Parasite
The jerky movements. The unfocused eyes. The awkward movements of something wearing a skin that is not its own. Li’s heart sank.
“Arvind?” he asked, dreading the response.
“Arvind’s not here, Dr. Li. In a way, he never was.”
The stilted delivery, the syncopated cadence, the deep burbling beneath every word; horrifyingly familiar.
“The parasite!… It’s back?” asked Wogel with a voice afraid and furious in equal measure.
“Back? I have never left.”
“But, we torched the wound! We extracted the mass! It was gone!”
What had been Arvind clumsily turned around, the best it could manage in the bulky astronaut suit. Wogel’s torch shone on the figure and cast a long and hulking shadow on the red cave wall behind.
“You are so easy to deceive. A little wailing, a little twitching, a pound of flesh. I relinquished enough control and you fell for it. What is the expression you use? Hook, line, and a third item that now escapes me.”
Li’s mind spun. He had a flare gun in his backpack, which at close distance could probably inflict some serious damage, but he would need some time to get it out of there, time he wasn’t sure he had. Maybe he could grab a rock and try to bash his erstwhile coworker in the head. He wondered what kind of strength the parasite had: during the previous episode, they had needed two people to restrain Arvind’s thrashing, but if what it was now saying was true, then it must have been concealing its real power.
“What do you want from us?” he asked with a snarl.
The Arvind shell raised its arms to gesture at the cave. It looked around, for the first time with a true glint in the eye. “This. I needed you to bring me here. To where I belong. To my ancestral home.”
“It needed us to come to a Martian cave?” Li mumbled. “But… Arvind contracted the parasite just a few kilometers from here. We’re already on Mars! Why would it?… Unless…”
The words died in his throat as the parasite turned towards him with an ungraceful jolt. “Do you understand now, doctor? I have been with you since Earth. Every step of the way.”
Wogel was shaking. He threatened to drop his torch, as the shadow jittered and bounced. “Liar,” he muttered with a hiss; yet a quiver in his snarl underscored his own uncertainty.
“Oh, afraid not. I made you come here. I led you and directed you and showed you the way that you so obligingly walked. When you were going the wrong way, I showed myself to set you straight. And now, I’m close enough that I no longer need you. I will…”
It did not finish the sentence. Wogel jumped towards it with a lurch and a scream. The torch on his suit kept moving frantically and erratically as the two were locked in combat. Li gripped the wall and held his breath; when the light became stable again, it shone on the parasite squeezing Wogel’s throat. Despite resistance, the astronaut eventually went limp.
The parasite turned to Li. “And now…”
But Li had already managed to extract and prime the flare gun, pointing it at the parasite.
“It is useless, doctor,” it said. Li didn’t know how, but the edges of the mouth appeared to be curled in a faint smile. “Even if you shoot, I will win.”
“I know you need a body. Let’s see how you fare when that body is on fire.”
The parasite didn’t flinch. In fact, it made guttural, short wheezes that seemed like a mocking approximation of human laughter.
“When I said I have been with you every step of the way, I meant it. Ever since the dawn of your species, I have been within you, waiting for my moment. You look to the stars and feel a tug calling you to explore space. Do you think it’s the human spirit, some kind of instinct that boldly leads you outwards, some part of your nature? It is me. The yearning you feel, the drive to explore and take your way to the stars, it is me. It was always me, manipulating you to do my bidding. And even if you kill this ‘me’, there are thousands, maybe millions more of ‘mes’ back on Earth, inside your kind, reproducing, waiting, until you will deliver me back to where I came from, even if it takes another hundred thousand years. You cannot resist my directive. You cannot deny yourself to me.”
Li couldn’t bear it any longer. He steeled himself and pressed the trigger. Just as the parasite was beginning its move, the flare erupted from the gun and struck the other, knocking it against the wall with a burning slam. But the recoil also flung Li backwards and crashed him on the cave wall, temporarily blinded and deafened; the first noise that emerged from the din in his ears was the many diagnostic tools in his suit alerting him of damage and compromised integrity with a thousand discordant beeps and rings. Part of his right arm was charred, his left no longer responded. He dragged himself to the burning corpse on the other side of the cave. It made no noise or movement as it gently smoldered.
He curled up to what had once been his colleague. His eye was drawn upwards, where, slowly, the image of alien graffiti and markings on the cave wall came into focus. He now gazed in anguish at what they had been following, what they had come here to investigate ever since the rover had sent back the picture. They had wondered what civilization had left them; they had speculated what they had meant; he remembered having been excited beyond words, proud to be the first human to see them in person. Now they flickered at the edge of his vision, as his oxygen ran out and the smoke of the flare gun threatened to fill the space.
Li tried to muster a sense of urgency as a rational part of him told him he had to warn somebody, but a profound sense of sadness was all he could feel. He closed his eyes.
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