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.
The tough, resilient stem stretched and stretched and stretched, until the tweezers-gripped head was a good two feet above his thigh. It stretched thin like taffy, bits of blood and clear slime masking the milky white color.
The stretching slowed, then stopped.
With a snarl, Perry pulled harder.
The unseen anchor ripped free; the stem shot out of his leg like a rubber band and wetly slapped against his wrist.
He looked at his thigh. A narrow opening, smaller than a pencil and already closing, sank down into his raw flesh like a tiny black hole. A rivulet of blood poured out, pushed up the tube like squeezed toothpaste as the thigh muscles expanded and closed the hole.
A smile broke across Perry’s face. A feeling of primitive success coursed through him, as did a limited blast of hope. He turned his attention to the strange white growth, the rounded head pinched firmly between the tweezers, the stem—or tail, or whatever the hell it was—wrapped wetly about his wrist, held to his skin by bloody slime.
He moved his hand toward the light to get a better look at the growth. As he rotated his wrist, marveling at the strange thing, he felt a brief tickling sensation, almost imperceptible, like the smallest mosquito trying to land.
Perry’s eyes shot wide open with revulsion. He felt his stomach churn and his adrenaline surge…
The white thing’s tail squirmed like a snake trapped in a predator’s grip. With a shout of fear, Perry threw the tweezers into the bathtub where they clanked against the white porcelain and clattered near the drain. The squirming, wet, wiggling, white thing remained wrapped about his wrist, the tail tickling his skin as the heavy, round, plastic-button head hung limp and free, swinging wildly with Perry’s every movement.
Perry screamed, both in disgust and in panic, and violently snapped his wrist as if he were flinging mud from his fingers. The white thing hit the mirror with a little splat. It looked like a moving piece of cooked spaghetti hanging loosely from the glass. Still writhing, its desperate motions smearing wet slime across the mirror, it slowly started to slide down.
That thing was inside me! That thing was alive ! It’s STILL alive!
Perry instinctively slapped hard against the mirror, his huge hand rattling the glass with a loud bang. The squirming growth erupted as if he’d slammed a soft-boiled egg. Thin gouts of thickish purple gel spewed across the mirror. Perry yanked his hand away. Bits of white flesh, now limp and saggy, covered his palm, as did globs of the purple goo. Curling his lip in revulsion, he quickly turned to grab the towel that hung from the shower curtain rod—too quickly. His sudden move tangled him in the pants still hanging about his ankles. His balance gone, he fell forward.
He reached his hands out to brace his fall, but there was nothing to grab before his forehead smacked against the toilet seat. A sharp crack reverberated off the narrow bathroom’s walls, but Perry was out before he even heard the sound.
23.
PARASITOLOGY
Martin Brewbaker was no more. Wednesday, less than three full days since he’d been shot to death, and all that remained was a pitted black skeleton missing the legs from the knees down. That and delicate gossamer mold that now grew in little patches not only on the skeleton and on the table, but in spots all over the BSL-4 tent. Even Brewbaker’s talon-hand had finally relaxed. It lay on the table, finger bones crumbling into a jumbled pile. Cameras inside the tent provided pictures—both live and still—that let Margaret watch the corpse’s final degenerative state.
She hadn’t felt such a black sense
of foreboding since her childhood, during the ever-so-deadly pissing contests between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutually assured destruction, the promise that any conflict could rapidly escalate into full-blown nuclear war. Bang. Dead. Done.
She’d only been a young girl, but more than smart enough to grasp the potential disaster. It was funny, really, that back then her parents had thought she understood because of her high intelligence, as if only a gifted child could comprehend the imminent threat of nuclear war. But, as they had in years before and had in years since, probably always would, adults mistake children’s innocence for ignorance.
Margaret knew exactly what was going on, and so did most of her classmates. They knew the Communists were something to fear, something more tangible than the Thing Under the Bed. They knew that Manhattan, their home, would be among the first places destroyed.
