by Jeff Strand
"Can we put these clips someplace else?"
"How sensitive are your testicles?"
"Fine, fine, just zap me so we can get this over with."
"I'm going to turn it up a little bit higher this time."
Since his adventure had begun, Benjamin had screamed no small number of times. Had they occurred simultaneously, this last scream would have easily drowned out the others. But it worked—Julie yanked out six feet of the parasite before Hank had to turn off the juice.
"Now we're getting somewhere!" Hank said.
The parasite bit Julie's arm on the exact same place as before. She winced in the exact same way. However, she kept her grip on the creature.
One of its legs moved out of Benjamin's mouth and slid into his nostril. A second leg slipped into the other nostril, completely cutting off his breath. He tried to use his eyes to signal to Hank that this wasn't very good.
With the next wave of current, seven or eight more wriggling legs began to emerge from Benjamin's mouth. Julie groaned with the strain but kept tugging.
And then, the parasite popped free.
Julie held it, staring at the eight-foot-long writhing creature with disgust. "I can't believe you had this thing inside of—"
Its head shot out, biting Hank on the center of the throat. He hadn't yet turned off the electricity. Some sparks shot from the box.
Benjamin ripped off the clips. They were meant to be carefully opened and removed, rather than torn off, but a couple of nasty nipple scars were the least of his worries at this point. The electricity stopped frying him.
Hank rushed to the other side of the room. Though the location was rather nasty, the bite itself seemed to be superficial. At least there was no fountain of blood spraying everywhere.
Benjamin managed to enjoy a brief moment of Hey, cool, it's out of me! Things are finally starting to look up! Then the parasite squirmed out of Julie's hands, landed on the operating table with a splat, and slithered onto Benjamin's chest.
He pressed his lips together as tightly as he could. No way was that bastard getting back inside. No way. He'd scoop his eyeballs out with a lobster claw before he let that parasite back into his body, although if he could avoid both of those events, that would be even better.
Despite his best efforts to keep it from doing so, the parasite wrapped around his neck. Rotten thing had a neck fetish. It tightened its grip like a very thin boa constrictor.
At least it's out. Gotta think positive.
Benjamin got off the table as Julie tried to grab part of the parasite. Hank opened a closet door, took out an axe, and carefully walked toward them.
"Whoa!" said Benjamin. "No axe! No axe yet!"
"See if you can hold part of it out between your hands. Give me something to chop."
"Don't chop! We're not desperate enough to chop!"
"I'm not going to dismember you! Just hold it out!"
Julie grabbed a handful of parasite from the front of Benjamin's neck and pulled it out, giving several inches of slack. "How about this?"
"Too close to my neck!" Benjamin insisted.
Hank raised the axe. "No, no, that's perfectly...wait, too close to his neck, he's right."
"Don't you have a scalpel or something?"
"A scalpel might not do the trick."
"What the hell kind of experiments are you doing here that you need to keep an axe handy?"
"We keep a thresher in the shed. Want me to go get that?"
The parasite slipped out of Julie's hands and snapped against Benjamin's neck. He coughed as it tightened. He looped the thumbs of both hands underneath part of the parasite that was wrapped around his chest and pushed it out as hard as he could, finally extending a choppable segment about a foot from his body.
Before he could indicate that, yes, he was ready for Hank to attempt to sever the parasite, the axe came down with a swish.
Considering his recent string of misfortunes, Benjamin would not have been at all surprised if the axe split his face in half. He wouldn't have been happy about it, but he would have accepted it as the most recent in a long line of lousy occurrences. He'd pry the axe out of his face, run his finger along the facial gap to see how deep it was, then wait for the next awful thing to happen.
The axe, however, did not split his face in half. It sliced cleanly through the parasite. Generous amounts of orange fluid that looked like Buffalo wing sauce squirted out of each side, spraying all over Benjamin's face, chest, and arms. In an effort to remain upbeat, he noted that the parasite apparently did not have acid for blood.
The parasite continued to violently squirm.
"Hold out another section," said Hank.
"No! You've used up your axe luck! Put it away." The parasite bit Benjamin on the shoulder, and he slammed his fist against its head. It didn't stop.
Julie grabbed the top half and gave a mighty tug. Her hands popped free and she did a brief slapstick comedy routine that would have been hilariously funny to Benjamin had he not been preoccupied by the parasite fangs in his shoulder. She landed on her butt and said nothing positive.
Hank set the axe on the table. He picked up one of the clips, pried it open, then held it up to the leaking part of the top half of the parasite and let it snap shut. Benjamin cried out as the current passed through the parasite into his already-really-damn-sick-of-getting-shocked body. Then the parasite slipped from around his neck and dropped to the tile floor.
It quickly slid through the orange liquid and bit Julie on the inside of her leg.
The lower half of the parasite wasn't squirming quite as much anymore. Benjamin slammed his body against the operating table a couple of times and it released its grip and fell to the floor. Then it wrapped around his ankle.
Hank picked up the axe again. He slammed the weapon into the top half of the parasite, narrowly missing Julie as he cut it in two and caused yet more orange liquid to spray.
"I don't want a fuckin' hysterectomy!" Julie shouted.
Hank, who had apparently really been looking forward to an opportunity to use the axe, chopped the parasite again, severing it right beneath the head. The head continued to roll around, its mouth rapidly opening and closing.
Benjamin stomped on it.
It continued moving underneath his foot, so he pulled away and retreated to a safer part of the room. Julie got up and climbed onto the table.
Hank chopped it into four more pieces, all of which continued to slither around the floor.
