Razors of wind tore through Ava’s shirt, slashing her skin as she dodged around, looking for an opening.
This better not be all the son of a bitch can do, she thought to herself, and quickly regretted that thought when Keyes somehow managed to instantly close the distance and catch her directly in the gut with his fist. Ava staggered and the fear of death briefly overtook her; however, the taste of blood rising up to her mouth replaced it with a lust for more carnage, and she stood up, renewed.
Ava ducked and weaved through the Devourer’s assault, taking grazing slashes all over her body and wincing as each one splattered her blood on the tile of the hallway; when she found an opening, she threw a haymaker with all of her focus into her fist, but missed, with the Devourer instead catching her arm.
“You’re just a child,” he said. “You don’t have a chance.” As if to punctuate his point, his muscles began to inflate to almost inhuman levels, and he lifted Ava up without even breaking a sweat.
“Oh, fuck me, you do have other tricks,” Ava said, before being bashed directly into the lockers lining the hallway, hard enough to leave a large human-shaped dent in the metal.
Ava slumped to the ground, unconscious, and the Devourer lifted her up by the neck, preparing to feast upon his rightful kill.
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Sam White was never what one would consider to be a brave kid. Sure, he liked gory movies and violent video games and whatnot, but when it came to real, actual danger, you could reliably expect Sam to be bolting in the other direction; one time, he’d started a fire while trying to cook macaroni and cheese, and when his parents came out of their bedroom to get the extinguisher, he’d already leapt out the window and bolted halfway out of the apartment complex.
He’d gotten stung by his parasite by blind chance: it had fallen out of a tree while he was on vacation with his parents, and they’d been told by the doctors (and by the federal agents that came to the hospital) that he’d been stung by a form of rare jellyfish that had been kicked up from the Gulf of Mexico into the tree by a storm, and that the venom had simply made him very ill.
Sam was a smart enough kid that right off the bat, he didn’t buy that story, though, and accordingly, the federal agents briefed him. If he experienced any weird effects from the sting, he was supposed to call a certain number, without telling his parents (and he was given multiple potential cover stories). Because of the nature of his Code, he was already experiencing the “weird effects” they had been alluding to, and being a good-natured, honest kid with a love of his country and a deep trust of authority, he was honest.
He was informed, in no uncertain terms, that the general public was on a need-to-know basis about the parasites. Any indication to the general public or the outside world that Sam had any sort of power would result in his immediate termination; the federal government didn’t need the mass panic caused by these things being out in the wild, you see.
Sam figured that, with the Devourer eating teenagers and police officers in broad daylight, however, that was right out the fucking window. Not only that, but Ava was almost assuredly going to do something stupid and make it very obvious to the world that she, herself, had some sort of power (if there were any witnesses, which he prayed to whatever higher power existed there weren’t).
While he had initially disappeared into the crowd, he doubled back, away from them, and weaved through his fellow students, pretending as if nothing was wrong. When several students told him that he was going the wrong way, he simply ignored them.
Eventually, he passed the crowd entirely, silently thanking that higher power that he hadn’t been tackled and dragged back into the crowd, and it didn’t take long for him to come back to the scene of the carnage, where they’d first been separated.
Unfortunately, what he saw was the worst case scenario, about to happen right before his eyes. Charles Raymond Keyes, the Devourer, was lifting Ava up by the neck, salivating for a taste of her brain.
Sam’s own brain went into bullet-time. Everything was moving in slow motion from the adrenaline that pumped through his veins. If the Devourer killed her, he was almost certainly next; he had some ability to sense his prey, clearly, but Sam’s was better, and he suspected the Devourer knew that. On top of that, he was starting to kind of like Ava. Like, like like Ava. Something about a girl who liked violence that much was kinda hot to him, and it’s not like she was uneasy on the eyes, even with the scruffy haircut.
God damn it, he thought to himself. I’m gonna get myself killed for a girl.
“Hey, Chuck!” he shouted, at the top of his lungs. “Little far from your suck-and-fuck, aren’t you?” He turned around and spanked his own ass through his jeans at the Devourer. “Come get some of this juicy meat!”
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Sam’s display had a secondary effect, in addition to momentarily distracting Keyes: it shook Ava back to reality. She was grievously wounded; some of her ribs were broken, but she couldn’t quite tell which ones or how bad, because her entire torso felt like it was engulfed in flames.
It almost reminded her of the pain she’d felt when the parasite first stung her. This time, however, she had the taste of blood in her mouth to energize her.
More importantly, she had the taste of blood in her mouth to use as a weapon. She looked Keyes dead in his eyes and spat blood directly into them, making him grunt in pain and blinding him, at least temporarily; for all the Codes he’d picked up from devouring people, nothing was protecting his eyes, it seemed.
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Adrenaline was keeping Ava moving, for now, despite the agony shooting through her every time a limb moved out of place or shifted a shattered rib. She thought quickly on her feet, and remembered that using any sort of Code requires focus.
“Hey, Sam!” she yelled, using as much wind as she could spare without ruining her plan. “Do that again!”
Sam, perturbed, started smacking his ass and shaking it at Keyes, and it made him look up and made his grip go slack as his attention wavered. Ava smirked as she saw her opening.
Ava went for it, throwing a haymaker with all of her might and focus directly into the Devourer’s midsection.
Blood and bits of organs sprayed all over the room as the force of Ava’s punch, which was enough to shatter concrete into pebbles, tore through the Devourer’s body, leaving only his legs standing, which crumpled to the ground along with Ava.
