Fanfic: Index Cases.
Title: Index Cases.
Rating: R, for language, violence, and unpleasantly sexual situations.
Fandom: Slither.
Synopsis: What if the 'first contact' in Slither had found itself another index case? Here are five alternate ways things could have gone, had things played out just a bit differently. Major spoilers for the movie, all the way to the ending, and it won't make much sense if you haven't seen the film.
***
1. Brenda: Instinct.
***
It was instinct made her do it. Instinct, and the urge to prove that she was better for him than that fancy little highpants bitch he had back home. Stupid little Starla, with her porn queen's name and her high-steppin' ways, like she was better'n the whole damn town. Everyone knew she married for money. Not for love, like was right to do, or because she had a rugrat on the way, but for money, pure and plain. Nothing about that made her better'n anybody else, but that didn't stop her swanning around, all la-dee-da, like the queen of everything she saw.
Poor Grant couldn't see her clear, but Brenda could. Brenda always had. The dumb cunt probably even told him he couldn't stick it in her until they got hitched, and poor, sweet Grant was just too good of a man to understand that a girl like that won't never keep her word. Would Starla have pushed him out of the way and taken that needle -- that horrible, wonderful, burning needle -- into herself to save him?
Hell, no. Not unless she knew what it would do for her, and maybe not even then. Starla didn't want no one sticking it in her, even when that was what her man needed most of all.
Bitch.
It was instinct made her do it to begin with, and so she just let the instinct drive from there -- it hadn't hurt her yet, after all. Changed her a bit, sure, but not in a bad way, because now, for the first time ever, why, things were going to go Brenda's way/ Things were going to go the way that Brenda wanted them to. And all because of instinct.
What she wanted first was meat, and for the damn baby to stop its screaming. Those two wants turned out to work together pretty well.
Next up, her body told her it wanted to make some new babies. Some special babies. Babies that wouldn't cry or make demands on her time and her body. Babies that would answer demands -- her demands. Babies that would serve her. She'd be their mamma and their daddy both, but she couldn't carry them herself, oh, no; she had too much work to do. Important work, work as wanted starting right away. She couldn't be the womb that nursed her children, not this time.
But that was all right, because she knew where she could go to find someone to help her. Someone that didn't have any other babies getting in the way.
Starla was finally going to know what it meant to have somebody stick it in her good and proper, the way a woman was meant to be stuck. And then Grant would be Brenda's for the taking.
Then everything would be Brenda's for the taking.
Ain't nothing wrong with a little instinct after all.
***
2. Starla: Pretty Things.
***
Boys were always bringing her things.
That was how it had been for just about as long as Starla could remember. When she was little, it was Bill Pardee, mostly, bringing her chewing gum and shiny stones and interesting feathers; whatever he thought might catch her fancy, as if she couldn't see, even then, just how sweet he was on her. As she got older, there got to be more boys, with more and finer things, until one day, there was Grant Grant, the biggest boy of them all, who brought her an education and a fine house on the hill, and everything she'd ever dreamed of having. And she'd taken them all, hadn't she, over the years? Sure she had. When you're a pretty girl, that's how the world's supposed to work. Boys bring you things, and you take them, and you're glad to be the kind of girl who gets them.
Now that she was a biology teacher, of course, the things she got had changed a bit; when she was smaller, boys only brought her frogs and bugs and horrible slimy things they'd stumbled over in the woods after curfew if they were trying to upset her. Now she was supposed to see the things as some sort of hidden treasure. Wormy apples for the favourite teacher.
This one was the nastiest thing she'd been brought yet, though, like some sort of vast, fleshy larva that moved under its own power. Brett and Dan said they'd seen it oozing in a trail of its own slime through the woods while they were out walking home -- 'walking home', in this case, being a sidelong way of saying 'gigging frogs', but since it wasn't her job to care about a little high-spirited poaching, she let it slide -- so they'd trapped it up in a glass pickle jar they just 'happened' to have along with them, and brought it to her, like cats bringing dead rats into the house and hoping for praise.
She praised 'em, all right; praised 'em up one side and down the other, because she'd never seen anything like it before. It could be damn near anything, but one thing was for sure: if it was a new species, it'd be her name that got listed as the scientist who discovered it, and her picture in an awful lot of papers.
Maybe she'd make it to Hollywood, and fame, and fortune, after all.
