Sudden and insatiable, an ever present need to devour biomass of any kind. It comes like a tidal wave taking over the host body until it consumes them wholly. Next is the loss of acute, then major motor functions, followed by loss of cognitive functions. Finally an entire loss of self... total brain death.
The slug takes over.
It’s not actually a slug, but that’s what I’ve taken to calling them until some Nobel Prize vying fuck finds our corpses in a couple hundred rygons and decides to name it after themselves...
As I lay wasting away on the floor of The Archibald’s medbay, the puppeted corpse of Johanson, our biologist, pounding at the other side of the door, I rack my brain for what she gleaned on these gelatinous creatures before she succumbed to one herself... First, the aforementioned gelatinous nature, they’re boneless and can apparently squeeze through crevices as thin as a coin when they’re not using my crew’s corpses like playthings.
Second, the aformentioned hunger, these things are hungry. The time it took for the first to slip from its storage crate in our cargo hold, to completely decimating our six month ration supply was only about three hours. Despite their intense need to consume, their endurance is astounding. I guess once they crawl in someone’s head they operate in a sort of “low power mode” because it’s been four days since the outbreak - and while my body starts to consume itself from inside out with hunger pains, my guts gnawing and ripping themselves apart, these... things haven’t relented for a moment. The ship’s been filled with the echoing footsteps of walking corpses for 98 hours straight, at least I think that’s right, I lost my com-pad on day one of the incident and my brain is feeling all kinds of disoriented from the lack of sleep and nutrients.
Anyway, the last thing we figured out about the slugs is how they appear to reproduce. Hermaphroditic, cellular division on a macro-level, whatever you want to call it, these things can divide and eject themselves from a host body. They split and rapidly expel themselves from an orifice, usually directly into another orifice as Johanson learned first-hand when Reyes’ corpse vomited one of these things into her throat, an image I don’t think I’ll ever be able to forget. Gods... the fear in her eyes as it was happening, I could tell she wanted to scream, to call my name, beg for help, but the slug being rocketed down her throat prevented her from letting out so much as a gasp...
I wonder what her last words would have been...
As for where these things come from and how they got in our cargo? Big fucking mystery, one we’ll all take to our graves if I bite the big one out here.
I roll on my side, the cool metallic floors of the medbay feel good on my flushed cheeks, and for a moment I’m almost able to forget where I am, almost able to forget the nightmare on the other side of the - SLAM. Johanson’s body must have resumed throwing itself against the door. It comes in waves, she starts, gets bored, forgets I’m in here, then gets fixated on breaking in and picks up where she left off. I snap out of it, and as I sit up, catching my breath from my most recent panic attack, I refamiliarize myself with the slate gray walls of this fucking medbay. These blank walls which I have been fruitlessly acquainting myself with, trying to stare holes through for the past four fucking days. Gods, why couldn’t Reyes have at least hung up a CPR poster or some shit? Was he allergic to interior design?
As Johanson’s pounding dies down, and my heart rate slows back toward resting,I can’t help but continue to think about Reyes. He fell during the second day of the incident. The guy was always prattling on about old holo-vids, he called it nostalgia but most of us called it living in the past.I mean, getting a routine check-up from him was basically like sitting through one of these things. He used to fire off quotes one after another, after another, all of them going over our heads. It’s funny the things you start to miss about people after they’re gone. As I lay on the floor, my brain swims with some of his old favorites, eventually landing on one uniquely apt for the situation I find myself in currently. So as impatience reaches an insurmountable threshold and I gather myself, struggle off the floor and to my feet, I feel the words “Get busy living, or get busy dying” slip past my lips.
I look towards the medbay’s only door, Johanson has quieted her pounding for the time being, but opening it and risking facing her, as well as the rest of the crew loose on the ship, head on is not an option.
I look towards the air-vent in the far corner of the room, if I pried it off and stripped out of my vacc-suit I bet I could fit through. It should only be a short crawl to the bridge from here, and from there... I don’t know, maybe Eli has a copy of “Flying Starships for Dummies” lying around in the glove compartment. Worst case, the engine backfires and implodes or I crash the thing into a moon trying to navigate it back to civilization... both of which would be better than starving to death in a drab room or being taken by one of those slugs.
