Roughly fifty miles away, standing on his front porch wearing nothing but a blue pair of jeans, Tommy Bradley puffed on the joint that he had lit up a few minutes ago and stared at the stars shooting across the sky. Inhaling deeply, he held the hit for a few seconds and then exhaled, letting the smoke pour gently out of his lungs. A grin spread across his face as soon as the effects from the marijuana started to kick in.
Scratching his bare chest, unaware that his entire life was about to change in a horrifying way in the next few seconds, he sat down on the top step of his grey, dilapidated porch and cracked open a Sam Adams that he grabbed out of the red Coleman cooler next to him. Taking a swig of the cool liquid, he set it down next to him and took another hit off the joint. He sighed deeply. Life for this twenty five year old bachelor couldn’t get much better. He had a great job working at the local hospital in the data entry department. It wasn’t the most exciting job in the world, but he could listen to music all day and the most stressful thing that ever happened was when the programs on his computer went haywire. His personal life was about the same. He was single, lived alone and did what he wanted, when he wanted. Tommy didn’t like stress in his life, so he tried to avoid the things that caused it as much as possible. It wasn’t that he couldn’t handle it if it came up, but he’d prefer to live a relaxed, easy life.
Taking another swig off the beer, he ran a hand through his short, dirty blond hair and heard a few objects hit the ground in front of him. Like bullets from a gun, three more objects slammed into the ground closer to him. “Holy fuck, are those meteors hitting the ground right in front of me?” He leaned forward to get a better look and suddenly flinched when he felt something sharp skim across his left arm. “Ouch, what the fuck was that??” he blurted out to no one in particular.
Moving his arm in front of him for a better look, he noticed a small cut about an inch in length running along the bicep. The cut wasn’t deep, but a tiny trickle of blood slowly oozed out of it. Tommy touched it gently with his finger and let out a soft hiss when pain suddenly shot through his entire body. His head began to buzz and this time it wasn’t from the effects of the pot.
Putting down the beer and snubbing the joint on the side of the step, he stood a little too quickly and found that his body felt incredibly weak. Bracing himself against the porch railing, he closed his eyes for a moment and tried to relax his body using the stress-relieving breathing techniques one of the HR people had taught him at the hospital. It didn’t work. He didn’t have the slightest idea as to what was happening to him, but he suddenly felt extremely ill and discovered that he was vomiting uncontrollably into the bushes in front of his house.
With his eyes closed, and puke seeming to spew out of every orifice in his body, he saw flashes of black things crawling through his mind. He opened his eyes quickly and felt a pain explode through his head. His legs buckled under him and he fell to the floor with a loud crash. His left arm, where he had been cut, was ablaze with pain. It felt as if his entire arm was on fire. He looked over and saw that tiny black hairs were growing out of the cut. As if in a time lapsed movie, the hundreds of black hairs quickly grew in length and then tiny bubbles, like joints, appeared along the hairs at two inch intervals. Growing faster now, the hairs began to twitch and move like the legs of a spider wrapping themselves around Tommy’s left arm. Tommy watched this with terror in his eyes. He tried to scream, but found that he couldn’t breath. He struggled for air, but his lungs were locked up like a vise.
The spider hair continued to grow, wrapping his arm up like a cocoon. But the cocoon of black hair was unlike the lifeless, benign butterfly cocoon. This seemed to have a life of its own: it pulsated and moved with a liquid motion that made it look like a giant slug was attached to his arm.
Tommy knew that he was on the brink of death. That whatever this thing was, it would eventually take his life. He made one last desperate attempt to stand up, to get this thing the fuck off of him, but he was paralyzed. He wasn’t going anywhere. Whatever this thing was, it had control of him and Tommy was now its slave.
Five minutes later Tommy’s entire body was ensconced in the black, liquid cocoon. He was still alive, much to his surprise. But he was in so much pain and agony that he prayed for death to take him. But unfortunately it never did. He was forced to suffer through all of the torture that the cocoon of hair was doing to him while he lay there paralyzed with all of his feelings intact. His mind was on the edge of insanity. It tried desperately to escape, to take him away from this waking nightmare, but something inside of him, something that breathed of wrongness kept forcing him back into the world of reality. It was as if whatever it was inside of him wanted him to experience this suffering, to know that it was in charge and could do this much harm to him. It wanted Tommy to feel this pain. And Tommy did, he felt the pain. His skin felt as if it were being torn, cut, ripped apart. His insides felt very strange, like they were being manipulated and changed into something else. To him, that was more unnerving than the pain of his skin because it didn’t feel right at all.
