Trinity

The monitor screamed its count before Casey's skull did. Thin green digits crawled upward while her pulse hammered behind them, and she woke not to light but to pressure: a slow cold coil unspooling along the inner wall of her abdomen, probing, tasting the soft tissue with something that was not a tongue but worked like one. She gasped. The number jumped. The thing inside her curled tighter, satisfied, and went still.

Hospital gown, pale blue, open at the back, riding up over her hip bones with every shudder. White cotton panties beneath, already damp with something that was not quite sweat. Her toes found cold linoleum, and the floor tilted, a faint grade toward a door beyond the green glow of the ceiling panel. The monitor ticked. No one answered.

*Help.* The word came out as a dry rasp, skin dragged over stone. *Please. Someone.* The beeping went on. The door stood open and the corridor beyond it was black. The silence in the room was not the hush of a sleeping ward at three in the morning. It was older. It belonged to a place that had stopped being a hospital long ago and become something that breathed in the dark and waited.

Casey hauled herself upright. Her arms shook and held. The IV line pulled free of her hand with a soft pop, and a bead of blood slid down her forearm in one slow line. She stood, the room tilted twice and steadied, and in the dark monitor glass she met her own reflection: twenty-six years old, small, freckled, blonde hair plastered across her face. Hollow-eyed. Alive. Alone.

She crossed to the door and looked out, and the corridor told her everything in one long red smear.

A stretcher lay on its side under a sheet that was no longer white. Blood had been dragged across the floor in a wide arc that ended at the wall in a dark fan, fingers of it climbing the plaster like roots. Farther down, a nurse lay against the wall, gown shredded, and across her open chest something pale and many-legged was curled, breathing. As Casey watched, it uncurled and turned a wet head toward her. Behind it came another, and behind that a third, smaller, still learning what it was.

She backed away. She did not scream. She was too dry for screaming, and some old cold part of her had already begun sorting the world into what was and what was not. She was in a hospital. It had been attacked. She was alone, barely clothed, and the only way out was through.

She went down the corridor low and quiet, keeping to the wall. A doctor's office with overturned chairs and papers scattered like shed skin. A supply closet picked clean, instruments spilled and rusting. A room where two bodies lay with their arms around each other. Casey stood in that doorway a long moment, feeling an ache she had no time for, before she moved on.

She saw her at the junction where the ceiling lights had failed and only the emergency strips glowed along the floor.

Tall, was the first thing, and the thing that stayed. Dark hair loose to her waist, gown torn to ribbons at the sides, skin a deep bronze. And her eyes were black. Not dark, not shadowed: black, iris and pupil together, a wet depthless black that caught the red light and held it. She knelt in the middle of the corridor with her back to Casey, laboring, her whole body heaving in slow powerful rolls. With each roll something pale and writhing slid out of her, hit the floor, and began to crawl. Her mouth was open in a low moan that was less a sound than a vibration. The parasites came like a birth that would not end, each one smaller than the last, each one turning to hunt.

Casey's hand closed on the doorframe. Her breath stopped. The woman's shoulders rolled once more, and then she went still, and her head turned, slowly, along the corridor, and the black eyes found her.

Casey ran.

She ran barefoot, gown flapping, feet slapping the waxed floor, and behind her she heard no footsteps, only a wet quickness, like something large moving through water. She took the junction left, then right, ducked under a swinging door and pressed into the alcove of a nurses' station. She held her breath until her ribs ached. The sound passed, stopped, turned, stopped again, and then thinned away down the corridor like a tide going out.

She did not stay. She ran until the corridor opened into the cafeteria: long tables, a serving counter, dark windows, a floor waxed to a mirror sheen that doubled the red strips of light. At the far end, over the only exit, a steel chain was wrapped twice through the door handle and around its frame. Through the glass she could see the parking lot, empty, dark, free.

She hauled on the chain with both hands and her whole weight. The metal sang against the frame and did not give. *Chained from outside,* she realized, and the thought was colder than the floor. *Someone wanted this place sealed.*

Then she heard it behind her: the squeak of shoes on wax, a wet breath, close. Trinity had not followed her through the corridors at all. She had come by the service passage behind the kitchen, the way the hunted never think to watch.

Casey turned. Before her mind could finish the shape of the woman, she was knocked off her feet, a hand at her throat, and then she was on the waxed floor with her heels scraping and Trinity above her, black eyes burning with hunger and rage in equal measure. Trinity kissed her, hard, and the mouth tasted of copper and something sweet gone over. Her hands tore the gown down both sides, the blue fabric parting in strips, and then the waistband of the hospital pants gave with a crack of elastic. Trinity's eyes locked on the white cotton beneath, and her head fell back, and she began to retch.

What came up was long, pale and ridged, and it moved like something that knew exactly where it was going. Trinity pressed her face between Casey's thighs and the thing slid into her, working, turning, filling her, and Casey gave a huge ragged cry, the first real sound she had made all night. Behind her eyes the world went white.

It was not a phallus. It was older than that, with no name in any language Casey had ever spoken, and it behaved like a fist and a tongue and something else at once. It pressed against her inner walls with slow grinding patience, rotating a quarter-turn at a time to find a new angle, and her spine arched off the floor and her teeth clicked from shaking. The sound that tore out of her was neither scream nor moan. It had no shape, like a wire drawn through wet cloth.

Then she stopped. No movement, no breath. Her hair lay spread across the wax, her chest still, her eyes closed.

The silence that followed was thick enough to taste.

Her eyes snapped open, and they were black. She sat up with drool strung from her lip and looked at the woman above her, and knew her name. *Trinity.* She knew it the way you know things when the parasite knows them. She lunged, and Trinity met her halfway, and they collided in the middle of the room with an appetite that left no room for fear.

Trinity pinned her against the serving counter, one fist in her blonde hair, the other gripping her hip. The kiss was deeper this time, and Casey answered it with teeth. Trinity's hips drove forward and the parasite rolled inside her, and Casey's head dropped back as a moan came out of her, half laugh, half sob. Her freckled skin was slick, her small breasts flushed, her nipples tight.

"Look at you," Trinity said against her mouth, in a voice like a chord struck underwater. Another thrust, deeper, and Casey's whole body locked, toes curling off the tile, back bowing. She was shouting Trinity's name over and over. Trinity shouted back, black eyes wide, and Casey felt it again, a slow roll through Trinity's belly, another pale thing sliding free and crawling down her thigh to the floor. Neither of them paused.

They tangled harder, Casey's fingers dragging through that dark hair, Trinity's teeth at her throat, marking her. Then Trinity turned her and pressed her face-down on the cold steel of the counter, and the parasite withdrew in one long slick pull and returned from a deeper angle. Casey's climax broke over her like a detonation. Her face crumpled against the metal, her mouth stretched in a soundless cry, her thighs clenching helplessly, and she came in waves that kept on coming, tears running from her black eyes, her breath fogging the steel.

Trinity followed her over. Casey felt the thing inside her swell and pulse, and Trinity's forehead fell against her shoulder with a long low groan. She gave birth to three more, one after another, and Casey felt each one pass through Trinity's body like a tremor through a bridge. It was not pain, and it was not quite pleasure. It was older than both, and it left her limp and wide-eyed and unhinged from herself.

After, they stayed there, breathing, foreheads together, a thread of spit still joining their mouths, pale shapes streaming across the cafeteria floor in every direction. Casey looked down at her own body, bare, flushed, bitten, still slick, then up at Trinity, and smiled. It was not Casey's smile. Not anymore.

"Welcome to the ward," she said, in a voice that was hers and was not hers.