Infected (9 page)

“Your doctors couldn’t do anything for my right knee, now could they?”

“I was at the game, Perry, remember? I saw your knee when I visited you at the hospital. Jesus H. Christ couldn’t have brought that knee back from the dead.”

“Maybe I’m just a Cro-Magnon, that’s all.” Perry fought the urge to scratch again. The rash on his right ass cheek demanded attention. “We still hitting the bar tonight?”

“I don’t think so, contagion-boy. I prefer the company of at least semi-healthy people. You know, those with rubella or smallpox? Perhaps a bit of the Black Death? I’d rather associate with them than deal with scabies.”

“It’s just a rash, asshole.” Perry felt anger slowly swell up in his chest. He immediately fought it down. Bill Miller seemingly lived to irritate people, and once he got rolling he didn’t quit. It would be “scabies this” and “scabies that” for the rest of the week—and it was only Tuesday. But they were just words, and good-natured words at that. Perry calmed himself. He’d already let his temper slip once this week—he’d be damned if he’d insult Bill like that again.

Perry moved his mouse and clicked, magnifying a section of the network schematic. “Leave me alone, will ya? Sandy wants this thing fixed right away. The Pullman people are going apeshit.”

Bill slid back into his cube. Perry stared at the screen, trying to solve a problem taking place more than a thousand miles away in the state of Washington. Analyzing computer glitches over the phone wasn’t an easy job, especially with network difficulties where the problem could be a wire in the ceiling, a bad port, or a single defective component on any of 112 workstations. Many times in customer support, he faced problems that would have chewed up Agatha Christie, Columbo and Sherlock Holmes in one big swallow. This was one such problem.

The answer danced at the edges of his mind, but he couldn’t focus. He leaned back into his chair, which set the itch on his spine afire with maddening intensity. It was like a thousand mosquito bites all rolled into one.

Perry’s train of thought dissolved completely as he ground his back into the office chair, letting the rough cloth dig through his sweatshirt. He grimaced as the welts on his leg flared up with itching so sudden and so bad that he might as well have been stung by a wasp. He attacked the leg welts, clawing his nails through blue-jean denim. It was like trying to fight a Hydra—each time he stopped one biting head, two more flared up to take its place.

From the next cube, he heard Bill’s poor impression of a Shakespearean actor.

“To scabies, or not to scabies,” Bill said, his voice only slightly muffled by the divider. “That is the infection.”

Perry gritted his teeth and bit back an angry reply. The welts were driving him nuts, making him easily irritated by little things. Still, although Bill was his friend, sometimes the guy didn’t know when to quit.

DIRTY FINGERNAILS

Margaret stared into the microscope’s eyepiece, trying to focus on the magnified image. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep. She couldn’t rub them, thanks to the plastic faceplate and the cumbersome biosuit. She blinked a few times to clear her vision. How long had she been working on Brewbaker? Twenty-four hours and counting, and no end in sight. She bent and stared into the microscope.

“Hmm, what have we here?” The sample’s meaning seemed rather obvious, but her fatigue and the horrid condition of the victim’s skin made her unsure. “Amos, come over here and look at this.”

He put down his chemical samples and moved toward the microscope. Like Margaret, he hadn’t slept in more than a day. Even with the lack of sleep and the awkward Racal suit, however, he moved with a smooth grace that made him look as if he floated rather than walked. He bent into the eyepiece without touching anything.

After a moment he asked, “What am I looking for?”

“I was hoping you’d see it right away.”

“I see a lot of things, Margaret,” Amos said. “Perhaps you could be a little more specific. Where is this skin sample from?”

“The area just outside the growth. See anything that would indicate moderate skin trauma?” Amos half rose to answer, but Margaret cut him off. “And don’t give me one of your smart-ass answers, please. I know damn well the whole body is ripped to shreds.”

Amos bent back to the eyepiece. He stared for a few seconds, silence filling the sterile morgue. “Yes, I see it. I see some scabbing and some damage down past the subcutaneous layer. It looks like a long groove—like a claw wound, perhaps.”

