Deathcap – Lara Elena Donnelly (1)

Depends, I guess.” He jerks his chin at the med bay door. “Would you eat that thing?” You consider it. You’re so tired nothing seems strange anymore. “I dunno. Bugs are supposed to taste like lobster.” “Yeah, but. Ain’t a bug though. Is it? It’s like that fucked up crab Bautista showed us.” Bautista said the thing was like this kind of parasite that gets in a certain kind of crab, wraps all around its brain so it can control its limbs and make it move, and then…She called it a parasitic castrator.

She showed pictures. Could you eat a crab like that? Could you eat the thing inside of it? Bautista could have told you, if she wasn’t dead. You hope she’s dead, anyway. Last time you saw her she was pale and sweating, belly swollen up, coveralls busted at the side seams and patches of lymph and blood where her skin had broken open. She was past talking—just making this low, animal groan. Bautista with her fancy fucking degrees, she would have known for sure if you could eat that thing.

Not that that’s what you want to do. You wish you’d shot her. There had probably been time to shoot her. You know there was time to shoot her because you just stood there for a second like an idiot and stared, thought about what was going to happen to her. She explained it to all of you, clinical and terrified, after the thing took out its first fire team and only one guy made it back, wild-eyed, sweaty, half nuts.

After he raped the tech who was trying to draw his blood—crying all the time, apologizing, not stopping. Bautista showed you all the surveillance footage. After the split and weeping skin stretched over the tech’s belly started to move like something in a nature documentary. After Bautista held the tech’s hand while he died, or as close as she could hold it through the containment chamber’s gloves. The other guy died too—the rapist. Different way, also bad. But nobody held his hand. “You think Bautista’s dead yet?”

you ask Baker, wondering if you sound normal. “Jesus,” says Baker, who definitely doesn’t. “I fucking hope so.”

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OceanofPDF.com It’s been seventy-two hours since you and Baker barricaded yourselves in med bay six. You’re supposed to be sleeping in shifts but the rota is starting to break down and right now you’re both propped up against the operating table, shoulders touching, heads nodding, red-eyed and grimy and laughing all the way to the gallows. “Spinach pakora,” says Baker. “The cheap stuff, from the divey place around the corner from my flat.” You can feel the crunch of the batter, the tickle of spices in the back of your nose.

You close your eyes for just a second. They’re dry from the stale, recycled air and your eyelids stick. It’s painful. You don’t want to open them again. “Deep fried morel mushrooms.” You blink up into the fake blue daylight of the full-spectrum lamps, which are supposed to make you feel awake.

The tubes hum on the edge of your hearing. “Expensive, innit?” Baker asks. “Like, they use those in—” he pauses, tucks his chin and lowers his eyelashes, raises one limp-wristed hand —“haute cuisine.”You shrug. “I guess. My grandma used to go out in the woods and pick ’em. Fried ’em in Crisco.” Baker lets his head fall back against the gurney. His Adam’s apple bobs beneath his stubble as he swallows.

Once, twice. “You know there’s this mushroom, it’s poisonous. Only a couple of people who’ve eaten it have survived. And they all said it was fucking delicious. Best thing they ever ate.”

This is a short excerpt from the opening of “” by Unknown, quoted for review and introduction purposes. All rights belong to the copyright holders.

Book Information

• Unique ID: fac18837ef7119f4
• File Extension: .pdf
• File Size: 3,239,738 bytes (3.09 MB)
• Title: –
• Author: Unknown
• Pages: 19
• Language: English (en)

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• Estimated Reading Time: 14.84 minutes
• Total Words: 2,968
• Total Characters: 16,620
• Average Words per Page: 156.21
• Average Characters per Page: 874.74

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