Saturday, November 5th, 1:43 a.m.
Paul watched the proceedings with a mixture of envy and awe. A twelve-year-old and a homeless man accomplished the impossible, a selfless act without any benefit to themselves. They sacrificed themselves so that a worthless piece of shit like himself could live. Without them, Paul would have been a meal for a hungry group of predators, becoming a living piece of irony. The embodiment of gluttony being eaten by those he despised.
He'd lost sight of the millionaire when the man had reached the top of the structure. He didn't see the man until he was a violet blur streaking through the air and colliding with the ground. The shape had been none other than Vergil Wilson. Paul didn't care if the man was bulletproof, no one could survive that fall.
The ground reverberated with the force of the impact. The earth shivered like a pebble rippled across the glassy surface of a placid lake. Cavitations in the earth spread from the center of the drive-in. Instead of the soothing ripples of water, each ripple made the ground more unstable underneath the truck. Paul closed his eyes at each pass, fearing that the weight of the truck would send them tumbling into the freshly dug network of underground tunnels. It wasn't a matter of if, but when.
A crackling sound permeated the air around Paul as if the all of the atmosphere had become charged with electricity. He felt the hairs on his arms stand on end. Goosebumps prickled the flesh of his arm, the little hairs standing on end. If Paul looked close enough, he could see little motes of purple flitting around in the air, like mischievous fireflies. Every second, the crackling grew louder, and the movements of the particles became increasingly frenetic. A sweet smell wafted through the air, the smell of a fresh roast marinating in the oven. It gave the crackling sound a whole new meaning, the smell of fat sizzling in intense heat.
Nothing but a good ol' fashioned human barbecue. Do you want an arm or a leg?
Paul shook his head to dispel the manic thought, and at his own hunger. It felt like an eternity since his mother had brought him bacon that morning.
"Get your ass moving Poindexter!" Paul shouted at the driver's seat of the truck where Vyth was sitting.
The gawking bystanders were jarred out of their reverie and crammed into the truck. None of them decided to sit with Paul, be he couldn't say he blamed them, his shirt was still stained with vomit.
When they were all safe and snug, The Being behind the wheel of the truck looked at the chaos, his eyes were devoid of hope. The truck lurched into motion almost spilling Paul out of the bed and Paul had to clutch at the sides to keep himself from tumbling out. He wouldn't be among the casualties tonight, not after all he'd been through.
Or all that's been sacrificed.
The ground still shook underneath the truck like a vibrating hotel mattress, but as the truck put distance between them and the crater, the rumbling ceased. In the night sky, Paul could discern the faintest dark shape, and he realized it was the flying kid.
Paul would've thought he would follow them like a lost puppy, but instead he hovered over the crater, like a sentinel as if he needed to watch the devastation himself.
Maybe he is waiting for her. He wants to be the hero swoop her off into safety, but life isn't a comic book kid.
Even if she had been able to kill all of them, the earth would have engulfed her, leaving her to suffocate to death. Paul hoped the monsters got to her first, she didn't deserve a slow painful death. Jordan Bryant deserved a rest.
Paul wished he was close enough to smack some sense into the boy. No one should have to watch their friend die, not even an annoying twerp like that kid. It was the least Paul could do for Jordan.
The truck hit a bump in the road and sent a jolt of pain ripping through his spine, pain that shocked him back into reality. None of these people gave a damn about him.
When all the action fades, these mouth breathers are going to want my head on a silver platter. They won't give a rat's ass that I saved their bacon. They would rather focus on the fact that he'd killed that lunatic of a police officer when Paul had just saved them from being human barbecue
Life's just not fair, people are ungrateful bastards.
Paul did not relish the thought of going to prison. He couldn't imagine how a paraplegic, morbidly obese murderer would be treated, and he didn't want to find out. That is assuming they even let him go to prison. If the government even got a whiff of what he could do, he would be whisked away to a government facility where he couldn't even get a decent meal. If they didn't want to study him, they'd probably eliminate him on principle.
America tends to nuke and ask questions later. Why solve a puzzle when you can blow it up?
The Being drove at grandma speed, a speed that Paul would have found infuriating if it weren't the only thing keeping him from spilling onto the gravel.
On accident.
Paul wrapped himself in his tendrils until he was as snug as a pig in a blanket and rolled out of the moving vehicle with his eyes clamped shut. Someone with as much loose folds of fat as himself did not land with grace, but his smooth and oily tendrils softened the impact. The only effect the fall had on him was the wind being driven from his lungs.
He looked at the truck as it faded into the night. It hadn't slowed down at all. Paul was surprised that such a drastic change in weight hadn't tipped them off. The suspension must have shot up like a teeter-totter. He attributed their error to stupidity or shock, more likely, it was both.
