Infected (24 page)

But the important thing wasn’t the new speech, it was their paranoid fear of cops. Was this some kind of instinctive memory? How could it be that they didn’t know why they were in his body, but they knew enough to fear the police? Were they just plain lying to him? What did they have to gain by being honest about anything? But he’d
felt
their fear of the police. Or maybe…maybe it wasn’t police at all. Maybe it was men in uniforms.

Perry realized that when he thought of cops or police, his initial mental image was that of a Michigan state trooper. Those guys were always fairly big, with immaculate uniforms, robotic politeness and a very prominent gun.

This was probably the picture the Triangles read, because it was the first thing
he
thought of when he heard the word
cop.
And his mental image of the state troopers—with their perfect uniforms and attitudes and guns—wasn’t really that of a cop as much as it was that of…

Of…

A soldier.

Were the Triangles afraid of soldiers? Two possibilities flashed through Perry’s mind. Either the Triangles knew what soldiers were by experience or instinct, or they had a broader knowledge of the world around them than they let on. Somehow they knew things that Perry didn’t.

A brief flicker of hope flared up in his chest. The Triangles feared soldiers. Was there some group that knew of the Triangles? If so, did it mean that Perry wasn’t the only one suffering through this horror?

“Why do you think they’re coming to get you?”

Pause.

Lumpy sound.

they WANT to kill us

kill Kill KILL

“How do you know that? How can you when you don’t even know where you come from?”

A double pause.

talking to friends

Friends. Were there other Triangles? Were there other people infected with these things? Maybe he
wasn’t
the only one—maybe this was bigger than just him.

“What do these friends say?”

Only a short pause this time.

hungry feed us

“Your friends are hungry too?”

hungry feed us feed

Feed FEED

“Oh,
you’re
hungry?”

feed Feed FEED

Feed feed

“Forget about the food,” Perry said insistently. “Tell me about your friends. Where are they?”

FEED NOW

The command sounded like a cannon exploding inside his head. His eyes shut tight. His teeth ground in reaction to the pain.

FEED NOW

Perry let out a small, choked groan, he couldn’t think straight, he couldn’t grip what he needed to do to

FEED NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW NOW

“Shut the fuck up!”
Perry shouted as loudly as he could, his voice a deep, guttural blast of pain and anger. “We’ll eat,
we’ll eat!
Just stop screaming in my head!”

okay feed us now okay

feed us now now now

Like the return stroke of a bowstring after release of an arrow, his mind snapped back to normal. A single tear trailed down his cheek. Their shouting had been so intense he’d been unable to move, almost unable to speak.

now Now Now

Perry jumped up as he heard their intensity start to creep higher. He’d hopped the eight hops to the kitchen before he gave it a second thought, his body acting from fear of that pain.

He was snapping to attention like a soldier under orders, not thinking, only doing as he was told, like some good little Nazi carrying out the master plan.
Jawohl, Herr Kommandant. I’ll kill the Jews and the Gypsies and the Czechs because I have no mind of my own, and it’s okay because someone told me to do it.
He was a robot, a remote-controlled servant. It humiliated him, somehow dug away at his pride as a man. A man, after all, was in charge of his own destiny, not at the whim of some slave driver, some controller.

He tried to console his damaged pride by telling himself he was very hungry and would have eaten anyway—it wasn’t because the Triangles had told him to. But that was bullshit. Right now he felt like a puppet on a string, doing a funky little dance each time the Starting Five tweaked at one of his nerves. Worse than a puppet—he felt like he was ten years old again, jumping with fear every time his father spoke.

Still had the Ragu. He fished it out of the fridge and pulled a box of Rice-A-Roni from the cupboard. He was almost out of food and would have to shop very soon. Wouldn’t that be a hoot? The condemned man, dying of some freaky parasite, pushing a cart at Kroger’s and picking out the last meal he would cook for himself. Now that’s a liberal death row.

A flash of cooking inspiration came to him as he put the Rice-A-Roni back and grabbed the half-full bag of Cost Cutter rice. No noodles, but the Ragu looked just too darn good to pass up. Fishing a measuring cup out of the cupboard, he set a pot to boil.

now Now now

The words drifted menacingly through his head.

“Just hold your horses. Dinner’s going to be ready in about twenty minutes.”

now now now

“It’s not ready yet,” Perry urged, his voice pleading. He poured the Ragu into a mismatched pot and set it to simmer. “Like I said, you’ll just have to wait a few minutes.”

The lumpy noise probed at his brain.

what is a minute

sonofabitch

“A minute. You know, sixty seconds.” It seemed so obvious it was difficult to explain. It was odd the Triangles wouldn’t know the concept of time. “Do you know what a second is? What time is?”

second no time yes

That reply came back fast, with only a touch of lumpy noise. They knew what time was. He’d have to illustrate “a second.” He looked at the clock on the stove—if they could see that, it would be easy to explain.

“You can’t…” A chill washed over him, cutting off the question. Suddenly he wasn’t sure if he wanted an answer. “You can’t…see…can you? See through my eyes?” He hadn’t given much thought to exactly what these bastards could do. They could “read” his mind, in the literal sense, so could they pick up and read optical impulses from his brain? Pick them off in midstream?

no we cannot see

The answer was a relief, but a short-lived relief, cut in half by the rest of the answer:

not yet

Not yet.

