I placed another human heart on the electronic scale. The weight was consistent with a man who bled to death from an animal attack.
The company was looking for insurance loopholes.
Say, for example, if one of them committed suicide before the animal chewed on his body. That's one claim they don't have to pay.
Or another hypothetical example: The man is overweight and his arteries closed up on their own before the thing even touched him. That saves the company forty five percent on reimbursement.
My reports are scientifically accurate and unbiased. If the company wants to redefine an animal attack as pylon damage from a cave-in, it's not my fault. I just document what I see and write reports.
So far, only one of the victims from Base C appeared to have died from anything that could even remotely be construed as suicide. The man had already been suffering from near fatal wounds when the creature came after him. I'll leave that one up to the jury.
I did find a case of an overweight man who had a pre-existing heart condition before the creature invaded the base. Evidence is leaning towards him dying before the creature actually touched him. If the company wants to split hairs over that, that's fine. I'll check the news and see how they do in court.
"Julia, will you come take a look at this?" said Clifton, my beak nosed intern. He was looking at the cadaver of Ellen Ripley, one of the few unfortunate drill techs that neglected to take their contraceptive shots until it was too late to do anything about it. He held a control pad in his hands, steering a tiny remote control camera up a hole in the woman's foot. The image on the screen reminded me of a view from the bottom of a well.
"Jeezus," Clifton said. "It's like the mother of all tapeworms crawled up inside her femur and went to town!"
I moved the camera, examining the sides of the wound.
The walls of this worm tunnel were not continuous. There were regular depressions all along it, looking like the interiors of insect bites. Something had not only drilled into this woman, it had also set up several back doors, apparently to access whatever part of her body it wanted.
Clifton frowned. "How the hell did she walk?"
"She was pregnant," I said, handing back the remote. "She probably wasn't on her feet very often."
"And she never once looked at her heels."
"It's difficult to say what happened at this point, but I would like to point out that, during pregnancy, women tend to get rather swollen, not only around the stomach, but also around the ankles and feet." My intern blinked several times. It seemed that this information was all new to him. "Keep going. I want to see how far it goes."
The robotic camera whirred sideways.
"That's the spinal column," said Clifton.
I rolled my eyes. "I know where the spinal column is, thank you."
The wound trailed upwards, resembling a crooked red straw stuck in a purple milkshake. A crack of light could be seen at the end, looking more and more like a partial solar eclipse the closer the camera got to it.
"You ever see The Ring?" he asked.
"I don't see a ring," I said.
"No, no," he replied. "Old horror movie. Killer video tape. Anyways, all through the movie, they show a view from the bottom of a well, which is the last thing the dead girl saw before she drowned."
I just stared at him.
"Never mind."
The robot climbed upward.
"The worm...it crawled this far up her spine, without causing paralysis. At the very least, she should have been in a lot of pain."
"She's pregnant," I said. "Try being pregnant and not being in pain. Especially in the back."
"Unbelievable," Clifton said. "Un-fucking-believable."
The wound channel continued all the way to the brain stem, the light, of course, coming from the gaping crater the animal had ripped in the front of her skull.
"Wait," he said. "What's that?"
"What's what?" I said.
Clifton turned the camera sideways, and we saw it.
A pulsating gray-green string, with rows of near microscopic writhing filaments sticking out of it. The string had wrapped itself around the folds of Ellen's brain tissue in a seemingly endless network, reminding me of photographs I'd seen of late stage heartworm infestation.
"Oh God," Clifton said. "Tell the cooks to cancel my lunch."
"Did Ms. Ripley ever report any psychological disturbances?" I asked.
He shrugged. "Their medical android reports nightmares. That's about it. But..."
I frowned. "But."
"Um, I don't know if you want to hear this. It's just a rumor. A story."
"You're right," I said. "I don't want to hear it, but tell me anyway."
"Well," said Clifton. "Wade George and his friend...Billy?"
"Brian," I prompted.
"Right. Brian. They said they interviewed the creature, and it told them a long story. Something about seeing what the creature saw, right after she entered that so-called `burial chamber' people are talking about.
