Chapter #12Leave her alone. by: Seuzz   An atmosphere of incipient thunder hangs in the room, and, almost involuntarily, most of your bodies take a couple of steps toward Cindy. But you hold yourself back long enough that, unaware of the narrowness of her escape, she gets out the door with Josh. You hurry her along before you can change your mind, and you are already nearly at her door before you let yourself relax. At the house she shares with a couple of friends, you sit on the couch and talk lightly of this and that with her, hiding your relief.
You are still vibrating angrily in your other bodies, though, and you realize that your "rescue" of Cindy will be a short-lived thing unless you make some changes.
Fundamentally, you decide that this means giving up some of your hosts. It is now apparent that you have not simply possessed six native humans; in sense, you have been possessed by them as well, in that you are yourself being deeply affected by their dispositions and chaotic emotions and desires. Perhaps—though at the moment this is only a surmise—you have unbalanced yourself by resting so heavily on six sexually insatiable male animals. Perhaps, then, you would achieve a greater distance, and a better control, by possessing a greater variety of hosts. That, at any rate, seems a logical conclusion to draw from the fact that your possession of Josh and Sandra has—at a little bit—helped counterbalance the effects of your possession of Chad, Raul, Michael, and the others.
Instead of lurching after fresh meat, though, you decide it would be better to withdraw from most of those you currently possess. Josh and Sandra, you think, you can safely keep; and the former would be especially useful for when (or if) you decide to retake your current crew. But you determine to pull out of his housemates.
Your control of their minds is so complete that you can scrub and fiddle with their memories, and so you relax their bodies and set about rearranging their heads so that they don't carry any dangerous recollections of the previous day and night. That done, you put each of them into their beds while sending Michael around with a dirty glass to collect the bits of goo that you vomit out of them. You then put him in his own bed, to await the return of Josh (with whom he shares a room).
It's nearly two o'clock in the morning, though, before you excuse yourself from Cindy's company; you've been so attentive to her that she begs you to spend the night, but you reluctantly demur. Back home, you cradle Michael's head in Josh's arms as he spits out his own parasite and then collapses unconscious against his pillow. You swallow up the worms you've rescued and rinse out the glass, then put yourself in Josh's bed, to spend the night thinking about possible future moves.
* * * * *
The next morning brings major drama. Your housemates are surly and argumentative with each other, for no good reason they themselves can understand, and at least two major fistfights break out. Anthony and Yung-ching are particularly out of sorts with each other, and after lunch Anthony and Chad announce that they will be moving out of the house. This comes as a surprise, but you are actually pleased by this twist; you'd been thinking about Cindy's idea of moving in with her boyfriend, and this seems like the opportunity to realize it. If you possessed her and moved her in with Josh, and then took Raul back while adding Felicia (both as a host and as a housemate), you would have four of the house's inhabitants again while (with the addition of the two girls) achieving a better balance of hosts. So you add Josh's voice to those encouraging the two ball players to get lost.
After the previous day's sturm und drang, your actual possession of Cindy is anti-climactic: it only takes a brief smooch during a chance meeting on the quad, and then she is a part of you. You are now quite pleased to have her; and, of course, she herself is quite pleased to have been caught.
"Don't worry about the Alphas yet," you tell yourself as you sit on the grass with the late afternoon sun slanting down on you. "It might unbalance things in some other direction. Let's go slow—move in lots of directions—and take careful stock of what it's doing to us before we add a new person."
(Your new-found appreciation for checks and balances within your own psyche has led you to abandon the use of the first-person pronoun even when talking to yourself, and you give what weight you can each of your individual hosts by letting them retain the usual pronouns. It is, of course, a complete fiction: you could have spoken Cindy's words (in her own soft, feminine voice) using Josh's mouth. But you prefer to err on the side of caution.)
You put Josh's arm around her waist and kiss the base of her neck. It's smooth and long and pale, and you feel a pleasant twinge in both bodies as she swallows. "Wanna go back to your place?" you murmur.
"Mmm. It's nice here, but okay." You rise and clasp the bodies close together, letting her bare legs brush against his jeans as you walk back to her apartment.
