Invasion

He takes his eyes off of me--a brief glance to the shadows cast by our lantern--and that’s when I lunge at him; My knife slides into his neck easily. His shock quickly morphs into a feral anger as black tar erupts from the wound, and in this moment, I know I made the right decision.

Black blood always gives them away. You just need to find a good reason to cut them first. The goosebumps are never wrong.

I quickly step back just as he swipes for me, his eyes are bulging out of his skull. He’s trying to breathe while choking on blood. I know it’s not dead yet.

“Jesus Christ,” Kate jumps to her feet, clutching a combat knife with a white fist. “Where is it? Where’s the--”

Her question is quickly answered as thin appendages, nearly invisible due to the darkness surrounding us, burst through the host’s skull. It’s as if it erupted from a glass vase. Shattered, bloody pieces of bone and brain matter fly through the air and into the fallen leaves.

“There it is!” I’m charging for him once more. He’s stumbling through the brush, blindly swinging his outstretched, clawed hands. The tendrils from his skull dance around each other in the air, reaching for whatever they can get--a desperate search for a new body to inhabit before the host dies.

I push him to the ground from behind. I pause to catch my breath as he flails on the ground. I hear a loud, wet, gurgling sound as more tar spills from his throat--maybe he’s trying to scream.

He kicks his foot out, and my knee buckles. My back hits the ground and he’s on top of me before I realize what’s happening. My mouth opens and my thoughts still in terror. The top half of his head has vanished entirely; his skull had paved the way for the parasite’s last effort to escape. His lower jaw hangs onto nothing as it snaps off and nearly hits me. Another tendril comes from his throat, dripping wet. It creeps steadily closer to my face as the host convulses, hanging onto life by a thread. Whatever the limb is covered with drips onto my face and into my mouth and it tastes tangy and it's coming closer and I don’t want it to get closer please stop please stop--

Kate’s hand plunges deep within the half-skull of the former man. She’s elbow-deep before I see her arm tense. She’s found it. More of the tar leaks onto my face and I have to shut my eyes. Close my mouth. The weight is lifted off of me as squelching and wet cracks fill the air. I wipe my eyes quickly enough to watch as Kate harvests the source of the tendrils as easily as pulling a carrot from the ground, roots and all. The back of my neck goes haywire at the raw presence of the creature.

Using both hands, she crushes it. The slimy body breaks apart in her grip and oozes through her fingers, and we both watch in silence as the pieces fall to the ground, and the host along with it.

I rub the nape of my neck, grateful that the goosebumps have gone down, and look around wearily. We wait in silence for a bit, listening for any snaps of branches or crushed leaves, but we only hear the calls of nocturnal frogs echo through the forest. At least they’re having a peaceful night.

“I almost had him,” Kate seethes through a tight jaw. She’s ripping apart the weakly-writhing organism with her nails now, probably wishing it was my face. Even in the dark, her eyes shine like emeralds. “If you hadn’t fucked it up, he would have told me where… I was so close, Eve. What the fuck!?”

I got to my feet, kicking away the bloodied jaw into the foliage. “We don’t know if he was even telling the truth. Why are you suddenly taking their word as gospel? Another minute, and he would have had us,” I’m fiddling with the soaked sleeves of my jacket. My arms are shaking. “They’ll do anything they can to survive, and that includes lying to our faces right before eating them off. Did you just forget that?”

"Fuck you,” she picks her knife from the ground and grimaces at what covers it. Quickly wiping the blade on the jacket of the corpse, she grabs for the lantern from the center of the makeshift campsite and turns towards the darkness. With a clean hand, she wraps her fingers around the heart of the golden necklace that clings to her neck with thin tendrils. The vibrant glow of the chain matches her hair.

Kate steps a few feet forward before stopping. Her ponytail swings as she turns to glare at me. “Sometime tonight, thanks.”

I hurriedly grab my fallen knife and clutch my backpack. Gritting my teeth, I stumble after her, leaving the evidence of our survival to be shrouded in darkness.