by Jason Parent
Envisioning the nurse’s round, fat-apple bottom almost made him forget about the ceiling. Then it moved again, and his attention was once again redirected.
Or is something moving on it?
He sat up and squinted. “What is that?” Something tiny was squirming around above him. He strained to see it better. The squirming thing came in clearer as it fell from the ceiling toward him.
It landed on his chest.
“Ngahh!” Monty gasped and stared at the tiny, peachy-pink maggot that landed over his breast pocket. He tried to blow it off, not wanting to touch it, but the critter had a good grip. It lifted one end of itself, what Monty assumed was its head. It was featureless except for a mucous liquid glistening on its skin. He studied it with equal parts amazement and revulsion as it danced its worm dance. And as he watched it, it seemed to watch him.
The maggot-worm’s head stretched. A point formed on top, angling outward like a spade. Monty had seen enough. He was just about to flick the boogery thing away when its head dove tip first into his shirt.
“Jesus!” Monty yelped as he instinctively tugged his shirt away from his skin. The fleshy maggot-worm flew off his shirt and fell to the floor beside his examination table.
He stood up and stomped it, smiling with sadistic gratification. Then he looked up, and his smile vanished. Maggot-worms, easily thousands of the disgusting buggers, wiggled and writhed between miniscule stucco stalactites.
Monty’s feelings of disgust grew into a throat-tightening unease. Unease morphed into dread when he heard the screams. One, then another, then another: all around him were people screaming, people banging and falling and flapping just outside his privacy curtain – people whose silhouettes told tales of pain and confusion.
Those people stood between Monty and the exit. He slipped silently from beside the table, never taking his eyes off the ceiling.
Thump.
Something heavier than a maggot-worm and a lot squishier landed near his foot. He looked down to see a slightly longer maggot-worm tethered to what looked like a wrinkled, fleshy walnut. A testicle? Monty dry heaved, but even as he did, he couldn’t take his eye off the flopping ball and chain. The nutshell cracked in a long, vertical slit, which widened, revealing the eye beneath. Iris and pupil shifted to look up at Monty.
He held back the vomit in his throat. Nurse Valentina busted through his curtain, shouting and pirouetting and nearly taking Monty down with an elbow. One of those maggot-things had landed on the voluptuous nurse’s cheek. It tunneled into her skin like a drill boring through wood. Nurse Valentina tried to yank it free. She had a firm grasp on the wretched critter between her thumb and forefinger, but when she tried to pull it out of her face, it broke in half. The portion between her fingers disappeared into her thumb. The other half disappeared into her face.
The nurse fell to the ground. Foam sputtered from her mouth, making a sound akin to gargling mouthwash. Her eyelids fluttered like moth wings, and her head jerked to one side. Every muscle flexed. Every vein protruded.
Then she stopped gurgling. Her body went limp.
“Fuck this!” Monty shouted.
He threw back his curtain and jumped back just as another nurse fell onto the floor directly in front of him, convulsing like Nurse Valentina had before going limp. Another staff member did the same closer to the exit.
He heard the sound first, the pitter-patter of raindrops splatting on a hard surface. Everywhere, maggot-worms poured down.
Monty decided that was his cue. He sprinted toward the infirmary door as the nurse who’d fallen beside it slowly rose. The wriggling critters were spotting the woman’s scrubs. He kept a wide berth as he passed.
He was beginning to think his day couldn’t get any worse when something landed in his hair. He didn’t know much about the strange animals, but he attributed the seizures and potential death to the appearance of maggot-worms on the ceiling. He grabbed a clump of his sandy-brown hair and ripped it from his scalp, dropping it as soon as he did. He wasted no time checking whether he’d torn the worm out of his hair or if it had even been a worm at all, instead choosing to keep on running. If it had burrowed into his noggin, he would know it soon enough.
He blasted through the infirmary’s double doors and collided with a man with a black cross painted on his forehead. As their shoulders butted, Monty spun sideways but did not fall. “You don’t want to go in there,” he said, gasping for air.
