Pathosis (A Dark Evolution Book 1)

by Jason LaVelle

  “It’s a nasty orange and black thing, yes it is, you’ll see.”

  Jack froze, his hand positioned on top of the glass jar. Orange and black? “¿Anaranjado y negro?” he asked.

  She nodded.

  “¿Arana peluda?” A hairy spider?

  Another nod.

  “This big?” he asked, spreading out the palm of his hand.

  She nodded and said, “Un poco mas pequeño.”

  Oh my God, could this be one of the spiders from the ship?

  Jack didn’t make any move to get up, but looked at the woman, who looked even more worried now. “Tell me what happened,” he said. As he listened, Jack placed the Bible carefully back on top of the large jar.

  He hoped that maybe God would watch over the jar and keep it safe.

  “It bit my son.”

  Jack looked over at the boy again. For the first time, he noticed the boy was holding a bag of frozen peas against his upper arm. Now that Jack looked at him closer, the boy looked decidedly ill. His face, which should have been a healthy bronze, was pale. Sharp, angular cheekbones protruded from his skin, which was a sallow color, like lemon taffy. Not good at all, he thought.

  “Can you show me the bite?” he asked the boy.

  The boy removed the bag of peas from his arm.

  “Oh, Jesus!” Jack exclaimed, rocking back on his heels.

  Strong venom can cause necrosis. Necrosis is, simply, cell death. The tissue of our body is made up of cells, so when the cells die, the tissue dies and deteriorates. The results are often nasty, gooey, black sores. This is only seen in the worst cases, and very rarely in the case of spider bites. It was the type of wound one might expect to see with a rattlesnake bite.

  As Jack looked at the boy’s arm, shocked, he observed a viscous black sore the size of a tea saucer covering most of the boy’s bicep. The center of the black patch was dripping melted flesh and the putrid stench of rotting meat filled Jack’s nostrils.

  “Oh my God,” Jack gasped. The boy put the bag of peas back against his arm.

  “You have to go to the hospital immediately.”

  “I don’t have money,” the woman replied sadly.

  “That doesn’t matter. The hospital will still take care of him.”

  She started to shake her head, but Jack rebuffed her harshly.

  “If you don’t go now, he will lose his arm!”

  The woman’s eye’s widened with fear as the severity of the situation set in. She nodded quickly. “And that?” she asked, pointing at the jar on the floor.

  “Just go, now.” Jack repeated. “I’ll take care of the spider and lock up the house when I leave.”

  Again, the woman hesitated. Should she trust this large white man? Then she seemed to make up her mind, because she spoke rapidly to her son. He didn’t move quickly, but she got the sick boy out of his chair and ushered him out of the room and down the hallway.

  “Holy shit,” Jack said, when he was alone. He got down on all fours and put an eye up next to the jar. Though the image was a bit convoluted by the curve of the canning jar, Jack could see the spider inside. Oh, no. It was the same strange species he had encountered during his cowardly minutes on the Coast Guard’s mystery ship the day before.

  “How the hell did you get off the boat?” he wondered aloud. No matter, I have something for you. From the deep cargo pocket on his pants, Jack extracted an eighteen-ounce can of an insecticide called pyrethrum. It was a pressurized aerosol spray, and it was deadly. To arthropods, that is. Pyrethrum is a contact killer - instant - extremely effective.

  Jack attached a thin straw to the business end of the aerosol can. He then scrunched down next to the jar and prepared to wedge the straw underneath. All this trouble for a damn spider. Carefully, Jack tilted the jar slightly to one side. It was only a fraction of an inch, but even so, the arachnid inside jumped hard against the jar, startling Jack so that he dropped the jar back down. Thankfully, it landed the same as before it had come up, flush with the floor.

  Jack let out the breath he was holding and, then took another.

  “Good Lord, man. Get your big girl panties on Jack.” Okay, round two. Jack was about to reach for the jar again when his phone rang. Ugh, your timing sucks!

  Chapter 11

  Special weapons and tactics, or SWAT as it is commonly called, was dispatched to the scene of the murder and subsequent flight of Sully Dorn. Early that morning, Sully had been trimming the dense hedges around his suburban home when he encountered a large black and orange spider crawling along its foundation.

  Sully was immediately intrigued, and grabbed a stick to try to pick it up. He wanted to show his kid. He successfully got a small branch under the ornery arthropod and called to his son. His wife came out with him.

  “Check this out, honey!” he said, holding the stick a little higher so they could see the beast perched at the end of it.

  “Whoa, awesome!” his five year old boy exclaimed, running up to his dad.

  That was just about enough excitement for the spider, because it leapt at little Jason Dorn, landing on his bare arm. Jason screamed, a high-pitched, piercing wail. Sully’s eyes widened in shock and his wife screamed for him to get the spider off Jason. Sully did, grabbing the spider roughly by the legs, at which time it immediately bit him on the hand.

  He didn’t let go, even though it felt like he was being stung by a hornet. He continued to hold the spider, and bashed it on the ground several times, until he heard a satisfying crunch of the thin exoskeleton breaking open, and the spider’s grey organs spilled out. It had bit him several times, and in the end, sank its sharp fangs deep into his hand. He had to break off the chelicerae to pull the needle-like daggers from his hand.

