[happy valentines before I forget I'm still alone as ever]

Somehow I wake up at home. My head is pounding, I can't feel my face, and I feel like my body is eating itself and simultaneously regurgitating every single organ. It's actually disgusting.

My phone buzzes from beside me. It's running on five percent battery, and the charger is halfway plugged in. I click it in place and I see a text from Josh. He wants to call me, but he picks up on the sixth ring.

"Tell me everything that happened. I want to know why you never showed up at our designated meeting spot." His voice is low and groggy like he just woke up. It's almost noon, but I can't judge him.

Some voice in my head says it was too dangerous. "Too much of a risk. A lot of people chased me out of there in the opposite direction too, so..."

He's quiet for a moment. "...Why did they chase you out, Dallon?"

"Because they caught me trying to break someone out of a cell. Turns out it wasn't the best idea I've had recently."

"No shit. They're infested with aliens that fucking kill their hosts in an average of twenty four hours or less. Why would you do that?"

"Impulse."

He hangs up on me. Jerk.

I can't even sit in bed for five seconds before my stomach growls at me, and it hurts like hell. It feels like it's being eaten away by acid. I'm so hungry, but every inch of my body feels like it's going to slide off my bones if I move. I must be really sick. Maybe the aliens transfer some intense... chicken pox or strep throat. I'm not really sure.

After a half hour of convincing, I roll out of bed and lean on the walls all the way to the kitchen. My head is spinning, and I feel like I'm about to puke if I don't find something to eat. Maybe I contracted diabetes, however in the world that would work.

I grab the tater tots and drop a handful in the little toaster oven, and while those are cooking I start on some chips. At first it's just a few, then I'm packing two or three into one bite, then I'm grabbing as much as I can to shovel in my mouth like I'm a fucking void trying to be filled with nacho cheese Doritos.

Then I've eaten one bag.

Then two.

Then three.

And my food is still cooking. It's been five minutes.

I grab the ice cream scoop from the drawer but that's not big enough for maximum scoop-age, and I end up tearing the container away from the ice cream and I eat every last drop before it even begins to melt.

It's been seven minutes. I welcome clogged arteries and heart attacks with open arms, because I'm still hungry.

By the time the tater tots are done eight minutes after that, I've eaten three bags of Doritos, one pint of ice cream, a jar of pickles, a microwave dinner, leftover Chipotle, two boxes of crackers, two baggies of uncooked ramen noodles, and the rest of the frozen tater tots.

And I'm still hungry. I feel like a character in a kids book about food and counting.

Everything settles for a few minutes. I sit on the floor, trying to make a mental list of everything I need to restock the entirety of the kitchen, but my stomach keeps growling and I think of chocolate and everything chocolate covered and deep fried every five seconds. It's not a good list.

Then my stomach starts burning, and it spreads to my throat and to my face, and I'm pretty sure I'm dying. I run to the sink and I puke out half my will to live and the raw tater tots I shouldn't have eaten.

Like any normal human being, I wash the chunks and everything else down the drain and my appetite fades out of existence. I don't think I've never had such a bad stomachache in my life, and that's including when I was dared to try a birthing contractions simulator six years ago.

And I'm still hungry.

So needless to say, something is definitely wrong.

☢️

Taylor knows. She knows who broke into her lab. She didn't need to try and watch the low quality security tapes and zoom in on his face, but she knows.

Tyler and Josh stand a few feet away, trading clipboards and chatting under their breath about the next stage of the experiments. They don't know what Taylor knows.

She spares glances at the two guards behind her, who don't know either. She holds the power, and she always has, but the tables have turned already, and they're on her side.

"What were her final vital signs?"

Josh clears his throat. "Poor, less than an hour away from complete shutdown of the last of her organs. She was gone anyways, and we can assume the process of death is the same as the last few."

Taylor nods. "And the symbiote?"

"Spiking, because it had already started digesting her intestines and had moved on to the liver and kidneys—"

"I meant whether or not it's been located yet, Joshua. It attached to someone, and they should be fairly easy to find." There's a terrifying tinge of anger in his voice. She has yet to tear her eyes away from the broken glass on the floor around her.

