The Brain Invaders

Chapter 5

I tossed my phone on my bed and picked up the magazine that had fallen on the floor. When I reached for it, it was open to an Ambien ad. My mom takes this when she has trouble falling asleep. Ever since Dad died, she’s lucky if she sleeps the whole night through. Usually, she’s awake every few hours.      

          The ad reminded me of the bingo chips I saw the people eat. They sort of looked like Communion wafers, only red. Kate told me that the chips are sleeping tablets. When the people eat the chips, they fall asleep, which allows the slugs to leave their bodies and return without a fight. Once the slugs get out, they rejuvenate themselves by inhaling smoke piped in through the sprinkler system.

          It was crazy to think that all this happened at bingo every Friday night at the fire hall and that no one had any idea. I thought about the clueless people who came with their friends expecting a fun time and a shot at winning money. I thought about them holding the bingo cards that Kate said were laced with poison to put them to sleep and them waking up with slime for brains.

          Kate’s right, players would freak if they were asked to eat a chip. A poison-laced card was so much easier.

But bingo? It sounded totally ridiculous, and if I had not seen it for myself and someone had told me about it, I would have thought them beyond crazy. When I think of bingo, I think of little old ladies, like Mrs. McGee, with their good luck charms sitting next to them sitting at long tables playing game after game because they have nothing better to do on a Friday night. Well, this is one bingo game where it doesn’t pay to be lucky.

I undressed and jumped in the shower. I was so used to the birthmark on my right arm that I hadn’t given it much thought until Ryan noticed it. Turns out, all four of us have a birthmark that sort of looks like a flame on our lower right arm a few inches up from our wrists.

Zach said that we’re special. He calls us The Knowers, because we know when someone is a fake. Sounded a little dramatic to me, but we did have certain things in common. Besides the birthmarks and our guts hurting when we run into one of these things, we were all born on a Friday the 13th. Now that’s just plain weird. But it could be why we feel a bond, like we’ve known each other all of our lives.

Mom had left to run some errands so I had the house to myself. Perfect time to look up sea slugs on the computer without her nosing around.  I got dressed, grabbed a Coke and my laptop and plopped on my bed.

I didn’t find any pictures of sea slugs that looked like the ones I saw in the fire hall. Most of the ones I found were colorful. Red and blue and yellow. Some even had feathers on their backs. The slugs in the fire hall were camouflage. It would be difficult to see them in a wooded area or among tall grasses. Zach said he had been doing a lot of research and suspected this particular species was genetically engineered, able to live in and out of the water.

I snooped around until it was time to meet the others. I followed Zach’s directions and took my time, not wanting to draw any attention. I went in the back door after making sure I wasn’t followed or that anyone was watching. I was the last one to arrive.

Once inside, I told Zach and Ryan and Kate that we had to find a way to kill the sea slugs before next week’s bingo game.

“My mom, Cassie and her mom are going to be at that game. We can’t let those things take over their brains.”

“I 100 percent know how you feel,” said Kate, sitting down at the kitchen table.

“No, you don’t! It’s not your mom and your best friend and your best friend’s mom. No one knows how helpless I feel.”

“You don’t know anything,” Kate said. “My sister is one.”

I looked at Kate and saw the pain in her dark, dark eyes. “Sorry, Kate. I didn’t know. How’d it happen?”

“One night, D.J. came home from a date. Her eyes were glassy. She was tripping over her own two feet. Mom and Dad thought she had been drinking, but she insisted she hadn’t been. I know now that the glassy eyes are a sign that a sea slug has taken over a body. The slugs cause tripping, too. It takes them a while to get the hang of controlling the brain. It’s like learning to ride a bike. It takes practice to get good at it.”

“Is that why Police Chief Sanders and the others were staggering around after the sea slugs took over their bodies?” I asked.

“Yes,” Zach said. “The human host, or person, is always a little wobbly at first. But it only lasts a few days. The sea slugs learn quickly how to operate the brain.”

“Zach’s right,” Kate said. “D.J. appeared normal in a couple of days. But I was 100 percent sure she wasn’t. My instincts told me that something was terribly wrong. My stomach hurt constantly and my arm burned. The only time my stomach didn’t hurt was when I wasn’t around D.J.”

“What did you do?” I asked.

“I began following D.J. Like you, I ended up in the fire hall and Zach found me. Funny, D.J. and I used to fight all the time. Now, she’s rarely home and when she is, she doesn’t talk to anyone. Mom thinks she’s going through a phase, but I know better. I used to wish I was an only child, now I’d give anything to have the old D.J. back.”

I asked Zach about his uncle. I wondered if his uncle was a Knower or if he had just witnessed the beginning of the invasion.

“When Uncle Ted returned from his diving trip, he was different. More distant, maybe. Or guarded. One night we went bowling. When we started, the lane next to us was empty. Then a lady came and started bowling in that lane. She was by herself, which was a little strange. But there was something about her. Something more. She looked normal enough. But as soon as I saw her, my stomach and my birthmark burned.”

 Zach said he saw his Uncle Ted holding his stomach. He figured that his uncle must not be feeling well either. That maybe it was something they ate. Still, he couldn’t shake the feeling that the stomach pain had something to do with the woman.

“When we left the bowling alley, Uncle Ted asked me about it. I told him that I knew it sounded crazy, but that I had a gut feeling that the woman wasn’t entirely human. I expected him to laugh at me. To tell me I needed to stop reading so many science fiction books. Instead, he told me about his diving trip and about the sea slugs and their invasion. I miss him so much."

"Where is he?" I asked.

 "Dead," Zach said. "And I think they killed him.”