He slowed and slid against the corridor wall, stopping to catch his breath and check himself for maggot-worms. When he looked up, he recognized several people standing behind the fruitcake with the Crayola paint-by-number cross on his head.
“Stearns!” Monty sprinted toward the friendly face, with three more standing behind the first, all ASAP guards he knew to varying degrees. Johnson, Kelly, and…that other guy, the Russian…Belgrade. But when he saw the rest of Stearns, he slowed.
The guard’s foot was wrapped in gauze. Blood had soaked through the bandages. The foot’s shape was all wrong. “What the hell happened to you?” Monty asked. “Your foot looks like ground sausage.”
“This guy happened,” Stearns said, jabbing the butt of his assault rifle into the small of the dirty stranger’s back, but it was Stearns who grunted. “The fucker blew a good chunk of my foot off.”
Monty gave the stranger a once-over, for the first time noticing that he was handcuffed. But whoever the man was, he wasn’t the fucker with the fork.
“Well, it looks like you got this one’s shoe,” he said, noticing the man’s filthy woolen sock. “A fair trade for part of your foot?” He looked the man up and down. “Wait a second…. Do I know you? Fuck, I do know you! That cross is a dead giveaway!”
“You know this guy?” Stearns asked.
“Well, no,” Monty said. “Not really. He blocked my car on the way in today. Fucker just stood there, trying to stare me down or something. I knew the bastard was going to be nothing but trouble.”
Stearns smiled wickedly. “Not anymore, he won’t.”
“And that other asshole?” Monty scanned the group, shaking and talking quickly. “The one who did this to my eye?”
“Dead,” Stearns said. He grimaced.
“I wouldn’t be so sure,” the strange man said.
“You shut up!” Stearns shouted, wincing. He took a step toward the prisoner, his face going beet red. He looked as though he wanted to kill the stranger, and if Monty knew his coworker as well as he thought he did, Stearns would have done just that if given a clear shot and a room empty of witnesses.
“Guys, can we talk about this later?” Monty asked. “Something very weird and very frightening is going on behind those doors.” He pointed at the infirmary’s entrance. “And I don’t want to be around when what’s in there comes out here.”
“Why?” Kelly asked. He was a burly man, as Texan as Texans come, from his black cowboy hat down to his black boots. The flamethrower strapped to his back, however, Monty found not convincingly Texan. “What’s behind those doors?”
“I don’t hear nothin’,” Johnson added.
Monty listened. He didn’t hear anything either. The screams had stopped. So had the raindrops and the seizures, apparently. “Don’t ask me how or why, mates, but that room right there is crawling with creepy crawlies: nasty, snot-covered maggot-worms.”
“Worms?” Johnson asked, the corners of his mouth twitching. He shook his head and walked toward the infirmary doors. “And I thought you’s a man, Monty. Been in the thick of it and all that, right?” He laughed, pushing open the door with his back as he egged on his partner. “You hear this shit, Kelly? Monty here’s afraid of—”
Johnson froze midturn, propping the door open with his boot. “Worms?” His face paled. The floor of the infirmary looked like the bottom of a grain silo before harvest, except the grains were moving, little squiggly lines writhin
g all over it. Nurse Valentina stood in the center of a large mass of night crawlers. Bigger worms dropped off her body like wet noodles, plopping on the ground and squirming their way toward Johnson.
Monty gagged, fear and vomit rendering him speechless. The worms weren’t dropping off her body. They were dropping from her body. And they were getting closer to Johnson, who seemed caught in a stupor. One worm mounted the toe of his boot.
Monty finally found his voice. “Get back! Don’t let them touch you!”
Johnson seemed mesmerized by the undulating nastiness on his boot. When it tunneled into his boot, straight through a steel toe, Johnson was too late in his efforts to shake it off.
The others watched, aghast, as the maggot-worm disappeared into the guard’s shoe. They did nothing as Johnson screamed and tried to pry his boot off. Whether consciously or unconsciously, they all stepped back.
