Infected (14 page)

“So the blue fiber, same material as the triangle structure, both sources composed of cellulose, a material not produced by the human body,” Margaret said. “And we think this is some kind of parasite. You have any theories on the blue fiber?”

“I think it’s a fizzle,” Amos said.

“A fizzle?”

“I think the blue fiber is part of a parasite that didn’t quite make it to the larval stage.”

“We know the stages now?”

Amos shrugged. “For lack of a better term, let’s call the triangle in the body the larval stage. Obviously, there’s a prelarval stage. The triangle is mostly cellulose, the fiber is cellulose, you do the math.”

It made sense in a way. Some cellular automata producing raw materials that were never quite used, or perhaps a mutation of the parasite that just produced cellulose and never moved to the “larval” phase, as Amos suggested.

And that word bothered her as well.

“So if there’s a larval stage,” she said, “I suppose it turns into something else in the
adult
phase.”

Amos clucked his tongue at her. “Don’t ask stupid questions, Margaret. Of course it does. And no, I don’t know what that is. Right now I don’t care—I want a shower before I have to face Murray Longworth.”

Maybe Amos could turn off his curiosity, but Margaret could not. Perhaps more accurately, she couldn’t turn off her fear.

If this
was
a larval stage, just what the hell awaited them in the
adult
form?

DON’T WAIT, EXFOLIATE

Perry sat slumped on his couch, a Newcastle Brown Ale in one hand and the remote control in the other. He flipped through the channels without really seeing the programs.

He’d known the blue and green plaid couch since he’d been a kid, when his dad brought it home from the Salvation Army as a surprise for his mom. At the time the couch was in pretty good shape for a hand-me-down, but that was some fifteen years ago. After his mother died, the couch—and the dishes and silverware, none of which matched—was all he’d taken from the old house. As far as he knew, the house was still sitting on that dirt road in Cheboygan, crumbling into nothingness. During Perry’s childhood, Dad’s repetitive handyman-special repairs were the only thing that kept the place standing. Perry knew that no one else would ever want the ramshackle house; it was either rotting away or already bulldozed under.

He’d had the couch for several years, first at college, then in his apartment. After that long it fit the contours of his big body as if it were custom-made for him. But even the couch, a beer and the remote control couldn’t remove the blackness that had followed him home from work. He’d been sent home early.
Sent home,
for crying out loud, like some undisciplined, lazy worker. That alone would have been enough to crush his spirit, but the Magnificent Seven simply refused to subside.

And they didn’t just itch anymore. They
hurt
.

It wasn’t just the thick, crusty scabs that throbbed incessantly. There was something else, something that ran
deep
. Something in his body told him that things were spiraling out of hand.

Perry had always wondered if cancer patients
knew
something was horribly wrong. Sure, people always acted surprised when the doctor gave them that “x-amount-of-time-to-live” shit, and some of them probably
were
a little surprised, but a lot of people suffer pain that they
know
isn’t natural. Like his dad.

His dad had known. Although he never said a word to anyone, he grew even quieter, even more serious and even more angry. Yeah, although Perry didn’t put the pieces together until his father entered the hospital, the old man had
known
.

And now Perry
knew
. He had a weird feeling in his stomach. Not an instinct or intuition or anything like that but a feathery, queasy feeling. For the first time since the rashes had flared up on Monday morning, Perry wondered if it might be something…fatal.

He stood and walked to the bathroom. Removing his shirt, he stared at his once-buff body. Obviously, the lack of sleep caused by his condition (it was a “condition” now, because of the feeling that something was really wrong) was getting to him. He looked pathetic. He always rubbed his head when he became nervous, and his hair stuck up wildly in all directions. His skin appeared paler than normal, even for a German boy trudging through a Michigan winter. The darkness under his eyes was pronouncedly unattractive.

He looked…sick.

Another detail caught his eye, although he wondered if it was his imagination. His muscles seemed slightly more defined. He slowly rotated his arm, watching the deltoid flutter beneath his fatty skin. Was he more cut than before?

Perry unbuttoned his pants and kicked them into the corner. He opened the medicine cabinet and grabbed the tweezers, then sat on the toilet. The cold seat made goose bumps run up and down his flesh.

He gave the tweezers a flick with his finger. They vibrated with a soft tuning-fork hum.

The rash on his left thigh was the easiest one to get at. He’d done a lot of damage to it, both from intentional scratching and his unconscious attack during the previous night. Scabs, both crusty-old and newly red, caked the three-inch-diameter rash. Seemed like as good a spot as any to get rolling.

He pinched the area around the scab-encrusted rash with his right forefinger and thumb, making it bulge out a little. Part of the scab’s edge had begun to peel naturally. He started picking with the tweezers, pinched them down on a flake of scab and gently pulled. The scab lifted, but stayed firmly affixed to the skin.

Perry leaned forward, eyes narrowing with determination and intensity. It would hurt like the proverbial bitch, but he was getting that thing off his body. He squeezed the tweezers harder and yanked. The thick scab finally gave, accompanied by a flash of pain; it came free with the tiniest of tearing sounds.

He set the tweezers down on the counter, then pulled off a strip of toilet paper. He dabbed at the bleeding, open sore. After a few seconds, the bleeding stopped. The exposed skin underneath didn’t look right. It should have had that wet look, that shiny look, like skin-in-progress or something. This looked different.

Too different.

The flesh looked like an orange peel, not only in color but in texture as well. It smelled faintly of wet leaves. Tiny tears oozed watery blood.

A chill of stabbing panic knifed through his body. If this had happened to his leg, had it also happened to…?

He reached down to his testicles and slowly lifted them to get a good look, hoping to God they would look normal.

In effect, God told Perry to piss off.

