Slow Decay

as he moved the forceps around, getting a better grip on the tablet. Manipulating the scalpel carefully, he extended the incision to the sides of the pill, then slipped the blade beneath the coating and prised it away from the interior. Oil spilled slowly out. In less than a minute, he had removed the coating entirely, stripping it away from the thing that had been hidden inside.

‘I hate soft centres,’ he said.

‘What have you got?’ Jack asked from the balcony.

‘Well, it’s not Turkish Delight, that’s for sure.’ Reaching out to the tray again, he picked up a pen-like device with a lens and a light at one end. He pointed it at the thing on the autopsy table and pressed a button on the side of the device. The plasma screen above his head faded within a few seconds into a high-definition close-up of the thing. The tip of Owen’s scalpel was just visible at the edge of the screen, the size and shape of a garden trowel.

‘Oh hell,’ said Gwen. She put a hand to her mouth. ‘You know what we’re looking at, don’t you?’

The thing was no more than a centimetre long, and curled into a comma. It was charcoal in colour, with irregular blue stripes, and looked like three very small worms, all joined together at one end. A tiny fuzzy cloud that might have been thousands of minute, translucent, fibres surrounded the free ends. The small teardrop of oily liquid that had surrounded and protected it was spreading out across the metal topography of the table.

Jack nodded. ‘Yeah. Yeah, I do.’

‘It’s an egg,’ Owen said. He used the scalpel to unfold the foetal creature. ‘It’s not a pill at all; it’s an egg. A fucking egg. And this is the embryo inside.’

‘But…’ Gwen seemed to run out of words. ‘But why?’ she finished eventually. ‘Why would anyone knowingly swallow an egg, especially if it turns into something like that?’

‘They don’t do it knowingly.’ Jack clenched his hands on the rail of the balcony, hard enough that Owen heard the metal creak. ‘And I think they do it so they can lose weight. Tell her, Owen.’

‘I’m guessing that the life cycle of this thing, whatever it is, is similar to that of our own, our very own, tapeworm,’ Owen said. He leaned closer, fascinated by the thing on the table in front of him. ‘It’s probably activated by the acidic contents of the stomach, hatches, then makes its way to the intestine and latches on. It sucks up nutrients, drawn from whatever the host has been eating. There’s so sign of a mouth, so I’m guessing it absorbs the partially digested food through its skin.’

‘Chyme,’ Jack suddenly said.

Gwen looked at him. ‘What?’

‘Chyme — semi-liquid, partly digested food leaving the stomach and entering the duodenum. Another candidate for my list of words that need to be saved from extinction and used in conversation as often as possible.’

‘All eyes on me, please,’ Owen said firmly. ‘Unless you want to be sent to the naughty corner. Now, unlike a tapeworm, I suspect this thing is voracious. That’s why the hosts are hungry all the time, and why they lose weight so fast. They’re almost starving, because the thing in their gut is taking all the food away from them before they get a chance to absorb it themselves. It’s like a cuckoo: relying on the host to do the hard work then taking advantage of the results.’

‘I hope for your sake it’s dead,’ Jack said.

‘Not dead as such, but it’s certainly inert. It will only come to life if I swallow it. Which I have no intention of doing. Not even on a bet.’

‘What about the other pill?’ Jack asked. ‘The one labelled “Stop”?’

Owen glanced over at the instrument tray, where three blister packs sat: the one Gwen had found in her own medicine cupboard, the one she had found at Lucy’s flat and the one Gwen and Jack had found at the Scotus Clinic. All three packs were now missing their ‘Start’ pills. Two of them still had the ‘Stop’ pills remaining. The third was empty. ‘I tested one earlier,’ he said. ‘Basic plant sterol — more or less harmless to humans, but I’m guessing it’s deadly to the worm-things. It probably allows the host to digest the remains, so there’s nothing left to give the game away.’