When the last bell rang and the classroom emptied out, she closed the door, turned the lock, and drew the shades. No use letting the world in on her secret before she had to; like any great explorer, she wanted a few moments alone with her find. The surface of the thing looked like a mucus membrane. She drew on a pair of rubber gloves -- wouldn't want to poison the goose who laid the golden eggs with the anxious sweat from her palms, after all.
Unscrewing the lid from the jar, Starla Grant carefully tipped the pulsing, squirming shape out onto the counter at the back of the room, and reached down to run her fingers, feather-light and ginger, along its outer surface. The flesh of the thing rippled under her hand, then spread open, like a mouth
(vulva)
opening to allow something inside. In the shadows of the cavity, something glittered.
Starla Grant leaned forward, eyes wide and shining with curiousity.
The needle took her squarely in the chest, between those breasts that had inspired gifts from three generations of the boys and men of Wheels, and she fell, nervous system overwhelmed by fire that had come from beyond any star she knew, infected in an instant with a viral load that didn't just corrupt, but changed, configured, God making Man all over again in His own image, and oh, God, it hurt, and there was already no way out; it was over before it started; it was over the minute she realized she was pretty, and that boys would bring her things. This had been ordained.
What had been Starla Grant, but now was something that was both so much less and so very, very much more, opened its eyes, still so blue, still so pretty (but that would change), and smiled.
Time for her to give the world something in return.
***
3. Margaret: Man Enough.
***
It was a pretty simple equation, really: little kid puppy-love becomes teenage adoration becomes real and true adult devotion, the kind they talk about in stories, the kind that never dies, but richens, growing sweeter and rarer like the very finest wines. It was the kind of love that all the poets say you should dream about, the kind that almost no one really gets, not in this world, where so many things turn bitter and go sour. It was perfect. It was timeless. It should have been shouted from the rooftops and celebrated in the streets, and there was just one problem, and it was a little, stupid thing, but it was a problem all the same, and here it is:
Shelby -- sweet, perfect, glorious Shelby, with her hair like winter fire and her sweet, laconic voice that held all the secrets of the ages -- liked men.
And Margaret, who adored her, wasn't one.
She would've been, if she'd had the option, but she didn't, not really; all their hormones and surgeries cost too much money, and there was too much chance she'd come out the other side just looking like herself with a few bits hacked off by some quack with a degree from correspondence school. That wasn't going to make her a man, not the sort that Shelby wanted to have in her life.
So she didn't even bother to try. She just sat there in her uniform, and watched Shelby's hands as she worked the dispatch phones, caressing the knobs and stroking the switches, and wondered if anyone else had ever really understood what it was to be jealous of a machine.
It was just her and Shelby when the call came in that there was something 'squelchy' in the woods, out near the Thompson farm, and the air was so thick with the things she couldn't say that she leapt at the chance to get out of the station and into the cool night air, where the problems were simpler ones. Stupid human hearts, with all the stupid things that they wanted but couldn't ever have. The world would be better off without them.
The 'something squelchy' was crawling towards the barn, according to the semi-hysterical Thompsons; it had tried to bite one of the kids, but he'd dodged it, and they'd left the thing alone since then, opting to let the police take care of it.
"Didn't sign up to be an exterminator," grumbled Margaret, and stepped out into the dark.
She called in sick the next day -- first time she'd missed working a shift with Shelby in near three years. That alone was enough to get Bill worried, and he told her to call if she needed anything at all. She told him she'd be fine, just as soon as she'd kicked this little allergic reaction to the thing she'd found near the Thompson farm, and that she'd file her report just as soon as she got back to work. He told her to do no such thing. "No report needed on a call about some ambulatory snot," he said.
She'd get him for that later. But at the time, she just smiled, and thanked him, and hung up the phone before getting back to taking care of business. There was work to be done, and plans to be made, before she could deal with fools like Bill Pardee, who'd been lucky enough to love someone as much as she loved Shelby, but let her slip away. Sold her, just about. There were changes happening to the status quo. Changes that didn't need no stupid two-bit surgeon.
By nightfall on the second day, she was man enough for Shelby after all.
***
4. Bill: Second Chance.
***
If he'd been chief of police in any town larger than a sneeze, Bill Pardee would not have been the one that got sent out to do a midnight recon on, quote, 'something squelchy in the woods' behind the Thompson farm. He'd probably have been in command of an entire 'something squelchy in the woods' division, and he could send those poor fuckers out to check out some wad of rabid bear snot, while he stayed nestled down in his cozy featherbed, not a care in the whole damn world.
