Infected (16 page)

Although they had yet to achieve conscious thought, at a primitive level the organisms inside Perry knew they had been attacked. They instinctively triggered an immediate growth process. The tail began a phase change of its own. Specialized cells grew, ensuring the organisms would remain anchored in their environment long enough to fully develop.

The six remaining organisms grew, rapidly and unimpeded, as the host lay passed out on his bathroom floor.

The linoleum felt
nice and cool on Perry’s face. He didn’t really want to try to sit up. As long as he lay still, the pain was only mildly intolerable.

When was the last time he’d been knocked out? Eight years ago? No, it was nine, when his dad had hit him in the back of the head with a full bottle of Wild Turkey whiskey. He’d wound up with nine stitches in his scalp.

Had it hurt this bad after Dad hit him with the bottle? That was so long ago, and it seemed like nothing compared to the dull waves of pain that now washed through his head. He tried to sit up, which only made it worse. It was like a tequila hangover times ten.

He felt sick to his stomach. Every little move toward an upright position shot more thick blasts of pain through his skull. He felt a puke coming on, working its way around his lukewarm, queasy stomach.

He reached up and gingerly touched his abused forehead. At least he wasn’t bleeding. He felt a pronounced bump, a half golf ball embedded in his skull.

He realized his pants were around his ankles, which added to the difficulty of sitting up. This was going to be a wonderful story to tell at parties—just as soon as he remembered what that story was. He slowly rolled to his back and pulled up his jeans. The room looked fuzzy and out of focus.

Perry grabbed the toilet seat. It wobbled weirdly as he used it to pull himself up. The seat was cracked in two at the oval’s front edge. Must have done that with his head.

His stomach churned once, twice, then rebelled. Perry leaned forward and vomited into the toilet, spilling a large quantity of bile into the water, a guttural grunt echoing in the ceramic bowl. His clenched stomach relaxed its grip, allowing him to breathe, but the air froze in his throat as shearing pain cut through his head.

His eyes shut tight. He groaned weakly against the rhythmic pounding of his skull. The pain immobilized him as assuredly as a straitjacket. He couldn’t even get to his feet to find a dozen or so Excedrin.

Somewhere in his head he remembered hearing that people puke when they get a concussion. He wondered how boxers or pro quarterbacks put up with it. This feeling wasn’t worth any amount of money.

Another wave of nausea slammed into his stomach, pushing more bile into the cloudy bowl. The acrid odor of vomit filled the bathroom. The smell made him even more nauseous, which made his head hurt more, which made him feel like puking yet again. It was one of those vicious circles that make even nonreligious people ask God what they had done to deserve such trauma.

“Must have been a child molester in a previous life,” he muttered to himself. “That or Genghis Khan.”

A third wave of nausea hit him. There was nothing left to vomit, but his stomach didn’t care. It clenched with explosion-violent fury that doubled him over, pushing his head almost into the toilet bowl.

His face scrunched as tight as his clamped diaphragm. His stomach refused to relax for a full five seconds, preventing him from drawing a breath. When it finally relaxed and air filled his lungs, he opened his watering eyes just in time for the pain to slam into his head like a seventy-mile-per-hour semi truck squashing a baby raccoon. He saw a few black spots, then his face slid back onto the cool linoleum.

“DELUSIONAL PARASITOSIS”

Morgellons disease.

Margaret stared in disbelief at the CDC report. The disease that wasn’t a disease at all, but believed by the majority of the health-care community to be “delusional parasitosis.”

“Delusional,” Margaret said. “Get a load of that.”

“Seems the vast majority of the cases are,” Amos said. “Symptoms range from feelings of biting or stinging to things crawling under the skin. Some cases have the strange fibers, and most involve some form of mental condition: depression, acute onset of ADHD, bipolar disorder and…take a guess at the last three.”

“Paranoia, psychosis and psychopathy?”

“You’re just racking up the cee-gars these days, Margo.”

Margaret, Amos and Clarence Otto waited in the hospital director’s office, a plaque-lined room with warm wood paneling and four well-groomed potted ficus trees. The director had been asked to leave by the persuasive Agent Otto, who apologized for the intrusion while at the same time leaving no possible way for the director to say no. Margaret thought Otto was a born salesman—a guy who could make you do whatever he wanted while making you think it was your idea the whole time. Margaret and Amos sat on a leather couch, both looking at pages of a report spread out on a coffee table. Otto had taken the director’s chair, behind the ornate wooden desk. He spun the chair in slow circles and seemed to relish the implied authority of the spot—smiling like a little kid playing grown-up boss.

Murray was on his way. They would give him their report face-to-face.

“I know I’m the dummy of the bunch,” Otto said. “So pardon me for asking—but you have a CDC report. What you’re saying is the stuff you guys have been studying for the past few days, that turns out to be a known factor?”

Amos shook his head. “No, not even close. This Morgellons thing, people don’t know if it’s real or a kind of group delusion. It took years of pressure from victims’ groups to force the CDC to at least pretend to take it seriously. The CDC created a task force, but so far they don’t even have a clear case definition of what Morgellons is. Most of the cases actually do turn out to be delusional parasitosis. People
think
they’re infected with something, organisms that can only be observed by the patient. In fact, the term Morgellons has been around for just a few years, and since it started to get publicity, more and more people report the symptoms.”

“Which means it’s spreading,” Margaret said.

“Not necessarily. It could mean that, or it could mean that once unstable people hear about the disease, their minds decide that’s what they have. They invent the symptoms in their own brain—hence the ‘delusional’ part.”

