Ekron

The Parasite - 1

It was day in the eastern hemisphere of Earth when Maria Brähl and the Macsks orbited over Eurasia seeking to descend over Kish. Something caught their eye shortly after they entered Earth's atmosphere while looking at the crater that once was an underground city known as Lidya, there was a large black line from the Baltic Sea to almost two hundred and fifty miles to the south, from the Gulf of Riga to near the outer limits of former Minsk. They flew over it to make a better observation and realized that it was some sort of serpent, at least five hundred feet of diameter and a visible length of two hundred and forty miles, as the rear end entered the Gulf and could not be seen. The head was scorched with a big crack of a couple miles lengthwise.

"That looks like a tenia with wings," said Maria.

Astarte was in an improvised bed while Trimurti cleaned the blood from her eyes and nose. Then she called for Maria and ask her to bring a notebook, as she had valuable information to share.

Then they went south and descended near Kish. The underground city was almost empty, with some humans hiding in the lower levels and Ekron worms lurking on the upper ones. Some abandoned ships, probably for evacuation purposes had been left behind or maybe the pilots had been killed before they could take off. They descended from the ship and explored the remains of Kish.

The Macsks stunned a worm, Maria tied its mouth and they locked it in a cage. They grabbed some food and raided houses looking for kid clothes, for the Macsks. Maria took some overalls and rugged leather boots for her. Then they went to the lateral sections of the middle levels, where mainframes were stored. With ropes, cranes, and tackles they managed to take out two big mainframes from there: ten feet long and half a ton of weight each, then they transported them to the surface; as well as several power cells to feed them. They loaded one mainframe and some power cells on an abandoned ship, and sent it to Qatra, piloted by a Macsk named Irkalla. The other mainframe was loaded in the army ship with the caught worm and the rest of the power cells, then they flew to the ruins of Minsk.

No direct bombing had taken place in Minsk, so a good part of the city was exactly as it was before the Annihilation War, the nuclear winters had covered it with a layer of ice that had melted a couple centuries before, but vegetation had not recovered its place due to the effects of acid rain and snow, so only residual dump stained the churches and buildings of the former city.

The ship descended on a valley north of the ruins of Minsk, with vestigial vegetation. Remains of trees with black and corrupted trunks framed the lower part of an enormous head, resembling that of an eel but without eyes.

A Macsk named Osiris climbed the five hundred feet to the top of the head aided by wood stakes, he got into the opened crack to tie some ropes to the cranial and vertebral bones of the monster. The crack was two miles long and fifty yards wide, it had at least twenty vertebras in naked bone that could be used as a workshop for Maria. Using the ropes secured by Osiris, they pulled up the mainframe and the worm to place them inside the crack.

Maria approached Astarte's bed and gave her to drink some of her blood, then asked, "Their pineal gland... is it here or here," pointing to a sketch in her notebook.

"There," answered the Macsk, rising a trembling finger, "the only one left has it there, the others have it deeper, but one is dead and the other is blind, so it doesn't matter."

In a couple days, Maria had the mainframe connected to the worm, and the worm connected to the monster. When they turned it on, the monster convulsed for some seconds as well as the earth beneath him. Then he slowly regained blood circulation, and the crack started healing. Modifications in his proboscis proved to be working well and soon the cables could be removed, as he started feeding from the energy stored in his body.

"How will you get to the dog?" asked Astarte to Maria.

"The same way he got to me, in dreams" she answered.