Scott Sigler - Infected

“Quit being such a macho stud-boy and go buy some Cortaid.” Bill hung over the gray cubicle wall like a puppy trying to decipher a new and unusual sound. “You don’t have to go to Mr. Evil Witchdoctor, for God’s sake, just buy something to help that itch. A disinfectant wouldn’t hurt either, by the looks of things. I’ll never understand why you like to sit in pain rather than partake in the wonders of a modern society.”

“Your doctors couldn’t do anything for my right knee, now could they?”

“I was at the game, Perry, remember? I saw your knee when I visited you at the hospital. Jesus H. Christ couldn’t have brought that knee back from the dead.”

“Maybe I’m just a Cro-Magnon, that’s all.” Perry fought the urge to scratch again. The rash on his right ass cheek demanded attention. “We still hitting the bar tonight?”

“I don’t think so, contagion-boy. I prefer the company of at least semi-healthy people. You know, those with rubella or smallpox? Perhaps a bit of the Black Death? I’d rather associate with them than deal with scabies.”

“It’s just a rash, asshole.” Perry felt anger slowly swell up in his chest. He immediately fought it down. Bill Miller seemingly lived to irritate people, and once he got rolling he didn’t quit. It would be “scabies this” and “scabies that” for the rest of the week-and it was only Tuesday. But they were just words, and good-natured words at that. Perry calmed himself. He’d already let his temper slip once this week-he’d be damned if he’d insult Bill like that again.

Perry moved his mouse and clicked, magnifying a section of the network schematic. “Leave me alone, will ya? Sandy wants this thing fixed right away. The Pullman people are going apeshit.”

Bill slid back into his cube. Perry stared at the screen, trying to solve a problem taking place more than a thousand miles away in the state of Washington. Analyzing computer glitches over the phone wasn’t an easy job, especially with network difficulties where the problem could be a wire in the ceiling, a bad port, or a single defective component on any of 112 workstations. Many times in customer support, he faced problems that would have chewed up Agatha Christie, Columbo and Sherlock Holmes in one big swallow. This was one such problem.

The answer danced at the edges of his mind, but he couldn’t focus. He leaned back into his chair, which set the itch on his spine afire with maddening intensity. It was like a thousand mosquito bites all rolled into one.

Perry’s train of thought dissolved completely as he ground his back into the office chair, letting the rough cloth dig through his sweatshirt. He grimaced as the welts on his leg flared up with itching so sudden and so bad that he might as well have been stung by a wasp. He attacked the leg welts, clawing his nails through blue-jean denim. It was like trying to fight a Hydra-each time he stopped one biting head, two more flared up to take its place.

From the next cube, he heard Bill’s poor impression of a Shakespearean actor.

“To scabies, or not to scabies,” Bill said, his voice only slightly muffled by the divider. “That is the infection.”

Perry gritted his teeth and bit back an angry reply. The welts were driving him nuts, making him easily irritated by little things. Still, although Bill was his friend, sometimes the guy didn’t know when to quit.

Margaret stared into the microscope’s eyepiece, trying to focus on the magnified image. Her eyes were red from lack of sleep. She couldn’t rub them, thanks to the plastic faceplate and the cumbersome biosuit. She blinked a few times to clear her vision. How long had she been working on Brewbaker? Twenty-four hours and counting, and no end in sight. She bent and stared into the microscope.

“Hmm, what have we here?” The sample’s meaning seemed rather obvious, but her fatigue and the horrid condition of the victim’s skin made her unsure. “Amos, come over here and look at this.”

He put down his chemical samples and moved toward the microscope. Like Margaret, he hadn’t slept in more than a day. Even with the lack of sleep and the awkward Racal suit, however, he moved with a smooth grace that made him look as if he floated rather than walked. He bent into the eyepiece without touching anything.

After a moment he asked, “What am I looking for?”

“I was hoping you’d see it right away.”

“I see a lot of things, Margaret,” Amos said. “Perhaps you could be a little more specific. Where is this skin sample from?”

“The area just outside the growth. See anything that would indicate moderate skin trauma?” Amos half rose to answer, but Margaret cut him off. “And don’t give me one of your smart-ass answers, please. I know damn well the whole body is ripped to shreds.”

Amos bent back to the eyepiece. He stared for a few seconds, silence filling the sterile morgue. “Yes, I see it. I see some scabbing and some damage down past the subcutaneous layer. It looks like a long groove-like a claw wound, perhaps.”

Margaret nodded. “I think I’ll take another look at those skin samples we got from under the victim’s fingernails.”

Amos stood straight and looked at her. “You don’t think he did this to himself, do you? This tear is all the way to the muscle, and it looks like repetitive damage. Do you know how much that would hurt?”

“I can take a guess.” Margaret stretched her arms high, bent to the left, then to the right. She was sick of the lab and sick of the limited sleep. She wanted a real bed, not a cot, and a real bottle of wine to go with it. As long as she was dreaming, she might as well throw in Agent Clarence Otto in a pair of silk boxers.

She sighed. Agent Otto would have to wait for another day. Right now she had other things to worry about, like what could make a man use his fingernails like claws to tear into his own body?

The computer terminal let out a long beep: information had arrived. Amos shuffled over and sat down.

“This is odd,” he said. “Most odd indeed.”

“Give me the Cliffs Notes version.”

“Results on the excised growth, for starters. They said their sample had almost completely liquefied by the time they got it. They did what they could, though. The tissue was cancerous.”

“What do they mean, it was cancerous? We saw it. It wasn’t a mass of uncontrolled cells-it had structure.”

“I agree, but look at these results-cancerous tissue. That, plus massive amounts of cellulase and trace amounts of cellulose.”

Margaret thought on that for a moment. Cellulose was the primary material in plant cells, the most abundant form of biomass on the planet. But the key word there was plants -animals didn’t make cellulose.

“The cellulose didn’t last, either,” Amos said. “Within hours of reception of material, cellulose decomposed into cellulase. They did everything they could to stop it, including attempts to freeze the material, but it didn’t freeze.”

“Just like the enzyme that’s decomposing the flesh. It’s like a…self-destruct mechanism.”

“Suicidal cancer? That’s a bit of a reach, Margaret.”

It was a reach. A big one. And yet maybe she needed to reach; reach for something that was beyond accepted science.

Coming home to apartment B-203 always generated mixed feelings. The place wasn’t much, one meaningless apartment in a massive cluster of identical buildings. Windywood was the kind of complex where even flawless directions would have people guessing; there were enough buildings to necessitate a little network of roads with smarmy names like Evergreen Drive, Shady Lane and Poplar Street. After one or two wrong turns, the plain-looking, three-story, twelve-unit complexes were all you could see.