Otto spun in the director’s chair, three full circles as he spoke. “So the more people that claim to have this disease, the more publicity it gets, then more people hear about it, and then more people think they have it.”

“Full circle of nuttiness,” Amos said.

“Goddamn Murray,” Margaret said. “He’s right about keeping this quiet. This is exactly what he said would happen if word got out. And that’s just for this itchy thing, the bugs-under-the-skin thing. Just imagine what the response is going to be like if people see pictures of the triangles.”

“Or get wind of grannies slicing up their kids, then playing all Scar-face with the cops,” Otto said. “Psycho grandmamas would definitely upset Mister and Missus Average American.”

Amos nodded. “Murray does have a point, I suppose. There were a dozen Morgellons cases five years ago, now there are over fifteen hundred, reported in all fifty states and in Europe.”

“So why haven’t we heard more about the triangles?” Margaret asked.

“We
know
this isn’t delusional. We’ve seen the little buggers, and we’ve seen the chemical imbalances in Brewbaker’s brain. This is
real,
Amos.”

“Because
most
of the cases are delusional, but not
all.
It’s the fibers, Margaret. There are documented cases with blue, red, black and white fibers that are made up of cellulose. There have been three instances where doctors had the fibers analyzed over the past four years, and guess what—they had the
exact
chemical composition as Brewbaker’s.
Exact,
as in down to the molecules.”

“Your fizzles.”

Amos smiled. “Yes, the fizzles. We have the triangle cases we’ve seen in the past few weeks. Let’s assume those are cases where the organism made it to the larval stage. However, this Morgellons research indicated there have been multiple cases, over several years, where we see the fibers, where we see fizzles. It’s possible there were full-blown larval infections
before
the last few weeks, sure, but if they existed, no one has heard about them.”

Agent Otto whipped himself in circles. He seemed to be trying to see how many spins he could get off of one push. “So the fibers have been around for a while, but only now are reaching this larval stage? Does that mean they’re evolving?”

Margaret started to speak, a kind of automatic reaction to correct a layman’s guess at science, but stopped. Otto oversimplified it, but his concept was right on the money.

“Amos,” Margaret said, “has this task force been mapping the occurrences of the actual fibers?”

Amos shrugged. “I would imagine so, but I’m not sure. We’d have to talk to them.”

Margaret flipped through the pages. “Doctor Frank Cheng. He’s the project lead. I need to talk to this man. I don’t know if Murray will let me call him.”

“Margaret, may I say something?” Otto asked.

“Sure.”

He spun once in his chair, then gripped the desk with both hands, smiling the whole time. “You seem to let people push you around. You ever notice that?”

She felt her face turning red. Just because she had a problem, and everyone knew she had a problem, didn’t mean Otto had to actually
talk
about it.

“That’s none of your business,” she said.

“Because it seems to me you’re a lot stronger than you think. We’re dealing with some pretty crazy stuff here, am I right?”

She nodded.

“So if you’ve got something you feel we need to do, maybe you should stop being such a pussy.”

“Excuse me?”

Amos slapped the coffee table. “Preach on, Brother Otto!”

“I said, Margaret, stop being such a pussy.”

“I
heard
what you said.”

“So stop letting Murray tell you what to do.”

Margaret’s jaw dropped. “Are you completely deranged? He’s the deputy director of the CIA, man! How can I
not
let him tell me what to do?”

“So he’s the deputy director. Do you know what
you
are?”

“Tell her!” Amos screamed. He stood and raised his hands to the sky.

“Tell the good sister what she is!”

“Yes, Agent Otto, please tell me what I am.”

Otto spun twice, then spoke. “
You
are the lead epidemiologist studying a new, unknown disease with horrific implications.”

“Horrific!” Amos echoed.

“You are short-staffed, and you can’t get the experts you should have.”

“It’s a
sin
!” Amos said.

“Amos,” Margaret said, “just knock it the fuck off.”

Amos smiled, then picked up a magazine off the coffee table and sat down, pretending to read.

“Margaret, he put you in charge of this. What will happen if you insist on talking to this Cheng guy? Do you think Murray is going to bring in someone else to replace you?”

She started to speak, then stopped. No. Murray wouldn’t do that. Not because she was the end-all be-all, but because he wanted to keep this tight as a drum. Murray
needed her.

“So,” Otto said as he gave one strong push. He started spinning, speaking one syllable on each revolution, almost as if he’d read her mind.

“Use…what…you…have.”

Her anger faded.

Agent Clarence Otto was right.

THE POISON PILL

The seedlings continuously monitored development, fed by data from the roaming readers. At a certain point, the seedlings’ checklists determined that the readers’ jobs were completed. A chemical signal rolled through the host. The readers went through a phase change. With a simple adjustment, the sawlike jaws dropped off and the balls sealed up tight.

Inside the balls, death started to brew.

They inflated, filling themselves with a new chemical compound. Herders moved the chemical balls throughout the framework, wedging them here, wedging them there.

Where the jaws had been, a crusty cap appeared. The deadly compound ate away at the inside of the cap, but the seedlings flooded the structure with another chemical that added thickness to the cap from the outside. It was a delicate balance, but as long as the seedlings remained “alive,” kept making the chemical, the poison balls would remain sealed.

If the seedlings ceased to function, however, the caps would disintegrate and the vile catalyst inside would spread through the framework, dissolving it, the modified stem cells and all the cells they had created. Cells would blacken, die, then dissolve, the resulting waste material moving on to poison other cells. The ensuing chain reaction would dissolve every soft tissue it reached—framework, muscle, skin, organs…everything.

To stop this from happening, the seedlings had to survive.

But this host had no way of knowing that.