Scott Sigler - Contagious

Betty, you have to save your soul.

Her soul? Couldn’t she just save her face? You don’t need a soul for senior pictures.

Oh, gawd, did it hurt. So much pain.

Kill them, Betty. Kill the people who are hurting you. Then all your pain will go away.

That voice. So beautiful. Was it the voice of God? If not, how else could she hear it? But really, it didn’t matter who was speaking, because the voice promised her that the pain would stop.

For that, Betty would do anything.

Her right cheek rested on a hard pillow. They had put her on her right side, left arm still behind her in the cuff. The man and the woman hovered over her, fucking with her face, her once-beautiful face. She felt them cutting.

Which one was hurting her this bad? Dr. Braun? That Mexican bitch? It didn’t matter, they were in it together. They would pay together.

She slowly opened just her right eye. She saw nothing but blue. They had covered her face with a napkin or something. It felt as though the napkin also covered her left eye. Could she open it? She decided not to—she had an advantage only as long as they thought she was out. Whatever the napkin was, it didn’t quite reach to the table. If she looked down the table with only her right eye, she could see just under the napkin all the way down her right arm, all the way down to the leather cuff that held her fast.

She moved her left foot very slowly—they had uncuffed her feet to turn her on her side.

With all her weight on her right shoulder, she couldn’t pull her right hand without making her whole body lurch. But she could pull the left hand if she did it very, very slowly.

Just a little bit at a time, real slow, a steady, gradual increase of pressure.

“This doesn’t make sense,” the man said. The rubber suit muffled his voice, but she could make out his words. He sounded very close, like he was leaning down right over the top of her covered face.

“She doesn’t have triangles,” the man said. “She doesn’t have the colored fibers of Morgellons. So what’s causing this excessive cell death?”

Betty kept pulling. It hurt. A new flavor added to the dessert bar. She felt a tearing sensation. Without a sound, she kept pulling, kept applying constant pressure. Skin slowly sloughed off her hand, allowing her to pull the hand through the cuff, like sliding off a bloody black glove. She felt chunks of ruined skin bunching up on the cuff’s far side. She knew she should have been horrified, but it was too late for that.

God helps those who help themselves.

She needed to act.

Without her skin, things would be slippery. She’d have to get it exactly right.

“Margaret, look at this!” the man said. “I… oh my God, I see something. There’s something moving in here, something really tiny. Put the magnifiers on, look.”

He took the Lord’s name in vain. Sinner. Betty heard the zip-zip of a rubber suit as the woman moved to stand next to the man.

“What the hell is that, Amos?” The woman’s voice. Also right in front of her, also hovering right over her face. “It looks like… it looks like a nerve cell.”

“This is amazing,” the man said. “You can see it moving. It’s hard to tell with all the damage, but I think it’s following the V3 nerve toward the brain.”

Betty felt her left hand slide all the way inside the cuff. She didn’t pull it out, not yet, but now she could anytime she chose.

“Cut it out of there,” the woman said. “Maybe these things are what’s causing the rot. If we can get them out, maybe we can stabilize her.”

“Sample tray, please,” the man said. “Crawling organelle isolated and removed. Examining. Object tears into smaller pieces…. Margaret, look ! These pieces look sort of like… muscle fibers. They’re… they’re moving on their own.”

“Get another one out of her face,” the woman said. “Let’s get some side-by-side video of these.”

Betty waited. She waited until she felt the scalpel slide in again, waited until she was sure she felt it hit her cheekbone.

She waited for that, so she knew exactly where it was.

Keeping her head and body as still as she could, Betty Jewell slid her hand out of the cuff.

Margaret watched Amos’sdeft, delicate technique as he cut away the rotting flesh, searching for another crawling nerve.

The high-powered magnifying goggles mounted in front of her visor showed Betty’s open wound with amazing detail, a super-closeup landscape of blood vessels, muscle, veins, bone and black rot. And amid all that, something moving. So tiny. Dendrite-like arms seemed to stretch out like an amoeba’s pseudopods. The arms contracted, pulling the body forward, the tail dragging behind.

Just like the camera mounted in Margaret’s helmet, the magnifying goggles would record their own feed. Judging by the rapid rate of rot, watching that video might be the only way she could study these things because they wouldn’t be around for long.

And neither would Betty, unless they could do something drastic.

“This isn’t like Dawsey at all,” Margaret said. “Unless this is some larval stage, something that was already over before we examined him.”

“You’ve got me,” Amos said. “Wait, here’s another one. Look at that, crawling along the afferent nerve. Let me get it out of there.”

Margaret watched closely. Amos’s scalpel danced around a second patch of black rot, cutting it out in a neat circle.

Then a flash of red. A blur, something that looked huge through the high-magnification glasses. That sudden movement, like it was flying at her face, made Margaret rear back.

She heard a snap and a gurgling sound.

Margaret whipped her right hand up and under the magnifying goggles, knocking them off her head.

Betty Jewell sat up.

Not all the way up—her right hand remained locked in the cuff, but her bloody, skinless left hand waved free, holding a scalpel.

Amos’s gloved hands clutched frantically at his suit-covered throat, grabbing, trying to claw through the black PVC. Blood sprayed against the inside of his visor. Drips of it leaked down the black suit’s outer surface, leaked from the small hole in his suit.

He took a half step back. Betty lunged forward again with the scalpel, her restrained right arm making the movement awkward and off balance. The scalpel’s tip sliced through his suit, just above his left pectoral.

Betty gathered her strength for another strike.

Margaret grabbed Amos’s shoulders and yanked him away from the trolley. She pulled far too hard for the confined space—they smashed into the trailer wall and fell to the floor. Amos landed on top. He kicked and kept grabbing at his throat, gloved fingers trying to reach inside the hole and tear it open, but the blood-slick PVC fabric wouldn’t give him purchase.

“Amos! Get off me!” Margaret pushed and pulled at the small man, trying to free her legs.

She looked up to see Betty slide her knees underneath her body. The girl rose up, kneeling on the autopsy trolley, right arm still trapped by the cuff. She leaned toward the cuff, then crossed her skinless left hand over the inside of her right elbow.

“Oh, God…,” Margaret hissed.

Betty yanked backward, twisting to the right, throwing all her weight against the cuff.

Her right hand slid free. Chunks of sloughed skin fell to the floor with a wet slap. Momentum carried her over the trolley’s left side. She hit the white floor, droplets of blood splattering across the autopsy chamber.

Amos’s movements slowed.

Margaret managed to kick her legs free. She pushed Amos off, then stood, her back against the trailer wall.