by David Coy
“What?”
“So it’s not just going to cop a meal from the guy and fly away. It looks to me like it’s following an all-to-familiar pattern for this planet.”
“Using the other species as a breeding substrate,” Donna said.
“No surprise there, I suppose,” Rachel added.
“None at all,” Donna agreed. “Let’s get that damned thing off him. Give me the scalpel.”
“Hang on,” Rachel said. “I’ve got a better idea.”
“What?”
“Let’s try to make it want to let go on its own,” Rachel said.
“Why?”
“To see what it does,” Rachel said.
“This poor bastard could die in the meantime. What do you want to do, just pester it a little until it lets go?”
“Exactly.”
“No way. That damned thing is coming off him right now.”
“We could learn a lot more from it alive than dead,” Rachel said. “For all we know, this thing could be in the middle of its lifecycle, not the end. Its lifecycle can tell us more about how to avoid it than anything else.”
“Maybe,” Donna said firmly. “But we’re not taking the chance. It’s coming off.”
Rachel handed the scalpel back to Donna, rolled back from the table a couple of feet and pulled up her face shield. “Okay. You’re the nurse,” she said. “It’s your call.”
“That’s right. You can play with whatever’s left of it,” Donna said. “I can’t wait to kill this thing.”
Donna moved around to the other side of the table and went right to work. She placed the scalpel’s tip on the center of the organism’s head and pressed the tip firmly in. With a slight snap, the blade pierced the parasite’s head. Instantly, a gush of yellow fluid flowed out from around it, running onto the table and forming a putrid pool under the man’s hip. Donna pulled the blade back across the parasite’s midline with a jerking, sawing action, opening a deep slit in it, head to end. Dark fluid leaked from the gaping cut framed by the sharp edges of the opened carapace. She repositioned the blade in the cut where she started and drew it down the thing’s length again, deepening the cut. This time when she reached the juncture of head and thorax, the organism seemed to shudder slightly, and the posterior end of it arched up and away from the man’s body. “That must have hurt some,” Donna said to it. “Too bad for you.”
She took hold of the end of the organism with a pair of heavy hemostats and pried it up even further. She looked underneath it. “Yep,” she said. “Got tendrils penetrating the skin here. And it’s got no signs of letting them go.” She worked the blade in against the tendrils and with mincing little cuts nipped away at the tough tissue. She had soon sawed through the two penetrating tendrils. Trying not to tear the little holes in the man’s skin left by the claspers any larger than they already were, she loosened the organism. She wriggled free the rows of tiny clasping hooks that ran around the parasite's perimeter; and in a minute, she had it loose.
She dropped its ruined body in the sample tray held up by Rachel. “Well, at least you left it in one piece,” Rachel said. “More or less.”
“You’re lucky I didn’t stomp it flat after I got it off,” Donna replied
Donna cleaned the area where the organism had attached to the man. When she was done they could see a neat ring of little penetrating wounds in an elongated pattern surrounding two severed tendrils sticking up a centimeter or two out of the man’s side. The little wounds wept blood, and Donna blotted it away.
“Nasty,” Rachel said.
“Nasty,” Donna agreed. “I can’t believe how many organisms there are on this planet that want to stick something dreadful in something else.”
“Now what?” Rachel asked.
“Now I’m going to try to pull out these tendrils and hope I don’t break them off. I don’t want to go in after them.”
Rachel spotted something. “Hang on,” she said. She reached in and squeezed the end of one of the tendrils. When she did a pale, translucent object the size of a pinhead squeezed out of the severed channel in the tendril. Rachel captured the object on a glass slide in a drip of accompanying whitish liquid. “Gotcha,” she said.
“Egg?”
“That’s my bet,” Rachel said.
“Great,” Donna said. “Let’s hope we killed it before any of them worked their way down the tubes and into this poor sucker’s body.”
“Right,” Rachel agreed. “If it is an egg, I might be able to incubate it and hatch another one so we can see what the first-stage larva look like.”
