Free Parasite by Patrick Logan

now.”
    Sheriff Paul White chewed his lip again.
    Askergan needed something , of that he was certain.
    He just wasn’t confident that he was what they needed.

11.
     
    The apartment had been foul-smelling to begin with, but now it was unbearable.
    It was the crackers, the tiny transparent ones that had promptly curled up and died mere seconds after tearing out of the chests of the two square-headed hitmen.
    And it was the blood.
    Together, the blood and dead crackers stunk of rotting meat tinged with metallic undertones.
    The two crackers that had budded from him were gone; after burrowing into the two men and causing the rush of new crackers to be birthed, they had apparently remained inside their corpses, presumably dead as well.
    Walter felt sick to his stomach. He had seen two men torn apart from the inside, and a horde of tiny white crab-like creatures spew forth and then die before all of them had even cleared their victims’ body cavities.
    He had no idea why those crackers had died—indeed, why any and all of the crackers on Main Street and Highway 2 had died—yet the one embedded in his shoulder continued to live. And that said nothing of the fact that the one in his skin had managed to raise another cracker—no, two more crackers—to attack the hitmen, and then those had started to proliferate…
    His stomach lurched.
    Why did they attack the hitmen? Why did they cause the small crackers to bubble forth and die? Why couldn’t they survive for any significant time away from their host… from him?
    The drugs, maybe? Was that altering their behavior?
    Just thinking about all of this made Walter dizzy and he gagged, his focus shifting from trying to understand what sort of parasite was leeching his drugs from him to fighting back the bile that filled his mouth. As he pressed his chin to his chest to try to suppress the urge to vomit, he finally got a good look at his own body. The blood vessels or stretch marks or whatever the fuck they were that spread from the cracker still embedded in his right shoulder had now acquired a dark purple tinge. And their varicose paths seemed to extend now; they passed all the way over his chest and onto the other side, circling his left nipple.
    He wanted to touch his skin, to feel it, but his hands were still strapped behind his back, tied to the chair.
    And he still couldn’t move.
    The smell.
    The blood.
    The bodies.
    The carnage.
    And still, despite all this, his searching eyes didn’t first look for a way to free himself, but to find the black leather case.
    The drugs; maybe the drugs are keeping the thing in my shoulder alive when all others seem to just die.
    Walter grimaced.
    The drugs; maybe the drugs are what are keeping me alive.
    It didn’t matter; it was all rhetoric.
    He needed his drugs either way, and he would soon have them.
    Walter’s first intuition was to stand, to run backward as best he could and drive the chair against the wall, hopefully splintering the thin wood.
    But Walter had been shot in the leg.
    A laugh burst from him.
    “Shot,” he said to the empty room. “I forgot I was shot.”
    But when he looked down, he was surprised that his blood had stopped flowing from the wound, and that he could no longer quite make out the ragged hole in his skin.
    His mind flashed to the white patches of skin on his shoulder, the area from which the strange, translucent crackers had sprung forth.
    Did it… heal me somehow?
    He shook his head.
    That was absurd—but this was all insane, wasn’t it?
    “I have to get the fuck out of here,” he said out loud.
    His wandering gaze eventually landed on Sherk’s six-inch knife lying in a pile of congealing blood. And at long last, Walter mobilized.
    That will do.
    With a grunt, he managed to prop himself onto his toes, wincing at the dull sensation in his quad. Gritting his teeth, he stumbled forward, barely able to avoid falling into the two men’s still warm corpses that lay beside each other like bizarre