Hi, I'm S.T. Gulik. I'm a mystical cockroach/author and editor at Sausage-press.com. I'm celebrating the upcoming release of "Birth" (second edition) by sharing it with you for free as a serial. It's a true story that hasn't happened yet. Enjoy!

WHAT’S UP, OCTOPUSSY?

When Max was eleven, the government collapsed.

It started with a fistfight during a State of the Union. The opposition leader sucker-punched the president mid-speech, and it quickly escalated into a full-scale riot. Right, left, politician, press, everyone joined in. It was a national catharsis long overdue.

Everyone hated politics. They bitched about being overtaxed and overregulated. They joked about how nothing got done and ranted when something did. It was bad reality television targeted at masochists and rage addicts. So when it was canceled, the only real surprise was that they’d been doing an okay job.

Historically, governments fell because revolutionaries overthrew them. This was more like a breakup. Everyone agreed it wasn’t working and they didn’t want to see each other anymore. The two major parties dissolved into hundreds of factions, each with their own manifesto and charismatic podium-thumper. None were moderate enough to secure more than a tiny fraction of the vote. People had been settling for years. Now everybody wanted it their way.

While the politicians were slap-fighting for votes, society came apart in their hands like overcooked salmon. The problems weren’t that serious at first. With the right solutions, they could have made a tasty croquette. Instead, they tried to put it back together with glue and nails, making the product unpalatable.

The police stopped coming to work because nobody paid them. Crime spiked until the mutants pouring from the sewers made it too dangerous to leave the house. Their wrath was justified. Max would have cheered them on if not for his legitimate fear of dismemberment.

Several generations ago, a popular video game console dubbed the Iii used radioactive materials in the batteries for their nunchuck-style controllers. The batteries leaked, causing a lot of cancer and death, but also a genetic mutation known as Iiitis (pronounced E-Itis), which caused the muscles of the right arm to create mass at several times the standard rate. Those afflicted looked like they spent all their time lifting weights, but only with one arm. They were frequently referred to as lobsters until the word was deemed hate-speech and replaced with Iiite.

The Iiite’s superior strength made them popular for a little while. They were a symbol of strength and human adaptability. Within a generation, they were dominant in every sport, the military, and every other industry where muscle was a factor. Before long, they got paid more than regular folks. That caused resentment, which developed into racism, oppression, and violence. Eventually, it got so bad Iiites had to go underground, literally.

They created new towns in abandoned sewer systems. Unable to earn money or grow food, they had to raid for the things they needed. The military tried to take them out, but the Iiites always managed to survive. Over time, the war petered out. Raids grew infrequent. It became one of those things that happened to other people.

This was all way before Max was born. When he was a kid, Iiites were assumed to be a few stragglers of a dying species eking out a sorry existence in the shadows. They were more pitied than hated. A few groups even attempted reconciliation, but their ambassadors rarely returned.

When the cops disappeared, Iiites reappeared everywhere. Angsty teens came up in groups of eight to ten and roamed the streets, ripping the right arms off everyone they encountered. They laid the arms out to spell messages, usually short ones like “Retribution.”

That seemed like a big deal until God manifested in Bryant Park. It turned out, thirty years ago, he’d split himself into four humans and started a shitty metal band called Poison Candy. Since everyone was worried about dying, Poison Candy’s big reunion tour wasn’t selling many tickets. Not wanting to be upstaged, they stopped pretending to be awful crotch-rockers and merged into a single divine being, breaking reality in the process. All kinds of shit went haywire after that. It was like living in a comic book.

That got old fast.

A few corporations saw opportunities in new markets and stepped in to provide missing essentials. Rather than taxing for things like schools and police, subscriptions popped up at various price points. Instead of toll-roads, they paved McRoads with mandatory drive-throughs. The result was horrible traffic, a spike in diabetes, and three distinct classes living side by side but divided by a cultural gulf so broad the passage from one street to the next sometimes felt like time-travel.

The most forward-thinking corporations created synergistic systems with other companies that catered to clientele in specific income brackets. Eventually, three conglomerates managed everything. K. Co. managed middle-class areas known as K-Districts and provided security through their world-famous K-Squad. Security for high-end I-Districts was seen to by I-Force (a division of IMD, a.k.a. International Monetary Divestitures, a.k.a. The Bank). Low-end S-Districts were stuck with Sav-Cops (a division of Sav-Mart). A Savanian could hire I-Force if they had the money, but if they had that kind of money, they’d be Klipsch.

S-districts had service-based economies and provided unskilled labor to the other districts. Most Savanians live in Smart Homes, large tenements designed to house as many people as possible without creating a health risk. The Valucational school system has six grades focused on vocational training and sales tactics.

