by Bryan Smith
She shrugged. “It’s nothing. Just a boo-boo.”
The bandage was largish for something described as a “boo-boo”. It also looked worn and a bit dirty. Derek had the impression it’d been in place for at least a few days. She’d likely showered with it on, accounting for its degraded appearance. Derek opted against inquiring further. She seemed uninterested in talking about whatever had happened, and he had no interest in pushing her for additional info. They were here to watch a movie and have fun, not discuss minor flesh wounds.
The movie started.
Ten or so minutes in, Claudia set her bag of popcorn on the floor and leaned into him for a kiss. He turned his head in her direction and let her press her lips against his. She surprised him when she pushed her tongue between his lips and cupped his crotch with a soft hand and squeezed. This was no sparsely attended screening of a movie that had been out for a while. The movie was brand new and nearly every surrounding seat was filled. It seemed a bit bold to initiate a groping session in the midst of such a setting. But maybe that turned her on. Maybe she was an exhibitionist.
Fuck it, Derek thought. If she’s cool with it, so am I.
His left hand went to one of her breasts and squeezed. She whimpered into his mouth and squeezed his crotch harder. Her tongue pushed into his mouth again, probing more insistently than before. He kept groping her breasts as his burgeoning erection strained the front of his jeans in a way that was painful and pleasurable at the same time. Claudia started moaning in a blatantly sexual way after several minutes of this.
And she wasn’t quiet about it.
A deep male voice from the row behind them piped up: “If you two don’t knock it off, I’m complaining to the manager.”
Claudia heaved a breath as she broke the lip-lock with Derek. She turned her head in the direction of the complainer and snarled at him, her face twisting in a way that was at once sexy and frightening. There was a hint of something feral and animalistic in the strained set of her features. And her voice was significantly huskier than before when she said, “Fuck off.”
Derek didn’t mind going with the flow when the girl he was flowing with was as sexy as Claudia, generally speaking, but there was a limit to how many lines he could cross. He wasn’t a rude person and didn’t want to cause a scene. Words of apology sprang to his lips, but before he could utter them, something caught his eye and made him frown.
The white bandage around Claudia’s wrist was soaked red. A thin line of blood slid to the heel of her hand and dripped to the floor. The so-called “boo-boo” was evidently a wound of much greater significance. He started to say something about it, but Claudia gripped him by the throat and pulled him close. Her hand was tight on his throat, effectively suppressing any further protest as she again pushed her tongue into mouth.
Blood from the wrist wound pattered on his lap in a thickening stream. Even more alarming, he noted a distinct difference in her teeth as they nipped at his mouth. They were longer now.
And sharper.
One of the nips pierced his bottom lip and drew blood.
Derek whimpered.
What in the name of holy fucking shit is happening?
The deep voice from the next row back piped up again. “That’s it. I’m going to the manager.”
There was a squeak of springs as the large man rose from his seat.
Claudia again broke the clench and snarled at the complainer. “Sit down and watch, fat man, or I’ll tear your head off.”
Her voice was even huskier now, barely sounding feminine at all. And her skin tone was darker. Her hair looked fuller and thicker. Longer, too. Also, her eyes were brown now. They’d been blue moments ago, as in all her pictures.
The fat man snorted. “Fuck yourself, whore. I’m getting you and your ugly boyfriend kicked out of here.”
He moved to the end of his row and took the first step down.
Before he could get any farther, Claudia sprang out of her seat, leaping over Derek and the couple seated to his left as she intercepted the fat man, who shrieked in alarm, a surprisingly girlish sound that rang out with crystalline clarity in the theater, overwhelming the sounds emanating from the theater’s speakers. By then the auditorium was a riot of hushing sounds and irritated voices. The near-capacity crowd wanted quiet for the movie. By then, though, Derek was sure these people would cease caring about the movie within just a few more seconds.
