Infected (10 page)

Two items hung side by side, obviously commanding a place of honor among the awards. The first was something he’d been stunned to see, even when he knew it was coming, something that had marked a turning point in his life: his acceptance letter from the University of Michigan. The other item he both loved and hated: his snarling, sweat-streaked, helmet-clad face on the cover of
Sports Illustrated.
In the picture he was tackling Ohio State’s Jervis McClatchy, who was completely wrapped up in Perry’s bulging, dirt-and grass-covered arms. The cover read, “So good it’s
SCARY
: Perry Dawsey and the Wolverine D lead Michigan to the Rose Bowl.”

He loved the cover for obvious reasons—what athlete
doesn’t
dream of making the cover of
SI
? He hated it because, like many football players, he was superstitious. The cover of
SI
was suspected by many to carry a curse. If you’re an unbeatable team and you make the cover, you’re going to lose the next game. Or, if you’re the best linebacker in a decade and you make the cover, your career will soon be over. Part of him couldn’t shake the stupid feeling that if he hadn’t made that cover, he’d still be playing football.

The place was small and admittedly a bit ghetto, but it was a veritable luxury condo compared to his childhood home. He treasured his privacy. It was a little lonely at times, but he could also do anything he wanted anytime he wanted. No one to track his schedule, no one to care if he brought home some girl he met at the bar, no one to bitch if he left his dirty socks on the kitchen table. No one to scream at him for reasons unknown. Sure, it wasn’t the mansion he should have had, it wasn’t the abode of an NFL star, but it was
his.

At least he’d found a job in Ann Arbor, home of his alma mater. He’d fallen in love with the town during college. Hailing from a small town like Cheboygan, he distrusted cities, felt uncomfortable in some sprawling metropolis like Chicago or New York. At the same time, however, he was the proverbial farm boy who’d seen the bright lights of the bigger world, and he couldn’t go back to small-town life, which seemed devoid of culture and fun by comparison. Ann Arbor was a college town of 110,000 that retained a cozy, small-town warmth, giving him the best of both worlds.

He tossed his keys and cell phone onto the kitchen table, threw his briefcase and heavy coat on the beat-up old couch, pulled the Walgreens bag from his pocket and headed for the bathroom. The rashes felt like seven searing electrodes grafted to his skin and connected to a ten-thousand-watt current.

He’d deal with the rashes, but first thing first—that zit-thing above his eyebrow had to go. He set the bag down, opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out tweezers. He gave them a habitual flick, hearing them hum like a tuning fork, then leaned into the mirror. The weird zit-thing was still there, of course, and it still hurt. He’d seen Bill pop a zit once: the process took like twenty minutes. Bill was methodical and a bit of a pussy, so that was fine. Perry had a higher tolerance for pain and a lower tolerance for patience. He took one deep breath, fixed the tweezers on the small, gnarled red bump and
yanked.
The chunk tore free—the pain came hot and sweet. Blood trickled down his face. He took another deep breath as he grabbed a wad of toilet paper and pressed it to the new wound. He held up the tweezers with his free hand. Just a small dot of flesh. But in the middle there, was that a hair? It wasn’t black at all, it was
blue,
a deep, dark, iridescent blue.

“Friggin’ weird.” He ran the tweezers under hot water, washing away the odd zit. He grabbed the Band-Aids from the cabinet: only six left. He ripped the paper off one and put it over the small, bloody spot where the zit-thing had just been. That had been the easy part—any pansy could deal with pain. But
itching,
that was a different story.

Perry dropped his pants and plopped down on the toilet. He pulled the Cortaid from the white bag. Squirting a healthy portion into his hand, he plastered the goo on the yellowish welt atop his left thigh.

He immediately regretted it.

The direct contact made the welt rage with intense itching pain, a blowtorch burning white-hot, as if his skin had melted away in glowing, molten drips. He scooted on the seat and nearly cried out. Controlling himself after only a second or two, he took a long, slow breath and forced himself to relax.