‘Perfect.’ There was something dark in Jack’s voice. ‘One pill to start the weight loss and another to stop it. Absolutely perfect. Symmetrical, in fact.’

Owen reached out and took a pair of tweezers from the tray. ‘Perfect apart from all the side effects,’ he said, picking the creature gently up from the autopsy table and holding it close to his face, turning it around so he could examine it from all aspects. ‘That raging hunger isn’t everything — there’s psychotic behaviour as well. We don’t know what causes that yet. And from what you said, the mature form of this thing leaped out of the receptionist’s throat, rupturing a major blood vessel in the process before it attacked you. That’s not the kind of behaviour that I’ve ever seen a tapeworm exhibit. It almost indicates awareness, perhaps even consciousness.’

‘Is it intelligent?’ Gwen asked. ‘Could we communicate with it?’

‘I don’t think the brain’s big enough to hold much intelligence. I think it’s going on instinct, and some basic processing of sensory inputs. What surprises me is the way you say it attacked you. Tapeworms are just inert assemblages of self-replicating segments. This thing — whatever it is — has the ability to sense where things are, decide they are threats and move to do something about that threat. Wherever their natural habitat is, they probably stalk their prey in some way before either laying eggs inside it or colonising it in the adult form.’

The colour had drained away from Gwen’s face. Her throat was working as if she was trying to stop herself throwing up.

‘We’ll call it George,’ Jack said suddenly.

‘Call what George?’

‘The parasite that’s inside your boyfriend. Makes it easier if we label them differently. Stops us getting confused. The one that attacked us in the Scotus Clinic was Ringo, the one inside Rhys is George, the one inside Marianne Till is Paul and that leaves the one inside Lucy Sobel as John.’

‘You forgot this one,’ Owen said, waggling the tiny alien creature back and forth in the air.

‘This one can be Stuart. As in Sutcliffe.’

‘Who was Stuart Sutcliffe?’ Gwen’s hand, still raised to her mouth, muffled her words, and Owen had to think for a moment before he could figure them out.

‘He was the one who left the Beatles in Hamburg, before they made it big. Nice guy. Invented the mop-top haircut, believe it or not. Dab hand at the old collage technique. Girlfriend’s name was Astrid, I think. Or Ingrid. One of the two.’

‘Jack.’ Gwen’s voice was tremulous. ‘We have to get rid of them. All of them. We’ve got the “Stop” pills. We can get Rhys and Marianne and Lucy to take the pills before anything worse happens to them.’

Jack looked down at Owen. Tell her, Jack’s eyes were saying.

‘We don’t know anything about the life cycle of these creatures,’ Owen said slowly. It was the same tone of voice he used to use when he was telling people that they had some inoperable cancer, or they were going to be paralysed for life. Slow, firm and reassuring. ‘And we don’t know how many other people are infected. I need one of the “Stop” pills so I can analyse it to see whether it can be synthesized, and we need to keep at least one of these creatures alive so we can study it and determine what it wants, what it needs, how it grows, how fast it grows and what its weaknesses are.’

Gwen turned towards Jack. ‘We only need one of them. Owen just said so — you heard him. We can give two of them the pills.’

‘And who gets to choose?’ Jack asked. He looked from Owen to Gwen and back again. ‘Which one of us gets to play God? Or would you rather we drew straws?’

‘Rhys is my boyfriend!’ she said, looking from one to the other. ‘Doesn’t that count for anything?’

‘And Marianne’s a nice girl with a family,’ Owen snapped. Something in him felt close to breaking point. He’d failed Marianne so far: he wasn’t going to fail her any more.

‘And no boyfriend,’ Jack reminded him.

‘That’s not the point,’ Owen shouted, rounding on him.

‘But what about Lucy?’ Jack asked them both. ‘I’m sure she’s got a family as well. Doesn’t she deserve the best chance we can give her?’

‘She’s a murderer,’ Owen reminded them both. Turning to Gwen, he said, ‘Do you want her to get away with