Dermaphoria by Craig Clevenger

And?”
    “And they’re not grounded, so if you’re pulling too much current from them, they tend to spark. That’s why you’ve got those burn marks on the slots. You can have either fumes or sparks, but you can’t have both.”
    “You want to rewire the place and ground the power. Not cheap.”
    “For starters. Lesson two: ether. We’ll be using it in quantity. It’s colorless, odorless and inflammable.”
    “What’s the problem?”
    “Not unflammable, inflammable, so the fumes can, and will, blow.”
    “I hear you, Eric. Jesus, fix the sparks, then.”
    “It doesn’t need sparks. Ether is heavier than air, so the vapors flow to ground level and then build up. Most lab fires happen when the fumes reach a wall socket and spontaneously ignite. You know the rest.”
    Time and materials were needed to prep the place, all of which were alien to White, but my list of gear was old news because he and his organization were in the business of procuring them for their legions of pyromaniac amateurs.
    “We got guys everywhere working for us, and our guys have guys working for them. Most of them are runners,” White began.
    Runners, or coyotes, who worked at piecemealing together large stashes of matchbooks, road flares and cold medicine to avoid the Man’s eyes. One of Hoyle’s runners, so far down the chain nobody knew his name, used a counterfeit license, provided by the chain, for making certain purchases. He also used it to gain entry into a nightclub where he got hammered on some sugary girl drink, made the wrong move on the wrong woman and wouldn’t take no for an answer until he heard it from the doorman’s flashlight. The cops pulled him over later on a suspected DUI. They seized two gallons of hospital-grade iodine in his trunk. Coyote sobered up in County with eight gangbangers tattooed like a collective flesh-and-blood Sistine Chapel. He didn’t shower for four days pending arraignment and refused to call anyone.
    He cut a deal and the DA cut him loose with a tapeworm stuck to his ribs.
    “Get the bag, son,” White shouted over to his van.
    The boy hopped out, dragging with him a large, plastic bundle. The drooling man-boy moved with an odd grace, shifting his weight and anchoring his feet, hauling the bag from the van. It struck the dirt with a noise like a coconut wrapped in a wet towel. As much as I didn’t want to look, I knew better than to look away.
    “My son does all of this,” said White. “Drains all of their fluids out and wraps them up. This happens if you fail a performance review and we fire you, like when this kid got scared and decided he could wear a tapeworm to a drop.”
    The head looked mummified, wrapped in cheesecloth or surgical gauze with stains seeping through in different stages of yellow, red and brown. The body was wrapped in a single layer of chicken wire.
    “We’ll dump him when we’re done here. Toe Tag weighed his stomach down with rocks so he’ll sink. The bottom feeders get throughthe chicken wire and pick the flesh from the bone. There’s catfish the size of dogs in some of the these lakes out here. You don’t want to order fish at any of the mom-and-pop joints between here and New Mexico.”

    thirteen
    I’ D SAY THE BUGS ARE MOCKING ME BUT THEY’RE NOT PROGRAMMED FOR THAT. The fuzzy logic of mockery doesn’t justify the engineering cost. Instead, they record everything with heat-sensitive cameras and motion-triggered microphones. They’re programmed to eat wallpaper paste, grease stains and bread crumbs, to shit into carpet, drop eggs into baseboard cracks, and they’re built for speed. I’ve only caught a few.
    The autopsy project has taken on a life of its own as I take the lives of more bugs. Specimens lie splayed onto cardboard dug from the trash, stripped and pinned with paperclips and thumbtacks. I’ve checked antennae polarity between every possible configuration, without a spark, an arc or a hint of current.
    These weren’t built with