Scott Sigler - Infected

At least he’d found a job in Ann Arbor, home of his alma mater. He’d fallen in love with the town during college. Hailing from a small town like Cheboygan, he distrusted cities, felt uncomfortable in some sprawling metropolis like Chicago or New York. At the same time, however, he was the proverbial farm boy who’d seen the bright lights of the bigger world, and he couldn’t go back to small-town life, which seemed devoid of culture and fun by comparison. Ann Arbor was a college town of 110,000 that retained a cozy, small-town warmth, giving him the best of both worlds.

He tossed his keys and cell phone onto the kitchen table, threw his briefcase and heavy coat on the beat-up old couch, pulled the Walgreens bag from his pocket and headed for the bathroom. The rashes felt like seven searing electrodes grafted to his skin and connected to a ten-thousand-watt current.

He’d deal with the rashes, but first thing first-that zit-thing above his eyebrow had to go. He set the bag down, opened the medicine cabinet and pulled out tweezers. He gave them a habitual flick, hearing them hum like a tuning fork, then leaned into the mirror. The weird zit-thing was still there, of course, and it still hurt. He’d seen Bill pop a zit once: the process took like twenty minutes. Bill was methodical and a bit of a pussy, so that was fine. Perry had a higher tolerance for pain and a lower tolerance for patience. He took one deep breath, fixed the tweezers on the small, gnarled red bump and yanked. The chunk tore free-the pain came hot and sweet. Blood trickled down his face. He took another deep breath as he grabbed a wad of toilet paper and pressed it to the new wound. He held up the tweezers with his free hand. Just a small dot of flesh. But in the middle there, was that a hair? It wasn’t black at all, it was blue, a deep, dark, iridescent blue.

“Friggin’ weird.” He ran the tweezers under hot water, washing away the odd zit. He grabbed the Band-Aids from the cabinet: only six left. He ripped the paper off one and put it over the small, bloody spot where the zit-thing had just been. That had been the easy part-any pansy could deal with pain. But itching, that was a different story.

Perry dropped his pants and plopped down on the toilet. He pulled the Cortaid from the white bag. Squirting a healthy portion into his hand, he plastered the goo on the yellowish welt atop his left thigh.

He immediately regretted it.

The direct contact made the welt rage with intense itching pain, a blowtorch burning white-hot, as if his skin had melted away in glowing, molten drips. He scooted on the seat and nearly cried out. Controlling himself after only a second or two, he took a long, slow breath and forced himself to relax.

Almost as soon as the pain started, it died down, then seemed to subside completely. Smiling at the small victory, Perry gently worked the salve into the welt and the surrounding skin.

He almost laughed with relief. Using far more caution, he worked the Cortaid into the other welts. When he finished, all seven of them fell quiet.

“The Magnificent Seven,” Perry mumbled. “You aren’t so magnificent now, are you?”

With all seven itches battled into submission, he felt giddy, he felt like howling with joy. But more than anything else, he felt tired. The maddening itches created constant stress; with that stress suddenly gone, he felt like a schooner with the wind dying out of its sails.

Perry stripped out of all but his underwear, left his clothes in the bathroom and walked to the small bedroom. His queen-size bed left little space for a single dresser and a nightstand. Less than eighteen inches separated the sides of the mattress from the wall.

He practically fell into the comfortable old bed. He pulled the loose blankets around himself, shivering as the cool cotton raised goose bumps on his skin. The blankets quickly warmed, and at 5:30 P.M . he was sound asleep, a small smile still tickling his face.

Margaret walked, trying to stretch her muscles, but there wasn’t much room in the claustrophobic BSL-4 tent. She wandered over to Amos, who was transfixed by a slide set under a high-powered microscope.

“What have you got on that thorn?”

“Still doing a few tests. I’ve found another structure that you should take a look at. And make it quick, it’s decomposing as we speak.” He stood, letting her peer into the microscope. The highly magnified image looked to be a deflated capillary, a normal vein. But it wasn’t all normal. Part of it looked damaged; from that area ran a grayish-black tubule. The tubule ended with a decomposing area showing the ubiquitous rot so common in all the victims. Amos was right, she could see the tissue dissolving right before her eyes. She focused her attention away from the rapid-rot spot and back onto the tubule.

“What the hell is that thing?”

“I love your subtle use of scientific terminology, Margaret. That appears to be a siphon of some sort.”

“A siphon? You mean this was tapping into Brewbaker’s bloodstream, like a mosquito?”

“No, not like a mosquito, not at all. A mosquito merely inserts its proboscis into the skin and draws out blood. What you’re looking at is another level entirely. That siphon draws blood from the circulatory system, but it’s permanently attached; there’s no visible means for opening or closing the siphon. That means there are probably matching siphons that return blood to the circulatory system-otherwise the growth would fill up with blood and burst.”

“So if it returns the blood to the circulatory system, it’s not feeding directly on the blood?”

“No, not directly, but it’s definitely capitalizing on the host’s bodily functions. The growth obviously draws oxygen and possibly nutrients from the bloodstream. That must be how it grows. It may also feed directly on the host, but I doubt that; that would entail a digestive process and a method for eliminating waste. Granted, the growths we’ve seen have been completely decomposed, so we can’t confirm or deny the existence of a digestive tract, but from what we’ve got here I doubt there is one. Why would something evolve a complicated digestive system when there’s no apparent need-the blood would supply the growth with all sustenance.”

“So it’s not just a mass of cancerous tissue, it’s a full-blown parasite.”

“Well, we don’t know that it’s really living in the usual sense,” Amos said. “If it’s a growth, it’s just that, a growth, whereas a parasite is a separate organism. Remember, the lab results didn’t show any tissue other than Brewbaker’s-that and the huge amounts of cellulase. But it does appear to be using the host’s bodily functions to stay alive, so at least for now I’d have to agree with you and define it as a parasite.”

Margaret noticed a touch of astonishment in his voice. He was really beginning to admire the strange parasite. She stood.

Amos bent back to the microscope. “This is a revolutionary development, Margaret, don’t you see that? Think of the lowly tapeworm. It doesn’t have a digestive system. It doesn’t need one, because it lives in the host’s intestine. The host digests food, so the tapeworm doesn’t have to-it merely absorbs the nutrients surrounding it. Where do those nutrients go if the tapeworm doesn’t get them? They go into the bloodstream. Blood carries those nutrients, along with oxygen, to the body’s various tissues and then takes out waste materials and gases.”

“And by tapping into the bloodstream, the triangle parasites get food and oxygen. They don’t need to eat or breathe.”

“That’s how it appears. Quite astonishing, isn’t it?”

“You’re the parasitologist,” Margaret said. “If this keeps up, you’ll be in charge and I’ll be the lackey.”