The vent’s grille comes off with ease, I set it down gently in the corner so as to not arouse Johanson on the other side of the door. I can’t help but groan and grunt as I proceed to take off my vacc-suit. The thing is cumbersome as hell and I find myself out of breath by the end of it. It goes to show what an involuntary four day fast will do to you I guess. Though maybe my newfound diet is a good thing, because as I heave myself up into the air vent, I’m surprised with the ease in which I fit in its steel confines. My shoulders pop and creak as I begin to inch my way forward through the vent, and as my elbows scrape against the vent walls, I can’t help but think I’d feel claustrophobic under different, less life threatening, circumstances.
Ten yards I must have crawled before I take notice of a grille built into the bottom side of the vent shaft. It looks down onto one of the ship’s hallways, outside the men’s dormitory I think. I slow my pace trying to quiet the metallic moans of the vent under my weight, and as I approach this grille, morbid curiosity causes me to peer down into the hallway below for a moment.
Footsteps. I hear them approaching. Shuffling, sliding, barely lifting themselves off the ground. After a moment, their source comes into view as McCaffery’s corpse comes shuffling down the hall. He was the third to fall I think, cornered in the - Gods what’s become of him... I look closer through the slats of the grille, nearly pressing my face through it to verify what I’m seeing. Cyan liquid drips from every orifice - ears, nose, mouth, tear ducts - all brimming with this alien secretion. His head has ballooned, swollen with the foreign intrusion infecting his body, it looks ready to burst from within. I can’t help but imagine it popping, painting the walls of the hallway below with viscera. I choke back the impulse to expel what little bile remains in my system, but not quickly enough, the thing below stops dead in the center of the hall, I angle my arm forward to cover my mouth. McCaffery remains eerily still for what feels like an eternity. There’s a deafening silence only broken by the subtle drops of goo falling from McCaffery’s ears onto the floor. I try to control my breathing as I feel the panic swell up within me like a dam fit to burst. McCaffery shuffles backwards a step, he turns, first his upper body then his feet, the way he drunkenly moves is like watching a puppet performing some macabre dance. McCaffery looks around, slowly scanning the details of the hallway around him, curious, methodical, like a predator seeking its next meal. As he begins to turn his attention upward, I can’t help but stare into his eyes, dead, blank, near bulging from his head as traces of the slug’s goo makes its way from within the socket past the eyeball. My stomach churns again.
Then, just as quickly as his attention was drawn, it’s lost. McCaffery turns his head down, he begins to shuffle back down the hallway, dragging his feet and leaving a faint trail of slug secretions in his wake. Two minutes of lying in a dark air vent in silence go by before I deem it safe to budge an inch, but as my retinal cones adjust to the darkness ahead and silence once again consumes this portion of the ship, I harden my resolve and begin to press on toward the bridge once more.
It’s maybe another twenty yard crawl through the ventilation shaft until I arrive at a sealed grille that opens up to the bridge, and as I position myself to peer down into the room, pressing my face to the grille’s slats, I can’t believe I’m so fucking stupid. Captain Archibald. Patient zero, the first to be taken, Eli locked him on the bridge on the first day of the incident, not before getting infected himself of course.
What’s strange, as I survey the scene below me from my vent, I can’t help but notice Archibald’s body is slumped in the pilot’s chair, immobile. The slugs are hunters, seekers, they don’t get bored, and they don’t tire out, at least not from what I’ve seen... so why is this one stuck?
Is it sleeping?
Dead?
Did it finally starve?
It is the oldest of the lot, so it makes sense it would be the first to kick the bucket once the food supply ran out, but I can’t be sure...
I wait. I wait an agonizing amount of time. I wait until my legs fall asleep, and then I wait some more. My internal clock, perpetually flawed since childhood, tells me it’s been between two and three hours, but I have no way of confirming. Two to three hours of lying, staring at a motionless corpse, its visage being burned into my head, its head fit to bursting like McCaffery’s was.Not a movement. Not so much as a finger twitching.
Did these things get bigger?
As my stomach growls and my eyelids begin to drop, I know I have to move. It’s risky, but the only way through is forward, at least that’s what I tell myself as I reach for the internal fasteners keeping the grille closed. Unhooked, I gently lower the grille down toward the bridge’s floor - Shit. I’m too high up, my arms won’t reach and the grille’s too big to pull into the vent with me. My only option is to drop the thing.
Deep breath.
