#moskitto

 Clay parked the truck and double checked the Dark Score address on his phone. The Hunter groaned and rubbed his eyes, muscles begging for sleep as the livid bruises now blooming on his face and neck were making their angry presence known. Clay reached into his beige military jacket and slowly divested himself weapons, storing them discreetly in the truck until he was practically naked with just a Sig Sauer and some knives.

As we all know from National Geographic, scientists are easily spooked by machetes.

Clay lifted the tarp on the back of his truck and was assured the grizzly corpses were still there and not yet becoming some sorta frankenstein abomination.  He jogged up to the small house, and uselessly tried to wipe black insectile blood off his hands on equally stained jeans before knocking.

If Anita hadn’t been so desperate for a paying gig she probably would have told this guy off online and then never thought about the interaction again. But she was desperate for a paying gig which is why she found herself covering her home office with sheets of plastic while she waited for some internet stranger to deliver her bugs to dissect. It felt like one of those moments where you look back and go ‘ah yes, that was the point of no return.’ It wasn’t long after she had set up her insect kill room when she heard a few knocks at her front door. Now all there was left to do was hope that he wasn’t secretly there to kill her. As Anita drew closer to the front door she recognized the very familiar smell of bug guts, and felt her nerves calm down a bit. She opened the door, but not too wide as to immediately welcome him in, “Wow, you look like absolute shit.”

“Thanks, squalid is my love language,” Clay replied, grin bright through the bruises. But the smile did not reach the Hunter’s cold dark eyes. His gaze sized up zzz Anita in a surgical moment before flicking around the surroundings, the snowy lakeside, the barren trees, as if something could jump them both at any time.

“So want to see what you're workin with and before we bring the gribblies inside,” suggested Clay with a nod towards the truck and the tarp over its back.

“Well, you must feel surrounded by love right now then.” There was something almost eerie to Anita about the way he had smiled, it felt like an empty gesture intended to put her at ease while doing the exact opposite. Following his eyes, she noticed him taking in the surroundings as if the trees might become sentient and attack. Which, admittedly, in this town wouldn’t be all that shocking. “Relax, Rambo. Nobody’s gonna interrupt today’s main event, ok?”

Nodding, Anita stepped out onto her front porch, closing the door behind her as she began to walk over to the truck parked in her driveway. “Do you know what sort of species you brought or did you just kill first and hope you got something of value?”

Anita’s quip seemed to set Clay at ease, sardony perhaps being a communication style the Hunter was more familiar with. “Alrigh’ but if I’m bout to get eaten by your pet man-gator I’ll haunt you listening to Three Days Grace in my skivvies.”

This dire threat thus levied, Clay walked to the truck and vaulted one-handed into the truck bed with casual alacrity. He pried back the tarp to reveal the spindly forms of massive mosquitos, each with the thorax the size of a human child and gossamer wings twice that length. Their proboscises were like dark chitinous spears. “Moskittos,” the Hunter provided.”They produce a powerful anticoagulant that’d made very value heart thinners and heart meds if extracted properly.”

“My man-gator is actually vacationing in Florida for the season, he’ll be real sorry he missed eating you though,” Anita found it amusing that he was very wrong about what kind of reptile he needed to be worried about eating him. Fortunately for him she needed money right now more than she needed a meal.

“Wow…” Anita remarked softly as the tarp was lifted. She had examined a Moskitto or two before, but it had taken weeks for her to track it and then figure out how to capture it without it making a meal of her. The fact that this man managed to get a whole truck load of them sent a small chill down her spine. She really should have learned more about him before inviting her to her home. “Some collectors like to buy their proboscis. Not really sure why, but they do.”

“You're an old hand with the cryptids and mutants then,” noticed Clay at her remark about the market for creepy bug-spears, looking down at  Anita from where he sat atop the truck’s tailgate. The Slayer seemed to look over the scientist again, as if reassessing her, but the amiable calm of his features and hard jasper eyes gave no hint at what conclusion he’d come to. “Good, we don’t have to go through the whole Bigfoot chat,” he affirmed.

“The anticoagulant can carry diseases if it’s not extracted properly which is part of why I’d prefer an expert handles that part,” admitted Clay, “Interested?”

Last time Anita was in town she was far more reserved about admitting to her knowledge of the ‘cryptids and mutants’, but that ultimately never really benefited her. So she decided to stop caring so much about tipping her hand about these sorts of things. Besides, the guy was at her house with a truck full of supernatural bugs - feigning shock or lack of knowledge seemed counterproductive. “I actually heard a rumor that there's a bigfoot roaming around lately. Might be a kerashag or something,” she added with a shrug.

