Feeder

by Patrick Weekes

  an old woman in a shawl—maybe the pattern had been bright once, but now it was faded—and she was hunched over and harmless, nothing to trouble yourself with if you passed her washing her clothes by the stream

  —could have passed for human if seen at a distance in bad light, but in the light of the bright and sterile room, it was clearly a leathery thing covered in plates, all colorless claws and twitching mandibles.

  And it was strapped to a long gurney on what passed for its back, with a bulbous mass of yellow pulsating at its abdomen. It turned to Tapper and Lori with a shelled and antenna-eyed face as they stared at it in shock.

  “Please help me,” it said.

  Tapper turned to Lori. “I’m out of your way.”

  IARA

  Iara was sitting against the wall, huddled in the light blue sundress she had worn before she had known their adventures today would include swimming. She had no problem with swimming—even before the change, it had been lovely to slip through the water feeling weightless and relaxed—but it called for a different outfit.

  Snuggling with Hawk had been quite enjoyable, though.

  Now Hawk was standing as tall as he could to block the doorway from the guards and their guns. “Hey, guys, chill,” he said as the eels slithered toward him. “You don’t wanna shoot me. Like seriously.”

  “No,” said one of the guards Iara had seen before Hawk had blocked her view. “She said bullets would not hurt you. She said we had to share, but that we’d get them back.”

  “Wait, what do you mean the eeyarrrrrrgh!” Hawk stumbled back, clutching at the eels coiled around him. One of them had already snaked its way up his leg and around his torso and was trying to force its way into Hawk’s mouth.

  Using the wall as leverage, Iara pushed herself up to an awkward crouch, the best she could do with her limited mobility. “Maya, are you strong enough to throw me at them?”

  “These are just fake muscles!” Maya said, and then, “Wait! Maybe!”

  As Hawk dropped to one knee, still vainly grabbing for the eels, Maya lunged at Iara—without moving her feet. Her arms stretched out unnaturally far and caught Iara’s hands, and then Maya pulled, her arms snapping back as she did.

  It was not as graceful as the superhero team-up move Iara had hoped for, but it worked nevertheless. Iara sailed through the doorway.

  The guards had been standing and watching their eels, and they raised their guns but did not have time to aim as Iara smashed into them. She struck down one, pushed off him, and caught the second with a punch to the temple that sent him sprawling.

  She was faster in the water, but a hero fought with whatever tools she possessed.

  Then she landed hard on her side and lay gasping and scrabbling as the third guard turned to her. She got her legs under her and lunged as best she could, knocking his gun away before he could aim, and he stumbled back, grabbed the gun another guard had dropped from by the doorway, and stepped back out of reach into the hallway. Behind him, Hawk was still flailing and grunting on the floor.

  The guard did not look cruel or villainous, or even blank like the men on the boat who had tried to kill them yesterday. He looked desperate, his eyes pleading and his face waxy even as he brought the gun to bear on her.

  Then Maya fell down onto the guard from, apparently, the ceiling, tangling him up with her long limbs. The guard flailed, and Maya’s long fingers slid around the wrist of his gun hand as he spun.

  The gun went off, and then again, and Iara rolled away before she realized that the gun had not been aimed at her.

  It was aimed at Hawk. Again and again it fired. Hawk, of course, was fine.

  The eels coiled around Hawk, however, exploded messily.

  The guard began screaming as the last eel fell from Hawk, dead and slimy. Maya rolled off the guard, arms still around him, and slid through his legs before twisting. The guard somersaulted over her and slammed into the doorframe.

  “Impressive!” Iara called over.

  “I hated wrestling,” Maya said, her skin shimmering as she slid back to her natural state, complete with skinny jeans and the same lime-green T-shirt with a smiley face on it, “but being superflexible helps a lot.”

  “Grrrrraaah!” Hawk yelled, pulling one last eel out of his mouth. It was long, and he gagged as he did it, then flung the creature to the ground and crushed it beneath his heel. “Thanks, both of you,” he said between breaths as he pushed himself back to his feet. “I can still taste that thing.”

