The humanity test.
For the chance to know, once and for all, who can be trusted, some dealings with monsters must be excusable. Inevitable. Just like this feeling between Ben and me.
Published: June 20th, 2017
Ben
Ben
Growing up is hard, and growing up in Prospero is even harder, but I think we manage. I mean, yeah, my friends and I spend more of our time fighting a race of shapeshifting aliens than we do hanging out, but we have our fun. We go to parties, help each other with our classes, maybe even fall in love…
I’ve no illusions that we live ordinary lives, but they’re our lives, and I’m going to make sure we make the most of them whether the Splinters want us to or not.
Mina
The truce is temporary. We will not humor the Splinters forever. It's only until the Slivers can be stopped, until the army of Shards being planted among our classmates can be disassembled, until we get our hands on the thing I'd almost given up believing in.
The humanity test.
For the chance to know, once and for all, who can be trusted, some dealings with monsters must be excusable. Inevitable. Just like this feeling between Ben and me.
And that has to be temporary too.
EXCERPT
Ben
At the time, my instincts told me that jumping
onto the hood of a moving SUV was a brilliant idea.
After half a second of trying to find something to
hold onto, I told myself I’d reconsider my instincts when I got out of this.
If I got
out of this.
A voice in my ear—I hadn’t lost my Bluetooth after
all. Haley’s voice, by the angry sound of it.
“Ben, what the hell are you doing?”
“I have no idea!” I yelled back, finally grabbing
the roof rack with both hands and holding on for dear life, doing my best to
block the windshield. The driver accelerated down the empty suburban street,
jerking the wheel back and forth, trying to shake me off. I knew behind the
tinted glass of this anonymous, plateless SUV were the gray faces of Slivers.
Today they were supposed to be kidnapping one of Prospero High School’s nicest
teachers from her home, and we were going to stop them. It wasn’t exactly a
piece of cake, but we’d done it before and should’ve been able to do it again.
I looked to the sidewalks, trying to spot any
other members of the Network.
There was a heavy blow against the windshield near
my chest. The tinted glass spiderwebbed beneath me. The Slivers were trying to
break through.
Not for the first time, I cursed The Owl.
“Everybody close on the house! They’re still on
the move!” Courtney called over the party line.
“Where’s that spike strip?” Haley asked.
“About twenty feet behind Ben before he decided to
go Shatner on us,” Greg answered.
The spiderweb of glass expanded as the Sliver
continued to force its way through.
The next voice was impossibly calm. “If we can
stop this vehicle, there’s every chance we can capture multiple Slivers at once
in addition to preventing Ms.
Craven’s abduction. Ben, do you think you can slow them down?”
Mina Todd.
She always asked for the impossible so reasonably.
The windshield broke open in front of me, safety
glass exploding outward as a long, muscular arm with a seven-fingered, clawed
hand burst through. It raked back and forth, opening up a large gash in the glass
that allowed me to see the three Slivers inside. They were of slight frame with
gray, hairless heads and bulging black eyes, and they had begun sprouting extra
limbs and tentacles to better mangle me.
“I’ll try,” I said, diving into the jagged hole
where the windshield used to be.
Their brief, startled pause before attacking was
all I needed.
I reached into my pocket and pulled out one of the
cheap stun guns Mina loved to make out of disposable cameras and jammed it into
the driver’s chest. The creature shuddered violently, jerking the wheel to the
side and stomping on the gas reflexively.
I forced the gearshift into neutral and pulled on
the parking brake. The SUV lurched to a violent stop in the middle of the
street.
So far so good.
Less good was the sound of snapping wood that came
from the passenger seat as its occupant’s body began to shift. Its rib cage
broke open into a giant, vertical mouth full of jagged teeth and swirling
tentacles. The tentacles lashed out at me, wrapping around my arms and neck,
and squeezed. The Sliver in the backseat joined in, grabbing the leg I tried to
anchor myself with against the dashboard and forcing me closer to that terrible
maw.
The passenger door flew open. The Sliver let out a
howl of pain as Julie buried a large meat hook in its back and began pulling it
from the car. Courtney wrapped her hands around Julie’s on the hook, throwing
her track team muscles into the effort and hardly wincing when the gelatinous
Splinter blood began to soil her neatly pressed blouse. The tentacles released
me, and soon enough the two girls wrestled the Sliver from the vehicle and
tased it.
One down.
The driver’s mutated arm reached across my chest
and pulled the door shut. It looked deep into my eyes with those empty, black
orbs. Its narrow mouth curled into the faintest of smiles as it held me pinned
to the seat with that monstrous arm. Though its face was formless, its flesh
waxy, I couldn’t help but feel something familiar in that smile and those
soulless eyes.