“Oh, what fun!” Donna said, testing one of the tendrils with a pinch of her gloved fingers. “Just flush it down the toilet.”
Rachel smiled at Donna behind her mask. She knew Donna knew better than to deliberately destroy an opportunity to learn something significant about the hazard. “Not a chance. When the baby’s born, I’ll name it after you. How’s that?”
“Call it Smith instead,” Donna said.
That brought a peal of girlish laughter from Rachel.
* * *
“How’s the new patient?” Rachel yawned at Donna. The sun was going down, and soon the planet would come to buzzing, spinning, window-banging life, but Rachel needed no bug-filled excuse to head for the safety of her shelter and the comfort of bed. She was exhausted. She had been idly watching Bobby pack away the food, and his rhythmic actions had made her even sleepier. It was dreamy to sit there, not move and watch someone else work.
“Which new patient do you mean?” Donna replied. “I’ve had a dozen today.”
“Oh, um…Collins,” Rachel said, resting her head on her fist. She felt like she could sleep just like that. “The truck driver guy, you know, stinky whatsit attached to him.”
“Oh, you mean with the Smith attached to him. That one. I dosed him with antibiotics and sent him home,” Donna said. “He seems fine, but I’ll check on him for the next week or so. Presuming the Smith didn’t get a chance to lay eggs in him, he’ll be fine. I hope.”
“Smith. That’s rich,” Rachel said with a grin, then yawned. “I’m done in. I’m going.”
“How are you feeling,” Donna asked.
“Tired,” Rachel said pushing the empty platter away and getting up.
“You know what I mean,” Donna said over her coffee mug. “How are you feeling?”
“I’m fine actually. I haven’t had a seizure in over a week, as you well know. I think I’m getting better, getting over them actually.”
“Just checking,” Donna said.
“Thanks for looking out for me. I’m fine.”
“Exhaustion is one of your causal factors. You know that.”
“I do. But there’s work to be done,” Rachel said. She dropped a pat of thanks on Donna’s shoulder as she left. “I’m fine. See you tomorrow.”
Donna watched her walk toward home, her arms and legs swinging heavily. Just when Donna was wishing she wouldn’t walk so close to those hard metal tables and benches when she was so tired, Rachel pitched face-first onto the ground, her body twitching as if electrified.
“Dammit!” Donna said. She hurried over to her and wrestled her vibrating form right side-up. Rachel’s eyes were closed tight and her usually generous mouth was drawn into a thin, tight line. Donna held her head on her lap and gently plucked leaves and dirt off her face. There wasn’t a lot to do but wait until it was over. This one wasn’t so bad. She’d seen worse
* * *
Tim Collins got into bed next to his big, smooth wife and pulled her close. When he did he felt the sore spot on his side flare up with a spate of heat. He winced and pressed gently on the bandage. It felt warm. He laid his hand on his wife’s thick waist, and although the thought of it made his interest rise, he reconsidered the wisdom of snuggling with her just now.
Soon he slept. And as he did, deep in his primitive mid-brain hundreds of tiny organisms that had gathered there for just one purpose, released a cocktail of stimulating
chemicals. Several others, variants of the first, with a much different destination in mind, and just now located in the vicinity of his testes, started their final journey.
Just before Verde’s red dawn, Tim Collins awoke in heat, wanting to fuck and urinate at the same time. The latter sensation passed and was replaced with a slight burning, crawling sensation deep in his urethra. The sensation was not unpleasant and—combined with the powerful urge to rut that had come upon him—had transformed his wife’s legs, and the familiar spot far up between them, into a singular and burning passion. His arms and hands squeezed her and groped her, and soon he had muscled her into a position that would easily enable the conjugal union his raging libido demanded. She sprawled and mewed a short-lived and counterfeit objection, then suddenly, he was in her, pounding and pounding; the burning, tickling sensation in his urethra increasing with each thrust, driving him to thrust harder. He was dimly aware that he was sweating and that his wife was smiling up at him with a feral and lascivious smile. The desire to fuck was so strong and the strength of it so surreal that in a few moments he lost all contact with the real world and felt only the sexual act itself.
