Hi, I'm Llrâc Nôdbé (Pronounced ‘Lark Nod-Bee’), or simply 'Lark' for short.
I'm a British Armed Forces and Gulf War Veteran, with a sarcasm to match.
I write whatever the voices tell me to write, and they don't always have something nice to say.
Because I've spent most of my life there, I tend to live in the past, and you can find me lurking around the 80's.
Listen out for the voices here: https://www.facebook.com/LlracNodbeAuthor
PARASITIC LOVE
by
Llrâc Nôdbé
Detective Sergeant Sirus Ganjavi held his stomach and mouth, and fought the involuntary spasms that threatened to fill his face-mask with lunch. The naked corpse, a man, was crumpled before him.
Hideous. Every pore of his wrecked body swollen and enlarged to varying degrees, as though each one had fought to expand the greatest. Some were the size of a large blackhead, whilst others could house a chicken’s egg. Dark, empty hollows leaving the man’s body sponge-like.
Sirus slid latex-clad fingers through his dense, dark hair and scratched. What could cause such devastation? Allergies? Virus? Chemicals? While he debated, his eyes were drawn to the only colourful object in this depressing blood-spattered crime scene; an empty heart-shaped Valentine’s box, its satin bow intact, but discarded to the side. A CSI technician clothed in white coveralls carefully photographed each item then handed Sirus a card, which reeked of ladies perfume. The uppermost side displayed the number one composed of intertwined red roses. He was her numero uno. How romantic. He flipped the card between his fingers. On the reverse, the inscription read:
Love,
Like a rose,
Has vicious thorns,
But Death,
Like a mother,
Has no boundary.
With CSI complete, the victim bagged and tagged, and the autopsy and toxicology results hours away, Sirus handed the scene over to uniformed officers and headed home.
***
Netflix and chill they called it, but Sirus couldn’t be less chilled if he tried. Sat in his boxers on his beat-up sofa, he shivered, but not through cold. It was his ritual—shed the clothes—shed the day, or some shit like that. With empathy a constant struggle, his job rarely affected him but, Jesus, today was horrific; what a way to go. Maybe watching a horror film wasn’t such a good idea. He reached for his beer and spotted the parcel his neighbour, Gladys, had taken in for him, corner torn and exposed; the nosey old bat up to her tricks, again. Inside was a glossy red Valentine’s box, which brought back vivid images of the man’s carcass, so he launched it across the room. He shrugged, took a swig of beer, and let the bitter taste swirl around his mouth before swallowing. This job didn’t allow time or energy for women, so a Valentine’s gift was definitely unexpected.
A huge yawn stretched his jaw wide and his eyes shut, but pain, sharp and unexpected, stifled the yawn. His eyes snapped open. Confused, his blurred eyes finally focused on the creature scuttling away on long, shiny, hairless legs, that click-clacked a musical rhythm on the kitchenette flooring. Unbelievably, expanding in size as it walked, the creature swung its oversized abdomen and swivelled around to reveal large, dripping, proboscis that oscillated below a bulbous mass of eyes.
Sirus tried to jump up, to flee, but the venom coursing through his veins had dulled his senses and reflexes. Knees failing, he slid onto the bedsit floor; legs on grubby carpet and back on cold linoleum. Paralysed. The three beers he’d drunk now soaked through his boxers onto the carpet beneath. Stabbed with thousands of invisible hot pokers, his skin burned and ruptured; pores popped open and spread wide before his eyes, perforating every inch of his body. Unable to cry out, saliva pooled in his throat, then slid into his lungs.
Click-clack. Click-clack. Click-clack.
Several terrified seconds passed before he finally saw the creature come into view when it clambered up onto his chest, and he watched in horror while its pulsating abdomen sprayed sticky liquid laced with eggs, which slipped into his open pores. Drawn by some invisible vacuum, the eggs that missed his body slithered across the floor, bouncing into one another until, they too, found an empty pore to settle into.
Like a ball of dung in a beetle’s legs, the creature rolled Sirus onto his front and repeated the insemination process. Nose swollen, with lips pressed to the linoleum, he struggled to breathe but, sensing this, the creature rolled him back before it was too late.
In and out of consciousness, Sirus struggled with excruciating pain. The egg sacks proliferated, pushing his pores, and skin fibres, to breaking point. Blood oozed from every pore—every orifice, and he could feel every pulsating, living pustule squirming inside him; penetrating, pungent, putrid. Sucking and devouring blood and fluids as though he were a living battery.
Now blind, due to the parasitic embryos stretching his eyelids, he was forced to watch them evolve and grow as the light through his finely stretched eyelids highlighted the repulsive infants nesting there. Bones formed, organs throbbed, and claws scratched against his eyeballs. Neighbouring pores bulged and split, becoming one, as the young aliens clawed their way out, fleeing their salubrious, honeycombed host in a paroxysm of slime, blood and a deafening cacophony of clickety-clacking in his ruined ears. Those on his underside lifted him effortlessly to garner their escape and joined the river of black, slimy, evacuating mercury. Sirus’s body and limbs jerked wildly like a demented puppet. Wood splintered, glass cracked, then silence. No longer paralysed, but too weak to move, Sirus stared out through the holes in his ruined eyelids.
Parturition over, only the Queen remained; vigilant, watching.
***
Her abandoned birthing vessel slowly began to move towards the coffee table, every action unfathomable pain—muscles and tendons torn apart, skin hanging from him like an oversized T-shirt. His hand, like a large, holey glove, slid across the wood and found his pistol. While Death’s love warmed him, the Queen scuttled away. She paused in front of the discarded Valentine’s card; her knees bent and body sank. Reflected in her numerous bulbous eyes were red roses intertwined into a beautiful number six.