Tyler and Josh share nervous looks. "I-I don't know, the security camera footage glitched. We don't know who it was."

"So we have one less symbiote to test. One of our best, too."

"Unfortunately. We have the other one you like, and there's a couple of people ready to go, and we even—"

Dallon Weekes has the symbiote that survives on a single host for months. He has the symbiote that singlehandedly killed over a dozen people in less than a minute. He has the symbiote that would stand a chance against her plans with her own alien counterpart.

"Tell me why," she murmurs, "someone breaks into this floor of the lab, knows exactly where to go, and has the knowledge that these levels even exist in the first place."

"Miss, I—"

"Because our employees are the only people that knows this part of the building is here. The only people," she turns to face them and they both freeze, "who have access down here, are the people that work on this project."

Josh is clearly sweating. "Well, Mulaney is pretty suspicious."

She stands and stares at them in silence. She knows what's going to happen next, but they don't. There's a definitive reason for the guards behind her.

"Have you ever watched them closely? The symbiotes?"

"We have to, it's part of our research."

"That's not what I mean, and you know it," she hisses, "and I know you haven't seen what happens in the first and final moments. I know you look away."

They both take a few small steps backwards and clutch their clipboards a little tighter. "Miss, we need to get started on our tests today, I think we should discuss this later."

"No, no. Let's talk about this now. You know, I like to watch very closely, because I plan to take on one of these little guys some day. It's so weird to watch," she sighs and even smiles a little at the thought, "when they first start to ease into the skin, they're crawling through the pores and in through every entrance to the body. I've always wondered how it feels in the ears, and how it feels to have it attach to your brain and infiltrate your own mind.

"And surely you have seen the vital signs at it ejects itself for the last time. Isn't it so strange to watch it crawl back out from where it came from? It's so weird to know it had just picked clean the insides of a human body. I wonder how that feels. Do you remember what subject fifty two said?" She steps closer until she's between both of them, her hand on Tyler's shoulder, digging into his shoulder with her nails.

Josh holds his breath as his partner responds. "S-she said it felt like she was being burned alive. She's been the only one that could ever say something while it happened."

Taylor nods and saunters back a few paces in front of the guards. "Good memory, good memory. I'm curious if it's the same sensation for other people, or if it's a universal feeling."

"I-It may be unique to each symbiote, but we don't know yet. L-Like Riot's symbiosis." Josh stutters out. His face is bright red.

She frowns and purses her red lips. "That's a good idea, Joshua. Why don't you guys test that theory for me?"

They both relax. They can get back to their experiments and escape the horrifying mess of a conversation. "Of course, we'll get right on it, we have the next set of symbiotes ready to go, and we'll bring in the next test subjects—"

"Oh, no, no, no," she pouts and motions for the guards to step forward, "you're testing it for me. I want to hear some descriptions while it eats your internal organs and picks your bones clean, yeah?"

Tyler and Josh both immediately go into panic when they're in the grip of two large men about to drag them off to imminent death by hostile aliens. "Wait, this has to be a mistake! We didn't do anything wrong!"

She ignores it. "I'll let Dallon Weekes know how this round plays out when I track him down and rip the fucking symbiote from his miserable body, by myself. See you later, Tyler, Joshua."

They draw a crowd as they're carried away struggling for their lives and screaming profanities at the top of their lungs. Taylor clasps her hands at her waist after waving goodbye until they're out of sight and their voices still faintly echo off the walls.

Then she spins around on her heels to face the group with a eerily sweet smile. "I don't know why this is so difficult for you all to understand," she's laughing, but nobody else is, "that every aspect of this experience is confidential. The next person to betray me like they did will end up just like them."

Her employees glance back down the hall as if they'd rush out and announce they were only part of an act, but they don't.

Taylor's smile falls to a rigid glare as she storms into the crowd and pauses to shove her fingernail into the nearest person's chest. She looks them dead in the eye and sneers.

"Bring me Riot. Never send a man to do a woman's work."