Chapter 8

The second time Jordy opened his eyes, the swirling confusion in his brain had finally settled into a pattern which made sense to him... which is why the first thing he did after sitting up was reach his right hand up behind his head, and under the collar of his lab coat. Underneath his hand he felt a large lump pressed up against his spine, extending from just below his neck down between his shoulder blades.

As he touched it, the lump writhed beneath his fingers.

"IT WORKED!" Jordy shouted in the dark, heedless of who or what might hear him. Then, remembering more about how he'd gotten here and who was chasing him, he quieted quickly, instead listening for any other sounds in the darkness.

What he heard was the scrape of a match; what he saw was a brief glow of light, obscured by unknown obstacles between him and whoever had struck it.

The silence stretched for seconds, punctured only by a long, deep exhalation of breath. Immediately afterward, Jordy heard the telltale groans and grunts of someone getting up after a long period of inactivity, followed by the muffled scrape of something heavy being pushed out of the way. The faint glow of a lit cigarette quickly appeared in the periphery of Jordy's vision, making slow and steady progress toward the place where Jordy sat. For a moment, Jordy vaguely wondered if he should run, or try to hide somewhere else. Then, a thought struck him: whoever was coming toward him was smoking! They never smoked, perhaps thinking that somehow it polluted the biology of the species they hijacked. However, like a tell in poker, it had become a weakness for the invaders - one of the easiest measures of identifying who had been taken over, and who had not.

'I wonder if any of the tobacco companies are aware how important their products have become, ' Jordy thought. 'If they do manage to take over the human race, then R.J. Reynolds and Phillip Morris are going to become extinct overnight!'

By the time he finished his thought, the person smoking the cigarette had stopped a few feet away from him; Jordy could just make out some sort of solid object sitting between them, but could see little else in the darkness.

Taking one last puff, the man flicked the remainder of his cigarette off into the darkness; Jordy watched it tumble end over end until it reached the ground and dissolved into a shower of sparks. While his head was turned, Jordy heard a soft metallic click.

"Just so there are no misunderstandings, doc, what you just heard was me cocking the hammer back on the.45 I have in my left hand. If you move in any way that I consider unfriendly, I'll be forced to shoot you. Is that clear?"

Jordy nodded, not saying anything.

"I'm glad we're straight on that. I don't want to have to kill you, especially if what you told me earlier is true. You might just be the most important human on the planet right now."

Puzzled, Jordy asked, "What I told you earlier? You mean we know each other?"

The man holding the gun sighed. "Yes, Dr. Floyd, we know each other... or I should say, we became very briefly acquainted when I spied you running from a group of your fellow doctors who seemed very intent on doing you some type of severe injury. Thinking that you must be trying to escape infection at their hands, I intervened and brought you to this place.

"Imagine my surprise when you revealed to me that you had already been infected... but that, if what you had discovered was correct, you could be the first human to consciously be able to resist their control... that you might even be linked to their group mind, yet be undetected in their midst. If it's true, that would make you, at the very least, the most formidable espionage tool we have in trying to suppress this outbreak. It would also make you the most hunted man on Earth, with the aliens stopping at nothing to kill you, and foreign governments stopping at nothing to possess you and the key to your secret. However, before any of that could possibly happen, there is still one small matter that has to be resolved.

"You have to convince me."

Jordy pondered all that he had said for a moment, and then asked "Do you mind if I ask a few questions before I make that attempt? Seeing as you seem to know more about me than I know about you?'

A derisive snort of laughter came from where Jordy knew the man was standing. "Sure, doc. I suppose we can spare a few minutes to get acquainted again."

"Thank you. I vaguely remember running away from some of my colleagues, though the reasons are a bit muddled. But you say I told you about my experiments and my hoped for results, and I remember nothing of that at all. Can you give me a brief summary of what I said to you?"

"Well, doc, by the time I got you here, you were rambling. You looked like hell; your eyes were wild and crazy, and your face was flushed and red. You told me that your name was Dr. Jordan Floyd, and that you'd been brought in by 'The Section' as part of the team of research scientists studying the few alien parasites that survived after we stopped their attempted invasion in the Midwest. After that near disaster, it had been decided not to assume that this might be an isolated incident, and to take steps to protect our people from any future danger.

"Your boss, who in this instance was pretty right on, felt we had been lucky the first time to find some 'War of the Worlds' disease that the aliens were susceptible to. Like an infection that constantly mutates to thwart the effect of antibiotics, your boss felt that these parasites might become resistant to the fatal effects of the disease, mutating into something even more dangerous to humans. So, your team had been charged with finding ways to prevent the 'slugs' from taking over human minds. You called it 'an inoculation, ' a kind of preventive shot that could injected like a vaccine; once you take it, then the aliens might be able to attach themselves to you, but they couldn't do much more. In that way, even if a killing blow couldn't be administered quickly, the most the aliens could do is freeload for a while.

"You thankfully skipped over most of the medical mumbo-jumbo, condensing it to the fact that you had experimented with ways to chemically enhance the brain so that the encroachment of the parasite's melding with its human host was rejected - fought off like an infection. For that purpose, you had to breed more parasites, and test them on numerous test animals - chimps, for the most part. You failed a lot, but you felt you were getting closer with each trial.

"Unfortunately, you also noticed that, as your boss predicted, the effect of the disease being used to kill the parasites was dwindling. Even more disturbing, the further along your experiments went, the more a new tactic of the parasites became apparent: when killed, certain parts of the brain of the host animal were destroyed, rendering them catatonic. They were vegetables, unable to perform any voluntary function at all. Yet, if one of these 'vegetables' were placed in a room with an unattached slug, the parasite would re-infect it, and it would become functional again.

"Suddenly, the vaccine became that much more important, because the mutative powers of the aliens were such that any defensive measures we took to kill the slugs would be useless after a few generations. If they were able to meld with the brain of a human, then were killed, there would be a devastating effect on brain function of the person; it would be as if they were dead anyway, at least to us. But, the aliens could go back and reanimate the person later, if we left them alive. In essence, our people would be like toy soldiers; we could remove the key from their backs, and they'd become immobile and useless. But replace the key and wind them up... and suddenly that soldier would be back in play.