Throwing the trimmer must have bought David some time. He made it safely across the living room and out the front door. In the yard, he stopped and looked back at the house as he caught his breath. Confident no one had followed him, he headed back in the direction of his truck, unexpectedly stepping right into the chest of the man with the pipe.
“How much you bench, bro?” the man asked.
David searched frantically for an escape.
“I said, what do you bench? 170?”
David opened his mouth to answer but was cut short as the pipe crashed into his skull. Time slowed as he fell to the ground, followed by an overwhelming sensation of drowning.
TWENTY-FIVE
AN INFESTATION OF
WIGGLERS
Water rushed around David’s body and his system instinctively gasped for air—but all it sucked in was two lungs full of water. He coughed, forcing the water out, but, now fully submerged, found no air to suck in. The restraints on his body broke loose, and he floated to the top of his sinking Aeropod. A small bubble of air remained trapped in the space between his body and the glass and he breathed in. The bubble was shrinking, and fast, but before it fully disappeared, David tried to calm himself with a few slow measured breaths. A muffled pop sounded as the locks released and he pulled in one final deep breath—moments before the pod lid released and his lifesaving pocket of air escaped upward toward the surface.
In the darkness, it was impossible to tell which way was up: the fading glow of the Aeropod sinking below him and the upward trajectory of the air bubble his only means of telling up from down. David gave a second for his body to right itself, then kicked furiously to the surface.
The farther he swam, the more his legs ached and the more his lungs burned. Whatever oxygen he managed to seize in that final gasp didn’t last long and his kicks became less and less productive, until he gave up his struggle. His vision filled with stars as his view faded to nothing but twinkling specks of light against a wavering black backdrop. His chest spasmed, a final reflex to find oxygen before shutting down, and his lungs filled with crisp night air. Coughs racked his body, spitting up what seemed to be gallons of water.
After floating and treading water for what seemed like hours, but had actually been mere minutes, David kicked and paddled to the only bit of land visible in the faint starlight, snaking through inky water and slimy tentacles of seaweed, until his feet finally found the gravel lakebed. The rocky pebbles slid beneath his feet as he clambered out of the water onto shore, and he silently rejoiced as he collapsed and the sharp stones pierced the flesh of his cheeks.
He rested there, facedown for several minutes, coughing the remaining water from his lungs. Relieved to be alive, he rolled onto his back and stared up at blanket of stars blurred against the clear night sky. A smile crept across his face and he allowed his stinging eyes to close as he nearly drifted off to sleep. A soft kick in his ribs roused him.
“You alright, kid?” a gruff voice asked from above. David opened his eyes and could barely make out the vague outline of a man standing above him, silhouetted against the backdrop of stars.
David sat upright, wincing as an ache throbbed in his back. He opened his mouth to speak but starting coughing again until he turned to the side and vomited on the jagged stones of the shore. The man knelt behind him and patted his back to help knock out whatever liquid still rattled around inside David’s chest. David coughed a few more times. The man stood and walked in front of him and reached out his hand. David grasped his dry, calloused skin and pulled himself to his feet.
“Thought you was dead. Ain’t nothing come crawling out that water in quite some time.”
David shook his head and spit onto the ground. “No, not dead, but I’m halfway there.” He turned his eyes to the stranger but was unable to make out much in the dark night: about his height, scraggly hair down to his neck, stray strands floating weak and wispy in the starlight.
“Got a name?”
“David.”
“Where’s you from David? All I know is I was sleeping and alluva sudden there’s this terrible screech from the sky. Then? Splash. Next thing something come crawling out the water. Like I said. Thought you was dead.”
Unsure of what to say, or even if he should trust this stranger, David remained quiet and tried to think. He hoped by now his eyes would have adjusted to the little bit of light the stars and sliver of moon provided, but every time he tried to focus he found he couldn’t. Balling his hands into loose fists, he rubbed his eyes to clear them and let out a sharp cry of pain.
