Get Ready with Me #3
Blood pours down my face as I cut deeper and deeper, obscuring my vision with a scarlet haze and spilling into my eyes.
I’m working blind now, starting a new wound to cross with the original at a haphazard angle.
Where these two slashes intersect, I somehow manage to extract a huge chunk of flesh, something that no amount of time and healing will fully repair.
From the other room, a loud, familiar retching begins. It’s the same sound I heard when Eddie made us pull over on the way here, but this time there’s a distinct wetness to the heaves.
Knowing my time is limited, I make a particularly bold move.
I grab a huge chunk of hair at the side of my head, bending toward the coffee table so I can pull it up with my cuffed hand and use the other one to saw along my right hairline.
The pain is so excruciating that it has essentially disappeared, a numb orb that surrounds my entire face.
At first, I’m worried my fingers will slip due to all the blood, that my grip is sliding up the length of my hair, but it quickly becomes apparent this is not the case.
The sensation is actually due to my scalp lifting away from my head, at least in this particular area.
I saw in a large circle, pulling away more and more until, finally, the entire section comes tearing off and leaves me with a giant circular wound. I can’t imagine any follicles surviving this kind of trauma.
Another gurgling heave erupts from the bedroom, this one more ferocious than the others and accompanied by two distinct, hollow cracks.
It’s enough to make me wipe the blood from my eyes, then lean over and take another look, fighting to see through what remains of the sticky red liquid obscuring my vision.
Eddie is bent over now. He’s on his hands and knees, his mouth stretched open so wide that it’s reached nearsupernatural proportions.
It seems those pops were the sound of Eddie’s cracking jawbone.
This contortion of his face is both horrific and fascinating in a way that’s impossible to look away from.
His neck has swelled up, stuffed with an object approximately the same width as a basketball, but oblong.
He retches again, the guttural sound accompanied by even more cracking bones as something emerges beyond the threshold of his lips.
I gasp, instinctively reeling. The thing protruding from Eddie’s throat has stopped just a few inches past his teeth, a bulbous black knob with two small appendages writhing and snapping at its tip.
It’s glistening, dripping with the same rotten mixture of bile, spit, and blood that pours from what’s left of Eddie’s wide-open maw.
“Uggghh.” Eddie forcefully heaves again, the strange object emerging a little more as the skin below his distended neck shifts.
The two small appendages become more coherent now, revealing themselves to hook slightly inward and end at a pair of gnarled, sharpened points. They move, quiver, and snap together, dripping with a thick mucus.
Eddie gives one final bellow, and at long last the black thing within him forces itself past the edge of resistance.
It comes spilling out of Eddie in a sticky, violent birth, but what first seemed like a relatively small object now reveals itself to be so much more.
Its shiny, armored body keeps coming and coming, first a head, then an abdomen, then a tail as its incredible weight slams against the wooden floor with a loud thud.
This enormous insectlike creature clicks and clacks with six sharp legs, struggling to find its senses amid the toxic spill of gore and viscera that accompanied its delivery. It opens and closes the protrusions on its face, which I now see are the sharp mandibles of a chattering mouth.
In many ways, the creature looks like a massive black earwig, but aside from the gargantuan size, one prominent detail sets it apart.
Haphazardly lashing the air above this abomination are four long tentacles, each equal to the monster’s body length and protruding from its back.
The last of these thin, muscular bands is still making its way out of Eddie’s hollow corpse, and as it retracts from the host I can see Eddie’s arm flopping and tugging awkwardly.
It appears the four tendrils are how he pilots humanoid limbs, and they could easily explain Eddie’s superhuman strength.
Just watching the appendages sway through the air gives a sense of their incredible power, like they could wrap around someone’s bone and snap it like a twig.
But it’s not just a monster that has emerged from the depths of Eddie’s belly. Spilling out with the creature and the carnage is a massive plume of bright pink dust, a bizarre spore-like cloud that erupts from his shattered throat and quickly fills the bedroom with a fog of neon specks.
