Infected (26 page)

As perfect as summer could be, winter was equally oppressive. Sure, it was beautiful in its own right, with snow-covered trees, sprawling fields converted to expanses of white nothingness bordered by woods and dotted with farmhouses snugly nestled into the landscape. But beauty didn’t hold much over substance when that substance was freeze-your-balls-off cold. Up north the winters were spectacular. Down in the southern part of the state, where population expansion never ceased, the forests and fields were only something he glimpsed on the way to work. Here, winter made life miserable. Cold. Freezing. Wet. Icy. And even the snow looked dirty, pushed to the side of the road in mangy, gravel-embedded slush piles. Sometimes the trees were bedecked with an inch of snow on every last branch and twig, but most of the time they were barren, brown dead and lifeless. That’s why he’d always wanted to make sure he was cremated when he died—he couldn’t imagine spending eternity in the frozen soil of a Michigan winter.

And yet his last days played out in that same Michigan winter. Even if the Soldiers could find him, what could they do for him? How far gone was this monotone cancer that shouted in his head like Sam Kinison on a bad acid trip?

He scraped the last grains of rice into his mouth.

“Pretty tasty, eh?” He tossed the plate carelessly onto the coffee table. Hey, he was dying, no point in cleaning up the mess, now was there? High-pitched fuzzy noise babbled in his head.

we don’t taste just absorb

Don’t.
A contraction. How about that? The Starting Five’s vocab was improving.

He leaned back into the couch’s familiar cushions. His stomach rumbling gradually subsided, then ceased. Staring out at the blank TV screen, he was struck by a sudden question—what to do?

During this entire bizarre scenario, he’d never exactly had to worry about entertainment. He’d either been sleeping, passed out, cutting into himself like some freak from a Clive Barker movie or talking to the Starting Five. The one time he’d tried to watch a little TV, good ol’ Columbo had gotten him into more trouble than he cared to remember.

But with TV out of the question, what was he going to do? He had, of course, brought computer books from work in order to study at home, but he’d be fucked if he’d spend whatever hours he had reading about managing Unix networks or integrating open-source code. He did, however, like the idea of reading something, anything that might give him even a few moments’ reprieve from this awful situation.

He was about a third of the way through
The Shining
by Stephen King, but hadn’t read a single page in weeks. Well, now was his opportunity. He wasn’t going anywhere. And perhaps engrossing himself in the book would relieve his mind from the background battle of Not Thinking About the Soldiers (and how loud the screams would be if he
did
think about them).

But first he had to clean the spaghetti sauce off his face and hands. Dinner had been a little messy. The stains on his sweatshirt he could care less about, obviously, but that sticky, tacky feeling on his face would distract him. He slowly rose from the couch and hopped to the bathroom, contemplating another trip down Tylenol Lane while he was at it. The pain in his leg was starting to get worse again.

He let the sink run until the water reached near-scalding temperatures, then washed off his face and hands. Gazing at his wet face in the mirror, he couldn’t help but again think of the George Romero classic
Night of the Living Dead.
He could have
been
one of the walking departed: skin with a sickly gray pallor, deep circles hanging under his bloodshot eyes, dry hair askew.

But it wasn’t all bad. His paunch had vanished. His muscles looked well defined for the first time in years. He could even see the beginnings of his six-pack. He’d lost at least fifteen pounds—all of it fat—in the past few days. He moved his arm and watched his deltoid flutter, muscle fibers visible and rippling.

Great fucking diet plan. I’d like to see Richard Simmons compete with this.

There was more to see than his musculature. He hadn’t looked in on one of the Triangles in quite a while. He wasn’t sure if he wanted to see what they looked like now. Maybe they were bigger, enlarging themselves as they continued their march on Mount Perry.

He had to look.

The one near his neck was the most convenient. Perry pulled back his sweatshirt collar, exposing the Triangle beneath. It lay just above the collarbone, near the trapezius.