Sonyans were middle class and generally had fourteen years of liberal arts education. They lived comfortably and enjoyed access to quality healthcare.

Inhabitants of I-Districts were called Klipsch. Unlike Savanians and Sonians, that name was foisted upon them by the lower classes. They refer to themselves simply as People.

People are the economy. They own all the businesses and make all the decisions. Instead of going to school, Klipsch kids have a small army of tutors to groom them for their roles as world leaders.

Things went right back to normal, proving once and for all that humans can’t resist organizing into arbitrary casts with no concept of merit or empathy.

Max grew up Sonyan, but never applied himself. He’d been managing Savanians at shitty jobs since high school. Some of his employees were smarter than him, but they couldn’t afford a real diploma, so they would always be poor. He saw what their life was like and always felt guilty for how much easier he had it. Over the years, the steady drip of guilt, tragedy, and disappointment in humanity eroded Max’s soul. Reality became a disease he treated with a variety of over and under the counter medications, some with unfortunate side effects.

---

Max gasped and flailed, splashing icy water over the edge of the tub. The black flame of freezer-burn played around his every cell. Trembling, he pulled himself over the edge and landed hard on his side.
It felt like he landed on a hunting knife.

“Fuck!” He growled through chattering teeth.

Reaching back, he found crude stitches running from his ass to the center of his spine in the shape of a heart. They tingled and drooled thick rivulets of various hues as he ran his fingers over them.

“Is that dental floss?” He swatted away the clinging ice then grabbed the splotchy old robe he used for a bathmat. It smelled like mildew and feet, but it was warm.

Max curled up in a ball and cocooned himself in dirty laundry until the shivering subsided. His heart was racing, pumping his remaining blood so fast he could feel ice crystals scratching up his veins.

The room went black then snapped back into focus.

His mouth felt like rotten leather. His eyelids stuck to his corneas as his gaze shifted to the sink.

It was far away. Looking at it made him want to go to sleep. His eyes slowly rolled to the ice cubes that lay melting on the tile. It took every speck of his remaining energy to lean over, but that moisture on his tongue was glorious. He sucked that puddle dry then wiggled a few inches to the next. Several pools later, he crawled back to the vent.

Max liked his little cocoon. When he was a kid, his parents kept their dirty laundry on the floor of a small closet in the hall. Tiny Max liked to go inside, close the door, bury himself in it, and toss it around. All those exciting textures, its weight, and the smell of his parents were all so comforting.

He hoped the heat would kick on soon. The thermostat was on 67, so it never stayed on for long.

As his mind cleared, a few blurry images flitted around the corners of his memory: hands in the air, people in ugly suits, chanting, a drag queen putting a little pink pill in his hand.

“Damn it! I knew there was something off about that guy.”

Rage gave him the boost he needed to reach for the sink. “Fucking turtle dick cunt swapping son of a whore!”

It felt like somebody replaced his kidneys with hungry rats. The room went monochrome, and the pitch of the ringing in his ears felt like it might shatter his skull. Luckily, his many overdoses had made him good at powering through.

He held onto the counter with one hand and used the other to drag his foot into a position where he could rock onto it. He did the same on the other side, then grabbed the counter with both hands and used every muscle in his body to lunge. He hit his head on the faucet but didn’t fall over.

“I’m going to kill everyone for this.”

He turned on the faucet and filled his toothbrush cup with water, chugging glass after glass until he noticed the black crud floating up from the bottom. He realized he was drinking five years of congealed toothbrush water.

“Oh, God.” Feeling like he was going to hurl, he turned to the little green trashcan and found two glistening lumps that smelled like Freon.

Max laughed and sprayed his kidneys with minty scum-water. “Joke’s on you, asshole.”

He stuck his head in the sink and sucked fresh water directly from the stream. With his mouth rinsed and his belly full, he returned to the can and fished out one of the kidneys.

It was black and covered in little ridges that looked like ears. Imagining the look on the harvester’s face made Max feel a bit better. The more he stared at them, the more he wondered if the thief had done him a favor.

The first time he should have died, he’d drank an embarrassment of liquor and taken a header down a flight of stairs. His skull cracked in seven places, and his head swole up so big it looked like a rubber mask. He never figured out how he made it to that Savanian ER.

When he woke up, the doctors told him he was more or less dead; not quite as dead as the living dead but in that general vicinity. It was shortly after the “Divine Disturbance,” so doctors were still trying to figure out why and how things had changed.

His doctor had said, “It’s like Poison Candy tied Death’s shoelaces together. Anything beyond that is speculation.”