Almost as soon as the pain started, it died down, then seemed to subside completely. Smiling at the small victory, Perry gently worked the salve into the welt and the surrounding skin.

He almost laughed with relief. Using far more caution, he worked the Cortaid into the other welts. When he finished, all seven of them fell quiet.

“The Magnificent Seven,” Perry mumbled. “You aren’t so magnificent now, are you?”

With all seven itches battled into submission, he felt giddy, he felt like howling with joy. But more than anything else, he felt tired. The maddening itches created constant stress; with that stress suddenly gone, he felt like a schooner with the wind dying out of its sails.

Perry stripped out of all but his underwear, left his clothes in the bathroom and walked to the small bedroom. His queen-size bed left little space for a single dresser and a nightstand. Less than eighteen inches separated the sides of the mattress from the wall.

He practically fell into the comfortable old bed. He pulled the loose blankets around himself, shivering as the cool cotton raised goose bumps on his skin. The blankets quickly warmed, and at 5:30
P.M
. he was sound asleep, a small smile still tickling his face.

VEINS

Margaret walked, trying to stretch her muscles, but there wasn’t much room in the claustrophobic BSL-4 tent. She wandered over to Amos, who was transfixed by a slide set under a high-powered microscope.

“What have you got on that thorn?”

“Still doing a few tests. I’ve found another structure that you should take a look at. And make it quick, it’s decomposing as we speak.” He stood, letting her peer into the microscope. The highly magnified image looked to be a deflated capillary, a normal vein. But it wasn’t
all
normal. Part of it looked damaged; from that area ran a grayish-black tubule. The tubule ended with a decomposing area showing the ubiquitous rot so common in all the victims. Amos was right, she could
see
the tissue dissolving right before her eyes. She focused her attention away from the rapid-rot spot and back onto the tubule.

“What the hell is that thing?”

“I love your subtle use of scientific terminology, Margaret. That appears to be a siphon of some sort.”

“A siphon? You mean this was tapping into Brewbaker’s bloodstream, like a mosquito?”

“No, not like a mosquito, not at all. A mosquito merely inserts its proboscis into the skin and draws out blood. What you’re looking at is another level entirely. That siphon draws blood from the circulatory system, but it’s
permanently
attached; there’s no visible means for opening or closing the siphon. That means there are probably matching siphons that return blood to the circulatory system—otherwise the growth would fill up with blood and burst.”

“So if it returns the blood to the circulatory system, it’s not feeding directly on the blood?”

“No, not directly, but it’s definitely capitalizing on the host’s bodily functions. The growth obviously draws oxygen and possibly nutrients from the bloodstream. That must be how it grows. It may also feed directly on the host, but I doubt that; that would entail a digestive process and a method for eliminating waste. Granted, the growths we’ve seen have been completely decomposed, so we can’t confirm or deny the existence of a digestive tract, but from what we’ve got here I doubt there is one. Why would something evolve a complicated digestive system when there’s no apparent need—the blood would supply the growth with all sustenance.”

“So it’s not just a mass of cancerous tissue, it’s a full-blown parasite.”

“Well, we don’t know that it’s really
living
in the usual sense,” Amos said. “If it’s a growth, it’s just that, a growth, whereas a parasite is a separate organism. Remember, the lab results didn’t show any tissue other than Brewbaker’s—that and the huge amounts of cellulase. But it does appear to be using the host’s bodily functions to stay alive, so at least for now I’d have to agree with you and define it as a parasite.”

Margaret noticed a touch of astonishment in his voice. He was really beginning to admire the strange parasite. She stood.

Amos bent back to the microscope. “This is a revolutionary development, Margaret, don’t you see that? Think of the lowly tapeworm. It doesn’t have a digestive system. It doesn’t need one, because it lives in the host’s intestine. The host digests food, so the tapeworm doesn’t have to—it merely absorbs the nutrients surrounding it. Where do those nutrients go if the tapeworm doesn’t get them? They go into the bloodstream. Blood carries those nutrients, along with oxygen, to the body’s various tissues and then takes out waste materials and gases.”