Claudia’s clothes were bursting at the seams. Hair sprouted from nearly every previously bare patch of flesh. Her hands got bigger, the painted nails lengthening into thick, sharp talons. The fat man’s face was a frozen mask of terror as Claudia fulfilled her promise of a few moments ago. She ripped his head off at the shoulders and hurled it away from her with all her might. The severed head hit the movie screen dead-center with an emphatic splat.
Screams erupted all around.
Blood fountained from the fat man’s ragged neck stump.
The house lights came up as people began rushing for the exits. Acting on instinct, Derek hurried to join them, but Claudia restrained him with a hand clamped firmly around his throat. She held him in place as she tore out the dead man’s stomach with her new snout and devoured a length of pink intestine.
Derek gagged.
Oh, fuck. Oh, fuck, fuck, fuckity, fuck fuck.
Claudia tossed the corpse away and looked at Derek.
“You’re mine,” she said, her voice barely sounding human now. “You’re not going anywhere. We’ll be together forever.”
Claudia raked a talon across his neck, drawing blood without severing any major arteries. Then she picked him up as easily as one might a light bag of laundry and heaved him over one of her very broad shoulders. His head bobbed as she sprinted down the steps toward the nearest exit. A crowd was gathered there, people desperately trying to push their way out. More screams erupted as Claudia tore into them, pulling off limbs as she pushed fresh victims aside and made her way to the exit.
Moments later, they were outside and running across the parking lot. As Claudia ran off into the night, Derek caught a glimpse of the full moon hanging in the sky overhead and understood.
The bandage.
The “boo-boo”.
A werewolf had bitten Claudia and now she was one, too. He felt the hot throb at his throat where she’d scratched him.
He wondered how much that first transformation process would hurt.
THE IMPLANT
Awareness of something wrong dawned slowly for John Stark that morning. He awoke with what felt like an ordinary stiff neck, the kind that occasionally resulted from sleeping with his head turned at a bad angle. That he awoke lying flat on his back as his eyes fluttered open didn’t matter. He’d been having some restless nights lately and might have shifted sleeping positions any number of times between bedtime and sunrise.
He was groggy at first and felt little motivation to do anything about the discomfort he was feeling as his consciousness continued its slow, lethargic return from dreamland. When his head was a little clearer, he would raise himself up a bit, maybe double-fold the top pillow for added cushioning, and wedge it carefully against the sore area. Then a bit later he’d get up and take some Tylenol. That should take care of things.
In those first moments, though, he was content to simply lay there as he attempted to hold on to fragments of the sex dream he’d been having prior to waking. In the dream, he’d been kidnapped by a gang of beautiful and glamorous female criminals. The babes lived a double life, working as fashion models during the day and committing elaborate heists at night. They took him to their mansion and forced him to be their sex slave. He felt like it’d been probably the most amazing dream of all time, but it was already breaking apart, the few remembered fragments growing fuzzier with each passing moment. Soon, he suspected, he wouldn’t remember it at all.
Bummer.
In a few more moments, his eyes opened wider as the grogginess continued to clear. He remembered the basic premise
of the amazing dream, but little beyond that, just one or two fleeting images. With the return to full consciousness almost complete, he rose up some, double-folded the pillow beneath his head, and tried to get comfortable.
It was then he began to realize he was dealing with something more than an ordinary stiff neck. Shifting position did nothing to alleviate the ache. Instead, it heightened awareness of the hard center of discomfort. He tried twisting his neck to see if this was some kind of kink that could be worked out, but all this resulted in was a sharp jab of pain he felt all the way down to his toes.
Frowning, he lifted up his head and slipped a hand beneath his neck to probe gingerly at the knot of discomfort. His breath caught in his throat and his heart did a little stutter as his fingertips skidded over the hard, round lump protruding from the flesh just beneath the base of his skull.
