Parasite (7 page)

“And the school? How’s
the school? All cleaned up?” the sheriff asked, trying to keep his tone direct but at the same time sympathetic.

Deputy Andrew Williams nodded slowly.

“Passable,” he said. “We tried—”

“The bodies? What about the bodies?”

Williams swallowed hard and began toying with the pen on his desk. Like the sheriff, of the many things that had affected them after the crackers had infested the town, the footage that they had seen on Nancy’s cameraman’s viewfinder showing what had happened Wellwood Elementary School had been one of the most disturbing.

And sad—definitely one of the most sad.

“Yeah, we moved them to the morgue, as you instructed. Only needed one bus, though, they were just—just—”

The sheriff laid his hand on the deputy’s wrist, stopping him from twirling the pencil. The man immediately looked up at him with his small, dark eyes.

“—their bodies were just so small,” he finished.

The way he said small—whispered the word—nearly brought tears to the sheriff’s eyes. As he fought them back, he tried to think of something else, something less depressing than the thought of an entire school of children being decimated by an infestation of some sort of alien parasite.

Only this was impossible; the only things that rattled around in his skull were thoughts of the attack. Eventually, his mind turned to Mrs. Drew, and how she had sacrificed herself so that they might try to get to the source of the problem.

Sacrificed.

Such a terrible word, conjuring images of ancient altars covered in dripping blood from the
sacrificed
.

But without her, Paul doubted that he or Williams would have been here today.

He wiped his eyes.

Fuck.

“Thank you,” he said, trying hard to sound strong. He lost the battle, and his voice wavered with the final syllable.

For a second, another emotion surfaced, one that surprised his tears away.

Anger.

Anger directed at Sheriff Dana Drew, anger for leaving him, for leaving all of them, when they needed him most—when they needed his radar, his ability to pick out the good boys from the bad. For his unique way of always seeming in control, keep everyone cool, knowing how to settle the masses, knowing what the fuck to do next.

And he was furious at Coggins, too, for being so selfish. For leaving.

Sheriff Drew would have stayed; no matter what he lost, if he were alive today, he would be here, standing beside me.

But Coggins wasn’t the sheriff—he knew that now. Coggins had left him alone again, and Dana Drew would have never done that.

For a brief second, Paul was back in the room again, the hot, stinking room of his nightmares, the weight pushing down on him, the fire burning just outside the door. Like always, he was unable to push it open and to see; to see what had really happened inside the Wharfburn Estate, the event that had precipitated this all those years ago. The imagery was so powerful that it was like a memory rather than a dream.

And yet he had never been inside the Estate…

It was like someone
else’s
memory. Or a story… had Coggins told him that much about what happened in the Estate all those years ago?

Coggins had been tight-lipped about the whole ordeal, but maybe… maybe back at the biker bar he had said something?

Paul couldn’t be sure, but he thought he must have. Because if it was only a dream, then it was stronger and more
real
than any he had had before.

He shook his head and breathed deeply in through his nose.

Keep it together, Askergan needs you.

“Thank you, Andrew,” he said. “What about the crackers, how’s the cleanup going?”

Deputy Williams’ eyes remained downcast.

“Surprisingly well. The gas station fire is out, and the majority of the crackers on Main Street have been destroyed—incinerated, as you asked. The rest, well, the rest will take time—there are just
so
many.”

The sheriff nodded, and he let go of Deputy Williams’ arm. He immediately started twirling his pen again.

“They all dead?”

The deputy’s body tensed beneath Paul’s grip, and he hesitated before answering.

“As far as I can tell.” The man swallowed hard before continuing. “Are we gonna get any help here, Paul? I mean, there are just so many dead…”

Sheriff White knew that he should say something motivating, even if his words were a lie about how they weren’t on an island, that the choppers would soon fly in and bring with them the help that Askergan needed.

But he couldn’t lie; it just wasn’t him.

“I tried, Andrew. I called and I called, and I tried. FBI, CIA, fucking even neighboring counties. Best I could get was a damn pathologist, someone to come look at the—” He swallowed hard. “—the bodies. Try to figure out what the hell those cracker things are.”

He sighed, and looked away from his friend’s dark brown eyes. “We’re alone, Andrew. Askergan is going to have to get through this alone.”

Like in his dreams, there was a weight on him, one that prevented him from taking a full breath, only now it wasn’t someone from his past on top of him.

This time it was the entire weight of Askergan bearing down.

“I tried,” he said quietly. “And that’s all
we
can do.”

The deputy nodded slowly.

