Parasite (4 page)

The third car that
Walter tried was unlocked, and he climbed into the backseat, first unzipping then unfolding the leather case without even bothering to close the door behind him.

It took less than a minute to load the syringe full of heroin. His first attempt to inject using his left hand was a failure; he was not as dexterous with that hand, and he had been so scared of losing any heroin that he couldn’t even manage to press the plunger. Still, he persisted, driven by the hope that injecting into his right arm, close to the cracker, might cause the thing to curl up and die.

An image of the translucent crackers, their six pointed legs aimed skyward, littering the road outside, came into his mind. and he shuddered.

Maybe that wasn’t something that he wanted to happen beneath his skin.

Without further delay, he plunged the dull needle point into the skin on the inside of his right elbow. With his belt firmly clenched between his brown and yellow teeth, he tried to make the fingers on his right hand open and close, to repeatedly make a fist, as was his ritual, but his hand was still refusing to cooperate fully, and he could only manage a crooked claw.

Annoyed, Walter let the belt fall from his mouth, and the drug simultaneously spread from the crook of his elbow to the smallest capillaries in his tingling fingertips and up his arm to his heart, where it was shuttled to his entire body. He pictured the yellowy substance flowing through him, and when the substance hit his brain, a sigh escaped his chapped lips and his eyes rolled back. Walter slumped against the seat, the cracker-induced anxiety leeching from every pore like a toxic sweat.

As his eyelids began to flutter, he waited for the sweet bliss, the all-encompassing feeling of euphoria that he knew would soon overwhelm him, turning his mind and body into liquid, turning him into an unfeeling, unthinking memory of a man.

But the familiar wave never hit Walter.

Instead,
nothing
happened.

Walter blinked and turned his head to look at the open case on the seat beside him.

It was his gear, he was sure of it. And it was
good
gear, straight from Sabra, the same gear that had gotten him high as a fucking kite before all of Askergan had started going to shit.

But now he felt…
nothing
.

Could someone have switched out my gear for something else?

He glanced out the open car door, his eyes falling on serenity baked in a hot yellow glow.

No, there’s
—

A scream bubbled up from somewhere deep within him.

There was a clenching sensation in his shoulder, as if an iron clamp had suddenly started to tighten on his deltoid.

It felt as if his entire shoulder was being crushed.

“What the fuck!”

Panting with the pain, he turned to the cracker and saw that it had become seemingly more defined, the ridges outlining the knobby appendages and the circumference of the shell now hard and thick beneath his skin as if etched in charcoal. The mouth or orifice or whatever the fuck the thing was with all the teeth that pointed out through the hole in his skin appeared be quivering as if it were excited.

Walter clenched his rotting teeth and turned his gaze back out the car door and stared at the six or seven cracker corpses in plain sight. They were most definitely dead, reduced to hard, translucent shells upturned on the hot black asphalt.

And this morbid scene extended for as far as he could see.

The hundreds of crackers that had flowed—that he had shouted to
join him
—down the street before his car had been rocked by the shockwave of the exploding gas station had all stopped moving.

They were dead.

But the cracker buried beneath the skin on Walter’s shoulder most definitely was not dead. This one was very much alive, and now that he had injected the heroin, it was thriving.

Carter Duke pulled the
plastic letters out of the sign placard and tossed them into the bag with the others that he had found in the church office. When the sign was completely devoid of letters, he stared at the empty space for a moment.

It’s only fitting
, he thought as he stared at the blank sign.
Askergan’s message is waiting to be written—waiting for me to fill this blank canvas.

Carter took a drag of his cigarette and continued to stare, enjoying the emptiness that seemed to transcend the sign and unexpectedly enveloped him as well.

It was strange, this psychological silence. For once, thoughts weren’t coursing through his head, and he wasn’t running through dozens of hypothetical conversations, continually coming up with and rehearsing answers to potential questions. Questions that would threaten to usurp his authenticity—that were
designed
to do just that, to poke holes in his universal condom of truth. Sure, this
emptiness
would only last a moment or two, but it was a welcome relief nonetheless.

Ah, the pressure of always being something else.

Even now, dressed as a priest, of all things, he knew what he really was: a conman through and through.

And it was psychologically exhausting.

The sign, on the other hand, couldn’t answer back. It couldn’t judge his response; it couldn’t try to tease out the truth hidden between, behind, or
within
his words.

It was a sign; just a simple fucking sign, and he could write what he wanted.

For a split second, he debated putting up something stupid, some inane commentary that served no other purpose but to incite idealistic hope in the insipid:
Make Askergan Great Again
.

Ironic, pithy, on point.

Carter looked into the cloth bag, his eyes scanning the dozen or so plastic letters.

Pity
, he thought.
No ‘k’s
.

