First Sight

I'd seen plenty up close but that one was so close to death that I didn't understand why Jeb would give it water, force it to live just so that Kyle could kill it, and he would kill it. But it lay there in the shade of that tree as if it were the last thing keeping it alive. Its skin was so burnt I couldn't tell if there'd ever been anything under the flaking, peeling, blistery flesh. It was barely discernible as a woman. But it could never be known if one of their parasites was male or female or if it even had the option. Their kind stole our bodies and wore them like coats. They took fathers from children, sisters from brothers, and lovers from one another. Kyle lost his Jodie to one of them. I lost everything. Why would we ever keep it alive?

Bile rose in my throat at the sight of it laying there and a part of me hoped never to touch it, but another angrier, blacker part hoped that I would be the one to kill it. The one to watch the silver light disappear from the eyes of whatever person it had been before. But I knew that the Jeb would probably take it to Doc with the hope that his niece would come out in one piece. She wouldn't though. They never did. They ripped and tore away at the things they inhabited, like angry children beating at a house. The difference being that the parasites destroyed it. I'd seen them after they'd been cut out, slashed out, torn from the bodies they wore so grandly. They were disgusting silver slime. And they refused to be removed without blood from the person, without crushing their brain and their lungs and everything that kept them living. They took our home, took our bodies, and then, took our deaths when they left. The thing on the ground underneath the tree, the thing that had once been Jeb's niece, Melanie Stryder, that thing would do the same, except it would bring hell down upon us.

It would find a way to escape. It would run from its cell, run from the cave and find help on the highway. It would bring seekers down upon us and we would all die or be taken by them. It had already bewitched Jeb into threatening Kyle, when he'd helped the group with his raids and his rush to capture and learn from the worms. It was able to captivate, and then, we would be gone. We would become them. Well, not Kyle and I. We'd promised. We would die first. We would take our own lives before we would allow anything to be us, and I was certain that Melanie Stryder had felt the same before she'd been crushed by the worm living in her head. We knew without a doubt that it had to be us that killed the body and killed the worm. Nobody else could do what needed to be done.