  “Shit,” he said, breathing heavily. His wife was holding their son’s face against her, trying to calm his sobbing. Sully said, “Come on, let’s get some ice on these bites buddy, then we’ll feel better.”

  Jason didn’t respond, but let his father lead him inside, while his wife gave Sully a disgusted, disappointed look.

  “What, I didn’t know that was going to happen!”

  That was in the morning. It was early afternoon now and Sully was in the street. He was two blocks from his house. He walked slowly. His head was pounding, and his body felt as if it were on fire. The nerves all over his dermis were firing like crazy. Every breath hurt, every step hurt, every sound was painful. He was filled with a rage that he had no way of understanding.

  He looked down at himself. He was shirtless, and wore only a pair of khaki shorts. His bare chest and belly were splattered with blood. He raised his hands. They were dark and sticky with congealing blood. He knew what the substance was, but his thoughts ventured no deeper than that. He could only think of the pain in his head, he had to stop that throbbing, aching, roar.

  A young man had come out of his house a few minutes before, when Sully was still near his own home. Just the sight of him infuriated Sully, and he chased the man up to the porch of his house, where the twenty-year-old bank teller tripped just before his concrete porch. Sully was on him immediately.

  He approached the man and kicked him hard in the ribs. There was an audible crack when the ribs broke and the man howled in pain. Sully, in turn, howled too. He reached down with both hands, and grabbed the man’s head. He lifted and twisted with all his might. The man’s neck popped and cracked loudly. Then Sully bent down, clamping his teeth onto the man’s ear, and tore it off. The man dropped to the ground and Sully chewed the ear for several minutes before swallowing it.

  Sully hadn’t seen any more neighbors. He was slowing down. His body was tired, but his pain-filled rage had not diminished. In the distance, at the end of the subdivision’s main road, Sully saw, through bleary eyes, that two black vans had stopped in the middle of the roa
d. Men were pouring out of them like disgusting little ants. Sully’s tired body began to run again, even though the adrenaline that had been coursing into his heart to keep him moving was dwindling, and that vital muscle was growing weaker by the second.

  Sully let out a loud bellow as he ran, quickly closing the distance to the new people. They were kneeling in front of the van. Then he felt sharp pricks in his upper body. Now he was hurting even more. His hand brushed over his chest and he felt little darts sticking out. There were four of them in his chest, but he still kept running.

  Then something heavy slammed into him, in his shoulder. Sully rocked back with the force of the beanbag round, fired from a giant shotgun like a mortar. He stumbled, then continued foreword. The second beanbag hit him in the head and Sully went down hard, his face bouncing off the pavement. He was instantly rendered unconscious.

  “Jesus, shit!” a black-clad officer said from ten feet away. “Next time don’t cut it so damn close, Mitch! He was almost on us!”

  Mitch shrugged from behind him. “This thing only shoots about twenty feet with any accuracy. Anyway, he’s down. Don’t be a pussy.”

  Sully was handcuffed, gagged, his head bagged, and his feet shackled. The SWAT unit pulled the tranquilizer darts from his chest and radioed the ambulance around the block. His nose was smashed flat by the lead shot within the beanbag round and his eyes were both black. They would load him up and take him to the FBI mobile command center at the Coast Guard base.

  Mitch had heard the CDC was down there in full biohazard suits. He wondered if he should be worried about it, then decided he had bigger problems right now. His wife was an alcoholic, and he was trying to get her into treatment. He didn’t need any more drama than that. He slapped away one of Florida’s ubiquitous mosquitos from his neck.

  “All right, call in the crime scene boys; I have a feeling they’re going to have their work cut out for them.”

  Indeed they did. There were two crime scenes. One was outside, at the house of a young bank teller. There was blood on the ground near his contorted body, and the CSI workers saw with disgust that his ear had been torn off - that’s where the blood had come from. Cause of death was beyond obvious. The young man’s neck had been rotated 180 degrees, so that as they looked at him, lying face down, he still appeared to be watching them, his eyes looking lifelessly out over his back.

  “Takes a lot of strength to do something like that.”

  “Takes a lot more than strength. He was resolved.”

  The second crime scene was Sully Dorn’s residence. The front door was wide open when they arrived, and there was a small crowd of people gathered on the lawn. They looked like neighbors. The women were sobbing and the men looked like they had been as well. With his trained eye, one of the crime scene workers noticed blood on the hands of one of the men standing outside.

  “You! Are you injured?”

  The man shook his head.

  “Why is there blood on your hands?”

  “I went in, to, to see if I could help them somehow, you know, after he left.” The man’s eyes clouded and he shook his head. “I couldn’t help them. It’s terrible in there.”

  The investigator stated flatly, “It always is, sir. Stay where you are, do you understand?”

  The neighbor nodded.

  The investigator spoke into a two way radio mic mounted to his lapel. “I need a unit down here immediately. There has been another contamination. Yes, a witness, he entered the residence. He has blood on his hands. Roger.”

  The investigator carefully unbuttoned the safety strap on the .38 he wore on his hip.

  “Sir, come here, please.”

