Twisted Roads – Twisted Horror Stories by Matthew Tonks

You Had Me at Hello

“It was more of a fascination than anything else, a retardation of the synaptic thread that shuffled signals from one part of the brain to the other. Dying from the inside out.”

“Isn’t that what we’ve always done?”

“Our body’s inner workings naturally break down, that is true, but this is our mind sabotaging us on a molecular level, and that’s something entirely different. The brain instructs organs to shut down, one after the other—until all that is running is enough to keep the brain supplied with the nutrients it needs to survive, but that doesn’t last for long.”

“Why doesn’t it reactivate the organs it shut down to reverse the situation? All early test subjects show that that ability is at their disposal.”

He smiles broadly. “That’s the fucking amazing thing about this, lady. She’s as cunning as she is beautiful. One of the fundamental baseline traits of the infection is the overarching confidence it gives to the brain by convincing it into thinking it is really in control, when it’s not. By allowing it to believe what it is doing is reversible, the brain gets cocky and plays right into her hands.”

“You make it sound like it’s actually living, breathing with a mind of its own.”

“What if it was?”

“Don’t be daft,” he scoffs.

“I’m not being daft,” he snaps back, as his expression changes from warm to cold in an instant. He pulls a wad of USB drives from his pocket and slaps them on the desk between them. “Eighty-seven out of the last one hundred infected patients that were sent down to the intensive care ward showed remarkably similar traits on sixteen different tests—and all one hundred communicated across a period of three weeks in one conversation.”

“BULLSHIT!”

“It’s all there in unedited glory.”

He looks down at the USBs, then up at Rohan. “One conversation?”

Rohan smiles broadly and slaps the desk. “One fucking conversation.”

“H-H-How the fuck is this possible?” he stammers.

“It’s mother-fucking aliens!”

“A-A-Aliens?” Charles stammers.

“Yup, they told me themselves.”

“I don’t know, man, you were stretching it with one conversation, but now adding aliens, I’m not sure anymore.”

“Just watch the recording, you’ll understand it all, and then you can decide if it’s fact or fiction.”

He looks down at the USBs again and swallows. “How many hours did you say are on there?”

“Around six hundred hours.”

“FUCK that, there’s no way I am sitting through six hundred hours of boring footage. Don’t you have a best-of collection?”

Rohan raises an eyebrow curiously. “Wouldn’t that defeat the purpose of authentication?”

“Maybe, but there’s no way I’m going to waste three weeks just to turn around and tell you I don’t believe a word of it.”

“BUT IF YOU TAKE THE TIME AND SEE WH—”

Charles raises a hand in protest—bringing Rohan to a grinding halt. “Mate, I know they say seeing is believing, but I gotta say this with as much honesty as I can. If there isn’t anything you can show me in under five minutes, then I just don’t give a shit what’s the truth.”