We see them praying to her – they hunt and gather, making their nests in dark, damp pipes, toilet shafts and sometimes, in the walls. We only work well with the ants – they are clean, and mindful of picking up fresh corpses when the giants rain the flesh eating acids down upon their backs.  It’s harder in the cities. We have more predators, even as intelligent bodies, and sometimes we’ve taken to eating our allies, the mice, because if we don’t we’ll starve. Now we are desperate – those who multiply far too quickly and adapt their immunity faster and smarter and better have plotted against us, the Rats, and other vermin. We cannot fight their God. She is too powerful.

I went to see her, so that I could be sure. I watched the sleek light brown bodies with their pulsing, throbbing innards seeking out a food source of sugar and flour from a crack in the cupboard of the house were we all have lived for 95 years. Decades of decay, incest, and overwhelming breeding – they came up from the sewers, and that’s where she lives. I’ve heard them whisper it in the walls. They scuttled and scraped against the sides of the sack, getting in, getting drunk on the sugar crystals, and gathering an offering for her.  Drones, they care not for me – a simple old rat with several tumors ready to hamper my legs into immobility at any time. They will feast on my ripe flesh when I can no longer move. They will nibble away at my fur, burrowing in, getting deep into my gullet, by way of orifices first, if they are polite enough not to chew through my yet-un-opened flesh. It’s the worst way to die. They get greedy, seeing their brethren feast, and suddenly I will be covered in diseased, anxious mouths with glossy black, brown, and off-lit exoskeletons rasping against my fur.

I shuddered, watching them from behind busy termites, and their wood claim.

Following them isn’t difficult, except in the crevices. I am not a fat rat, but I cannot always go where they go. I take the long way around to get down into the sewer, listening to their whispering and scuttling feet across the bricks, and the meaner ones, who hiss like whispering serpentine ghosts that seek souls, only to eat them. The heat of the sewage was familiar – pillowy feces, soupy bile, and all manner of dark, liver-damaged urine clung to the black rot of biological decay beneath the water. I ambled close to the edge, careful not to disturb the sleeping soldiers that clung to the ceiling of the sewer, ready to scuttle free. They opened their beady eyes—black in the sunlight—red underground, and hiss at me, telling me I don’t belong.

The stench was becoming unbearable. When the breath of the sewage changed, I knew it was no longer the comfortable heat of human defecation that warmed my flesh, but the heat of a thousand, million roach-bodies, soft and crunchy beneath their armor, entirely inedible and completely parasitical, smelling like a combination of death and toe cheese. It was not even the clean natural way that dead mice smell after opening a winter-sealed vault… it was like sinking my nose into puss-ridden flesh-eating bacteria itself, and you cannot wash it off. The sheer heat of their pulsating bodies, alive and hungry, gave me the chills. Some of their wings brushed my skin as I kept on, following a slow trail of them that seemed to be lining up, and pooling around a dark cave. The mouth of it seemed to be covered in hanging moss, or so I thought.

It was not a cave at all.

There beyond the curve of the tunnel, was indeed a black ichorous mouth, but it belonged to a gaping vagina, bearded with green sewage slime, and something was moving within the pale, white flesh of it. As I drew closer, my awe astounded me, as I saw two fat legs braced against two long brick frescoes from the old-world design, left over from the old catacombs of the city before it became a sewer tunnel. There were bones, I could see, behind her knees, and her skin was flabby and quivering, glistening with yellow sweat. The hissing was a roar, now, a sea of roach-voice raised in song, those who were lined up now crawling over the woman’s bare flesh, bulbous and bloated belly the color of bruise, which quivered beneath their little scuttling feet. Those roaches, they were feeding her, and as I struggled to see around her giant belly, a terrible thing happened: The woman bellowed; a scream not unlike a hiss with a laborious note attached, so horrifying that what happened next was almost dreamlike, if the nightmare hadn’t been real.

Her anus was stuffed with black sewage ichor and it pursed and blew air more foul than the roaches smelled themselves. The legs braced harder on the walls and the roaches sang their roach song, prayers uniting a force more unnatural than any sound in the world, and that’s when it happened:

Her slime-bearded flesh dialated so wide that I could see deep into her warty sex. Within I saw yellow puss, white-hot patches of staphylococci, red gaping sores, and a hundred thousand roach babies swimming, diving, laughing, slithering, suckling, eating, tearing, breathing, a hurricane of roach flesh ready to spill forth into the sewer bed she had made to birth her young. In they were sucked once more, the contractions showing through the musculature of her bruised, swollen belly. They were eating her inside out. They had broken the amniotic fluid sac and were feasting on her womb, the little parasites. What a great and mighty God this was, that she would endure so much to bring such pestilence unto the world. Again, she grunted, and the groan was fierce, the roaches gathered around her dripping vagina parted as the sea of gelatinous fluids were released.

It was on that sluice of body slime, that they were finally pushed out, a terrible tide of stinking young, their brown and black bodies slick with her wetness, and her blood. They spilled slowly past her engourged, blistered, labia, down near that festering rectum of doom at the first few inches of floor. Their hungry mouths made their exit more urgent and as that great mother goddess sat up to get the strain her contracting muscles to get the rest of them out of her womb, I saw that she was a terrible thing. Long spidery saw-like brown legs snatched to move the old ones away, to make room for all her new children, ready for the hunt. Her upper half was all exoskeleton, and her black beady eyes saw me at once. She opened her mandible, and out came another hiss that I understood all too well. “Infidel!” she said, and a terrible laughter came to deafen me, as I drowned beneath the feet of a million new hatchlings. They deafened my ears, crawling into them, nibbling at my brain as I scratched and squealed, desperate to get them out. My little claws were bloody by the time I could faintly hear her calling out in a rasping, scratching whisper, “That’s right, my children! Go forth and eat the flesh of man, for you shall inherit the earth!”

I vomited green bile onto my feet, unable to hold in the rancid meat I’d dug out of the dumpster beside the great building that is home to us all. Visions of these horrible baby bugs growing to their full size, blanketing the streets so you could not walk but on their backs, which prickled the bottoms of bare feet-flesh, and my paws were aching at the sight of brown undulations on walls, streets, brick and mortar, and finally, the flesh of my own self and my children.

I am meek, and I shall not inherit the earth. Not even the giants can save us from the Roach Goddess. She breeds too many soldiers, too fast.

*copyright 2005, Rain Graves. All Rights Reserved.