Infected

  It was all over, really. What were the doctors going to tell him, anyway? Maybe they could tell him something. Better to go out knowing his killer than to just sit in the apartment and waste away to nothing. But more than likely, he knew, the doctors would look at him, examine him, poke him and prod him, then announce that this disease was a “new development.” And somehow, even though they would know as much about the disease as the Pope knew about making hard-core porn, the doctors would still try to sound intelligent. Doctors were like that, always trying to come across as wise men, never for a moment losing the charade of competence.

  He slowed to turn right on Observatory, but had to wait for pedestrians to cross the slushy street. He was on campus now, and U of M students were renowned for their lackadaisical attitude toward cars. They lazily strolled through crosswalks, even on busy streets, immortal in their youth and confident that cars would slow for them. They were college students, and for most of them the concept that they might face a quick and unfair death had yet to hit home.

  “Your day will come,” Perry said quietly to the bundled and backpacked students as they passed in front of his car. “Mine sure as hell has.” He finished his turn onto Observatory. Now he was only a few blocks from the medical center.

  Perry realized he had yet to call work. What difference did it make if he called in, anyway? A lot of good his three years of devotion did at this point. Never late once, and would that help him survive?

  “Fuck ’em all,” Perry said quietly. His coworkers would hear about it soon enough on the news. He could hear the teaser now: “Michigan man dies from new disease, which is named after his doctor, who is still very much alive and getting pretty frigging rich on the lecture circuit. Story at eleven.”

  He stopped for a red light at Geddes. East Medical Center Drive was just up on the right. Cottony clumps of snow swam in the fluctuating wind, hanging weightless and spinning one second, whipping about as if on an intangible roller coaster the next. Despair filled his skull more tightly than even his own brain. All around him were cars filled with normal people. Perfectly unaware of the disease turning Perry’s body inside out. Fucking normal people.

  Or…or were they normal? How did he know they weren’t suffering from the same condition? Maybe they sat in their cars, fighting the urge to itch, to scratch until their fingernails came back bloody. How was he to know if the people around him were normal or infected?

  It hit him, suddenly and solidly, that it was highly unlikely he was the first person with this disease. And if he wasn’t the first, a disturbing question reared up to confront him: Why hadn’t he heard of this before?

  A horn blast sounded behind him, jerking him back into awareness. The light was green. Heart racing, mind drowning in a sea of strange questions, he pulled through the intersection, then off to the side of the road. On his right was a snow-covered cemetery. How friggin’ perfect. Traffic rolled along behind him, the people who might or might not be normal going on about their business. He gripped the steering wheel to keep his hands from shaking.

  Why hadn’t he heard of this before?

  He had fucking blue triangles growing under his skin, for the love of God. The disease seemed so unusual—the media would have reported such a thing long ago, wouldn’t they? Of course they would have. Unless…unless the people with this disease went into the hospital, but never came out.

  Perry sat very still, staring out the windshield, the cold air filtering into the car and chasing away the artificial heat. What if the hospital was waiting for people like him? Maybe they wouldn’t even try to help him. Maybe they would just study the triangle, lock him up like a prisoner so they could watch him die. And maybe they’d just kill him and dissect him like some lab animal.

  It was the only thing that made sense, or he’d have heard of this somewhere. There was more to this situation, much more. It wasn’t just a simple disease, after all; he was marked for death sure as if he were in a Nazi concentration camp and the triangles were Stars of David sewn onto his clothes.

  But if he couldn’t go to the hospital, what was he going to do? What the hell could he do?

  Fear slowly sank its claws into his consciousness, squeezing out his breath, joining with the biting cold to make his big body shiver.

  “I need a drink,” Perry whispered. “And just a little time to figure this out.”

  He did a U-turn and kept driving. He didn’t stop until he reached the Washtenaw Party Store. The pay phone was not in use, for once—he didn’t talk to anyone, he didn’t look at anyone, he made his purchase and left.

  34.

  TURKEY SHOOT

  Perry shambled back into his apartment carrying two bottles of Wild Turkey—one full, the other already half empty. The promise of violence hung off his frame like the potential energy of a safe hanging fifteen stories over a crowded street.

  Friday night, and it was party time.

  Perry calmly set the bottles on the kitchen table, then strolled into the bathroom. The floor there was crusted not only with dried vomit, but with dried blood as well. He noticed a good three inches of water remained in the tub, still and dead like stagnant pond water, disturbed only by the plunk of occasional drops from the shower head. Chunks of the thick orange skin clogged the drain. Smaller parts floated on the water’s filthy soap-scum surface. He heard a faint trickle slipping down the drain, filtering past the disgusting clog.

  He hadn’t even thought about it when he’d showered. The orange skin apparently came off on its own. His free hand gently touched his collarbone, fingers tracing the slightly too-firm outline of a triangle. It felt more defined, the edges slightly more discernible to the touch. The blue looked a bit more pronounced, still faint, but now clearly visible with a color like that of a faded tattoo.

