An undisclosed location in the pits of Foreign Wherever, shoved in a folder and zipped up tight with hundreds of other megabytes like digital sardines, sat soaking in a putrid brine until some depraved sap gets hungry enough to grab the fly and pull the zipper down, separate the teeth to empty it all, its oil-logged manila flaps relieved and sighing as it pours its deluge of slop at his feet, and he plucks up his favorite and slips it into a disc drive, licking any errant slick off his fingertips.

A young girl. A young woman, he corrects, presents it to the world, to the authorities, to anyone who points a finger. A young woman, consenting, hand to god she wants this. She wants to be tied up, intricately muscled into ornate sailor knots, thighs to belly and spread wide. She loves the feeling of a funnel inside her, and what’s better than one is two, what’s better than two is three—she bares her teeth with joy, folded like origami on the stainless steel tabletop, shaking her head only because she can’t believe her dream is coming true.

The camera has hands; hairy and burly, prodding, stretching. Shoving the funnels in deeper, glistening with lubricant because they’re not monsters over there and also, remember, she wants this. The camera says something to the woman; it waggles a finger in her face and she shakes her head but she doesn’t audibly protest, there’s no call off, so the hands give her a loving pat on her head, and then a generous squeeze of one of her perky tits for good measure.

Word is said. Another pair of hands come into play, these two clad in thick black rubber and sopping wet. They do the same—run their uncoordinated fingers through her hair, grab at her chest and pull her nipples, desperately wanting some kind of response, and eventually the woman gives it up in the form of an exaggerated childish whine. The gloved hands love that, they giggle as they continue their exploration, even roaming south to stick some fingers through each funnel, as if illustrating to the camera just how open and ready and willing she is. The woman shakes her head again, she says something and she sounds like she’s going to cry while she speaks, but there are no subtitles, there’s no translation so there’s no proving beyond a reasonable doubt that she’s saying no, and according to The Law it is a criminal offense to record video like this without explicit consent from all participating parties. All of whom are most definitely legal adults, not only in the eyes of certain countries with different rulings on age of consent or what constitutes a consenting adult in the first place, whatever, whatever—it’s time for the eels.

They writhe like a horrific eldritch mass, overflowing from the mouth of a plastic beach bucket, tense black ribbons that fold over on each other, an oil spill incarnate. The gloved hands dive into the bucket. The eels flop aggressively this way and that, they try to fight but they’re just big dumb strips of meat, no match for the hands. They grab a clump, a bundle of curling and uncurling cartilage that drips a trail of swamp water all the way back to the girl, woman, and her eyes look upon the hands’ findings with abject horror.

The first eel slides in desperately; nowhere else to go. The promise of a dark, dank something is its only means of survival. And it seems satisfied, because once it’s in it stays there, and the pairs of hands laugh and coo happily as they grab for another, and they slide that one in through the same funnel. The woman twists her face into something new and uncomfortable. She shakes her head. Tries to say something but the voices behind the camera drown her out with laughter.

They keep them coming. Slippery and unrelenting, into each orifice, the camera watches every eel wriggle down and out of sight. It’s like a magic trick, this bitch is full of eels and they just keep shoving in more. 

She cries, her mascara runs down her cheeks and her head is shaking, and soon her belly is bulging, convulsing from her many dozens of antsy visitors with no way out, just like her, a Russian doll of complete misery–except she’s Japanese and of course she actually loves this so scratch that metaphor–one of the bare hands pushes harshly on her stomach and then recoils when it feels the eels push back, and the hands all laugh and luge another couple down into her ass, try to force one through her urethra even but both parties harshly reject that motion, but it doesn’t matter because the funnel’s still in, so the bare hands end up just twisting it round inside its hole until blood starts pooling over. She’s wide open and wailing, presumably from absolute delight, and one more eel gets forced in before she seems about to burst. The gloved hands offer mercy, they allow the last few creatures refuge in the bottom of the bucket, and now both hands, or all four hands, everyone involved including the girl, woman, bitch, whore–they pull out the funnels and press down on her belly, desperate to get whatever went in back out. She’s grunting, struggling to free her bowels, all her canals, from this torture–this delight, this whatever–and after some words of encouragement the first few eels slop out her holes, left to writhe on the table in a sheen of shit and blood and KY. The hands applaud and they ask for more. She’s panting and sweating, takes a deep breath and then pushes again, arteries in her neck engorged, set to blow, her cunt yawns wide and dispenses another fat eel, its body slaps comically against the stainless steel and it gasps for air, or water, or whatever the fuck eels need to live–the sweet cocoon of questionably legal pussy, maybe–and she manages to get a few more of its brothers out of her before she loses steam, drained of everything she had, her legs lost in a sea of goopy gory eels.