John sat bolt upright and probed at the object with a little less delicacy. This resulted in additional jabs of pain, but he couldn’t help himself. There was something sticking out of his neck that didn’t belong there, an alarming development to say the least. Any pain he was feeling from the stings that resulted from each poke of the object was overridden by other concerns, primary among them being a single basic question—what the fuck is this fucking thing sticking out of my fucking neck!?
It did not feel like a natural object.
This impression was a good thing in the sense that, if accurate, it ruled out the sudden protrusion of a long-developing malignant tumor. The measure of relief this insight afforded him was not insignificant, but it was swept aside by the lingering mystery of what the clearly foreign object embedded in his neck actually was.
He was able to discern the basic shape of the thing with a bit more gentle probing. It was an almost perfectly round knob and felt like it was about half the size of his thumb. He tried pulling at it slightly, but this resulted in a jolt of pain sharper than any of the previous jabs.
He was breathing heavily and his heart was beating faster as he tossed aside the blanket covering his body, got out of bed, and hurried out to the bathroom down the hall. The bathroom door had a tendency to stick in the frame. After shouldering it open, he traipsed across the small space on legs turning more rubbery by the moment. He stopped at the sink and peered at his reflection in the mirror above it.
John knew what he had to do.
But he was reluctant.
There was something in his neck that shouldn’t be there. It hadn’t been there when he’d gone to bed. That he knew for a fact. He’d gone to bed stone sober, just as he had every night for the last five years, following his fifth (and final) DUI arrest. He’d been in full possession of his senses until lights out, no question about it.
So, again…what the fuck?
He lingered there in frozen terror a moment longer, knowing he needed to visually appraise whatever it was. Until he did that, he couldn’t even begin to figure out what the thing in his neck really was or how to remove it. And yet a very frightened part of him didn’t want to see it, was, in fact, terrified at the very idea. Whatever this thing was, someone else had put it there.
Or something else.
Aliens, maybe.
The idea was ridiculous on the surface. He’d always scoffed at tales of alien abductions and experiments, treating the stories with the same disdain he felt for kooky conspiracy theories. Only now, with this goddamn thing stuck in his neck, it was hard to discount any of the wild possibilities he’d once treated with such contempt.
“I’ve got to do this,” he muttered, his voice too loud in the otherwise empty room. “I’ve got no choice.”
He turned to his side, craned his neck around, and lifted up the little scraggle of dark hair at the nape of his neck. The object protruding from his neck was pretty much as he’d envisioned it from his initial tactile examination, except that the hard knob was a shade of light blue rather than the dark brown or black he’d expected.
Leaning over the sink, he put his head as close as he could to the mirror, his eyes swiveling and straining in their sockets as he tried hard to get the best possible view of the thing. He still couldn’t tell whether it was made of metal or some other hard material. With the fingers of his other hand, he pressed down as hard as he could on a patch of flesh adjacent to the protrusion, hoping for a glimpse of the part of the object that was actually inside his flesh. This resulted in a series of minor stings that were bearable and nothing compared to the sharper jabs that came when he applied direct pressure to the object.
By doing this, he was able to catch a brief glimpse of something silver attached to the bottom of the blue knob. He was only able to observe it for a few seconds before the stinging sensations became more than he could tolerate. Though minor at first, they became steadily more intense the longer he pressed down on the flesh adjacent to the object.
He took his hand away from his neck and let out a breath.
A rod or bolt of some sort, apparently made of metal, had been inserted in his neck while he slept. How this had been accomplished without waking him or causing excruciating pain, he did not know. He stared at his reflection and wondered what to do.
Get it out. Now.
Well, that was easier said than done, wasn’t it?
The object was deeply and firmly embedded in his flesh. Removing it would require a significant amount of force. Judging by the jabs of pain triggered by simple prods of the exterior knob, any attempt at removal would likely result in waves of mind-bending agony. There was also the issue of the placement of the object to consider. It was lodged dangerously close to critical areas such as his brain stem and spine. By trying to forcibly extract it, he might inadvertently cause some kind of debilitating and irreversible damage.