Paul's position, helpless in the middle of a road was less than ideal but more ideal than being behind bars or murdered by a crazy Asian. It was only a matter of time before even people as slow-witted as those people realized Paul was missing, so he needed to come up with a plan fast. He couldn't crawl across the road even if he had enough strength to do so. He'd been too heavy to move for a long time.
Something niggled at the back of Paul's mind, like a word on the tip of the tongue, but trying to focus on it made it scurry away. It was something that happened over the course of the night, something he should've noticed but hadn't. Paul did not operate well under pressure, and this was no exception. He knew deep down whatever he had missed was vital to get him out of this predicament, but all he could focus on was what he'd lost.
He longed for the comfort of the Relaxzen Rocker and his mother's quilt. He wished he had grabbed it when he had been crawling for his life, but one rarely thought of blankets when they were on the brink of death. Paul imagined the look of deep hurt in his mother's eyes when he had to tell her that he'd lost her quilt.
I'm going to get that damn quilt back whatever it takes.
Already knowing the effort was futile, Paul tried to use his arms to pull himself along the ground, but his arms felt like lead weights instead of anything useful. The top half of Paul's body still ached from falling twenty feet and then dragging himself against asphalt. The thought of wearing down his already tender and bleeding skin did not sound like his idea of a pleasant time. He decided to lay on his back and admire the night sky and hope that the rest of the night would prove uneventful.
It really is a beautiful night.
Stars crowded the sky. They clustered against each other polluting the pure, inky blackness of the night sky. Stars made it impossible to truly appreciate the oblivion of space. Annoying as they may be, Paul couldn't take his eyes off them. Right before his eyes, the stars had started to rearrange themselves. Paul watched them with rapt attention, not able to decide whether or not they were real or the product of bone-deep exhaustion.
One star had a reddish cast to it. As a child who had nothing but time alone, astronomy became a passing hobby of his. Paul's instinct was to name the star Mars, but that didn't sit right. He shouldn't have been able to see the planet at this time of year.
The red star seemed to draw in Paul's eyes, leaving him unable to tear away his gaze. It hung there, emblazoned in the night's sky like a festering wound. It didn't look bright. The star burned with a feverish glow that was a blemish on the otherwise pristine night sky. While the other stars seemed to orbit around it, the red star stood still.
Despite their meandering paths, every orbit drew closer to the red star. It was a slow and inexorable path that each star seemed intent on following. As each star made contact with the fevered star, they disappeared. The red star did not gain in size or brightness, but whatever it touched ceased to exist.
Paul lie there helplessly, as all-natural light was engulfed by the hungry entity in the sky. A tendril slapped Paul in the face leaving red spots in his vision. It had shaped itself into a flat spatula-like protrusion and whacked Paul in the face with as much strength as it possessed. He tore his gaze free from red anti-star and realized he couldn't see anything. The thing had swallowed all visible light. Paul couldn't even see the hand in front of his face.
Forget the quilt, I just want to be in my room with the nightlight on, my mother tucking me into my sheets, and kissing me on the forehead.
The tendrils seemed to read his mind. They writhed with an eagerness that bespoke an intelligence of their own, each a product of his fractious mind.
Who wouldn't be going crazy after something like this? The crazy thing would be to be okay after all this.
As Paul thought the words, the tendrils popped out of existence. He had to expend extra effort just to retrieve them, but this time they were placid, eager to obey Paul's every command. There was no trace of the eerie intelligence they had displayed before, and not one of them slapped him in the face.
He tried to relinquish conscious control to see if they would start to act on their own, but they evaporated the moment he let go. Paul regretted having left the truck when he did. He could have just waited until they drove him into town, and he could have killed them all there, where his house would have been a reasonable distance away. Now he had no idea where he was, and no way to escape.
What is it I'm not realizing?
Paul's teeth chattered against each other, and Paul was hugging his arms to his chest. Gooseflesh prickled underneath the hairy coat covering his arms. Despite his best efforts, Paul could do nothing to dispel the shivers starting to wrack his body. Where his bare skin made contact with the cold stone, Paul's body was leeching heat at a dangerous rate. Paul wasn't much of an outdoorsman, but this felt like it was well below the temperature that could kill him.
He closed his eyes and was plagued by the image of Perry Durant's heart spurting out of his chest.
Regrettable but necessary.
Paul told himself that, but the words gave him little comfort. By all accounts, the man the perfect representation of what the justice system should be, but Paul chose his own miserable existence instead. In his own twisted way, Paul had rationalized himself as another positive force in the universe. Paul was a biological accountant, eliminating individuals from the equation who lied, cheated, and stole. Now that he'd killed someone who didn't deserve it, Paul found the rationalization to be a tough pill to swallow.
The flat end of a spatula hit slammed into his jaw. The tendril seemed to say, "Snap the fuck out of it. We didn't come this far for you to pussy out and grow a conscience."