“So what do we do now, then?”

What would Sheriff Drew do?

Paul chewed his lip.

WWSDD.

Sheriff Dana Drew would calm the masses, inspire confidence in them, keep things from getting out of control during this chaotic time.

At the very least, the man would try.

“Call Nancy. Let’s get a news conference set up. Askergan needs us now.”

Sheriff Paul White chewed his lip again.

Askergan needed
something
, of that he was certain.

He just wasn’t confident that
he
was what they needed.

The apartment had been
foul-smelling to begin with, but now it was unbearable.

It was the crackers, the tiny transparent ones that had promptly curled up and died mere seconds after tearing out of the chests of the two square-headed hitmen.

And it was the blood.

Together, the blood and dead crackers stunk of rotting meat tinged with metallic undertones.

The two crackers that had budded from him were gone; after burrowing into the two men and causing the rush of new crackers to be birthed, they had apparently remained inside their corpses, presumably dead as well.

Walter felt sick to his stomach. He had seen two men torn apart from the inside, and a horde of tiny white crab-like creatures spew forth and then die before all of them had even cleared their victims’ body cavities.

He had no idea why those crackers had died—indeed, why any and all of the crackers on Main Street and Highway 2 had died—yet the one embedded in his shoulder continued to live. And that said nothing of the fact that the one in his skin had managed to raise another cracker—no, two more crackers—to attack the hitmen, and then those had started to proliferate…

His stomach lurched.

Why did they attack the hitmen? Why did they cause the small crackers to bubble forth and die? Why couldn’t they survive for any significant time away from their host… from him?

The drugs, maybe? Was that altering their behavior?

Just thinking about all of this made Walter dizzy and he gagged, his focus shifting from trying to understand what sort of parasite was leeching his drugs from him to fighting back the bile that filled his mouth. As he pressed his chin to his chest to try to suppress the urge to vomit, he finally got a good look at his own body. The blood vessels or stretch marks or whatever the fuck they were that spread from the cracker still embedded in his right shoulder had now acquired a dark purple tinge. And their varicose paths seemed to extend now; they passed all the way over his chest and onto the other side, circling his left nipple.

He wanted to touch his skin, to feel it, but his hands were still strapped behind his back, tied to the chair.

And he still couldn’t move.

The smell.

The blood.

The bodies.

The carnage.

And still, despite all this, his searching eyes didn’t first look for a way to free himself, but to find the black leather case.

The drugs; maybe the drugs are keeping the thing in my shoulder alive when all others seem to just die.

Walter grimaced.

The drugs; maybe the drugs are what are keeping
me
alive.

It didn’t matter; it was all rhetoric.

He needed his drugs either way, and he would soon have them.

Walter’s first intuition was to stand, to run backward as best he could and drive the chair against the wall, hopefully splintering the thin wood.

But Walter had been shot in the leg.

A laugh burst from him.

“Shot,” he said to the empty room. “I forgot I was shot.”

But when he looked down, he was surprised that his blood had stopped flowing from the wound, and that he could no longer quite make out the ragged hole in his skin.

His mind flashed to the white patches of skin on his shoulder, the area from which the strange, translucent crackers had sprung forth.

Did it… heal me somehow?

He shook his head.

That was absurd—but this was all insane, wasn’t it?

“I have to get the fuck out of here,” he said out loud.

His wandering gaze eventually landed on Sherk’s six-inch knife lying in a pile of congealing blood. And at long last, Walter mobilized.

That will do.

With a grunt, he managed to prop himself onto his toes, wincing at the dull sensation in his quad. Gritting his teeth, he stumbled forward, barely able to avoid falling into the two men’s still warm corpses that lay beside each other like bizarre lovers. Walter shifted his weight onto his good leg, and then pivoted toward the knife. This time when he felt the chair teetering, he went with the fall, twisting onto his back as he did.

The chair toppled, and Walter went down with it.

The fall didn’t hurt as much as it should have, especially considering the loud rap the back of his head made when it went bouncing off the parquet. He saw stars for a brief moment, but his body had been so racked with pain—first with the gunshot wound, then with the stretching and tearing of his skin when it birthed the crackers—that bonking his skull barely registered.

His head still swimming, he turned so that he was partially on his side, and then tried to stretch his hands and fingers as far as the telephone cable would allow.

They came up short.

“Fuck,” he swore, reaching again, his outstretched fingers desperately trying to grab the knife that was just a few inches from his grasp.

Again his hand grabbed air.