Carter pulled his head out of the bag and looked around. It was late dawn, and the sun that crept over the horizon was hot but lazy. The church behind him was a pale white, but it had long ago fallen to neglect, and long strips of paint peeled down its length.

A simple structure, essentially just a large triangle—not much to look at, really. For a place that claimed it paid homage to the Almighty, it lacked a sort of panache; it looked more a pauper’s shack. Oh, sure, there was the humility and humbleness and all that, but with all the money they had found in the church—a little over fifty-six grand—and the drugs, the least that Father Stevens could have done was to put a new coat of varnish on the old tradition. Even the church’s steeple looked bent, although he couldn’t be sure if it was truly crooked or if it was simply an illusion from the wavy lines of heat. But alas, the man had had other priorities, and fixing up the church clearly hadn’t been one of them.

Carter spat onto the ground at his feet, generating a small puff of dirt.

Could have fucking paved
something
, though.

There was no church parking lot, just a patch of hardened dirt and clay off to one side where the parishioners parked.

Carter cleared his throat and turned to Pike, who through all of his contemplations had been standing silently beside him. It made him wonder, with everything that continued to whirr in his brain, what was going on in his friend’s mind.

But that was a tough nut to crack.

“Not much to look at, is it?”

Pike’s response was immediate.

“No.”

Carter shrugged, but his indifference was short-lived. He knew that to convert the Askergan citizens, to
fully
convert them, this terrible excuse of a church wouldn’t do. They needed something new, something modern. Something that would not only support a new identity, a new culture, but one that would promote it.

And the name—
Askergan
—that wasn’t helping either. It was either a name recycled from some old city back in the days of horses and when life expectancies barely tickled double digits, or someone had taken a bag of letters like the one in his hand and shaken it, pulling them at random.

Askergan; no, that won’t do. None of this will do.

For as long as he could remember, he and Pike had been on the run, snatching and grabbing what they could in an attempt to extort their way into some semblance of normalcy. But despite their scores, which were usually small but occasionally substantial, they would soon thereafter be on to the next town.

This was the life that Carter had chosen for them, but with every town sign that reflected in the rearview, he left something other than victims behind.

He left a little bit of his soul. And Carter wanted to change that before there was nothing of the real him left.

And there was also the practical matter of running out of leads, of having used up any and all of the contacts he had massed over the years. Case and point coming all the way to this remote county to extort a scumbag priest based on some information Pike had found on the internet and a few photographs that he had discovered simply by accident.

Yeah, things were getting lean.

But now they were
here
, and there was something about Askergan, something that had struck him the moment he and Pike had rolled into town.

Askergan was like the beauty queen whose jealous boyfriend had splashed acid in her face: once beautiful, but now scarred. Scarred, but still with enough underlying charm to get by in life.

We can stay here,
he thought, his mind drifting to Pike as a young boy, punching and kicking his way through grown men, trying not only to break their bodies, but to also bury whatever it was inside of
him
that was already broken.

No, running wasn’t going to be in the cards for them anymore. No more—he could sense a time when they no longer had to resort to blackmailing undercover police officers to relieve them of their pathetic pensions.

This was a new beginning—
the
new beginning.

And there was work to be had to Askergan, in case they ever got bored, in case all else failed. There was work, money, and drugs in Askergan.

Carter turned his attention back to the letters and then ironically gave the bag a shake. As the letters settled, a smile split his dark beard.

Yes
, he thought as he began picking out the letters one by one.
This is a new beginning, a time for a new Askergan—a new time for a Modern County.

Walter lucked out. after
the pain had subsided somewhat as the cracker relaxed following the injection, he found a red flannel shirt in the backseat and quickly pulled it on, desperate to hide his hideous shoulder. It wasn’t so much that he was concerned about what others would think if they caught sight of it—Lord knows, he had stopped caring what others thought about him long ago—but more to hide the thing from his own eyes. To offer himself a moment unburdened of disgust, however temporary, so that he could try to contemplate what had happened—what the thing was doing in his shoulder, and why injecting nearly two grams of heroin had failed to get him high.

But before all that, he had to get out of there, to get far away from this horrible place with the idiot cops that were likely out looking for him as he sat baking in the sauna of a backseat. He put little stock in their policing skills, case in point the drugs that he had managed to keep on his person even after being thrown in jail, let alone his rather simple and even predictable escape.

But, shit, even a blind squirrel found a nut once in a while.

A quick glance into the front revealed that the keys were still dangling from the ignition, a fake casino chip fob hanging limply from the keyring.

Someone must have been in one hell of a hurry to abandon their car if the keys are still in it
, Walter thought.

His mind flipped back to the scene that had unfolded after slipping out the police station window.

