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.