Sampson, an ASAP guard who had started at the research center at the same time as Monty, came waddling up the hallway, a lantern-shaped device swinging between his legs. “That scientist who breached the clean room, whatever he is now, he broke through the wall of the clean room’s air vent and got into the central air-circulation system! The probe I sent in couldn’t trace him as far as he moved. He could be anywhere!”
“I think we found him.” Stearns aimed his rifle at the nurse. “Belgrade, keep an eye on the prisoner.”
Sampson yelped, stopped short, and almost stumbled. He dropped the scanner, pulled his AK-47 off his shoulder, and aimed it at Johnson. “What’s wrong with Johnson? Oh geez, oh geez. Not another Romanov.” Sampson turned to run.
“Stand your ground, soldier,” Stearns ordered.
Monty stepped back as Stearns turned his weapon on Sampson. Stearns was the CO on shift. Disobedience meant termination, and with Stearns, one never knew if that meant just one’s job.
Sampson took another step then froze. He turned around. Monty heard his coworker’s stomach turning and saw the sweat pouring down his forehead. His whole body shook worse than Johnson, who was presently in full-seizure mode.
Sampson had been there when Romanov attacked Kleinhoffer, another guard who’d been called in to assist at Bio-Lab 347. Monty had heard some of the madness over his portable radio but hadn’t been able to separate facts from hysterics. Apparently, someone had torched Kleinhoffer. Romanov, too. That might have been Sampson himself, or that sorry-ass bloke in handcuffs. He wondered if it was connected to those worms and figured it had to be. What did you see, Sampson? What did you do?
Sampson’s lips trembled. His voice shook as he said, “Johnson’s not human anymore.” He stepped closer to Kelly. “You have to light him up,” he said softly. He lunged for the nozzle. “We have to burn him!”
Kelly tried to push Sampson back, but the latter had hold of the torch before Kelly could pull it away. Sampson pressed down on Kelly’s forefinger, already bent over the trigger. Flame spurted along the floor, up in the air, everywhere in sporadic clouds. Stearns hobbled out of range, assisted by Belgrade. Their CO left his prisoner in peril, though the man with the black cross was quick to get himself out of it. The prisoner started down the hallway, trying to seize an opportunity for escape, but Belgrade tripped him. He crashed down to the floor, twisting sideways to let his shoulder break his fall with a dull thump.
While Kelly and Sampson wrestled with the nozzle, a random burst blasted toward the seizing Johnson. He ignited with a whoosh and immediately bubbled and crackled. That seemed to ease Sampson’s nerves a bit. He threw his hands up and stepped away from Kelly.
“What the hell are you doing?” Monty snapped as he cracked Sampson in the jaw. Sampson rocked on his feet, but Monty grabbed him before he could fall into the funeral pyre. Even as he held Sampson up with his left hand, he reeled back for another haymaker with his right. Belgrade grabbed his arm and prevented a second blow.
“He was infected,” the square-jawed Russian said in a tone that sounded as angry as a bulldog’s growl but really was just the way he talked. “Sampson did what he had to do. He did what we should have wasted no time doing.”
“Agreed,” Stearns said from where he was sitting atop the fallen prisoner.
“Have you all gone mad?” Monty got right up into Belgrade’s face. “Johnson was still Johnson. He didn’t look any different to me until that asshole scorched him with a bloody flamethrower.”
“They’re right,” the stranger said, his voice strained beneath Stearns’s heavy frame.
“Oh, hell, even the fucking dero has an opinion on the matter. Well, that’s just fucking great! Not a single one of you has any fucking clue what you’re—”
Nurse Valentina burst through the infirmary’s double doors and latched her fingers into Sampson’s cheeks – not on his cheeks or around his cheeks but into them. Monty blinked then blinked some more, hoping his eye was playing tricks on him. Human fingers didn’t just pass through human cheeks.
Nope, that’s what I’m seeing.
