by Scott Sigler
“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.”
Amos laughed. Margaret hated him at that moment—over thirty-six hours into their marathon session, with little more than twenty-minute catnaps to pace them, and he still didn’t seem tired.
“Are you kidding me?” Amos said. “I’m a total chickenshit, and you know it. First sign of danger—physical or emotional—I run for the hills. My wife actually has my balls in a jar back at the house. She’s taller than me, she puts the jar up on a shelf where I can’t reach it.”
Margaret laughed. Amos was famously open about who ran his household.
“I’m fine where I’m at,” Amos said. “I rather like being the lackey if being in charge means having to deal with Dew Phillips and Murray Longworth. But if I do wind up calling the shots, just remember I like my coffee black.”
They sat in silence for a moment, tired brains processing the strange information that seemed to provide no answers.
“This can’t stay a secret forever,” Amos said. “Off the top of my head, I can name three experts who should be here right now. Murray’s secrecy policy is asinine.”
“But he’s got a point, you have to admit,” Margaret said. “We can’t have this story out, not yet. We’ll have anyone with a rash, bug bite or even dry skin flooding the hospitals. It’s going to make it very difficult to find someone who’s actually infected, especially as we have no idea what the early stages of this infection look like. If the story got out now, we’d have to look at millions of people. Hopefully we can at least come up with some kind of screening process or test for infection before this story breaks.”
“I understand the precarious nature of the situation,” Amos said. “I just think that Murray is taking this too far. It’s one thing to keep a lid on something—it’s quite another to be completely understaffed. What the hell happens if a hundred Martin Brewbakers suddenly pop up, and no one is prepared for it, let alone warned it could happen? You think a bomb is a terror weapon? It’s nothing compared to hundreds of Americans going psycho on each other. What happens if we keep this a secret until it’s too late to do anything about it?”
He walked back to his station, leaving Margaret to stare at the half body. The constant decomposition had partially relaxed Brewbaker’s talon hand—where it had once stood straight up, it now hung at forty-five degrees, halfway to the tabletop. His blackening, liquefying body didn’t have much time left.
Margaret wondered about Amos’s comment; if there was some rogue lab with the technology to genetically engineer a parasite that could alter human behavior, wasn’t it already too late?
17.
CAT SCRATCH FEVER
Perry awoke with a scream. His collarbone raged with pain, like he’d dragged a razor blade across the thin skin atop the bone, peeling back flesh like a cheese grater rubbed across some Cheddar. The fingers of his right hand felt cold, wet and sticky. A sunrise beam of light pierced his half-drawn curtains, lighting up the window frost crystallized on the pane. His room filled with the hazy glow of a winter morning. In the dim light, Perry stared at his hands; they looked to be covered with chocolate syrup, thick and tacky-brown. He fumbled with the lamp on his nightstand. The bulb’s glow lit up the room and his hands. It wasn’t chocolate syrup.
It was blood.
Eyes widening in horror, Perry looked at his bed. Thin streaks of blood dotted the white sheets. Still blinking sleep-crust from his eyes, he ran to the bathroom and stared in the mirror.
Trickles of dried blood and finger-smears of the same streaked his left pectoral, clotting in his thin blond chest hair. He’d torn the skin during the night, digging into the flesh with his fingernails, which were caked with blood and bits of dried skin. Perry looked down at his body. Blood smudges, some wet, some tacky and some completely dry, covered his left thigh.
With a sudden start of horror, he saw bomb-run droplets of blood on his underwear. Pulling the waistband out, he looked down. A sigh of relief—no blood on his testicles.
He’d torn into himself during the night, ripping away at the itches with an abandon that didn’t exist during waking hours. How had he not woken up? “Sleeping like the dead” was an understatement. And despite more than thirteen hours of sleep, he still felt tired. Tired and hungry.
Perry stared at himself in the mirror. Pale skin, nearly white, smeared with streaks of his own blood dried to a reddish black, as if he were the canvas for a child’s finger painting, or perhaps some ancient shaman bedecked for a tribal ritual.
The rashes had grown in the night. Each was now the size of a silver-dollar pancake, and had taken on a coppery color. Perry craned his neck, trying to use the mirror to see the blemishes on his back and ass. They looked okay, which was to say he hadn’t scratched them raw during the night. In truth, they looked anything but okay.
Not knowing what else to do, Perry took a quick shower to wash off the dried blood. The situation was fucked up, obviously, but there was little he could do about it now. Besides, he had to be at work in a few hours. Maybe after work he’d actually break down and make a doctor’s appointment.
Perry scrubbed up, then applied the rest of the Cortaid, being very careful with the raw wounds on his leg and collarbone. He applied Band-Aids to both areas, then dressed and made himself a whopping breakfast. His stomach groaned with a ravenous hunger, more intense than his normal morning cravings. He made five scrambled eggs, eight pieces of toast, and washed everything down with two big glasses of milk.