That was the first muscle name he’d learned. When he was a child, his father would grab the trapezius with a paralyzing grip that made Mr. Spock’s little nerve pinch pale by comparison. Man-oh-man, how that had hurt. Dad usually accompanied the pinch with a phrase like, “It’s my house, and you’re going to live by my rules” or the ubiquitous, “You’ve got to have
discipline.
”

Perry pushed away thoughts of his father and concentrated on the Triangle. It was bluer, now more like a new tattoo rather than a faded one, and firmer, the edges clearly defined. Just as his fluttering muscles became more obvious seemingly by the hour, the Triangle’s rough texture was beginning to show through the skin. He tested the skin with a poke from his free hand. Definitely firmer. He leaned in over the sink until his face was only six inches from the mirror, allowing himself the best look he’d ever had at one of the little invaders.

He stared at the edges. At the slits. At the blueness. At the pores of his skin that still looked perfectly normal except for the thing underneath. He noticed the number of blue lines that extended out from the Triangle. Used blood. Deoxygenated. Same shade as the little veins on his wrists. That’s why the Triangles appeared blue—they took in oxygen from his own blood through their tails or whatever, the blood worked its way up the tiny body and the deoxygenated blood dissipated on top just under the skin. It all made perfect sense.

The slits seemed much more developed than the last time he’d looked. They had a pucker to them, almost like thin lips, or maybe more like…like…

A snippet of their voice flashed back to him—
no we cannot see
…
not yet.

Not yet.

“Oh my God don’t let that be what I think it is.”

Once again, God wasn’t listening.

Each of the three slits opened, revealing the deep, black, shiny surfaces underneath. If there was any question as to what they were, it disappeared when all three sets of lids blinked in unison.

He was looking at his collarbone, and his collarbone was looking right back at him.

“Motherfucker,” Perry said, panic once again creeping into his voice. When were these things going to stop growing? What was next? Were they going to grow out of him, grow little hands and feet or claws or tails?

His breath came in thin, shallow gasps. His eyes fuzzed out of focus, his mind seeming to go away somewhere for a quick break. Hopping had become so normal for him that he managed to get back to the couch and plunk down without breaking his trance.

His brain ran on autopilot, ran like a movie that played on and on and on while Perry sat back and watched, unable to change the channel, unable to look away from the flashing images.

He remembered a show he’d seen on The Learning Channel. There was this wasp, an evil little fucker. It attacked a specific type of caterpillar. The wasp didn’t kill the caterpillar, only paralyzed it for a while—during which time the wasp laid eggs inside the caterpillar.
Inside,
thank you very fucking much. The wasp, its mission complete, then flew off. The caterpillar woke up and went on about its leaf-munching life, apparently unaware of the vile disease incubating in its guts.

It was the most horrible thing Perry had ever seen. The wasp eggs didn’t just hatch and rip their way out of the caterpillar…

They
ate
their way out.

When the eggs hatched, the new wasp larvae fed on the caterpillar’s innards. And they grew. The caterpillar struggled for life but could do nothing about the larvae eating it from the inside. The caterpillar’s skin bulged, rippled, moved as the larvae inside continued to eat, methodically chewing away at its guts with the same slow, robotlike precision that the caterpillar used to dispose of a leaf. It was appalling. It was a living cancer. And to make it worse, via some horrid instinct the larvae knew what to eat; they consumed the fat and internal organs while leaving the heart and brain alone, preserving the crawling buffet for as long as possible.

So perfect was the larvae’s evolution that they didn’t kill the caterpillar until they finished their growth cycle—as they ripped their way out of the caterpillar’s skin, glistening with the wet slime of the chewed guts, their victim kept squirming, writhing with what little energy it had left, amazingly alive even though its innards had been munched on like the Sunday breakfast bar at Big Boy.

Was that what faced Perry? Were they consuming him from the inside? But if that was the case, then why were they always screaming at him to eat? They weren’t going to take over his mind. That much was obvious—if they could take over his mind, they wouldn’t need eyes, now would they? Maybe this was just the first stage—if they could grow eyes, why not a mouth? Why not
teeth
?