And while he was coming up with mastrubatory fantasies, why not just add a pretty little Starla Pardee to keep him company in that big imaginary bed, with not a Grant Grant in sight? Stupid imagination. Just another fucking cocktease.
It would be a better world, though. A world where he didn't have to deal with stupid people making stupid demands on his time; a world where he and Starla could be together, all the time, without her husband or the mistakes he'd made as a kid getting between them, getting in the way. She could've been his. All he had to do was agree to run away with her and leave Wheels behind forever, and she could've been his -- hell, she was his, until the night that he was fool enough to tell her 'no'.
A second chance, that was all he wanted. A world that didn't have Grant in it, where he could start again, start over, start fresh, with Starla by his side.
Instead, what did he get? Big fish in a tiny little pond full of slime, shit, and mosquitoes, with the constant reminder that there were bigger fish out there, bigger fish like Grant Grant, king turd of shit mountain, who had everything he wanted and didn't really care who he'd taken it away from. Bill shoved his way through the bushes out behind the Thompson farm, playing his flashlight over the ground, and stopped as the beam came to focus on a thing that looked something like a brain, and something like a giant maggot, and something like the afterbirth you might get out of the world's biggest, ugliest hamster.
"What the fuck are you?" he asked the something squelchy, almost reflectively. It didn't answer, but kept on squelching mindlessly towards the farm up in the distance. "Whatever the fuck you are, you are damn ugly." This assessment didn't seem to bother the something squelchy. It just kept on squelching.
One hand on his sidearm, Bill picked up a nearby stick, and poked the something squelchy to see what it would do. It stopped squelching, and its top spread open like the petals of a flower -- assuming you regularly sculpted flowers out of slowly decaying meat, that is, which most people have better sense than to do.
Bill poked the something squelchy again.
The something squelchy poked Bill back.
When he came to, with leaf mold in his hair and a burning sensation at the base of his brain, like fire ants were dancing through his thoughts, Bill lurched back to his feet and turned his face, thoughtfully, towards the distant lights of Wheels. A world with no Grant. Where Starla was his, just his, and nobody could come between them.
Maybe imagination wasn't such a cocktease after all.
***
5. Kylie: Epidemic.
***
It wasn't hard to slip away from them.
They were both in a state of shock, after all, both reeling from their brushes with something neither one was equipped to understand. Not with their unadjusted little human minds, anyway; they were too clean, still, too uninfected. He never quite managed to catch hold of them. They weren't his.
Kylie meant to be sure they never would be.
So she slipped away, left them standing in the field of his dead with a murmured, "I think I'm gonna be sick." Neither of them questioned her sudden bout of nausea -- how could they, with his seed leaking out of Bill's belly, and the memory of his flesh lingering on every inch of Starla's skin? They felt sick to their stomachs, and it wasn't feigned; she could feel it oozing off them like an invitation. She could feel a lot of things.
She could feel him. And so she went back into the house, back into the wreakage of his failure, where he was waiting. Just a nasty little cyst of flesh on the floor, hastily cobbled together out of the remains of his unfortunate host, Grant Grant, the man who, in the end, didn't matter.
The cyst opened as she approached, but didn't fire. It recognized her too well for that.
"Fucked up pretty proper, didn't you?" she said, conversationally, and crouched down, studying the needle that glittered, dimly, in the dark slit cut into the raw pink flesh. "Failed. Completely. This world, it ain't never going to belong to you.
"I know what you're thinkin'. You're thinkin' you'll just wait here until somethin' living -- somethin' your slugs missed -- comes along, and then you'll try again. Get your revenge on that whore who gave you a heart and then showed you what it feels like when a heart starts breaking. Make her hurt. And it's a good plan. It's a real good way to cope with things. There's just one problem."
Kylie stood, and smiled. It was the sort of expression that would have had Bill reaching for his gun, injuries or no, and set Starla to screaming, but they'd never see it on her face; not until it was too late. Not until she was ready.
"Me."
As she ground her heel down on the cyst and listened to the sound of screaming that only her slowly altering ears could hear, she said, calmly, "See, Daddy, you forgot how you got started. Forgot the infection that failed to conquer you, and turned you instead. Forgot about antibodies.
"Forgot that you weren't the first."
She ground her heel down a few last times, after the screaming had stopped, until she was satisfied that every fragment, every spore, was broken down. Then she turned, wiping the smile off her face, and hurried out into the sun to join the other 'survivors'. She had a world to conquer, after all.
