27 Feb Host, By Corey Martin
The dread comes first. The signs begin later, though still months in advance. You’ve seen it happen before. You know what to expect, what to fear. The way your sister’s body changed and betrayed her. The way your best friend survived, only to wish she were dead. The way your mother suddenly was. You swore it would never happen to you, that you were too careful to let it, after knowing and seeing and fearing the toll it takes, the way it destroys the body it feeds on. You can’t tell whether it has taken hold until weeks after contact, so it’s hard to know whether anyone is actually safe. They screen for it anywhere from hospitals to amusement parks. There is a test, compulsory in some cases if there’s any possibility you’ve been infected, but it doesn’t always work.
You start to fear it more when you suddenly feel different, and your body isn’t quite working the way it usually does. It’s as if it somehow knows that what you’ve always feared has come to pass. You try to convince yourself you’re just tired. Who isn’t sleeping poorly these days?
You don’t want to think about what comes next. It seems to affect everyone in unique and horrifying ways. Some have terrible spasms up and down their back, cramps through their legs, a numbness in their arms. Nausea is common, which makes sense—you feel like you’ve been poisoned. Eventually, it can impact the mind, with splitting headaches, vertigo, confusion. You’ve heard there are people who don’t even know it’s inside them until it’s too late, until they’re doubled over in pain with it tearing them open to escape. You heard one time about someone who lost all their teeth, but you’re not completely convinced that’s true. You hope for the sake of your dental bill that it’s not.
Once the transmission is confirmed, it has to be monitored. They say it’s for your own protection, but you’re skeptical about whether you’re the priority. Is it likely for the life of the host to take precedence? Sometimes you swear you can feel it writhing inside you, trying to push its way out through your intestines, through your skin, but you don’t tell anyone. You worry that it has already started to impair your thoughts. You haven’t been thinking as clearly as the weeks have gone on, and you know you can’t blame it on sleepless nights anymore.
That isn’t to say you haven’t been losing sleep. You can’t tell whether it’s from the pain or the terror, but you don’t know when you last slept through the night. You wake up to scream, and you wake up to cry, and the difference between the two doesn’t seem to matter anymore. You’re short of breath just getting out of bed, and you’re certain now that you can feel it shifting within you, sending jolts of pain up your torso every time it moves.
It’s the blood that upsets you the most. You’ve never done well with the sight of it; now it’s everywhere. It’s as if even the contents of your veins know what’s coming and are trying to get out of dodge as soon as possible. You bleed from your nose, from your gums, from your groin. Your veins protrude from your skin and seem ready to burst, and dark red lines claw their way across your chest and your swollen stomach.
Finally, the months of torture come nearly to a close. The end of it all begins with pain, right at your core. Your body is finally in agreement with the screaming of your mind to get rid of the thing that has invaded you. It starts subtly, so subtle that you’re not sure it’s happening, but as it gets deeper and sharper and faster, you know it’s coming, and you brace yourself as well as you can. An awful tightness moves across your body in waves, beginning in your back and rippling into your stomach. You could almost swear someone had taken a knife to your chest and was slowly raking it down to your pelvis. Every time it ends, it begins again, just as quickly. The ever-present nausea overcomes you, emptying thick bile and half-digested food onto the floor in front of you. The waves of pain come faster and stay longer, and you begin to shake with the intensity of them. You feel the pressure continue to build, and you are filled more than ever with a need to get this thing, this parasite, out of you. It takes more energy than you have to expel it from you, but as you continue, your body takes over, and you lose control. You hear yourself scream, you feel your skin burn and tear, and you feel all of this for what seems like days before it’s over. It emerges covered in your blood, and as it shrieks and wails and cries out for a new host to latch onto and feed off of, you thank god that host will no longer be you.