Infected (28 page)

“I’ve already got pictures of all this shit,” Dew said. “Come on upstairs. I figure you’ll want to see this.”

Otto and Margaret walked up the creaking stairs and followed Dew into a bedroom. Inside, a Racal-wearing photographer took endless shots of a body tied to the chair. This one wasn’t as bloated as the others, clearly a more recent kill. But the missing hands, the missing feet, the hammer sticking out of the skull, the pitted black skeleton lying on the floor…

When would this end?
Would
it end at all?

“I’m not talking about that,” Dew said, pointing to the skeleton. “I’m talking about
those.
” He jerked his thumb to the other side of the room, to the wall.

Sketches and paintings covered the wall. She turned quickly, taking in the whole room in a new light—paintings, sketches, everywhere. This was the room of an artist. She turned back to the far wall. Three canvas paintings dominated the wall, all two feet by three feet.

The first, a close-up of that pyramid thing from the back of an American one-dollar bill. The highly detailed painting showed the circle, all done in shades of green. Someone had tacked a dollar bill to the wall, backside facing, obviously for comparison. Two things immediately stood out—the first was the glowing eye atop the pyramid. There wasn’t one triangular eye, but three, lined up corner to corner, so that the three glowing eyes made for one larger triangle. Their bases made yet another triangle of negative space. The other change was the Latin phrase in the banner below the pyramid. What should have read
Novus ordo seclorum,
or “new order of the ages,” instead read
E unum pluribus.
The classic motto of the Founding Fathers: “From many, one.”

The second painting looked more rushed, not as detailed. Black paint on the white canvas. Two stylized trees, maybe oaks or maples, reaching their branches toward each other. Between them on the ground, a single blue triangle.

The third painting, right in the center of the wall—that one stunned her.

Bodies twisted together. Well, no, not all bodies, some body
parts.
Here, a hand severed at the elbow, there, a thigh torn free from both hip and knee, strands of ragged flesh dripping half-coagulated blood streamers toward the ground. Horrid, twisted bodies, bound together with coils of razor wire that sliced bloody notches in tan skin. Triangles adorned all the bodies and the body parts, blue-black, more like textured tattoos than something that was part of the skin, or under the skin. A few faces looked out—some dead, some living and screaming. A strand of razor wire pulled tightly against the open mouth of a man, his eyes scrunched tight in agony.

The bodies acted like some kind of building material, creating an arch made of agony, fear and death. The arch rose up and gently curved to the right, off the canvas. Margaret found herself looking beyond the canvas, her mind subconsciously trying to fill in the curve’s path. In the background of the scene, she made out the descending leg of another arch—multiple arches, at least two, but there might be many more outside the frame’s reference.

She suddenly realized that two of the faces—and, judging by the skin tone, many of the body parts—were Kiet Nguyen himself.

“This is your self-portrait,” Margaret said. “This is what you did with your time, before you killed all those kids.”

“That’s Nguyen?” Otto asked. “You’re sure?”

Margaret handed him the photo.

“Sonofabitch,” Otto said as he looked from the painting to the photo and back again. “Damn, Doctor, you’ve got sharp eyes. Okay, so if that’s Nguyen, who are the other people?”

Margaret nodded inside her Racal suit. She was getting used to Otto’s ability to ask the obvious question, make the simple connection that she and Amos sometimes didn’t see.

“Oh my God,” Margaret said. She pointed to one of the faces, high up on the arch. This one was upside down, connected to a white man’s body whose head and shoulders were on the canvas but whose feet extended beyond the frame.

“Is that Martin Brewbaker?”

At the sound of the name, Dew hurried over. He leaned close to the canvas.

“Goddamn,” Dew said. “That
is
the little psycho. How the fuck did Nguyen know that guy?”

Margaret shook her head. “I don’t think he did, Dew.”

“Of
course
he did,” Dew spat. “I’m looking at Brewbaker’s face right there. The kid painted it, and that’s that.”