Her belly still churns, the hands keep pushing, they keep telling her something and they sound mad about it. She weakly shakes her head. Her voice is raspy, tired and ragged. But the hands keep pointing, there’s something inside her still and they want it out.

They bare down hard on her stomach. She tries to fight but she’s so weak, the hands so strong–she cries out with newfound agony, her holes tear and weep viscera as something new escapes her, something fleshy and massive and bony, veiny, crying. The gloved hands scoop up the thing and display it to the camera: some sickly overcooked fetus, umbilical cord twisted in gnarled knots. Its eyes are milky with pus, its little voice garbled, inhuman as it babbles and sobs for skin-to-skin. The hands speak and suddenly there are subtitles.

-YOUR BABY! YOUR BABY IS HERE!

The girl is dazed. Unable to find the words. Her eyes begin to well with tears, a smile tugs at the corner of her mouth.

-LOOK, YOUR BABY!

The gloved hands place the fetus across her chest, where it seems to calm down, sort of melt over her skin and start purring. She manages to lean forward, and she maternally rests her cheek against her baby’s, and the hands clap again and the eels slap their bodies against the table in celebration, and everyone is so happy, so you see nothing bad was happening at all.

-WHAT WILL YOU NAME IT?

The girl, the woman–the mother–she smiles as her shaking hands cradle the veiny head of her child. Then she looks at the camera.

“Newfag.”

He blinks, his eyes squishing audibly, and he reorients himself. They’re driving down some dimly lit backroads, a narrow curve that disappears behind a chain link fence and out into who knows.

Sonny looks at him with concern or maybe disgust.

“You look like shit,” she tells him.

“Oh. Okay.” Newfag rubs his nose, inadvertently dusting his fingers in flecks of dried blood.

“You need to clean up.” Sonny says. Hurriedly, she throws open the center console and fishes around. Eventually she produces a brown, wadded up napkin. “Here.” She shoves it at him.

“Okay.” Very lazily, Newf dabs his nostrils with the napkin. It doesn’t do much, just dislodges a couple blood boogers. Sonny doesn’t have the patience for this.

“Oh my god, just spit in it.”

Newfag hocks a particularly viscous spitball into the napkin, thick with mucus and also more blood, and he wipes that on his face. Sonny watches in bewilderment, like she can’t believe how simultaneously heinous and unintelligent this guy is. When he deems himself thoroughly clean, he balls the napkin up and stuffs it in his coat pocket, and then turns to her for the verdict.

“Hmm.” She seems disappointed. “Maybe you should hide.”

Newf, red and green and yellow smeared across his face, cocks his head like a confused puppy. “Why hide?”

“It’s either hide, or I pull up to security with a blood-hemorrhaging middle schooler in my passenger seat.” Sonny quickly, expertly, shrugs her way out of her coat and throws it over Newfag’s lap. “Get down and put this over you.”

He does what he’s told without question. Unbuckles his seatbelt, crawls down into the perfectly Newfag-sized space at the foot of the seat, balls up his little body and tosses the coat over himself. He’s instantly enveloped in the smell of cigarette ash and body odor, some intoxicating pheromone that further dilates his pupils. Diminished to pubescent levels of debilitating arousal. Could he jerk off under here without Sonny knowing?

He shakes the thought.