  The woman standing next to the man started to protest but the man shushed her and immediately complied. It was a good thing he had; the investigator was just cleared to use lethal force if the man had tried to evade them.

  “Sit down here and don’t move. There will be some officers coming to pick you up. You will go with them without trouble, you understand?”

  The man nodded. “I understand. I’m infected with something, aren’t I?”

  The investigator didn’t answer, but he could feel the eyes of everyone in the group on him.

  “I don’t know, sir. Just sit tight.” The investigator left his partner behind to babysit the witnesses while he performed an initial walkthrough of the crime scene. He wished he had stayed outside.

  Sully Dorn had killed his wife and child. That in itself was upsetting and unsettling to most people. Carl, however, saw death every day while investigating tragedies like these. That was his life. This was a different sort of crime scene, though. It looked as though a pack of wolves had been in the house. He noticed broken furniture everywhere, glasses smashed on the kitchen floor, and plates had apparently been thrown against a wall and shattered everywhere.

  It looked like the wife had tried to throw things at him to defend herself. Unfortunately, it had not worked. She was lying on the dining room floor with her head just outside the sliding glass door. Carl stared down at her. Her face was mush. It had been beaten into an almost unrecognizable casserole of flesh, like ground beef. The killing blow had come from the door. The sliding glass door had almost severed her neck. Carl could envision how it happened. Sully had beaten her mercilessly. When she tried to escape through the door, he caught her, threw her down on the door track, and used the slider as a blunt guillotine, repeatedly bashing it into her neck until it spilled blood and gore all over the deck outside.

  Freaking sick.

  The boy wasn’t far from his mother. He had obviously heard all the racket and come to see what was going on. Looking at the boy, even Carl was at a loss. One of the boy’s eyes was missing, replaced by a bloody hole, as if Sully had used his finger or another long object as a dagger to drive into the eye socket. The eyeball was nowhere to be found (they would later discover his son’s eyeball in Sully’s stomach). The confusing thing about the boy was his arm. The boy’s arm was gone, completely torn off his body.

  The small figure was lying in an enormous pool of blood. The jagged flesh at the shoulder joint told Carl there was no cutting instrument used. How the hell could someone rip an arm off? He imagined that Sully must have stood over his son, with one foot on his chest and pulled on the arm until it came off in his hands. Carl followed a stream of blood over to the utility sink, where the small arm of Jason Dorn had been discarded.

  I can’t do this anymore.

  Chapter 12

  “You see that man up there, right?”

  “Yes, of course I see him, he’s in the middle of the road, Mom.”

  “Well, are you going to slow down?”

  Kala sighed as she glanced in the rearview mirror. Abigail was in the back seat and when she saw Kala looking, she crossed her eyes at her. That brought a quick smile to Kala’s face. Since her sister was murdered yesterday evening, Abbie had seemed to be in and out of reality, as if she was still in shock. Understandable, Kala thought, but she was glad to see some of Abbie’s usual frivolous behavior coming out again. Abbie had spoken to her parents this morning, and even though she was in tears while she was on the phone, she had been in a much better mood since then.

  Abbie went back to her phone. She had a set of white ear buds pressed into her ears and her fingers were tapping away lightly at the screen of her phone. Every so often, she would pause her typing to snap a picture of herself, presumably to add to the text she was sending.

  Kala glanced over at her mother, who sat rigid and upright in the passenger seat. Her eyes seemed like they were almost bulging right out of her head, like one of those dogs with the ridiculously cute flat faces. The driving was making her anxious. Kala knew this wasn’t easy for her, but she was trying. Since her dad was swamped at work, he couldn’t take her driving.

  Kala would turn sixteen to
morrow, and these were the last few hours she needed to complete in order to obtain a driver’s license. A large smile crept over her face as she thought about finally having her driver’s license. No more driving with her parents, which would be nice. She could drive herself to a date if she wanted. Not that she went on dates. The boys she knew, even the football players with their bulging biceps and hard chest muscles, just didn’t appeal to her.

  She had her own interests, and so far, they were more intriguing than the boys around here were. When she found someone, he would have to be hot, of course, but he would also have to be interesting. To Kala, that meant smart and funny. Smart + funny + hot = nobody around here. She wasn’t worried about it; eventually there would be a guy who knocked her off her feet.

  “Hey!” her mother’s harried voice broke into her thoughts. “You’re distracted! Focus!”

  Ugh, she hated it when her mom told her to focus, as if she had an attention problem or something. Sure as shit, though, she had been distracted, and now the man who had once been a few hundred yards away was only a few seconds ahead, and was still walking in the road.

  “Sorry,” she huffed, and let up on the accelerator. The car leaned forward as it slowed.

  “Now, why is he in the middle of the darn road, do you think?” Her mother squinted ahead at the man they were approaching. “Slow down some more, Kal, he looks like he’s weaving. He might come over into our lane. My God, do you think he’s drunk?”

  Kala slowed the car even more. They were on a two-lane road between their neighborhood on the outskirts of Miami and the city. The speed limit here was forty-five. Kala looked down and saw that the speedometer read fifteen miles per hour, then down to ten. She sighed inwardly.