“Oh, Timmmm” his wife crooned, “Fuck me!”
Tim obliged and with his heart racing and his body slick with sweat, he pounded and pounded, a deep guttural groan accompanying his dis-rhythmic thrusting. With his wife’s big, smooth legs wrapped around him he pounded and pounded, his breath coming in ragged gasps. Driven ever forward by his desire, he felt the burning, tickling sensation suddenly increase a hundred-fold, and the sheer immensity of it nearly overpowered him. He opened his mouth in a silent scream of primal lust as the sensation became unbearable—and he came.
With a long and sweaty gasp, Tim Collins flushed the squirming, wriggling larva out of his urethra and into his wife’s vagina with a series of strong contractions and a powerful gush of his own human semen.
And with his heart racing out of control and his lungs pumping air, he rolled off his wet and admiring wife, and died.
* * *
“What do you mean, he’s dead?” Donna said into the phone.
The round and weeping face at the other end of the line was inconsolable. “He just died,” Martha Collins said. “He just…after we…he just died there in bed.”
“I’ll be over there in a few minutes,” Donna said. “Don’t move his body.”
Donna hung up and called Rachel. “Hey, our Smith-infected guy died,” she told her. “I’m on my way over there now.”
“I’ll meet you there,” Rachel said. She pounded down what was left of her breakfast and headed out the door.
When Donna arrived at the Collins’ shelter, Martha Collins was sitting on a chair in the living area, her big pink legs erupting in plump splendor from her house robe. Her face was swollen and pink, too; her eyes red from recent tears. Her thin hair was stuck in moist strands to her tear-streaked cheeks.
“I take it he’s in the bedroom,” Donna said, as kindly as she could, given her overwhelming curiosity.
Martha nodded her head a quick time or two and sniffed. “Yeah,” she said in a weak and barely audible voice. “He’s in there.”
* * *
Donna did a quick appraisal of the body, feeling for a pulse in his neck just to be sure his wife hadn’t reached a premature conclusion. “Huh…” she said to herself. “Dead as a doorknob.”
She’d have to perform an autopsy to be sure about the cause of death. If she had to guess right then, a massive cardiac or cerebral event would be high on her list as likely suspects. But since she was on Verde’s Revenge, and her patient was a man who’d just had a half-kilo parasite removed from his side just over twelve hours ago, she wasn’t ruling out anything. She checked in his mouth and down his throat with a hand light for telltale signs of something nonhuman in those moist cavities. She lifted the bandage and looked for any change in or around the wound and could detect none. She started to puzzle over it. When he’d come to the clinic yesterday, his vital signs, including his blood pressure, were good—especially good—in spite of the stress he was under. When she’d scanned his heart, she found a perfectly normal, middle-aged heart beating slightly fast but with no arrhythmia or other abnormal operational characteristics. Those facts began to work on her, and she was soon inclined to the idea, if not convinced of it entirely, that a cardiac event was very unlikely. She scanned his naked body with the light.
Giving in to an impulse she couldn’t resist, she got down on the floor and checked under the bed for anything crawling there that might be lethal. She saw nothing but a dusty sock and a dozen wadded-up balls of what she took as plastic wrappers from food bars.
* * *
Rachel sat down and leaned in toward Martha and put her hands together between her knees. “I’m so sorry,” she said, with genuine kindness.
Martha dabbed her nose with a tissue and nodded her thanks. “He was a good man,” she said. “Basically.”
“Did he give you any sign that anything was wrong?” Donna asked, walking in.
“Yes,” Rachel said more gently. “What was he doing when he died?”
“Ahem…” Donna said, trying to spare Martha the embarrassment. “They were making love at the time.”
