Stephenie Meyer owns The Host, not me.
A/N This is a violent chapter. You have been warned.
Hangover chapter #1
Mixed Feelings
*Malevolence*
"Turn on the radio, Fractals. I want to hear a news station."
The parasite reached over and turned on the radio, taking her eyes off the road for a moment in order to find a suitable frequency.
"Fzzz... The search for Sophia Conrad continues. The Seekers now believe that she is connected to the disappearance of Zoe Parva, who went missing two days ago. The Seekers ask our listeners to call them if they see a black 2000 model Ford explorer with a driver matching Parva's description."
The radio continued to detail what Sophia and Zoe looked like, and gave the car's license plate number.
"Well, fuck." Sophia said. The license problem would easily be solved, as screwdrivers were not hard to find, but now that they had a description of Fractals' host body...
All news was bad news, she supposed.
It looked like the bug had outlived its utility. She needed it to drive to the next town over, but after that it would be almost useless. With the bugs aware Fractals was missing, having anyone see its face would be nearly as bad as being spotted herself.
Its host's name had been Zoe Parva. Sophia felt a momentary surge of curiosity about the host woman's life before Fractals had stolen her body. She buried it; allowing herself any sort of attachment to the body of someone she planned on killing could make her hesitate to pull the trigger when the time came. For all intents and purposes, the host woman was already dead, anyway. When she killed Fractals, it wouldn't be murder; she'd just be putting Zoe's body to rest.
She'd have to find a new driver and a new car after she put down the bug. After she found one, she wouldn't have to think about who Zoe had been at all. But... It might still be useful in the short term picture, so she wouldn't kill it immediately. She'd been planning on interrogating it; she'd have to do that before she killed the thing.
First things first, though. Food wouldn't be much of an issue for the next few days, as she'd had Fractals get a couple crates of canned foods just in case something like this happened. She needed ammo, and Fractals would have to stay out of sight and in the dark about that anyway. She was keeping it in line by threatening to go on rampage, and there lay the problem; it would do everything within its power to keep from enabling her to do more damage. Also, as soon as she started shooting, it would stop helping her so readily. This meant that she'd have to keep it from figuring out what she was doing.
The rest of the day, Sophia directed Fractals to keep driving on the highway, with deliberately vague directions such as "Go southwest" or "Turn here" as its only guidance.
She'd been considering where she could get bullets from, and she could only think of a few places that might still have any - Seeker stations, military bases, and the like. Regardless of how much the Souls had gutted the world's militaries, it was unlikely she would get very far at all on an Army base. That left the Seekers.
"Fractals, how many people are in one of the smaller Seeker stations?" she asked.
"..."
Click, click, click, click. Sophia absently flipped her pistol's safety a few times, casually looking out the window.
"The smallest one I ever dealt with had about twenty people on an average day."
Sophia loved the noise that safety made. It was nice, being able to send a message so easily.
Sophia smiled. She figured that at night, at a suitably early hour - say, 3:30 am - it would be almost empty. CCTV cameras, once the bane of her existence, were now no longer an issue - her face was probably on national news! - and so she didn't have to worry about them any longer. She felt she had a solid chance of taking out whoever was inside as long as she had the drop on them. And if she couldn't, it made little difference. No matter what happened, she'd take a few Seekers with her.
It was strangely liberating, not caring about things anymore.
She'd need to find a suitably small station, which wouldn't be too hard with Fractals driving. She'd need to have Fractals park the car somewhere far away from the station, and then...
Zoe stared at the point of Sophia's bayonet, barely ten centimeters from her left eye. The child had ordered her to drive into the woods, away from another one-stoplight town only memorable for its tiny Seeker station. She had then removed Zoe from the car (forcefully and enthusiastically), taped her hands and mouth, and brought her to a frozen creekbed nearby.
"You have thirty seconds to give me a good reason not to kill you. Scream and I'll make it very, very slow." Sophia's voice was harsh and monotone.
Zoe thought quickly, wincing as Sophia roughly removed the tape. She didn't want to put anyone else in harm's way, but looking down the barrel of the AK things seemed different.
"I know where your brother is, Sophia," she said.
Sophia began circling around her, AK still trained on her head. "Alex is dead, I saw it. I saw him die. Try again, bug. Fifteen seconds left."
"I'm not lying. If you knew more about my people's Healers, you would understand how much damage they can repair."
"Bullshit," the girl stated succinctly. "Five seconds, Fractals."
She needed something more. "I know where your family is, Sophia," she desperately said, immediately regretting her words. If Sophia believed her she would come after the unsuspecting Souls like a demon out of human legend.
"Mmm-hmm." Sophia sounded disinterested. She heard a familiar click behind her. "Sorry, Zoe."
Radiant Reflection was considering moving to another line of work. Seeking had been a fulfilling profession several years ago, but today there were barely enough wild humans left to justify the size of the Seeker force. As soon as this crisis with the Conrad girl was over, he intended to move on.