“You alright boy?”
“My eyes. They’re killing me.” David said. “I must have gotten some sand in them or something.”
“Shit,” said the stranger. “Should of figured. Come on, let’s go. We got to get you cleared out.”
The stranger grabbed David’s hand and led him across the shore to the forest’s edge. As they entered the wood and the stars and moon were lost behind the canopy of leaves and branches, everything went black, leaving David no choice but to trust the man and let him drag him along to wherever their destination might be. They crunched their way through the darkness, twigs and leaf litter crackling beneath their feet.
David had no idea how far they had travelled. But eventually the gloom began to fade, replaced by a growing blur of orange and yellow that swelled with every step they took. A crackling sound and a whiff of smoke let David know they were nearing a campfire. Suddenly, the stranger’s voice broke the silence between the two.
“Sit down here.”
David’s heart pounded, threatening to burst through his ribcage, straight into the flames. He couldn’t see clearly—his vision still only a blur of light and dark. Occasionally he caught a streak in the foreground, like the floaters that sometime crept into his vision after staring at a computer screen for too long, but they were gone before he could focus on them.
You hear me boy? I said sit.”
“I—I can’t see …”
“Just drop yer ass right on down and you’ll be alright.”
Inch by inch, David squatted, waving his hands beneath him until he found the worn surface of a massive log beneath him. Although dry, he marvelled at how slick the wood felt beneath his fingers. Driftwood. He took a seat.
“Wait here. And for Christ sakes don’t go around touching your eyes again. Pisses them off.” The sound of footsteps on undergrowth faded as the man walked away.
Terrifying. That was the only word David could come up with to describe his newfound blindness. The mental struggle to suppress the instinct to rub his eyes consumed what mental faculties he had left. The fire crackled in front of him, flashing points of light as the heat of jumping flames licked his face.
A few minutes later the shuffling sound of feet on dry leaves signaled someone was approaching.
“That you?” David called out, hoping the response would match a voice he recognized.
“Yup. Me.” the man grunted. “Lay down. On your back. Need a closer look at your eyes.”
David swung a leg over, straddled the log and lay back, staring up into the distorted sky above. Like camping, he thought. But even that infinitesimal bit of light disappeared as the man sat on him and brought his face within inches of David’s. Every time he exhaled, David caught a whiff of his breath: earthy, a little acidic. Kind of sweet, but with a hint of bitterness and decay lingering underneath. Through it all, he kept his eyes open, catching fleeting, blurred glimpses of the man’s profile in the dancing light of the fire, his skin dark, leathery and aged.
Bringing himself even closer, the stranger pulled at the lids of David’s right eye. As he leant in, his nose brushed against David’s, and sweet, vinegary breath poured out. Another flicker of light caught in the man’s own eye, revealing a vacant silvery-gray pupil set against a ball of veiny pinks. He let out an exasperated sigh and David swallowed the lump of bile rising in his throat.
“Didn’t seem like you was in the water lo
ng,” the man said. “Been breeding all this time and probably got nowhere else to go.” The stranger sat up and thumped David’s chest. “Yep. Got to do a flush and pick. Sorry, brother.”
“What’re you talking about?” David asked. The stranger hefted a canvas sack onto David’s chest and bits of glass and metal clinked against each other as he rummaged through it.
“Here we are,” the man muttered. In the firelight a spark of flame reflected off on the indecipherable metal instrument in the man’s hands. David tried to squirm free, but even though it didn’t feel like the man weighed much, he was held tight to his spot. The man leaned in closer.
“Don’t go wiggling so much. All yer gonna do is hurt yourself more.”
The unmistakable sensation of cold steel pushed against David’s lower eyelid, stretching it open. “What the hell are you doing?” he screamed.
“Told you. Got to flush and pick. God damned invasion you’ve got there. Way too much for any prayer of symbiosis.”
“Stop! Jesus, just stop!”