The tendril was right. With enough research, Paul was sure that he would find all of Officer Durant's dirty laundry. The guy was probably a scummy piece of shit just like the rest of society, and Paul was doing the world a favor by getting rid of him.
The smack to the face jogged something else loose in his mind.
Since when have the tendrils been able to shape themselves?
In an effort easier than breathing, Paul had been subconsciously shaping the tendrils into whatever suited his purpose, but until that evening, Paul couldn't remember a single time he had done something like that. Was it possible his gift was more bounteous than he realized? That the confines of his sheltered life had limited his creativity, and he had blossomed under intense pressure?
Paul called the four tendrils into existence. Until this point, Paul had always viewed the tentacles of an enormous creature from the depths of the abyss, so that is what they had remained.
But what if they could be so much more?
Like a lump of clay, Paul tried forming the tendrils into new and exciting shapes.
Paul imagined a long and cylindrical shape with a hardened shell that could withstand even his tremendous girth. He divided the tendrils into multiple chitinous segments with a hinge joint between each section that would allow for flexibility and range of motion. Finally, he sharpened the tips of the limbs into a point with a slight hook-like projection that could used to latch onto most surfaces.
When all was said and done, Paul realized that his creations closely resembled the physiology of a spider. They sprouted from the small of his back adjacent to his thoracic vertebrae. Probing with his fresh, new legs, Paul latched dug each piece into the frost-hardened earth. Securely fastened, Paul pushed himself upwards, lifting him off the ground.
The movement produced an effect that left Paul hovering over the earth, his limbs akimbo. He left two tendrils planted in the ground at any given time and used the others to propel himself forward. The going was slow as each movement sent Paul lurching forward almost knocking him off balance and tumbling onto the ground. Distributing his weight evenly proved to be a difficult task, but the tendrils seemed to have an intuition that made up for Paul's complete lack of grace.
When Paul started moving at a quicker pace, Paul's thoughts graduated from trying to move to thinking about starvation and temperature. The winds rushing past Paul were leeching the heat from his body at a rapid rate.
Paul had never found it necessary to equip his closet with outfits designed to withstand the elements. He figured if he just stacked layers of T-shirts and sweatpants on top of each other he would be able to nullify the worst effects of the cold. The natural insulation of his thick layer of fat could handle the rest.
Once Paul retrieved the quilt, he promised himself he would take a couple dozen health days before continuing his revenge. Besides, he would need weeks to top the Cade Jahns masterpiece. With his new tendrils, a myriad of possibilities had opened unto him like a flower of unimaginable beauty, and Paul felt his eyes water at the thought of the pure euphoria.
A blur of movement at the periphery of his vision sent Paul tumbling to the ground. He thoughtlessly probed with a tendril to determine the source of the disturbance. He arranged his tendrils as a tripod on the ground and used the fourth tendril to sweep the perimeter. Whatever the source, it had fled the boundary of Paul's influence. It was at that moment Paul realized something else. Until this moment, Paul could only use his tendrils in areas he was intimately familiar with, and as of that moment, he had no idea where he was.
Another flurry of movement rushed by Paul, but this time it was faster. He felt the air rush by him. The scars on his face itched the way they did when someone stared at them, and Paul couldn't escape the feeling he was being toyed with. This time, the tendrils did falter, and they blinked out of existence as quickly as they had appeared. Paul was powerless to control his descent, and he landed on his legs with the sound of cartilage popping and bones spanning. Pain flooded his body and blocked any other sensation than white-hot agony. His nerves sent one continuous message to his overtaxed brain.
"Hey, you're paralyzed you fat fuck, and don't you forget it."
Paul read the message loud and clear, and he screamed a scream so loud it would have put an opera singer to shame. It was so loud that Paul didn't hear the sound of bare feet slapping against the ground as the figure rushed towards him. He didn't sense the predator until it was on top of him. Its knees dug into his stomach, propelling a fine mist of his breath into the air. Paul's mouth gaped open like a fish gasping to breathe.
A flounder. I probably look like a pale flounder. A pale mass flailing around on the ground, a creature not designed for anything other than the softest of environments.
In his oxygen-deprived state, Paul still had the mind to raise a flabby arm to his mouth, remembering how the predators chose to spread the parasite. Instead, teeth sank into the flesh of his him. The predator's teeth had punctured his skin and buried themselves up to the gums. When the predator relinquished its grip, it took a chunk of Paul's flesh with it. Paul heard a retching sound and a sickening plop.
He felt another hot flash of pain, but this time, it was much closer to his wrist. Paul didn't know what a severed artery felt like, but he assumed it was something like this. He could feel the hot blood spray onto his shirt and drip into his eyes and nostrils. Instinctively, Paul closed his eyes, trapping the blood in his corneas. It stung way worse than soap in the tub. When he opened his eyes again, he felt blood and tears streaming down his face.
