About an hour after everything happened, the police sirens fade out, and the city cops give up looking for me. Every time they got anywhere close, the alien inside my body would cradle me to the ceiling in a black cocoon disguise. So now I just sit in the same corner with my knees to my chest, trying to hold back a dozen panic attacks from destroying my mental stability all at once. I feel like I'm going to cry.

"Does the ankle feel better?"

"No."

"Can we fix it now?"

"No."

The alien growls at me, but it fucks off and leaves me alone again. It's been popping up every now and then to ask if it can rearrange the bones into place, and I won't let it.

"How do you know my name?"

"I can see our memories and hear our thoughts. Your name is Dallon Weekes, you worked as a reporter until you were fired for misconduct during an interview with Taylor Swift of the Life Foundation. Your fiancé left you, and we eat tater tots and junk food. They taste delicious. Like the commander's head. Want more heads. Tasty."

Gross. "What's your name?"

"Our name is Venom."

"Cool, cool."

"Do we want to know anything else?"

"No. Can you just leave me alone for a little bit longer?"

"Of course, lo-."

"Stop calling me that."

It's so cold, and my head aches. I still feel like I'm going to cry, and my ankle feels like shit. I wish I could rewind back a few months to when I still had a fiancé, plans for the future, and no head-eating alien reading my mind. I miss Brendon.

A light shines into my corner. "Dallon? Is that you?"

"Brendon?"

"It's me, honey, I promise. Can you come down and stop hiding from me?"

Realization hits, ans I don't want to. It probably isn't even him. I bet it's one of Swift's cronies trying to drag me back to her. "How do I know it's you?"

He sighs and lets the flashlight fall to his side. He's still just a silhouette. "I'm your ex finance."

It is him. He's the only person I can really trust, but I don't want to hurt him. I'm possessed by an alien for fucks sake. "Give me a second."

"Why is he the only person we trust? He used to work for Taylor. Are they associated?"

"Not anymore," I whisper, "now can you please take me down to him?" Venom grumbles but complies and swings me down from the platform like Spider-Man.

Brendon turns off his flashlight when I'm a few feet in front of him. He's terrified, and dressed in his old Life Foundation sweatshirt. He reaches out and grabs my hand to give it a sympathetic squeeze. "Is everything okay?"

I shake my head. "No. You have to go. Leave me alone before I hurt you, please. I just need to be alone and far away from you."

Concern washes over his face. "You're not going to hurt me. Just come with me, okay? We can help you."

"He is right," Venom mutters, "I like him. I like you. This is fun."

I nod and let him take me to his car. He helps me into the backseat and runs around the front to the drivers seat. Then he starts the car and aims all the air vents on me.

I feel a little better, but I'm still on the verge of a breakdown. I can't slow my breathing and there's nothing I can do to stop my heart from beating so fast. Instead of crying, I just feel like I'm about to puke my guts out.

Brendon keeps glancing at me in the rearview mirror. I don't think he's even paying an ounce of attention to the cars behind us. "Are you doing alright?"

"Not really."

"What's it doing now?"

"Nothing."

"Does it talk to you?"

"Always."

☢️

Sarah locks the door to the MRI room behind us and tapes a piece of cardboard over the little window slit. I watch them whisper to each other from across the room, listening to Venom running around in my head going on and on about how hungry it is.

"...So it's an alien?" She stage whispers to Brendon, who nods and glances back to look on me with her. She stares at me like I just sprouted horns and speaking in tongues, but Brendon's face is unreadable and dull.

"We can hear you, y'know. Neither of us are deaf."

She clears her throat and apologizes, but goes back to murmuring about me immediately. Is this how she tells patients they're critically ill and about to die? Maybe she isn't the best doctor I've met then. The lack of interaction is really freaking me out.

Brendon whips around and stomps toward me. He looks me in the eye and glares like he used to when I said something incredibly stupid when we were still together. "Okay, you were right. We had aliens at the Life Foundation, and we withheld that information from the public. Now I want to know how you got this one, right this second."

Venom does this weird curling thing, and I can feel it shrink back down in my body. "Dude, you're scaring him."

"Good! Tell that thing to get the fuck out of you! Did anyone tell you what that thing has done? Who took you to the labs?"

"Josh and Tyler, hell if I know their last names. They took your spot after Swift fired you, and no, they didn't exactly tell me the consequences to my actions."

