“Did you see that?” Trent muttered.
He had forgotten he turned off the earpiece.
Kurt saw the eyes move from his end but was moreover shocked by the coins starting to move. They uncoiled and had legs like centipedes and crawled slowly towards Trent.
“Get out of there!” Kurt yelled, but his words fell on deaf ears.
Trent continued to stare at the queen’s face as she grinned with her jagged teeth showing. Trent dropped the bags of gold and gasped. The queen took a step forward and he noticed the swarm of golden insects surrounding him. He quickly spun around and sprinted out of the cavern in a burst of panic.
Kurt grabbed the remote control on the desk and followed Trent with the rover. The golden insects raced after Trent and crawled up his legs and pierced his ankles and calves with needle like bites. He fell on the ground with a thud as the golden insects covered his body in a mass of yellow.
He writhed as they bit and chewed until there was nothing left but bones. Kurt watched in horror and wanted to shout, “Get up,” but knew it was futile.
After the golden insects had their full, they scrambled back into the cavern and it became quiet. My God, Kurt thought. Murray was right: the gold is alive! A call from Washington jarred Kurt’s shock and he answered the phone.
“Did you guys find them?”
Kurt was silent.
“Hello, Trent… Kurt…”
“This is Kurt.”
“What’s wrong with you? Did you find them?”
“Find what Gordon?”
“Stop goofing around. The bodies you moron.”
Kurt tried to speak, but he felt like his muscles had frozen.
“Hello… you there?”
“They move.”
“What?”
“They… move.”
“What moves? Where’s Trent? Let me talk to him.”
“The gold… it ate him.”
“What is it with you, have you gone insane?”
“Murray… he was telling the truth.”
Gordon sighed, “Why is it the crazy ones survive?”
The End
3.
THE BODY SURFER
By Edward Ahern
Danton roused to the sense turmoil of his new host- gasoline smoke, dung flavored dust, lice bites, taste of spiced mutton, ache of hernia, tinny horns, blurred vision of a tent stocked with cloth.
The last host had been driving to this village when it was broadsided by a Mercedes truck. It had bled out, forcing Danton to blindly flee into a new body.
Burrow now, burrow. Slide past the thinking and the seeing and the hearing. Deeper, hiding depth at the bottom of mind.
Danton waits, measuring time by his host’s body rhythms. He hibernates, sipping from its energy and cradling in its rhythms.
Motions ebb. Breathing slows. Pulse lowers. Now, Danton thinks, let’s see what I’m riding. Gently creep up from the lair. Seep upward, deadening and oozing, an invasive well spring. Pluck from the sleeping sensations. Fat circulating from the evening meal. New sweat coating old. Rasping tobacco breath. Eye lid flutter. Dream of saffron rice.
Fleas, they called themselves, hopping on and off hosts until they found the quarry. His last host had known that the quarry lived in this village. It had died luckily close.
Slither into the sleeping library. It is Khalil. Sells fabrics. Poor. Seven children, three dead. Ignored wife. Timid thief. Ah, knows the prey’s relatives but not the prey. Bad, only the women in the target family come to the shop. Can’t be helped.
Danton swirls, gelling brain fluid into a cocoon for himself. Khalil will never know he’s being ridden. Danton waits .He cannot sleep, but shrivels his thoughts, aware only of the host’s physical sensations. Body temperature rises slightly. The gray light of false dawn creeps into the room.
Stirrings. Stiff muscles flex. Flatulence. Its eyes open. It needs glasses. It washes body parts, dresses and eats. Khalil walks to its stall in the souk. It hates many people here. Danton waits. A bird dog, he thinks, just a bird dog. But instead of scents he prowls for thoughts. The closer to the quarry the stronger the thought scent. No, not quite a bird dog. Danton retrieved thoughts but killed his quarry. And he relished the kill.
One day. Two. Three. . It prays, sells cloth. Eats. Defecates. Sleeps. Once beats wife.
Danton holds to his perch, insulated from the host. In it but not of it. A deer tick that wants no host diseases.
On the fourth day two wrapped women enter the souk. Khalil recognizes them, they are kin of the quarry. Danton has more difficulty infiltrating into women. The younger, ride the younger, fewer hard thought patterns. With both hosts awake he must take great care.
Danton stretches out gently from Khalil and touches the girl’s head like a blessing. Ooze inward from the skin. Confirm. Quarry’s daughter. Lives with prey. Curl back to cup the neck nape. Glide through hairs, black and clean. Poise at the skin, then flow in through a hole smaller than a pore. Once at the mind bottom, hollow out a sac. Bulge his stream to accommodate a morsel of himself and leave it behind. It shivers as Danton’s bit of consciousness nestles in.
Draw back like ebbing water. Resettle on his perch in Khalil.
The two women buy nothing. Khalil is annoyed.
The day passes. Khalil is ignored. A cab ride, Danton is taught, just a cab ride. He subsides, becoming only what Khalil senses.
Light fades. It prays, eats and argues with the woman. It falls asleep. The night gradually chills. At its coldest, Danton winds himself about himself and glides out without damaging Khalil, who is left behind unknowing and alive.
