[SoylentOrange]

I got the bug to write a real story instead of trying to jam one into a comic script. Kooh, I owe you for the inspiration for this, and once the story wraps up it'll be on an open-ended note, where I'll take requests and you can perhaps add your own TFs into the story.

Now, this one starts with a bit of a wind-up, so bear with me for a bit...
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Mary Carver loved her apartment. Some called it small; she preferred cozy. Others said it was too remote, tucked too far into the back of the complex. She found the seclusion peaceful, and while it might be a bit of a trek across the parking lot to the rest of the compound, she liked being so close to the oregon forest that sprang up just behind her property.

Most bearable of all was her upstairs neighbor, Katie. Katie Green was a fellow student, one of Mary's classmates at the local law school where they were both struggling to become lawyers. Katie wanted to get into corporate and patent law, while Mary was thinking of perhaps becoming a public defender. The hours were very long and the workload almost incomprehensible, but the pair were good at encouraging each otherand keeping one another awake during long all-night cram sessions. Had Mary any inclinations to that effect, she might have even been attracted to Katie- her thick, curvaceous body certainly filled out a lawyer's suit more impressively than Mary's lithe, slender figure.

It was on one of these long nights that Mary was startled by a loud crash coming from her kitchen. She rushed out, wondering what in her sparesely-furnished kitchen could have fallen or otherwise created such a loud noise. Her answer came in the form of a small crater on her floor, a green and black rock spiked through the linoleum and sticking out of the concrete underneath.
"Mary?" Came Katie's voice from upstairs. "Mary, you okay, hon?"
"I'm okay," Mary called out as she approached the crater. Looking up, she could see that the falling rock had punched a tea-saucer-sized hole clear through Katie's apartment roof and down to her floor.
"What was that?" Katie asked, looking down at Mary through the hole.
"It looks like a metorite," Mary said, kneeling down to look at the rock. Rather like a lumpy, oversized carrot, the green and black rock tapered down to a point, drilling itself into Mary's kitchen floor.
"Well don't touch it," Katie warned as she got down on her hands and knees to look through the hole, "It's probably a thousand degrees."
"Yeah, I'll give it time to cool off..." Mary said as she stood up and dusted her hands on her pants. "But where'd it come from?"
Katie snapped her fingers. "Oh yeah! I remember there was gonna be a meteor shower tonight. I heard it on the raido coming back from class. I was gonna go out and watch it, but you know..." she finished, shrugging in the direction of her desk, no doubt as piled with books and files as Mary's was.
"So, I get to keep this, right? It's finders, keepers with stuff that falls from space?"
Katie laughed. "We haven't covered extraterrestrail property law yet, but I think so, yeah."
"Speaking of property law, one of us needs to call the landlord tomorrow so we can get this hole fixed before the next big rain hits. I don't fancy a funnel going all the way from the roof to my floor."
"Ha, me either! Tell you what, 'till you can wrangle a repairman here I'll cover the hole with a big cooking pot. Should keep both our floors dry for a while."
"Thanks, Katie- you're the best."
"Don't I know it," she replied, winking. "Now if you'll excuse me, I'm only two pages worth of research paper away from getting to sleep tonight."
"Only two?" Mary whined. "I've got five..."

Late that night, while Mary slept exhausted in her bedroom, the green meteorite began to slowly and quiety crack. As the fissures grew, a slimy green substance began to ooze out of it, until finally the entire meteorite crumbled into fragments, leaving a green, slimy creature on the kitchen floor. It looked much like a slug, if somewhat even less distinct. It was a simple creature, and as it inched itself across the floor it had only one drive- to get somewhere warm. Having no eyes, it could not see that the cold object it was fleeing from was a refridgerator. Having only the sense of touch, it knew that the shag carpeting it moved onto was warmer than the cool linoleum, but it wanted to be warmer still. The creature pressed on, worming its way between the carpet and a large, flat obstruction something with a brain could recognize as a door, feeling the warmer air coming from underneath it. Within the warm air of Mary's bedroom, the creature sensed an area within the room that was warmer still, and began heading towards it. Up the steep slope of Mary's bedsheets, across the uneven terrain of he covered form, until at last the creature found itself perched on the edge of Mary's blanket, reveling in the warm blast of each of Mary's breaths. With one final push, the creature slid into Mary's open mouth, a remarkable change already underway.

"Mary!" Katie yelled, pounding on her downstairs neighbor's door. "Mary, wake up! Don't make me drag your sorry ass outta there!"
Mary stirred in her bed, feeling as if she'd been sedated. "Whuh? Stop pounding..."
Katie opend Mary's door and stepped into the bedroom. "Girl, have you lost your mind? You're going to be late!"
"Ugh... what time is it?" Mary asked, picking up her alarm clock and looking at it briefly before casting it aside and rolling back over, pulling the covers tight around her. "God, no way. Can't make it."
"Awww," Katie said, her demeanor instantly softening. "What's the matter, hon? You sick?"
"Something," Mary muttered, unable to shake off the malaise that plagued her. "my mouth's all dry, my stomach hurts... just really rotten."
"Oh, you poor thing," Katie said, coming to the side of the bed and putting her hand to Mary's forehead. "Well, at least you don't have a fever."
"Listen, can you take my report in for me? It's there in the printer tray..."
"Sure thing, hon," Katie said, going over to Mary's desk and pulling the stack of paper from the tray. "You take it easy and get better, okay?"
"Thanks Katie," Mary said, lifting her hand out of the covers towards her friend. Katie took Mary's hand, giving it a squeeze and smiling before leaving Mary's room and closing the door behind her.