  Iara opened her mouth to reply, and then from behind her came a wretched wail. She turned awkwardly and looked over her shoulder.

  It was the guard she’d knocked down. He was looking at the remains of the eels lying in the hallway, his mouth hanging open, one muscle in his cheek twitching.

  “No, no-no-no-no!” he cried, and lunged forward, knocking Iara down.

  She rolled over and got her hands up, ready for an attack, but he was already past her and out in the hallway. He clutched one of the dead eels in his shaking hands.

  Then he opened his mouth and tried to shove the eel inside.

  “Dude!” Hawk shouted, and knocked the guard down.

  “Let her back in!” the guard shouted, crawling toward another dead eel. Hawk blocked him, and the guard tried frantically to reach past him. “I need her, I need her!”

  “What is he doing?” Iara asked, feeling sick to her stomach as she looked at him.

  “She needs to eat,” the guard muttered, still trying to reach past Hawk. “She eats and it takes the pain and you don’t have to be here anymore and I need her.” He lunged again, and when he bounced off Hawk’s immovable frame, he fell back, tears starting to stream down his face. “I need her.”

  “You’re saying the eels kill you,” Maya said to him. “Is there one still in you? Is it making you do this?”

  “What,” said the guard. “No! I’m, I’m, I’m . . . I’m starting to remember, and I don’t have to remember when they’re there! You do what she asks, and they stay, and you don’t remember the things that hurt you!” He looked at Maya, and Iara saw him try to compose himself. “Please. I don’t want it to come back. I want to be fine. Let me be fine. Feeling nothing is better than feeling pain!”

  Maya gave the guard a sad little smile. “I know it feels better to take the pain away, but this won’t help you get better. And you need to get better, okay? There are people who—”

  “No!” The guard lunged—not at Hawk this time, but at Iara, and Iara flinched before realizing he sought the gun beside her. He grabbed it, brought it up under his own chin, and fired.

  Iara looked away. When she opened her eyes, her sensitive ears ringing from the echoes of the gunshot, the guard was on the ground. There was blood on the wall behind him. Out in the hall, Hawk and Maya stared at the dead man in horror.

  Iara took a breath. Another. Even the heroes could not save everyone.

  Then she swallowed and made her voice strong. “We know the eels affect their victims. An addiction, even as they consume them from the inside out. It is good to know this. It is better than not knowing.”

  Hawk looked over at her, his breath still uneven. “I don’t know.”

  If he was looking at her, though, he wasn’t looking at the dead man on the ground. “Pick me back up, please,” Iara said, and he came forward and gently lifted her in his arms. “Maya, come in and close the door.”

  “What do we do?” Maya asked, her voice tiny.

  Iara pointed at the computer servers behind them. “We find what we came here to find. We find out what we are and why Tia Lake wants us.”

  LORI

  As she stood there in the stark white room looking at the feeder strapped down, her phone buzzed.

  Handler: Okay. This is new.

  “Superhelpful,” Lori muttered, and then looked at the feeder. “What are you?”

  “I was doing my wash, and she took me,” said the feeder. It pulled against the straps holding it down to no effect.
“I was washing the clothes.”

  “It’s doing something that makes it look like an old lady,” Tapper said, voice tight. “But it’s not. Are they all like this?”

  “Yes. You can see what it really is?”

  “I see everything, remember?” Tapper grimaced.

  “What are you?” Lori asked again. “The truth.”

  “I wash the clothes of the ones that will die,” the thing said. It cocked what was probably its head at her. “The smell changes in the parts that aren’t here yet.” Lori’s phone buzzed.

  Handler: bean nighe

  Handler: Scottish relative of the banshee

  Handler: No idea how you pronounce it

  “You mean you kill them,” Lori said. “You . . . what do you do? Tracking pheromones? You catch the scent of people who have illnesses, and you eat them.”

  “I wash the clothes,” the feeder snapped back at her. “The smell needs to change so it matches the parts that aren’t here yet.”