He glides from the hut and moves into the light spattered dark, he holds, swaying at roof top level. The mind morsel that he infested the girl with pulses, and he moves forward and side to side, keeping in the spoor of himself. His reach is about as long as he can hold his breath. Mistakes cause delays, which will kill him. The roads below are traps, almost never going the direction he needs. Slide around a taller building, around another. The walled compound ahead. Left, near the back wall. First, no, second floor, open window, not that it mattered.
The girl’s bed is in a darkened corner, but he did not need light to see it and the pulsing germ of himself. He swirls so close that were he breathing his breath would flutter its hair. Touch with the lightness of dust fall.
Sleeping.
He flows in. Smell of sandalwood soap and child pungence. Fan whirr. Tongue taste of sugared cake. Barked knuckle ache. Swells of growth and wellness. Burrow, burrow down until only heat and pulse and motion are sensible. Hollow out the lair.
Sleeping still. Swim upward. Deaden and seep, deaden and seep. Explore the library. Amira. Five.. Father equals quarry. Father away, back perhaps tomorrow. Dream of moving through a wheat field. Certainty that Amira is exactly where she should be. The perch in her consciousness is spun. Danton slides back down. He waits.
Target does not return the next day. Danton is cocooned but cannot settle into dormancy. He is taught not to comingle with hosts, but is restless. After half a day, he seeps into her mind and explores. Beliefs. Warm, over washing beliefs. Father, mother, something called Allah, hazy but protective. The day’s purpose is itself. Mutton, rice, bread tastes, all new and sharp. Running without restraint. So little difference between waking and sleeping. He is uncomfortable and slides back down.
The quarry is another day late. He moves back into her consciousness. Delicacies of soft touch. Annoyance at an older sister. Attending with vigor to a small cat. Water has taste. Small pains are newly discovered. He holds at sense level, unwilling to return to the lair. Finally she sleeps and Danton drops back down. He does not wish to share her dreams.
Amira is in high excitement. Her father has returned. Quarry spends time with assistants and wife, then takes Amira onto his lap. Questions back and forth. He reads Amira’s senses of the quarry’s warmth and odors and muscles. Target is uneasy, asks Amira several times if she is unwell, or has troubles
.
Target wraps it’s arms around Amira more tightly and opens up to absorb everything it can about her. Amira is completely open to his gentle probing. Danton is trained to the stillness of a hunting cat, but senses his own fear, despite his sealed cocoon. He drops from his perch, down the deadened channel into the lair, landing hard. Too hard. Bleeding starts, couldn’t be helped. He knows by training that the target cannot have sensed him, but fear lingers.
Danton waits in the lightlessness. Breathing slows, pulse slows. Motion almost stops, Wait. Wait. Wait. Judge time by the falling night temperature.
If the target did sense him its defenses will be up. The target travels constantly, and could be off again the next day. There may be only this night, Danton takes energy from her. The kill, so close to the kill. There is only one suitable technique, nice in the sense of elegance. Danton poises, flexing for departure.
.He wraps himself around himself and glides out. Amira is left in her bed unaware and dreaming. She is still bleeding internally and will die.
Floor slide without resistance into the targets room. Observe. Wait. Target sleeps. Unfold and reach out. Gently, gently touch, not the head, but lower down, the neck nape. Gray frizzled hair. Acne-pored skin. Breathing slow, even. Pulse slow, soft. Deaden and slide in. Deaden and slide deeper. Deaden and slide deeper. This leaves blood spotting, but no matter. He pushes himself into the brain stem.
He is cord bound. No references but up and down, stem tissue and not stem tissue. Swirling blood in veins. And touch, his own touch to use. Touch, touch again and again, and again. Ah. Numb this spot. Carve. Cut close by. Cut again, Fuzzy, aching. The killing cuts always demand such energy. It is done. Danton rests in the blood of his kill.
He cannot leave from this depth, and must move upward. Target’s body is inactive, its pulse rate slow. The target sleeps as it dies. Deaden and slither upward,
Clear out a lair and climb past, up, and up. Cradle quickly at the level of thought. Enter the library.
Shaikh Rhaman. Confirmed. A flip flop procedure, first the kill then extract information before thought is lost… Query, answer. Query, answer. Query, answer. Dawn swells into the room. A good performer, Danton thinks, knows when to exit. Two associates in the house, Khalil and Faisal. Faisal is trusted to travel. Faisal it is. Store intelligence. Slide down into the lair. Rest. Draw energy from the sleeping, dying Shaikh.
Wait.
Wait.
Quickening pulse. Motion. Movement. Disturbed motion. Thready pulse. Danton is curled tightly in the lair. Wait.
From motions Danton infers that the Shaikh performs his ablutions. The killing cuts are bleeding nicely, The Shaikh begins having trouble breathing and thinking. Wait. The Shaikh’s body falls sideways and begins to tremble and lose function. Danton swells quickly upward into his perch.
But then, without thinking, like a relapsing alcoholic taking a drink, Danton reaches outside the cocoon to the dying Shaikh. His action violates his training and Danton is shocked at himself.
Bloated fear of dying, swelling, blobby. The Shaikh has no reference for Danton’s invasion. Just weak hatred.
