Chapter 7 : The Parasite's Plan
Carl awoke to the harsh glare of the work lights and the cold touch of metal against his skin. He was lying naked on one of the examination tables with leather restraints binding his wrists and ankles. The straps were tight enough to cut off circulation, and his attempts to move only confirmed their effectiveness.
"Ah, you're awake," Allen's voice came from somewhere behind him. "Excellent. Consciousness is essential for what comes next."
Carl turned his head as much as the restraints would allow and saw Allen standing beside the table.
"Well, we mustn't raise suspicion," Allen said conversationally, selecting a scalpel from Carl's own instrument tray. "The cut must be forensically correct. We have to be careful of the pectoral muscles or I'll lose the use of these arms."
"Why is my arm free?" Carl asked, noticing that his right arm, while restrained at the wrist, had more mobility than the rest of his body.
Allen smiled with Eddie Sykes' ruined face. "Final neural splicing requires a sensory-motor standard to perfect my brain's fit to yours. The rest of you is paralyzed, but once this is done I will unbind you, and we will be free together."
The casual tone in which the creature discussed his impending possession was perhaps more terrifying than outright threats would have been.
"You're going to transfer yourself from Allen into me?" Carl asked, though he already knew the answer.
"Correct."
"How?"
Allen approached the table like a surgeon preparing for a delicate operation. "Well, normally via the alimentary canal. You see, over eons, we have become perfectly streamlined to facilitate our entry into other beings. As a larva, I entered Eddie Sykes' mouth as he slept."
The casual mention of the real Eddie Sykes sent chills through Carl's veins.
"But I've grown since then," Allen continued with obvious pride. "Oh, how I have grown. We will have to make an incision."
Carl watched in terror as Allen began cutting into his own chest, the blade parting the dead flesh.
"You're going to use your puppet there to pluck you out," Carl said, his scientific mind still trying to process the impossible. "But once he's dislodged you, won't he go limp and drop you?"
"I am quite more familiar with your physiology than even you, Doctor," Allen replied without looking up from his self-surgery. "I know what I can and cannot cut."
The incision was widening, revealing internal structures that defied every principle of human anatomy Carl had ever learned.
"The most supreme adaptations are purchased at the cost of inessentials," Allen continued in a lecturing tone. "Our hosts already carry structures for sight, sound, smell, locomotion. It'd be quite redundant to carry those capacities ourselves."
"So we travel light," he added with satisfaction. "No quaint fins or stalks or feathers terminating in hooks or... suckers or little digits. We've no use for any of it, for we have transcended."
The arrogance was breathtaking. Here was a creature that existed only by stealing the bodies and senses of others, yet it spoke of transcendence.
"Have I amused you, Doctor?" Allen asked, noticing something in Carl's expression.
"You are truly self-deluded," Carl said, finding strength in his contempt.
"You're stalling for time."
"It's already too late."
"You really don't see it, do you?"
Allen paused in his surgical work. "See what?"
"You're jealous."
"Absurd."
"You have no senses of your own," Carl pressed. "You have to steal them from others."
The thing's face darkened with rage. "We have inhabited men for millennia. We have caused great nations to fall. We have shaped—"
"You've stolen everything you ever had," Carl interrupted. "You're nothing but a thief and murderer. A parasite. You're pathetic. You're nothing but cancer with a big mouth."
The words struck home, and Allen's expression twisted with fury before settling back into calm.
"Your friend, the sheriff, will come soon," Allen said with malicious pleasure. "Sunup, I believe. He will make a fine first meal for us. His flesh will nurture our body, and your anguish as we consume him will nurture my soul."
The threat to Nate sparked protective fury in Carl, but bound as he was, there was nothing he could do but listen.
"To say nothing at all of his," Allen continued. "Now where will we begin? You know, it's a curious problem. With careful flensing of the superior and inferior extremities, leaving the primary arteries intact, a man can live for hours."
Carl listened to the clinical description of torture, his revulsion growing with each detail.
"Oh, you can harvest meat all the way to the coxal region before he dies. He offers up his pain along with his protein. Finally, we can harvest the arteries at our leisure. But of course, the, uh, flesh of the extremities is tough."
"Now aside from the rump, the organs are most toothsome, but bring death much faster. You think about it. Let me know which you prefer."
"Either way, as I use your hands to haul forth his smoking entrails, and your mouth to guzzle them down, the repeated orgasms that we will have with your loins will be astounding."
The graphic description made Carl's stomach churn, but it also revealed something crucial about the creature's psychology.
"You called yourselves our livestock," Allen continued, "but you're so much more. I could've eked two weeks out of Brady and Jackson if that was all. But I reinvested half the energy their blood gave me to keep their brains alive."
"That way I could whisper directly into their eighth cranial nerves. Just to make sure they understood everything that I was doing to them."
The cruelty of fhis creaturewas overwhelming, but Carl forced himself to focus on what the creature was revealing about its methods.
"And Eddie Sykes?" Carl asked.
"Oh, yes. He is here with us right now. Mute and powerless as I disembowel him."
The revelation that Sykes was still conscious, still trapped and aware after nine months of horror, was perhaps the most disturbing detail yet.
"You're forgetting something," Carl said quietly.
Allen's surgical preparations paused. "I forget nothing."
"Your arrogance makes you stupid."
"What have I forgotten, sweet doctor?"
Carl met those inhuman eyes with steady defiance, even as he felt the creature's presence beginning to probe at the edges of his mind. "Never mind."
"I will know every thought in your head in just a few moments," Allen said, returning to his work, "all your memories, your senses. And your fear. Your suffering... all mine."
As the creature prepared to complete its extraction from Allen's body, Carl realized his time was almost up. Whatever desperate plan was forming in his mind, whatever slim chance he might have to stop this cosmic horror from claiming not just himself but potentially Nate and countless others, he would have to act when the moment came.