“I see,” Rachel said, in her most professional voice.
“He was very amorous,” Martha said.
“I see,” Rachel said, twisting her mouth in thought.
“I’ve never seen him like that before,” Martha said sniffing and dabbing. “He was so excited. Like an animal.”
Thinking, Rachel bit her lip. “Really?” she asked.
“Yes,” Martha said. “He was fucking me like a…a…teenager,” she said, suddenly weeping again. “It was great.”
Rachel and Donna exchanged looks.
“So he died right after he…finished?” Rachel asked.
“Yes,” Martha said and sniffed. “He just rolled over and died.”
Rachel leaned back and looked at Donna. Donna rolled her head toward the bedroom for Rachel. “We’re going to look at the body some more now, Martha,” she said.
“Okay,” Martha said, dabbing her eyes with the wad of tissue.
* * *
“So what do you think?” Rachel said looking down at the naked dead man.
“I say massive stroke. Aneurysm maybe, “Donna replied. “I’ll have to open his head to find out for sure.”
“You checked him for creepers?” Rachel asked.
“Yep. Nothing.”
“Hmm.”
“What are you thinking?” Donna asked.
“The fact that he was so horny all of a sudden…that doesn’t precisely jive with being sedated hours before and having a big, fat parasite excised from your flank, now does it?”
“Nope. What the horny business does jive with is good health, low stress and a feeling of well-being, generally speaking.”
“Parasites are tricky,” Rachel said.
“Don’t I know it?” Donna quipped.
“Sometimes they have incredibly complex, even remarkable life cycles,” Rachel droned on, mulling it over.
“Ya think? What’s that got to do with our dead guy?”
Rachel thought about it. “I’m not certain yet. I’m working up a theory.”
“Care to share it?” Donna asked.
Rachel sucked a big breath through her nose and thought. “Sure. Let’s go outside.”
They excused themselves and went out into Verde’s already-steaming air. Donna closed the door behind them. “Okay, what’s your theory?”
“I think the parasite used Collins as an expendable vector,” Rachel said flatly.
“Okay…” Donna said, trying to derive the upshot.
“I think you need to check Mrs. Collins for a parasitic infection,” Rachel went on.
Donna had already connected the dots, and she nodded her head. “Makes sense,” she said. “The parasite used Collins to get its eggs inside a female mammalian. Damn. Now tha
t’s one you wouldn’t guess early. Are there any analogs in the knowledge base for that one?”
“Nothing precisely like it that I know of. Many similar though,” Rachel said. “But it’s still just a theory until you can verify the presence of some stage of the life form inside Frau Collins.”
They went back inside. Martha was now curled up in the chair, her plump form molded to the chair’s shape like a soft, pink and white sculpture. Donna sat down on the sofa next to her and leaned in with a sympathetic expression.
“I know you have a lot to deal with right now, Martha, but I’d like to do some tests.”
Martha’s lower lip trembled. She dabbed her eyes. “It’s okay,” she said. “He’s dead already. God has him in His care now.”
Donna and Rachel exchanged looks. “Not on him, Martha,” Donna said. “On you. I need to do some tests on you.”
Martha looked confused. “Me? Why me?”
“I just want to make sure that whatever killed your husband hasn’t somehow contaminated you.”
Martha’s lip stopped trembling and her look changed from grief to stony concern. “You think that fucking thing that got on him somehow did something to me, infected me?”
“Well, we don’t know,” Rachel chimed in. “We just want to be sure.”
“That’s right,” Donna added. “We just want to make sure.”
Martha studied both of them, a black cloud of fear coming over her. “Okay. You do your tests,” she said firmly. “I don’t want to die.” She started to get up out of her chair. “I have to go to the bathroom first.”
“Uh, that’s not a good idea right now,” Donna said, exchanging looks with Rachel. “I’d rather you do that in the clinic. I’ll need the sample.”
“Yep,” Rachel said. “Not a good idea. Need that sample.”