Free Parasite by Patrick Logan Page B

be shot… can it?
    He debated probing this wound as well, but the uncomfortable lack of feeling in the new skin on his shoulder lingered, and he decided against it.
    Besides, there was a more pressing matter at hand.
    When Walter reached down to pick up his case of drugs— good Lord, how long has it been since I got high? —he felt a strange taste in his mouth. Or, more appropriately, he felt less strangeness in his mouth.
    In fact, it almost felt normal.
    He clucked his tongue, and this felt normal, too. Sure, his tongue felt a little numb, but when he reached up to grab it between two grimy fingers, it was all there; the tip that he had bitten off seemed to have been regrown.
    A small smile crossed his lips.
    Healed. The thing is healing me somehow.
    His hand, now wet with saliva and blood, went to his cheek next. The pockmarks from the glass that had been embedded there after being thrown from his car after the explosion at the gas station were gone—smoothed over. In fact, he realized as he further probed his face, several of the lesions that had seemed ubiquitous following his foray into intravenous drug use were gone too.
    His skin seemed soft and smooth; it felt so completely normal that he was taken aback. It was all normal, except for the patches of white skin that had healed over after the crackers had been born. 
    A strange expression crossed his face.
    With the hand not gripping the leather case, Walter undid his pants and slid a hand down his leg. He could still feel dried blood around mid-thigh, but the hole he’d expected to find simply wasn’t there.
    “What the fuck?”
    He could feel a protrusion, something hard deep beneath his skin, but there was no ragged bullet hole. Although the healed wound prevented him from digging deep enough to actually feel it, he knew what this hard object was: the bullet.
    It was the pain; it had to have been the pain. Whatever had happened when he had been shot and then bitten off a piece of his tongue had fucked with his brain.
    Or maybe he had imagined this, all of it—maybe he was still lying in the back of the stolen car, a needle hanging out of his arm, and this was all just a nasty trip.
    It was also possible that he had suffered a severe head injury when he had been thrown from car after the gas station exploded, and that he was in some sort of dream-like coma.
    Or maybe he was dead already.
    Walter squeezed the fake leather case in his hand.
    “Well, only one way to find out.”
    The cracker buried in the skin on his right shoulder twitched.

12.
     
    It was nearly dark outside, yet Walter Wandry hadn’t moved in many hours. He was sitting on the couch, staring at the TV without actually watching it. The black leather case was spread out in front of him on the rotting coffee table, several used syringes resting beside it. The small plastic baggie was open, and it was empty. His lighter, a cheap yellow BIC, was also spent, and the spoon that he had used to boil the heroin was marked by a dry brown smudge.
    He had injected all of his heroin, more than he usually consumed over an entire weekend, let alone one afternoon, and he still felt nothing.
    His tongue darted from his mouth and skipped across chapped lips. He was thirsty again.
    Well, maybe not exactly nothing; his shoulder, the one with the embedded cracker that he had since pulled the flannel shirt back over to cover the hideous sight of, and the network of purple vessels that marred his pale, inverted chest, had stopped hurting.
    It was as if the cracker had been as hungry for drugs as he was, and now that he had obliged, the greedy fucker had taken it all from him, somehow redirecting the flow to it rather than to his brain.
    Walter had first injected into his right arm, then his left, but it made no difference; the moment before the surge that he expected as the opioid hit his brainstem, the feeling passed. Just like that, it fucking passed, as if his tolerance was suddenly so high that it would take a