They were still growing. Maybe they were simply going to take over his mind, pushing Perry’s own consciousness out of the way one step at a time. Maybe they were slowly choking out his brain, just as a gangly, fibrous weed in a garden methodically robs sustenance from a rose. The rose may be beautiful, glowing and soft, but the weed…the weed is the survivor, the one that grows in harsh soil, rocks, bad weather, low light. The one that faces impossible conditions and not only survives, but flourishes.

Perry was suddenly quite sure he knew what was happening—the Triangles were growing
into
him, taking over his body and his mind, keeping the shell, leaving the outside world none the wiser.
Invasion of the Body Snatchers.
It was the typical Hollywood script. And why not? It made sense. Why send armies and conquer the earth when you could slowly replace the human race? More efficient, more economic. Neater.
Tidier.
No messy bodies to clean up. Better even than the infamous neutron bomb that killed all the people and left the buildings standing.

Soon they’d tap in to his eyes. What next? His nose? Hell, maybe they were already smelling the rice simmering on the stove. Or maybe his mouth—they could speak to him through his own voice. Then what? His muscles? His very motions? Just how efficient were the little bastards?

And how long were they going to be
little
? Maybe they weren’t separate at all. Maybe they were just different parts with different missions. Living jigsaw-puzzle pieces all planning on connecting in the swinging-singles Triangle bar known as Perry’s Place.

A warm flash of fuzzy noise interrupted his doom-and-gloom thoughts.

how long is a second

how long is a minute

how long

Perry desperately wanted to avoid that mental screaming, that insistent chain saw of Triangle demand grinding through his thoughts.

“Okay, let’s figure this out.” He talked quickly, hoping to prevent any agitation. “See, a minute is sixty seconds, and a second is a very short piece of time.” The fuzzy noise seemed stuck on a high-pitched buzz—as he talked, they searched the database to keep up with the meaning of his words. “And a second is, like, this long…here, I’ll count to five using seconds. Pay attention to how long each count is, and that’s a second. One…two…three…four…five.” A flash of childhood memory reared to the surface, the jazzy counting song from the show
The Electric Company
(one-two-three four, five, six-seven-eight-nine-ten, eleven tweh-eh-eh-elve).

“That was five seconds, get it?” The high-pitched searching grew louder, followed only by the briefest buzz of a low pitch.

second is short

minute is sixty

seconds hour is sixty

minutes correct

All inflection left the Starting Five’s voice. He could only assume that the word
correct
had been part of a question and not a statement, as there wasn’t even the smallest lilt in the words that echoed through his head. Whatever the reason for their brief digression into spaced-out land, they had returned to their emotionless monotone.

“Correct.” He’d never mentioned the concept of an “hour.” They had pulled it out of his brain, probably based on its association with the minute and the second. Their ability to scan his brain grew faster and faster.

It hit him—quite suddenly, with the shuddering force of truth and revelation—that people were just complicated machines. They were no different than computers. The brain was simply a control center and a storage device; when you needed to remember something, the brain sent some kind of signal to recall stored data, exactly like telling a program to open a file. The command was sent, and another part of the computer

twenty-four hours in

a day

looked for data with code that matched the command, found it and sent that information to the processor where it was read and displayed on the screen. The brain was
exactly
the same thing. Memories were stored in there somehow, some chemical process tied up in the cerebrum or cerebellum or what have you. With the right technology, you could read that stored data as easily as you could read the stored data in a hard drive, or the stored data on the pages of a book. They were all just mediums for keeping track of simple bits of information that

seven days in a week

formed something more complex. But just like matter (compounds, then elements, then atoms, then protons and electrons), everything could be broken down into smaller and smaller parts.

It was looking more and more like the Triangles were constructed to read those little parts…to be able to fetch Perry’s stored memories off the hard drive he’d been carrying since before his birth: his brain. The sheer

four weeks in a month

complexity of the Triangles’ ability was daunting. And they learned quickly; their search times seemed to grow progressively faster. They were also learning not only to pick up the single memory or word he had spoken, but associated words and memories as well. So far it looked like they could only tap into his long-term memory: time concepts, vocabulary, words with images attached in order to define meanings.

These creatures

twelve months in

a year

had the ability to read his brain like a hard drive, but they had no initial concept of simple things like

ten years in a decade

time, or the technology of television, or that voices could be projected, not real.

Something was missing from this mystery, or perhaps something was just a bit out of place. He still didn’t know what the Triangles were, where they came from or how long he had until they took over his body.

But maybe he could stop them. Maybe…if he got help.

The mythical Soldiers were out there, and they
knew.
They knew about the Triangles. They wanted to kill the Triangles. Fuck up the Starting Five and send them packing. The big question, Perry old boy, the big twenty-thousand-dollar question is
who are these “soldiers”?

This wasn’t Hollywood. There were no Men in Black to save the day with a handsome smile and a witty comment. No
X-Files
agents crashing through his door to cast plaintive looks his way. No superhero from another planet with a special gun to blast the boogers right out of his body. He didn’t know whom to call, where to go, but there had to be somebody out there.