Parasite

by Patrick Logan

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.

  Thick men that were here for only one reason.

  These men were here to collect.

  “Why don’t you sit down?” the man with the short blond hair asked. His thin lips curled into a smirk. “I think it’s about time we had a little chat, Walter.”

  7.

  Refusing to sit hadn’t gone over well with the hitman. In the end, the man had forced him onto a wobbly wooden chair and had proceeded to tie up his wrists behind his back with telephone cable so tightly that Walter could barely feel his fingers.

  Despite his predicament, he couldn’t help but laugh in response to the man’s most recent demands.

  “Look around, you fucking moron—I have no money.”

  The man sitting in the chair in front of him bent forward, his expression souring.

  He leaned in so far that their foreheads nearly touched.

  “Don’t fuck with Sabra,” he hissed. His breath smelled of stale bread. “Sabra wants his money. He gave you the product, and now he wants his money.”

  Walter pulled as far away from the thick man with the short blond hair as possible, which, granted, wasn’t even far enough to breathe fresh air, given the telephone cord that dug into his wrists before twisting through the back of the kitchen chair on which he sat.

  Sabra.

  An image of the massive, fat man, like a humid pile of uncooked pizza dough, flashed in his mind. Sabra, with a mouth foul enough to rival his own stench. Sabra, who controlled nearly all of the heroin distribution in the Northeast. Sabra, of the infamous torture methods that involved a man’s scrotum.

  Fucking Sabra.

  The man had stupidly given Walter an 8-ball of heroin to sell, most of which he had promptly injected, and what little remained he had stuffed into his fridge a few moments ago. A part of him knew that he should be frightened, or at the very least concerned. He had heard stories of men who had crossed Sabra, men who—

  Walter felt a twinge in his shoulder, as if someone had prodded his flesh with a cattle gun. The sensation fired all the way up to his throat, causing the cords in his neck to stand out.

  He gritted his teeth and fought the urge to cry out.

  Something told him that he needed to get high again soon, only this time it wouldn’t only be for him, but for the cracker as well. As much as he wanted it out of him, he was fairly certain that having it curl up into a translucent shell like the rest of them on Main Street was likely a worse proposition.

  Walter blinked, trying to keep his head relatively clear. The man before him, mistaking his expression as one of fear, smirked.

  “What’s a matter? You think—”

  Walter didn’t let him finish. Instead, he lunged forward, tilting onto the chair’s front two legs, and drove his forehead into the bridge of the unsuspecting man’s nose.

  Blood immediately gushed forth from the gash on the bridge of the man’s nose and from both of Walter’s nostrils at the same time. Hot liquid sprayed Walter’s face, and he rocked backward, teetering before his chair finally settled.

  The man made an ungh sound and instinctively brought a hand to his face, trying to stem the bleeding. “You motherfucker!” he yelled, his voice coming out thick and nasally.

  Now it was Walter’s turn to smile.

  There was a commotion behind Walter as the other man, the shorter one with the dark hair, stopped rooting through Walter’s things and started to come over toward them, but the man with the blood seeping out from between his knuckles and dripping onto his chin held out the hand with the gun. Walter noticed that the barrel was longer than expected, and it took him a moment to realize that there was a silencer on the end of it.

  “Stay the fuck over there, Sherk. Just keep looking,” he instructed. Then he turned to Walter and stared directly into his eyes. “I’ll take care of this bastard.”

  Somewhere behind him, Walter heard one of his cupboards being thrown wide, followed by the tinkling of glass. He couldn’t turn to see what the man was doing, his tightly bound hands so restricted his range of motion, but he hoped to Christ that the man stayed the fuck out of the fridge.

  I need to get high.

  The bruises from being launched from the car following the explosion at the gas station, the cuts on his cheek and face, his stiff leg—all this pain was coming back now, and he needed something strong to mute these sensations.

  When he turned back to the blond man with the bleeding nose, Walter was surprised to see that he was once again smiling.

  “So”—his voice sounded strange and muffled what with his hand still trying to stem the bleeding—“you’re a tough guy now, Walter?”

  He laughed and then pulled his hand away and spat blood onto the carpet.

  “Good, good—tough guys are always the most fun.”

  When the man leaned in this time, he made sure to keep enough distance between them that Walter couldn’t reach him.

  His smile vanished and a coldness returned to his eyes.

 
“This is how it’s going to work, Walter—I’m going to get that money for Sabra. I’m going to get whatever product you have left as well, and I’m going to give it to him on your behalf.”

  He leaned away, his leather jacket crinkling loudly.

  “I’m going to give Sabra both the money and the product as a token of your”—he waved the barrel of the gun in a small circle—“appreciation.”

  Walter said nothing and the man shrugged.

  “That’s okay, you don’t need to say anything. I am just telling you what is going to happen. Now—”

  There was a tapping sound from behind Walter, drawing the blond-haired goon’s attention. His eyes floated above Walter and landed on something behind him.

  “I see you have a son,” he said with a smile, his gaze returning to Walter.

  Walter’s expression remained flat.

  “Ah yes, I can see it in your eyes… you love your son, don’t you, Walter? Who would have thought that a fucked-up junkie could love another person, much less a son? And a woman? How did you get a woman to fuck you?”

  The man raised an eyebrow.

  “You rape a bitch, Walter?” His voice was a mocking whisper. “Yeah, I bet you raped some bitch.”

  Again, Walter resisted the urge to reply.

  “And I see that he got your looks, Walter. How unfortunate. So now”—he waved the gun in a circle again—“we have added another element to this equation.”

  Walter finally understood; the man with the short black hair and the scar across his throat, the one who didn’t speak, the one called Sherk, had found the picture of Tyler on top of his TV.

  Took them long enough. Geniuses, these men ain’t.

  “We know about your son, so maybe you can simply tell you where the product is? The money? Unless, of course, we have to search for your son and the gear, Walter…”

  Walter couldn’t hold it any longer. His cheeks puffed and he suddenly burst out laughing. He laughed so hard that tears started streaming down his cheeks. At some point during his outbreak, he realized that the man in front of him was saying something, but he couldn’t make out any of the words—he was laughing too hard.