But could he?

“Hey.” Sonny taps the top of his head. He tenses like he’s been found out.

“Yeah.”

“We’re gonna pull up to security in a second here.” Something in her voice sounds tight and terse. Prickled with newness. “These guys are. Ah. They… talk in a really specific way. So I’m gonna talk to them the way they like to be talked to. Okay?”

Newfag can sense that Sonny’s being purposefully vague, hinting at something he should probably be aware of but definitely isn’t. Under the cloak of girl smell, he simply nods his head.

“When you get out, when you talk to these guys, you don’t call me anything other than Sonny, okay?”

“What else would I call you.” What else do you want me to call you.

“Like,” she groans, impatient and anxious, “like don’t. Fuggin’. Call me she or. Shit like that.”

Newfag takes a distracted huff of pit stink.

“Okay?”

“Yeah, okay.”

“Okay.”

The truck slows to a tentative roll, the cab fills with orange light. He hears the outside pour in from an open window, rushing cars far off on the turnpike and the whine of approaching airplanes. A tinny R&B tune melds into the soundscape as the truck stops.

“Hey there,” someone, some guy, says through the window.

“Hey, buddy,” Sonny says, her quality of voice shifted into something more rigid, more business. “I’m doing a cargo pickup for tail number VH-R36.”

“Sure thing, buddy. Mind showing me your license and registration?”

“Not at all.” Sonny reaches over. Very subtly, almost softly, she presses Newf down and out of the way to pop open the glove box. He listens to her fish around. Imagines her fingers grazing over the barrel of a gun as she goes.

“Theeeeere you are, sir.” She almost sounds like a different person.

“Thank you, buddy.” There’s some typing on a keyboard, some submission of information Newfag will never be privy to. The guy out the window clears his throat. “You registered with a carrier, or you independent?”

“Independent.” Sonny offers a stunted chuckle. “No health insurance but at least my wallet’s happy, y’know?”

“I hear that, brother.” The guy laughs, warm and comfortable. Some papers shuffle; Sonny reaches over again and shoves the registration back inside the glove box, shuts it promptly.

“Thanks, buddy,” she covertly pats Newfag on the head. Good boy.

“You’re gonna pull into Gate 3 up on your right.”

“Gate 3,” Sonny repeats.

“Yessir. Right on your right.”

“Excellent, thank you, sir.”

“No problem, buddy; have a good night.”

“You as well.”

The truck lurches forward, the window rolls back up. Back in the safety of the closed truck, Sonny takes the slightest breath of relief.

“...you can get up now,” she finally rips the coat off him to reveal his sweaty, pretzel-twisted self on the car mat. She squints at him. “...did you get? Yellower while you were under there?”

“Huh?”

“You’re. Really yellow.” She pulls down the sun visor and flips open the mirror for him to look. Beneath the snot and the dried blood and the sweat, Newfag can clearly see that his skin tone’s continued to sour, veering so far into unnatural he almost looks like a wax figure. His eyes refract in yellow darts through his busted lenses. Even his gums have a sickly yellow hue to them now, though that could be from neglecting to brush his teeth for [redacted] days at this point. He nods and shrugs.

“Yeah, I guess so,” is all he manages.

Sonny rolls her eyes.

Newf averts his. “Uh. So.”

The air in the cab stagnates with insufferable awkwardness.

“He called you ‘brother’.”

Sonny furrows her brow. Her grip on the steering wheel tightens. “Yeah. Sometimes they do that.”

Newfag nods. And then he shakes his head, because he doesn’t want Sonny to think he’s agreeing with them. The men. Who call her brother.

“I thought you were a girl.”

Sonny clenches her jaw. Doesn’t say anything.

Newfag doesn’t say anything either.

Like a glorious beacon, their benevolent saving grace, Gate 3 peeks its way over the horizon, and the truck gratefully steers right. He can hear the roar of an airplane overhead, close. And the squeal of tires, the diminishing whine of a jet engine. There are voices outside, lots of voices. The truck slows and then stops, parks.

