Laughing wildly, joyfully, at the ceiling, the walls, Jim rolled back-and-forth through the bills. Within seconds, the money was stuck all over his sweaty skin—his face, arms, back, and buttocks.

He paused, reveling in the feel of the paper covering his body, panting heavily as he stared upward. It was in this moment of brief reprieve, however, that his mind betrayed him. Like the shadow of a passing cloud, his revelry darkened.

Jim recalled the surprised, angry look on Harry’s face when he’d pulled out the gun, apologetically announced his intention to double-cross his oldest friend, his soon-to-be former partner-in-crime. “Sorry, Harry,” he’d murmured, trying to ignore the pained look in the other man’s eyes, right before he pulled the trigger. Twice.

On the heels of this, Jim felt a quick tug of guilt at the memory of the young kid (couldn’t have been a day over eighteen, he thought) who’d stupidly tried to stop him on his way out of the bank and received a fatal bullet in the gut for his trouble.

Jim shut his eyes tight and shook his head, pushed away the bad memories, the haunting faces, angry at them for spoiling this moment. After all, business was business! And there was no way in hell he was going to let a few tough decisions ruin his…

“Ow!”

A deep, piercing pain shot through his bicep, as if someone had grabbed the skin there and pinched him. Pinched him hard.

Confused, Jim lifted his arm, inspected the area where he’d felt the pain.

“What the hell?” He pressed a finger to the sore spot on his skin, pulled it away and bemusedly inspected the smear of red on the fingertip.

He was bleeding.

A papercut? he thought. Then a darker idea pushed its way to the forefront of his mind.

Or did something just … bite me?

“Ow! Fuck!”

Jim kicked his feet as sharp, stinging pain lit up the skin of his ankles, toes, and calves. Goddamn it! Something was biting him. And it fucking HURT!

Yanking a wet bill from his cheek, he started to sit up, wanting to get off the bed and figure out what the hell, what-the-hell-exactly, was attacking him.

Bed bugs? Maybe, but they’d have to be the biggest damn bed bugs he’d ever encountered. Fleas? Mice?

Then Jim froze, stared down at his cash-covered body with a sense of disbelief, a look of horror on his face.

Did they do something to the money?

The idea screamed across his brain like a flaming meteorite headed for earth, scorching the muddled sky of his thoughts, gouging his consciousness with a dark line of fear.

Poison? Did they poison the …?

Two more stabs of pain derailed his train of thought. This time the bites—yes, there was no way around that now, these were BITES—came from the wailing nerve endings of his lower back.

He sat up straight, reached his hand awkwardly behind him, felt the jagged rip in his flesh, the warm trickle of blood running down into the crack of his ass. He thought maybe that one would need stitches. He twisted his torso, pushing aside the money, looking for … what exactly? He had no idea. Little black insects? Red-eyed rodents? Who the fuck knew?

“What the hell, man! Where are you?” he roared, but then his jaw locked in a teeth-baring grimace, his eyes shot open, and he let out a full-throated shriek at the water-stained ceiling.

Because now the biting had really begun.

Jim’s entire body flared with sudden, flesh-tearing pain, as if he’d been covered in barbecue sauce then dropped into a tank packed with hungry Piranha. Because this no longer felt as if he was being bitten ….

It felt like he was being eaten.

Crying uncontrollably, Jim writhed and rolled and screamed for mercy, his body ravaged with unceasing, razor-sharp punctures. He could feel his skin growing slick with blood, pumping out of his body to soak the sheets and the mattress beneath.

“Oh God, stop!”

Growing dizzy from blood loss and blind panic, he rolled sharply, flung his body off the bed and onto the hardwood floor, where he landed with an awkward thump. Naked and covered head-to-toe in his own blood, Jim began army-crawling away from the bed, using his elbows to propel himself slowly, inch-by-inch, across the floor. He ignored the painful scrape of the old wood against his belly and thighs, ignorant of the wide trail of crimson he left behind like a drunken painter’s brush stroke.