“Soon,” it whispered to me in its chittering,
popping voice.
A new arm burst from its shoulder, splitting into
two insectoid hands that allowed it to shift gears and disengage the parking
break simultaneously. I watched helplessly as Greg and Kevin finally caught up
to us with the jury-rigged spike strip we’d built for just this occasion,
tossing it uselessly to the ground just as the driver swerved out of the way.
I didn’t know if the Slivers were still going to
try for Ms. Craven or if they would content themselves with taking me instead.
Would they try to drag me to their Warehouse (assuming the Slivers had a
Warehouse) and replace me, or would they kill me as soon as they found a nice,
quiet place to pull over?
They weren’t slowing down. If anything, they
seemed to be speeding up. They swerved down the street, aiming for the side of
an old duplex. Ms. Craven’s duplex.
I took advantage of the driver’s focus to pull one
arm free, fasten a seatbelt around me, and brace myself.
The SUV slammed through the duplex’s wall with a
crushing impact that knocked the wind out of me and whipped my neck forward.
The unsecured driver flew through the jagged remnants of the windshield and
landed in what used to be Ms. Craven’s living room. The passenger from the
backseat climbed over me with spindly spider’s legs, following the driver out
the windshield.
A woman screamed inside.
Slowly, painfully, I undid my seatbelt and crawled
through the windshield, landing on the floor in a dazed heap.
Somehow I stumbled to my feet and pulled the mini
flamethrower from my back. It wasn’t much—just a kitchen lighter duct-taped to
one of those recalled aerosol fire extinguishers that Mina had stocked up on,
but it did the job. Flicking the lighter on, I lifted it high.
The driver had Ms. Craven wrapped in a set of
tentacles and interlocking claws, lifting her off the ground. Ms. Craven looked
at me fearfully, trying to cry out through the tentacle lashed across her
mouth. The flamethrower wouldn’t do much good at this range, standing as much a
chance of burning Ms. Craven. I was going to have to wait for backup.
“Let her go,” I said shakily. All of my
experiences with Slivers so far had proved that they loved to talk. I only had
to stall them long enough for Mina and the rest to get here.
The driver looked to the passenger, exchanging a
low series of pops and clicks. The passenger nodded, calmly raising one of its
three arms and pointing the hand at me, flat. Just like the driver, a small,
frightening smile crossed its face.
I lost all feeling beneath my waist, my legs
giving out beneath me. Then I could feel again—too well. It felt like every
nerve in my body had burst into flames. Violent waves of nausea hit me, and my
muscles no longer seemed to be my own.
Two realizations hit me at once.
First: they had a Shard we hadn’t documented yet.
Second: this Shard had remote control of human
bodies.
There was shouting, and then Kevin and Greg slid
through the massive hole in the wall, brandishing their flamethrowers and
Tasers. Less than a second later, a sliding glass door opened in the next room,
and Mina and Haley ran in to join us.
Only Aldo, Julie, and Courtney had yet to catch
up.
The two Slivers looked at each other, then at us.
They could have taken me easily, maybe even two of us. But five of us,
well-armed as we were—that gave them a moment of pause. The driver dropped Ms.
Craven roughly to the floor. Both of the Slivers raised their arms, and the
driver looked at me, curling its lips into that faint, unpleasant smile.
“Soon,” it said again.
Long spikes of bone erupted from each of their
chests and backs. They both began to laugh—a raspy, choking sound—as the base
of each spike began to pulsate.
“DUCK!” Mina blurted, falling to the floor.
Everyone dropped, dozens of bony spikes narrowly
missing us as they erupted from the Slivers’ bodies, lodging in the walls and
shattering windows.
By the time we regained our feet, the Slivers were
gone.
“Is everybody all right?” Mina asked.
There were murmurs of assent. Ms. Craven was on
the floor, sobbing.
Finding out about Splinters is never easy for
people to deal with under the best of circumstances, much less while being
kidnapped by the extreme anti-human cult of Splinters that we’d taken to
calling “Slivers” last fall.
Not that getting kidnapped by regular,
garden-variety Splinters was all that much better.
I was confident that Ms. Craven would come out of
her shock soon—she’d always struck me as pretty tough. Once this wore off, we’d
be able to tell her the truth. Maybe even make her a part of the team.
Assuming, of course, she was really human.
Haley examined my scratches and scrapes. Content
that I must have been okay, she smiled and threw her arms around my neck,
hugging me close. I don’t know what was more uncomfortable, Haley’s weight
against my aching ribs or the look of annoyance on Mina’s face.
“I’m fine,” I assured Haley, pulling away, “though
that Shard they have sure did a number on me.”