Yeah, seeing those horrible crackers would make normal, rational people do irrational things.

And boy am I grateful,
he thought with a smirk as he forced his thin frame between the front seats and climbed over the center console. With a sigh, he collapsed into the driver’s seat and turned the keys.

To his surprise, the car started on the first try.

The tightness in his shoulder continued to ease as he put the car into drive with his right hand; either that or he had simply become accustomed to the sensation. Either way, he wanted the thing out… the fucking thing had stolen his drugs, stolen his high. And if there was one thing that Walter would not stand for in this world, it was someone—or something—messing with his drugs.

He would amputate his arm if he had to get high, although he was acutely aware that this would cause some complications when it came time to inject again. But that was just a minor detail, something that he could work out later.

Details
.

The word resonated with him.

Details… like what the hell happened in the Askergan Police Department. Details like where the fuck had all of these damn parasites had come from. Details like what had become of his son—what had happened to Tyler.

Sweating profusely in the flannel shirt, Walter Wandry gritted his teeth and slammed his foot onto the gas pedal. The tires screeched, and the car lurched forward.

As he sped down Highway 2, swerving to avoid the parked and abandoned cars while simultaneously trying to crush as many of the cracker shells as possible, his mind was preoccupied, trying to remember how sharp the cooking knives in his drawer back at his dilapidated apartment were.

And wondering if he really could cut off his arm without killing himself.

*                            *                            *

Walter’s entire body was soaked with sweat, partly from the sun that had nearly reached its zenith and had quickly heated the stolen car with a broken air conditioner, but mostly due to the fact that he hadn’t gotten high in at least seven or eight hours.

Maybe even longer.

Still, he was happy to be out of the shithole that was Askergan County. He had only been to the place a handful of times in his life, despite living only about an hour and change away. And with each of those visits, the most recent one notwithstanding, he had just been passing through, using it as a throughway to Darborough or another adjacent county to score. So now, as he pulled into the small parking lot of his apartment complex in Pekinish, something just felt right—it felt
right
to be home.

But then his mind flashed to being thrown in the jail cell, crawling through the police station window, being nearly blown up, and then having that
parasite
in his shoulder, and things didn’t feel
right
anymore. Instead, they felt horribly
wrong
.

Walter tore the casino chip fob off the keychain and threw it out the window.

“A lot of luck this brought you… can’t even afford a goddamn car with AC,” he grumbled as he scooped his drug case up and shoved the car door open.

Squinting hard, Walter quickly made his way across the tarmac to the back door, rhythmically squeezing his right hand as he walked, trying to force more feeling into the limb. The pain in his shoulder was almost completely gone now, but he was still experiencing something of a phantom limb sensation—his arm was there and it was his, but it also
wasn’t
.

Like the drugs; they were in him, but they just weren’t doing anything.

There, but not there.

The door to his building wasn’t locked, as the last person to enter or leave had simply ignored the handwritten sign on the door that said,
‘Please always make sure to loke the door’
.

Loke
. For fuck’s sake, even I can spell ‘Lock’.

But there really was no need; why lock the door to this place—this housing unit with cramped apartments that were but a haven for drug users, prostitutes, and other high-ranking and contributing members of society?

The lobby was dark, as several of the pot lights buried in the popcorn ceiling had long since burnt out and hadn’t been replaced. And despite the bright sun outside, the windows had been painted with a thick black paint, one that not only served to keep the offending light out, but also as a glue to hold the smashed pieces of glass in place.

Cheaper than replacing the broken panes, which would only be broken again in a few days.

Walter made his way across the trash-littered foyer to the elevator, jamming his left thumb into the up button. While he waited, watching the LED lights above the metal box change from 4 to 3 and then to 2, he clucked his tongue against the roof of his mouth and then licked his chapped lips.

Drink. I need a fucking drink.

Sweat trickled down the inside of his armpits before being soaked up by the flannel shirt he had stolen from the car, but even that was near saturation and had been reduced to a soppy mess.

Stolen.

He couldn’t help think about the hard outline of the cracker buried in his shoulder.

Stolen—like this fucking creature did to my high.

Walter shook his head and tried to distract himself from the thought by bringing a hand up to his cheek and inspecting the damage from the glass that he had landed on after being ejected from his car. His fingers probed the deep pockmarks on his cheeks, moving from one blood-caked divot to another. He picked idly at the crusty sores, inspecting the brown scum beneath his too-short nails after each satisfying peel. He brought his hand to his beard next, trying to force his fingers through the tangled mess of wiry white hair that traveled nearly to the hollow of his throat. This proved impossible: the coarse beard hairs were a knotted mess, and the dried blood had stiffened and glued the strands together.

As he continued to pick at the cuts on his face and tug at his beard, his eyes remained fixed on the sign above the elevator.