You're taking Sandra back to her apartment, too, and are displeased to find Chad squatting in front of the door when you arrive. He nods curtly when he sees you; "Class get out late?" he says in a surly tone.
You ignore him as he follows you in. You thought you'd wiped his mind of his recent history with Sandra; did you over look something? "So what's up?" you ask as you pour yourself some orange juice while pointed declining to offer him any.
"Me and Anthony are moving out. Like, tonight." That's good news. "He's gonna crash with Tommy for awhile, but I need a place to stay."
"So why do you think I care?"
"You've got a couch."
You stare at him: "Christina might have something to say about that."
"You've also got a bed."
But Chad's appearance isn't the only surprise of the afternoon; Cindy's living room is also occupied. The presence of Linda Rogers, one of her roommates, leaves you phlegmatic, but you do a double take at the other: It's one of the girls you saw yesterday, one who had jogged your memory so unsatisfactorily. She's rangy and athletic, with jean cutoffs, a red cotton blouse buttoned up to show off her tight stomach, and a long brown hair pulled back in a rainbow-colored bandana. You nudge Cindy, but she shrugs; she's never seen the strange girl before either.
The girl and Linda are talking intently but freely, and turn friendly but distracted eyes on you as you enter. You drop your bags and step over to the kitchen, which is separated from the living room by only a countertop, and pull a couple of apples from the refrigerator. "Hey, Linda," you say with seeming unconcern. "You and your friend want something to eat?"
"No, we're okay. We're going to grab a bite in a bit. Oh, this is Allison, by the way. She's in my poli sci class, and we're working on a project."
"Yeah, you know that military base outside the city?" the girl says with cheery forwardness. "There's, like, some weird shit going on out there, and we're trying to organize a protest for next week. You guys wanna get involved? We're trying to get as many people together as we can."
Your eyebrows twitch briefly as you look over at Cindy; you keep her poker-faced.
"You're a real piece of work, Chad," you tell him. He stares back with what is clearly meant to be a smoldering look.
"C'mon, it would be fun."
"I wouldn't call last time 'fun'."
"I remember different."
"Well, that's your perspective."
"Actually, it was ... different ... wasn't it?" He tilts his chin; there's a strange gleam in the eyes that peer out at you from under the brim of his cap.
"What, because you let a girl be on top for once?"
He holds your gaze for a bit, and his lips twist into a faint smirk. "It was like something got loose between us."
For the first time in your experience on this planet, you begin to feel a bit of fear. "You think I let the animal out in you, is that what you're trying to say," you reply, trying to bluff your way through a situation you're not sure you understand. "God, your patter could use some polishing."
His smirk widens, and he glances away as he picks up the deck of cards that has been resting on the countertop. "Tell you what," he says as he begins shuffling them roughly. "How about we gamble on it? Winner gets to have his way with the loser." He stares at you meaningfully.
You are highly mindful of your earlier warning to yourself: if you're going to start taking new hosts, you need to do it slowly, one at a time. You are, at the moment though, faced with two possibilities, each of which you badly want to explore. Allison's protest could give you a way to check out the military installation where you think you were being held; possessing her mind might also tell you where you've seen her before, and might even give you a key to your hidden past.
But Chad's taunting has left you deeply chilled. You thought you had cleansed his mind of the memory of the game of strip poker; is his seeming reference to that game just a coincidence, or is he remembering things you'd prefer that he forget? It would seem best to check it out, but if any host had the capacity to unbalance yourself again, it would probably be Chad. | Members who added to this interactive story also contributed to these: |
View Portfolio
Visit Notebook
Send Gift Points
Awards
Badges
Send Email
Community Newsfeed
General Discussion
Sponsored Items
Book of Trinkets
Static Items
Books
Groups
Interactive Stories
Audio
Campfire Creatives
Community Notes
Crossword Puzzles
Documents
Folders
Images
In & Outs
Madlibs
Photo Albums
Polls
Product Reviews
Quizzes
Survey Forms
Web Pages
Word Searches
More by this author