And she didn't need the competition.
Rating: R, for language, violence, and unpleasantly sexual situations.
Fandom: Slither.
Synopsis: What if the 'first contact' in Slither had found itself another index case? Here are five alternate ways things could have gone, had things played out just a bit differently. Major spoilers for the movie, all the way to the ending, and it won't make much sense if you haven't seen the film.
***
1. Brenda: Instinct.
***
It was instinct made her do it. Instinct, and the urge to prove that she was better for him than that fancy little highpants bitch he had back home. Stupid little Starla, with her porn queen's name and her high-steppin' ways, like she was better'n the whole damn town. Everyone knew she married for money. Not for love, like was right to do, or because she had a rugrat on the way, but for money, pure and plain. Nothing about that made her better'n anybody else, but that didn't stop her swanning around, all la-dee-da, like the queen of everything she saw.
Poor Grant couldn't see her clear, but Brenda could. Brenda always had. The dumb cunt probably even told him he couldn't stick it in her until they got hitched, and poor, sweet Grant was just too good of a man to understand that a girl like that won't never keep her word. Would Starla have pushed him out of the way and taken that needle -- that horrible, wonderful, burning needle -- into herself to save him?
Hell, no. Not unless she knew what it would do for her, and maybe not even then. Starla didn't want no one sticking it in her, even when that was what her man needed most of all.
Bitch.
It was instinct made her do it to begin with, and so she just let the instinct drive from there -- it hadn't hurt her yet, after all. Changed her a bit, sure, but not in a bad way, because now, for the first time ever, why, things were going to go Brenda's way/ Things were going to go the way that Brenda wanted them to. And all because of instinct.
What she wanted first was meat, and for the damn baby to stop its screaming. Those two wants turned out to work together pretty well.
Next up, her body told her it wanted to make some new babies. Some special babies. Babies that wouldn't cry or make demands on her time and her body. Babies that would answer demands -- her demands. Babies that would serve her. She'd be their mamma and their daddy both, but she couldn't carry them herself, oh, no; she had too much work to do. Important work, work as wanted starting right away. She couldn't be the womb that nursed her children, not this time.
But that was all right, because she knew where she could go to find someone to help her. Someone that didn't have any other babies getting in the way.
Starla was finally going to know what it meant to have somebody stick it in her good and proper, the way a woman was meant to be stuck. And then Grant would be Brenda's for the taking.
Then everything would be Brenda's for the taking.
Ain't nothing wrong with a little instinct after all.
***
2. Starla: Pretty Things.
***
Boys were always bringing her things.
That was how it had been for just about as long as Starla could remember. When she was little, it was Bill Pardee, mostly, bringing her chewing gum and shiny stones and interesting feathers; whatever he thought might catch her fancy, as if she couldn't see, even then, just how sweet he was on her. As she got older, there got to be more boys, with more and finer things, until one day, there was Grant Grant, the biggest boy of them all, who brought her an education and a fine house on the hill, and everything she'd ever dreamed of having. And she'd taken them all, hadn't she, over the years? Sure she had. When you're a pretty girl, that's how the world's supposed to work. Boys bring you things, and you take them, and you're glad to be the kind of girl who gets them.
Now that she was a biology teacher, of course, the things she got had changed a bit; when she was smaller, boys only brought her frogs and bugs and horrible slimy things they'd stumbled over in the woods after curfew if they were trying to upset her. Now she was supposed to see the things as some sort of hidden treasure. Wormy apples for the favourite teacher.
This one was the nastiest thing she'd been brought yet, though, like some sort of vast, fleshy larva that moved under its own power. Brett and Dan said they'd seen it oozing in a trail of its own slime through the woods while they were out walking home -- 'walking home', in this case, being a sidelong way of saying 'gigging frogs', but since it wasn't her job to care about a little high-spirited poaching, she let it slide -- so they'd trapped it up in a glass pickle jar they just 'happened' to have along with them, and brought it to her, like cats bringing dead rats into the house and hoping for praise.
She praised 'em, all right; praised 'em up one side and down the other, because she'd never seen anything like it before. It could be damn near anything, but one thing was for sure: if it was a new species, it'd be her name that got listed as the scientist who discovered it, and her picture in an awful lot of papers.
Maybe she'd make it to Hollywood, and fame, and fortune, after all.
