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Parasite

The Matriarch – Part 4

October 20, 2017 by Elizabeth Drake

The fourth installment of a short story my husband wrote for Halloween. You can catch up with Part 1 here , Part 2 here and Part 3 Here.

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The Matriarch – Part 4

THURSDAY AFTERNOON

Ursula sped down the highway in her beat-up hatchback with a white-knuckle grip on the steering wheel. “God, those things are hideous!  Where did they come from?  How did they….”

“Not important right now,” Greg answered curtly.  “Their Queen is dead.  Without her, their numbers can only dwindle.  We need to keep them from getting their hands on this one.  I know a safe place we can go.  Once we get there, I can answer all your questions.  Or you can just leave, and you’ll never see either of us again.”

“Is that thing still alive?  Why don’t we just kill it, too?  Who cares if I never see you again?  I’m going to be wondering about everyone I meet for the rest of my life!  And about people I’ve already known for years!”

Greg sighed.  “Because, for lack of a better term, you could say we’re vegetarians.”

“Wait….what do you mean ‘we’!?”

Greg shook his head. “Homo Sapiens are omnivores by nature, capable of surviving on a variety of diets.  Like most predator species, they possess forward binocular vision as opposed to having their eyes on the sides of their heads like horses, cattle, or other prey species.  Their digestive tract benefits from the ingestion of fruits and vegetables, but also excels at digesting the proteins and fats from other animals.

“Many humans decide to forego their ability to consume animal matter, despite having the biological capability to do so, out of the belief that it is not ethical to consume other animals.

“Now, consider Felis Domesticus, the common house cat.  They do not possess such an adaptable digestive tract.  They are obligate carnivores.  They evolved to hunt, catch living prey, and eat it.  If there is not sufficient animal protein in their diet, they will die.  Perhaps it is a mercy that no feline species evolved self-awareness and sapience the way humans did.  If such a being ever felt guilt over their consumption of other animals, they would have to live with such guilt.  Or die from it.

“Miss Thelstein, my people are not obligate carnivores.  We are obligate parasites.  And the universe is cruel enough that we evolved to be intelligent enough to empathize with the suffering and pain we cause to our host organisms.  But we cannot survive without those hosts.

“Those of us that feel this empathy are a minority.  A hunted and persecuted political faction among our species.  The others happily invade and infest the human race with no reluctance other than being cautious enough not to get caught.

“But now that faction has lost their brood-queen.  Their time is over.  When they realize this, they will seek revenge.  I must keep my Queen safe until their death throes are spent.

“No.  Not dead.  Dormant.  In stasis.  I won’t wake her until a suitable host is found.  And she would not find you suitable.  For ethical reasons.

“The body I inhabit had already been taken by one of those who did not feel empathy towards our hosts.  When I destroyed him, the central nervous system of the host was too ravaged to survive without continued connection to one of our kind.  It was too late for me to help him, so I took the body.  Not ideal, but I can inhabit this body without violating our code.

“Violent criminals.  Those of your species who do deliberate harm to others.  If we are obligated to be parasites, we can at least take the ones you would be better off without.  No, it’s still not consent.  But they don’t get that from their victims either.  It’s as ethical as we are capable of being in order to survive.  It will have to be enough.”

Filed Under: Halloween, Short Stories, Uncategorized Tagged With: Halloween, Matriarch, Parasite, short story

The Matriarch – Part 3

October 18, 2017 by Elizabeth Drake

The third installment of a short story my husband wrote for Halloween. You can catch up with Part 1 here and Part 2 here. biohazard-2696875_640

The Matriarch – Part 3

WEDNESDAY NIGHT

“Easy, Number Nine.  Mr. Allen gets the point.”

Greg coughed as his airway opened, and he massaged the bruises Nine had left on his neck.

“It would inconvenient for us to find someone else for this task,” said shark-boy.  “Your background has allowed you an unusual degree of independence, but any further flippancy will not be tolerated.  We can find someone else, if necessary.”  The shark-grin became a frown.  “You will do this task for us.  And you will not survive failure.”

Well, thought Greg, that’s that, then.

He took a deep breath, bit his tooth until he felt a break in the surface, and let out a long exhale as though he were sighing.  He’d just killed them all, even if it would be hours until they realized it.

“I submit, Great One.  How exactly can I serve you?”

Shark-boy, unaware of his now-inescapable death, went back to grinning.

