Don’t know if we are continuing, but here is the post regardless. Thanks to Juan for the assist.
Alex and the Leecher
Alex raked his hands down his face in frustration. It had been days since the attack and between dodging questions and trying to figure out what was wrong with Sarah, there hadn’t been much time to think about the attack itself. She’d finally stabilized before, he knew it. The treatment should have lasted longer than that. Something had changed, but what?
He’d run every test, considered every theory. There weren’t changes in blood chemistry or organ function, yet she was clearly growing weaker by the day, like something was draining the life from her.
And he knew an expert on draining life, didn’t he? He yelled at the empty lab around him, “Why can’t you do something useful and actually help me?”
A WASTED LIFE IS WASTED POWER. POWER BREEDS POWER. DRINK HER POWER AND TAKE AWAY HER LIFE.
Alex scoffed. “Power? Look at her. She’s being kept alive by those machines. She has no power to give.” He kicked at a garbage can, sending it flying across the room. “Why do you have to be so useless!”
DESPAIR IS FOR THE WEAK. WE ARE NOT WEAK. THE WOMAN IS WEAK, YET SHE IS TOUCHED BY ONE OF US. ITS POWER HOLDS HER STILL. LET HER BECOME STRONG WITHIN US AND FADE OUTSIDE US. MAKE HER POWER OURS AND LEAVE HER REST ONCE AND FOR ALL.
“What? What did you say?” The Leecher did not answer, perhaps sensing a rhetorical question, but the words echoed in Alex’s head:
She is touched by one of us. It’s power holds her still.
Touched? But how could that be? That seemed…impossible, and yet it made sense given Sarah’s decline started after the attack. What had changed since then? He looked down at his chest where the lanyard had been. This demon or whatever the Leecher was…that had changed.
Alex didn’t know exactly how all this worked, but he instinctively knew that the Leecher wasn’t directly responsible for Sarah. Yet the correlation, what the Leecher had said, and the lack of any other leads were too strong to ignore.
He now had a working hypothesis, that Sarah had been tainted somehow. But how to prove it? Maybe these creatures like the Leecher were metaphysical in origin, but there had to be some physical manifestation, something he could measure.
He walked to the sink then splashed some water on his face. It was time to get to work.