering sounds I heard in my brain would take any knowledge of that away. Already, I could almost understand what the keening, droning noises I’d been hearing now during the nights meant.
    Eat. Eat.
    Kill. Eat.
    Spawn.
    Paul Hughes was lucky. His bad day had ended a long time ago now, before things really did get bad.
    Mine was only just beginning.

EARDRUM BUZZ
    “Join the Misery Machine Street Team!” the ad in the back of the music magazine read. “Inseminate the masses with Eardrum Buzz!”
    Wes ripped the page out and filled in the coupon in seconds. The first Eardrum Buzz disc, Misery Machine,  had permanently bonded to his car CD player a few weeks earlier. He didn’t leave the driveway without the machine gun attack of their bass drum rattling the dashboard. They remained anything but a household name, but Wes couldn’t get enough of the power saw drone of their guitars, or the manic fever squeals of their singer, Arachnid.
    Yeah, they were a gimmicky band—all the members named themselves after bugs. But the fierce mind-drill power of their music was as insidious as a horde of marauding Carpenter ants. And let’s face it—nobody had designed a cooler looking homage to insect life than Eardrum Buzz’s Misery Machine  CD cover’s locust orgy—at least not since Journey had celebrated the scarab on multiple LP covers in garish reds, blues and golds. Wes was hooked.
    Join their street team and help bring the music of Eardrum Buzz to others? There was nobody more suited to that than Wes. At least, that’s how he felt about it. So he