Ava woke up the next day feeling no different than usual, as groggy as ever, and wondering if she had just dreamed everything that had happened the previous night. She certainly wasn’t feeling any “great power” of any kind, and didn’t feel like she had parasites.
Seeing the jellyfish-like discarded skin sitting on her dresser, next to the PlayStation games, quickly disabused her of the notion that she had dreamed any of it. It had, in fact, been very real, and Ava groaned.
As if to answer her, her phone buzzed with a text from a number she didn’t recognize.
“You’re Ava, right?” the text read. Ava quickly tapped at her phone.
“Yup,” her reply stated, curtly.
“Come to park. Need to talk,” the almost-instant reply read.
“What park? Who is this?” Ava typed. She had a feeling she knew what park, as there was only one near her apartment complex, but something about getting mystery texts made her suspicious.
“You know the park. I’m from your school. Will explain in person,” the reply read. Ava shrugged her shoulders, grabbed the mystery jellyfish under the assumption that the two things were related, and set off out the door, passing by her still-snoring mother on the couch on the way out.
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The park, which had a name that Ava didn’t know and didn’t really care to, was a small one. It almost seemed like a joke to call it a park; it was more like a median with a tree and a bench. Guess that makes it a better meeting spot, Ava thought to herself. No way to get confused on what part you’re supposed to meet in.
The only other person she noticed was a boy around her age, and she clenched her fist, expecting the usual situation. He was five-foot-six, a bit taller than her but not by much, and while skinny, his body seemed toned and athletic; his hair was cut short, with thick-framed glasses adorning the bridge of his nose. He looked over at her and waved, then went red when he noticed her fist and backed away.
“Hey, whoa, I’m not here for a fight,” the mystery boy said.
“Well, what are you here for, then?” Ava asked, sharply. “I don’t have all day.” The boy tried to stifle a laugh and rolled his eyes.
“Oh, bullshit, you totally do. I heard about the fight yesterday,” the boy said. “Badass stuff.”
“…so I have a fan now, I guess?” Ava asked.
“That’s… one way of putting it, sure,” the boy said, adjusting his glasses. “Don’t freak out when I tell you this, but I know you’re a parasite host now.”
“Are you stalking me or something? I’ve already got one weirdo on my ass, I don’t need two,” Ava grunted. The boy laughed.
“Not even close. Trust me, I know better,” the boy said. “For one, you’ve been holding onto the skin it shed the whole time.” Ava turned red with embarrassment at this, having forgotten she’d brought the mystery jellyfish with her.
“Yeah, I, uh… I guess so,” Ava said, sheepishly.
“But, even if you hadn’t brought that gross thing with you, I’d still know,” the boy continued. “See, this is why I called you over here to meet with you: because I want you to understand what you’ve been dragged into.”
“And what, precisely, have I been dragged into?” Ava asked, quirking an eyebrow. The boy sighed.
“Alright, you might want to sit down for this, because this might be a little long,” the boy said. Ava complied, taking a seat on the park bench. “So, basically, these parasites have been showing up around the globe for… I’m not really sure how long, honestly, but definitely longer than we’ve had them. Every one of them gives you a different power if you survive the initial sting, and we call those powers Codes,” the boy continued.
“Like cheat codes?” Ava giggled.
“No, like genetic code or computer code. I’m on a web forum with a few other people who’ve gotten stung, and while none of us are a hundred percent sure, we think it’s doing something to our genetics and overwriting our genetic code, like some sort of benevolent cancer,” the boy explained. “My Code is Sense, which is why I was able to figure out that you were a parasite host. I can detect other parasite hosts within a certain distance, I think about half a mile, and we actually live in the same complex.”
“So, how do I figure out what my Code is?” Ava asked. “This sounds pretty sweet, honestly.”
“That’s the other cool part of my power. Let me see your hands,” the boy said, and Ava held her hands up, palms up. The boy laid his hands atop hers, and Ava felt a quick rush of static electricity.
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“…huh. Your Code is Fist. That’s a new one,” the boy said. Ava burst out laughing.
“Oh, you’ve gotta be kidding me,” Ava said. “I was already good at fighting people, I didn’t need a parasite for that!” The boy adjusted his glasses, making them shine in the sunlight briefly.
“We’ll see,” the boy said. “Come on, let’s find somewhere that there’s no witnesses so you can experiment a bit.”
“What, so you can kill me and take my power or something? Get real,” Ava said, mockingly. The boy sighed.
“Come on, you’ve already seen my power, and it’s not even an offensive one. I’m not a fighter, let alone a killer,” the boy said. “If I read your Code right, you’d have a pretty massive advantage over me, even if I wanted to do that.”
“Okay, so what’s in this for you?” Ava asked.
“We’ll discuss that later,” the boy said. “I felt the other presence with you, too, and we’ve gotta talk about him.” Ava quirked her eyebrow again.
“So, you want me to do your dirty work for you?” Ava asked.