  He walked back to the kitchen. He grabbed a fork and then a knife out of the butcher’s block, eyes once again lingering on the thick-handled, thick-bladed chicken scissors. He was dying. So many things yet to do, to experience. He’d never see Germany, never go deep-sea fishing, never visit the Alamo or all the historical sites of colonial America. He’d never get married. Never have children.

  It wasn’t all bad. He’d lived a full life. He’d been the first in his family to attend college. He’d played Division I football, been on ESPN, lived his childhood dream of being a Wolverine playing in front of 112,000 screaming fans at the Big House. But above all, he’d escaped his father’s life of violence. He had surpassed his environment, surpassed his heritage, fought and clawed his way into respectability.

  But for what? For nothing, that’s what.

  He sat down at the kitchen table, set the knife on the tabletop, then took a long pull from the half-empty fifth. It tasted awful and seared his throat, but those sensations barely registered on his brain. He knocked it back as if it were water. The Wild Turkey was already roaring through his head. By the time he finished the bottle he knew he’d be three sheets to the wind. Ripped. Drunk-ass wasted.

  He’d be feeling no pain.

  Tears of despair tugged at his eyes. It wasn’t fair. He refused to cry. His father hadn’t cried once during that whole cancer ordeal, and if Dad hadn’t, Perry wouldn’t, either.

  Good old “Dirty Bird” carried a kick as severe as its taste. Perry felt light-headed and his toes tingled. His thoughts seemed thick, syrupy. He sat for a few minutes more, fighting back the tears, the Wild Turkey worming its way into his brain.

  He picked up the knife.

  The blade was almost ten inches long. The kitchen’s fluorescent ceiling lights seemed to glint off of each and every tiny serration. When he cooked chicken or beef, he used the sharp butcher knife to cut through the

  no no no

  raw meat with little effort. Perry doubted that the knife would be any less effective on human flesh, particularly the thin skin atop his shin.

  His eyes blurred a little and he shook his head. He realized he was about to cut into his own body with a butcher knife. A little
Wild Turkey goes a long way. Yes, he was going to cut himself, but there was something in his body that

  no no no

  didn’t belong.

  He was going to die, sure, so be it, but he was taking these fucking triangle things with him. It was time for the Big Six to lose a member. Perry laughed out loud—anytime you drop players from the lineup, you have to make a cut.

  He polished off the last of the fifth, the liquid searing its way down his throat. He tossed the empty bottle aside, then used the knife to cut right through his jeans. The denim offered little resistance to the blade. In a few seconds, his pant leg hung in two long, ragged strips, exposing his tree trunk of a leg.

  Perry lifted his foreleg and laid it on the kitchen table like a pot roast served at a family dinner. The wood felt cool against the back of his calf. The Wild Turkey buzz droned through his mind like a horde of lazy bumblebees. He knew if he didn’t act soon, he wouldn’t be able to do anything but babble, drool and pass out.

  It was time to get down to

  no no no kill

  business.

  Perry steeled himself with a few deep breaths. He was acting crazy, he knew that, but what difference did it make to a dead man? He poked at the triangle with the fork. Nothing had changed since his earlier examination.

  “You’re going to kill me?” Perry said. “No-no-no, my friend, I’m going to kill you.”

  He pushed the fork into his skin, just firmly enough to hold the triangle in place. The three metal tines made deep indents in the bluish skin.

  Small flecks of rust dotted the knife blade. He’d never noticed them before. He noticed them now. He was suddenly noticing a lot of things about the knife, things like the nicks in the wooden handle, things like the two silvery rivets that fastened the comfortable wooden handle to the blade, things like the grain of the wood, like a hundred little minnows forever trapped mid-swim in a soft, warm, brown stream.

  He’d made the first cut before he really knew what he was doing. He found himself staring drunkenly at a two-inch gash. Hot, tickling blood spilled down the side of his calf, spreading across the tabletop, then falling in thick red splatters against the white linoleum floor. He heard the dripping of the blood before he felt the pain, which was severe but distant—separated, as if it were pain seen on TV while Perry was curled up on the couch under a fuzzy blanket with a cold Coke in one hand and the remote control in the other.

  no kill no please

  no kill

  He felt as if he were on autopilot, gliding through this bizarre action like a spectator. Who knew there would be this much blood? It covered his leg, smeared against his pale skin, made it difficult to see the triangle’s edge, yet he pushed down hard on the fork, put the knife blade perpendicular to his skin and made another fast cut. More blood spilled across the table and onto the floor. The pain didn’t feel distant now, not at all. Perry ground his teeth in an effort to control himself, to finish the job.

  The blood somehow found its way up the knife blade and onto his hands. He heard the steady stream-drip of his own blood pattering to the floor below.

  “How’s it feel, you little fucker?” Perry’s words were slow and slurred.

  “How’s it feel? Do you like that? Kill me? No-no-no, I’ll kill you. You’ve got to have discipline.”