They didn’t even know if his face would heal. Thankfully it did. He later learned that his body repaired itself extremely fast.

Max was one of the lucky few to get the “alive-plus” upgrade when Poison Candy momentarily expanded the chemical world, stretching the fabric of reality. Now, instead of being either alive or dead, people could also be zombies or alive-plus. “God” said that alive-plus was “a special gift so partiers of a certain caliber could keep rocking forever.”

Max hated parties. The prospect of immortality was horrifying, but he could do all the Krokodil he wanted, so yay?

At least real zombies weren’t hungry like in the movies. They mostly just moped around smelling bad until they either crumbled or gelled, depending on the weather. Max preferred them to the zealous idiots who migrated to Bryant Park to make offerings of cocaine and cheap liquor.

Max waddled to the hallway and cranked his thermostat to 73, then returned to the bathroom.

He frowned at his reflection. “What the fuck, Max? You know better than to go around other people.”

Morbid curiosity had driven him to the Baptastic Revivalicious Cavalcade of Christianity. He could never resist a good freak show. Ironically, in that sea of fundamentalist sociopaths, it was the friendly drag queen who did him in.

“Who knew free pills from a stranger could be a bad thing?” He wanted to slap himself, but he didn’t feel up to it.

The air hung like green-gray mold, couching everything in a sticky film. The seeping humidity was making the wallpaper sweat and squirm like a fat boy on a blind date. Outside his bathroom window, the sky had been turned a hideous plaid of greens and browns to warn of potential terrorist activity. Even the zombies looked depressed.

His stomach gurgled. The only solid food he’d eaten in the last twenty-four hours was the breading of a burnt corndog.

“God, I feel like shit.”

He scoured the bathroom for narcotics but couldn’t find so much as a headache powder.

He’d been living off his savings for the last several weeks, ever since the zoo fired him over an incident that led to the zombification of three turtles, two penguins, one debutante, and a small group of Klipsch perverts. Now he was broke and out of everything. Even if he got a job today, he didn’t know how he’d afford food to last until his first check.

In no condition to go on interviews, Max put the thought out of his mind and shuffled to the kitchen. He guzzled the last of his herbally fortified juice-drink on the way to his liquor cabinet.

“Goddammit!”

His urinary jowls weren’t the only things the paunchy poacher had plundered. Max kicked the door shut.

“Fuck!” He braced himself against the wall until his toes stopped throbbing. His wounds would heal, but now he would have to spend the rest of his money restocking his bar, which meant he would have to find a job. Then it dawned on him.

“Shit! It’s Sunday. I can’t even buy booze. Fucking Baptastics ruin everything!”

“Mroowr?” Spooky meowed inquisitively.

Max walked to the bedroom, where his Bio-Bed nestled in several inches of dirty laundry. She liked it that way. Every time he washed clothes, she acted like he was destroying her natural habitat. He used that as an excuse to buy new clothes every time he found something cheap and cool.

“Hi, Spooky.” Max ran his fingers through her soft, black-and-grey striped cheek. “I bet you’re wondering what was going on last night. Just a little organ theft. Nothing to worry your big squishy head about.”

Spooky purred and rubbed against his hand.

He glanced at the lines pumping the sedatives in and the waste out to make sure everything was normal. He took good care of Spooky. Being genetically engineered as an immobile blob of fat for humans to sleep on was indignity enough for one lifetime. She was the nicest thing he had and the only living being that loved him.

Max was morally opposed to Bio-Beds, but she’d come with the apartment. His options were to maintain her or put her down. She was way too sweet and comfortable to kill. Whoever came up with the idea of harnessing the oozy squish of cat-fat for furniture was an evil genius.

He plopped onto Spooky’s belly and burst a stitch.

“Ahh!” The pain triggered a coughing fit that triggered more pain. He rolled onto his belly and screamed into her fat.

“Mroooww?”

Max wanted to cry, but he was too dehydrated. It was all getting too vivid. With nothing to dull his senses, he couldn’t help but notice the filth. The glassware on his nightstand was stuck in a mass of tissues and allergy medicine that had gotten wet and dried out so many times it turned into paper-mâché.

He thought of the sign by the kitchen door. ‘Abandon soap all ye who enter here.’ It was cute when he got it, but less so in light of his having run out of soap weeks ago. How had he let it get this bad?

“I gotta get some fresh air.”

He snatched a T-shirt out of the closet, found his pants, and made sure his phone, keys, and hammer were still in them. He hadn’t left the house without a hammer since a brief but unpleasant encounter with a feisty undead lady. He was pretty sure a couple of whacks to the head would put anybody down, but he’d never tried it. The National Association for the Advancement of Dead People paid the cops to arrest zombie bashers.