“Is that Gary Leeland?” Otto said, pointing again to the canvas.

Margaret and Dew both leaned close.

“Holy shit,” they said in stereo.

Margaret waved the photographer over. “I need shots of this, the whole thing, and get all the detail. Use a new disk, I’m taking it with me.”

She turned to leave, then stopped. Something about that dollar-pyramid bothered her. She turned back and walked toward it, until she was only a foot from the painting. Something about the Latin phrase.

Nguyen had painted the phrase,
E unum pluribus.
But that wasn’t right. In Latin, “From many, one,” was
E pluribus unum.

Switch the phrase around, to
E unum pluribus,
and what did you have?

From one, many.

THE LIVING-ROOM FLOOR

He didn’t know who sang the song, but he knew the words.

“Somebody knockin’ at the duh-or, somebody ringin’ the bell. Somebody knockin’ at the duh-or, somebody ringin’ the bell.”

Perry found himself in a dark hallway, the lilting melody filling the air with not only sound, but also a warning. The place seemed alive, pulsating, throbbing with a shadowy warmth; it seemed more like a throat than a hallway. At the hall’s end stood a single door made of a spongy, rotten green wood covered with a vile, mucal slime. The door thumped in time with his own heartbeat. It was a living thing. Or maybe had been living once.

Or maybe…maybe it was waiting for its
chance
to live.

He knew it was a dream, but it still scared him shitless. In a life where waking hours are draped in the costume of horrid nightmare, where reality has suddenly become questionable, it’s easy to be scared by dreams.

Perry walked toward the door. Something unspeakable lay behind it, something wet, something hot, something waiting for a chance to rage, to murder, to dominate. He reached for the handle, and the handle reached for him; it was a long, thick, black tentacle, wrapping around his arm, pulling him into the spongy green wood. Perry fought, but for all his might he was yanked forward like a child by an angry father.

The door didn’t open—it sucked him in, joyous in a sudden meal of body and mind. The green wood engulfed him, the dank rot caressed him. Perry tried to scream, but the oozing tentacle forced its way into his mouth, cutting off all sound, cutting off his air. The door enveloped him, held him motionless. Mindless terror pulled at him, dragging his sanity under…

When he awoke
, the fork remained stuck in his shoulder. The sweatshirt had tried to pull back to its natural position, catching on the fork and pushing it at an angle; the end of the utensil rested against his cheekbone. The wound didn’t hurt because it was completely numb. He didn’t know how long he’d been out.

He grimaced as he grabbed the fork with his right hand and gently removed it from his trapezius—it made a wet, sucking sound as it came out. Thick trickles of blood coursed down his collarbone and curled under his armpit. The front of his sweatshirt had changed from white to bright red with thin streaks of the dark purple. The stab wound alone wouldn’t have been that bad, but twisting the fork had ripped open a large chunk of flesh. He gently fingered the wound, trying to ascertain the damage without setting off the pain button. His fingers also hit the corpse of the Triangle, which was no longer firm, but soft and pliable.

The hooks of this one were undoubtedly still stuck in his body, maybe wrapped around his collarbone, maybe wrapped around a rib or even his sternum. If that was the case, ripping it out might cause one of the hooks to puncture a lung, or even his heart. That wasn’t an option. But it was
dead,
over which he felt an indescribably sick satisfaction. The fact that he would have to carry a corpse around embedded in his shoulder, however, tugged at the back of his mind, tweaking at the last vestiges of normality clinging to his tortured soul.

He carefully stood up and hopped to the bathroom. His ruined leg didn’t hurt as much now, but it still throbbed complaint. Too bad he couldn’t ride this game out on the bench, let one of the second-stringers come in and fill in his position.

Play through the pain.

Rub some dirt on it and get back in there.

Sacrifice your body.

Lines of dried brown blood patterned the linoleum floor. Chunks of orangish skin still floated in the tub, although the water level had dropped. He could tell the original depth by the tub ring left from tiny scab flecks.