“We believe we’d found the upstart rival queen that disappeared thirty years ago.  She’s been in stasis all this time.  Revive her.  Earn her trust by helping her find a new host, and she’ll think you’re one of hers. The upstarts will flock to her, and you will destroy them one by one.”

 

 THURSDAY

Ursula screamed as Dr. Allen crouched over the prone body of the Director and tore off the Director’s shirt.  Then her eyes widened and her scream died as Dr. Allen clutched an elongated worm-like creature and peeled it off the Director’s spine.

Her breath came in shallow bursts as Ursula stared in disbelief at the hideous creature in Dr. Allen’s hands. She couldn’t help but notice the horrifying similarity to the unknown specimen in the cylinder.

Dr. Allen dropped the worm on the floor, then crunched the eyeless head under the heel of his shoe with a nauseating squelch.  Yellow ichor covered his shoe and pant leg and dripped from his fingers where he’d gripped it.

He looked at Ursula. “Your Director was under that thing’s control for weeks.  This whole Special Exhibit idea was part of its plan.  You’re not one of them, but I don’t know how many of your coworkers are.  You are in danger. We need to get out, and if we run across anyone else, let me do the talking.”

Ursula blinked, flared her nostrils, and held up a finger.  She turned and grabbed a wastebasket just in time to not get any vomit on her clothes or shoes.

“Okay,” she said, her brain spinning as she tried to come to grips with truth of the ‘Invasion of the Body Snatchers’.

Dr. Allen strode over to the other specimen, the one still in the glass cylinder floating in a clear liquid, and picked it up.  “All right.  Follow me.”

 

WEDNESDAY, 3:30 AM

Greg took his temperature.  Ninety-eight-point-seven degrees Fahrenheit.  The fever had broken.  He felt tired and dehydrated, but his bio-enhancements had helped him to survive the virus.  That was a relief.  He’d had this body for a long time, and it wouldn’t be easy to replace if it died.  Not with all the enhancements he’d made to it since its acquisition.

It had originally been host to one of the Great Queen’s prime offspring.  Shortly after helping his own Queen-Matriarch enter bio-stasis and go into hiding, he’d begun working out how to steal the body and masquerade as an agent of the Great Queen.

Once he’d gotten the body, he’d waited patiently for a chance to act.  Now it was time.

Shark-boy, Number Nine, and the others would be dead by now.  After the limo driver had collapsed, Greg (he’d gotten used to thinking of himself as the name of this host body) had broken the window to the front area and taken the wheel.  He’d driven the limo into a ditch and covered it with brush and branches to hide it as well as he could while his body’s boosted immunity fought the virus.

By the time the Great One and her Primes managed to disengage from their dying hosts, it would be too late.  There were no other suitable hosts for miles, and they could only survive a few minutes without a host.

It would be hours before the Great Queen’s other agents began to suspect something was wrong.  Until then he would continue to pretend to be one of hers and recover his own Queen-Matriarch.

Filed Under: Halloween, Short Stories, Uncategorized Tagged With: Halloween, Matriarch, Parasite, short story

The Matriarch – Part 2

October 16, 2017 by Elizabeth Drake

Part 2 of my husband’s short story. You can catch up with Part 1 here.

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The Matriarch – Part 2

 THURSDAY MORNING

Behind her pursed lips, Ursula’s teeth clenched together as she turned the glass cylinder over in her hands.  The elongated grey, many-segmented worm-like creature that floated in the yellowish liquid was not something she recognized, but then she’d only been researching parasites since the unwelcome task of dredging them up from archival storage had fallen on her lap.

The parasite made her skin crawl.  It would be perfect for the special exhibit.  But the glass cylinder was unlabelled.  She’d have to do some digging to find out what it was a specimen of and then get some brain-bleach to make her nightmares go away.  Still, it was exactly the kind of repulsive-but-facinating thing that the Museum Director wanted for the exhibit.

She began shuffling through the faded, crumpled newspapers in the box the glass cylinder had been packed in.  Maybe the specimen label had come loose.

“Miss Thelstein?”  Ursula looked up from the box and cursed under her breath at the sound of the Director’s voice.  “Are you in here?”

“Over here,” she said.

“Right this way.” The Director’s only sounded like that when he was talking to someone important. Like a donor.

Ursula heard two sets of footsteps making their way down along the disorganized aisles of shelves, crates, boxes, and display cases that sat in the sub-basement archives.