“And by tapping into the bloodstream, the triangle parasites get food and oxygen. They don’t need to eat or breathe.”

“That’s how it appears. Quite astonishing, isn’t it?”

“You’re the parasitologist,” Margaret said. “If this keeps up, you’ll be in charge and I’ll be the lackey.”

Amos laughed. Margaret hated him at that moment—over thirty-six hours into their marathon session, with little more than twenty-minute catnaps to pace them, and he still didn’t seem tired.

“Are you kidding me?” Amos said. “I’m a total chickenshit, and you know it. First sign of danger—physical or emotional—I run for the hills. My wife actually has my balls in a jar back at the house. She’s taller than me, she puts the jar up on a shelf where I can’t reach it.”

Margaret laughed. Amos was famously open about who ran his household.

“I’m fine where I’m at,” Amos said. “I rather like being the lackey if being in charge means having to deal with Dew Phillips and Murray Longworth. But if I do wind up calling the shots, just remember I like my coffee black.”

They sat in silence for a moment, tired brains processing the strange information that seemed to provide no answers.

“This can’t stay a secret forever,” Amos said. “Off the top of my head, I can name three experts who should be here right now. Murray’s secrecy policy is asinine.”

“But he’s got a point, you have to admit,” Margaret said. “We can’t have this story out, not yet. We’ll have anyone with a rash, bug bite or even dry skin flooding the hospitals. It’s going to make it very difficult to find someone who’s actually infected, especially as we have no idea what the early stages of this infection look like. If the story got out now, we’d have to look at
millions
of people. Hopefully we can at least come up with some kind of screening process or test for infection before this story breaks.”

“I understand the precarious nature of the situation,” Amos said. “I just think that Murray is taking this too far. It’s one thing to keep a lid on something—it’s quite another to be completely understaffed. What the hell happens if a hundred Martin Brewbakers suddenly pop up, and no one is prepared for it, let alone warned it could happen? You think a bomb is a terror weapon? It’s nothing compared to hundreds of Americans going psycho on each other. What happens if we keep this a secret until it’s too late to do anything about it?”

He walked back to his station, leaving Margaret to stare at the half body. The constant decomposition had partially relaxed Brewbaker’s talon hand—where it had once stood straight up, it now hung at forty-five degrees, halfway to the tabletop. His blackening, liquefying body didn’t have much time left.

Margaret wondered about Amos’s comment; if there was some rogue lab with the technology to genetically engineer a parasite that could alter human behavior, wasn’t it
already
too late?

CAT SCRATCH FEVER

Perry awoke with a scream. His collarbone raged with pain, like he’d dragged a razor blade across the thin skin atop the bone, peeling back flesh like a cheese grater rubbed across some Cheddar. The fingers of his right hand felt cold, wet and sticky. A sunrise beam of light pierced his half-drawn curtains, lighting up the window frost crystallized on the pane. His room filled with the hazy glow of a winter morning. In the dim light, Perry stared at his hands; they looked to be covered with chocolate syrup, thick and tacky-brown. He fumbled with the lamp on his nightstand. The bulb’s glow lit up the room and his hands. It wasn’t chocolate syrup.

It was blood.

Eyes widening in horror, Perry looked at his bed. Thin streaks of blood dotted the white sheets. Still blinking sleep-crust from his eyes, he ran to the bathroom and stared in the mirror.

Trickles of dried blood and finger-smears of the same streaked his left pectoral, clotting in his thin blond chest hair. He’d torn the skin during the night, digging into the flesh with his fingernails, which were caked with blood and bits of dried skin. Perry looked down at his body. Blood smudges, some wet, some tacky and some completely dry, covered his left thigh.

With a sudden start of horror, he saw bomb-run droplets of blood on his underwear. Pulling the waistband out, he looked down. A sigh of relief—no blood on his testicles.

He’d torn into himself during the night, ripping away at the itches with an abandon that didn’t exist during waking hours. How had he not woken up? “Sleeping like the dead” was an understatement. And despite more than thirteen hours of sleep, he still felt tired. Tired and hungry.