“Can you believe it? Isn’t it horrible?” The driver’s eyes were puffy, mascara swiped to a gray stain under her eyes.
“Yeah,” Jessica agreed automatically.
“When first I saw the news I thought it was so early, nobody would be at work. But it was nine in the morning in New York. Those towers were full of people.” The driver wiped her nose.
The bus was nearly empty. Two little kids sat behind the driver, hugging their backpacks. The radio blared. Horror in New York. Attack on Washington. Jessica dropped into the shotgun seat and let the noise wash over her for a few minutes as they twisted slowly through the empty streets. Then she moved to the back of the bus.
When she’d gotten dressed that morning her jeans had nearly slipped off her hips. Something about that was important. She tried to concentrate, but the thoughts flitted from her grasp, darting away before she could pin them down.
She focused on the sensation within her, the buck and heave under her ribs and in front of her spine.
“What are you fixing right now?” she asked.
An ongoing challenge is the sequestration of the fecal and digestive matter that leaked into your abdominal cavity.
“What about the stuff you mentioned yesterday? The intestine and the… whatever it was.”
Once we have repaired your digestive tract and restored gut motility we will begin reconstructive efforts on your reproductive organs.
“You like big words, don’t you?”
We assure you the terminology is accurate.
There it was. That was the thing that had been bothering her, niggling at the back of her mind, trying to break through the fog.
“How do you know those words? How can you even speak English?”
We aren’t communicating in language. The meaning is conveyed by socio-linguistic impulses interpreted by the brain’s speech-processing loci. Because of the specifics of our biology, verbal communication is an irrelevant medium.
“You’re not talking, you’re just making me hallucinate,” Jessica said.
That is essentially correct.
How could the terminology be accurate, then? She didn’t know those words—cervix and whatever—so how could she hallucinate them?
“Were you watching the news when the towers collapsed?” the driver asked as she pulled into the high school parking lot. Jessica ignored her and slowly stepped off the bus.
The aliens were trying to baffle her with big words and science talk. For three days she’d had them inside her, their voice behind her eyes, their fingers deep in her guts, and she’d trusted them. Hadn’t even thought twice. She had no choice.
If they could make her hallucinate, what else were they doing to her?
The hallways were quiet, the classrooms deserted except for one room at the end of the hall with 40 kids packed in. The teacher had wheeled in an AV cart. Some of the kids hadn’t even taken off their coats.
Jessica stood in the doorway. The news flashed clips of smoking towers collapsing into ash clouds. The bottom third of the screen was overlaid with scrolling, flashing text, the sound layered with frantic voiceovers. People were jumping from the towers, hanging in the air like dancers. The clips replayed over and over again. The teacher passed around a box of Kleenex.
Jessica turned her back on the class and climbed upstairs, joints creaking, jeans threatening to slide off with every step. She hitched them up. The biology lab was empty. She leaned on the cork board and scanned the parasite diagrams. Ring worm. Tape worm. Liver fluke. Black wasp.
Some parasites can change their host’s biology, the poster said, or even change their host’s behavior.
Jessica took a push pin from the board and shoved it into her thumb. It didn’t hurt. When she ripped it out a thin stream of blood trickled from the skin, followed by an ooze of clear amber from deep within the gash.
What are you doing?
None of your business, she thought.
Everything is going to be okay.
No it won’t, she thought. She squeezed the amber ooze from her thumb, let it drip on the floor. The aliens were wrenching her around like a puppet, but without them she would be dead. Three times dead. Maybe she should feel grateful, but she didn’t.
“Why didn’t you want me to go to the hospital?” she asked as she slowly hinged down the stairs.
They couldn’t have helped you, Jessica. You would have died.
Again, Jessica thought. Died again. And again.
“You said that if I die, you die too.”
When your respiration stops, we can only survive for a limited time.
The mirror in the girls’ bathroom wasn’t real glass, just a sheet of polished aluminum, its shine pitted and worn. She leaned on the counter, rested her forehead on the cool metal. Her reflection warped and stretched.
“If I’d gone to the hospital, it would have been bad for you. Wouldn’t it?”
That is likely.
“So you kept me from going. You kept me from doing a lot of things.”
We assure you that is untrue. You may exercise your choices as you see fit. We will not interfere.
“You haven’t left me any choices.”
Jessica left the bathroom and walked down the hall. The news blared from the teacher’s lounge. She looked in. At least a dozen teachers crowded in front of an AV cart, backs turned. Jessica slipped behind them and ducked into the teachers’ washroom. She locked the door.
It was like a real bathroom. Air freshener, moisturizing lotion, floral soap. Real mirror on the wall and a makeup mirror propped on the toilet tank. Jessica put it on the floor.
“Since when do bacteria have spaceships?” She pulled her sweater over her head and dropped it over the mirror.
Jessica, you’re not making sense. You’re confused.
She put her heel on the sweater and stepped down hard. The mirror cracked.
Go to the hospital now, if you want.
“If I take you to the hospital, what will you do? Infect other people? How many?”
Jessica, please. Haven’t we helped you?
“You’ve helped yourself.”
The room pitched and flipped. Jessica fell to her knees. She reached for the broken mirror but it swam out of reach. Her vision telescoped and she batted at the glass with clumsy hands. A scream built behind her teeth, swelled and choked her. She swallowed it whole, gulped it, forced it down her throat like she was starving.
You don’t have to do this. We aren’t a threat.
She caught a mirror shard in one fist and swam along the floor as the room tilted and whirled. With one hand she pinned it to the yawning floor like a spike, windmilled her free arm and slammed her wrist down. The walls folded in, collapsing on her like the whole weight of the world, crushing in.
She felt another scream building. She forced her tongue between clenched teeth and bit down. Amber fluid oozed down her chin and pooled on the floor.
Please. We only want to help.
“Night night, baby,” she said, and raked the mirror up her arm.
The fluorescent light flashed overhead. The room plunged into darkness as a world of pain dove into her for one hanging moment. Then it lifted. Jessica convulsed on the floor, watching the bars of light overhead stutter and compress to two tiny glimmers inside the thin parched shell of her skull. And she died, finally, at last.
MEN ARE TROUBLE
James Patrick Kelly
James Patrick Kelly has won the Hugo, Nebula, and Locus awards; his fiction has been translated into twenty-one languages. His most recent book is the 2018 story collection The Promise of Space from Prime Books. His most recent novel was Mother Go, published in 2017 as an Audible original audiobook on Audible.com. He writes a column on the internet for Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine and is on the faculty of the Stonecoast Creative Writing MFA Program at the University of Southern Maine. Find him on the web at www.jimkelly.net.