Parasite, page 5
“You said the blood on your suit wasn’t yours. Whose is it?”
“The monster’s.” The older woman’s eyes seemed very strange in the flare’s dancing red light, and her mouth twisted into a wide smile. “It’s all the monster’s now.”
That was when pieces of the puzzle fell into place.
Something about the two corpses in the bedroom had bothered her, but it had taken the sight of blood on Robin’s suit to make her realise what was wrong. The corpse on the floor had gummy, black blood in a pool around its head. It had stuck to Robin’s gun when she’d poked it. Charles had assumed that being exposed to the air for a week had turned it that way, but the blood from the body in the bathroom had been dark brown and dry—the way blood was supposed to look. Natural. Unlike the first body.
The words on the bathroom wall flashed back to her: They take our skin.
Charles stared at Robin, her mouth open but incapable of making a noise. Robin’s face was splitting in half. A crack had started over her nose and spread up to her hairline and down to her neck. The crazed smile slid farther and farther around her cheeks as the centre of her face opened like a book.
Inside was something unnatural. Something inky black, writhing and squirming to break free. Something alive.
Charles tried to scream, but her throat was frozen. She stumbled backwards, tripped over a broken desk, and landed on a stack of papers with a loud thud. Robin’s body was continuing to split, the two halves curling around behind her to free the dozens of thick black tendrils inside. They stretched out, poking at the air, tasting and testing, moving closer to Charles.
They take our skin.
Robin had encountered the monster. She hadn’t been lying about that. She’d just neglected to mention where it was hiding—beneath her skin.
Charles’s hand tightened around the gun. She raised it, aimed at the writhing black mess, and opened fire. The thick platinum rounds blasted holes through the place where Robin’s head had been. The tendrils jerked and thrashed, and little bits of them flew about the room as the bullets separated them from their body. One of the largest arms shot towards Charles and snatched at her ankle. She kicked at it, scrambled backwards, and closed her eyes as she emptied her clip into the beast looming over her.
Silence rushed in to fill the room as Charles’s gun ran empty. Gasping, trying not to hyperventilate, she opened her eyes to see Robin’s crumpled remains lying on the ground.
It was half human, half monster. What remained of Robin’s body was limp, strangely deflated, inexplicably fused to the stilled black creature that had hidden inside her. The black tendrils lay in a tangle, many of them torn in half by the gunfire. A pool of dark blood inched out from the body, dyeing the scattered papers black.
Ellan was probably the first to be taken, Charles thought, dragging herself away from her superior’s body, unable to avert her eyes. I bet she didn’t stay at the control panel like she said. They’d have needed their scientist to help identify the new lifeform. And it got her and took over her body, but her companions wouldn’t have known that, so they let her back into the station, and by the time they realised something was wrong, it was too late.
A loud thump echoed through the building, and Charles gasped. “Jay!”
Robin had divided the teams carefully, she realised. She’d kept Charles for herself and put Jay with Ellan. Jay had trusted the girl. Charles cursed and kicked herself to her feet, slipped on the scattered papers, caught herself on a bench, and ran through the door to the kitchen.
Food, stacked tidily, none of it eaten, no empty packets in the bin, Charles noticed as she tore through the room. Of course. She wasn’t alive, so she didn’t need to eat.
She skidded to a halt at the entrance to the recreation room, fumbling to fit a fresh clip of bullets into her gun. The nearly spent flare continued to splutter on the floor where she’d thrown it, tossing a red glow across the overturned furniture. Jay lay in the middle of the room, spreadeagle, his legs twitching feebly.
“Jay?” Charles hissed, approaching him. She didn’t see Ellan. “Jay, can you hear me?”
His eyes were blank, staring at the roof, and his mouth lolled open. Charles pressed a hand to his chest. He felt cold. She gave him a gentle shake then pulled her hand back with a gasp as she felt his skin roil under her fingers. A tiny black tendril stretched over Jay’s bottom lip, tasting the air for a second before retreating.
“No!” Charles gasped. She clamped a hand over her mouth, smothering the wail building inside her.
The body in the sleeping quarters. The body that leaked inky black blood. It must have been changing. The final team member had seen it changing, and he shot it then hid in the bathroom and killed himself because the alternative was too terrible to stand.
Charles pressed her palms against her eyelids as bile rose into her mouth. What she needed to do was clear, but the very idea made her want to be sick. She’d become fond of Jay, despite his merciless flirting and teasing.
It can’t be real. He can’t be infested. He can’t be changing. He’s Jay, for goodness sake; he’s the ass who’s impervious to harm.
Still, she could see the black things crawling around his mouth, poking at his gums, and rubbing over his large teeth. Teeth like a horse’s and a mouth like a gate to hell.
How long had it taken Robin to change? It must have been fast; they’d found her within a couple of minutes of hearing the gunshots. And judging by the way Jay’s fingers twitched, he wasn’t going to stay still for long. There was no room for delay.
“I’m so sorry, Jay. You deserved better than this.” Jay’s head jerked at her voice, and his eyes rolled around in their sockets to fix on her. Something strange and cruel lurked there, and Charles knew she was no longer talking to her Jay. She raised the gun, aimed it at her partner’s head, squeezed her eyes closed, and pulled the trigger.