Why do people think the end of the world is such a difficult concept for a child to understand? Much of childhood is spent in fear of the unknown, in fear of creeping shadows and lurking monsters and things that promise a long, ugly, and painful death. A nuclear war was just one more boogeyman that threatened to take them all away. Only this boogeyman also scared her parents and all the other grown-ups, and the children tuned in to that frequency of fear as surely as they tuned in to Bugs Bunny.
You could run from a monster, you could dodge the boogeyman, but the nuclear war was out there and out of their hands. It might come at any moment. Maybe when she was on the playground at recess. Maybe when she sat down to dinner. Maybe after she went to bed.
Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.
That hadn’t just been an abstract prayer in those days. It had been a possibility as real as the sunset. She remembered living in constant fear of that unknown. Sure she played, went to school, laughed and carried on with her friends, but the threat was always there. Each thready white contrail in the sky was a potential first finger of doom.
And the game would be played out, win or lose, without her able to do anything about it.
She tried to tell herself that this wasn’t the same thing. She was on the forefront of this potential holocaust, after all; she was the front line of defense. This wasn’t out of her control but rather—quite literally—resting squarely in her hands. For some reason, however, that rational, adult knowledge couldn’t banish the little girl’s fear that there was nothing she could do to affect this game’s outcome.
She wondered how Amos could ignore that feeling, or if he even felt it at all. He hummed the theme song to Hawaii Five-O for the millionth time, yet Margaret was too tired to complain. She sipped at her coffee. She’d downed pots of the stuff, hoping it would stimulate her, yet nothing seemed to cut through her lethargy. It felt good to breathe normal air, air not filtered by the biosuit. She wanted to sleep, or at least stretch out and relax, but there really wasn’t time. They needed to finish up the work, incinerate the decomposed remains, and get the hell out of that hospital.
Amos turned to her. His hair was askew, his clothes wrinkled, yet his eyes were alive with excitement.
“This is really quite amazing, Margaret,” he said. “Think about it. This is a human parasite of unparalleled complexity. There’s no question in my mind that this creature is perfectly suited to its human host.”
Margaret stared at the wall, her words quiet, barely audible. “I hate to paraphrase a tired old cliché, but it’s almost too perfect.”
“What do you mean?”
“Like you said, the creature is ideally suited. It’s like a hand in a glove. But think about it, Amos, think of current technology levels—this creature is miles above that. It would be like the Russians suddenly landing on the moon while the Wright brothers were still struggling at Kitty Hawk.”
“It’s amazing, sure, but we can’t ignore the fact that it’s right here in front of us. This is no time for sensitive American egos. There’s some genius out there that’s so far beyond us we can’t even comprehend it.”
“What if there is no genius?” Margaret asked, her voice still small.
“What are you talking about? Of course there’s a genius—how else could this thing have been created?”
She turned to look at him, her skin almost gray, fatigue covering her face like a caul. “What if it’s not created? What if it’s natural?”
“Oh come on, Margaret! I know you’re tired, but you’re not thinking straight. If this is natural, how could we have never seen it before? A human parasite of such size and virulence, and there isn’t one documented case before this year? That doesn’t make sense. For this thing to be so closely matched to human hosts would constitute millions of years of coevolution, yet we’ve never seen anything like this in any mammal, let alone primates or humans.”
“I’m sure there’s many, many things we haven’t seen,” Margaret said. “But I just can’t accept that someone created this thing. It’s just too complex, too advanced. Regardless of what the scare-tactic media like to spout, American science is state-of-the-art. Who’s more advanced? The Chinese? Japan? Singapore? Sure, maybe some countries are starting to get an edge on us, but an edge is one thing, and an exponential shift is another. If we can’t create something that’s even close to this, I find it hard to believe anyone else could. That’s not ego, that’s just the facts.”
