Getting away from it all by visiting a holiday village during
school half term, might seem like a bit of a contradiction to most
people. But that was how Angela liked it. To sit alone
in the midst of humanity, with all its faults. Isolated in
the crowd.
It was her yearly sojourn to this place, just slightly south of
Blackpool. Her time to rewind. It had been a
particularly hard year out in the Killing Fields and there was a
whole mountain of stuff she had to mentally process and archive.
The Bistro in Kirby Hall was unusually quiet for the time of
day. Angela had chosen her usual table near the fire exit,
so she could watch the entire room, and was picking at a plate of
fish, chips and mushy peas. Today she had auburn hair, and
had tucked one ironed-straight strand behind her right ear, as she
immersed herself in Asimov’s, I, Robot. To her well
honed literary tastes, he was one of the bright young upstarts of
the genre.
She had performed a perfect autopsy on the fish, stripping it
of batter and folding the two greasy segments away from the pale
while flesh, but had still only eaten one tiny morsel. The
peas were likewise abandoned, as they had had a funny metallic
taste. So she absentmindedly dunked the fat chips into the
small pot of horseradish sauce, whilst slowly turning the pages of
her book.
Letting her internal CPU trawl through the past several months
of reaping.
The boy swam into view first. Overweight, in baggy shorts
too tight for him, wearing an off-grey T-shirt with a bad
Transformers picture on it. She sensed his piggy eyes on her
rather than saw him, as she was poised, another chip over the pot
of sauce.
"Good God . . . not here . . ." she muttered under her
breath.
His obese mother and father followed him in with a variety of
coats, carrier bags and general junk—capturing the centre table
meant for six. The two adults ignored the slight girl in the
corner, but their brat continued to stare. The mother
knocked against an adjoining table and spilled someone’s coffee,
without bothering to apologize. The father sat down with a
resounding thump, and began to monopolize the already harassed
waitress.
"'Oy, love—over here! I’m bloody starvin’!"
God, not here.
Angela hid her face behind her hair, trying to ignore them.
The almost-people. The Hollow Men. Mankind’s eternal
parasites—the Mistletoe.
They had been there from when Man first came down from the
trees. Skulking in the shadows, watching and waiting.
Imitating our moves and the way we looked. Mistletoe were
our parasitic friends—our doppelgangers. In an odd
evolutionary deal, they grew up beside us . . .
stealing our
life energies . . . becoming us . . .
Not constructed of flesh, blood and bone, but of a cartilage
substance which grew a mushroom-like substitute for flesh over it,
powered by osmosis and fed on sugars and water. Cut them and
they do not bleed . . . but they might ooze sap slightly.
Many of the Mistletoe in current times didn’t even realize what
they were. Until they went to a doctors, of course.
Ignorant through generations upon generations of the Kissed.
Lock them away in a dry, darkened room and they forgot what
they wanted to become. They would loose human shape within
24 hours, to wither and rot. It was as if their bipedal
wet-print began to unravel . . .
Unchecked, the parasite would eventually strangle and outlive
the host. It could mean the extinction of the human race.
Which was why a very clever man made Angela and her siblings back
in the 1800’s.
To burn the Mistletoe away from the roots
up.
To be farmers, tending their human sheep.
To save the day.
As other families drifted away and the Bistro staff retreated
into the kitchen, only Angela and the family-from-Hell were left.
Cautiously, she risked a glance at them, as an odd silence settled
over the eating hall.
There was something wrong with the boy.
His mouth had drooped open at one side, as he absorbed his
third glass of cola, and he had gone a dreadful pasty colour.
With a fascination born from a life time of studying these
creatures, she watched him ooze bonelessly off his seat and slump
across the table. His mother and father, still trawling
copious amounts of fast-food into their cavernous mouths, seemed
oblivious of their progeny’s plight.
It was only when he actually fell to the floor, like a beached
whale, that they could be bothered to respond.
"David . . . stop pissing about and get off that floor!
That shirt were clean on today!" his mother mouthed, dribbling red
sauce down the front of her glittery top.
David lay still, his breathing ragged.
"David! Listen to your mam when she’s talkin’ to you!"
The father shoved his dying son with the toe of one trainer.
Still no response.
The two adults returned to their meals. David’s breathing became even more ragged and his features
began to slip.
Something inside Angela Steel snapped.
Pushing back her chair with a clatter, she rose to her feet and
moved quickly to the boy’s side.
"You stupid morons," she said. "Can’t you see he’s
unraveling?"
Shocked silence was the parents’ only reply.
By now, the thing that thought it was a boy had stopped
breathing. Flexing her right hand, a hypodermic extended
from Angela’s forefinger and she injected it swiftly into the
creature’s neck. It seemed to make no difference to his
accurate impersonation of a corpse.
She glanced up at the parents, casting their flabby shadows
across their son’s body.
"You never told him, did you?" she said, angry at their
complacency. "You never told him what he was . . ."
"He would have worked it out when he were older," the father
said. "Why are you trying to help? You were built to
destroy us."
She didn’t answer. She couldn’t find the words.
As her hands changed shape again, so that the fingers became
live electrical contacts, she shocked the fake child with a
thousand volts. His hair bristled on end and a button pinged
off his pants, but there was no movement.
"Pass me that Cola . . ." she snapped at the mother.
Silently, the Mistletoe did as she was told. Drawing a
good quantity of the sticky stuff into her morphed-syringe, Angela
hesitated for a moment. Here was one of the parasites of the
future. In a generation, he could have spawned, or infected
with the Mistletoe kiss, thousands of un-beings. And she was
trying to save him . . .
Plunging the needle into his chest, where a normal heart would
be, she injected him with the caffeine/sugar hit. With a
strangled cry, the creature sat bolt upright and threw up all over
his mother’s shoes.
"Greedy little bugger ate too much salad. Told you to
leave the green stuff alone!" Angela heard his father exclaim, as
she walked angrily out of the food hall, without looking back.
In a daze, she found herself jamming stuff into her single bag
and slinging it in the rear of the Range Rover. She just had
to get out of there, and get out now.
The Mistletoe had spoiled this haven for her. Once a year
away from the never ending war . . . that was all she had
asked . . . Climbing into the vehicle, it took her three
attempts to get it started as her hands were trembling so much
with anger and frustration.
Artificial tears blinding her blue eyes, she drove too fast
over the speed bumps by the holiday village’s main gate. By
roadside, the family of three were stood, like lumps on a log,
dead eyes watching her departure. Tentatively, the boy
raised one hand to wave goodbye, before his mother caught his
wrist to stop him. Angela should have done the human race a
favour and run them all over.
For, despite being parasitic duplications whose kind had been
bleeding humans dry of emotions and will for millennia, they had
what she never could.
A real family.
Close, if not bitter, bonds.
Trying to stop her tear ducts from leaking, the android headed
down the road towards the motorway, and her lonely life as a
reaper of those Kissed by the Mistletoe.