The crack echoed through the rec room. Charles held still for a moment, tasting the gun’s bitter propellant on her tongue, before opening her eyes. Jay was still. Her bullet had entered at his temple, and the hole was so small that she could almost pretend it wasn’t there, except blood, inky black, oozed out from under his head.
Charles pulled herself up. Her legs felt unstable, but she couldn’t stand being in the room with her dead partner for a moment more. She turned towards the hallway and started running, leaping over the toppled furniture and trying to make out a clear path in the dim light. She didn’t know where Ellan was, and she didn’t want to find out. She was the only member of her team left—and the only one who knew what had happened on Station 332.
Get to the ship. Get off the planet. Warn Central.
Chapter Ten
Charles ran as quietly as she could manage, not bothering to try any of the hallway lights. Her heartbeat throbbed in her head as she struggled to control her panic. The station felt different, in a strange, cold way, now that she was the last human within its metal walls. The air had become thicker and staler.
The airlock was empty, at least. Charles shoved open the door, slid into the room, and scrambled to pull on her suit. She couldn’t remember which cables Jay had used to close the doors and depressurise the chamber, but that didn’t matter: all she needed to do was suit up, break the external door open, get through the sea of diamonds outside to the ship, and get off the damned planet.
She’d just wriggled her first foot into its boot when she heard the smooth whoosh of closing doors behind her. Charles jumped backwards and swivelled in the same motion, knocking over one of the shelves.
Ellan stood against the opposite wall, having just reconnected the plug to lock the interior doors. She smiled at Charles. It wasn’t a nice expression. “Hello, pretty.”
Charles didn’t hesitate to raise the gun and open fire. Five rounds hit Ellan squarely in the chest and face, but she didn’t even flinch. Instead, her grin widened as the front of her suit split open. Black tendrils poured out, moving at an incredible speed. They picked up one of the tall metal shelves and hurled it at Charles. She ducked, but the shelf’s corner grazed her shoulder, sending her tumbling to the ground with a gasp of pain.
Another black tendril darted towards her. Charles was too slow; a tendril snatched the gun out of her hand and flung it against the opposite wall with enough force to shatter it and leave a chip in the concrete.
“You shot my sisters,” Ellan hissed.
Charles felt her breath freeze in her chest as she watched the bullet holes in the other woman knit together. Skin fused to skin, leaving Ellan’s face smooth and blemish-free. “They were the firstborn of my colony, and you shot them.”
Charles struggled to keep her face impassive as she crawled backwards, placing as much distance as she could between herself and the inhuman woman. She’d been in a lot of stressful situations, including a couple of close calls during her short military service. Once, her teammate had fumbled and dropped a ticking grenade at her feet, and during another incident, her crew had forgotten about her and nearly left her on a remote planet with no oxygen. But for the first time, she was truly terrified. Not of what the monster was, but of what it could do to her.
It wants to steal my skin. Turn my body into its home, absorb my memories, mimic my mannerisms, use my face as a mask. Would it hurt? Would I feel it as its black tendrils wriggle through my flesh, melt into my organs, infiltrate my brain? How long would I be aware?
I’d rather die than find out.
Charles twisted to look over her shoulder, hoping to see something to defend herself with, but there were no guns within reach, just empty boxes and emergency oxygen units that had been scattered across the ground when the shelf hit her.
“I dealt with the others quickly,” Ellan continued, gliding towards Charles. The black tendrils sprouted out of every gap in her suit, writhing around the woman’s legs and carrying her across the room. “But now it’s just you and me, my pretty. And we’re going to have a little fun before I welcome you as my sister.”
Charles lunged for the external door, grabbing an empty box in her left hand and an oxygen unit in the right. The emergency oxygen units were palm-sized and designed to fit inside a mouth. They were meant for evacuations, where the user needed only a couple minutes of oxygen to get to a safe location. Charles pushed the unit into her mouth and bit down on the plastic wings to break the seal, and clean air filled her throat as she reached for the door.
Ellan was fast. The beast’s tendrils shot towards her, and Charles threw the empty box at them, praying that the surprise would buy her the precious seconds she needed to get outside.
If anything, it only enraged Ellan further. She growled—a deep, inhuman rumble—as she knocked the box aside and sent a cluster of tendrils at Charles.
She ducked as the black mass smashed into the door in front of her. The whine of twisting metal blended with Ellan’s roar as the thick metal door burst out of its bracket and ejected onto the sand-like surface of the moon.
Okay, I’ll take it. Charles bent double and barrelled through the opening. The tendrils grazed her back as she slipped under them, then she was free, dashing through the drifts of diamonds. The ship waited for her just two dozen paces away, its black highlights contrasting beautifully against the sparkling ground.
A cold, black tendril wrapped around her ankle. Charles tried to hop out of it, but it tightened and tugged, sending her collapsing into the hard ground. The creature wrenched her backwards and whipped through the air. Her back hit the station’s door with a thud that winded her so thoroughly that she thought she might never breathe again.