Mary lay there in her stupor for some time, not feeling well enough to get up, but too uncomfortable to sleep. Eventually it was hunger that drove her from her bed, a roiling in her stomach that no amount of wishing would silence. Mary staggered from her bed, past the crater of the now-crumbled meteorite and to her refridgerator. Pulling it open, her hunger assaulter her anew, and she grabbed the first thing that looked edible, a few slices of leftover pizza. She bit into them hungrily, one after the other, and had finished them off before she'd even been able to really register the taste. She moved on to her other leftovers, making short work of those, and when she'd cleaned out her fruit and vegetable drawer after that, she began eating absolutely everything inside the refridgerator. Whole eggs eaten raw, shells and all. Pickle juice and salad dressing drank straight from the jar. It was only when she moved on to the freezer and was stymied by her inability to chew through the frozen food that she abandoned the refridgerator for her cupboards, eating out boxes of cereal, uncooked pasta, anything that was edible. It was hours before she finally stopped, every bit and scrap of food in her kitchen devoured, every ounce of liquid drank. She was positively drunk on food, able only to wonder curiously why she didn't feel any fatter as she staggered back to her bed.

"Mary? Honey? You doin' okay in here?" Katie asked, poking her head in the front door that evening. As she made her way through the darkened apartment, she could make out the overflowing garbage can and sink piled high with dishes from what moonlight came in through the front window. "Mary?" She asked again, cracking open the bedroom door. Mary stirred from her spot on the bed, buried beneath a heaping pile of blankets, sheets, towels, and anything else she could stack atop herself for warmth. She poked her head out, bleary-eyed.
"...Katie?"
"Goodness gracious me, honey, it's a hundred degrees in here. Come on, sit up, let me see you."
Mary lurched sleepiply into a sitting position against the headboard, pulling her massive pile of blankets up against her as she did so. Had she not had so much piled over her, or had mary been slightly more lucid, she might have noticed that the great bulge in front of her was not all due to blankets. Her stomach, somehow able to hold all that food without distending, was now bloated and swollen, easily the size of someone twice or even three times her weight. Unfortunately for Katie, she could only see Mary's head and shoulders poking out of the massive pile of cloth, and thus had no idea of the transformation taking place in her friend, just out of sight.
"You don't feel like you have a fever..." Katie said, putting her had to Mary's forehead again. "But it's like an oven in here."
"I dunno," Mary said, her head leaned back against the wall and her eyes closed. "feels better warm."
"Well, is there anything you need? Anything I can get you?"
"Hungry. Thirsty."
"Okay, I'll go get something out of the kitchen for you. Is there anything in particular-"
Mary shook her head back and forth against the wall. "Nothin' left."
"Nothing left? Where? In the kitchen?" Katie asked, confused.
"Yup," Mary said, eyes still closed. "Nothin'."
"Well... okay, I'll go make something up upstairs if there's nothing good left here. You just sit tight. Anything in particular you feel like?"
"Don't care," Mary mumbled. "Just hungry."

When Katie came back, she had a pot full of spaghetti with sauce and a pitcher of fruit juice, the former of which she set down atop the pile of blankets where Mary was sitting.
"Spaghetti Greenini, just like my momma taught me," She said, handing a fork to Mary. "Great comfort food. And some multi-fruit juice, maybe not the most complimentary drink with spaghetti, but it'll help you get better."
Mary barely managed a nod as she took the fork and started shoveling great handfuls of spaghetti into her mouth, barely stopping to chew as she drained the pot in a matter of minutes.
"Oh lord, honey, you must have worms or something," Katie said, amazed. "I've never seen you put it away like that."
Mary licked the last dollop ou sauce from the pan, discarding her fork inside it and reaching for the pitcher of juice. She drained it in one go, taking long, deep draughts from it until it was empty. Katie watched in amazement as Mary let the jug fall to the side of her bed as her friend leaned her head back and smiled.
"Feels better. Thank you."
Katie sat where she was on the side of Mary's bed, concerned. This wasn't any kind of sick she'd ever seen before, but Mary seemed to be okay. "Well.. I've got another paper to write, so you get some sleep. But I want you to call the doctor first thing tomorrow, you hear me?"
Mary nodded and slid back down into her pillows, already back asleep by the time Katie had re-locked Mary's front door with her copy of the housekey.

Under Mary's covers that night, a remarkable transformation occurred. Her stomach, formerly a bloated sphere of flesh, began to slowly compress back down. Like a tube of toothpaster squeezed in the middle, as her abdomen deflated, a ripple began to expand outward from it, a small wave of the slimy green parasite just beneath the skin. Mary slept blithely through this part, unaware of anything even as her insides began to fall completely to the service of the parasite. As Mary's body regains its original shape, it is now made up of much less Mary and much more of the parasite, her bones, muscles, and organs devoured- assimilated might be a better word- and replaced with the parasite on the cellular level, marking her last day alive as a human.