Parasite (3 page)

Glass.

That was the first thing that popped into Walter’s mind:
glass
.

Even before he opened his eyes to see it, he could feel it everywhere: in his long gray beard, in his neatly parted and slicked black hair. He could feel it biting into the backs of his arms and the base of his neck. It was embedded in his cheeks; it had sliced his upper lip.

Walter gasped, his narrow chest drawing in a huge breath for what seemed like the first time in ages. And then he started to cough, a thick, throaty cough that was accompanied by the familiar coppery taste of blood in his mouth. Eyes still closed, he spat, not caring where the thick wad landed.

The ringing in his ears droned onward, but now he recognized another sound, one that was just as persistent.

The ocean? Is that water I hear?

But that couldn’t be; he had been driving, hadn’t he? He had been driving down the cracker-covered street when…

Everything came flooding back to him and his eyes snapped open, his pupils so wide that his dark irises were all but invisible.

It wasn’t the roaring of seawater that he was hearing, but the sound of fire, the eager sound of flames consuming everything in its path.

Walter Wandry was lying on his back in the center of the road, his head angled to the left. His eyes slowly began to focus on what remained of the gas station that cornered Highway 2 and Main Street, the same gas station that he had passed less than a day ago when he had come racing into town, looking for his lost son.

For Tyler.

He cracked his jaw and closed his eyes for a moment before quickly opening them again.

The cop car. Where is the cop car?

Keeping his head still, his eyes scanned the fiery blaze, looking for the cop car or the dark figures.

He didn’t see anyone. There was nothing, only smoke, fire, and crispy shells.

I hope they burned. I hope those fuckers burned.

Images of the final few seconds before the explosion started coming back to him, and his heart began to race.

My drugs.

“No,” Walter grumbled, the sound rolling around in his mouth, making friends with blood and saliva. He spat again, this time making sure that the offending substance landed on the tarmac instead of on himself.

“No.”

With a groan, he rolled onto his stomach, and then pushed himself onto his knees, trying his best to brush as much of the glass off of him as he could. It was an impossible task, as he quickly realized that the Chevy’s windows must have blown inward, and all of the tiny cubes of shatterproof glass had collected on his person as if he were some sort of magnet for superheated sand.

So Walter gave up and went back to searching the road for the cop car or the Chevy…
his
Chevy, the one with his drugs on the passenger seat.

His eyes widened when he saw three crackers begin to make their way toward him, their fluid movements somehow erotic, enticing. Six legs, all of them moving and bending in such coordination over the road littered with burning debris. It appeared as if they were floating.

“Out of the way!” he roared, shooing them with his left hand as he crawled in their direction.

The crackers paid him no mind and continued past, all still heading in the same direction like a school of chitinous fish.

Another explosion ripped through the air, and Walter turned his gaze toward the east. A giant fireball licked the skyline, bathing the tops of the trees in a dirty orange glow.

What the fuck is going on?

But the thought was fleeting—only one thing mattered to Walter now.

He squinted as he scanned the asphalt, and his eyes eventually fell on something familiar. A smile graced his thin face.

His black pouch was lying on the road between the white hash marks roughly ten feet from him.

Walter crawled forward again, ignoring the fact that it seemed every muscle in his body was crying out for him to stop, to just lie there and wait for help. It occurred to him that he couldn’t see his car anywhere, that he must have been thrown from the vehicle with the explosion, but his goals and motivations, as they had so many times in his life, became singular. And creeping forward literally one inch at a time, the fact that his left leg was nearly numb and his jeans were sticking to his skin from his thigh down to his ankle barely registered.

He had nearly made it to his black case when he saw the first cracker die. It wasn’t something he would have noticed—truthfully, when he got like this, even the most basic of needs, be it eating, sleeping, or shitting, went ignored—but this happened but a few inches from his face and would have been impossible not to see.

