Scott Sigler - Contagious

“Perry? It’s Margaret.”

He opened his right eye. His left was swollen shut.

“Hey,” he said.

“I’m going to fix you up, okay?”

“Just leave me be.”

“No can do. I’m a doctor. You’re bleeding. That’s the math.”

Perry looked at her with his one good eye, then slowly sat up. He scooted until he rested his back against the wall.

“Fine,” he said. “Just till you stop the bleeding.”

She knelt and opened the first-aid kit. She pressed gauze bandages against the cut on top of his head. “Hold that there, please.”

Perry did.

She put another one on the forehead cut. Blood instantly soaked it.

“Okay, Perry. Tell me what hurts.”

“My ego. I just got my ass kicked by the poster boy for the AARP.”

“Maybe you’re lucky,” Margaret said.

“Well, buy me a fucking Lotto ticket. How do you figure I’m lucky ?”

“Dew’s told me a couple of stories over the past three months. He’s killed a lot of people, Perry. I know you’re big and strong and athletic. You know how to fight —Dew Phillips knows how to kill or be killed.”

“Ha,” Perry said. “He didn’t do either. Does that mean I won?”

Margaret laughed. “See? You’re cracking jokes. You can’t be hurt that bad.”

“Guess again.”

She tossed the bloody gauze aside, then poured some peroxide on the cut.

“Does that hurt?” she asked.

“Compared to getting hit with a table leg? Might as well be a sensual massage.”

“Good, then just think of this part as your happy ending.”

She proceeded to stitch up his cuts. Six stitches on the forehead, five on the top of the head, and three more on his lip.

“How bad is the eye?” Perry said. “Is it ruined?”

She pulled open his upper and lower eyelids and flicked a penlight at the pupil. The eye was already filled with blood, but the pupil contracted with each flash.

“You’re going to have a hell of a shiner, but I think you’ll be okay.”

She made him take off his shirt. Her eyes lingered on the gnarled, fist-size scar on his right collarbone, then inadvertently flicked to the similar one on his left forearm. She’d treated him for weeks and knew of his other horrible scars: on his left thigh, the center of his back and his right gluteus, along with a smaller one on his left shin.

Margaret checked his ribs and found they weren’t broken. He refused to remove his pants, so she had to take his word for it that the thigh was okay. She finished by checking his knee, sliding up the pant leg and using her fingertips to probe the area. It was swollen, but she didn’t feel anything broken, so she dug her fingers in a little deeper to check for ligament damage.

“Does it hurt when I do this?”

“Yes,” Perry said.

“Describe the pain.”

“Is goddamn near excruciating a standard medical term?”

She stopped. “If I was hurting you that bad, why didn’t you say something?”

He shrugged. “Me and pain go way back.”

“Well, you and your old buddy pain are going to be spending some quality time together while you heal up from this. Can you make it back to your room?”

Perry struggled to his feet. Margaret tried to assist, but he was so heavy she felt like a little girl pretending to help rather than making any actual difference. She found a bottle of ibuprofen in the first-aid kit.

“Take four of these and just go to sleep, okay? I’ll come and check on you later.”

He took the bottle and hobbled to the door. He opened it, then turned back.

“Tell Dew I need to see him,” Perry said. “Tell him it’s important, and that… and that I won’t give him any more trouble.”

“Can it wait until tomorrow morning? I want you asleep.”

Perry thought for a second, then nodded. He held up the bottle, gave it a single shake as kind of a salute, then limped toward his room.

She did want him asleep, but she also didn’t want to risk a second round of fighting. Perry acted different, defeated, but Dew probably hadn’t calmed down yet, and any number of insignificant words might set the two men off again.

The only reason Perry Dawsey was still alive was that Dew Phillips wanted him to be.

Margaret needed to make sure Dew didn’t change his mind.

As the Jewell family slept, the changes began.

The new seed strain behaved much like the one that had infected Perry Dawsey. At first, anyway. Demodex folliculorum —tiny mites that live on every human being on the planet—found the seeds. Since the seeds looked and smelled like the pieces of dead skin that made up Demodex ’s only food, the mites ate them. Protein-digesting enzymes in the microscopic arachnids’ stomachs hammered away at the seed coats, breaking them down, allowing oxygen to penetrate and germination to occur.

And also like Perry’s infection, this round began in many microscopic piles of bug shit.

Each activated seed pushed a filament into the skin, penetrating all the way down to the subcutaneous layers. At the bottom of the filament, receptor cells measured specific chemical levels and density, identifying the perfect spot for second-stage growth.

Unlike Perry’s strain and those that came before it, these filaments released one of two chemicals into the bloodstream:

Chemical A if it was a hatchling seed, similar to the ones that infected Perry Dawsey and Martin Brewbaker.

Chemical B if it was the new strain.

The chemicals filtered through the host’s circulatory system. After a short time, the filament measured the levels of both A and B. This produced a simple majority decision: if there was more Chemical A, the hatchling seeds continued their growth and the new strain seeds shut down. If there was more Chemical B, the inverse occurred.

As it turned out, Bobby Jewell was the only one with more standard hatchling seeds. Five of his seven infections, in fact, were the same thing that had infected Perry.

Betty, Donald and Chelsea Jewell would have the honor of incubating the new strain.

From this point the two strains followed almost identical growth patterns. Second-stage roots reached out to draw material from the subcutaneous environment: proteins, oxygen, amino acids and, especially, sugars. Both strains harnessed the host’s natural biological processes to create new microorganisms. There were the reader-balls —cilia-covered, saw-toothed, free-moving things designed to tear open cells and examine the DNA inside, analyzing the host’s biological blueprint like a computer reading lines of software code. There were the builders —they created the flexible cellulose framework that in the original strain would become triangles. There were the herders —microorganisms that swam out into the body to find stem cells, cut them free and drag them back to that framework where the reader-balls would slice into them and modify the DNA.

The new strain added to this list. It modified stem cells to produce tiny, free-floating strands of a strong, flexible micro–muscle fiber. These fibers would self-assemble, binding together in specific, collective patterns. While Bobby Jewell’s body dealt with the activities of reader-balls, builders and herders, his daughter, brother and niece would have to deal with the newest microorganism.

Chelsea, Donald and Betty would feel the effects of the crawlers .

Perry Dawsey’s seeds had come from batch thirteen. His triangles hatched in seven days. Due to constant design improvements, the seeds of batch seventeen needed only five.