  “It can sense the future,” Tapper said. “Parts of it are . . . I don’t know, shiny. Blurry. It’s like how things look when I go fast. It smells when people are going to die, and then it kills them and . . . I don’t know.” He pointed at its belly, distended and covered with the bulbous mass of yellow. “That’s not part of it. It’s something else, another one or—”

  “A parasite,” Lori finished, and Tapper blinked, then nodded.

  “She can’t grow more of her here except in others like us,” the feeder said. “We make them from the little bits, and once they are big enough, she puts them in the prey here to grow.” It looked at Tapper, mandibles on its face clicking. The almost-human face crackled and jolted into an expression that could have been pity. “She wants you. She told me. She wants the touched.” Her eyes clicked over to Lori, and the look of pity fell away like two gears with half of a face on each, turning from humanity into alien angles. “Not you. You are just prey. You are not going to die soon, little dear. I could smell if you were. That is my gift to you.” Its mandibles clacked. “In return, will you free me? A poor thing that only washes the clothes of the ones who will die. Will you show kindness?”

  Lori walked over to the bed where the feeder lay strapped down. The mass of yellow pulsated, not regularly like a heartbeat but as though something inside wanted to get out. “Take my hand,” she said, and reached out.

  The feeder’s little claw clasped Lori’s hand, pinching sharp enough to hurt, and the feeder said, “Yes, I have many clothes to wash, little dear, and I—”

  The fangs came out of an impossible space and closed down upon the feeder on the table, spearing through it in a dozen different places. The feeder shrieked and thrashed, limbs flailing under the restraints, and then, as the great curving fangs closed, the feeder went still.

  One of the fangs had pierced the yellow blob at the thing’s abdomen, and Lori watched with sick fascination as it popped open. Dozens of tiny snakelike forms slid out and splatted limply on the white floor. She realized they were tiny eels, lying dead in the slime that had held them.

  A moment later the fangs withdrew, still locked around their prey, seeming to fall away into the distance even though there was no distance for them to fall into. A moment after that the bed was empty, the straps loosely holding nothing.

  “Guess I’ve got the second- worst power,” Tapper said.

  The laugh bubbled up inside Lori, a stupid little chuckle that found its way out as she turned to him. “Thanks,” she said, and shook her head. “I needed that.”

  “Yes,” said a voice from the doorway behind them, “I needed that too, which makes you eating it a bit of a problem.”

  06

  IARA

  Iara settled into the seat by the server. She rolled out her shoulders, pulled the keyboard and mouse toward her, and squinted at the screen.

  “It requires a password,” she said.

  “Well,” said Hawk, “I guess we could wait until one of the other guys wakes up.” He nudged one of the guards Iara had knocked out.

  “I don’t know how to hack computers,” Maya said, shoving her hands into her pockets. “I mostly just played lesbian dating sims.”

  “I do not believe this will be a problem,” Iara said, smiling over at her. Then she looked at the computer tower beside the desk and clicked at it.

  “You can hack computers with your voice?” Maya asked.

  “I knew a few tricks before I changed,” Iara said, and rolled the chair over to one side. She was glad that Tapper was not present. He would have said something about Oracle again, the computer hacker in a wheelchair, and she would have been annoyed with him. She looked at the computer tower again and clicked. “It was slow and boring most of the time. This made it much faster.”

  “That is supercool!”

  Iara shut her eyes and let out a breath. With her two triangulating clicks, she had an image of the processor, and somewhere between feeling and hearing, she could sense the electric currents, the hum of the current through the room and countless little ones and zeroes carrying all the information she wanted.

  “What kind of lesbian dating sims?” Hawk asked casually.

  Boys, Iara thought, and clicked a third time.

  When she opened her eyes, the password field was filled with a bunch of dots. She hit enter, and the desktop flashed into place.

  “We are in,” she said, and flipped her hair back over her shoulder. “Unless you have anything more pressing to discuss.” Hawk blushed and looked down. “So. Let us hunt.”

