Infected (31 page)

some can see.

not all. not yet.

“So which one of you can see? My back? My…my balls?”

no, your ass, show us

“No.”

show us

“No fucking way.”

SHOW US

The low-level mindscream hit him, causing more fear than pain. What he had to do sickened him, but he had no choice.

He dropped his pants and bent over, gripping the counter edge for support. He held the ruler behind him at ass level, parallel to his butt cheeks, directly in front of the Triangle buried in his posterior.

“Do you see this?” Perry felt embarrassed, like a teenager who’s pantsed in front of the girls, or someone caught masturbating. He felt his face flush red. He was standing there in his kitchen, pants about his knees, bent over like some silkyboy waiting for a bull fag to take it to him. He’d certainly rather have some three-hundred-pound convict sticking it up his ass than deal with the situation he had now. Even AIDS would be better than going out this way.

yes what is it

He felt loud, high-pitch noise. Excitement rolled into his thoughts, an overflow emotion from the Triangles. He’d had all the Triangles covered up from the first moment they could see. The Triangle on his shoulder had enjoyed only a few moments of vision before Perry fucked up its whole day. Aside from an eyeful of fork, this ass-eye view was really the first thing they’d ever seen.

“It’s called a ruler. It measures distances.” Perry closed his eyes and laid his head down on the counter. It felt cool against his warm face. “See the lines and the numbers?”

He felt them accessing the new words.

yes lines and numbers yes

Their excitement level soared, leaking into his own mind. Perry fought it down. Anger crept into his thoughts—he wasn’t going to let their emotions overtake him.

“Okay. The big lines represent inches. That’s a unit of measurement. The numbers count how many inches there are. There’s twelve inches on this ruler, twelve inches is called a ‘foot,’ which is a larger unit of measurement. Understand?” The fuzzy noise in his head was a speedy blur, then it was gone.

yes.

twelve inches in a foot

“Okay. Now, there’re the twelve inches in a foot, and if you have three feet—”

three feet is a yard

They were at it again, checking his brain like the Perry Public Library. It was a redefinition of being used, and

one hundred yards in a

football field

there was nothing Perry could do about it. Nothing. His anger continued to grow, his temper slowly mushrooming like a nuclear pile approaching critical mass. Perry shut his eyes tight and tried to

5,280 feet in a mile

control the emotions, but there were too many: excitement, frustration, humiliation from being bent over the counter with his ass exposed like some prison bitch waiting to be taken, and rage at having his brain and memories fingered through like a
Compton’s Encyclopedia.

His father’s voice came to him, unbidden. This time it sounded real and vibrant, not a memory but something angry and new.
Look at yourself, son. Bent over like some nancy-boy, you’re a goddamned disgrace. I oughta teach you some manhood, boy. You gonna let them treat you like that? You gonna let them? Huh, boy? You gonna let them
PUSH YOU AROUND LIKE THAT
?

A narrow-eyed snarl slipped across Perry’s face. He reached his left hand over to the stove and cranked the front right burner’s knob to “high.”

He stood and pulled up his pants. Their disappointment overflowed into him, as pure and as powerful as the excitement had been.

let us see. let us see

“You wanna see? See the fucking shit stains in my underwear.”

let us see let us see the ruler

“Shut the fuck up, you’ve seen enough.” Part of Perry hoped they’d continue. He wanted to hurt them, teach them some manners. Another part of him (the part that had been all of him until a week ago, the part that was fading fast) struggled to bring his temper under control. He was split right down the middle, and he didn’t give a ratfuck which part came out on top.

let us see See SEE

Perry flinched as the Triangle volume started to rise. A mindscream fast approached. The part of Perry that hoped for a peaceful resolution shrank away to nothingness.

In that moment, he was his father’s son once again.

“You want to see?”

Pain was coming, Perry knew. Truckloads of it. A clearance sale on agony.

“You got to learn not to talk to me that way. Tell you what, I’ll show you how I cook your dinner.” Perry hopped up onto the counter.

He sat with his ass on the countertop, legs dangling over the edge, right ass cheek almost touching the edge of the electric stove, back resting against the cupboards that held his mismatched plates. He watched the burner slowly change from black to a soft, glowing orange. An orphaned, dried-out grain of rice sat

let us see

on the burner. Perry watched closely. The grain was at first white, then slowly turned black.

It began to burn, sending a thin

let us see now

tendril of smoke toward the ceiling. The little stream thickened as the metal continued to heat, smoke rising in a tiny column then dissipating into

let us see,

we’re warning you

nothingness. It was so black against the hot metal. There was the briefest flicker of an orange flame, and then nothing. The smoke quickly petered out, leaving a small black husk on the glowing burner.

warning you warning you see See SEE

“You want to see?” Perry rolled onto his left cheek and hooked his right thumb under his waistband. They’d “warned” him. Nobody “warns” a Dawsey of anything. It was Perry’s house, after all, and anyone under his roof was damn well going to live by his rules.

yes we want to see

now Now NOW, and

we’re not going to

tell you again

Perry slid over so his right cheek hovered directly above the burner. He instantly felt the rising, searing heat. He pulled his pants down, exposing the right cheek to the burner only inches away. Blistering heat cascaded over his naked skin.