“Yeah, these guys can carry a whole host of nasty infections. I performed a dissection of one a few years back.” As Anita looked back over at the guy there was a part of her that wished she had pushed for a higher percentage of the take. Sure, he risked his skin killing these things but one wrong slice of her scalpel and she could get very sick rather quickly. “You have a partner in the killing of these things too, or that all you?”

“A Shaggy huh?” Clay asked, drawing his own surmises about Ex-Professor Nieves from her use of the necrophage’s proper name. “I hope so, if anything that big is being seen by normies, I’d rather it be those hair-chewer Chewbacas y’know? They don’t hurt nobody.”

Clay listened to Anita talk about her dissection, sitting on the top of the tailgate, arms resting laxly on the knees of his jeans. Late evening light refracted off Dark Score Lake, the setting sun spreading one last corridor of gold along its surface, surrounded by the darker violet and blue mirrored from the eventide above. In the distance Clay could make out the weathered shells of abandoned vacation homes poking out like opponent bone mounds in sleeping winter woodland. Clay guessed that Anita Nieves was more than just an itinerant academic looking for some solitude, but the Slayer had more than enough on his hands just keeping Spawn and Alghouls from overrunning White Rest without alienating people who could help keep him funded.

“Just me this time,” Clay admitted. “When there’s a rush of anemia cases at the hospital it can give Dracula vibes,” the Slayer continued with the casualness of a professional discussing the mundane intrigues of the office. “But often it's something simpler,” Clay said, nodding down to the truck bed full of bloodsuckers more mundane than ravenous corpses. “So what got you into cryptid bugs Nieves,” Clay asked, keeping the questions on Anita’s profession rather than the far more sensitive topics of species. “You find a specimen scientific journals wouldn’t accept or something?”

If Anita hadn’t put it all together before, it was apparent to her now. The man was some sort of hunter. Judging by his dracula hunter, likely a slayer. Though in her experience, just because a hunter wasn’t the type to typically kill her kind - didn’t mean they would never do so. And now this one knew her name, and her address, and that she was no stranger to the strange world they were both a part of. “Normies,” she repeated softly, wondering if that comment was his way of suggesting he didn’t think she was one.

“And you normally go chasing after Dracula vibes? Sounds quite dangerous.” Anita leaned against Clay’s truck, careful to press her body against part of it that wasn’t covered in fresh bug intestines. Crossing her arms as she listened to his question, she began thinking about the version of the truth she was willing to tell him. “My father was incredibly prominent in the pest control business down in Mexico. Sometimes he would get calls for, well - how did you put it? - really big bugs. It’s one thing to hear stories of creatures like this, but once you see one for yourself …” She trailed off, letting the implication of acceptance end the story. “I know the larger scientific community isn’t ready to accept these truths, but I’m a scientist. Once I knew things like this were out there, I wanted to study them. Only the bugs, of course. Girl’s gotta have a specialty.”

The story was the truth, save for the omission of her own species. Anita didn’t need him knowing that though. She may be in business with him but she sure as hell didn’t trust him. “How’d you get into killing things like these and scrapping them for parts?”

“Only if people might get hurt,” was Clay's stance on chasing Dracula vibes. “Best leave dark castle’s with lots of lightning and moody fog alone y’know,” was the Slayer’s sardonic tip of the hand to what the limits of his aggressive cryptozoology were. Besides, what's even the point of trying to take revenge on a virus?

“That’s brave of you,” noted Clay from his tailgate perch. “You’re dad too. I mean it,” he followed up quickly. “All this stuff can bring on some real vertigo, and going against the consensus and dealing with the gaslighting takes guts,” noted the Hunters whose duties regularly included the very kind of occlusion and cover-ups he was praising Anita for overcoming.

“Oh y’know,” Clay previarticated, “Rural living, hunting elk and the sorta thing,” was true. “Once day you learn fairy tales are real but they are more dangerous than charming, buuuuuuuuuut,” Clay shrugged, his dimpled smirk full of the phlegmatic ruefulness of someone who’d survived a war only to realize they’d been a casualty after all. “But rent and shit doesn’t stop just cuz Tinkerbell and Nellie are real, right? The dead are rising and Hell’s full, but late stage capitalism keeps rolling on,” Clay observed merrily, pointer fingers making motions evocative of wheels.

“Besides,” Clay noted more soberly, “those fucking fairy tales wrecked alot of lives back home,” the Appalachian son said. “Cutting up those fairy tales and selling them gave my neighbors another chance at normalcy,” admitted the zombie outbreak survival.

“Yeah, best leave the dark spooky castles to the Buffy’s of the world, huh?” There was a combination of sarcasm and realism in Anita’s voice, almost as if she was daring him to admit that slayers were real too. Or even, given his own choice to bring up Dracula and blood sucking, that he might be one himself. It was hard for her to hold back a laugh when Clay called her father brave. The man was plenty of things, brave would never be one of them. “I’ve done my fair share of gaslighting. It’s easy to deal with when you know the signs.”

