Pilot and host biology¶

Pilot and host biology is what the party learns, mainly from Donald McManley's autopsy in Roosevelt, about how the skinwalkers of The Walkers in Skin are built: engineered, childlike "vehicle" bodies piloted by a brain-like organism that lives in the skull.


Type	Lore / biology
Aliases	Pilots and vehicles
Studied by	Donald McManley
Key episode	Walkers 08
First appearance	Walkers 08

The autopsy¶

In Walkers 08, the party brings the body of a dead gunman to the conference room of the Roosevelt police station, where McManley performs an autopsy, storing the organs in Tupperware from the break room and recording his findings on a small tape recorder. He finds that the body has no stomach and only about eight feet of malformed intestine. He dictates: "Coroner's note. No stomach." (Walkers 08)

Opening the skull, he finds a limp, brain-like organ with long tendrils covered in small suckers. A great deal of space has been carved out of the skull, which is not of normal thickness, and light can be seen filtering up through the mouth along a path from the sinuses. Dante (as Kurt) reacts: "What in the Goosebumps fuck is that?" The organ is put in a Tupperware container, which Howard holds on to, fascinated (Walkers 08); see Pilot organ in Tupperware.

Hosts as vehicles¶

McManley's conclusion is that the body is not a person: "This is not a person. This is a vehicle. Somebody made this. And whatever you killed inside of it was its pilot." (Walkers 08) He adds that:

the pilot's tendrils appear to latch onto the blood vessels coming off the host's brain and feed on its blood supply, which would explain the injuries he finds there;
with so little digestive tract, the pilot could conceivably digest only simple starches and sugars, and "couldn't eat real food";
the host body has no arterial thickening and no worn joint cartilage, with baby-soft skin: "a 200-pound baby";
a normal person cannot be possessed, since a normal skull has no room for a pilot; asked about the raw material for a host, he says "conceivably, a tissue sample";
living hosts run a couple of degrees warm.

Behavior¶

Questioning two captured men, the Biz gets the impression that "the facade of acting like a person has just completely dropped away" and that they are willing to die for the cause, whatever it is. They say nothing (Walkers 08).

Pilots can leave a host. The prisoners' bodies later slump in a pile in their cell, and Dante (as Kurt) catches movement up by the drop ceiling. Shining a flashlight through an eye, he sees light at the back of the mouth, showing that the head is empty: whatever was inside has scuttled into the ceiling tiles. A host shot in the head dies with its pilot inside; when the party spot-checks the four bodies from the ambush with flashlights, one child and one adult, both shot in the head, still hold their pilots. McManley says: "I think I shot something a lot worse." (Walkers 08)

Sugar and blood¶

McManley's remark about simple sugars leads the party to connect the pilots' diet to the sugar clues: the fridge full of sugar at city hall, the sugar missing from the police station's break room and the sugar put in Roosevelt's gas tanks. Their need for blood is consistent with the finale, in which skinwalkers carry tanks of blood, with writhing things inside, toward the portal (Walkers 08, Walkers 09).

In Walkers 09, the creatures are also seen outside their hosts. A naked copy of Huell pulls him off his horse with tendrils coming out of its mouth; the horse stomps on the copy, crushing its head and spraying a rainbow-colored grayish slick, which Andre says matches what came out of the aliens in earlier arcs. Later a duplicate of Andrew Howard lunges at Huell, and gray tendrils from his mouth reach into Huell's, probing a memory. In the cavern, when the duplicate Andrew lunges at the real Howard, Kurt and Howard shoot him, and Howard hits him in the back as he flees; a brain-like creature wriggles out of his mouth and scrambles away. See Replication.

What remains unknown¶

McManley says that whoever made the hosts is "so far beyond our ability to make this", and the episodes never establish who builds them, where the pilots come from, or what happens to a host's original mind. At the table, Rita and Zack wonder whether a little alien is piloting the "flesh suit", with a Men in Black joke (Walkers 08). Much of this is learned at the Roosevelt police station.