Paul's vision was blurry, and his attacker's face was a fuzzy outline, but Paul knew with a sinking feeling that the Superfriends had failed. There were still more of those fucking parasites out there.
Gathering the last semblance of his composure, Paul shaped his only tendril into a tentacle with a blunt spherical tip, spikes jutted from it like a mace. He swung it with as much force as he could manage and was greeted with the sound of eggshells cracking underfoot. The force of the blow knocked the predator off Paul's chest. Where it landed, it looked like a limp pile of flesh on the ground. Paul probed the creature and found the black worm wriggling out of the man's ear. Paul wrapped the tendril around the worm and constricted. Black juices dripped to the ground.
Paul summoned all four tendrils when he was sure there wasn't any danger. It took a lot longer this time, and he needed more concentration. It was like he was beating them into shape with a mental hammer instead of sculpting them.
Note to self: My powers are limited by exertion. Fan-fucking-tastic.
He moved at a quicker pace than before. The cutting night air dug into his wound, reminding every second of the open wound. Paul knew how grimy and disgusting people's mouths were and how easy it would be for it to get infected. There was no telling what was in that monstrosity's mouth and he didn't relish the thought of losing an arm to infection. Losing his legs hadn't been a great loss, but the thought of losing the feeling of food in his hands was too painful to consider.
Quilt, then hospital.
In the distance, Paul could see the porch light of his duplex shining like a lighthouse guiding him home.
Why would the light be on? Mom's fast asleep and the brat is dead.
Paul had a nasty mental image of the reporter coming back to get her due, but it wasn't that. Joyce Neiman had a sixth sense for Paul's needs. If he didn't know any better, he would've thought she would be in the kitchen cooking him up a meal. It would have been one of her most admirable traits if it wasn't so pathetic. He wasn't complaining though, the night had felt endless and nothing sounded better than a nice, warm meal.
Paul's impromptu legs carried him to the front door. He knocked and waited for his mother to answer the door. He realized that she would find out his ability, and he also realized he didn't care. Paul smiled. This would be a perfect time to introduce her to the new and improved Paul Neiman. Knowing Joyce, she would look at him with a new sense of wonder and pamper him, saying shit like, 'I knew my boy was special.' She would truly appreciate his gift and not treat him like some two-bit monster.
Heavy footfalls sounded in the living room of his house, and Paul felt a twinge of anxiety. Joyce usually tiptoed around her own house like her mere presence was a burden, but now she was clomping around the house like a wildebeest?
She must be flustered about my disappearance. Yeah, that must be it. I mean how often do fat paraplegics go missing?
She fumbled with the doorknob. It twisted and rattled in its housing. The door shook as if she were yanking on it with all her strength, but the door still didn't open. Paul heard a growl of frustration, and the door shook with a renewed fervor.
The door shot open, and Paul had to thrust himself backward to avoid being hit.
"Jesus Christ M-" Paul shouted.
A creature that was no longer Joyce Neiman had answered the door. Sure, she looked like the woman who had taken care of him his whole life, but all the things that made her the woman he knew and loved were no longer present.
The timidity that defined her had been replaced with the confident, lithe movements of a jungle cat. The eyes that had always looked on Paul with unconditional love now looked at him like he was an all-you-can-eat buffet. As she stepped into the light, the glow cast shadows across her face and Paul was able to imagine this thing wasn't his mother at all, but an imposter. However, when the creature lunged at him, Paul was unable to defend himself.
A deep part of his subconscious could not raise a hand, or a tendril as the case may be, against this abomination. His mother was somewhere in there, and suddenly, Paul understood that moron of a millionaire. He would have done anything to try and get the parasite out of his mother's head. Paul knew the human body forwards and backward. He could probably operate on his mother with a precision that would make a surgeon green with envy.
It's the least I could do for her.
That thought flew from his head as her slight form slammed into Paul's gut and sent him tumbling backward. The tendrils dissipated into the air like the water vapor of someone's breath on a cold day.
His mother looked down at him, and Paul thought he saw a different expression on her face. It was the look he saw every night before his mother put him to bed. The expression of the predator was gone, and Paul's fluttered with joy. Tears tracked down his cheeks.
It's her.
The expression looked painful like it was a struggle to keep it on her face, and Paul knew that it was. Joyce was fighting back the parasite to be with her son, but her love surpassed even evil brain parasites. While she looked on him with compassion, she still did not get off Paul's chest. It was like she was waiting for something.
A kiss. I could use one of those. I didn't want to kill anyone, but she gets that. I had to do it.
Paul puckered his lips in anticipation. Joyce's hands put pressure on his shoulders, with a little more force than Paul was accustomed to. Her head leaned towards his. She opened her mouth, and hot, rank breath spilled over his face. Familiar lips closed over Paul's own.
Wriggling, tasteless warmth slid down Paul's throat.