The accent in the bug-slayer’s voice and his comment about ‘back home’ told Anita that he also wasn’t a White Crest native. Which wasn’t surprising considering the type of people who seemed to gravitate to this place. “So you’re a modern-day Robin Hood, huh? Save people from things that go bump in the night and then make sure you get paid for your efforts. Or, well, maybe Robin Hood isn’t the best comparison. But, ya know,” she shrugged then shoved her hands in her pockets as the cold air was starting to get to her. “I’m sure your neighbors appreciate whatever amount of normalcy you were able to restore.”

“I think Rob had a decent idea until he became a simp for King Richard ,” noted Clay breezily, as if the 13th century English Outlaw was someone currently getting ratioed on Twitter. “I don’t have those delusions of grandeur, ….because I’m not a Disney furry bait fox,” he noted with a sage nod, as if not being an animated fox from 1973 was the sole reason for discretion. “Also like, Richard the First was a complete fucking monster so y’know, weird that Rob was cool with him after fighting John for so long,” Clay shook his head with a playfully disapproving expression, as if finding the Disney Fox’s antifacist cred lacking. “Yikes Rob.”

Clay noted Anita’s movement, “Kay do you want me to bring these inside?”

Anita knew that something she had said sparked this seemingly unprompted history lesson, but for the life of her she had no idea what that something had been. She was all about learning, but she tended to care far more about science than history… or Disney foxes? So she just nodded and laughed where it seemed appropriate. His next question made sense, but as Anita looked over at the mound of bug parts in his trunk she realized that she should have covered her hallways in plastic sheeting, not just the office. “Yeah, gotta get them into the makeshift lab somehow.” She scrunched up her face in thought as she tried to figure out how to do so easily and cleanly. “Unfortunately the office is at the back of the house… so I can help you carry these if you need?”

Clay cocked his head at Anita’s noncommittal laughter, expression thoughtful. “You don’t have’ta pretend I’m funny or make sense if you don’t want to y’know,” Clay said with the air of man shrugging off some triviality of etiquette. “It’s just us and Nessie out here,” the mutant pointed out, looking out over the black slate waters of Dark Score Lake spread out beneath the pale pinpricks of emerging stars. “I’m a big boy, Professor. Don’t have to protect me from my dysfunction,” he promised with a wry chuckle of someone who wasn’t quite broken enough yet to escape the bite of self-awareness. “Kind of you though.”

“Sure,” Clay affirmed at her instructions. The Hunter hefted several of the child-sized insects up and over his arms with unnatural ease before jumping down from the trunk. Thick yellow hemolymph oozed from bullet holes in each of the monstrous flies, dripping down Clay’s jacket sleeves and leaving a musty-smelling trail on the grass as walked towards the house’s back door.

Most people didn’t call Anita out on feigning interest. Then again she wasn’t usually feigning interest around men, she often let her disinterest in those circumstances be obvious. Which is probably why she was caught off guard when he called her out so spectacularly. “Actually, it’s just us. Nessie migrates for the winter season.” There was something really reassuring about him being so self-aware.

As Anita watched Clay begin to carry the bugs to the back door it became incredibly apparent how messy this was going to get. And quickly. She reached into the bed of the truck and grabbed one Moskitto, holding it as far away from her body as she could as she quickly tried to catch up with her temporary business partner. “Be careful! You’ve gotta go through the back part of the kitchen to get to the office. And I only had enough plastic sheets to cover the office!” Despite carrying more insects than she was, he somehow was moving at twice her speed.

Clay paused at the back door and froze, listening, dark eyes scanning the houses’ interior through the crack of a door. The Slayer held completely still as the threshold for a full minute before continuing into the premises without acknowledgement of the pause. Even with his burdens, Clay moved through the kitchen with a physical ease born both from strength and the subtler confidence of not being made awkward by others’ boundaries or space. It was an invasive boldness reserved for radiant extroverts, rich men, and seasoned criminals. Clay Hale was only one of these things.

Yellow hemolymph dribbled on plastic sheets as Clay turned in place at the waist, scanning Anita’s insectile menagerie with interest. “So where do you want me to put these?”

Anita watched the bug slayer stand at the entryway to her house for what seemed like forever. She wasn’t fully sure what he was doing, whether he was contemplating how to get the bugs inside without making a mess or if he had maybe just… broken? Either way he was letting a pile of dark yellow goop form on her back porch. These fucking bugs must have only been dripping their intestines really slowly because as she and Clay brought them through the kitchen they left a long sticky trail of this ember discharge behind.