The Pseudo-Chronicles of Mark Huntley

Becoming What We Become - 11/18/04

Thursday, November 18, 2004

We’ve been running for so long now, I haven’t had much time to stop and really think about what she and I are now—well, what we’ve become. I don’t mean what she and I are to each other, though we’ll get to that.

I mean, what frigging species are we?

Odd question, yeah. But think about it. We’re not quite homo sapiens any longer, that’s for sure. Me with my internal knife, my union with some kind of creature that can take over my body at will, and my sanity bleeding out the edges of my attention. And Naomi— with her Way of Knowing, able to survive situations that plain-vanilla humans just could not hope to survive.

We’ve killed. We have seen horrors beyond most people’s imaginings and are on our way to seek out more. We’ve allied ourselves consciously with aliens, and they are a part of each of us.

So yeah. We can no longer stand with the rest of the human race, not really.

What are we?

Maybe I shouldn’t speak for Naomi here. Maybe I should only examine what I am. I mean, that’s what has me more worried at present.

I’m thinking about what happened yesterday.

I guess it was only a matter of time until luck ran against us rather than with us. In all our travels, popping into different towns and cities, we’d just happened to stay at a safe distance from the resident muchos. But yesterday, when making a stop at Anytown, KS (you were just hoping for a third “Anytown,” weren’t you, Reader?), we ran smack into one of the purples. None of us, including the purple, saw it coming.

It happened because we needed to steal another car. See, after we ditched Sam’s car in Fill-in-the-Blank-sville, we were only able to grab another car right away because we got lucky. Some damn fool had left their keys right in the ignition of a car sitting in a Walmart parking lot. This car had served us well for a while, but we’d started to get nervous about the stolen vehicle report eventually, somehow, catching up with us. We needed to find a different ride.

As Naomi pointed out, we wanted good odds for finding another easy mark, so we’d do best to seek out another smorgasbord of options like a big-box parking lot.

The place we settled on to do our searching was the lot outside an Eagle grocery store. This was apparently where all the residents of Anytown did their food shopping—a huge place, crammed with cars, for a town of relatively small size. God bless corporate consolidation. We grinned at each other as we pulled into a spot, congratulating ourselves on stumbling across this area. At least one person here had to have pulled a careless move like leaving the keys in the car.

Now the trouble with casing all these cars was that with lots of cars came lots of people, coming and going. If any of them decided to pay attention to us for more than a few seconds, they might start to notice a… suspicious pattern. Like the fact we didn’t seem to be heading into the store at all.

But I realized that most of these people weren’t paying much attention to anything but their errands. In fact, they all seemed to be in a hurry, with their faces set in grim, worried, expressions. Many of the shoppers were coming out of the store with huge loads of goods.

“Apocalypse panic buying,” Naomi murmured to me. “They haven’t quite come to the conclusion yet that their world is ending—but they’ve got an inkling. They’re stocking up in case all the shit in the news reaches their street.”

“Well, then, let’s see who was so panicked they left their keys behind,” I said.

We tried to match the hurried pace of the other people in the lot, so we didn’t stand out. Peeked in a lot of windows as we went. And then a twinkle caught my eye in somebody’s front seat. In a nice blue sedan (hint: it’s not blue, and it’s not a sedan. I’m lying to you again, Reader, and I’ll continue to do so flagrantly. Forgive me!).