Andre Infante



Author's note:  A bonus story!  Actually, it's a story I posted on Reddit a while back, heavily edited.  This won't take the place of Thursday's story, it's just  a freebie.  Enjoy!



I have a technique for dealing with mosquitoes. Its been a tremendous boon to me so far, since I live deep in Louisiana, which is basically the seventeenth century with higher ambient humidity and no scientific revolution.  I swear to god I've seen mosquitoes the size of hummingbirds.  I realize that this doesn't forgive what happened, but maybe it'll help you understand why we were so desperate.  You see, this technique works very well, but it has its problems.  Let me explain:


I have this cousin.  He's  a short guy, got a real big forehead, kind of caveman looking.  I'm real, real close with him.  Grew up with him.  He's like a brother to me.  Now, he's got a degree, but this being Louisiana, he's got to take what he can get, work wise.  So, he takes a job with a nursing home.  


Now, the first thing you learn working for a nursing home, particularly an entry level job, is the term 'biological waste'.  You'd be amazed how much sheer volume of blood, vomit, hair, fluids, and waste a couple of hundred old people generate in a confined space.  If you read up on it, there are very specific laws about how you're supposed to deal with that stuff.  You need permits and licenses and inspections and lord knows what else.  So, about a year ago, my cousin gets reassigned to garbage duty, and he finds out that they don't follow the proper procedures for disposing of all this crap.  They're seriously just throwing blood, semen, urine, feces into baggies and chucking it.  


So, at this point, my cousin has a choice.  He can either go read a law book to try to figure out who he should inform, get his work closed down, and make his ass unemployed, or he can  keep his head down and shut the hell up.  So, he shuts the hell up.  


Now, my cousin and I are both big dumpster divers.  In a small town in Louisiana on a Friday night, there's really not a whole hell of a lot else to do.  You'd be amazed at the crap you can find.  I got half a dining room set once, and he found a computer once.  It was soaking wet, but after he dried it out and replaced a couple of parts, it worked fine.  He sold it for fifty bucks.  So, I guess during a late shift on a Friday night, he got bored.  All I know is, I got a phone call at about 2AM, and when I find the receiver, the first words I hear are 


"Uh, hey, it's me.  Do you have any ideas for what to do with like two pints of blood?"


Don't ask me why he did it, I don't know.  All I know is, that isn't the sort of shit any man should have to deal with at two in the morning.  Still, I got the call so I pulled some clothes on and dragged my ass down to his house.  We spend about two hours just sitting on the porch in silence, staring at the bucket of blood.  Eventually, an idea comes to me. 


I have a condom in my wallet.  Now, in my case, a condom is about as useful as volcano insurance, but I keep convincing myself that I might need it one day, so I keep it.  Anyway, I take it out, fill it with blood, add what's left of a bottle of Drano, and tie it to a rafter.  To this day, I'm not sure if that was a stroke of genius, or just really, really late. 


Anyway, we both stare at it for a while, and then go inside and go to bed.  
The next morning, the whole porch is crunchy with dead mosquitoes.  Thousands of the little bastards.  They just keep coming, too.  Every time one of them takes a bite, it makes another little hole, and the smell gets stronger.  We crack open a couple of beers and just watch.  


Now, in my mind, this was the turning point.  One of us should have said to the other "Well, that was fun, and we can never do this again," or even "Maybe we should try pig's blood?"  We didn't.  I don't know exactly why, but I keep waiting for him to do it, and he keeps waiting for me, and in the mean time, events plow right along like a bulldozer into an orphanage.


In a really twisted kind of way, it almost gets to be a competition.  Every few nights before garbage day, one of us will climb the fence into the waste area and steal some bags of blood.  Never urine or feces, though, because that would be weird.  Whoever brings back the most blood gets fewer mosquitoes, and more bragging rights.  This goes on for longer than I'd care to admit.


Then, about three months later, he shows up with a gallon and a half of human blood.  That is about as much as we normally get in two weeks, put together.  I'm sure he's killed somebody.  He calms me down, and explains to me how he got it.  