Sonny lets go of her breath.

“Alright. You ready?”

“Uh.”

“You are,” she tells him, and she gets out of the truck. He follows like a terminally ill puppy.

A small group of men in tactical gear stand watch nearby, all of them hardened, tough-looking. All of them armed with some kind of ridiculously overcompensating firearm. Sonny walks up to them with no fear.

“Evening.” She says.

“Yo,” one of them says. “You West’s guy?”

“I am,” she holds out a hand. “Sonny.”

An older guy, haggard and pasty, takes up her offer. They shake hands terse like businessmen. Business… people. “Thanks for making the trip.’

“Hey, thank you. Philly to Jersey’s nothing compared to your trip.” They both laugh. Chuckle, really. Pretty noncommittal, just keeping the peace, all that. The pasty guy snorts through his nose to tactfully change the subject. Then he gestures out to the tarmac.

“Jet just landed; they’re bringing it over now. I got all the verification ready for you in the meantime.”

Sonny nods stiffly. “Excellent.” She jabs a thumb back to Newf. “My guy Newfag here’ll help your boys load in the Catch.”

Pasty glances past her shoulder, beholding the little guy in all his pathetic, jaundiced glory.

“His name’s Newfag?”

“He’s Finnish.” Sonny says flatly. One of the other guys laughs uncomfortably.

“Why’s he look like that?” He asks, and he points to the blood seeping through Newf’s jacket. “Someone shoot him?”

The rest of the men hold tight to their guns. Pasty’s eyes widen, a bout of paranoia making its way up his spine.

“No one’s tailing you, right?” More to Newf than to Sonny.

“Uh.” Newfag tries his hand at a joke. “I hope not.”

Pasty doesn’t laugh.

“Alright,” he elbows the guy next to him; a much trimmer, more lively man, also wielding an assault rifle. “Andre, get the truck open and sit tight with Fag. Processing’s gonna take a minute.”

“You got it.” Andre gives Newfag a nod of acknowledgement. “Hey, mate, what’s happenin’?”

Newf just shrugs.

“Don’t touch anything,” Sonny reminds him.

“No problem, man.” Andre speaks for the both of them. He’s Australian, or New Zealandian or something. He sounds goofy; it lessens the threat of the AK-47 around his shoulder. Sonny gives Newf a final glance, a secret message he can’t yet decipher, before she heads off with the rest of them, talking about paperwork and authentication and whatever.

Andre smiles coolly; he nods his head back towards the box truck. “C’mon, let’s get this sucker open, yeah?”

Newf watches him hop up, muscle open the lock with an adept arm, hike up the rolling door—he gets a bit lightheaded from Andre’s strength, or maybe the blood loss. The box is dark inside but very obviously crowded. There are tarps. Power tools. Delicious secrets.

Andre helps him up then, careful not to pull too hard, wouldn’t want to hurt the little guy. Newf struggles to his feet for a moment, his knees kind of wobbly. Acetaminophen’s not giving up anytime soon.

“You excited, mate?” Andre smiles. His arms rest like chicken wings on his gun.

“Excited?” Newfag is trying to remember what excited is.

“Yeah, for the Catch! You psyched?”

Newfag is trying to recall the nuance between excited and psyched. He almost sort of smiles, he thinks, though maybe not.

“Hell yeah.” He says.

“Hell yeah,” Andre repeats. “This your first time?”

His first time? The question makes him blush mustard.

“I mean. I’ve done the bingo thing before,” Newf offers with a shrug. “I won eleven dollars on a technicality.”

Andre thinks this is funny. He laughs, and it’s warm and genuine. He settles himself in a little more.

“But you’ve never had the Catch.” He clarifies.

“Yeah. No.”

Andre smiles wider, knowingly. “Awesome. You’re gonna love it, man.”

Newfag sees the experience in the guy’s look. He can tell he’s done this before, probably more than once. That would explain his preparedness—his Kevlar vest and tactical gear, his cool demeanor, his big fucking gun.

“You’ve done it before?” He asks.