The metal lifted from his eyelid and David blinked violently as the man sat up again and rested his free hand on David’s chest. “David, was it? I’m only trying to help. You got yourself a wriggler infestation in your eyes. That water out there, the water you come swimming out of be jus’ swarming with ‘em. I don’ clear ‘em, ain’t no way you gonna see nothing no more. Nope. Not now, Not ever again.”
“Wigglers? What do you mean, wigglers?”
“What I done said. Wigglers. Now sit yer ass down and let me flush ya. Ain’t gonna hurt none’s long as you stay still.”
David closed his eyes and took a breath, reconsidering whether he should trust the man. A wet spasm below his left eye worked toward his nose. His eyes flew open, and the twitching worsened.
“There’s one ‘em now, scootin’ his way out.” The calloused tips of the stranger’s fingers brushed against his eyelid as he reached in and pinched. In the blurred world in front of him, David could barely make out the man’s hand pulling away, a long black string caught between his fingertips. He followed the string down with his eyes, crossing them until he couldn’t follow any further. The man pulled back on the string with a slow but steady hand, and David sensed something sliding behind his eyeball, in the socket slipping past his sinuses. The man continued to pull, stretching the black thing millimeter by millimeter, until it slipped loose and what looked like a six-inch piece of wet black thread flailed wildly in the stranger’s hand. The man grabbed the worm’s body with his other hand, flung the monstrosity into the fire, and David fainted.
TWENTY-SIX
PINKEYE
“—stop giving him trouble. We understand you were upset, but his head isn’t right,” said a man in a blue t-shirt. David recognized him as one of the men who’d chased him through the basement.
The steak on his eye warmed thoroughly in his hands, dripping blood down his cheek. David lifted it from his face and tried to open his eye, but it remained swollen shut. He poked gingerly at the inflamed mass and winced.
“You’re gonna want to keep that on a bit longer if you want the swelling to go down at all,” the man added.
“That’s just a myth. You know that, right? A steak on your eye isn’t going to help anything,” said the other man—the one who’d clobbered him with the pipe.
“It helps keep it cool. Like an ice pack,” said the first.
“Look at it. Does it look cold to you? All that slab of meat is going to do is give him an eye infection. Why don’t you just go get some ice?”
“Because we don’t have any.”
David pressed the steak back against his eye, careful to make sure he didn’t open it and let in any bacteria. The beating was bad enough. The last thing he needed now was to throw a case of pinkeye into the mix.
“Guys, I appreciate the hospitality and all. But come on, what did you expect me to do? Ignore him?” David asked. “I mean, the guy broke into my truck. He stole my stuff. You can’t just let someone like that wander around—”
TWENTY-SEVEN
TUG AND PULL
“—cooperate with me or this won’t work. Sure, this’ll keep your eyes open, but I need you to look where I says.”
Instinct told David to blink, but instinct wasn’t working. The man had attached some sort of metal spreading mechanism to each of David’s eyelids, forcing them to stay open.
“Now, look as far to the left as you can. I’m gonna flush the right.”
“What are you planning to do?”
“Just a saline flush. They get more mobile the more liquid that’s around ‘em. Kind of like going home. Honestly this’d work better out in the water, but there ain’t no way you’re gonna get me in there and there ain’t a clean source nearby.”
David’s breath quickened, and he tried to pull his head back, away from the bottle the man started to tip toward his eye.
“You saw what I pulled out. And that’s only one of ‘em. Trust me, you want ‘em all out.”
With the memory of the wiggling thing still fresh in his mind, David conceded and shifted his vision to the left as the man commanded.
“What are those things?”
“Well, like I said before, I calls ‘em wigglers, but I’m probably only one calls them that. You can’t see it now, what with it being dark and all, but across the way there on the other side there’s a big old building. Used to be a tracker farm.”
“Trackers? You mean like field serpents?”