When the last bell rang and the classroom emptied out, she closed the door, turned the lock, and drew the shades. No use letting the world in on her secret before she had to; like any great explorer, she wanted a few moments alone with her find. The surface of the thing looked like a mucus membrane. She drew on a pair of rubber gloves -- wouldn't want to poison the goose who laid the golden eggs with the anxious sweat from her palms, after all.
Unscrewing the lid from the jar, Starla Grant carefully tipped the pulsing, squirming shape out onto the counter at the back of the room, and reached down to run her fingers, feather-light and ginger, along its outer surface. The flesh of the thing rippled under her hand, then spread open, like a mouth
(vulva)
opening to allow something inside. In the shadows of the cavity, something glittered.
Starla Grant leaned forward, eyes wide and shining with curiousity.
The needle took her squarely in the chest, between those breasts that had inspired gifts from three generations of the boys and men of Wheels, and she fell, nervous system overwhelmed by fire that had come from beyond any star she knew, infected in an instant with a viral load that didn't just corrupt, but changed, configured, God making Man all over again in His own image, and oh, God, it hurt, and there was already no way out; it was over before it started; it was over the minute she realized she was pretty, and that boys would bring her things. This had been ordained.
What had been Starla Grant, but now was something that was both so much less and so very, very much more, opened its eyes, still so blue, still so pretty (but that would change), and smiled.
Time for her to give the world something in return.
***
3. Margaret: Man Enough.
***
It was a pretty simple equation, really: little kid puppy-love becomes teenage adoration becomes real and true adult devotion, the kind they talk about in stories, the kind that never dies, but richens, growing sweeter and rarer like the very finest wines. It was the kind of love that all the poets say you should dream about, the kind that almost no one really gets, not in this world, where so many things turn bitter and go sour. It was perfect. It was timeless. It should have been shouted from the rooftops and celebrated in the streets, and there was just one problem, and it was a little, stupid thing, but it was a problem all the same, and here it is:
Shelby -- sweet, perfect, glorious Shelby, with her hair like winter fire and her sweet, laconic voice that held all the secrets of the ages -- liked men.
And Margaret, who adored her, wasn't one.
She would've been, if she'd had the option, but she didn't, not really; all their hormones and surgeries cost too much money, and there was too much chance she'd come out the other side just looking like herself with a few bits hacked off by some quack with a degree from correspondence school. That wasn't going to make her a man, not the sort that Shelby wanted to have in her life.
So she didn't even bother to try. She just sat there in her uniform, and watched Shelby's hands as she worked the dispatch phones, caressing the knobs and stroking the switches, and wondered if anyone else had ever really understood what it was to be jealous of a machine.
It was just her and Shelby when the call came in that there was something 'squelchy' in the woods, out near the Thompson farm, and the air was so thick with the things she couldn't say that she leapt at the chance to get out of the station and into the cool night air, where the problems were simpler ones. Stupid human hearts, with all the stupid things that they wanted but couldn't ever have. The world would be better off without them.
The 'something squelchy' was crawling towards the barn, according to the semi-hysterical Thompsons; it had tried to bite one of the kids, but he'd dodged it, and they'd left the thing alone since then, opting to let the police take care of it.
"Didn't sign up to be an exterminator," grumbled Margaret, and stepped out into the dark.
She called in sick the next day -- first time she'd missed working a shift with Shelby in near three years. That alone was enough to get Bill worried, and he told her to call if she needed anything at all. She told him she'd be fine, just as soon as she'd kicked this little allergic reaction to the thing she'd found near the Thompson farm, and that she'd file her report just as soon as she got back to work. He told her to do no such thing. "No report needed on a call about some ambulatory snot," he said.
She'd get him for that later. But at the time, she just smiled, and thanked him, and hung up the phone before getting back to taking care of business. There was work to be done, and plans to be made, before she could deal with fools like Bill Pardee, who'd been lucky enough to love someone as much as she loved Shelby, but let her slip away. Sold her, just about. There were changes happening to the status quo. Changes that didn't need no stupid two-bit surgeon.
By nightfall on the second day, she was man enough for Shelby after all.
***
4. Bill: Second Chance.
***
If he'd been chief of police in any town larger than a sneeze, Bill Pardee would not have been the one that got sent out to do a midnight recon on, quote, 'something squelchy in the woods' behind the Thompson farm. He'd probably have been in command of an entire 'something squelchy in the woods' division, and he could send those poor fuckers out to check out some wad of rabid bear snot, while he stayed nestled down in his cozy featherbed, not a care in the whole damn world.