“Fucking A, that was a good fight,” Ava said, bleeding from cuts all over her body and beaten absolutely senseless, as the adrenaline started to wear off and the injuries started to catch up with her. The last thing she saw before she faded into unconsciousness was Sam running up to her and kneeling down; she thought she felt him cradling her head.
She smiled. Ordinarily, she might’ve felt a little insulted by the gesture, but not this time.
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Ava had expected to wake up in a hospital, or maybe the nurse’s office, or the police station if she was really unlucky, when she came out of her injured fugue.
She did not expect to be in an unfamiliar bedroom, in an unfamiliar house, with Sam holding her hand. She yanked it away and bolted upright.
“Okay, first question, where am I?” she asked.
“Oh, that’s easy,” Sam said. “Remember how, when we were in the forest, I said I knew a guy if you broke your hand? Well, I also know that guy for if you break your damn-near-everything-else, like you just did.”
To prove his point, another boy, a little shorter and less toned than Sam, walked into the room. His hair was a bit longer and a reddish shade of brown, and while he wore glasses himself, they weren’t as thick-rimmed.
“Oh, good, you’re up,” the new boy said. “You saved my life, you know that?”
“Did I, now?” Ava asked, wiping the sleep from her eyes.
“How do you think I saved your ass?” he asked. “I’ve got one of the parasites too. Sam and I have been friends since second grade, and he was the first one to find out when I got stung by mine. Turns out, I got the Code of Mending, which means I’m a natural doctor. If you hadn’t splattered that creep, he would’ve eaten me.”
Ava blinked.
“Oh, fuck me, don’t I know you?” she asked. “You’re Scott Albright, aren’t you? That was your older brother I got in trouble for knocking out the other day, after he decked me!”
“Yeah, trust me, I know,” Scott said. “Don’t worry, no hard feelings on my end. Luke sucks. God, he won’t shut up about wanting to fight you again, and I don’t think he realizes just how bad of an idea that is now; you’d turn the poor guy into goo.” Ava burst out laughing. It felt good to laugh; unexpectedly good.
“So, wait, how long have I been out?” Ava asked.
“Oh, about…” Sam took stock for a second and glanced at his phone. “You finished that fight at about 11:00 AM, and it’s 6:30 PM now, so about seven and a half hours?”
Ava blinked.
“And you said I broke damn near everything in my body, huh?” she asked.
“Yep. Your ribcage was basically powder,” Scott chimed in. “Like, when I touched your chest to use the Code, it felt mushy. A ribcage should not feel mushy.”
Ava blushed harder than she’d have ordinarily expected.
“You touched my chest?” she asked. Scott blushed in return, realizing what he’d just said.
“It wasn’t like that,” he stammered. “I mean, I had to, in order to heal you.” Ava laughed and held a hand up.
“It’s fine, dude,” she said. “If it means I can sleep off having my bones turned to putty in seven hours and wake up feeling good as new, I don’t give a damn how… awkward it is to use your whole thing. Just don’t assume it means anything, you get me?”
The fear left Scott, and he settled down.
“I got you,” he said to her. “Thanks for not freaking out about it.”
“What are you thanking me for!?” she asked. “You’re the reason I’m not laid up in a body cast right now.”
“You know, good point,” he said, smiling.
“So, what’s the next step?” Ava asked the two boys. “Devourer’s gone, presumably all’s well now, right?”
“That’s… up for debate,” Sam sighed. “We got you out of there in time, so none of the heat’s on you, and you slept through most of the commotion, but it turns out, a kid and a police officer getting their brains eaten in broad daylight makes for one hell of a news story. Not just that, but the guy slit Mrs. Robbins’ throat up at the front office using the air itself, which is pretty hard to pass off as anything other than… what it is.”
“So Pandora’s box is open, then?” Ava asked.
“I wouldn’t… necessarily go that far,” Sam said. “I mean, I don’t really know. Like I said, I’m not operating on anywhere near complete info here, you get me? For all I know, they could be successfully covering it up. Actually, that’s probably a pretty safe bet.”
“So I’m safe and I don’t need to worry, is what you’re saying? Get to the point already,” Ava said.
“Again, not really. See, the news is pretty aware that the killer was taken out by… something hitting him with the force of a freight train, so hard that his torso was splattered all over the surrounding hallway in a cloud of blood and organ goo, and that’s the kind of detail you tend to dwell on,” Sam explained, turning on the TV in Scott’s bedroom and flipping to the news.
On the channel, the headline was simple and clear: ROBERTS KILLER DISINTEGRATED - ACT OF GOD? The anchor seemed to be sincerely discussing the possibility that the killer had been struck down by literal divine intervention, which seemed to back up the successful-coverup idea.
“My point is,” Sam continued, “we’re not the only parasite hosts in the world. We don’t know what the rest of that community is like, outside of the few of us on Parasite Watch, and we just held up a big neon sign to the world that we have a strong one living right here in Houston. It might be fine; if everyone’s like us, you’ll just make a bunch of new friends.”
“But if there’s more people like Keyes, this is gonna be a problem,” Ava went on, finishing the thought. “Oh, god damn it.”
“It’s okay,” Sam said. “You took down Keyes, no problem. Just… try to lay low. I know this’ll be hard for you, but don’t fight anyone for a while. Don’t show off your power or anything. If the news comes and tries to talk to you about Keyes, play dumb, pretend you skipped that day.”
Ava nodded.
“I can live with that,” she said, getting up from the bed and starting to walk out of the room.
The immediate problem of Charles Raymond Keyes, the Devourer who had murdered at least thirteen people in his quest for power, had been solved, but the future was uncertain for Ava Hidalgo. All she knew was that she was almost certainly going to have to fight again… and that thought put a great, big, dumb smile on her face.