“Yeah. I suppose that’s kind of what they are. Definitely SBS. They probably growed ‘em there too—but these’re different.” The man poured the contents of his bottle into David’s eye, and David cringed at the flurry of motion from the area behind his eyeball. “You really don’t know trackers?” he asked.
“It’s a long story, and I’d rather not go into it… but no, it seems there’s a lot I don’t know lately.”
The man grunted in response and set the bottle down on the stump next to them. He pulled a small set of tweezers out of his bag, brought himself within inches of David’s eye and started tugging at another black string.
“These guys here,” he said, as he freed the end of another six-inch-long worm and held the squirming mass in front of David, “these guys are trackers. And that water you swum out of is infested with ‘em. Government used to grow and raise ‘em in that plant, before all hell broke loose. Guess when they abandoned the place, they just left ‘em there.” The stranger tossed the wiggler into the fire and set about pulling another from David’s eye. “Way I figure, there musta been some kind of breach sometime along the way, and they got outta the isolation tanks into the water. Who knows how far they spread.”
“What do they—” David grimaced at the sharp pain behind his eye, and the tail went taut.
“Jus’ hold on. Gettin’ shy. Need another splash.” The man poured more of the saline solution into David’s eye. The wormy-thing relaxed and began to slide free as the stranger coaxed it from its hideaway. “Tricks ‘em.”
“What do they do? I mean, what is their purpose?”
“Trackers. That’s what they call ‘em and what they do. All connected to the network, keep track of whatever their hosts see and sends it to whoever wants to do some watching. Trained to wiggle in and settle down. Most people have ‘em never even know. Usually can’t without a scan. ‘Course most people only got one. Pretty sure you got at least a dozen.”
He freed the end of the latest worm from David, tossed it into the fire and set back to work.
“Thinking we got em all from this … wait, one more back there. Deep. Dang she’s a feisty one.” David could feel the tweezers poking at his eye as the stranger tried to grab it. “Just about … oh no. Oh no oh no oh no.”
“What? What’s wrong?”
“She’s gone and tried to hide.”
“What do you mean, hide?” A strange congestion took over David’s sinuses, and he suppressed an urge to sneeze. Tears welled from his eyes.
The stranger pressed the palm of his hand down on David’s forehead.
“Don’t sneeze. Whatever you do, don’t sneeze,” the man whispered.
“Why? What happens if I sneeze?”
“Lotsa bad stuff. She’s crawling through your ducts into your sinuses. You sneeze and you could tear ‘er and trap ‘er stuck, or even worse you could drive her even deeper and she’ll burrow straight into your brain. Fight or flight reflex, programmed right in … shit, musta let it get too dry.”
“That thing’s going burrow into my brain?” David’s resisted the urge to hyperventilate.
“Not if you stay still and don’t scare it, it won’t. Least I don’t think it will. Now, breathe through your mouth, not your nose. I gotta pull this.”
The stranger inserted a narrow set of tweezers in David’s right nostril. The man’s hands were steady and sure, never even touching the sides of David’s nose, like an expert game of Operation.
“Hold still, I’m gonna feel around for her,” the stranger said.
Not wanting to risk getting poked, David decided not to answer and remained motionless while the stranger did his work. Deep inside his nasal cavity, well beyond the area where he thought his nose ended, the gentle tapping of the tweezer’s metal tips prodded his sinuses.
“Hold still. Don’t breathe. Think I found her.”
Closing his eyes and holding his breath, David focused on the crackling of the nearby fire. The man seemed to be in a state of controlled meditation, holding the tweezers still. After a moment, a small pinch of pressure convulsed in his head, then a sudden twitch erupted inside his sinus as the tweezers closed around the worm.
“Got her,” the stranger said. “You go ‘head an’ breathe—but jus’ through your mouth while I drag this little bastard out. You’re turning blue an’ I need you awake.”
The Unfortunate Expiration of Mr David S Sparks Page 11
