Parasite

by Patrick Logan

It was bright outside—too bright. The sun felt like shards of ice jammed into his retinas.

  His eyelids fluttered, and he tried to concentrate on keeping them open, to fight the tears that first formed a film and then cascaded down his cheeks.

  My heroin!

  This singular thought kept his eyes open, but his vision was blurry and he had to blink rapidly several times before the world before him slowly came into focus.

  Rainbows; there were rainbows everywhere, despite the fact that the air was hot and dry. The harsh sunlight separated as it passed through the hundreds of translucent cracker corpses, causing a slight prism effect.

  It made him queasy.

  Walter turned his head to the other side, grinding his cheek into several cubes of shatterproof glass that littered the road.

  C’mon, where’s the bag? Where the fuck is the case?

  Then he finally spotted it: the black case was clutched between the fingers of… his hand?

  The fingers looked familiar, thin and red, with nails bitten to the quick, and the cross tattoo in the webbing between thumb and forefinger was indeed his, but it didn’t feel like his hand. It was his, it had to be, but he couldn’t feel it at all; from the shoulder down, his arm was completely numb.

  What the fuck? Is it broken? Dislocated? Fucking amputated?

  He tried to force his fingers closed, to squeeze the case, to feel it, but nothing happened.

  Walter tried to remember which arm he had shot into. It could have been his right, even though this would have been strange given that he was right-handed and preferred to inject into his left. But his arm had never felt this way, even when he had had no choice but to inject what he knew to be dirty drugs.

  Infection didn’t feel like this, not even the kind that turned his skin ashen and gave him palpitations. That was bad; this was worse.

  Maybe I hit a nerve?

  Walter finally mustered the courage to scan his numb arm, and when his gaze fell on the crook of his elbow, his heart sank: his pink, mottled flesh was relatively smooth and unmolested.

  No infection on his right arm.

  When his slow, rising gaze finally made it to his shoulder, Walter snapped to his feet so quickly that his head spun and he immediately fell back onto his ass. A bolt of pain flashed up his spine from his tailbone to the base of his skull, but it barely even registered. Instead, he began to frantically use his good hand to smack at his numb shoulder and arm, trying to brush off the cracker that was nestled there.

  “Fuck!” he screamed, still swiping at the characteristic shape.

  Every time his hand passed over the spot, he felt the creature, but no matter how hard he swiped, the irregularly shaped thing was still there.

  With a grimace, he took another look at his shoulder, forcing his chin to his chest to get the best possible view.

  Walter’s heart nearly stopped.

  It was patently obvious that no matter how many times he swatted at the cracker on his shoulder, it would not be brushed away like a pesky spider; no, it was clear that this cracker was more permanent.

  With his lower lip dripping blood and spit, Walter somehow mustered the strength to inspect the shape buried beneath his skin.

  The cracker was smaller than he had first thought, but the characteristic oval-shaped outline of the shell still covered most of his left deltoid. He could also make out the creature’s six legs, all folded and articulated so that they were completely pressed against his… well, against whatever was underneath his skin.

  “Fuck!” he swore, looking skyward, his eyes once again watering in the bright sun.

  Then he turned back to the shape and used a trembling thumb to apply some pressure to one of the thing’s legs. It was surprisingly pliable, despite the rigid outline beneath his skin.

  A quiver ran through his entire body as if he had just experienced a minor electrical shock.

  “Oh God,” he whispered, tucking his chin against his collar to get an even better look.

  The hard outline was horrible, of this Walter had no doubt, but there was something far more disturbing.

  The thing’s mouth, a small, silver-dollar-sized orifice, was directed out of a fairly smooth circular opening on his skin. Inside this hole, he caught sight of a horrible set of tiny, reciprocating teeth. Worse still was the fact that his skin around the hole seemed to be fused perfectly around the orifice. It was as if his pale flesh seemed to be part of the cracker’s mouth—some sort of macabre, surrogate lips.

  It was almost too hard to stomach, so instead, Walter tried to squeeze the case again. He was surprised to find that this time his fingers responded, even if this response had been reduced to only a pathetic twitch.

  Maybe I’m just high.

  Walter looked skyward again, staring into the sun until black specks clouded his vision.

  Oh, he was high alright, but this was still happening.

  Sudden movement in his right shoulder, an odd puckering sensation, drew his eyes back.

  Even through watery vision, Walter could see the cracker quivering slightly, thrumming like a plucked violin string. The feeling made him nauseated; it felt like there were hundreds of spiders crawling under his flesh, all milling about, trying to find a good spot to lay their eggs.

  His stomach lurched and his fingers squeezed the leather case, only this time he wasn’t sure if this was a reflex caused by the cracker’s movement in his shoulder, or if he had sent the command himself.

  If he had thought it.

  Another thing struck him then; he thought that he could actually feel the texture of the leather case in his hand.

  He tried to squeeze his hand again, and this time his fingers actually closed.

  He supposed that relief should have washed over him, that he should have felt relief, gratitude even. But the fact that he had regained control of his arm didn’t matter as much as it should have.

  There was only one thing that mattered. And it was the same thing that he had done daily for as long as he could remember, long before he had even had a son.

  Walter squeezed the case again and a smile crossed his lips.

  He was still high, but one could always get more high.

  4.

  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 unfee
ling, 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.

  5.

  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.

  6.

  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.