Overall, the rashes felt fine, although they looked worse than ever. If they didn’t itch anymore, they couldn’t be that big of a deal. Perry felt certain the rashes would subside by day’s end, or at least be on their way out. Confident his body could handle the problem, he gathered up his battered briefcase and headed to work.
18.
NERVES
Margaret looked at the readout with disbelief.
“Amos,” she called through the biosuit’s tinny microphone. “Come here and take a look at this.” Amos glided over, as unaffected by fatigue as ever, and stood next to her.
“What have you got?”
“I finished the analysis on samples taken from all over the body and found massive quantities of neurotransmitters, particularly in the brain.”
Amos leaned forward to read the screen. “Excessively high levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin…my God, his system was out of control. What do you think did this to him?”
“That’s not my specialty, I’ll have to check into it. But from what I do know, excessive levels of neurotransmitters can cause paranoid disorders and even some psychopathic behaviors. And I’m not sure there
has ever been a case documented with levels this high.”
“The growth is controlling the victims with natural drugs. I wish we could get our hands on a live victim so we could see the insides of those damn growths. This is twice now we’ve had victims to examine, but both times the growths have been completely rotted out. It’s almost as if the person who created these things intentionally added the rotting aspect, so it would be harder to examine the little buggers.”
Margaret rolled the concept around in her brain, but it didn’t take hold. She was already suspicious of the growths’ incredible complexity—another theory began to take shape.
Amos pointed to the screen. “The growth either produces or causes to be produced excess neurotransmitters, which create reproducible results. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”
“There are other variances as well,” Margaret said. “There was seventy-five times the normal level of enkephalins in the tissue surrounding the growth. Enkephalin is a natural painkiller.”
Amos thought for a moment. “That makes sense. It’s hard to tell with all the rot, but it looks like the growth causes a lot of damage to the surrounding tissue. Whoever engineered the growth doesn’t want the host to feel that damage. The level of complexity is astronomical.”
“Amos, you don’t have to root for the little buggers,” Margaret said, a dressing-down tone in her voice. “We’re here to stop these things, remember?”
He smiled. “It’s hard not to be astounded. Come here and take a look at what I’ve got under the ultraviolet microscope.”
Margaret shuffled to the device, where Amos had been working for the last thirty minutes. Her Racal suit zip-zipped with each step as if she wore children’s footed pajamas.
She peered into the microscope. The sample looked like a normal nerve cell. Amos had done a perfect job of isolating and preparing the tissue: fingerlike dendrites, stained and glowing electric-blue under the ultraviolet light, reached out and over the thicker axons. It was the same connection that provides signal communication for every animal on the planet.
“It’s an isolated cluster of nerve cells,” she said. “Where is this from?”
“I found it near the eighth cranial nerve. The rot is working its way through there, but I was able to find a few relatively clean areas.”
Inside the awkward biosuit, Margaret frowned. The eighth cranial nerve, or the vestibulocochlear nerve, was where signals from the ear entered the brain.
“It’s heavily damaged, shows signs of decomposition, but still obviously nerve tissue,” Margaret said.
Amos remained quiet. Margaret looked up from the microscope.
Amos leaned forward. “You’re sure?”
Margaret wasn’t in the mood for games, but she took another look anyway. She could see nothing unusual.
“Amos, if you’ve got a point to make, please make it.”
“The cells don’t belong to Martin Brewbaker.”
Margaret stared blankly, not understanding the statement. “Not Brewbaker’s? Why are you looking at other samples? If they’re not Brewbaker’s nerve cells, then whose…” Her voice trailed off as the significance hit home.
“Amos, are you telling me these belong to the growth?”
“I performed protein sequencing on the black thorn and the vein siphon. The results turned up some unknown proteins, definitely not human. So I took some samples from around the body and ran the same sequence. I found high concentrations in the brain—that’s how I discovered the cluster on the cranial nerve. I found the protein in other places, but no more nerves, only remnants of that peculiar rot. There were high concentrations in the cerebral cortex, thalamus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, hypothalamus and septum.”
Margaret felt overwhelmed. Much of the brain’s higher functions remained a mystery, even in this day of rapidly ascending scientific knowledge. The sections of Brewbaker’s brain infected with the rot composed part of the limbic system, which was thought to control memory storage and emotional response, among other functions.
What the hell was the growth doing in Brewbaker’s brain? It already had him controlled with the neurotransmitter overdose, didn’t it?
Amos continued. “What you’re looking at here is the only sample I’ve found that wasn’t completely decomposed. I’ve never seen proteins like this, so I assume they’re synthetic, man-made. If they’re natural, they’re nothing I’ve encountered. I’ve searched all the academic and biotech databases and found nothing similar. That means if the proteins are synthetic, someone is keeping their research well guarded, which doesn’t surprise me considering the vastly advanced technology we’re dealing with.”