Sampson screamed as the nurse’s milky hands melded with his dark skin, swirling like the froth atop a cappuccino. The pigments blended so quickly, Monty could no longer tell where Valentina’s hands ended and Sampson’s face began. Everything melted together like Harlequin ice cream left out on a hot summer day.
Whatever process caused the flesh to appear to be melting turned to actual melting when Kelly sprayed them with fire. He held down the trigger long and hard, his teeth gnashing, and the conjoined infected went up like cherries jubilee.
“Jesus fucking Christ, mate! You’re going to burn the whole goddamn facility down!” With no one holding him back, Monty rushed Kelly.
Sampson and his forever-entwined lover were sizzling like bacon on a stove top, though they smelled more like roast pork. Monty kept his distance from the blaze and managed to refrain from throwing another haymaker.
“Look,” he said, “I’ll be the first to admit that that was some seriously fucked-up shit, but has everyone here gone completely homicidal? There are doctors here. We’re supposed to help sick people, not charbroil them.”
Someone grabbed Monty’s shoulder. He turned around to find Stearns back on his feet, with Belgrade babysitting the prisoner, who was now standing behind him.
“You saw what was happening,” Stearns said. “It’s some kind of mutation, and damn us all to hell, it’s loose in this facility. We’ve got to destroy it before it infects us. Are you with me?”
The hall went silent, and for the first time, Monty noticed his teeth were chattering. If he was terrified, the adrenaline pumping through him kept him on his game. He’d seen the worms. He’d seen the seizures they caused. He’d even seen Nurse Valentina, a bloody waste as that was, melt over Sampson as if she were cheese on chicken parmigiana. It didn’t make sense. None of what he’d seen made any damn sense. Viruses, even those the world’s governments tried to claim were dead and buried, didn’t do the type of shit he just witnessed to ordinary blokes. Leprosy or Ebola might make one’s flesh fall off, maybe even get a little melty for all Monty knew, but he was sure as shit that neither disease acted that quickly or that freakishly.
He looked from Stearns to Kelly to the stranger they had in custody. They all had stepped away from the infirmary doors and the human bonfires. Monty’s teeth still chattered, though a little less, and his body was trembling, but he felt no shame for being afraid. After taking a cleansing breath, he asked as calmly as he could, “What the fuck is happening here? Does anyone know? I mean, does anyone really know?”
Stearns shook his head. “We don’t know.”
“Sure you do,” the stranger said. “You had to go meddling where your stupid, meddling noses didn’t belong.”
“Belgrade,” Stearns said.
Belgrade slugged the dirty vagrant in the stomach. The man grunted then grinned through obvious pain.
Stearns continued. “That scientist
, the one who attacked you, he infected himself with some sort of…hell, I don’t know. You’ve seen what it does as much as I have. Some sort of biological weapon, if I had to guess.”
“Certainly,” the stranger said, “in hands like yours—”
At a look from Stearns, Belgrade punched the man again, knocking the wind from his lungs.
“All we know,” Stearns said as though he’d never been interrupted, “is that it’s a nasty motherfucker, can spread through contact, and seems to be susceptible to fire. At least, fire’s done the trick so far. Belgrade, run the scanner.”
“I’m not really sure how,” Belgrade said, “but I’ll try.”
Monty watched as Belgrade played with the device Sampson had brought down the hall. He hit the same button five times on the keypad at its base. “Everyone, close your eyes,” he said. “The girl who made this said it might blind you if you don’t.”
The machine sparked a light at its center, which rapidly grew in intensity as if it were a star imploding. “Initiating scan for biological contamination,” a robotic female voice said.
Monty pressed his eyes shut though he was tempted to open them as a wave of heat permeated his body. A soft boom and an electric sizzle sent vibrations through him.
“Scan completed,” the robot female said. An image of the hallway and everyone in it, as well as the inside of the infirmary, normal as could be, appeared at the top of the scanner. For almost a minute, it remained silent. Monty assumed it could not find what it was designed to look for.
That has to be a good sign. He allowed himself a glimmer of hope. But what about the worms?