There was a regulation (outdated, in his opinion), that there had to be several Seekers on call at the station at any given time. Thus he found himself at the station in the wee hours of the day, bored out of his mind.
He heard a deep crack from outside the station. Though he couldn't place where he'd heard it before, it set the hair on the back of his neck on end.
"I'd better go find out what that was," he said to Ray, his partner. Whatever the noise was, it didn't quite fit into the Souls' world, but he still couldn't remember what it was. He grabbed a flashlight and his jacket, and headed for the exit. Opening the door, he heard the crack again, this time much louder, and accompanied by the tinkling of shattered glass.
He remembered what it was in a flash of horror. His host had been a veteran of one of humanity's internecine wars. If that noise wasn't a Kalashnikov, he'd eat his own boots.
It's the human from the news! He realized, turning back into the station and drawing his Glock.
Then he heard it again, again, and again, this time accompanied by screaming.
He grabbed his radio. "Conrad's here!" he said. "Does anyone see her?"
He heard the AK again, and this time someone shot back. His partner's voice crackled over the radio. "She went into the basement!" she cried, obviously fighting to stay calm. "I think she killed everyone else, Radiant!"
He ran around the corner into the main hall and saw Ray kneeling behind a desk, crying over somebody's body. An unfamiliar voice came over the radio, young, female, and mocking. "'I think she killed everyone else, Radiant!' Jesus, you guys are pathetic. And thanks for the heads up, bug, I thought you were the only one."
"Conrad. You don't want to do this," he said, keeping an eye on the basement stairwells. There were only two of them, and he could see both.
She ignored him. "Ooohh, what's this? All kinds of goodies down here."
He whispered to Ray, "You watch the left stairs, I've got the other one. She has to come up sooner or later." Ray nodded, wiping her face.
"Ammo! It's like Christmas, guys, you should come down here!" Conrad squealed into the radio. They heard the AK again, once, twice, followed by a crash and then an opening door. "Let's see... thirty cal, thirty-eight, nine mil, forty cal, forty-five... Ooh, you saved me some ten millimeter!"
"Is she high?" Ray asked, confused. "How can she be so..." she trailed off, unable to find the right word.
"She's making fun of us," he told her. "She found the ammo lockup from the early days - everyone wanted to get rid of their dangerous guns and ammo, remember?"
"'Seven point six two by thirty-nine'," Conrad said quietly, dropping the kid in a candy store act for a moment. "Every once in a while, I guess I do get what I want," she breathed into the radio.
"Oh, no," he said, with a sinking feeling. He hadn't been down there for a long time, but if he remembered correctly...
"Three thousand rounds. Damn, I don't think I can carry even a third of that."
"What does that mean?" Ray asked Radiant, noticing him shudder.
"She just found a 3000 round box of AK ammo. We've got to stop her here, because if she makes it out... That's enough for her to shoot until her barrel melts," he informed her. "Watch your side. We can't let her get away."
"Conrad. Put down the guns, we won't hurt you if you do." he lied. There was no way she would be considered suitable as a host after this display of sociopathy. Lying was detestable, but allowances had to be made when dealing with feral humans.
However, the girl wasn't listening. "Give me a minute, give me a minute. Geez, can't I rob you in peace?"
Crack!
"A phone! I guess I should call an ambulance for your friends before I go."
Just keep waiting, she'll have to come up eventually, he mouthed to Ray.
Crack! Crack-crack!
"Bug drugs. I've been meaning to find out what these all do. That Awake stuff is incredible, you should try it." He heard cans clanking in the background as she spoke. "Awake, No Pain, Heal, Still... Oh, there's directions on the side."
Crack!
"Lockers! I wonder what's inside them." Crack-crack! "Uniforms! What a surprise! I wonder if any fit? Then I can be a Seeker too!"
They heard the AK again, several times, and then silence for several minutes.
"Close enough. I'll be up in a second. Tell me how I look, okay? I've got a present for you first, though."
Something sailed up the right stairwell, hissing and trailing silvery mist. It bounced off the wall and rolled next to Ray. She looked at Radiant, and then collapsed forwards.
Still, Radiant thought, covering his mouth and nose while backing up.
Another can flew up the stairwell with an uneven trajectory. This one bounced off the ceiling, and rolled away from him.
He saw a flash of red in the left stairwell and shot at it, realizing too late that it was just a jacket. Then Conrad herself stepped forward, firing on full auto.
Radiant Reflection never stood a chance. He did hit her in the chest, twice, before she brought the AK under control. However, neither round penetrated her freshly stolen body armor, and thanks to her new best friend No Pain, she barely felt a thing.
"I don't think the uniform looks that bad on me," she commented. "What do you think?" she said, grabbing a pair of handcuffs from a corpse and securing Ray's paralyzed body.
After ten trips, Sophia had finally dragged everything - drugs, ammo, Ray, and Fractals' bound body out to her shiny new Seeker-mobile.
She went back inside one last time to look around, saw nothing left that she wanted, and left.
A/N Flame, review, or comment, but let me know what you think!