Falling Prey

by M. C. Norris

  She could smell the astringent stink of their home brewed antiseptic, and heard the moans of the infirmed. They were getting close to the so-called hospital, which was just a cavern beneath their dormitory that featured an underground spring, and a flat slab of sandstone on which to operate. It was stocked with oil lamps, fashioned surgical instruments, strange nostrums and remedies. Every medicine was blended strictly to the specifications of a detailed logbook penned by one Captain Benjamin Briggs, the nineteenth century founder of this colony, after whom Briggstown was eventually named.

  To the best of her understanding, Captain Briggs and his entourage were the original human castaways in the Garden of Eden. They were the true survivors who’d not only erected the fort’s massive walls around the rim of an extinct volcano, but they’d also developed the fundamental skills that were still employed by all of the guilds. Captain Briggs was a warrior, doctor, scientist, artist and inventor, all rolled up into one. It seemed to Sandy that he was a pretty remarkable man, one to whom far more credit for Briggstown was owed than men like Dr. Bendu would have newcomers believe. Sandy liked to imagine Captain Briggs rolling in his grave over the devolution of his once astonishing sanctuary in a savage land to what was now, under guild rule, little more than a human trap.

  A recovered automobile’s stereo system was rigged to a bank of vinegar batteries in clay casks. The sounds were piped nightly over the wall, amplified through a system of rawhide bullhorns. Newcomers to Eden invariably followed the sound of music through the twilit jungle until those rolling doors slammed shut behind them. Once those gates closed, especially if you happened to be female, then you were regarded as little more than Briggstown’s property, and were absorbed into a caste. Only warriors seemed willing or able to venture freely beyond those walls to hunt and forage. Meyer hadn’t specifically stated that others were forbidden to leave, but Sandy suspected that if she ever had any doubts about Briggstown being a trap—and she didn’t—then, all that was required to test her theory was to attempt to leave.

  Meyer wobbled past the slab, where four patients groaned and shivered. Without casting a glance in their direction, he made his way over to the great hearth, and struck up a gasping rhythm with an enormous bellows. The flames leapt higher with every downward thrust, until the hospital was brightened by the roaring portal. Meyer tossed a few logs lackadaisically into the fire, smacked off his palms, and wobbled back over to the cutting slab. He put his hands on his hips, and he glowered down at the twisted mess of a human form. “I don’t guess he’s going to make it through the night.”

  “Oh, um …” Sandy smiled through her teeth at the patient, and rose tiptoed to whisper into Meyer’s hairy ear. “Maybe we shouldn’t say things like that right in front of the patients.”

  “Why?” Meyer’s bulging eyes, the downturned corners of his wide mouth, gave the distinct impression that he might at any moment unleash a sticky tongue to snatch a fly right out of the air.

  “Well, I think it might be a good idea to try and keep their spirits up, you know?”

  Meyer didn’t appear to know. Perhaps he’d spent too many years down in the caves. He stared down at the patient, blinked his bullfrog eyes, and licked his lips. “Secure his wrists and ankles, if you would. I’ll need to fetch a particular device.”

  Muttering to herself, she squatted beside the patient, and assured him that everything was going to be alright. That wasn’t exactly the truth. She had no clue what Meyer was up to, and until she landed on Eden, she’d never had any medical experience. Back home, she worked down the block from a hospital, so medical professionals were always a part of the neighborhood scenery. She found their world intriguing. At the local café, she enjoyed eavesdropping on their oftentimes gruesome conversations over lunch break. Their lives seemed more interesting than her lot in life as a secretary. Yeah, their jobs were probably intense, and they surely went home covered in every sort of bodily fluid, but at least those nurses could jump into their cars at the end of each day feeling good about the fact that they’d actually helped people, all day long. How amazing would that feel? Nurses put positive energy out into the world every time that they pulled on their scrubs, and Sandy envied them for that.

  The patient on the slab in front of her emitted a thin moan. Sandy sighed, and clasped her hands before her chest. This wasn’t a typical hospital, to be sure, but Sandy intended to do a damned good job, to help lots of people, and to be the best nurse that she could be, under the crude circumstances.