Ellan’s face appeared in front of her. The woman’s sweet, innocent visage had been twisted with malice and fury. The whites of her eyes had turned black, and her skin seemed to be cracking, showing tiny hints of the darkness that lived inside.
“Not so fast, my pretty.” Her voice was barely human anymore. It was mixed with a grating, guttural growl that made her almost unintelligible.
Charles blinked her watering eyes, struggling to draw breath through the emergency oxygen unit in her mouth. She thought she must have cracked it when she’d been grabbed; the air wasn’t flowing as freely as it should have. She could see something brightly coloured out of the corner of her eye and twisted to look at it.
Dozens of cables snaked through the external door’s access box, which Jay had never had the chance to close.
Feel free to heckle me into electrocuting myself…
It was a wild hope. She had no idea if Jay had been exaggerating about the electrocution, but it was her only chance. Charles stretched her arm out and grabbed a fistful of the cables, tugged them free of their sockets, and shoved their ends into Ellan’s face.
Thank goodness for non-conductive suits, Charles found herself thinking, her mind numbed with shock as Ellan bucked, writhed, and began splitting apart.
The human skin broke into odd sections, fraying at the edges, peeling away as the monster inside tried to free itself. The wail was deafening, and the smell that crept around the edges of the breathing unit made Charles gag. The black tendrils pinning her bubbled, their moist surface blistering and popping, and then the creature dropped Charles.
She hit the ground hard and skittered backwards, breathing as deeply as her aching ribs and damaged oxygen unit would let her. Ellan lay still on the sparkling diamonds, deformed so much that almost nothing human remained. Little puffs of dark steam rose from where the black flesh had burst.
She looked ridiculous. Ridiculous and repulsive and terrifying. An involuntary moan rose in Charles’s throat, but she smothered it. If she was reading the light hiss correctly, her oxygen unit was leaking air, and she didn’t have any breath to spare. There would be time enough to have a hysterical fit once she was inside a controlled environment.
Charles jogged towards the waiting spaceship, her boots sticking in the thick ground. Her oxygen unit ran out of air halfway there, so Charles held her breath. She was dizzy by the time she reached the door and pressed the button to open the airlock.
As she stood inside the tiny room, punching buttons to pressurise and filter the toxic air out, it was impossible not to remember how she’d stood there with her team members barely an hour before. Central had been desperately short on choices when it had cobbled them together, but Charles thought it had done a remarkable job, regardless. She wished she could have served with her partners for longer. She wished they’d met a kinder end.
A quiet beep announced that the airlock had pressurized. Charles spat out the empty oxygen unit and began gulping down the clean air before pressing another button to open the door leading to the main part of the ship.
The shuttle looked different now that it was empty, as though it were a room she remembered from a previous life, where she no longer belonged.
Robin had been their pilot, but Charles had also gone through the mandatory training for shuttle piloting. I might not be as graceful in the takeoff, she thought as she buckled herself into the pilot’s seat and powered the ship on, but I can do well enough to get off the hellish planet and back to Central.
The ship rose off the moon in a flurry of the tiny, sparkling diamonds. Charles leaned towards the ship’s window to watch the station disappear from view. She could still see Ellan’s fried body just outside the station’s door. Little wisps of black smoke rose from it like phantom tendrils stretching towards the sky.
Charles still had no idea what sort of creature had taken over her friends. It was clearly aggressive, intelligent, and extremely adept at mimicking its host. She hated to think about it, but it seemed increasingly likely that the problem wasn’t isolated to Station 332. All of Central’s more experienced teams had been dispatched on their own emergency response missions by the time she’d been drafted to visit Station 332. What were the odds they’d encountered their own aliens?
“I hope they fared better than we did,” Charles muttered as she turned the ship towards the wormholes that would take her back to Central.
“Yes,” Robin murmured in her ear, and Charles grabbed for the gun strapped to her suit even as she realised bullets would do nothing but slow the monsters down. “Let’s hope.”
Station 333
Chapter Eleven
“Your shift finished an hour ago.”
Kala jumped as the cool voice spoke in her ear. She turned to see Vivian standing just behind her. The tall woman’s heavy-lidded eyes were fixed on the window in front of them.
“Uh, yeah, I figured I’d hang around for a while—”
“It’s because his ship is late, isn’t it?” Vivian’s lip curled up as she spoke. Her long black hair was plaited so tightly that Kala couldn’t see a single strand out of place, and her silver-and-steel-blue suit was immaculately ironed. Kala had heard that Vivian started her career in the military sector of Mendes Twelve, the communications hub near the centre of the prestigious Mendes cluster of stations, where the standards were higher and the dress code was stricter. Vivian was so cool and precise in everything she said and did that it was sometimes hard to remember there was a live, feeling person inside.
“That’s not your business.” Kala crossed her arms and turned back the window overlooking the large metal hangar. “But yes, his ship should have been back this morning.”
“He outranks you,” Vivian observed.
Kala felt a flush of anger build inside of her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
Vivian finally moved her eyes, flicking them away from the window to glance at Kala’s face. She let the silence stretch until Kala was squirming. “I was only saying he doesn’t need a subordinate fretting about him. You’re not being paid to wait at the door like a love-sick puppy.”