“One of the ones The Owl showed you?” Haley asked.
“No, this one’s new,” I said.
“Dammit, I hate Shards,” Greg said, shuddering. I
didn’t blame him; the last time we’d gone up against a Shard, it had made him
feel a swarm of spiders crawling beneath his skin.
“Tell me about it,” I said.
“Hey, guys?” Aldo said over the group line.
“Did you secure the other Sliver?” Mina asked.
“Yeah, we got her. No problems there. What about
yours?” Aldo asked.
“They’ve retreated. They haven’t doubled back your
way?” Mina asked.
“No, we’re clear,” Aldo said. There was something
held back in his voice I didn’t like.
“What’s wrong, Aldo?” I asked.
“Uh, I think you need to see this one for
yourselves.”
“We’re on our way,” Mina said. “Haley, Greg, keep
an eye on Ms. Craven.”
“I got some stuff that might calm her down,” Greg
said, patting a pocket on his old army jacket.
“Don’t,” I said.
Greg shrugged. “More for me then.”
I followed Kevin and Mina out the front door. By
force of habit, I looked up and down the street, hoping by some miracle that we
hadn’t been spotted—or heard, for that matter. It was early Sunday morning, so
the streets were mostly deserted. Typical abduction timing. The cops would be
here eventually—a vehicle crashed through the side of a house has a way of
summoning them sooner or later—but given the Prospero Police Department’s
closeness with the main Splinter Council, this would all no doubt be hushed up
pretty quickly.
“You’re gonna have to spend some quality time with
Mina’s first-aid kit, brother,” Kevin observed.
“I’ve looked worse,” I said.
“You’ve looked better, too,” Mina interjected
coldly.
“What’d I do?” I complained.
“You nearly ruined the operation. This didn’t go
half as smoothly as our other interceptions,” Mina shot back.
I didn’t have a good defense for that. Ever since
she’d started receiving those messages from the Owl, giving us the Slivers’
plans for abductions, we’d had a pretty good (though not perfect) track record
of intercepting and stopping the Slivers before they could take their intended
targets. Over the previous month and a half, we had managed to save the mayor’s
son, Sheriff Diaz’s wife, and the head of the PTA from being taken without
their ever knowing anything was going on. Things could have gone better this
time, I knew that, but they also could have gone a lot worse.
“I didn’t have a choice. They know what we’ve been
doing, and they’re being more careful. I did what I had to do,” I said.
“You could’ve been killed.”
“But I wasn’t!”
Kevin squeezed his way between us and put an arm
around each of our shoulders.
“Let us not forget, my friends, that we did stop them from replacing Ms. Craven.
It may have been sloppy, and she may have been needlessly introduced to our
world, but we saved her. We did a good thing; the forces of evil are in check
for another day. We should be celebrating!” Kevin said, smiling that easy smile
he always used to defuse tense situations.
Mina sighed. “Please try to avoid unnecessary
risks in the future.”
“Will do,” I said.
“There, isn’t that better than fighting like a
couple o’ freshmen?” Kevin said.
“So says the senior commencement speaker,” I
replied, punching him in the ribs softly.
“Hey, I’m as surprised as you guys are that I
actually got the gig,” Kevin said, grinning.
“Right… so how long have you had that speech
written?” I asked.
“Seventh grade, give or take a month.” Kevin
laughed. “Come on, it’ll be my last chance to try to change a few minds here
before I move on to the real world.”
“Freshmen don’t fight any appreciably more or less
than any other students,” Mina said as if she’d missed half the conversation,
looking a bit lost in thought.
“Really? Maybe we should ask Aldo,” Kevin joked.
Tall tales about Aldo’s secret second life, or
third life in our case, had become something of a running joke among the
Network, given his habit of accumulating even more scrapes and bruises than the
rest of us in spite of spending most of his time behind the scenes, digging for
information or tinkering with the equipment.
Underground cage fighting and undercover spy
operations were common speculations.
This conversation did lead to one topic that had
been eating at me lately: the passage of time. Of the eight members of the
Network, Kevin and Courtney were both seniors and were going to be moving on
from Prospero within the next six months. I didn’t know how we were going to
keep the fight going without them. We would find a way to manage, Mina always
had in the past, but it would be rough without Courtney’s organizational skills
and Kevin’s ability to put things in perspective.
Julie, Courtney, and Aldo had dragged their
captive Sliver to the privacy of Courtney’s backyard, a good five blocks from
Ms. Craven’s, and by the time we caught up with them, they already had it tied
up in copper wire and were threatening to touch the wire to a car battery. As
usual, Julie (her jet black hair streaked with hot pink and red for Valentine’s
Day coming up) smiled at us perkily beneath her thick goth makeup.
