Eddie Kaspbrak uttered a strangled cry and pushed himself away from the table with such a sudden revolted confusion of arms and legs that his chair nearly tipped over. A huge bug, its chitinous carapace an ugly yellow-brown, was pushing its way out of his fortune cookie as if from a cocoon. Its obsidian eyes stared blindly forward. As it lurched onto Eddie's bread-and –butter plate, cookie crumbs fell from its back in a little shower that Bill heard clearly and

which came back to haunt his dreams when he slept for awhile later that afternoon. As it freed itself entirely it rubbed its thin rear legs together, producing a dry reedy hum, and Bill realized it was some sort of terribly mutated cricket. It lumbered to the edge of the dish and tumbled onto the tablecloth on its back.

'Oh God!' Richie managed in a choked voice. 'Oh God Big Bill it's an eye dear God it's an eye a fucking eye —

Bill's head snapped around and he saw Richie staring down at his fortune cookie, his lips drawn back from his teeth in a kind of sickened leer. A chunk of his cookie's glazed surface had fallen onto the tablecloth, revealing a hole from which a human eyeball stared with glazed intensity. Cookie crumbs were scattered across its blank brown iris and embedded in its sclera.

Ben Hanscom threw his — not a calculated throw but the startled reaction of a person who has been utterly surprised by some piece of nasty work. As his fortune cookie rolled across the table Bill saw two teeth inside its hollow, their roots dark with clotted blood. They raided together like seeds in a hollow gourd.

He looked back at Beverly and saw she was hitching in breath to scream. Her eyes were fixed on the thing that had crawled out of Eddie's cookie, the thing that was now kicking its sluggish legs as it lay overturned on the tablecloth.

Bill got moving. He was not thinking, only reacting. Intuition, he thought crazily as he lunged out of his seat and clapped his hand over Beverly's mouth just before she could utter the scream. Here I am, acting on intuition. Mike should be proud of me.

What came out of Beverly's mouth was not a scream but a strangled 'Mmmmph!'

Eddie was making those whistling sounds that Bill remembered so well. No problem there, a good honk on the old lung-sucker would set Eddie right. Right as a trivet, Freddie Firestone would have said, and Bill wondered — not for the first time — why a person had such weird thoughts at times like these.

He glanced around fiercely at the others, and what came out was something else from that summer, something that sounded both impossibly archaic and exactly right: 'Dummy up! All of you! Not one sound! Just dummy up!'

Rich wiped a hand across his mouth. Mike's complexion had gone a dirty gray, but he nodded at Bill. All of them moved away from the table. Bill had not opened his own fortune cookie, but now he could see its sides moving slowly in and out — bulge and relax, bulge and relax, bulge and relax — as his own party-favor tried to escape.

'Mmmmmph!' Beverly said against his hand again, her breath tickling his palm.

'Dummy up, Bev,' he said, and took his hand away.

Her face seemed to be all eyes. Her mouth twitched. 'Bill . . . Bill, did you see . . . ' Her eyes strayed back to the cricket and then fixed there. The cricket appeared to be dying. Its rugose eyes stared back at her, and presently Beverly began to moan.

'Quh-Quh-Quit that,' he said grimly. 'Pull back to the table.'

'I can't, Billy, I can't get near that thi — '

'You can! You h-have to!' He heard footsteps, light and quick, coming up the short hall on the other side of the beaded curtain. He looked around at the others. 'All of you! Pull up to the table! Talk! Look natural!'

Beverly looked at him, eyes pleading, and Bill shook his head. He sat down and pulled his chair in, trying not to look at the fortune cookie on his plate. It had swelled like some unimaginable boil which was filling with pus. And still it pulsed slowly in and out. I couldhave bitten into that, he thought faintly.

Eddie triggered his aspirator down his throat again, gasping mist into his lungs in a long, thin screaming sound.

'So who do you think's going to win the pennant?' Bill asked Mike, smiling insanely. Rose came through the curtain just then, her face politely questioning. Out of the corner of his eye Bill saw that Bev had pulled up to the table again. Good girl, he thought.

'I think the Chicago Bears look good,' Mike said.

'Everything is all right?' Rose asked.

'F-Fine,' Bill said. He cocked a thumb in Eddie's direction. 'Our friend had an asthma attack. He took his medication. He's better now.'

Rose looked at Eddie, concerned.

'Better,' Eddie wheezed.

'You would like that I clear now?'

'Very shortly,' Mike said, and offered a large false smile.

'Was good?' Her eyes surveyed the table again, a bit of doubt overlaying a deep well of serenity. She did not see the cricket, the eye, the teeth, or the way Bill's fortune cookie appeared to be breathing. Her eye similarly passed over the bloodstain splotched on the tablecloth without trouble.

'Everything was very good,' Beverly said, and smiled — a m o re natural smile than either Bill's or Mike's. It seemed to set Rose's mind at rest, convinced her that if something had gone wrong in here, it had been the fault of neither Rose's service nor her kitchen. Girl's got a lot of guts, Bill thought.

'Fortunes were good?' Rose asked.

'Well,' Richie said, 'I don't know about the others, but I for one got a real eyeful.'

Bill heard a minute cracking sound. He looked down at his plate and saw a leg poking blindly out of his fortune cookie. It scraped at his plate.

I could have bitten into that, he thought again, but held onto his smile. 'Very fine,' he said.

Richie was looking at Bill's plate. A great grayish-black fly was slowing birthing itself from the collapsing remains of his cookie. It buzzed weakly. Yellowish goo flowed sluggishly out of the cookie and puddled on the tablecloth. There was a smell now, the bland thick smell of an infected wound.

'Well, if I can help you in no way at this moment . . . '

'Not right now,' Ben said. 'A wonderful meal. Most . . . most unusual.'

'I leave you then,' she said, and bowed out through the beaded curtain. The beads were still swaying and clacking together when all of them pushed away from the table again.

'What is it?' Ben asked huskily, looking at the thing on Bill's plate.

'A fly,' Bill said. 'A mutant fly. Courtesy of a writer named George Langla-han, I think. He wrote a story called "The Fly." A movie was made out of it — not a terribly good one. But the story scared the bejesus o ut of me. It's up to Its old tricks, all right. That fly business has been on my mind a lot lately, because I've sort of been planning this novel — Roadbugs, I've been thinking of calling it. I know the title sounds p-pretty stupid, but you see — '

'Excuse me,' Beverly said distantly. 'I have to vomit, I think.'

She was gone before any of the men could rise.

Bill shook out his napkin and threw it over the fly, which was the size of a baby sparrow. Nothing so large could have come from something as small as a Chinese fortune cookie . . . but it had. It buzzed twice under the napkin and then fell silent.

'Jesus,' Eddie said faintly.

'Let's get the righteous fuck out of here,' Mike said. 'We can meet Bev in the lobby.'

Beverly was just coming out of the women's room as they gathered by the cash register. She looked pale but composed. Mike paid the check, kissed Rose's cheek, and then they all went out into the rainy afternoon.

'Does this change anyone's mind?' Mike asked.

'I don't think it changes mine,'Ben said.