  She did a search for her own name and found a massive collection of files, all encrypted. A few clicks cut through that, and then she was at something she couldn’t just click her way past: an exceedingly large group of Word documents.

  “Aw, man, you didn’t tell me we were gonna have to study,” Hawk muttered.

  “We seem to be part of something the Lake Foundation cares very much about.” Iara frowned, biting her lip as she scrolled through the list. “The company makes most of its money harnessing the power of the miracoral, and this is . . . we are . . .” She sighed. “This is a great deal of data.”

  “There,” Maya said, and pointed, and Iara looked at Maya with one eyebrow raised until Maya blushed and added, “Um, there’s a doc with a name different from the others. All the others look like dates or versions or something, right, but that one that says ‘Nix Vector’ is different.”

  Iara smiled. “Well hunted.” She opened the document.

  Executive Summary:

  The mutation of the Nix strongly correlates to the miracoral incursion. While it is not conclusive that the Nix are intended as an agent of the miracoral, or indeed that the miracoral is a causative agent in their creation at all, further study is warranted.

  All Nix located so far appeared human before the miracoral incursion, and all have birth dates within the same year. There is no common ethnicity or location associated with the Nix mutation, although all Nix either lived near water or participated in aquatic sports (swimming, water polo, etc.). Whether the mutation is a by-product of the incursion or a response to it remains unknown. Regardless of cause, all Nix have undergone physical mutation evidencing new abilities, most tied to increased aptitude for aquatic survival. Physical testing and dissection will yield more data on specific ability sets and known levels of mutation from human norm. Because of the results of early experimentation on Subject Campbell (see below), the eel symbiote will not be introduced to the Nix upon capture of the subjects.

  Targeted Candidates:

  Bautista, Joshua: Mutation includes significant physical augmentation and resistance to physical injury, along with the ability to last up to an hour on a single breath.

  Campbell, Sarah: UPDATE: Upon capture, Campbell was exposed to an eel symbiote. The subject immediately suffered seizures and was dead within minutes. It is unclear at this time whether this was a matter of incompatibility between Nix biology and the eel symbiote, or if it was a deliberate decisi
on by the element responsible for the creation of the Nix to terminate the subject rather than let it become compromised by the eel. Prior to death, mutation included bioluminescence in nonliving tissue (hair, fingernails) and the ability to generate electric fields.

  Costa, Iara: Mutation includes moderate physical augmentation and hearing, as well as possible electrochemical reception. Note that Costa suffered an incomplete L2 spinal cord injury in childhood. This has not been corrected by the mutation, but Costa’s abilities are strongest in water.

  Daniels, Shawn: Mutation includes dermal adaptation, the ability to consciously reconfigure the properties of skin cells, which he uses to increase the effective sharpness and density of his limbs.

  Fin—

  “We can’t read this all now,” Maya cut in, and slid Iara aside. “Let me copy it to the USB drive I got.” She pulled out the keychain that Iara had bought her yesterday and popped open the drive. “We can read it later together, all right?”

  “All right, alemã.” Iara scooted out of the way, a little taken aback, as Maya slid the drive in. “I suppose you are correct. Do we have a plan for meeting the others?”

  “Um . . .” Hawk thought for a moment. “No. You want me to call Tapper?”

  “That would be good, thank you . . .” With a little smile, she added, “Joshua.”

  The caught-by-his-mother look on his face was perfect.

  LORI

  Lori spun, hands balled into fists. The man in the doorway was short, portly, and unassuming, with curly hair that was starting to go bald in the front and a casually annoyed expression.

  “Who are you?” she asked.

  “Says the intruder who set off the alarm and interrupted Ms. Lake’s interview,” he said dryly. “I’m someone who is really looking forward to explaining to Ms. Lake how her longest-lasting incubator just got eaten. You can call me Kirk. And you”—he cocked his head, then smiled—“would be Angler Consulting.” His gaze slid over to Tapper. “And your new friend Latrell Taylor. How are you, Mister Taylor? Still hoping to get that scholarship?”

  “Is he human?” Tapper asked Lori without taking his eyes off the man. “He looks human.”