It was still on the second floor.

“Come on, hurry the fuck up.”

He licked his dry lips again and jammed the
UP
button three or four more times. Each time he pressed the button, the red light around it lit up, but then went dark a second later.

“Fuck off,” he muttered, finally giving up and kicking the metal door.

It wasn’t the first time that the elevator had broken, or was being held on a particular floor, and it certainly wouldn’t be the last. Not here—not in this shitty place.

Walter made his way to the stairs, throwing the door wide in frustration.

By the third floor, he was completely out of breath, and he came to a stop, grasping the metal railing tightly as his narrow chest heaved.

He coughed loudly, and then spat a thick wad of yellow-brown mucus onto the stairs before pulling himself onto the next step.

By the fourth floor—his floor—he was so utterly covered in sweat that he debated tearing off the flannel shirt and leaving it in a damp heap right there in the stairwell. But a quick peek, a passing glance, at the mark on his shoulder, and he quickly decided against it; not only could he still clearly make out the dark outline of the cracker, but he could see the teeth again, rotating and gnashing, as if trying to take a bite out of the flannel fabric. He compromised by simply opening his shirt all the way.

Breathing heavily, he made his way out of the stairwell and down the hallway, and then stopped in front of his apartment. The door was slightly ajar, but this wasn’t terribly unusual, especially not given the circumstances in which he’d left the previous day.

It had been his ex-wife that had called him, letting him know that Tyler had never returned from a fishing trip—he was surprised that the fucking drunk had even realized he was missing—and that the Askergan cops weren’t telling her shit.

Her calling had been strange enough—he hadn’t spoken to her in a number of years—but her calling about Tyler? That had been odd enough to get even his dulled intuition working.

“Why you calling me?” he had demanded.

When she had failed to come up with a reasonable response, his mind had really started to churn.

Insurance; life insurance.

Like an omen from a God he didn’t believe in, the words had seemingly come out of nowhere. Maybe he had heard something about collecting life insurance on a TV show, on one of those true crime shows, but regardless of where they had come from, when he had asked about a life insurance policy on his estranged son, his ex-wife’s answer had been curt, to the point.

“There is, but if Tyler’s dead, I get it all.”

Fat chance.

He laughed at the absurdity of the conversation now, but given what he had seen back at the station and what was happening to him… well, maybe wishing his son dead wasn’t the worst thing in the world. And if he got some money out of it, so what? Was that so wrong?

Walter pushed the door to his apartment wide and stepped inside. Almost immediately, some of the anxiety of the last few days flowed out of him and was replaced by the feeling of just being home—even if home for him was a shitty apartment with peeling beige paint, a dirty mattress on the floor, and a tube TV that was still on and blaring shopping network reruns.

“I get it all.”

Walter laughed at his ex-wife’s words now, knowing that if there was any insurance money in this deal, she wouldn’t be getting a fucking penny.

He opened the cupboard above the sink and rooted around for a clean glass.

But either way, dead or alive, he needed to find Tyler.

And he knew just where to start. The black cop. The black cop with the bulging biceps that had dared to grab him by the throat.

“Fucking prick,” Walter grumbled, grabbing a glass that didn’t appear clean so much as less dirty than all the others. He used his thumb to wipe away a brown smudge that went all the way around the rim of the glass, then proceeded to fill it with water from the tap.

The water tasted foul, and did little to quench Walter’s thirst. What he needed was a drink—a real drink. He turned to the fridge, grabbing the grease-smeared handle with his left hand, the drug case still clutched between the numb fingers of his right. He had only pulled the fridge partway open when he froze, his heart catching in his throat.

“Welcome home, Walt,” a voice from somewhere deeper in the apartment said.

Walter’s hand, numb or not, squeezed the leather case so tightly that he felt his fingers start to burn. Instead of panicking, he slipped the case into the fridge without opening it any further, sliding it onto the shelf beside a half-empty bottle of beer. Then he closed the fridge and stepped out into the open.

Despite being seated, it was clear that the man in Walter’s favorite chair at the back of the room was large. He had an almost comically square head, and the tightly cropped blond hair that clung to his large forehead did him no favors. The man’s ears were cauliflowered, the tops of which were so thick that they pulled away from his temples, which only added to the immense size of his head. He was wearing a patent leather jacket, which must have been ridiculously hot given the weather, and his thick, knobby hands were resting comfortably on his knees. As Walter’s gaze drifted downward, a sneer began to form on his narrow face. There was a matte black of a pistol in the man’s lap, and it was aimed directly at him.

The door to the bathroom suddenly opened and another goon stepped out. This man was shorter than the one in the chair, and he had dark black hair instead of blond, but they were the same nonetheless; thick men in leather coats with big heads and ugly ears.