Blood trickled from his shoulder. He grabbed the bottle of hydrogen peroxide from the cabinet behind the bathroom mirror. The bottle was almost empty, just enough left to clean the wound. Setting it down on the counter, he tried to pull off his sweatshirt, but a shooting pain in his left shoulder stopped him. He slowly raised the arm—it was sore and painful, but it still worked, thank God.

He clumsily peeled off the blood-wet sweatshirt using just his right arm, then dropped it on the floor and kicked it into the corner where he didn’t have to look at it.

Perry wanted a shower, but he didn’t want to clean the tub, and he was too grossed out by the floating scabs to stand in the ankle-deep water. He’d have to make do.

He grabbed a clean washcloth out from under the sink—he wasn’t about to use anything that had touched the scabs or the Starting Five. Only now it wasn’t the Starting Five anymore, was it? Perry smiled with the small victory. Now they were four. The Four Horsemen.

The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse.

His smile vanished. The new name didn’t exactly make him feel any better.

His head pulsed like a dying star. He wet the white washcloth and tried to wipe the smeared blood off his chest, ribs, shoulder and out from under his armpit. He dabbed at the wound itself; the washcloth quickly turned a sick shade of pink.

The wound didn’t look all that bad. The Triangle, however, looked awful. Its “face” was ripped open along with the skin that had covered it. At first it was hard to tell the difference between his flesh and the flesh of the dead Triangle, but after looking closely he could see that the thing’s tissue was paler than his own, a gray-pink fading to white. It sure didn’t look healthy. But then again Perry figured that if
he’d
been stabbed to death with a fork,
he
wouldn’t look that great either.

He poured peroxide over the wound. Most of it ran quickly down his chest to soak into his pants and underwear. It was chilly. He didn’t care. He dabbed at the fizzing wound with the washcloth.

He had only three Band-Aids—that would be just enough to cover the wound. He pinched together the ripped skin over the Triangle’s dead head, then used the Band-Aids like sutures to pin everything down. The white absorbent patches on the tan strips instantly turned pink. It was just superficial blood now; it would clot up in only a minute or two.

The smell of Band-Aids briefly lifted his spirits. That smell carried a childhood association, the feeling that you were done hurting. When he was a kid, he’d get cut or scraped, he’d bleed and his mom would put a Band-Aid on it. Whether it was the Band-Aid or the TLC, the pain would be greatly reduced and he’d be back to playtime in nothing flat—unless, of course, his father wanted to teach him a lesson about crying.

Signs of weakness were not allowed in the Dawsey household. Perry couldn’t count the number of beatings prefaced by his father’s angry declaration, “I’ll give you something to cry about!”

Despite the pain, the Band-Aids did provide a little positive energy. The plastic scent filled his nostrils, and he couldn’t help but relax a bit.

As he grew calm, he realized that it was quiet. Not just in the empty apartment, but in his head. There was no fuzzy noise, no lumpy sound, not even a little bit of static. There was nothing. He didn’t bother to kid himself that they were all dead—he could still
feel
them. He felt a low buzz at the back of his skull. They weren’t dead, but it felt different. Maybe they were…asleep.

If they were asleep, could he call someone? The cops? Maybe the FBI? The little bastards were deathly afraid of people in uniform—what kind of uniform, Perry didn’t know. If they were out, he could try
something
.

He had to try.

“Hello?” Perry whispered, testing the waters. “Fellas? Are you there?”

Nothing.

His mind raced like a windup toy that bounced off wall after wall, moving around quickly but with nowhere to go. He had to think. His cell phone was the obvious choice; it wasn’t like he could get in his car and drive away from the danger.

But who to call? Just how many people knew about these Triangles?

Call…who? The FBI? The CIA? There was obviously an airtight lid on leaks to the media regarding this situation, or he’d have heard about it long ago. He hopped quietly to the kitchen table and grabbed his cell phone. He hopped back to the couch and pulled the phone book out from under the end table. He started to flip to government agencies in the Yellow Pages, then inspiration hit him.