I’ve seen these specks before, aided by the blacklight at Club Flamingo.
This haze of pheromones was barely noticeable back then, invisible to the naked eye, but now that Eddie’s flesh is no longer there to contain it, the dust gets everywhere.
Within seconds, the churning flecks of pink have filled the entire bungalow.
The previously ten-foot-wide cloud has bloomed to an area more than five times its initial size and intensity, and it would likely continue without walls to stop it.
It appears to spill endlessly from somewhere within the creature’s body, drifting from the spaces between its hard carapace.
I’m so caught up in observing this shocking display that I’ve completely forgotten the mission at hand, but my mind is pulled back into focus when the giant earwig abruptly snaps its head toward me, erupting with a violent, rattling hiss.
I spring into motion again, not pointing the blade to defend myself but driving the metal into my face with even more ferocity.
I cut across my chin, my brow, and the bridge of my nose, hacking manically as the creature skitters forward.
“Enjoy your new face!” I shriek, re-blinded by the spurting from my wounds.
Something hits me hard in the chest, slamming me backward and yanking my arm.
There’s an audible pop as pain surges, but it appears the sound was the cracking of a wooden coffee-table rung, not calcium and marrow.
I’m still held against the furniture with my cuffed arm, but I can now sense the slightest bit of structural give.
The massive insect is on top of me. It pins me down with all the weight of its formidable body and uses one of its four tentacles to keep my free wrist positioned above my head.
With three other tentacles, the creature begins to wildly poke and prod my cheeks, stretching my skin as it rattles and chirps.
The sounds are frantic, an expression of frustration that somehow translates despite our crossspecies divide.
I can feel that the ends of its muscular appendages are equipped with sharp barbs, but the creature isn’t using them to pierce me.
It’s upset, yes, but it’s also careful not to cause any more damage.
I can’t help the smile that creeps its way across my slashed-up face, nor the maniacal laughter that spills from my throat, dancing its way between bloody teeth.
The creature stops, its giant mandibles hovering over my grinning mug and its dark eyes staring into mine. From this close, I can now see the strange bag that hangs around its throat, the same jet black as its armored shell, only leathery and loose.
The bag begins to rattle, producing a distinct, familiar sound that I once assumed was made by the broken bones of Eddie’s neck. The insect’s throat muscles clench in rolling waves, tightening to control the pitch, and through this terrible, uncanny hum, concrete syllables begin to form.
“You’ve done it now, sport.” Eddie’s true form chortles.
“You lose,” I snarl, the fact that I’m speaking to a giant bug barely registering. “We both lose.”
“Not yet,” he retorts.
“You said it yourself: all my siblings are far, far away.” I chuckle. “This torn-up canvas is all you’ve got. Go ahead and climb inside me you vain fuck, see how many Rolling Stone covers you get now.”
The insect’s strange rattle abruptly stops. He hesitates, then drops to a menacing lower pitch. “I’ll just have to start younger.”
Before I have time to fully comprehend what this means, Eddie leaps off me and skitters away, slamming through the bungalow door with a loud bang.
I remain flat on my back, staring up at the ceiling as my face radiates in a sensory halo that oscillates between overwhelming numbness and violent stabs of pain. The second I realize he’s actually gone, I’m flooded with relief, and for the briefest moment I let this satisfaction wash over me.
It doesn’t last long, however.
I’ll just have to start younger.
This strange new puzzle piece begins to mingle with the others, fresh images manifesting and falling into place. I’ve learned so much in the last few minutes that it’s hard to keep track of everything.
Eddie has been around for centuries.
Eddie’s host body is my father.
I have siblings all over, but I’m currently the only one near Palm Springs.
Eddie has kept tabs on me since birth, because he needs a biologically related host when the time comes.
A biologically related host.
A biologically related host.
A biologically related host.
Biologically related.
My eyes snap wide open.
He’s headed for Marlo.