Margaret nodded. “I think I’ll take another look at those skin samples we got from under the victim’s fingernails.”

Amos stood straight and looked at her. “You don’t think he did this to himself, do you? This tear is all the way to the muscle, and it looks like repetitive damage. Do you know how much that would hurt?”

“I can take a guess.” Margaret stretched her arms high, bent to the left, then to the right. She was sick of the lab and sick of the limited sleep. She wanted a real bed, not a cot, and a real bottle of wine to go with it. As long as she was dreaming, she might as well throw in Agent Clarence Otto in a pair of silk boxers.

She sighed. Agent Otto would have to wait for another day. Right now she had other things to worry about, like what could make a man use his fingernails like claws to tear into his own body?

The computer terminal let out a long beep: information had arrived. Amos shuffled over and sat down.

“This is odd,” he said. “Most odd indeed.”

“Give me the Cliffs Notes version.”

“Results on the excised growth, for starters. They said their sample had almost completely liquefied by the time they got it. They did what they could, though. The tissue was cancerous.”

“What do they mean, it was cancerous? We saw it. It wasn’t a mass of uncontrolled cells—it had structure.”

“I agree, but look at these results—cancerous tissue. That, plus massive amounts of cellulase and trace amounts of cellulose.”

Margaret thought on that for a moment. Cellulose was the primary material in plant cells, the most abundant form of biomass on the planet. But the key word there was
plants
—animals didn’t make cellulose.

“The cellulose didn’t last, either,” Amos said. “Within hours of reception of material, cellulose decomposed into cellulase. They did everything they could to stop it, including attempts to freeze the material, but it didn’t freeze.”

“Just like the enzyme that’s decomposing the flesh. It’s like a…self-destruct mechanism.”

“Suicidal cancer? That’s a bit of a reach, Margaret.”

It
was
a reach. A big one. And yet maybe she needed to reach; reach for something that was beyond accepted science.

ONE MAN’S HOME…

Coming home to apartment B-203 always generated mixed feelings. The place wasn’t much, one meaningless apartment in a massive cluster of identical buildings. Windywood was the kind of complex where even flawless directions would have people guessing; there were enough buildings to necessitate a little network of roads with smarmy names like Evergreen Drive, Shady Lane and Poplar Street. After one or two wrong turns, the plain-looking, three-story, twelve-unit complexes were all you could see.

His building was only two down from the complex entrance, right across the street from the Washtenaw Party Store. Made things quite convenient. Meijer’s grocery store was only a couple of miles away; he hit that for the big grocery runs. For everything else the party store did the trick. It was a low-rent part of town, and the party store wasn’t exactly a high-class operation—there was always some welfare reject on the pay phone just outside the door, working a “deal” or having a far-too-loud argument with a significant other.

Perry didn’t have jack squat to eat at home. The party store had a great little deli, so he stopped for a ham sandwich with Texas mustard, and grabbed a six-pack of Newcastle beer. Sure enough, some chick was screaming into the phone. She held the receiver in one hand, a well-bundled baby in the other. Perry tried to ignore her as he walked in and tried to ignore her again as he walked out, but the girl was
loud.
He didn’t feel any sympathy for her—if he could rise above his background and upbringing, anyone could. People who lived that way
wanted
to live that way.

He pulled into the apartment complex and into his carport, which was less than an eighth of a mile from the entrance. The girl bothered him—if he’d made it to the NFL, he’d live in a big house somewhere, far from the rabble of Ypsilanti. He couldn’t shake the feeling that he was a failure. He should have more than this. The apartment was nice in its way, and he hated to feel ungrateful for the things that he had, but there was no denying the place was low-rent.

Seven years ago no one thought he’d wind up in anything less than a mansion. “Scary” Perry Dawsey, then a sophomore at the University of Michigan, had been named All–Big Ten linebacker along with senior Cory Crypewicz of Ohio State. Crypewicz went in the first round to Chicago. He pulled down $2.1 million a year, not counting the $12 million signing bonus. It was a far cry from Perry’s meager tech-support salary.

