Infected (11 page)

Perry stared at himself in the mirror. Pale skin, nearly white, smeared with streaks of his own blood dried to a reddish black, as if he were the canvas for a child’s finger painting, or perhaps some ancient shaman bedecked for a tribal ritual.

The rashes had grown in the night. Each was now the size of a silver-dollar pancake, and had taken on a coppery color. Perry craned his neck, trying to use the mirror to see the blemishes on his back and ass. They looked okay, which was to say he hadn’t scratched them raw during the night. In truth, they looked anything
but
okay.

Not knowing what else to do, Perry took a quick shower to wash off the dried blood. The situation was fucked up, obviously, but there was little he could do about it now. Besides, he had to be at work in a few hours. Maybe after work he’d actually break down and make a doctor’s appointment.

Perry scrubbed up, then applied the rest of the Cortaid, being very careful with the raw wounds on his leg and collarbone. He applied Band-Aids to both areas, then dressed and made himself a whopping breakfast. His stomach groaned with a ravenous hunger, more intense than his normal morning cravings. He made five scrambled eggs, eight pieces of toast, and washed everything down with two big glasses of milk.

Overall, the rashes
felt
fine, although they looked worse than ever. If they didn’t itch anymore, they couldn’t be that big of a deal. Perry felt certain the rashes would subside by day’s end, or at least be on their way out. Confident his body could handle the problem, he gathered up his battered briefcase and headed to work.

NERVES

Margaret looked at the readout with disbelief.

“Amos,” she called through the biosuit’s tinny microphone. “Come here and take a look at this.” Amos glided over, as unaffected by fatigue as ever, and stood next to her.

“What have you got?”

“I finished the analysis on samples taken from all over the body and found massive quantities of neurotransmitters, particularly in the brain.”

Amos leaned forward to read the screen. “Excessively high levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin…my God, his system was out of control. What do you think did this to him?”

“That’s not my specialty, I’ll have to check into it. But from what I do know, excessive levels of neurotransmitters can cause paranoid disorders and even some psychopathic behaviors. And I’m not sure there has
ever
been a case documented with levels this high.”

“The growth is controlling the victims with natural drugs. I wish we could get our hands on a live victim so we could see the insides of those damn growths. This is twice now we’ve had victims to examine, but both times the growths have been completely rotted out. It’s almost as if the person who created these things intentionally added the rotting aspect, so it would be harder to examine the little buggers.”

Margaret rolled the concept around in her brain, but it didn’t take hold. She was already suspicious of the growths’ incredible complexity—another theory began to take shape.

Amos pointed to the screen. “The growth either produces or causes to be produced excess neurotransmitters, which create reproducible results. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”

“There are other variances as well,” Margaret said. “There was
seventy-five
times the normal level of enkephalins in the tissue surrounding the growth. Enkephalin is a natural painkiller.”

Amos thought for a moment. “That makes sense. It’s hard to tell with all the rot, but it looks like the growth causes a lot of damage to the surrounding tissue. Whoever engineered the growth doesn’t want the host to feel that damage. The level of complexity is astronomical.”

“Amos, you don’t have to
root
for the little buggers,” Margaret said, a dressing-down tone in her voice. “We’re here to stop these things, remember?”

He smiled. “It’s hard not to be astounded. Come here and take a look at what I’ve got under the ultraviolet microscope.”

Margaret shuffled to the device, where Amos had been working for the last thirty minutes. Her Racal suit
zip-zipped
with each step as if she wore children’s footed pajamas.

She peered into the microscope. The sample looked like a normal nerve cell. Amos had done a perfect job of isolating and preparing the tissue: fingerlike dendrites, stained and glowing electric-blue under the ultraviolet light, reached out and over the thicker axons. It was the same connection that provides signal communication for every animal on the planet.

“It’s an isolated cluster of nerve cells,” she said. “Where is this from?”

“I found it near the eighth cranial nerve. The rot is working its way through there, but I was able to find a few relatively clean areas.”

Inside the awkward biosuit, Margaret frowned. The eighth cranial nerve, or the vestibulocochlear nerve, was where signals from the ear entered the brain.

“It’s heavily damaged, shows signs of decomposition, but still obviously nerve tissue,” Margaret said.

Amos remained quiet. Margaret looked up from the microscope.

Amos leaned forward. “You’re sure?”

Margaret wasn’t in the mood for games, but she took another look anyway. She could see nothing unusual.

“Amos, if you’ve got a point to make, please make it.”

“The cells don’t belong to Martin Brewbaker.”

Margaret stared blankly, not understanding the statement. “Not Brewbaker’s? Why are you looking at other samples? If they’re not Brewbaker’s nerve cells, then whose…” Her voice trailed off as the significance hit home.

“Amos, are you telling me these belong to the growth?”

“I performed protein sequencing on the black thorn and the vein siphon. The results turned up some unknown proteins, definitely not human. So I took some samples from around the body and ran the same sequence. I found high concentrations in the brain—that’s how I discovered the cluster on the cranial nerve. I found the protein in other places, but no more nerves, only remnants of that peculiar rot. There were high concentrations in the cerebral cortex, thalamus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, hypothalamus and septum.”

Margaret felt overwhelmed. Much of the brain’s higher functions remained a mystery, even in this day of rapidly ascending scientific knowledge. The sections of Brewbaker’s brain infected with the rot composed part of the limbic system, which was thought to control memory storage and emotional response, among other functions.

What the hell was the growth doing in Brewbaker’s brain? It already had him controlled with the neurotransmitter overdose, didn’t it?