Now, with that many old people in an enclosed space, the mortality rate is pretty damn high.  Especially since there's an ugly summer flu going around.  Since the only funeral home is two towns over, the nursing home added a special cold room just to keep the corpses from rotting until the hearse could come and pick them up.  Now, my cousin has the master key, and he knows the night watchman, who was about sixty.  The watchman told him that the room gives him the heebie-jeebies, and he didn't patrol that area.  


He takes me the next day, and shows me his system.  I help.  I think that this is the exact moment that I become doomed to hell.  The system is as so: we sneak into the mini-morgue with some rope, a syringe full of heparin, a hunting knife, a cattle prod, a bucket, and a list of the corpses not scheduled for autopsy.  We inject them with the anti-coagulant in the heart, cattle prod them a few times, tie a rope around their angles, and string them up.  We take the gowns off,  put the bucket under them, and carefully cut the carotid arteries.  Simple.   


This goes on for a while.  By the end, we have, oh, probably fifty gallons of blood in used condoms all over both our porches.  The neighbors start to comment, so I put paper bags over the condoms and claim they're part of my religion.  Doesn't endear me to the neighbors any, but that's hardly the point.  Besides which, the neighbors are enjoying the benefits of the mosquito holocaust, too.  They have no right to complain.  


We've been doing this for, hell, probably a month when it happens.  I guess we get careless. Now, you have to understand that this nursing home is grossly understaffed. They've been having financial issues, laid off a bunch of staff, and really are not equipped to deal with the narcoleptics, the alcoholics, or the plain old alzheimers cases. So this may help to explain why what happens happens.


So, we sneak in as usual.  There is a busted lock on the cafeteria door, and my cousin has keys.  The security system is only wired up to the front door.   We're feeling pretty good about it.  I get a towel out for wiping up blood, we grab the first corpse, string it up, drain it, no problems. Grab the next one. I hit him one-two with the injection and cattleprod, which makes the old guy twitch.  The twitchers always creep the hell out of me.


My cousin pulls his gloves on and does a boy-scout knot around the guys feet.  We haul him up and tie the rope off to another pipe.  Now, remember that we're taking the gowns off first to avoid having to explain suspicious blood stains.  So this guy is stark naked, and hanging from the ceiling like a dead hog, and his flaccid penis is bouncing around at about waist level.  Now, I haven't seen a great many of them in my time, but this guy's something special.  He's hung like a very special breed of horse.  It dangles past his belly button.  I nearly throw up.  

Then, just to make things worse, he gets an erection.  It's actually pretty common in the first day or so after death.  Random muscle clenching, gaas bubbles, all that.  We soldiered on, tried to ignore it, tried to avoid getting smacked in the face with it, and above all avoid making any kind of eye contact.  

We wait about five minutes or so for the anti-coagulant to take effect.  Then, my cousin got the knife.  I could never do this part.  He strolls up, and very casually stabs the old guy in the throat.

To this day, I'm not sure what the hell happened.  My best guess is that this senile old guy gets lost around his hospital, wanders into the mini-morgue, and falls asleep on a table.  Everyone assumes he's  supposed to be there, so they lock him in.  Then, we come in and zap him with the cattle prod, knocking him out.  

Whatever actually happened, all I know is that the stab wound brings him out of it, and what we end up with is a screaming, naked hold guy strung from the ceiling, dick swinging wildly, spraying blood everywhere.  

 My cousin and I stare, mute with shock, for a good three seconds, from the guy, to each other, to the guy, to each other.  We make eye contact, and my cousin, who's my best friend, who's my favorite person in the world, makes a run for it.  He didn't even go the right way, evidently, because he tripped the silent alarm and the police were there within a couple of minutes. 

Now, I'm trying to do the right thing.  I pull the knife out, and I'm trying to stop the bleeding, and trying to heft him over the pipe to get him to the ground.  It was really a two person job, though, and somehow, I end up grabbing his penis for leverage.  


I really don't know what the policeman thought when he rounded the corner and saw me, covered in blood, next to the old guy on the ceiling with my his dick in my hand.  The expression on his face as his eyes went from bucket to syringe to rope to knife to box of condoms, is permanently burned into my brain.      


All I know is that, in accordance with my parole agreement, I am required to recommend strongly that you do not, under any circumstances, use this method of pest control. I am not explicity forbidden, however, from telling you that it worked pretty damn well. The local mosquito population has never been the same since.