Everyone told me I had to go to Chinatown to find him. He was the only doctor left in the city that would do it.
As a tall, scrawny white guy, it was hard to blend in on the street, walking around the throngs of Asian street vendors, so I kept my head down.
I passed two guards standing on the corner. One made eye contact. Flashed a cunning smile.
I crossed the street and darted inside the dilapidated building. I found the name I was looking for on the directory: P. Song, M.D. His was the apartment on the second floor. End of the hall.
I knocked.
No answer.
I knocked again.
A muffled voice inside demanded to know who I was.
“I need your help,” I whispered to him.
“Go away,” the voice said.
I pounded on the door several times until it flew open and a small hand pulled me inside. The hand belonged to the doctor.
“Fool!” He scolded me. “You make noise. Police come with noise. What you want?”
“I want you to kill the thing growing in my stomach.”
Song shook his head. “No abortion. This outlawed many years ago. Before Guests come to Earth.”
“I know-“
“Before treaty!”
“Yes I know this. But people say you can still help. You can make all of this stop.”
“No,” Song is firm. “No help. Go home.”
“I can’t go home! It’s all over.” I broke down, crumpled into his chair in the corner of the room. “My girlfriend - she kicked me out. She doesn’t understand what happened. She thinks it’s my fault.”
“Was it?” the little man asked.
“What? No!” Desperate tears in my eyes. My stomach growled. It was feeding.
Song nodded. Like everyone else, he understood what the Guests were capable of. They only did this to men. Young men. Poor men. Never women. They’re valuable. Us- well, we’ve always been expendable.
Song began to search around the apartment, rifling through drawers and cabinets.
“What happen?” he asked.
I tried before to remember, but that night was just a blur.
“All of them - one minute I was having a drink after work. There were these new guys from work. I didn’t know one was a Guest. And when I woke up, I didn’t know where I was. I don’t even remember leaving the bar. I remember throwing up in the bathroom. I must have passed out. He must have-”
I stopped myself with a shudder. I still couldn’t say it out loud.
The little man collected together small vials filled with liquids and a myriad assortment of long, sharp metal tools.
“He left me in an alley. Inside a trash can.”
“When?” Song was getting clinical.
I counted on my fingers. “A couple weeks ago.”
Song sat down. “Show. Open wide.”
I opened my mouth. He probed with a flashlight and a metal tool. “I see red. Yes, scar tissue,” he said. “Does it hurt?”
“Yes. I’ve been trying to hide the pain but everybody notices. Yesterday, I got fired from my job. They know it’s gonna happen any day now. This thing is going to claw its way up my throat.”
Song handed me a vial. “Medicine. For the pain.”
“What about the thing growing in my stomach?”
“The guest?”
“The alien.”
Song bristled at the correction. “They are guests. The government invited them to stay. Keep planet alive. Now we must keep the peace.”
He tried to offer more.
“This bad thing. But try. First year is worse. No shape shift. Then it will grow like you. Half your DNA.”
I was desperate. “Is there nothing else I can do?”
“Accept fate.”
I was disgusted by this so-called doctor. “You betray us. Your own kind. For them? They don’t care about you. You are their slave.” I went for the door.
“Stop!” Song raged. “I no slave.”
“Then help me!”
I felt a clawing sensation in my throat. A nauseating urge to vomit. “Oh God. It’s coming!”
Song dove to his mattress on the floor. He reached a hand underneath, fishing it back and forth several times until it emerged clutching a brown envelope.
“Take this.”
I ripped open the envelope. Two white pills fell into my hand.
“Poison,” Song said. “It might work. Sometimes they die. Sometimes you die.”
I swallowed both immediately and grasped his little hands. “Thank you.”
There was a commotion in the hall. Someone shouting commands over a loudspeaker. Song looked through the peephole.
“Guest Police,” he said. “Run.”
I was already squeezing out through the bathroom window when several agents burst through the door.
I leapt from the fire escape into an open dumpster below. I tried to stay quiet but the poison was already taking effect. I doubled over in pain and retched hard. I couldn’t breathe for what felt like minutes.
It was suffocating agony.
My eyes bulged.
My tongue ripped in half.
A vein in my neck burst from the pressure.
Finally, the creature was born.
After regaining my strength, I managed to climb out and hobble down the alley. Still wiping drool from my mouth, the thin black slime floating away in the air. I was almost to the street when I heard it. This low, shivering, otherworldly cry.
I stopped.
I couldn’t just leave it there. Not there. Not all alone in a dumpster where they left me.
I crept up to the trash bin. Got up my nerve to peer inside.
There, among all the foul refuse, lay my small offspring, with all its razored tentacles and hard crocodile skin. Big empty yellow eyes stared up into mine.