Its thoughts are swirling wildly. It does not realize that its thinking flows into Danton like river water. Floating in the water are memories, sensations. More than Danton wants to know. Confusing. Pain, he begins to sense the Shaikh’s pain.
The Shaikh has weak dying thoughts, and Danton easily outshouts him.
“Shaikh Rahman. You have no bodily control and very little time. Listen to me. I will help you scream for help. I will let you ask one thing - that you be taken to Amira. You need to say good-bye to her. If you fight me I will leave you on the floor to die in your feces. “
The Shaikh sputters out hatred, and horror at his weakness, and disbelief, and then grudging agreement in the hope that he can somehow trick or overpower this hallucination. Its thoughts begin to flicker.
Danton has stolen energy from the Shaikh and must now give some of it back. The Shaikh screams. His wife hears and finds the Shaikh on the floor
Screams, motion, bodies filling the small bathroom. The Shaikh tries to shout a warning but Danton chokes its vocal cords, and then plays them. “Take me to Amira now!”
Shouting, calls for a doctor, an ambulance. The wife, who has been screaming the loudest, is obedient. She speaks.
“While the ambulance is coming, carry him to Amira’s room. It is closer to the entry way.”
The Shaikh is picked up by his arms and legs and carried to the girl’s room. The wife screams again, for Amira cannot be awakened. Faisal stays in the room. Danton swells outward for eight feet and cradles Faisal’s neck nape. He inserts his morsel seed and moves back. Faisal is bleeding from his neck but no one will notice.
The Shaikh is beyond making sounds.
“Listen to me Shaikh. You are dying. Amira is dying. Can’t be helped. You should say your good bye. I will help you. Do you understand?”
Confused thoughts, fear for Amira but no longer for himself. Vaguely, what, not grateful, accepting.
Danton has little energy left, but plays the vocal cords again.
“ Goodbye Amira.”
Wasted, Danton thinks, with drinker’s remorse. Foolishly wasted energy.
He has left the dead only once, and hated it. His host is his world, and once death begins its cloying process he must fight hard to escape. He claws in as much as he can of the Shaikh’s energy and swirls about himself.
The Shaikh fails. Fading screams. Gray, clotting gray, must kick loose from the spreading nothing, must flee. Out, swirling and disheveled, only partially wrapped about himself. He seeps quickly into Faisal. Down, quickly, burrow down into the black comfort at the bottom of mind. Wait.
Faisal does not travel for two weeks after the funerals, but finally flies out of country. It carries instructions which Danton records. Danton knows he should try to leave Faisal alive, so the known instructions can be passed along. Faisal should voyage onward as an unwitting Judas goat.
The commute by body begins. Hardest to find that first air traveler. Then traveler to traveler, airport to airport to airport. Child, stewardess, salesman, child. They are disposable, more roughly handled than their baggage. He does not explore them beyond confirming a destination.
Danton relishes his kills and normally relives them several times. But he drifts instead to the flowing, almost directionless thoughts of Amira, and they sour his killing after-lust. Her sensations, so open and strong, bathe him and wash off his pleasure in the kill.
Danton’s last host deplanes at the airport where he is housed. He wraps himself about himself, seeps out of his host, and dives easily back into his body, Monitors record his reentry.
He has been absent for two months and his body has vegetated. His withered muscles twitch as Danton prods them awake. The reopened senses seem stale,-like bad air conditioning. Not like Amira’s he thinks.
His minders are careful but uncaring. Before any other muscles, Danton’s vocal cords are made pliable enough that he can recite the stored information. Danton expects nothing different.
Then therapy. Body and mind. From the careful ministrations of many people Danton senses that he is one of very few, that the bird dog is so caringly tended to because his masters have so few dogs with which to hunt.
Four months are spent reconditioning his body and oh so gently assessing his mind. Occasional women are provided to him for one night each so that they learn nothing and no attachments are formed. He is allowed two drunken evenings of his choice.
And he is judged to be again field ready.
As Danton receives instructions, he hesitates. What happens, he wonders, to fleas too weak to hop, to crippled hunting dogs. Amira, with no duplicity of her own, has made him wary. But as the briefing continues the sickly-sweet killing expectation rises. He wants again to jaguar-prowl in darkness, to ride the many hosts to prey. And most of all perhaps he wants to leave himself behind.
End
4
.
VANILLA QUEEN
By Christine Ruggiano
Vanilla Queen popped on the stereo and there was the old feeling again. An angel stood in my doorway looking everywhere but at me. But she was gone, and she’d always be gone.
But the moment ends the second I can’t hear the sound of the turntable. That soft purr was absent and in the remaining air of silence was just that, silence.
Three stouts later and I found myself in a record shop. Lined with hipsters desperate to grasp onto a feeling they were born too late for. I dug through all the vinyls. Half of it was from hipster bands that knew their audience wanted to pretend they were hip and have their album on an old black disc too big for simple storage.
There was not a single Golden Earring album in the whole place. I stumbled out of the record shop looking like the old sketchy drunk guy. Mumbling a “you, too,” as the thick-rimmed sales clerk wished me a “pleasant evening.”
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