When the dead first woke up, there were a lot of hate crimes against them. People expected them to be like they were in the movies, so every jackass with a shotgun decided they were going to save the world. A few people who were too sentimental to splatter grandma’s skull discovered zombies were mostly harmless. They just moped around, looking confused. Every so often, one would flip out. Nobody knew why.

He opened the door and scanned the hallway for crackheads. Seeing none, he hurried down the stairs to the street. He stopped to stare at a zombie who was hunched over with his forehead pressed against the bricks of the complex adjacent. Black saliva dripped from his dangling jaw to pool in front of his mildewed oxfords.

“What’s up with you?”

A passing woman mistook his words for a quasi-friendly salutation. She forced a weak smile, shrugged, and quickened her pace.

Max blushed. He hated it when strangers talked to him.

What kind of creep goes around talking to random people? She probably thought I was hitting on her, and homeless. Fuck, I look like I just crawled out of a grave.

Max made a mental note that he was no longer at home and walked briskly towards S-District. He’d chosen an apartment at the edge of a K-district so he could have middle-class amenities while still within walking distance of slum pricing. The previous tenant as murdered, so he’d gotten a great deal.

His heart palpitated as he remembered rent was due in a week. He pulled out his phone and checked his balance, sixty-three dollars and fourteen cents left. If he didn’t find some money soon, he’d lose his place, and Spooky. That couldn’t happen.

Maybe he’d check out the gr app. He’d heard a lot of Klipsch hipsters were collecting Savainians like trading cards. All he needed was a tragic story to get their attention. That bubble was due to burst, but it might get him through the end of the month.

Neo-Catholistics were handing out pamphlets up ahead, so he shoved his hands in his pockets and crossed the street. Organized panhandling pissed him off on a good day, and he was more than usually in the mood to curb someone. His aptitude for repression had kept him from killing anyone so far, but it was an inevitability he preferred to avoid as long as possible.

Two blocks from the Mega Sav-mart, he noticed an unusual movement out of the corner of his eye. His eyes darted reflexively after it just in time to catch a glimpse of something pink and lumpy slithering behind a snack-cake display. It looked like an amputee had dragged his boneless stump out of view, but there wasn’t room for a person back there.

The display was in front of a small market, the kind where the register is outside so the proprietor could bark deals at people as they passed. Max respected Savanian hutzpa but hated their pushy bullshit. They all reminded him of W.C. Fields.

Still, it would haunt him for days if he didn’t find out what that was.

He forced a smile and walked over to the produce table to get a better view without being rude. The barrel-chested merchant smirked beneath a thick walrus mustache.

“Can I help you with anything, sir? We have a special on porcupine kabobs, only $7.99 a pound.”

“Nah, just browsing. I’ll let you know.”

Max snuck around the display for a closer look. A sliver of something fleshy peeked out from behind the box. Before Max could come any closer, a giant worm-like thing scuttled toward the merchant, clambered up his leg, and wrapped around his head.

Max jumped back and grabbed a handful of snack cakes to defend himself. “What the fuck is that?”

The worm was about the size of a large man’s arm and covered in little fleshy lumps. Its head looked kind of like a hairless beaver with big black eyes and a mouthful of long needle-like teeth.

The merchant was off-kilter, his curses muffled by the creature’s midsection.

Max hurled cakes at it, wincing as the floss chomped his side.

The creature caught one of the snack cakes in its mouth and unwrapped it with its nubby under-thingies. It made a cute nom-nom noise as it chomped through the cake and relaxed around the merchant’s head like a scarf.

The man smiled and scratched the sucker marks on his face.

There was a conspicuous absence of blood and screaming.

“No need to be frightened, sir. This is my cheekworm, Cat.” He unwrapped another cake and handed it to Cat.

The worm was horrifically cute, adorably monstrous. It nibbled the little bar like a contented toddler with long pointy fangs.

“I named her Cat because I had a cat named Cat when I was a kid. He was a good cat. I’ve named every pet that came after in honor of him. My name, incidentally, is Cecil.”

“It certainly is different.” Max’s eyebrow twitched.

“They’re something new. My brother discovered them a few short weeks ago. He was on an expedition to a sunken city off the coast of Cobya. He went under, and they came up. The whole area was crawling with them.”

Max stepped forward to examine the creature.

Cat was hairless and ruddy. It looked like somebody sewed a bunch of baby cheeks onto a fat snake. Her underside had lines of little plungers that could protrude on stalks like fingers or contract to barely perceptible ridges. Her feline mouth and the big black eyes near the top of her face gave her a cute, cartoonish quality.