And while he was coming up with mastrubatory fantasies, why not just add a pretty little Starla Pardee to keep him company in that big imaginary bed, with not a Grant Grant in sight? Stupid imagination. Just another fucking cocktease.
It would be a better world, though. A world where he didn't have to deal with stupid people making stupid demands on his time; a world where he and Starla could be together, all the time, without her husband or the mistakes he'd made as a kid getting between them, getting in the way. She could've been his. All he had to do was agree to run away with her and leave Wheels behind forever, and she could've been his -- hell, she was his, until the night that he was fool enough to tell her 'no'.
A second chance, that was all he wanted. A world that didn't have Grant in it, where he could start again, start over, start fresh, with Starla by his side.
Instead, what did he get? Big fish in a tiny little pond full of slime, shit, and mosquitoes, with the constant reminder that there were bigger fish out there, bigger fish like Grant Grant, king turd of shit mountain, who had everything he wanted and didn't really care who he'd taken it away from. Bill shoved his way through the bushes out behind the Thompson farm, playing his flashlight over the ground, and stopped as the beam came to focus on a thing that looked something like a brain, and something like a giant maggot, and something like the afterbirth you might get out of the world's biggest, ugliest hamster.
"What the fuck are you?" he asked the something squelchy, almost reflectively. It didn't answer, but kept on squelching mindlessly towards the farm up in the distance. "Whatever the fuck you are, you are damn ugly." This assessment didn't seem to bother the something squelchy. It just kept on squelching.
One hand on his sidearm, Bill picked up a nearby stick, and poked the something squelchy to see what it would do. It stopped squelching, and its top spread open like the petals of a flower -- assuming you regularly sculpted flowers out of slowly decaying meat, that is, which most people have better sense than to do.
Bill poked the something squelchy again.
The something squelchy poked Bill back.
When he came to, with leaf mold in his hair and a burning sensation at the base of his brain, like fire ants were dancing through his thoughts, Bill lurched back to his feet and turned his face, thoughtfully, towards the distant lights of Wheels. A world with no Grant. Where Starla was his, just his, and nobody could come between them.
Maybe imagination wasn't such a cocktease after all.
***
5. Kylie: Epidemic.
***
It wasn't hard to slip away from them.
They were both in a state of shock, after all, both reeling from their brushes with something neither one was equipped to understand. Not with their unadjusted little human minds, anyway; they were too clean, still, too uninfected. He never quite managed to catch hold of them. They weren't his.
Kylie meant to be sure they never would be.
So she slipped away, left them standing in the field of his dead with a murmured, "I think I'm gonna be sick." Neither of them questioned her sudden bout of nausea -- how could they, with his seed leaking out of Bill's belly, and the memory of his flesh lingering on every inch of Starla's skin? They felt sick to their stomachs, and it wasn't feigned; she could feel it oozing off them like an invitation. She could feel a lot of things.
She could feel him. And so she went back into the house, back into the wreakage of his failure, where he was waiting. Just a nasty little cyst of flesh on the floor, hastily cobbled together out of the remains of his unfortunate host, Grant Grant, the man who, in the end, didn't matter.
The cyst opened as she approached, but didn't fire. It recognized her too well for that.
"Fucked up pretty proper, didn't you?" she said, conversationally, and crouched down, studying the needle that glittered, dimly, in the dark slit cut into the raw pink flesh. "Failed. Completely. This world, it ain't never going to belong to you.
"I know what you're thinkin'. You're thinkin' you'll just wait here until somethin' living -- somethin' your slugs missed -- comes along, and then you'll try again. Get your revenge on that whore who gave you a heart and then showed you what it feels like when a heart starts breaking. Make her hurt. And it's a good plan. It's a real good way to cope with things. There's just one problem."
Kylie stood, and smiled. It was the sort of expression that would have had Bill reaching for his gun, injuries or no, and set Starla to screaming, but they'd never see it on her face; not until it was too late. Not until she was ready.
"Me."
As she ground her heel down on the cyst and listened to the sound of screaming that only her slowly altering ears could hear, she said, calmly, "See, Daddy, you forgot how you got started. Forgot the infection that failed to conquer you, and turned you instead. Forgot about antibodies.
"Forgot that you weren't the first."
She ground her heel down a few last times, after the screaming had stopped, until she was satisfied that every fragment, every spore, was broken down. Then she turned, wiping the smile off her face, and hurried out into the sun to join the other 'survivors'. She had a world to conquer, after all.
And she didn't need the competition.