Tuesday Tales - Fruit

 

Welcome to Tuesday Tales! This week's word prompt is “fruit”. We are back with my new Sci-Fi story. 

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His gaze dropped back to the bottle in front of him. He reached out as if to take a drink. Maybe a little liquid courage would make this easier for him. Instead, he picked at the label. “I wandered a little too far into the woods. I saw a bright flash of light. I thought it was Grandpop and his flashlight looking for me. The next thing I knew it was daylight. I was sitting on the forest floor and my parents, aunts, uncles and Grandpop were surrounding me. The back of my neck hurt a lot. It was difficult to register everything they were saying over me but one phrase stuck out to me. I remember it now. Three days. I was missing for three days.”

“My goodness. Where were you?” Dani let out an audible gasp. Her hand may have even flown to her breast like a damsel in distress. When did something this terrifying turn her into the heroine in her favorite historical novel? She grabbed her margarita to take another burning swallow. Wincing, she suddenly wished she asked for the frozen fruit one.

“At first I had no idea. The only evidence of where I had been was the four dots at the base of my skull.” He turned his back to her and lifted his long, black hair to show the four dots on the back of his neck. They formed a box much like what a die looked like when a gambler rolled a four. He spun back towards her in his chair and continued. “I could hear voices in my head. I saw constellations in my mind that I still haven’t heard of. I told my parents about everything and they took me to all sorts of specialists. No one knew what was wrong with me. It wasn’t long before the fevers started.”

“You had an infection.”

“Not quite. When I say fever, it isn’t like the high temperature that comes with a virus. It was an intense desire I didn’t instigate and couldn’t control. At first, I wanted to make friends in the worst way. I would ask someone to play, lure them someplace private and vacant…”

“And then?”

“Everything would go black. When I woke up, my new friend would be lying dead, drained of every drop of blood in their body. Either the intense pain and pressure in my head or the lifeless body of someone who trusted me made me sick. It still does. However, the voice in my head was sated.”