Max reached out his hand but quickly jerked it back when she dropped the cake and hissed, propelling sticky saliva in and around his eyes. A guttural howl swelled in her throat as she bared six rows of teeth.

Max stepped back, and the growling slowly subsided.

The merchant gained Cat’s attention by humming what sounded like polka. Cecil locked eyes with her and blinked until she smiled and licked his face.

He wiped a smear of icing drool from his cheek. “Unfortunately, they tend to be a touch territorial. They bond instantly with the first human they see and protect them from anything they perceive as dangerous. My brother learned that the hard way.” He pulled the thing down and cradled it in his arms like a baby.

“The first mate tried to pick one up that had already bonded. The little guy felt threatened. Took his head clean off like he was a chocolate bunny.”

Max looked skeptically at the creature. “Shouldn’t it be on a leash or something?”

“No. I believe we’ve learned enough about them to avoid further incidents.”

Max arched an eyebrow.

“Pretty soon, they’ll be as common as cats or dogs. In many ways, they’re superior to both. They are sweeter, smarter, and more loyal than any other household pet. One hundred times more effective than guard dogs. They don’t claw the furniture. They eat almost anything, but nothing they’re not supposed to, and you don’t even have to worry about having them fixed. Watch this.”

He placed Cat on the table, pulled a butcher’s knife out of his apron, and placed it about six inches from her tail. Cat coiled in ecstasy as he sawed through her with smooth, even strokes. She trilled as though in the throes of passion. When the blade hit the cutting board, Cat curled away from it, giggling and oozing thick yellow goo.

The merchant slid the blade under the segment and flung it like a teppanyaki chef.

Max was too shocked to do anything but catch it.

Its jiggly warmth spread through his hand, tingling up his arm and throughout his body, filling him with peace. It felt like falling into a hot tub.

Taking hold with all its suckers, the peppy lump squirmed and dripped yellow custard onto his shoes. He tried to drop it, to shake it off, but the suckers had fused to his flesh.

It was growing about a centimeter every second, winding around his arm until a head bloomed cooing on Max’s shoulder. It opened its big black eyes, and all the shock and disgust melted into fatherly pride. It wasn’t long before Max was cooing back.

“Amazing, isn’t it?” the merchant asked proudly. “You now have a friend who would kill or die for you. He’s a part of you, built from your own DNA. That’s why he looks like you. He’s your son.”

“Did you just rape me?”

“I did nothing of the sort. If you don’t want it, just put it on the ground and stomp its head. It’ll let you. They’re that sweet.”

“Right.”

The cheekworm snuffled around Max’s ear.

“I guess this is where you tell me how much he costs.”

“Oh, no. I couldn’t take him away from you now if I wanted to. He’s yours for life. If you’d like to show your gratitude by purchasing something from my store, that’s up to you. They love snack cakes. How about a treat for your new friend?”

The creature rested its head on top of Max’s.

“Sure, why not? Do you carry Juicetastic XXX by any chance?”

“What flavor?”

“Mango ecstasy?”

“I’ll just go get it for you.” The merchant waddled through the doorway.

Cat poured off the table and followed close behind.

Max tossed a few snack cakes on the counter and called after him, “Two gallons.”

The merchant came back and bagged everything up. “What do you think you’ll call him?”

“I don’t know. Cakey?”

The worm trilled in his ear.

“That’s just adorable. I think he likes it.”

Max didn’t care that Cecil was patronizing him. He placed his phone near the sensor and watched his funds roll back to forty-nine dollars and fifteen cents. “Is it a he?”

“Call it whatever you want, but it’s neither. No genitalia, you see? These little guys just latch onto the first DNA they come into contact with. You might say you played the role of the father, making Cat here the mother, so I suppose they’re metaphorically female. I don’t see what it matters, though. You aren’t going to fuck it, are you?”

“Eww, no. Of course not. I was just curious.”

“Only joking, sir, only joking. Be good to the little guy, and he’ll be good to you. Now, if his feathers get ruffled, and you need to calm him down, do as I did earlier. They seem to enjoy polka the most. Blinking at them conveys love and trust and puts them at ease. If you have any problems or questions, feel free to come back any time.”

The merchant handed him his bags with a big smile that said Max was free to fuck off. “You have a nice day now.”

Max smiled politely, “You too.” Not quite sure what had just transpired, he quickly returned home before anything else could mate with him.

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I'm unstuck in time, so there's no telling when I'll post chapter two. Follow me so you won't miss it. If you'd like to get it all at once, you can preorder it here: https://amzn.to/2EKAGw6