Body Surfing

cut him a week ago, not five minutes before.
    Q. shook his head, half disbelief, half recognition.
    “I felt him making me stronger. But that wasn’t his main focus. It seemed more like he was looking around for something. Someone.”
    Lana flashed a look at the doctor, but didn’t say anything. Q. took a deep breath. For some reason he didn’t want to tell the huntress this next part. He didn’t trust her as he did the doctor. She had her own agenda, and it seemed a little more ruthless than Dr. Thomas’s. But he knew he had to.
    “My friend Jasper has—my friend Jasper had been dating Michaela for a year, still hadn’t gotten past second base. I used to tell him he was a leftover Puritan. Anyway, whatever, I could tell L—” Q. had to swallow, force himself to say the name. “Leo found this important. He even tried to trick Jasper into having sex with my girlfriend, Sila, but it didn’t work. It was like…like he wanted to give him one last chance.”
    “A chance to what?” Lana’s angry tone couldn’t quite hide her curiosity.
    “To die,” Q. said. “To spare him Leo’s fate.”
    Lana’s eyes went wide for a moment, then fell closed. Her lips moved silently, mouthing words in what looked like a dozen different languages. Q. glanced at the doctor, who nodded that he should continue.
    “He made me steal my dad’s car. There wasn’t much of me left by that point. I was just watching. I couldn’t stop watching and couldn’t do anything about it either. I picked up Sila and Michaela. He had it all planned out. Just before we crashed I made—” Q. swallowed again, but this time it was his own emotions that made it hard to speak. “I made Sila give me a blowjob. That’s—that’s how they get out, isn’t it? Sex? He had to get out of me before we crashed.”
    “It’s likely he would have survived the crash even if he hadn’t left you,” Dr. Thomas said. “As you saw back at your apartment, the Mogran are quite resilient.”
    Q. shook his head. “No. He had to get out. Had to do something before we crashed. Before—before Jasper died.”
    Lana set the bottle down heavily. “Dear God.”
    Q. sat back. The tone in the huntress’s voice was terrifying, in part because she sounded terrified, but also because her voice was so filled with hatred that it stank up the room like a noxious gas. Q. thought God’s name had ever been used quite so vainly.
    “Huntress?” The doctor peered at Lana. “What are you thinking?”
    “Oh, come on, doctor. I know you have a theory. All of you gatherers do.”
    Q. looked at the doctor. “Hunters? Gatherers?”
    The doctor blushed. “A joke on the hunters’ part. It’s their term for people like me, who search out people like you.”
    “‘Gatherers,’” Lana repeated scornfully. “Rounding up the Mogran’s abandoned hosts like stone-age women picking up acorns while their men go out with spears and hunt bears. The gender roles might have softened, but the hierarchy hasn’t. Go on, doctor. Tell Q.your theory. Tell him what you think the demon has done to his friend.”
    Dr. Thomas smiled sadly at Q. “We understand very little about how the Mogran come into being, but among the most popular theories is that a virgin who is possessed by a Mogran at the time of death will in turn become a Mogran.”
    “But wouldn’t that kill the first one?”
    “No one has ever heard of a demon exiting a body without having sex. If this theory is correct, it would mean the process of creating a new demon somehow manages to protect the existing demon from the destruction of its host’s body. So far no one has been able to come up with an explanation as to why or how this should be. The same confusion is the only thing keeping the Mogran from testing this theory, since, if it is incorrect, the experiment would result in their own death.”
    Q. shook his head. Not so much because he didn’t believe what the doctor had said, but because he didn’t want it to apply to Jasper.
    “The Mogran have been around for thousands of years. Surely they’d’ve figured this out. They’d’ve been in a virgin when it got killed, realized they didn’t die. Would’ve investigated, figured it out.”
    Lana shrugged. “The Mogran do not die that easily or that often.” She turned to the doctor. “You have done your research.”
    There was almost a threat in her voice, but she didn’t elaborate. Instead, she remained silent for a long time, obviously