Amos continued. “What you’re looking at here is the only sample I’ve found that wasn’t completely decomposed. I’ve never seen proteins like this, so I assume they’re synthetic, man-made. If they’re natural, they’re nothing I’ve encountered. I’ve searched all the academic and biotech databases and found nothing similar. That means if the proteins
are
synthetic, someone is keeping their research well guarded, which doesn’t surprise me considering the vastly advanced technology we’re dealing with.”

She was awed. It was unthinkable that the organism’s creator had engineered a new parasite that could grow from a very small embryo, possibly even a single cell, and latch on to a human host. It was even more unthinkable that this creature produced neurotransmitters like some kind of factory, dumping them into the bloodstream. But it was numbing—yes,
numbing
—to comprehend the genius that had bioengineered artificial nerves so accurately that they could interact with human nerves.

“I follow the vein siphon, that makes sense,” she said. “But the siphon is just a physical attachment to draw nutrients. What good does it do the parasite to grow mimic nerves?”

“You’ve got me. But one must draw the logical conclusion that the growths tapped in to the nervous system, just as they tapped in to the circulatory system.”

“But
why
?” She spoke more to herself than to Amos. “The neurotransmitter overdose produces somewhat predictable,
reproducible
results. If the goal is to make people crazy, then why would they go through the trouble of tapping in to the nervous system? And what’s the purpose for doing so?”

Amos shrugged. He rolled his shoulders and twisted at the waist, trying to loosen up. He walked around the table, doing mini laps, trying to shake off the fatigue.

Margaret shuffled to her station, her mind spinning with possibilities and a new level of fearful respect for the mystery organism.

It had seemed so obvious—unbelievable and awe-inspiring, but still obvious—that this was an organism bioengineered to make people violent and unpredictable. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure. There was something else to the mystery, something that a theory of high-tech terrorists didn’t explain.

“Hey, Margaret, bring me the camera.” She looked back—Amos stood next to Brewbaker’s hip. All parts of him were being consumed by the black rot, but some spots weren’t quite as advanced. The hip was one such spot. She grabbed the camera from the prep table and handed it to Amos.

He pointed to the hip, to the little lesion they’d seen earlier.

“Margaret, look at this.” He knelt down and took a picture.

“I see it. You already showed me.”

“Yes, but do you see anything different?”

Margaret sighed. “Amos, no more drama, please. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”

He said nothing. Instead he stood, fiddled with the camera, then stood shoulder to shoulder with her so they could both see the camera’s small screen. The screen showed a close-up of the lesion, a tiny blue fiber sticking out of it.

“So?” Margaret said. “We’ve got shit to do before his body is goo, Amos.”

“That’s the picture we took when we first saw it,” he said, then hit the advance button on the camera. The picture changed. “And
that
is the picture I took just now.”

Margaret stared. The two pictures looked exactly the same, except for one thing—the second picture showed not one fiber, but three, a small red one, a small blue one, and the original blue one, which was three times as long as it had been before.

Even though Martin Brewbaker was dead, the fibers were still growing.

HUMP DAY

By noon the damnable things started itching again, and Perry had to wonder if he should see a doctor. But it was just a little rash, for crying out loud. What kind of a wuss goes to see a doctor for a little rash? If you don’t have self-discipline, what do you have?

He’d always been a very healthy person. He hadn’t vomited from a non-alcohol-related incident since the sixth grade. While others succumbed to the flu, Perry would suffer only a runny nose and a slightly queasy stomach. While others called in sick at the drop of a hat, Perry hadn’t missed a day of work in three years. He’d inherited his resilience, as he had his size, from his father.

Perry had been twenty-five when Captain Cancer finally claimed Jacob Dawsey, the toughest sonofabitch this side of Brian Urlacher. Prior to that last trip to the hospital, from which Jacob Dawsey never returned, he had missed only one day of work in his entire life. That day came when Perry broke his father’s jaw.

Perry had returned home from late-season football practice to find his father beating his mother. Snow had been falling on and off for a week, enough to cover the sparse grass with patchy white, but not enough to accumulate on the dirt road that led up to the house—the road glistened with cold wetness.

His father had thrown his mother off the front porch, into a slushy puddle, and was in the process of whipping her with his belt. The scene was nothing new, and to this day Perry had no idea why he snapped, why—for the first time in his life—he fought against his father’s incessant rage.

“Gonna show you who’s in charge, woman,” Jacob Dawsey said as he brought the belt down with a
crack
. “Give you women an inch and you take a mile! Who the hell do you think you are?” Even though his father had spent all his life in northern Michigan, he had the faintest trace of a drawl. It colored his words, making
hell
sound like
hail.

At the time Perry was a high-school sophomore, six-foot-two, 200 pounds and growing like a weed. He was no match for his father’s six-foot-five, 265 pounds of solid muscle. But Perry rushed him anyway, hit his father with a flying tackle that carried them both into the tattered front porch. Rotten lattice shattered around them.

Perry got up first, screaming, snarling, and hit his father with a heavy left hook. That blow broke his father’s jaw, but Perry only found that out later. Jacob Dawsey tossed his son away like so much rubbish. Perry jumped up to press the attack. His father grabbed a shovel and proceeded to give Perry the worst beating he’d ever suffered.

Perry fought like he’d never fought before, because he was sure he was going to die that day. He landed two more shots on his father’s jaw, but Jacob Dawsey barely flinched as he brought the flat of the shovel down again and again.

The next day the pain was too much for even the mighty Jacob Dawsey. He went to the hospital, where the doctors wired his mouth shut. When his father returned home, he called his son to the kitchen table. Black-and-blue, cut in a dozen places, Perry could hardly walk after the shovel-beating, but he sat at the table as his father scrawled out childish writing on a piece of paper. Jacob Dawsey was only semiliterate, but Perry could make out the message.