“Ya all right, Ben?” she asked, eying the
scratches on my face.
“I’m fine.”
Aldo’s concerned expression was unsettling. Ever
since our fight with Robbie, Aldo had assumed a bravura I’d never known he had
in him. He was the first to cheer any victory lately. If he wasn’t smiling…
“What is it?” Mina asked, looking down at the
Sliver, which looked more human now despite the few extra limbs it still
possessed.
Courtney held the end of the copper wire above the
car battery with a plastic pair of tongs. “Show them again.”
The Sliver hissed something in its chittering
language that must not have been kind. Courtney and Mina exchanged a glance.
Mina nodded. Courtney dropped the wire onto the battery’s contact.
The Sliver screamed too humanly as it shuddered
and arched what could best be approximated as its back, and the wire sparked
violently. When Courtney took the wire away, it reluctantly took the face of
its true, human form with a look of pure spite.
It was the face of Ms. Claudette Velasquez, my
calculus teacher. That she was a Splinter was not news; we had known this for a
few months.
That she was working with the Slivers was a surprise. The last time we had
seen her, she had a seat on the Splinter Council.
“What are you waiting for? Kill me. That’s what
you want, isn’t it?” she challenged.
“We’re not that stupid,” I said.
Ms. Velasquez looked at the battery with a mix of
anger and fear. “Then what is your plan for me?”
“You’re going to tell us everything you know about
the Slivers’ plans,” Mina said simply, taking the tongs from Courtney and
holding them a little closer to the battery. “And when we’re convinced you’re
not holding out, we’ll hand you over to the Splinter Council.”
Ms. Velasquez’s eyes went wide with genuine fear.
“And if you’re never convinced?”
“We turn you over to them anyway, only we don’t
tell them how remorseful and cooperative you were.”
Ms. Velasquez’s eyes scanned us, probably trying
to gauge whether or not Mina was telling the truth. She must have believed her,
because her body visibly slumped.
“Fine. I will cooperate. Just don’t—”
She let out an ear-splitting scream, her eyes
bulging—then fell still with mouth agape. We stared, trying to figure out if it
was a trick, when the flesh began to melt from her bones in thick gray rivers.
“What the… no, no…” Aldo muttered, trying to scoop
bits of dissolving Splinter into one of his specially rigged containment boxes,
watching with confusion as the liquid continued to evaporate after the box was
sealed.
The entire Splinter corpse down to the bones was
deteriorating into nothingness as the raw Splinter matter became incompatible
with our world.
“What the hell just happened?” Courtney asked.
“She was going to talk!”
“Was she?” Mina asked doubtfully.
“Well she sure as hell wasn’t going to die!” said
Aldo, staring at the last vanishing remnants of the body. “Splinters just don’t
do that spontaneously.”
“They might if they got one of those in ’em,
brother,” Kevin said as he pointed to what was left of Ms. Velasquez’s
deteriorating bones.
What looked like a foot-long, white caterpillar
made of tumors and small air sacs disentwined itself from around her spine.
Slowly, it walked away from the dissolving remains of my math teacher, shaking
off bits of gray slime.
Then it started to glow a faint, pulsing white,
lifting off the ground and beginning to float away like a plastic bag in the
breeze. Mina grabbed it with her tongs.
“That a Splinter?” Kevin asked.
“No, I don’t think so,” Mina said.
“Then what is it?” Aldo asked.
The answer hit me before Mina could say it out
loud.
“A game changer,” I said. “If they’ve got
themselves some sort of alien suicide pill hiding inside them to keep them
compliant, we might have to reconsider our capture strategy.”
Capturing a Sliver for information had been one of
our dreams ever since we started receiving information from The Owl.
Just when we thought we had the Slivers figured
out, they had to come up with something like this.
I would’ve laughed if it weren’t so damn depressing.
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About the authors:
F.J.R. TITCHENELL is an author of young adult, sci-fi, and horror fiction, including Confessions of the Very First Zombie Slayer (That I Know of). She graduated from Cal State University Los Angeles with a B. A. in English in 2009 at the age of twenty. She currently lives in San Gabriel, California, with her husband, coauthor, and amazing partner in all things, Matt Carter, and their pet king snake, Mica.
MATT CARTER is an author of horror, sci-fi, and yes, even a little bit of young adult fiction. He earned his degree in history from Cal State University Los Angeles, and lives in the usually sunny town of San Gabriel, California, with his wife, best friend, and awesome co-writer, F.J.R. Titchenell. Check out his first solo novel, Almost Infamous, or connect with him on:
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