“Pardon?”

“You’ve, uh. Had the Catch before?”

Andre looks at Newf with sweet condescension. His grip tenses on the gun, eliciting tactile little squeaks, an almost suggestive gesture.

“Lots of times,” Andre tells him. His eyes are steely but sparked with pride, his voice a predatory growl. “Always finished, too.”

The waters are getting murky now. Newfag can’t tell if they’re still talking about GeoCatch. But Andre’s a pro; sees Newf getting anxious and offers a chuckle to clear the air, pop the balloon with a precise little needle. He goes back to resting his hands over the gun, much more relaxed, less reminiscent of anything that could be misinterpreted.

“You’re nervous.” He’s not asking.

Newfag isn’t nervous. He isn’t anything. But his body is tense. And he certainly doesn’t want to neg Andre or his huge fucking gun.

“Yeah. I guess.”

“Don’t be.”

“Okay.” Newf tries a laugh. “Ha-ha.” It’s really bad.

“You’re in the home stretch now.” Andre is gracious enough not to acknowledge the laugh. “Retrieval’s the hardest part. The rest comes really naturally.”

The confidence, the assuredness exudes from Andre’s pores, weeps out his orifices and pools at Newfag’s feet. It’s intoxicating. He wants to get down on all fours and lap it up.

But he contains himself.

“Why’d you stop? Catching, I mean.”

Andre thinks a moment. He looks Newfag up and down with dark eyes, boring deep inside to determine his trustworthiness. Feeling around, dissecting his guts. Then, with chilled composure he simply shrugs.

“Got old.” He says. “I spent a lot of time doin’ dirty work, y’know? Knees ain’t what they used to be.” He chuckles. Newf imitates him like a robotic parrot.

“Uh-huh.”

“So I don’t Catch anymore. But I’ll help out for a cut.”

Newfag nods. “Yeah. Thanks, by the way. For the help.”

Andre sort of bows his head, curtseys with his gun like he’s at an open-carry debutante ball. The two of them laugh and Newf sounds almost normal when he does it.

The jet outside crawls forward. They watch as a man ushers it along, towards a group of others waiting patiently if not wholly disinterested. It all seems so banal to them. Just another day and all that.

Newfag turns back to Andre. He wants to pick his brain. He wants to know what to expect, what he should know. How he can win.

“Do you miss Catching?”

“I don’t miss havin’ holes in me.” Andre glances at Newf’s shoulder.

“I’ve just. I’ve heard people say that it’s kind of, uh. Addicting.” Newf looks back at the jet, averts his eyes. “Like, on CrowdSauce threads, I mean.”

“I don’t know about addicting.” Andre scoffs dismissively.

“Yeah, no, that’s just what I’ve read.” Newfag has the overwhelming urge to clarify, to distance himself. Those aren’t my words; I would never say something so stupid.

“I was a coke fiend in my twenties; that’s addiction.” Andre spits.

“Sure.” Newf levels with him. “I mean. I was an alcoholic.”

He doesn’t know why he says that. He isn’t sure if that’s true, but it comes out, and it does the job because Andre visibly softens.

“Yeah,” is all he says, but it’s with a new air of respect.

“Yeah. DUIs and shit.” Newfag sighs. He shakes his head wistfully, looks off onto the majestic horizon of the runway as if looking into his past that may or not be entirely fabricated.

Andre clicks his tongue. “It is a power trip, though. Catching.” 

Newf looks back to him. “Yeah?”

“Yeah. I’ve done hundreds of ‘odd jobs’, y’know, and nothing even comes close.”

The way “odd jobs” hangs in the air, almost an offering.

“…like what kindsa ‘odd jobs’?”

He takes it; a bone in his teeth, bone on bone, he shows his find obediently. He sits down amidst the clutter to prove he’s not a threat. Andre practically scratches him behind the ear.

“I worked as a hit man for a while.” He says it so frankly and then watches to gauge Newf’s reaction. He’s cool, he’s calm. Andre’s pleased. “Really carved a niche out for myself, y’know. I started out doing work for blokes on SilkRoad and I was good. It wasn’t fun but it was never boring either.”

