Sean E. Britten

This is a story about you. You wake up in your bed feeling refreshed and rested. Gentle sunlight slips through your window.

You get up and shower and go through your morning routine. Wiping steam from the mirror, you look at your own reflection. That’s your face alright. All the usual stuff is on it. Your hair looks good, or however it normally looks. Unless you don’t have any, that is.

When you go downstairs, you’re greeted by your romantic partner. If you don’t have one, you do now. They’re your favourite gender. Or if you’re not into that, it’s some other kind of companion like a roommate or a cat. Or a bookshelf. Whatever they are, they’ve made you your favourite breakfast.

After you’ve eaten, you leave your house or apartment or whatever and get into your car, a dove grey 2024 Hyundai Tucson midsized SUV. That’s the kind of car you have and that you drive, a dove grey 2024 Hyundai Tucson midsized SUV. You get in and you drive it to work.

You’re driving your dove grey 2024 Hyundai Tucson midsized SUV down the highway and OH MY GOD IT’S FUCKING OPTIMUS PRIME! Okay, wait, it’s not Optimus Prime, but it’s a GIANT FUCKING ROBOT. It’s like thirty stories tall and covered in big guns, and it’s got a metal face like one of those samurai helmets, you know? It cuts the highway in two as it SMASHES DOWN, falling, flattening like a dozen cars right in front of you!

The impact makes your dove grey 2024 Hyundai Tucson midsized SUV bounce. You slam on the brakes, shrieking to a stop. The GIANT ROBOT turns over and picks itself up, peeling pancaked cars and other vehicles off its back. Exploding, it unleashes a barrage of rockets and missiles back in the direction it fell from! You turn to see a MASSIVE FUCKING KAIJU rumbling toward the highway! It’s SICK! It looks like some crazy giant lizard-bug thing with tentacles, all covered in slime. Roaring, it punches through the wall of munitions being fired by the GIANT ROBOT and comes at it with claws and tentacles swinging and some kind of crazy acid spitting out of its mouth!

The GIANT ROBOT reels back and it punches the FUCKING KAIJU right in its ugly face! Bits spray off of it. At first you think it’s just slime but no, it’s parasites. Like that bit in Cloverfield, you know? You know the part I’m talking about with the parasites? You’ve seen it? It’s a good movie if you just skip the first twenty minutes. Anyway the GIANT ROBOT hits the FUCKING KAIJU and all these crazy, dog-sized parasites just go spraying everywhere and raining to the ground. And then the FUCKING KAIJU hits the GIANT ROBOT and it stumbles back onto the highway and steps on some more cars and totally FLATTENS the fuckers. Oh, man, this is such a dangerous situation you’ve found yourself in! You should definitely get out of here! But you can’t drive forward even if you thought you could get past the GIANT ROBOT because the highway has been destroyed. And there’s a bunch of cars that have wrecked behind you so you can’t go backward.

You abandon your dove grey 2024 Hyundai Tucson midsized SUV and sprint toward the side of the highway. The ground shakes thanks to the two battling titans and knocks you off your feet. You slide down the grassy embankment next to the highway and keep running into a grid of streets. You’re not the only person with the same idea and a bunch of other people are running alongside you.

OH SHIT, it’s a bunch of those CRAZY FUCKING KAIJU PARASITES and they’re COMING RIGHT AT YOU! They’re big, angry mouths on legs, these horrible crab-spider things, and they’re falling from out of the sky and jumping across the rooftops and running down the street and pouncing on people and biting them! They’re not eating them, they’re just biting them because that’s how they lay their eggs! That’s a thing you’re already aware of in this situation!

You see an office goods store and you run toward it, leaving everyone else to get attacked by the parasites. The GIANT ROBOT and FUCKING KAIJU are still going at it, making everything shake and breaking windows and shit but they’re getting further away so it’s mostly the parasites that are the thing now. You run inside but one of the parasites sees you and follows you!

The store is empty, the employees and customers must have fled. You see a bunch of aisles stretched out in front of you and hesitate. Behind you, a parasite SMASHES through the glass doors at the front of the store and sends shards of glass flying everywhere! You need a weapon to defend yourself! Do you…

To search the ‘PENS’ aisle, turn to page eleven…

To search the ‘NOTEBOOKS’ aisle, turn to page fourteen…

To search the ‘SCHOOL SUPPLIES’ aisle turn to page twenty-two…

Except that this isn’t multiple choice so you run into one of the aisles at random to get away! The parasite shrieks as it chases you around the store. You try dumping things in its path to stop it but it jumps over them with its springy crablike legs! Your eyes sweep across the shelves looking for some kind of weapon as you move from aisle to aisle.