John nodded, still staring at his reflection.
What he needed was the help of medical professionals.
On the other hand, what if his wildest imaginings were true and the object in his neck was some weird piece of alien technology? Once this was determined to be the case, he might be taken into custody by the military and shipped off to fucking Area 51 or some other secret place from which he might never return. Where once he might have dismissed such a notion as paranoid and absurd, it now seemed all too plausible.
John Stark really didn’t want to spend the rest of his life locked away in a secret underground laboratory. He also didn’t much relish the prospect of doing nothing and leaving himself at the mercy of whoever had implanted the object, regardless of whether those responsible were actual creatures from somewhere beyond earth or some sinister and equally mysterious earthbound organization.
Several more minutes of thinking it over resulted in no revelatory insights, but he did come to a conclusion about what he needed to do next. He shuffled back to his bedroom, grabbed his phone from the nightstand, and called Mike Carter.
Mike was his oldest and most trusted friend. They’d known each other since elementary school. They’d been through thick and thin together. John had been best man at both of Mike’s weddings. Mike had bailed him out of jail a couple times back when he was still drinking and getting into trouble. His old friend might not have a solution for him, but he might be able to steer him in the right direction as far as what course of action to take.
That initial conversation was brief. John didn’t want to tell the full story over the phone because it would make him sound crazy. Mike would think he’d suddenly started drinking again, which would be a logical enough deduction to make minus the visual evidence. Instead, John kept it simple, effectively imparting a sense of urgency and direness in just a few terse sentences.
Mike said he’d be right over.
He got to John’s house inside of fifteen minutes.
At first he expressed the expected skepticism when John told him what had happened and his suspicions about it. The skepticism faded, however, when John showed his friend the object embedded in his neck and invited him to press down on the flesh adjacent to it in order to glimpse the silv
er bolt.
They were in John’s living room at that point. The morning light spilling in from the sliding glass doors overlooking the patio and large, leaf-scattered back yard was muted, the day overcast and drizzly. Only a single lamp was on in the living room. The semi-gloom imbued the moment with a disquieting sense of the funereal.
Mike drew a hand across his mouth and scratched at his jaw. “Maybe you’re not paranoid, after all.”
John let out a shuddery breath and nodded in an emphatic way. “Damn right, I’m not. That thing is there. It’s weird, but it’s real. And I want it the fuck out of me. What the hell do I do?”
Mike took his hand away from his mouth. “There’s only thing you can do.”
John’s brow furrowed in confusion. “And what would that be?”
Mike smiled.
For the first time, John experienced a mild tingle of trepidation where Mike was concerned. There was something in that tight little smile that was not at all friendly. But surely that was just more paranoia, right?
Mike reached inside his jacket and took out an automatic pistol. “What you need to do, John, is put this gun in your mouth and wedge the sight up against your soft palette. Once it is firmly in place, squeeze the trigger.”
John laughed, albeit nervously.
This had to be a joke.
Only it didn’t seem like a joke. And that gun was very real. “This isn’t funny.”
Mike nodded. “Unfortunately for you, John, I’m not attempting to elicit a humorous reaction.”
John flinched but did not retreat as Mike approached him and pressed the gun into his right hand, forcing him to curl his fingers around the grip of the pistol. Once the gun was securely within John’s grip, Mike moved back several steps, glanced briefly at the smart watch strapped around his hairy wrist, and shifted his gaze back to John.
His tone was stern and devoid of even the slightest trace of mirth as he said, “Put the gun in your mouth, John.”
John glanced at the gun. He tried willing his fingers to uncurl and allow the ugly weapon to fall to the floor. Instead the gun came to his mouth. Then it went inside his mouth and in another moment the sight was wedged painfully against his soft palette. He trembled and whimpered and longed to yank the gun away, but he just stood there, powerless, no longer in control of his own actions.