“Nice.”

“Got to see lots of different places, too. I’d have a job in LA, stop by Disneyland on my way back.”

“That’s epic.”

Andre laughs. “It’s like, you spend the morning digging a grave and then that same day you’re hanging out with Mickey Mouse. Feels real, uh… unfitting. Ironic? Hard to keep your morality straight with that kinda whiplash.”

“Mmm.”

“And, I mean, the shit you see. I was takin’ out mob guys and… and cheats. Fuckin’ kiddy porn collectors, all that. Real pieces of shit, you know? So it didn’t really feel hard ever.”

Newfag thinks about this. Digests it. “But then you stopped?”

“Got old.” Andre reminds him. And then he adds, a little softer, “Got married. I have two little girls now. Makes traveling a pain.”

“Oh wow. I bet.”

“And really, I was good at what I did, all that crap, but you can’t spend your whole life getting shot at. Can’t spend your thirties, forties, fifties on CrowdSauce. Not when you’ve got kids and a wife and a house. My daughters’ got four fuckin’ guinea pigs who need feeding, y’know?”

“Sure.”

Andre sighs a breath of hope. “You gotta grow out of some things eventually. You’ll be better for it.”

Newfag takes this. Internalizes it.

“So what do you do now?”

Outside, the jet’s taxied, the cargo doors depressurize and roll open, and–perfectly timed–they let loose a torrent of yappy dog barks.

Andre can’t contain his laughter at the absurdity. “We run a fucking puppy mill.”

The barking floods the tarmac, echoes out into the New Jersey abyss; completely tone deaf, entirely unfitting for the situation. Newfag tries a smile again. Manages a couple more laughs and this time he almost sounds human.

A couple men are tugging something large from the cargo hold. A black hardshell case, shut tight and restrained with bungee cord. They handle it with care and utmost concentration; those without their hands on the cargo standby with fingers on triggers. Besides the barking, everyone is deathly quiet.

Andre smiles as he looks on. Newfag can see the nostalgia return in his eyes, the thrill of the Catch overcomes him and he licks his lips. “Here we go,” he whispers to no one.

The men heel-toe their way with the cargo in an orderly fashion. Militaristic pallbearers. Andre unclips a flashlight from his belt loop. He clicks it on and points it between the two of them, paving a landing spot for the crate in blinding floodlight. 

Time seems to slow down as they approach. The dog yapping pitches up, stretches out, morphs into a warm angelic choir, and Heaven rejoices, doves coo as the crate is lifted and hiked into the light. Andre rests a hand over the lid of the container. He pats it lovingly. Under his palm, stenciled across the top, is a stick figure with its brains blown out.

Newfag knows how ridiculous he must look right now. Yellow eyes bugged, mouth agape and dripping pink drool. He doesn’t give a fuck. This is bigger than all of that. This is the fucking Catch.

He looks up to Andre with some pathetic pleading gaze and Andre grants him silent permission. Slowly, delicately, Newf reaches out. His fingertips just brush the surface of the crate and already he’s sweating. It feels like a dream. It feels. He feels.

“Alright, all set.”

Sonny materializes from thin air in the opening of the truck, and all at once the world comes back, time resumes as normal. The dogs are barking so loud and the men have already dispersed to deal with them. “You ready to go, Newfag?”

Newf peels his eyes from the crate. He glances back over to Andre–permission to leave, Daddy? Daddy nods with encouragement.

“Get goin’, kid,” He tells him with a wink, and he hops down off the truck.

Sonny catches Newf’s hungry eyes. “You good?”

He nods. “Good.”

The two of them pull the cargo hold shut. Lock it tight. Newf climbs onto solid ground; he and Sonny make their way back to the cab of the truck.

Off in the distance, the men begin unloading the rest of their goodies–huge metal dog crates covered in moving blankets. The puppies inside are distraught. Their barks so articulate and feverish they almost sound human.