  The wrist and ankle restraints were loops of heavy gauge copper wire reeved through metal stakes driven into chinks in the stone slab. She got to work, securing his ankles first, followed by the wrist of his right hand, but she wasn’t sure how exactly she should go about securing what remained of his left arm, if it even needed securing at all. She supposed not. She left it lying crookedly at his side, at the small risk of receiving one of Meyer’s quizzical frowns.

  Nearly every part of the warrior’s body appeared to be injured in some way. She had to look past the hundreds of abrasions that spangled his filthy carcass, and focus only on those injuries that demanded immediate treatment. His left arm was a mangled mess. Dislocated from the shoulder, the bones were pulverized beneath the skin. His throat was ripped out, and bubbling forth a blend of mucus and blood. His left orbit was crushed inward to the bridge of his nose. The eyeball once housed there had burst from the explosive force, and its contents had dried where they’d dribbled down his chin. The left side of his jaw bulged outward like a bruised potato, and his swollen tongue protruded between fragments of shattered teeth. It looked as though he’d either fallen from a great height, or something of stupendous mass had slammed into the left side of his body with the force of a runaway train.

  Sandy cocked her head, narrowing her eyes at the injury to his throat. The flesh was torn, peeled down to his collar bone, but the wound originated at a crescent-shaped divot in the side of his neck, about the size and shape of a set of human teeth. That was peculiar. Who would bite into the throat of a fellow human being, rending and thrashing like a rabid dog? Honestly, she preferred not to know. It was easier to believe that whatever had sunk its teeth into this man’s windpipe was something other than a human being.

  “You just relax now,” she said, stroking the patient’s forehead, as Meyer reentered the hospital cavern with what looked like a stainless steel rod in one hand, and a bladder of dark, sloshing liquid in the other. “The doctor is back, and he’ll get you all fixed up.”

  The man’s undamaged right eye fluttered open for the first time since she’d been at his side. Drool rolled from between his parted lips. He arched his neck, emitted a mournful groan, and turned to gawp at Sandy.

  She leaned in close, peering deeply into his single eye. Something was weird in there. Sandy scooted on her knees around the man’s head until she’d relocated to his right side. From this angle, she could maybe get a better look at it. Using her thumb and forefinger, she spread his eyelids, and stared down into the squirming organ. Sandy wrinkled her nose, poking a fingernail gently against the eyeball. Segmented masses churned and recoiled from her touch. “Hmm.”

  Meyer waddled up, breathing laboriously, and sank down onto one knee beside her. The steel rod in his hand was actually hollow, and sharpened on one end to a needle point. He began to affix the sloshing bladder of liquid to the dull end of the hypodermic that was aimed at the inside of the patient’s thigh. “Antibiotic cocktail with a powerful hallucinogenic stimulant. This should either liven him up for a while, or send him into the hereafter like a friendly slap on the ass.”

  “Wait a minute,” Sandy said, pawing at Meyer’s arm. “Come up here, and have a look at this.”

  “What exactly are we looking at?”

  “I don’t know. It’s like—there’s something inside of his eye. Something alive.” Sandy screwed up her lips. “It almost looks like it might be worms. Have you ever heard of such a thing?”

  “Worms, you say
? Inside of his eye?”

  “Yeah, whole bunches of little critters, see? Right there.”

  “Get back! Get back! Good God, get away from him!” Meyer shouted, as he staggered to his feet, and stumbled away, clutching his chest. He dropped the hypodermic to the stone floor. The needle rolled musically from its tether to the bladder.

  “What on earth is the matter?” Sandy edged over to the medic’s side, shifting her gaze from Meyer to the moaning patient.

  “I thought they were just a myth,” Meyer muttered, wiping his brow. “Fifty years, and I’ve never seen them. I can’t believe they’re really real.”

  “What?”

  “Nurseworms!” Meyer stabbed an index finger at the ceiling, turned on a heel, and waddled back off in the direction of the hospital stores. “It’s a lethal contagion described in the final entries of Captain Briggs’ journal. Nurseworms were the very malady that wiped out the original colony in just a matter of days, but in the century since their passing, not a single other case has never been documented—until tonight.”