Consider it a litmus test for whether the slug inside the captain is actually dead or not. I lower the grille as much as my arm’s reach will allow and... release. It clatters to the ground with, what is compared to the previously present blanket of silence, a deafening clang that echoes across the bridge. I shrink back into the vent, using its dark confines as cover should Archibald awaken, and... nothing.
I stop to think. If the slug is really dead, what could have killed it? If it’s starvation, surely the others will follow soon... could I outlast them? Perhaps it’s the ship’s artificial atmosphere? The oxygenator is still operational, but maybe the slugs need something else to survive? There’s too many variables and my body is growing too weak to wait and see if this problem will just “sort itself out”.
I wait for another thirty seconds for a delayed reaction, yet still no movement from the captain. So I inch forward and out of the ventilation shaft, lowering myself down into the bridge with the grace of a newborn calf. Thank the stars for my apparent luck, in my current state I’m not sure I have what it would take to face one of these things in an altercation.
I can’t help but let out a grunt as I climb to my feet and begin to cross the bridge towards the ship’s main console, keeping both eyes locked on the captain’s body the entire time. As I draw closer to both I can’t help but be transfixed on the grim details of the captain’s facade. His eyes have burst from his head leaving empty sockets leaking an all too familiar cyan colored goo. His body is bloated and beginning to rot from days of sitting in a post-mortem state. His face is twisted with a sickening smile plastered across his face, the slug within causing immense pressure that pushes his individual teeth forward like kernels ready to pop. His skin-
Wait- Why the fuck is he smiling-
I can barely finish my thought before I feel a hand clasped tight around my throat. Archibald has lurched forward. I’m caught off guard.
Was this fucker playing dead?
I’d stop to consider the ramifications, but I can feel oxygen being cut off from my brain as my windpipe is pressed shut. Shit. As Archibald rises, I go with him, suspended in the air as he chokes the fucking life out of me.
Why is he so strong?
As my vision begins to blur, I kick wildly, trying to find purchase on any susceptible portions of his body - Success, a heel to the lower ribs knocks him off balance, he tumbles to the floor, but his iron grip causes me to go tumbling with him. We’re both prone, I know I need the high ground, I need to climb on top of him. Pinning his shoulder to the ground, I sweep my leg over and mount the captain, the struggle has barely begun and I can already feel my lungs about to give out. I cock a fist back, but catch an upward strike to the chin before I can release it. My teeth clamp down, I can feel a warm rush of liquid fill my mouth immediately. My ears start to ring as I bring my left fist down onto the captain’s skull, then my right, then my left again, his face becoming even more malformed with each strike. I stare into his socketless eyes, his face is still smiling with that gut wrenching grin. Amid my flurry of blows, the captain opens his mouth, a fountain of cyan goo shoots from it like a firehose. I avert my gaze, turning my head to the side, but feel some of the gelatinous texture begin to mix with the blood in my mouth. As the torrent of goo ceases, I lurch.
I heave. I spit.
I continue my assault, turning back to the captain pinned underneath my weight. I bring both fists down onto his skull, again and again, I feel its texture turn from hardened bone to pudding with each successive strike. The captain stops moving. I continue to pound away, not stopping until I’m certain this fucking thing is dead. The viscera of shattered skull fragments, brainmatter, slug, and blood from my own split knuckles all mix together on the floor of the bridge, and as I continue to hurl downward strikes, I hear myself screaming in agony, a guttural and barbaric yell that is completely involuntary.
Exhaustion takes me as I roll off the captain’s body and onto my back next to him, and as my ears begin to stop ringing, I hear the pounding of the remaining slugs on the bridge doors, it seems the commotion has called them forth. Lucky for me, the doors remain locked and sturdy, thank you Eli.
After a few moments, my composure returns to me and I feel capable of sitting up, then eventually standing. I ignore the vigorous pounding at the doors behind me as I place myself in the pilot’s seat. It takes a few minutes, some trial and error, but I’m able to familiarize myself enough with the litany of buttons, switches, and knobs to get the engine on. I carefully test the thruster output, the ship lurches forward, my neck is barely able to support the weight of my own head at this point, but we’re moving.
I’m able to breathe a sigh of relief as I check the navigation data for the nearest civilized settlement. Once I arrive I can inform customs as to what’s happened and they can send an armed force to clear out the ship. I grab the steering sticks, push forward, and begin to coast through the void.
This will all be over soon.
As the ship’s speed begins to ramp up, I can’t help but think to myself... Fuck I’m hungry...
