Excerpt
From "Piggyback" in In a Green Dress, Surrounded by Exploding Clowns and Other Stories
This story isn't for you.
#
The creature I'm riding staggers and clutches his left arm. He cries out, and I nearly cry out along with him.
I can feel the pain shooting through him—through us both—because we're connected. I can feel his fear, too, but it's nowhere near my own. Because what will happen to him if he fails isn't even close to what will happen to me.
He doesn't know that this is my last chance.
#
The creature, an overweight middle-aged human with shaggy dark hair, is called Calvin Garland. He's homeless, and he's drunk, and he's having a heart attack in a New York City alley.
But he's mine.
Not that he even knows that I'm here, wrapped around his shoulders like a slimy green mink stole. Not that he or any other human is aware of me...though occasionally, when I want him to, he can hear me, just a little. And sometimes, he catches a glimpse of me out of the corner of his eye, just for an instant.
It's happened to you, too, hasn't it? Haven't you ever thought there might be a good reason for that?
#
Calvin falls against an alley wall, clutching his chest. At the same exact moment, I wrap a green tentacle around him and clamp its fanged red sucker into the flesh over his heart.
I pump a stream of syrup into his heart and follow that with electric shocks. The whole time, my hundred scarlet eyes are looking for any sign of The Viscera in the sky.
If The Viscera is watching, and Calvin drops dead, I'll be swept from his body and subjected to torments you can't even imagine. I'll spend the next thousand years shrieking and howling in agony at the hands of creatures who can see, touch, and torture me just fine.
None of this will happen merely because I lost a host. It will happen because I failed to drive a host to save the planet from the greatest threat it has ever faced.
#
"You don't want to die," I whisper in Calvin's ear from my fluttering, ooze-coated lips.
"I don't wanna die," whimpers Calvin as the syrup and shocks take effect. "I don't wanna die."
His heart returns to normal, for the moment at least. Maybe if he'd taken better care of himself all those years...but he was living rough even before he moved to the streets.
I curl another tentacle around his head, plant a sucker between his eyes, and pump in a different syrup to take the edge off. He won't do me much good if he's too freaked out to walk and talk and fire a gun.
Then, suddenly, the temperature drops twenty degrees, and the sun turns to shadow. My circulatory organs pound, and my slime turns to ice, because I know.
The Viscera is here.
All my eyes turn upward. There it is, hanging over the tallest towers, filling the sky—too massive to take in all at once.
Yet not a single human can see that vast mass of squirming tentacles and pulsating ebony flesh. No human-built instrument can detect the flickering strobes of its sensory organs or the excrement dripping from its orifices.
And no human mind can comprehend the intentions of its ancient, implacable intellect. Not one of you can fathom the extremes that it will go to when dealing with its Yoke servants, like me.
But I can. And that is why I quake as it passes. That is why I do everything I can to stay unnoticed and unpunished.
Though I know, as every Yoke does, that The Viscera misses nothing. It is our God, just as it is yours.
Even though you don't know it yet.