"Tell me honestly," said Benjamin. "Are these all going to grow into separate full-size parasites? Because I'll really be disappointed if that happens."
"I doubt that very much," said Hank, stomping on a piece. "They shouldn't be able to last very long outside of the host, although they're a bit more—" He stomped on another piece. "—stubborn than I would've guessed."
"Do you have a flamethrower?" Benjamin asked.
"Not in this room."
"Gasoline and a lighter?" Julie asked.
Hank shook his head. "No."
"Machine gun?"
"Now you're just being silly."
"I was being silly with the gasoline and lighter," Julie said. "I guess now we just wait for aberrant science to run its course."
"I don't want to be a pain," said Benjamin, "but I'm legitimately concerned about the whole 'growing into separate full-sized parasites' issue. You've got to have something we can use on them, don't you?"
"Hydrochloric acid?"
"Works for me."
For the next few minutes, they took turns pouring hydrochloric acid onto the parasite pieces. They dissolved quite nicely, and Benjamin had to admit that it was even kind of fun, at least until he accidentally spilled some on his hand.
Soon nothing remained but several smoking, black masses on a floor soaked with orange liquid.
"Well, nobody died," said Hank. "At least that's a step up from last week."
EPILOGUE
"I have to disappear for a while," said
Julie, as they walked out of the building. "Maybe forever. I thought it was going to be for more of a noble purpose, and I thought I'd have more money, but oh well. I'll still enjoy the vacation."
"Where are you going?" Benjamin asked.
"Promise not to rat me out?"
"Of course."
"Southern hemisphere. Maybe."
"Fair enough," said Benjamin. "So this is goodbye, huh?"
"Yeah. I'm not much of a hugger, especially the way you look now, but how about we settle for a friendly goodbye handshake?"
Benjamin glanced down at his hand. "My hand is still kind of burning from the acid. We'd better not."
"Okay. Let me just say this, then. If you weren't married, and before all of the body chemistry changes from the parasite, I so would have done you."
Julie gave him a quick kiss on the cheek, and then the pudgy man in the black suit put the cloth sack over Benjamin's head.
* * *
Turning forty wasn't anywhere near as upsetting as he thought it would be.
* * *
One year later...
Benjamin sat at his desk, grading final exams. This was the single dumbest student he'd ever encountered in all of his years of teaching. How could he not know that Gregor had transformed into a cockroach? This element of "The Metamorphosis" wasn't obscure symbolism that could only be identified by thorough analysis by a literary expert—the guy'd turned into a frickin' roach! Even for a student who never listened in class, the words "turned into a roach" should have captured some part of his attention during the discussions.
He wrote a nice big "F" at the top. Welcome to summer school, kiddo.
He still had some scars from where the sores had healed, but they really weren't too hideous. You could hardly even see them except in direct light. And there was no evidence that he'd bashed his front teeth out against a bathroom sink. Modern dentists were awesome.
He took a bite from his celery stick. For some reason, chocolate now tasted like a flavorless blob and made him sick to his stomach. Fortunately, sex did not have the same effect. He hadn't had the nerve yet to test gambling.
His life had been unbelievably chaotic in the weeks following the incident (which is how he liked to think of it, as "the incident" rather than "the time this freaky parasite grew inside my body and made me suffer temporary fits of insanity and made sores break out all over me and lots of people died") but things had eventually calmed down.
His students didn't think he was as cool as he'd hoped, but that might change when the movie version came out next summer, even though he heard the studio was going for a PG-13 rating and replacing the parasite with an imaginary friend. And changing his name to "Bradley," which was deemed more commercially viable. Bastards.
"How's it going?" asked Margaret, walking into his office. She'd lost twenty-three pounds on the Parasite-Related Stress diet and had kept it off all these months, though she'd been disappointed that Weight Watchers magazine wouldn't run an article about her. Hardly touching your food and throwing up a lot was not part of their approved plan for weight management.
"Not too bad. Better than having a parasite in my stomach." He'd used this joke approximately eight thousand times since the incident, and planned to use it at least another eight thousand times, especially when Cindy was around.
"Most things are," she said, putting her arms around his chest and giving him a kiss on the cheek.
Though he couldn't quite say that he was glad it all happened, and he wasn't really sure he'd learned any important lessons that he couldn't have figured out from other sources, and it was still kind of difficult to justify the tooth thing to people who asked about it, Benjamin did have to admit that things could suck a lot worse than they did right now.
And he couldn't ask for much more than that.
About The Author
Jeff Strand is the Bram Stoker Award-nominated author of such demented books as The Sinister Mr. Corpse, Gleefully Macabre Tales, and Pressure. He lives in Tampa, Florida, where his problems with intestinal parasites are few and far between, although that last burrito (the one with the funny colored sour cream) didn't work out so well for him. He can't remember if he already mentioned that he lives in Tampa, Florida. If you're a brave web-explorer, you can visit his website at www.JeffStrand.com.
Table of Contents
BENJAMIN'S PARASITE
CHAPTER ONE
CHAPTER TWO
CHAPTER THREE
CHAPTER FOUR
CHAPTER FIVE
CHAPTER SIX
CHAPTER SEVEN
CHAPTER EIGHT
CHAPTER NINE
CHAPTER TEN
CHAPTER ELEVEN
CHAPTER TWELVE
CHAPTER THIRTEEN
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
CHAPTER SIXTEEN
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
CHAPTER NINETEEN
CHAPTER TWENTY
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
EPILOGUE
About The Author