She was awed. It was unthinkable that the organism’s creator had engineered a new parasite that could grow from a very small embryo, possibly even a single cell, and latch on to a human host. It was even more unthinkable that this creature produced neurotransmitters like some kind of factory, dumping them into the bloodstream. But it was numbing—yes, numbing—to comprehend the genius that had bioengineered artificial nerves so accurately that they could interact with human nerves.
“I follow the vein siphon, that makes sense,” she said. “But the siphon is just a physical attachment to draw nutrients. What good does it do the parasite to grow mimic nerves?”
“You’ve got me. But one must draw the logical conclusion that the growths tapped in to the nervous system, just as they tapped in to the circulatory system.”
“But why?” She spoke more to herself than to Amos. “The neurotransmitter overdose produces somewhat predictable, reproducible results. If the goal is to make people crazy, then why would they go through the trouble of tapping in to the nervous system? And what’s the purpose for doing so?”
Amos shrugged. He rolled his shoulders and twisted at the waist, trying to loosen up. He walked around the table, doing mini laps, trying to shake off the fatigue.
Margaret shuffled to her station, her mind spinning with possibilities and a new level of fearful respect for the mystery organism.
It had seemed so obvious—unbelievable and awe-inspiring, but still obvious—that this was an organism bioengineered to make people violent and unpredictable. Now, however, she wasn’t so sure. There was something else to the mystery, something that a theory of high-tech terrorists didn’t explain.
“Hey, Margaret, bring me the camera.” She looked back—Amos stood next to Brewbaker’s hip. All parts of him were being consumed by the black rot, but some spots weren’t quite as advanced. The hip was one such spot. She grabbed the camera from the prep table and handed it to Amos.
He pointed to the hip, to the little lesion they’d seen earlier.
“Margaret, look at this.” He knelt down and took a picture.
“I see it. You already showed me.”
“Yes, but do you see anything different?”
Margaret sighed. “Amos, no more drama, please. If you’ve got something to say, say it.”
He said nothing. Instead he stood, fiddled with the camera, then stood shoulder to shoulder with her so they could both see the camera’s small screen. The screen showed a close-up of the lesion, a tiny blue fiber sticking out of it.
“So?” Margaret said. “We’ve got shit to do before his body is goo, Amos.”
“That’s the picture we took when we first saw it,” he said, then hit the advance button on the camera. The picture changed. “And that is the picture I took just now.”
Margaret stared. The two pictures looked exactly the same, except for one thing—the second picture showed not one fiber, but three, a small red one, a small blue one, and the original blue one, which was three times as long as it had been before.
Even though Martin Brewbaker was dead, the fibers were still growing.
19.
HUMP DAY
By noon the damnable things started itching again, and Perry had to wonder if he should see a doctor. But it was just a little rash, for crying out loud. What kind of a wuss goes to see a doctor for
a little rash? If you don’t have self-discipline, what do you have?
He’d always been a very healthy person. He hadn’t vomited from a non-alcohol-related incident since the sixth grade. While others succumbed to the flu, Perry would suffer only a runny nose and a slightly queasy stomach. While others called in sick at the drop of a hat, Perry hadn’t missed a day of work in three years. He’d inherited his resilience, as he had his size, from his father.
Perry had been twenty-five when Captain Cancer finally claimed Jacob Dawsey, the toughest sonofabitch this side of Brian Urlacher. Prior to that last trip to the hospital, from which Jacob Dawsey never returned, he had missed only one day of work in his entire life. That day came when Perry broke his father’s jaw.
Perry had returned home from late-season football practice to find his father beating his mother. Snow had been falling on and off for a week, enough to cover the sparse grass with patchy white, but not enough to accumulate on the dirt road that led up to the house—the road glistened with cold wetness.
His father had thrown his mother off the front porch, into a slushy puddle, and was in the process of whipping her with his belt. The scene was nothing new, and to this day Perry had no idea why he snapped, why—for the first time in his life—he fought against his father’s incessant rage.
“Gonna show you who’s in charge, woman,” Jacob Dawsey said as he brought the belt down with a crack. “Give you women an inch and you take a mile! Who the hell do you think you are?” Even though his father had spent all his life in northern Michigan, he had the faintest trace of a drawl. It colored his words, making hell sound like hail.
At the time Perry was a high-school sophomore, six-foot-two, 200 pounds and growing like a weed. He was no match for his father’s six-foot-five, 265 pounds of solid muscle. But Perry rushed him anyway, hit his father with a flying tackle that carried them both into the tattered front porch. Rotten lattice shattered around them.