He bites his lip and grips my shoulder so hard I'm sure it's bleeding, and he turns away with his hands in his hair. "She killed them, Dallon, she had to have killed them by now. She's after you now, haven't you thought about that?"

"Well, I was told she was trying to kill me, but I try not to think about it, really. I seem to have bigger issues shoved down my throat."

"These things," he drills his index finger into my chest, "are parasites. They eat your insides faster than you can even imagine. They tear you apart and use you until you're a bag of skin and bones. They drain your fucking mind and and take over your body until you aren't even a person anymore."

I know that, but hearing him say it makes it a little scarier. "I'm not stupid, I knew what I was doing, I just didn't think it would, like, possess me so fast."

"What did you think would happen?"

"I thought it would ask for permission or something. Like a vampire, y'know? I didn't think it would happen in two seconds."

He stares at me for a moment and turns away to put his head in his hands. I didn't mean to upset him, but it's alright I guess. It might as well happen, because everything else sure is.

Sarah is the only one in the room that really gives a shit. She's sifting through the piles of failed X-rays and scans while Brendon tries to prevent himself from strangling me for being so stupid, and right before he decides he should punch me in the stomach, she throws the stack of papers into the air and points to me.

"You didn't like the MRI machine," she reaches for the control panel and Venom begins to stir and grumble profanities, "so I-I'm just wondering what would happen if we... exceeded the thirty second mark?"

Brendon's face pales before mine can, and he tries to stop her before I take a single step to do it myself. By the time either of us reach for her hand, she flips the switches and presses the buttons, and the machine hums to life.

I tolerate it for the first few seconds, but after about ten, a loud ringing noise echoes in my brain and knocks out every other thought like it's a WWE championship.

Another five seconds later, it feels like my entire body is vibrating like a bell, and I can't think straight. Venom curls and shifts between condensed shapes and short but angry insults hurled to Sarah for turning on the MRI. 

More more seconds pass, I can't tell how many, and my body is being torn apart on an atomic level. I can feel every inch of skin peeling off of my muscles, and the muscles ripping apart, and the bones shattering into a thousand pieces. I can't feel my body, but I know it's being pulled into a billion pieces and scattered across the universe.

The feelings subside roughly ten seconds after, and in between passing out and regaining consciousness, I look up to see a puddle of black goop writhing in the tile floor. It rolls around with the help of quivering little tendrils, squealing and crying like an animal, trying to climb the walls without falling back to the ground.

Sarah stares at it in complete shock, on the verge of fainting. Brendon secures the knot in his shoelaces, punts Venom like a football into the MRI screening room, and locks the door just as it latches onto the door and gravitates in my direction.

She rushes to my side immediately, pressing the back of her hand to my forehead, holding two fingers to the side of my neck, checking my eyes and pulling my sweatshirt down to listen to my heartbeat. "You're starving, you're overheating," her shoes tap nervously, "and your pulse is extremely low. Assuming your condition only worsened at the fucking monster rate it did since I've seen you last... you would be dead in a matter of hours, six maximum."

I don't start to freak out immediately, because it takes a second for it to sink in. Six hours and I would've been dead. "Like, dead, dead?"

She nods and Brendon stares at the floor. I wonder if he regrets ever working with aliens alongside Swift. I guess you never really grasp how dangerous something is until it hits too close to home.

"We did studies," he whispers and crosses his arms as he takes a seat on the desk, "with the relationship between high pitched sounds and symbiotes."

Sarah frowns. "And?"

"The people who lived said it was the most painful thing they'd ever experienced. Like their body was being ripped apart with a hot blade, cell by cell by cell. They died a few hours later." He finally makes eye contact with me, and he apologizes without saying a word.

That's not enough.

He lied about testing with aliens, he was fired because I found out about it, and instead of staying by my side for trying to release the truth, he left me and only came back so I didn't die. He didn't care, he was just sorry that the aliens got lose, and nothing else.

Sarah tries to grab my shirt collar and pull me back inside after I undo the lock, but she can't. Before I slam the door shut, I see Brendon pinching the bridge of his nose, and then I watch Venom crawl across the floor and up the wall, then disappear through the air duct on the ceiling.

That's not my problem anymore. I'll be long gone by the time any of them find me.