Julia Elliott - The Wilds

“What?” Beth smiled. “Did you test positive?”

“Actually,” he said, “I don’t know. I’ve never been tested. Have you?”

“No. Maybe I should be.”

She examined his clothing: a plaid shirt, rumpled, but not demonstrating a lack of concern with personal grooming. His gray-streaked hair was tousled but clean. Beth blushed and changed the subject to another organism.

“I heard you did a postdoc with Polysphincta gutfreundi .”

Gesticulating expressively, opening his mouth to reveal half-masticated meat, Dr. Bloom held forth on the parasitic wasp larva that, after hatching in the body of the orb spider, released chemicals that made its host weave a custom cocoon for it. The spider essentially became a zombie that did the worm’s bidding.

Lit from within by his third beer and his zeal for parasitic organisms, Dr. Bloom began to look strangely attractive. Beth remembered an article she’d read about the flu virus that argued that infected humans became more social than usual, optimizing the virus’s chance of spreading. She thought of her boyfriend, a beautiful, frivolous creature, knowing that she’d allow their relationship to grow like an extravagant mushroom that would, one hot summer day, suddenly lapse into slime.

Whenever Jenny found herself in front of her computer screen, she could not stop searching for more information on T. hermeticus , which flared occasionally in the outer reaches of cyberspace like gamma-ray bursts. Her talent for obscure searches had led to the discovery that at least two dozen teens had been infected nationally, six of whom were now in comatose states at Palmetto Baptist. She’d ferreted this last bit out on a local church prayer board:

Please pray for Sheila Freeman’s son who is in a coma and the other five teens who struggle in darkness with him. In Jesus name .

Although the poster did not mention T. hermeticus or even verify the hospital, Jenny felt sure that the prayer giver was referring to the new freak parasite. The local infection had also made an appearance on her son’s Facebook stream. That morning, he’d left his iPhone on the kitchen table, and though she felt guilty typing in his silly password and examining his page, she rationalized that her snooping was for his own good. A girl named Kaitlin Moore had posted the following status update two days ago at 1:36 AM:

Please send good vibes to my cousin Ashley who is in a coma at the hospital her mom found her passed out in front of the TV. So weird .

In the ninety-two comments that followed, condolences and positive energy flows abounded, but halfway through, rumors and speculation took over. Jenny learned of three similar cases (friends of friends of posters), in which the hapless hosts had fallen into unconsciousness after especially intense gaming bouts, Twitter marathons, or Internet-porn odysseys. When a boy named Brandon Booth opined that the sufferers were victims of a virus originating from alien life-forms, several teens pounced on him, telling him to “get a grasp, dork” because this was “not a sci-fi flick but the real fucking world.”

Brandon was not the only one who suspected alien shenanigans. Out in cyber la-la land, wild theories flourished. People with usernames like Phoenix66, upon hearing about the parasite, conjectured that the original space colonists had returned to Earth to help humans evolve to the next level. Later that day, Jenny stumbled upon an antigovernment site attesting that T. hermeticus had been designed by the US military in conjunction with Middle Eastern elites to terrorize the US population into docile sheep. Though she chuckled to herself at these paranoid assertions, she often emerged from her Web-surfing stupor with a sense of wonder. What if? she’d think as she enjoyed a cigarette, staring out at the riotous jungle that was overtaking their backyard. But the mystique would fade in the fluorescent light of the kitchen as she opened a can of tuna.

She didn’t believe that the parasite had been bioengineered by aliens or the US government or al-Qaeda, but she was terrified that it would infect her son. Though she sat him down in the matter-of-fact brightness of the kitchen and asked him if he’d heard about the comatose teens (he’d scanned Kaitlin Moore’s Facebook status), though she explained the presumed causes of T. hermeticus transmission, though she went over the symptoms and warned him about the correlation between excessive screen time and junk-food consumption and full-blown toxoplasmosis, she still felt the relentless throb of fear behind her breastbone every second of every waking hour. And her husband was out in the desert doing God knows what. She envisioned him standing on a pink dune, staring into a hazy void specked with an occasional camel. Did they even have camels in Afghanistan? She couldn’t remember. She would Google it when she settled back into her swivel chair.

“If I understand you,” Adam said, “then the screen time and junk food are not causes of the coma but symptoms of the disease.” Was he looking at her with pity, as though she had lost it?

“I’m not sure.” She forced her mouth into a smile that she hoped radiated adult wisdom. “But I think that’s about right.”

“So it doesn’t really matter what I do.” He grinned and slunk toward the dark den.

That night Jenny woke up sweating, shaking off a nightmare in which her husband had transformed into some kind of desert scorpion cyborg, and her son, after falling into a coma, had pupated into a winged creature that moved so fast she couldn’t catch a glimpse of his face.

Miles Escrow had the eerie feeling that he’d experienced it all before: the whine of the jukebox, water stains on the ceiling, Wanda Bonnet blowing her nose into a sodden tissue after another weeping bout. She was the only mother of a comatose teen who’d shown up at Lizard Man that week. Ten minutes and two shots of vodka later, she was gone, driving through rain back to the hospital. She’d come, he figured, thinking her old haunt might soothe her, but she must’ve felt alienated after all, judging by the startled-doe look on her face.

Those patrons whose kids weren’t infected were probably at home, domestic surveillance in overdrive. DHEC had finally issued a statement verifying the number of diagnosed teens in the state (fifty-two), explaining the life cycle of T. hermeticus , and urging people not to panic as medical authorities were doing all they could to understand the bug, including setting up testing facilities that would soon be available to the general population. Although the sick kids were comatose, their comas were relatively high on the Glasgow scale, and there was no reason to believe they wouldn’t snap out of it soon.

Tonight it was just Miles, Stein, Old Man Winger, and Rufus Pope, the bottom-heavy mixologist who lurched like Godzilla behind the bar. But then Carla Marlin showed up with some startling news. When she barged into the bar, eyes on fire, she seemed disappointed that her grand announcement would be received by only four men, one of them (Miles dared to think) a decent catch, albeit securely snatched up in the Tabascored talons of Tina Flame.

Or was he? Miles gave Carla the head-to-toe and found her paling in comparison to his ten-year live-in. A sun worshiper with freckled tawny skin and hair bleached white as polar-bear fur, she failed to tickle his fancy. That didn’t stop him from draping a soothing arm over her shoulders as she drew out her prologue to the big revelation, punching code into her Droid, lighting a Winston, and licking a drop of nectar from her piña colada’s straw before clearing her throat. But when Roddy Causey cruised into the bar, she withheld the goods again, waiting for him to secure a Budweiser lest she waste her breath on three old men and the flunky of Tina Flame.