  “What should we do?”

  “Move the other patients away from him, if you would. Drag them clear over to the far wall, but don’t get too close to that one. Ho-ho, if he bites you, it’s over!”

  “If he bites me?” Sandy grabbed the wrists of the patient furthest from the infected warrior, and began dragging him across the cave floor.

  “Indeed,” Meyer replied, while banging around in stone cabinets chiseled into the pumice walls. “It was Captain Briggs’ own daughter who got lost in the jungle overnight. By the time they found and rescued the child, she’d contracted nurseworms through an open wound on the bottom of her foot. She was the first documented case, but once they brought her back into Briggstown, the malady spread like the Black Death.” Meyer popped the stopper from a clay jug. He leaned down to sniff the bung, and recoiled. “These are nasty parasites, voracious little buggers that bore tunnels all through the brain matter, affecting judgment, and altering behavior.” Meyer hefted the jug off the floor, and tottered back across the cave to the restrained patient on the slab. “Biting is the mechanism by which they’re most commonly transferred, because the saliva contains great quantities of their eggs.”

  “Ew.” Sandy watched Meyer swing the jug over the patient, slopping the pinkish medicine all over his body. The man coughed, lolling his head back and forth, as if to avoid the fumes. “He got bit. Look at his neck.”

  Meyer halted his application process. He stooped to gawk at the gruesome injury to the man’s throat. “Yes, I believe you’re right. He didn’t come about them naturally, by any means. I’d say we may have an epidemic of nurseworms on our hands.”

  “Why do they call them nurseworms?”

  “Ah, because they heal!” Meyer exclaimed, as he heaved a great splash of fluid over the patient’s face. “They tend to the injuries of the infected, and restore them quickly to health. From an evolutionary standpoint, it’s presumably meant to increase the longevity of their host, and therefore, the likelihood that the worm colony will be spread. I suppose there might even be some medicinal use for the little buggers if they didn’t always burrow straight for the brain, but the fact is, they’re just too dangerous to keep around.”

  Before Sandy could react, Meyer snapped a wooden matchstick against the back of his front tooth. Flame spat from his bullfrog mouth. The tiny flare arched through space to engulf the infested patient in a ball of fire. The warrior’s back arched, his legs straightened, and his wrists curled over his shackles. Sandy watched his fingers creeping through the flames. She covered her mouth and screamed for him, as roiling masses of worms came spewing from his eye sockets like bundles of hot wires.

  “What the hell’s going on down here?” A cloaked man cowered in the doorway. He shielded his face from the intense heat with a fold of tanned hide.

  “Nurseworms!” Meyer screamed, pointing at the inferno. “They’ve already made it inside. Go and tell Dr. Bendu that we’ve got nurseworms! Run!”

  Sandy shrieked with a mix of surprise and pain, as one of the other patients whom she’d dragged across the room seized her by her sprained ankle, and sunk his teeth all the way to the gums. Falling to the cave floor, she clawed the ground for a stone, a stick, anything to knock him loose of her, but there was nothing but powdery dirt raking through her nails. Using the heel of her other foot like a maul, she raised her leg, and slammed it down on the snarling head, again and again, until it lifted its face to leer at her through its worm-infested eyes. She jerked her foot loose of its grip, leaving it to ponder the sudden throbbing inside its skull, as dollops of eggs rode vines of slobber from its quivering lips to the cave floor.

  She crawled away, scooting backwards away from the growling thing, clutching a wound on her ankle that she knew was infected. Once she’d hitched her way to a safe distance, she bent over her ankle, and lifted her hand. Hundreds of yellow eggs, no bigger than grains of sand, were already bursting, one after another. Wriggling larvae disappeared into the crescent-shaped wound, and plunged into her flesh. “No,” she whispered, shaking her head from side to side.

  It wasn’t fair. She’d tried so hard to be one of the good ones, a hard worker and a helper. She stood by every move that she’d made, except for the moment when she was called up to testify. Was this her penance for that single slip? Was that all it took? Just like Margot, she’d committed a single sin, and for that she was unforgiven.