At first, the cracker’s movements seemed to slow, the rhythmic bursts of air exiting the top of the shell becoming hastened, irregular. Then with the next few steps, the many joints of the frontmost leg refused to lock and then became limp, and the other five legs resorted to dragging it along like a numb, arthritic finger. When another leg stopped working, and then another, its forward progress was significantly inhibited. It was only when the fourth leg was paralyzed that it fell to the asphalt. One of its legs, one of two that still seemed to be clicking and clacking, tried to drive itself into the road and force the shell up again, but it failed. After a few more desperate, grasping attempts, it too fell limp. The final leg soon followed suit.

Dead; the air stopped pulsing through its white shell.

It was finally dead.

And Walter couldn’t have cared less. He crawled another foot forward, and watched—only because it was still in front of him—as the thing began to turn translucent. A moment later, the legs curled upward, articulating those many joints not in the smooth, fluid movements as it had made its way over the uneven terrain, but like jerky drying in the sun. And there they remained, all six of the roughly eight-inch protuberances pointed into the air until the cracker resembled something of the exoskeleton of an overturned crab.

Turning his head to the side, Walter spat again. And then he reached out with his left hand, trying to grasp the case without having to pull his body forward another inch. Like the dead cracker before him, his left leg had become nearly completely useless, and dragging it was becoming more and more difficult. He wheezed as he stretched out, grunting as the muscles in his chest and shoulder screamed at him.

Nothing; his fingernails only came back with grit buried beneath.

Walter, eyes closed tightly, head to one side, crawled forward another foot and then a second before collapsing onto the road again. This time when he reached out blindly, his hand closed on the familiar shape and texture of his black faux-leather case.

A sigh escaped his lips, vibrating the blood and saliva that clung to his bottom lip.

His relief was short-lived, however. A second later, he felt something graze the back of his hand. It only brushed against him at first, but then, as if gaining courage, he felt six distinct pressure points in his skin. Then he felt those points lazily make their way onto his wrist, then up his forearm in an awkward, drunken gait. Walter was so tired and sore that he couldn’t even be bothered to turn his head to look at what was crawling on him.

But one thing was certain: it was much different from the itching that happened under his skin when he went more than a day without a hit.

Hit; drugs. I have my drugs.

As if to affirm this thought, he squeezed the leather case with his hand, and a smile again crossed his thin, pale lips.

He closed his eyes when the crawling reached his shoulder. For a moment, he thought he had fallen asleep; that the only reason the thing had stopped moving was because he had passed out again. But then the cracker nestled the soft underside of its shell against his skin. It felt oddly comforting—
drugs; I have my drugs
—but this sensation only lasted a short moment.

The cracker’s conveyor-like teeth suddenly clamped down on Walter’s shoulder and then began cutting their way into his flesh, slowly, carefully,
meticulously
dissecting his skin, before the entire cracker forced itself
beneath
.

High or not, in possession of his drugs or not, Walter couldn’t help the scream that bubbled from deep within him.

Despite the power of the cry that rocked his frail body, when the sound finally escaped his thin and chapped lips, it was more a whimper than a wail.

Then Walter’s mind started spinning, and he tumbled into a pit of unconsciousness.

The sun shone brightly
down on Askergan County that morning, illuminating the dark embers from the multiple fires that floated in the air like disinterested pixies.

Thousands of the crackers had either died or had been destroyed in those early morning hours, their corpses with their upturned legs drying in the sun like forgotten fruit. There would be much cleaning and restitution after this day was done, but Walter Wandry had no interest in participating in this effort.

In fact, he had no interest in Askergan at all, save for once again seeing it recede in his rearview.

It was difficult for him to open his eyes, especially given the fact that in addition to a cruel pounding behind them, the lids were gummed shut. At first he’d tried to reach up with his left arm to wipe the substance away, but that arm felt heavy and ungainly and he’d quickly abandoned the effort. His right arm felt strange too, but this was a familiar strangeness, one that he knew was the result of recently having injected into the crook of his elbow.

As his slender fingers finally managed to wipe away thin trails of mucus from his eyes and the lids slowly separated, he quickly closed them again.

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.