Thirteen Specimens Read Online Free

was still stimulated even with the rape finished, as it continued to gaze upon the small, shattered, doll-like body. The creature’s own body was covered in a shell of hard chitin, causing it to resemble a horseshoe crab, or a prehistoric trilobite. Its olive drab color also made it look to Candle like one of the infantrymen’s helmets. Ringing the large insect’s body was a fringe of jointed legs so fine they were almost thread-like, and when the animal became excited about what it observed and transmitted to the Guests, those legs rippled with a faster and faster rhythm. Of course, the thing itself was mindless, but its exhilaration seemed an expression of the Guests themselves as they received its images in whatever realm or plane of existence they called their home.
         There was one large eye centered in the front of the creature, and a metal handle affixed to its underside. Candle often felt more like a mule hired to carry the living camera about than a real photographer. He did not have to concern himself with composition to any great extent, lighting conditions and F-stops. All he had to do was transport this animal, and point it at what he knew it wanted to see. Yes, he did extract the cylinder from its pinched rear orifice when the film strip inside was full (at which point, this model half-ejected the cylinder on its own), but the images recorded into those containers were for human use, in human newspapers, in human TV news programs. As for the Guests, who could never reach this world but were fascinated by it all the same (were perhaps all the more fascinated because they could never come here) – who could do no more than influence the mutation of simple earthly insects into useful forms – they did not need to view the record of images because they could witness the proceedings just as they happened. Moving pictures, taken in through the cyclops eye of a camera such as this one, which often seemed like a heavy extension of Candle’s own arm. A race of voyeurs, was how Candle thought of them, unseen behind the door of their own dimension...but their collective eye avidly pressed to the keyhole of his living lens.
         The Guests essentially paid his bills, however. And he hadn’t told Lever last night that he did in fact entertain dreams of prizes and books, one day. Of making some kind of lasting impression, a record of his accomplishments, like the records of other lives he was ever capturing in the cartridges he inserted into his nameless pet. His own history would be defined by association with the broader history he felt compelled to secure proof of...
         After a while, Candle could take no more of the teenage girl’s humiliation. Her stunned surrender made it all the more horrible to him. He lowered the camera to point at the ground but he was sure the device wouldn’t be too disappointed; there was so much yet to see. As he turned to walk away, though, Cog spotted him and said, “Hey, guy, don’t you want a piece of this?”
         “No thanks,” he said.
         “I’ll save ya a piece,” said Lever, who slid out his bayonet with a ringing metallic hiss from its sheath. Candle hadn’t actually seen Lever do such things himself, in the past few hours since they had arrived, but he had photographed the bodies of other women who had had their vaginas torn wider with bayonets after being raped – or perhaps before, so as to better accommodate the large Americans. One sprawled child he had seen in this condition he’d guessed to be 10 years old. He had needed to look away from her quickly, but had continued aiming the camera in her direction until he thought it had drunk its fill.
         “Lick it up,” he had muttered, too softly for himself to hear over the crackle of gunfire, over the pleading wails of women and panicky shrieks of children. “Choke on it, you fuck.”
         But maybe Lever had in fact been one of those to mutilate women in that way. He