After crawling a safe distance from the bed, Jim stopped, exhausted and breathing heavily. He could still feel something gnawing at his inner thigh, his ass cheeks, his shoulder. Tears streamed down his face. Grunting from the effort, he tried to roll himself over, get a better look at the damage to his flesh, when he cried out in pain once more. Whatever was attacking him had attached itself to the back of his neck, where it felt like a good-sized chunk of flesh was, quite tenaciously, being chewed away. Through gritted teeth he whipped a hand to the spot, his fingers clamping onto something that wiggled and pulsed like a rapidly beating heart between his fingertips. Pinching hard so it wouldn’t slip free, he brought the thing around to his face ….

And stared, in dumb wonder, at what he held.

Pinched between his red-smeared fingers was a blood-soaked hundred-dollar bill, with Benjamin motherfucking Franklin at its middle. The old man’s fat face bulged slightly from the bill’s surface, as if straining to break free from the paper’s two-dimensional confines.

Green, hateful eyes stared back at Jim; the face twisted in a sort of wide-eyed madness. Ink-drawn teeth snapped repeatedly open and shut like a junkyard dog as drool and blood dripped from his lips, the typically jowly, placid face now transformed by a desperate, raging, hunger.

The money? Jim thought, the shock of the realization momentarily dulling the pain of being consumed by the hundreds of other writhing, bloodthirsty dead presidents. The fucking money ….

It was eating him alive.

Well fuck me to next Tuesday, he thought, with a sense of idiotic detachment enhanced by shock.

But Jim hadn’t made it this far, hadn’t done all the horrible things he’d done, just to lose now. No way. No-fucking-how. His look of bewilderment and pain twisted into a grimace of hateful rage. He crumpled the bill tightly in his fist, could almost feel the tiny bones of Franklin’s face breaking inside his wet palm. “There!” he yelled, triumphant. “There now!”

Adrenalized with renewed purpose, with clarity, Jim pushed his torso up with one arm and, with his free hand, began pulling the other bills off his skin, crumpling each one into tight balls, elated by the sensation of crunching bones, the pulpy squirt of whatever lived inside the demonic faces as he squeezed them to death, before tossing each one carelessly away.

Grinning through the pain, Jim ignored the blood leaking freely from a thousand deep gashes all over his body. He reveled in his victory. “Little bastards!” he screamed. “You like that? Huh? Do you?” He stared at the defeated wads of bills scattered around him, the heaped pile of cash writhing on the bed a safe distance away.

He was reaching for a particularly tenacious bill gnawing at his ankle—one of the few remaining threats—when he felt something that would have normally caused him no more thought than the sight of a distant star, or the slow turning of dusk into night.

Jim felt a breeze. A strong one.

Panicked, his eyes darted upward—past the bed, beyond the large pile of murderous cash sitting on top of it—to the open window. The one facing the street. The one he liked to leave open because of the consistent airflow that cooled the room while he slept.

This time, however, it was more than just a slight draft coming through the window. A deep grumble of thunder confirmed the beginnings of the long-threatened storm, now brewing in the sky above. No, this was not a gentle caress, but a hard, thrusting gust of wind that pushed through the small opening, hard enough to blow most of the lofty pile of green paper off his bed and into the air.

Straight toward him.

“No,” he gasped, and began batting his hands at the drifting, falling leaves of bills; the dark-eyed, furious, teeth-cracking visages of Ulysses S Grant and Benjamin Franklin.

Losing that battle, Jim tried his best to stand, but his mind swooned from the effort, and he fell flat onto his face. Lost too much blood… His thoughts were thick as syrup, his muscles heavy as iron. Despite it all, he willed himself, one last time, to get up, to GET THE FUCK UP AND RUN!

But then the swirling cloud of money began sticking to him. He twisted and spun, grabbed at whatever he could get his hands on… but there was too much, too many. He whimpered and begged as needles of pain shot through his already ravaged flesh.

Jim’s eyes fluttered and his body began to convulse beneath a hundred feasting mouths. With the last of his strength, he plucked a bill off his chest, stared in fading wonder at the small, tenacious face. Felt the pulsing heartbeat coursing through its fibrous paper veins.

Finally, his fingers lost their strength, and with a deep, sorrowful sigh, he fell backwards onto the floor, releasing the frenzied paper struggling against his grip.

A gleeful Benjamin Franklin, now free, drifted toward Jim’s face with wide, anxious eyes.