“That’s one way of looking at it,” the boy said, matter-of-factly. “You’ll understand when I tell you who he is, and what he does. Now, let’s go find some woods or something.”
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After a bit of hiking in the sweltering heat, which the boy apologized profusely to Ava for all the way along, the boy and Ava finally came to a clearing that seemed fairly far from prying eyes (at least as far as Ava could tell).
“Is this far enough? I wanna get this show on the road and see what these fists can do now,” Ava said, grinning. The boy scanned the horizon quickly.
“Yeah. I don’t sense anyone nearby with a parasite, so we should be fine,” the boy said.
“So… what do I do? Do I need to, like, charge up my energy to use my Code or something? Do I point my finger and yell ‘Spirit Fist’ at something?” Ava asked. The boy nearly doubled over laughing.
“You watch too much anime,” the boy said. “Don’t worry, I thought the same thing. It’s not that complicated. Just…” The boy looked around, and then pointed at a tree that looked fairly sturdy. “Try punching that tree over there.”
Ava walked up to it and gave it a quick jab… and clutched her hand in pain when her fist met hard wood.
“Try giving it your full force and really concentrating on your fist,” the boy said. “Trust me, if you break your hand, I know a guy.”
“You… know a guy? Like, a doctor?” Ava asked, raising her eyebrow.
“Oh, you sweet summer child,” the boy said, shaking his head. “Better than a doctor. Give it a shot.”
Ava shook the dirt off her hand and shrugged her shoulders.
“Alright, sure, why not?” she asked. “I’m in so much weird shit right now, I may as well just roll with it.” She backed up a few paces, then charged full-speed at the tree, putting as much focus and concentration into her fist as she could before slamming it full-force into the bark.
This time, the result was much different, and a loud crack rang through the sky as Ava’s fist tore through the bark of the tree like hot butter, ripping it in half and knocking it away as if a hurricane had hit it.
The boy’s jaw dropped.
“Holy fucking shit,” he said, quietly. Ava laughed.
“I know, right? This is awesome!” she said to herself, grinning.
“No kidding. That brings us to… our problem,” the boy said. “I know about the guy who attacked you last night.”
“Yeah? What about him? He gonna be a problem when I’ve got this fist?” Ava asked.
“I mean, yeah, probably more than he would be if you didn’t have it,” the boy went on. “His name is Charles Raymond Keyes, also known as The Devourer. He was stung by a parasite and given the Code of Devour, which enables him to steal people’s Codes by… you can probably guess.”
“What, he eats people?” Ava asked.
“Yeah, precisely,” the boy said. “He’s been in town for a minute, and I think he’s after me because of my Code of Sense.”
“He said something about having unfinished business with the previous host of mine,” Ava said. “You know anything about that?” The boy squinted his eyes a bit.
“No, I honestly don’t have a clue,” he said. “Keep in mind, I don’t really have a lot of info here. All I really know is what the people on the Parasite Watch site have pooled together, which isn’t really a lot.”
“What’s your name, anyways?” Ava asked. “All this parasite bullshit aside, it’s been kinda nice hanging out.” The boy laughed and adjusted his glasses again.
“Sam,” he said. “Sam White. I live over in 2205, if you ever wanna hang out again.”
“Sure,” Ava said. “I’ve got your number, I’ll hit you up.”
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Later that night, Ava sat on her bed with her laptop open, browsing through the Parasite Watch website. It had a distinctly late-nineties look to it that Ava didn’t entirely appreciate; in fact, it was almost eye-searing.
She also found it to be fairly uninformative; Sam had pretty much covered everything any of them knew, and most of them didn’t even seem to know what specifically their power was. She did notice that Sam had set up a side business offering to tell anyone who’d come meet him in person, for twenty dollars, but it didn’t seem to be getting many takers; instead, the site was full of all sorts of bizarre woo-woo ways to try and make the Code manifest itself, with only a few people whose powers were either obvious enough from the start to make themselves known (such as Sam’s Code of Sense) or had come up in the host’s daily life (as Ava’s Code of Fist would most likely have, eventually).
One thing she did notice, however, spooked her. Sam hadn’t been lying about the Devourer; there was a lot of discussion of him on the forum, and a lot of the users who discussed him seemed to quickly drop off of the site, as if they’d been hunted down and murdered. People who talked about reporting him to the police reported that they weren’t taken seriously; the Devourer didn’t have a habit of leaving bodies, due to the nature of his power, so it was as if anyone he killed simply vanished into thin air.
Up to this point, she hadn’t entirely been taking the idea seriously. At best, she considered it a chance for a good fight. This, however, made Ava Hidalgo, for one of the first times in her entire life, consider her own mortality, and the fact that if she were to lose the inevitable fight against Charles Raymond Keyes, she was probably a dead woman.
She smoked some more of the weed she’d pilfered, curled up into a ball, and put on The Office on her smart TV, wanting nothing more than to undo the past two days from the moment she’d walked home from school.