Amos seemed annoyed by her persistence. “It’s highly improbable that this affliction has existed but has never been documented. Sure, there are species as yet undiscovered, I grant you that, but there’s a difference between some unknown microscopic creature and this. There’s nothing like this. I can’t even think of a tribal myth or folktale that resembles this. So if this is natural, where in the blue blazes did it come from?”
Margaret shrugged. “You’ve got me. Maybe some kind of dormancy. This may have been a known quantity in prehistoric times, and something caused it to die out. But it didn’t die out all the way. Somehow it stayed dormant for thousands of years until something caused this outbreak. There are orchid seeds that can stay dormant for twenty-five hundred years, for example.”
“Your theory sounds about as far-fetched as the Loch Ness Monster,” Amos said.
“Well what about the coelacanth? People thought it was extinct for seventy million years until a fisherman caught one in 1938. Just because someone hasn’t seen it doesn’t mean it isn’t there, Amos.”
“Right,” Amos said. “And this thing happened to remain dormant for hundreds of years in areas of extreme population density? It would be one thing to find this deep in the Congo jungle, but quite another to find it in Detroit. This isn’t AIDS, where people just die—these are defined, triangular growths. In the communication age, something like this doesn’t go unreported. Pardon my brusqueness, but you’ll have to find another theory.”
Margaret nodded absently. Amos was right. The concept of a dormant human parasite didn’t wash. Whatever these things were, they were new.
Amos changed the subject. “Have Murray’s men found any connection among the victims?”
“Nothing yet. They’ve traced the travel of all victims and anyone the victims came in contact with. There’s no connection. Most of the victims hadn’t traveled anywhere. The only link is that Judy Washington and Gary Leeland, the two Detroit cases, happened within a week of each other and happened at the same retirement home. They checked that place out with a fine-tooth comb. No one else shows any signs of infection. They’ve run tests on the water, the food, the air—nothing out of the ordinary, although we’re still not sure what to look for so that doesn’t rule anything out.
“The two Toledo cases were weeks apart, but within a few blocks of each other physically. There seems to be some proximity effect. The transmission vector is unknown, but Murray still thinks there’s a terrorist out there deliberately infecting random people.”
“That fits with our observations,” Amos said. “I’m more and more
convinced that Brewbaker and the others may have been contaminated but weren’t contagious. We’ve found nothing on him indicative of eggs, an embryonic form, or anything else that could be responsible for new parasites. Besides, Dew hasn’t shown any symptoms, nor has anyone who came in contact with Brewbaker’s body.”
Margaret rubbed her eyes. God, she needed a nap. Shit, what she needed was a week in Bora-Bora with a sleek cabana boy named Marco catering to her every need. But she didn’t have Bora-Bora, she had Toledo, Ohio. And she didn’t have a cabana boy named Marco—she had a gossamer-mold-covered, pitted black skeleton formerly known as Martin Brewbaker.
24.
THE BATHROOM FLOOR
The genetic blueprint recognized when the shells reached the proper thickness; energies then turned to the body’s growth. Cells split again and again and again, a nonstop engine of creation. Internal organs began to take shape, but they wouldn’t fully develop until later. Because the host still provided all food and warmth, most of the internal organs could wait—right now the most important needs were the tendrils, the tails and the brain.
The brain developed rapidly but remained a long way from forming anything that resembled an intelligent thought. The tendrils, however, were of a relatively simple design. They grew like wildfire, branching out in all directions, spreading into the host. The tendrils sought out the host’s nerve cells, intertwining with the dendrites like fingered hands clasping tightly together.
Starting slowly, almost tentatively, the organisms released complex chemical compounds called neurotransmitters into the synaptic cleft, the space between the tendrils and the dendrites. Each neurotransmitter was part of a signal, a message—they slid into the axons’ receptor sites, just like a key into a lock, causing that nerve cell to generate its own neurotransmitters with its own specific message. As in the host’s normal sensory process, the action produced an electrochemical chain reaction: the messages repeated through the nervous system until they reached the host’s brain. The process—from the time the message fires until it finally reaches the brain—takes less than one-thousandth of a second.