He tried to close his eyes, the only part of him that remained untouched, but every time he did he saw the black things swarming through his mind. He called them things because he couldn’t figure out what they were. There was just a swarming mass of inky blackness that revealed the hidden beast lurking inside for a fraction of a second and then moved to cover it up again. It was like a bowl full of black slugs squirming across a treasure at the bottom of the bowl. But to see it, you have to push the slugs out of the way before they ooze back into each other again. But his body and mind were in so much pain that there was no way he would ever find the strength to push the slugs out of the way and discover what truly lay beneath. And at this point, he didn’t care. He only wanted this to end.
After ten more minutes of torture, which seemed like a lifetime to him, the pain in his body suddenly eased up and the black cocoon on his body stopped pulsating. In an instant, the black cocoon hardened as stiff and rigid as a stone. With what little strength and clarity it had left, Tommy’s mind braced itself for what would happen next.
A bright white light suddenly exploded in his head. It wasn’t painful, but the images that it conjured made his eyes twitch uncontrollably. He saw Roland Washington and Raine Weaver, two of his close friends who he went to visit from time to time. The images of them at first, were of the pure, happy memories that he had of them. But then the thoughts turned black and he saw their bodies mutilated in horrendous ways. An image of Roland Washington with his skull smashed in and Raine lying next to him with half her body cut in half flashed through his mind. Another vision was a close up of Raine’s face. She looked normal, her pale green eyes stared back at him. But suddenly they exploded and blood poured out from where her eyes used to be. The vision changed again and he saw an image of himself standing over the dead bodies of Roland and Raine. Both were lying facedown in a pool of their own blood. The image of himself turned its head and seemed to look directly at Tommy. The eyes on the Tommy image were slanted and angry. A wicked smile played across its face. Tommy didn’t notice the left arm of the Tommy image at first. But when the image turned its body toward him, he saw that the arm was black, and five long taloned blades grew out from where his fingers used to be. The blackness moved along his arm and up his body, transforming him into an evil, demented creature. Tommy screamed inside his mind at what he saw and the vision changed again to a black sphere floating in space. Behind the sphere a gleaming yellow sun burned brightly. A myriad of stars sparkled brilliantly all around. The image zoomed in on the black sphere, which was merely a blob of black liquid that sailed silently through the darkness of space. There was an attraction to it and Tommy yearned to reach out and touch it. He couldn’t explain why, but something inside was drawing him closer. And that’s when he heard the voice.
It was cold and raspy. Like someone trying to speak with their throat slit. It called out a name he had never heard before, “Khor?”.
Tommy heard himself speaking without even realizing it, “Yes, Shin Drun, I hear you. The Tek hit its mark and the cocoon was spun. I am reborn, Master Drun. What is it you want of me?” His voice sounded loud and commanding.
The raspy voice hesitated a moment and then answered back, “The girl, she has been found after all of these yeaarrrsss.”
He felt a wave of excitement flow through him. “What will you have me do Master Drun?”
“Bring her to me. Kill any that stand in your waaaayyy. You are not alone Khor. The others are close, they will find you. You will need their help to capture the girl.”
“As you wish Master Drun. And what of the Gremlocks? Are they aware of the situation?”
The voice hesitated again, “They are. Find her fast and bring her to meeeeee. Now go.”
The vision pulled away from the sphere at the speed of light and Tommy found himself back on the porch staring up at the ceiling again. Unfortunately he was still encased in the black, rock hard cocoon. But now he felt different, he felt better. He could feel incredible strength coursing through his arms and legs. His brain seemed to move at an incredible speed, his mind formulating thoughts and ideas with little effort. He flexed his muscles and found that he could move his body now. Pushing out with his arms, he saw the black cocoon start to split down the middle like a peapod. He pushed harder and the entire cocoon split in half and fell away from him like the discarded shell of a peanut. When Tommy saw what had happened to his body he should have been horrified, but he wasn’t. The skin that used to be pale and pasty, was now black like leather and covered in tiny diamond shaped scales. Where his fingers used to be, he now had four razor sharp talons on each hand and his arms were solid and extremely powerful. His brain felt different, his body felt different. He had urges that he never would have had before. He didn’t know what was going on, but every minute that passed he felt himself slipping into a world of blood and death. Something was taking over his mind and body and he started to crave it, he needed to kill. It was inborn in him. And now he knew what he had to do. He was Khor, the Masters number one assassin reborn in this body. The Tommy of old was almost gone, replaced by this killer of killers. A grin as sinister and threatening as a knifeblade spread across his face. He jumped up off the porch and raced headlong into the darkness of night in search of his prey.