  Perry steeled himself, forcing his vision to clear once more and his mind to center on the next task. Despite his drunken state, his hands remained amazingly steady—he’d definitely missed his calling in life.

  no kill please no

  kill no

  His face furrowed in confusion. Something tickled at the edge of his mind, like a dream trying to crawl in and stir up nocturnal secrets. He violently shook his head, then stared with new focus at the bloody fork and knife. The second cut had left one side of the triangle in place, like a door hinge—he slid the blade under the angular flap and flipped it back like a bloody piece of raw bacon.

  cold no kill cold cold

  What he saw stopped him instantly. A low hiss leaked from his mouth like air from a punctured tire.

  “How’s that for a prize in your Cracker Jacks?”

  He stared at the thing that had made him itch, made him tear into himself like a wild animal in a trap—at what was undoubtedly killing him. Blood pooled and flowed around a dark blue triangular lump. Perry wiped away the pulsating blood to get a better look.

  It was deep blue, shiny, although maybe that was from the wetness of the blood rather than its true color. The triangle’s surface wasn’t smooth, but gnarled, twisted…malignant, like tree roots massed together and exposed to the soil surface, or like the texture of steel cable without the orderly lines.

  Sobriety suddenly swam its way to the surface, spurred on by a horror-fueled fight-or-flight response. This was a whole ’nother ball game from the rashes, a completely different league than the thick orange blisters. His body hadn’t made this thing, couldn’t have—where the hell had it come from?

  Perry snarled. The growling voice of a rabid animal escaped his throat. He not-so-gently slid the fork under the bloody blue triangle. The metal tines scraped against his own raw flesh. He’d never felt pain so

  no feel no kill no kill

  pure, so dense, so all-encompassing, but he ignored it completely, focusing instead on the abomination buried in his shin.

  Play through the pain.

  He felt the tines of the fork meet the slightly giving resistance of the triangle’s stem. He gently fished around until the fork slid all the way through, its red-smeared prongs poking their little heads out from underneath the triangle’s other side.

  The blood-covered table felt cold and sticky under his calf. Perry raised the fork. The triangle seemed to lift easily. The stem itself, however, was another affair, far more solid and firm than before. It would take strength to pull this one out.

  Sweat poured from his face as pain sheared through his leg. It was slammingly intense, but he held it in check with the promise of purging this abomination from his body. Perry yanked up hard on the

  no kill no kill

  fork, but the stem held firm. Blood spilled anew from the leg, splashing into the puddle that blazed red against the white linoleum floor.

  His head lolled to the right. Spots appeared before his eyes. He scrunched his eyes shut and shook his head, blinking fast as his equilibrium and vision returned. He’d almost passed out. Had he lost that much blood? His head started to spin—he didn’t know if it was from the Wild Turkey or blood loss. He felt control slipping away.

  please no no no

  no no no no

  He jammed the fork in deeper, allowing more of the tines to poke through the other side, enough for him to get a decent hold with his free hand. He held the fork as if it were a curling bar and he was ripping off a few quick reps. His meaty biceps twitched in anticipation. He took a breath and

  NO NO NO NO NO NO

  NO NO NO NO

  yanked.

  He heard a ripping sound and felt a blast of searing nuclear fire rage through his leg. Something in the stem snapped. Perry’s momentum carried him backward over his chair and spilled him onto the floor.

  Blood had trickled before—now it gushed, this time from the back of the leg. A wave of gray washed across his eyes.

  Have to stop the bleeding. I’m not gonna die on the kitchen floor…

  He pulled off his T-shirt and leaned forward, ass and legs spreading blood all across the linoleum. Perry wrapped the shirt around his gushing calf, tied a granny knot, then yanked it tight with all his strength. His short scream filled the small apartment.

  He rolled to his back, body tightly tense with agony, the gray washing over him yet again. He fell limp.

  His chest moved in regular breaths as he lay on the blood-smeared floor.

  35.

  COMMUNICATION BREAKDOWN

  The five remaining organisms conducted a “poll” of sorts. Following deeply ingrained instructions, they measured densitie
s of thyroxine and triiodothyronine, hormones that stimulate the metabolic rate. Both hormones are produced by the thyroid gland, which is located in the neck region of all vertebrates. By measuring the densities of these chemicals in the bloodstream, the five organisms detected which of their number was closest to the neck.

  Or, more accurately, which was closest to the brain.

  The triangle on the host’s back, the one on the spine, just below the shoulder blades, came out the winner. This new discovery stimulated additional specialized cell development from that triangle—like a stealthy snake approaching an unknowing victim, a new tendril slowly grew along the spinal column toward the brain.

  Once there, the tendril split into hundreds of long strands, each microscopically thin. The tendrils sought out the brain’s convergence zones. These zones act like mental switching stations, providing access to information and linking that information to other relevant data. The tendrils sought out specific areas: the thalamus, the amygdala, the caudate nucleus, the hypothalamus, the hippocampus, the septum, and particular areas of the cerebral cortex. The tendrils’ growth was very specific, very directed.

  Sentience was limited but progressing—they had only just begun to think, to be aware of themselves. Words had floated about their environment, and they had picked up a few, but with the growth into the brain they would learn more and learn them quickly.

  They had tried to stop the host, but their messages were weak. They simply didn’t have enough information to communicate properly. That was changing; soon they would be strong enough to make him listen.