He calmed himself, forcing himself to focus, think logically. He was, after all, an educated man. A
college boy
, as Daddy would say. All he had to do was think, and maybe he could come up with some answers on his own.

He just didn’t have enough information to form any kind of hypothesis, nothing to go on. No clues. Even Columbo would have been stuck with this one. Of course, Columbo would play the blithering buffoon, countering the suave, rich attitudes of his homicidal targets. Columbo would let stupidity show, wear his weakness on his sleeve, allowing his targets’ confidence to grow and grow and grow until they let something slip, something tiny, something that would normally go unnoticed. Unnoticed by normal eyes, but not Peter Falk’s cross-eyed stare. That’s what he had to do; play dumb, and get them talking.

“Hey fuckers.”

hey hello

“What is it you fellas want with me?”

what do you mean want

“Why are you in my body?”

we don’t know

So much for detective work. There was really nothing else to do. Just sit. Sit and wait. He was nothing more than a walking, talking buffet table. Sit and wait. Sit and listen.

You gonna let ’em push you around like that, boy?

Another voice…his daddy’s voice. It wasn’t real, it wasn’t a voice in his head like the Triangles’, it was a memory. No, not a memory, a phantom. His daddy’s voice, as if his daddy were with him in spirit.

“No, Daddy,” Perry said, his voice a dry husk. “I won’t let them push me around.”

He hooked his index finger under his sweatshirt collar and pulled it back violently, ripping it slightly, exposing the Triangle on his collarbone. He couldn’t see it, but he knew that the icy-black eyes were blinking away, taking in the view of the living room and all the knickknacks that Perry had acquired since high school.

The fork still sat on the plate, a few rivulets of spaghetti sauce clinging to the tines. Perry grabbed it with a caveman grip, clutched it like a murderous dagger. He giggled once as he remembered the punch line to an old grade-school joke.

“Fork you, buddy.”

With all the force he could muster, he jammed the fork into his trapezius. The center tine poked through one of the black eyes with a tiny, wet, crunching noise.

The tines kissed off his scapula and out the back side of his trapezius, accompanied by a double-squirt of red and purple that landed wetly on the couch’s worn-thin upholstery.

He wasn’t even sure if he felt it. He didn’t have to scream in pain—the Triangles took care of that.

It wasn’t even a scream, really, just a noise. A loud noise. A fucking hellfire and bear-the-cross loud noise, blaring like a klaxon alarm stuffed down his auditory canal to rest nicely against his eardrum. He rolled off the couch, thrashing his head in sudden and all-encompassing agony.

He rolled onto his back, reached up, grabbed the fork and twisted it, driving it up at an angle deeper into his shoulder.

Perry couldn’t know that on the second thrust the fork tines punched a neat hole through the Triangle’s main nervous column just below its flat head, killing it instantly. Had he known, he probably wouldn’t have cared—all he knew was that he wasn’t a patsy, wasn’t some pushover, he was Scary Perry Dawsey and was once again whipping ass.

“You
fucks
!” Perry screamed louder than ever before, perhaps needing to hear himself over the horrid death-shriek that raged through his head. “How do you like it? How’s it feel?”

stop stop stop stop

stop stop stop stop

“The
fuck
I’ll stop! How’s it feel? How does it
feel
?” Tears found their way out of Perry’s tightly shut eyes. Pain raged through his body, but his conscious mind felt none of it.

fucker you will pay

stop Stop STOP

“Bite it, baby!” Perry fed on the pain like an alcoholic diving into that first off-the-wagon drink. “I’m doing this one and then I’m calling the Soldiers to come get the rest!” He twisted the fork again and started to say something, but lost the words as the fork stuck deeply into a tendon. He made the major mistake of giving in to the pain, rolling in useless protest—his shoulder and the end of the fork hit the front of the couch, driving the prongs in ever deeper.