  Icy cold, yet hot, she choked in the astringent fumes as a cascade of pink liquid sluiced over her. She didn’t have to turn her head to know what was happening, or why. His labored breaths bubbled in his lungs, as the toad physician administered a dose of his only medicine to her deadly affliction. Gouts of gasoline slopped over her head and back, until mats of sodden hair hung down over Sandy’s face. She wished that she had a hair clip, a bobby pin, anything.

  She heard the snap of a match against Meyer’s front tooth. As the spitting stick flitted through the air, her last thought was that life had never played fairly, from Sandy’s beginning to her untimely end. No family, no children, no one left in the world to mourn her loss, she was simply going to vanish in an underground inferno like so much garbage, as if she’d never even existed at all. For all their uphill struggles, she and Ray had never once been lucky in life, but that had never stopped them from pushing forward, from being genuinely good and productive people, and from making positive plans for a future that never came to pass. Flames consumed her with a woof of expanding air. Sandy was going to be a nurse, maybe the best nurse that Briggstown had ever seen.

  ###

  22-D

  “By now, you’re probably wondering what in the hell is going on, and if you’ll ever know what’s going on before your time here runs out.” Lifting the rag from the antiseptic, Dr. Bendu encircled it with his lithe fingers, each decorated with an outgrown nail, and squeezed the brownish fluid back into the clay basin. He smiled down at his experiment, dabbing at the raw edges of her peeled scalp, stroking the dome of her exposed skull. Margot’s eyes winced at his touch. She shuddered, palpitating around the gag stuffed in her mouth.

  Dr. Bendu didn’t strike Nate as being a doctor at all, not one of medicine or otherwise. The utter disarray of his laboratory, and the impulsive, almost juvenile spurts by which his synapses fired, Dr. Bendu appeared to be more of a backstreet hustler who’d seized an opportunity to elevate himself to a status above his misled community. The man constantly referred to an old journal of quilled entries that were obviously conceived by a more enlightened mind.

  “Have you ever heard of the Mary Celeste?”

  The name did ring a bell. He couldn’t exactly recollect the strange tale, but he recalled the name as being that of a ship that had met with some sort of a noteworthy tragedy at sea. It seemed he’d read an account of the disaster at a pretty young age, maybe in one of those chapbooks of weird tales of science fiction and adventure that he’d enjoyed as a child.

  �
��She was a ghost ship. Perhaps the most famous ghost ship of all. En route from New York to Italy, the entire crew of the Celeste mysteriously vanished into thin air in November of eighteen seventy-two. When she was recovered, they found no sign of a struggle. She was fully stocked with provisions, and her cargo was untouched. There was even food sitting uneaten on the table. There was no reason to suspect mutiny, or famine. Everyone aboard her had simply disappeared.” Dr. Bendu jabbed a pointed finger in the direction of his workbench. “Fetch me a scalpel, please.”

  Nate edged over to the cluttered work surface. He felt hollow inside. His legs were wooden, and his mouth was dry. He’d hardly known the girl strapped to the examination table. In fact, he hadn’t known her at all. His profile of Margot was one force-fed to him by the others in her group, who attested she was some sort of a murderer, a selfish thief of human life who could not be trusted, but that didn’t make it any easier to participate in whatever deranged experiment this witchman had a mind to conduct.

  “It’s pink. Yes, that’s the one.”

  Nate’s quivering hand lifted a device that appeared to have once been a child’s toothbrush. A red-haired mermaid smiled up from the pink handle. In place of the bristles, which had been melted away, was a rusty, razor blade. Rapid breaths filled and emptied his lungs. His lips were numb. Turning robotically on his heel, unable to look away from the terrible instrument, he extended his arm, and Dr. Bendu snatched it from his hand.

  “Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs was in command of that vessel. I kind of like his name. Don’t you?” Dr. Bendu sloshed the homemade scalpel in the basin of filthy antiseptic. “His wife and infant daughter had come along with him on that particular voyage, in addition to a crew of mostly Germans. Arian Martens and Gottlieb Goodschaad. You don’t get much more German than that, do you?”