“Do you see now, fuckers?” He felt the overflow excitement again, coursing through his body, intense and stronger than ever.

what is it? is it dinner?

are we going to eat?

what is it?

“You don’t know what it is?” Perry heard the malice in his own voice, the hatred and the anger that had once again taken over his body and thrown reason and common sense out some mental twentieth-story window to splatter on the concrete sidewalk below. He heard his father’s voice within his own.

“Well, if you don’t know what it is, maybe you’d better take a closer look!”

Perry slammed his right cheek down on the burner and immediately heard the answering sizzle. The scorching pain stabbed into his body, but it was
his
pain, and he welcomed it with the wide-eyed smile of a madman. His nervous system railed against the searing heat as his flesh bubbled and blistered and blackened.

NO NO NO NO NO

NO NO NO

The stench of his own burning flesh filled the room. The unbearable agony ripped through his every fiber. Later on he’d congratulate himself on his incredible willpower—he managed to keep his ass pressed firmly against the burner for almost four seconds, fighting against his body’s primal directive to
get away
from the pain—

NO NO NO NO NO

NO NO

The mindscream hammered into his head and broke his superhuman concentration. Perry leaped off the stove and landed on his bad leg, which promptly gave way. He fell in a heap on the bloodstained linoleum floor.

NO NO NO NO NO

NO NO

He didn’t have time to regret his actions; he didn’t even have time to tell himself how stupid it was. He felt the scorching pain on his ass and the strong smell of cooked human flesh (and was there another smell in there?) and the jackhammer screaming that ripped into his mind and stirred his brains like a swizzle stick.

NO NO NO NO NO

NO NO NO

Despite the pain that had him whimpering like a little girl, despite tears streaming down his face to mix with the dried blood on the linoleum floor, despite feeling every injury flare back to agonizing life, he knew he’d killed another one. He held that satisfaction tight to his soul as he passed out.

THE ARCHES

Margaret, Amos and Clarence Otto stared at the photomural. Clarence had had the painting blown up to three times the original size, so that Nguyen’s nightmarish vision took up an entire wall.

They’d all caught a few hours of sleep from around 2:00
A.M
. to 5:00
A.M
., then it was back to work. After two hours of staring at the mural, staring and
thinking,
Margaret still felt groggy despite five cups of nasty hospital coffee. Amos, as usual, looked none the worse for wear. Neither did Otto. Margaret hated them both.

Amos stood right in front of the photomural, his nose just inches from the wall. “How did Nguyen know these people?” he asked.

Margaret stared and thought hard about the question. “I don’t think he knew these people at all,” she finally said.

Amos looked at her and crossed his arms. “What, you’re saying that the kid was a psychic or something?”

Margaret shook her head slowly, but kept her eyes fixed on the painting photo. “No, I don’t think so. Not psychic, but something
like
psychic. Something beyond the science we know.”

Where she could identify and match, she had taped the life-size pictures of the infestation victims’ faces next to their life-size spot on the painting.

Blaine Tanarive.

Charlotte Wilson.

Gary Leeland.

Judy Washington.

Martin Brewbaker.

Kiet Nguyen.

There was an indefinable horror in seeing the real faces taped next to Nguyen’s ghastly, painted renditions. Horror, yes, but that horror paled in comparison to the math.

Those six faces, she knew.

There were eleven other faces that she did not.

So there were more. At least eleven more. And who knew how many beyond that? The thing made of those bodies seemed to expand far beyond the frame. How many other faces would be on the rest of the…the…what was it? An arch? No, there were multiple arches.

The
construct
.

Why was she focusing on that? Why did she feel the need to name it? Was it significant?

Margaret slowly walked backward, taking in the painting. Her eyes traced the arch, trying to imagine where the other end of it would logically fall.

The construct would be huge. The two arches alone would be at least twenty-feet high.

Arches. Made out of human parts.

“Clarence,” Margaret said quietly, “get me Dew on the phone.
Now
.”

INTERNET

Perry woke all at once, sitting straight up with eyes wide open. His sleeping mind had been searching his thoughts, not unlike the way the Triangles searched his gray-matter database, looking for an answer to the problem at hand. While sleeping, his brain had found a keyword to clutch, a distant beacon of hope in a dark flatland of despair.

That word was
Internet
.

How stupid he’d been to call on the phone, rummaging through the Yellow Pages trying to find Triangle this or Triangle that. How could the Soldiers make themselves known in the Ann Arbor Yellow Pages? America was a big fucking place. And who was to say that this Triangle infection epidemic was limited to the United States? It was probably global. And if you wanted to communicate with people all over the world, you needed a global medium. Not television, not radio, not phones, not newspapers—if you wanted to keep something quiet but let people know you were out there, there was only one answer, the only true global medium: the Internet.

He moved to rub the sleep from his eyes and suddenly had to bite back a scream as he rolled onto his scorched ass. He couldn’t see the window in the living room, but the brightness of the apartment told him he hadn’t been asleep long. If he ever got out of this alive, he’d buy himself a brand-new bed. Something he couldn’t afford. Something so comfortable he’d never want to get out of it again. Something that was better than sleeping on linoleum floors.