"You think...maybe...that this worm...I don't know...dug into her foot when they were exploring that place, and somehow transferred her consciousness into that big creature they're keeping in her bedroom?"
After a little coaxing, I got a more detailed synopsis of this ridiculous theory, which is as follows:
When Ellen entered the hall of ghostly mirrors in this mythical tomb, she noticed a few of her companions wandering through the looking glass, wherein they were attacked by alien parasites and died.
In a scenario similar to that old movie, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, the woman was faced with a series of choices that bring death to anyone who makes an unwise decision. Instead of chalices, she is faced with windows, or doorways, leading to various things she desired, one of which being the son she believed she would soon have, wealth, revenge, comfort, whatever.
Clifton thinks that this was a vision induced by a hallucinogenic gas.
True to mythic formula, true love, the love of a parent, was the correct treasure to pursue, with non-fatal results. The other mirrors, of course, contain deadly worms.
Clifton theorized that they all contained deadly worms, and, as much as Ellen obsessed over avoiding them, she couldn't see anything in the fog beyond that looking glass, so the worm slipped into her boot undetected.
From that moment forward, Ellen had a psychic brain link with the creature. This is problematic when you consider the question of why nobody else who entered that room experienced such psychic or psychological disturbances. Unless there was only one worm, her boyfriend, Dennis, and the others, should have suddenly hallucinated about being alien royalty, eating human flesh, having out of body experiences and what have you, becoming their own monsters...or becoming absorbed by the creature in Ellen's bedroom.
I sighed. Clifton was an amateur science fiction novelist, and it showed.
"Cliff? Could you do me a favor? Stop writing scifi for awhile and do a romance novel. A western. Anything but Weird Tales of the Paranormal. It's affecting your work."
"Oh yes. And autopsies are so romantic."
"Any particular reason your writing has to be inspired by your life?"
He shrugged. "Write what you know."
"Fine," I said. "Get started on your new medical drama. Give me some samples of that infected brain."
Cliff blanched. "Oh sick."
"Not any sicker than that sample page you asked me to read last week."
He wrote a story about an intelligent extraterrestrial bubonic plague, one featuring the most disgusting attributes of just about every disease known to man.
Actually, that wasn't the worst part. It was the sex scene at the end.
Clifton snapped on a pair of gloves, carefully picking pieces of Ellen's skull with a tweezer.
He leaned closer to the body, peering in the cavity the beast had ripped in her head.
"It's a little dark," he said. "And the thing's wrapped around her hippocampus. I'm going to have to cut her open."
Without warning, the worm shot out of Ellen's dead brain tissue, burrowing into Clifton's eye.
He screamed, trying to rip it out, but it only divided into two separate worms, the other one burrowing into his wrist.
He collapsed on the floor, thrashing and foaming at the mouth.
I have medical training, but I called Doctor Barnett as backup.
A minute after the call, Cliff abruptly stopped thrashing, pulling himself up on one of the tables.
"Whoa," he groaned. "What the fuck?"
A fat red faced walrus mustached man waddled in, staring at the trainee. "Is he all right?"
"I don't know," I said. "He just got a tapeworm in the eye. What do you think?"
The doctor turned Cliff around, tugging at his eyelid.
"I...don't know what to tell you. Threadworm larvae usually enters the body through an open wound or by orally ingesting it. I've never heard of one that makes its own wounds."
He suggested a few remedies for your typical worm infection. Albendazole, ivermectin, melarsomine hydrochloride, that kind of thing. We had a case of the stuff lying around for emergencies, though up until this point I doubted it possible for anyone to find a tapeworm with which to get infected, to begin with.
"You might want to combine them if the first one doesn't work."
Not really helpful.
"Thanks," I said. But I thought, For what?
As Barnett was leaving, I heard Cliff blurting, "I know where the animal is. I can see it!"
And then he staggered over to a tray containing a chunk of human flesh we'd cut from a body for testing.
"Ooh! I love cinnamon. Can I have this, or are you going to eat it?"