But Crypewicz hadn’t been as good as Perry, and all the country knew it. Perry had been a monster, the kind of defensive player who could dominate a game with his sheer ferocity. The press had tagged him with several nicknames, “Beast,” “Cro-Mag” and “Fang” among them. Of course, ESPN’s Chris Berman always seemed to have the last word on nicknames, and the first time he used the “Scary” tag, it stuck.

My, but how a cheap-ass cut block could change things.

The knee injury had been awful, a complete blowout damaging the ACL, the medial collateral, every frigging ligament in the area. It even caused bone damage, fracturing the fibula and chipping his patella. A year’s worth of reconstructive surgeries and rehabilitation didn’t bring him back to full speed. The fact was, he just couldn’t cut it anymore. Where he’d once raged across the football field, inflicting his savage authority on anyone foolish enough to cross his path, now he could do little better than hobble along, chasing running backs he could never catch, taking hits from blockers he could never avoid.

Without the release provided by football’s physical play, Perry’s violent streak threatened to eat him up from the inside. Thank God for Bill, who’d helped him adjust. Bill had been there for the next two years, acting as Perry’s conscience, making him aware of his ever-present temper.

Perry yanked up the Ford’s parking brake and hopped out. He was Michigan born and bred, and he loved the cold months, but winter made the complex look desolate, barren and hopeless. Everything seemed pale-gray and lifeless, as if some fairy-tale force had sucked the color from the landscape.

He put his hand in his pocket. The crinkly white Walgreens bag was still there. The itching was just too intense. He’d stopped at a drugstore just a few blocks from his apartment complex and bought a tube of Cortaid. It was silly to feel like he’d given in, like he was weak just for buying a tube of anti-itch medicine, but he felt that way regardless.

He wondered what priceless piece of wisdom his father would have regarding the medicine. Probably something along the lines of,
You can’t tough it out from a rash? Jee-zus, boy, you piss me off. Somebody’s going to have to teach you some discipline.
He’d have followed up that comment with the belt, or a backhand, or his fist.

Dear ol’ Dad. Humanitarian and all-around great guy. Perry shook the thoughts away. Dad was long dead, the victim of well-deserved cancer. Perry didn’t need to concern himself with that man anymore.

Sliding over the parking-lot snow, that thin film no shovel could seem to finish off, he reached the apartment building’s dented green front door and keyed in. He grabbed his mail, mostly junk mail and coupons, then trudged up the two flights to his apartment. Walking up the steps dragged his jeans against the welts on his leg, amplifying the itching—it was as if someone had jammed a burning coal in his skin. He forced himself to ignore it, to show at least a modicum of discipline, as he unlocked the door to his apartment.

The layout was simple: facing out the door to the hall, the kitchen nook was to the left and the living room was to the right. Just past the kitchen nook was the “dining area.” The spot was tiny to begin with; cluttered by both the computer desk that held his Macintosh and a small round table with four chairs, the place had barely enough room to maneuver.

The living room was decent-size, comfortable and sparsely furnished with his big old couch, in front of which sat a hand-me-down coffee table. An end table with a lamp tucked up against the couch. A small recliner—too small for Perry’s body—was the habitual territory for Bill on football Sundays. Directly across from the couch and to the right of the door was the entertainment center with a thirty-two-inch flat-screen and a Panasonic stereo system, the only expensive items Perry owned. No need for a landline phone: work provided his cell, and cable modem provided his Internet connection.

There were no plants and few decorations. On the wall above the entertainment center, however, were Perry’s numerous football accolades. A shelf held trophies for high-school MVP awards and his treasured Gator Bowl MVP trophy from his freshman year. Plaques dotted the walls: Big Ten Defensive Player of the Year,
Detroit Free Press
Mr. Football award from his senior year in high school, a dozen others.