You end up in an aisle lined with letter openers. Spiked implements of every description hang from hooks, hundreds of them. You’re surprised there’s such a demand! Your eyes settle on a shelf with several boxes marked ‘Novelty “KATANA” Sword Letter Opener! 1m Long Blade! EXTRA SHARP! Essentially Just a Real Katana!’

You rip open one of the boxes and remove the letter opener, unsheathing a blade over three foot in length. It gleams in the store’s fluorescent lighting. The kaiju parasite leaps into the aisle, screeching, and jumps at you! You managed to swat it out of the air. The parasite skitters sideways and launches itself at you again! You hack and slash, and one of its crablike legs tears off at the base. It gets in under your sword though, and hits you in the side! Teeth rip through your clothing and dig into the flesh over your ribs! Oh no, this is how they breed! It’s laying its eggs or whatever inside you!

You manage to turn the sword around and you RAM it into the parasite’s back! It goes all the way through, skewering the little monster and then nailing it to the floor. Pieces of your clothes and skin hang from the parasite’s jaws. You stagger backward, hand going to your side. After the initial shock wears off, the pain is excruciating. It feels like something is worming its way deep into your chest. Like a bunch of snakes eating their way through your flesh. And then the area around the bite starts to blow up, getting bigger, and bigger! It’s tearing you apart! You feel like you’re being pulled in two!

With a big, wet POP, you split apart! There’s a second version of you standing right in front of you! They look exactly like you, like a clone, even wearing the same torn clothes with blood on their side! How is that even possible?

You look down at your hands. They’ve melted into some kind of horrible talons! They’re covered in a blue, crablike exoskeleton, like the parasites. Your hands, your arms, you have too many arms, your chest, your legs, too many legs! All of it is covered in some kind of hard shell! Your mouth gapes too wide, your teeth too pointed against your tongue, your eyes set too widely apart! Somehow, your mind has wound up in the body of the newly born parasite, a body which is a horrifying blend of parasite and human! And that must mean, the parasite’s mind is now inside your real body!

Your old body stumbles. Your old face gapes at you with surprise. The parasite must not understand what has happened either and is struggling to control your human form! Suddenly, it lurches toward you as if to attack. You act without thinking and RAM your taloned hands into your own chest, spearing your old body right through the heart and lungs! Your old body seizes and dies almost instantly.

Watching yourself bleed out on the floor, it occurs to you that maybe the you you just killed was the real you after all! Maybe you’re nothing but a parasite who has copied the real you’s memories. The you you remember being is dead. Your mind didn’t get transferred, merely cloned into this body of an alien pretender! What have you done!? Oh, my God, you’re stuck like this, you’re a freak, and it’s very possible you’ve killed the only true version of yourself! What do you do?

But no, no! This is a story about you! Perhaps your memories could be false but the narrative has been following you the entire time, hasn’t it? It hasn’t switched perspectives! You’re you, you’ve always been you! Haven’t you?

You leave the office supply store and slink home, moving from hiding place to hiding place along the now abandoned highway to avoid being seen. When you get back to your home or apartment, you have to sneak inside. You hate the thought of your loved ones seeing you like this but you don’t know where else to go.

“Honey, is that you?” your romantic partner or companion or cat or bookshelf calls out to you.

Before you can think of what to do, they come into the front room. For a moment, they’re taken aback by your appearance. You try to explain yourself but all that comes out of your mouth is a series of terrifying shrieks and gnashing sounds.

Their face softens, if they have a face. “It’s alright, I can see you. I’d recognise you anywhere.”

The whole day is a write-off at this point. You go back to bed with your romantic partner or bookshelf or whatever. Gentle sunlight slips through the window. They stroke your newly formed exoskeleton and whisper reassurances into the hole where your ear used to be. It’s all going to work out okay. This story has got to have a happy ending, this is a story about you.

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Sean: This story brought to you by the dove grey 2024 Hyundai Tucson midsized SUV.

Actually, no, this story was brought to you by my overwhelming desire to write something else in second-person! I’ve written a couple of stories in second-person before and they’re a couple of my favourites. Pick-Your-Own-Adventure: Escape From AllMart is probably still my favourite piece of my own comedy writing, the bit about the kitten just fucking gets me, and Unseen I think is pretty solid to be honest. This story might be more of a fever dream than anything else.

I’ll be back on Mixtape next time and have a bunch more lined up, just not quite sure what order to run them in so maybe check the actual Mixtape #2 playlist to see when I’ve decided to update that one!