He grunted and closed his eyes, slowly turning his strained neck back to a neutral position. Three ragged breaths later, with spit and blood now beading on his long gray beard, he turned it in the opposite direction. Then he opened his eyes and found himself staring directly into a miniature harbinger of death.

A small, transparent cracker lay on its back only a few inches from his face. It looked hard, like a dried clam shell, the six small legs pointing toward the ceiling as if in prayer. Staring at the center of its mass, Walter could make out the small opening and the hard white teeth inside, but he didn’t see much else. The shell was almost completely transparent, and although he could see right through it, it didn’t appear to have any organs, much less a brain. It had a network of vessels—some blue, most red—seeming to branch from the thing’s mouth, but that was pretty much it.

Walter instinctively glanced at his shoulder with the hard shell of the cracker still buried beneath, and instantly recognized the similarities between the dark purple lines that radiated from the embedded cracker and now traveled completely across his narrow chest, and the ones inside the upturned crab inches from his face.

His head started to throb, so he shut his eyes again. Keeping them tightly closed, he stretched out once more with his fingers, and this time he felt something wet on his palms as the telephone cable cut deep into his wrists. When his fingertips brushed against something hard, his eyes snapped open.

Ignoring the blood now dripping down his forearms, he stretched even further, grunting with the effort. This time, his right hand wrapped completely around the handle of the blade.

He grinned, exposing his crooked, bloodstained teeth.

The next part was easy, for as awkward as it was to turn the knife inward toward his wrists, the blade was so sharp that it easily sliced through the cable.

Walter sighed as the pressure in his wrists and forearms instantly relented. Still, the first thing he did after his hands were freed wasn’t to rub his wrists, but instead he brought his right hand up to the strange white skin on his shoulder. His fingers palpated the spot, curious at first, as if he were touching some foreign substance instead of piece of himself.

The newly formed skin was oddly soft and cool to the touch. And smooth—it was impossibly smooth. And while he could feel the texture on his fingertips, the skin itself didn’t seem to register his touch.

A shudder ran through him, and he pulled his hand away.

Intent on ignoring the patches of white skin on both his shoulders, let alone the cracker embedded in his skin and the thick network of veins that spider-webbed across his chest, Walter slowly eased himself into a standing position, keeping the leg that had been shot out in front of him protectively. Although slightly numb, he found that he could bend his knee with only mild stiffness.

How is this possible? This can’t be what it feels like to be shot… can it?

He debated probing this wound as well, but the uncomfortable lack of feeling in the new skin on his shoulder lingered, and he decided against it.

Besides, there was a more pressing matter at hand.

When Walter reached down to pick up his case of drugs—
good Lord, how long has it been since I got high?
—he felt a strange taste in his mouth. Or, more appropriately, he felt
less
strangeness in his mouth.

In fact, it almost felt normal.

He clucked his tongue, and this felt normal, too. Sure, his tongue felt a little numb, but when he reached up to grab it between two grimy fingers, it was all there; the tip that he had bitten off seemed to have been regrown.

A small smile crossed his lips.

Healed. The thing is healing me somehow.

His hand, now wet with saliva and blood, went to his cheek next. The pockmarks from the glass that had been embedded there after being thrown from his car after the explosion at the gas station were gone—smoothed over. In fact, he realized as he further probed his face, several of the lesions that had seemed ubiquitous following his foray into intravenous drug use were gone too.

His skin seemed soft and smooth; it felt so completely normal that he was taken aback. It was
all
normal, except for the patches of white skin that had healed over after the crackers had been born. 

A strange expression crossed his face.

With the hand not gripping the leather case, Walter undid his pants and slid a hand down his leg. He could still feel dried blood around mid-thigh, but the hole he’d expected to find simply wasn’t there.

“What the fuck?”

He could feel a protrusion, something hard deep beneath his skin, but there was no ragged bullet hole. Although the healed wound prevented him from digging deep enough to actually feel it, he knew what this hard object was: the bullet.

It was the pain; it had to have been the pain. Whatever had happened when he had been shot and then bitten off a piece of his tongue had fucked with his brain.

Or maybe he had imagined this, all of it—maybe he was still lying in the back of the stolen car, a needle hanging out of his arm, and this was all just a nasty trip.

It was also possible that he had suffered a severe head injury when he had been thrown from car after the gas station exploded, and that he was in some sort of dream-like coma.

Or maybe he was dead already.

Walter squeezed the fake leather case in his hand.

“Well, only one way to find out.”

The cracker buried in the skin on his right shoulder twitched.