As they came around the corner, Ursula nodded in greeting to the salt-and-pepper haired Director, and a russet-haired fellow with the ugliest pair of horn-rimmed glasses ever made and an expression that warned his sense of humor had been surgically removed.  Before she could say anything, the Director’s eyes lit up and a smile curved the left side of his mouth.

“Well, now,” he cooed.  “That’s certainly an interesting specimen!  Looks like something out of a horror movie.  Are there any more like that?”

Ursula blinked at the strange conversation.  “Not that I’ve found yet.  Besides this one, just some tapeworms and African earwigs.  Creepy, yes, but not enough to make a full special exhibit out of.”  Ursula figured besides the real specimens, he’d also want full-color displays illustrating their life-cycles and how they infected their host organisms.  That would go a long way towards making the exhibit complete.  But she didn’t make the suggestion for fear of being put in charge of it.

The stranger spoke.  It sounded to Ursula as though he was having difficulty unclenching his teeth.  “Where did you….find that?”

The Director beamed at him, then back at Ursula, then at the stranger again.  “I’m terribly sorry.  I haven’t made introductions.  “Miss Thelstein, this is….Doctor…Greg Allen.  He’s a…”  The Director hesitated.

“A Veterinary Parasitologist,” said Dr. Allen.  His tone suggested that the words left a nauseating taste in his mouth.

“Yes!” The Director seemed oddly delighted.  “And this is Miss Ursula Thelstein, one of the archivists from our research department and Ad Hoc Display Coordinator for the upcoming Special Exhibit!”

Ursula gave a pained-but-polite smile.  “Ad Hoc” was Latin for “this title comes with neither a promotion nor a raise.”

“And to what do I owe the pleasure of Dr. Allen’s visit?” she asked.

 

THURSDAY NIGHT, PREVIOUS

The boy’s shark-grin instantly turned to a frown.  “There are troublesome elements I need dealt with.”

Greg made a slight tilt of his head toward Baldy.  “Isn’t that what he’s for?”

The boy’s grin returned.  “There are times to use a wrecking ball and times to use a set of lockpicks.  I want them all rounded up before they realize we’re onto them.  That calls for quiet footsteps and quick hands.”

“Quiet footsteps and quick hands?”  Greg pursed his lips.  “It sounds like you want someone in better shape than me.  Some shadowy ninja-type guy.”  He managed to keep a straight face.

“I have plenty of those.” The boy flicked his wrist.

Greg pondered the timing of the limo’s arrival minutes after his tire blew out.  If he was ever able to return to his car, he was positive any trace of a sniper’s bullet would’ve already been long removed.

“Sounds like you’re all set.  Thanks for the lift, and you can drop me off right…”  Greg’s words cut off as a muscular hand suddenly squeezing his larynx.

“You,” scowled the granite-slab voice, “will show respect.”

 

THURSDAY MORNING

Dr. Allen pointed to the odd specimen-without-a-label that the Museum Director was so excited about.  “I’m here for that, actually.  Where did you get that?  Do you know what it is?”

Ursula shrugged.  “A few decades ago, the State University apparently donated a box from their Bio department to the museum.  Looks like it got shelved in the archives and forgotten about before anyone got around to cataloguing it.”

Ursula thought that odd.  She’d had heard that museums in London had an enormous backlog in their archives yet to catalogue and were still finding treasures from ancient Egypt that British archaeologists had brought home with them in the nineteenth century.  But that didn’t make sense here.  It wasn’t that big of a box, and it’s not like this museum had ever been overwhelmed by a sudden influx of inventory that it couldn’t be catalogued in less than a day.

Dr. Allen turned to the Director.  “Thank you.  I’ll take it from here.”

“Are you sure you don’t need my help?”  The Director’s eyes flicked from the specimen, to Dr. Allen, then to Ursula.

“No,” said Dr. Allen more curtly than Ursula expected.  “I’m sure you’re very busy.  I’ll help Miss…Thelstein?…with the…star…of the exhibit.”

Ursula was getting an odd feeling about all this.  All alone in the museum sub-basement with a stranger?

“Oh, I’m certainly not too busy.” The Director smiled.  “I think it would be best if I….”

The Director’s sentence was cut off as Dr. Allen swept behind him and gripped the base of the Director’s neck and struck him with the other hand in the kidneys.

Filed Under: Halloween, Short Stories, Uncategorized Tagged With: Matriarch, Parasite, short story, Writing

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