It was the scariest thing he’d ever seen. Pale orange skin covered the left side of his scrotum. The area was mostly bald; only a few curly pubic hairs remained.

He’d been nervous up till now, even heading into the wonderful world of pure dread, but these were his balls. His
balls,
for crying out loud! He sat, frozen, the toilet seat refusing to warm up, the drip under the sink suddenly so loud he wondered in amazement how he’d ever managed to sleep in the tiny apartment.

His mouth felt paper dry. He heard himself breathing. Everything seemed so quiet. Perry fought to control the panic dancing back and forth through his mind; he tried to rationalize the situation.

It was just a strange rash, that’s all. He’d go to the doctor and get it cleared up. Might take a shot or two, but it probably wouldn’t be worse than the gonorrhea and syphilis tests he’d had in college.

Gathering his courage, he let his fingers explore the area. It felt firm and unnatural. This wasn’t something a shot of penicillin could clear up, because it wasn’t just on the surface. He felt something
inside
his scrotum, something that had never been there before, something just under the thick orange skin.

A coppery chill hit Perry as he realized, suddenly and with perfect clarity, that he was going to die. Whatever this shit was, it was going to kill him, slowly, as it grew into his sac and up into his dick. A terror sat inside him now, growing just as surely as the Magnificent Seven grew, creating a dark, cold, shaky vibration in his soul.

Breathe,
he told himself.
Just breathe. Control yourself. Discipline.
He forced himself to let go of the nasty, growing, firm lump and the thick orange skin. That peculiar mental fuzziness overtook him again, and he stared at the wall with a blank expression.

Without conscious thought, he clutched the tweezers and viciously jabbed them into the side of his thigh. The needlelike points slid effortlessly into the skin and poked out through the top of the scab-wound. Perry screamed in pain; his mind cleared—he realized both what he was doing and what he had to do.

He ripped the tweezers free. Bright red blood streaks flew in all directions, landing on his linoleum floor like tiny threads, as did thin wet strands of a much darker red, so dark it looked…purple.

Blood (and purple) trickled down his leg. He set the tweezers on the counter and yanked free a rolling wad of toilet paper, which he pressed firmly into the wound. The paper turned bright red. The bleeding quickly subsided.

Perry gently lifted the wad of bloody paper. The stabbing tweezers had ripped through the orangish skin, leaving a thick, torn piece sticking up from the center.

This thing had to go, and it had to go right motherfucking now.

Play through the pain.

He fastened the tweezers around the flap of orange skin, squeezed tightly, and yanked as hard as he could. Ripping, clawing pain shot through his leg, but he smiled with satisfaction as the orange flesh tore free. More blood spilled to the floor.

He held the piece of flesh up to the light. It was
thick,
thick like the skin on one of those fat Sunkists, the kind that are as large as grapefruit. Thin white tendrils stuck out from the sides like a thousand minute jellyfish arms. The fleshy thing was ripped and torn in a dozen places, but had come off in one solid piece.

He set it aside and dabbed at the wound with fresh toilet paper. Despite the pain, he felt surprisingly good, like he’d finally taken control of the situation. The newly exposed flesh seemed incredibly sensitive, and even the slightest touch hurt. Tiny rivulets of blood slowly ran from the wound’s edges.

But something wasn’t right. He stared at his bloody thigh, and his in-control feeling faded away—this wasn’t over, not yet. A discolored, pale whitish patch the size of a quarter sat in the wound’s center.

It seemed perfectly round, but bits of normal flesh swelled up around it and covered the edges of the white patch. Perry used the pointy tweezers to poke at the white growth—it seemed firm, yet flexible.

As the cold feeling of panic grabbed hold of his brain, he realized that he didn’t actually
feel
the poking tweezers. He didn’t feel them, because the whitish patch
wasn’t him.

When he pinched at it, the normal flesh around the edges easily peeled up and away from the white spot. The white spot was a separate…
thing
…from his own skin. It was as if a rounded plastic button had spontaneously grown within the muscles of his thigh.

He pushed the loose flesh from the edges of the white growth. The thing’s shiny coating made it look like a piece of bone china.

Did cancer look like this? Maybe, but he was pretty sure that cancerous flesh didn’t make perfect circles and didn’t just spring up in a matter of days.

Cancer or no cancer, the sight of the milky white growth stirred a primal fear in his soul, as if a rusty bear trap had clamped down on his heart, pinching it shut, preventing it from pumping. He tried to master his breathing, tried to calm himself.

He carefully slid the tweezers under the whitish growth. The points scraped against his raw muscle, but he ignored the pain. He lifted the tweezers from the underside—the hard growth tilted within his flesh, but it stayed anchored into his leg. Blood pooled each time he moved it.

He carefully used his fingers to pull his flesh back as far as it would go, probing underneath with the tweezers. Like putting your hands in your pocket and being able to “see” what’s there, Perry felt a stem—a stem that extended farther into his thigh, anchoring the white thing in place.

Doctor time.

Definitely doctor time.

But first, he wanted this
thing
out of his leg, and he wanted it out now. He
had
to remove it; he couldn’t stand to leave this fucking thing in his flesh for even one more second.

With the tweezers centered on the unseen stem, Perry pulled up gently. As he lifted the growth, he
felt
the stem’s length via a strange combination of sensations from his thigh muscles and resistance against the tweezers. The whitish mass pulled free of his flesh with a
pop
of inrushing air. Thin blood trails arced from the open wound, splashing against his leg and adding to the red and purple streaks on the worn tile floor, but the stem stayed firmly anchored deep in his thigh. Agonizing pain crept up his leg, but he ignored it, kept it distant from his consciousness.

He had to do this. It was time to turn the Magnificent Seven into the Big Six.

Keeping the tweezers firmly gripped on the strange stem, he yanked up as hard as he could, yanked with the strength of a condemned man fighting for his life.