The Variant Effect

by G. Wells Taylor

"Everybody fought," he grunted, stuffing a fist into a pocket. Damn hernia!

  "Rawhide saved a whole squad, didn't he, when a big pack of skin eaters caught them in the sewers?" This came from red hair.

  "In tunnels under a university," Borland corrected, wishing he could just pull the other bottle out and have a go. "We call them Biters."

  "You were there too?" asked another bagged-boy, this one a pretty blonde woman.

  "YeahÖI figured out that's where we'd find the hunting pack." Borland rubbed a hairy hand under his nose. "Didn't you hear our little soap opera earlier?"

  "If the skin eaters-er, Biters got him," the Asian fellow said. "Why didn't the Variant get into his blood when they ate his skin?"

  "It doesn't pass on in every case." Borland shrugged, adjusting his hernia on the other side. "Besides we all have it in us. You do too, from the water, and your mom's milk."

  "Really?" the fifth bagged-boy asked.

  "Yeah." Borland shrugged. "And back then when everyone was taking it for depression and anxiety too, it just built up in the system untilÖ" He clapped his hands, and two of the bagged-boys jumped back. "Look I forgot my camera up there," Borland lied.

  "Protocols sayÖ" the blonde bagged-girl started.

  "I'm Captain Joe Borland. I fought Variant back in the day," he declared, nodding at her, a little ashamed of his gut in front of all that smart and beautiful. "Rawhide gave the building an all clear. I think I can handle resealing it." He reached out and patted her shoulder thinking: After I have a drink or two. "You keep protocols in place on the street." He smiled, brought her close and whispered: "Tell the Chinese kid he's got his hood on backwards. You don't want him to smother."

  He sauntered toward the building. His hernias nagged at him terribly, but he didn't care. Borland couldn't shake a depression that came from seeing Hyde again. A drink would help.

  CHAPTER 5

  VARION - Stop the Fear. Start Living. Be the Real you!

  Borland remembered the slogan on his way up in the elevator. He burped whiskey and slipped the bottle back into his pocket. It was one ironic slogan. He remembered laughing about it back in the day-really gag reflex belly laughs with his bagged-boys, all cranked down at the stationhouse.

  He barely felt a pang thinking that a lot of those boys were boxed now, either killed by Biters or otherwise Variant Effected, or they'd gone off themselves with something triggering the chemicals inside their own skins. You'd never know once it started if a guy was just going to start washing his hands until all the soap was gone, or if you'd have to put a bullet in his eye when he tried to set you on fire.

  Varion looked simple enough, just like drugs always looked simple enough. It was marketed as a new generation of psychoactive chemicals that could be used to control a range of mental disorders. It was advertised as a convenient, once-daily pill for major depressive disorder and generalized anxiety disorders. Varion also worked to chemically modify areas of the brain responsible for fears, phobias and where obsessive-compulsive disorders were triggered. It was a cure-all that pacified areas of the brain key to personality and behavioral problems. Borland could never remember all the fine print names-amygdala or something and some frontal cortex doohickey. Varion was supposed to put the psychiatrists out of work.

  VARION: For a world that needs you 24-7.

  Borland remembered reading the sales job on the side of the pack when he was taking the damned stuff. Everyone was on something by the time Varion came along, so it was easy for people to switch. Why not? It was a new generation of antidepressant that didn't just lift your spirits: it cured you. And there were no side effects-at first.

  The elevator shuddered at the sixth floor, and he walked off. After a couple steps Borland's right heel started sticking, making a squishing noise like he'd stepped in gum. He dug into his pocket for the whiskey wondering why he put it away in the first place. The building was sealed. There was no one to impress.

  He walked across to the room with the blood angel and leaned on the doorframe staring down. The stain had a waxy gleam now where the light from the window caught the thick layer of accelerant. Borland shrugged.

  Varion had lived up to the hype. Mental wards emptied after the first two years it was being prescribed-even before the FDA approved it for over-the-counter distribution in year four-roughly day 1,463. The time around what happened was counted in days. It was never a very accurate way of doing things. Borland could never figure it out, but people used numbers to emphasize how bad things were getting. It wasn't until years later that they broke it down to something that made more sense. The day before meant the time leading up to what happened, the day after, covered what followed, and everything in between was referred to as the day. Back in the day, things went to hell. Borland was talking about it that way when people were still taking potshots at: "first case was seen day 1,684 in China, but they hushed it up and we kept taking Varion for years." He hated that kind of thing.

  Competing pharmaceutical companies and unlicensed overseas manufacturers dropped their traditional lines of you-altering substances and started making cheaper generic Varion knockoffs: Veritru, Varax, Vanac, you name it. Companies unable to make the cut went bankrupt despite government bailouts. Then, the nail in the coffin for traditional psychiatric medicine: the vice-president of the United States announced that Varion had completely cured him of the anxiety issues that drove him to have sex with an underage male prostitute. People ran to their doctors. The market was already primed for a change.

  They found out too late that the human body couldn't filter the stuff like normal chemicals. Some was peed out, but the majority of it was absorbed into tissues where it built up over time. Nor did they understand its resistance to traditional water treatment methods after it went into the sewer, or that it showed an amazing ability to bond with other psychoactive chemicals and chemicals generally that had entered the environment in similar fashion. It even formed complex molecules by bonding with naturally occurring elements.

  Later, they discovered that when the altered or hybrid Varion molecules returned through the tap or food or environment and were ingested, they started to interact with Varion and other chemicals that had built up in the tissues. But all that was really understood too late, the day after.

  There was a wide range of effects that were impossible to predict-some outright fatal and others that radically altered psychology and behavior. Following the first couple hundred tragic cases, when scientists figured out they didn't fit the traditional human horror show, the UN banned the sale of Varion after it had been on the market internationally for eight years or on about day 2,931.

  Scientists later blamed that action for what happened next.

  Going cold turkey or replacing Varion with older psychoactive chemicals during withdrawal caused a pharmaceutical backlash as the body extracted Varion stored in body tissues. These interacted with the hybrid Varion to produce the limbic storm. Everything went out of balance.

  Borland understood that to be an amplification of the disorders that Varion was designed to cure or the activation of new or latent problems that did not exist prior to the consumption of the drug. All kinds of things started happening. Fingernail biters suddenly chewed down past the first knuckle and on from there until they bled out. The same was true for any neurosis, anxiety disorder or compulsive thought or action, regardless of magnitude or pathology. Governed by an uncontrollable limbic storm, these minor to major disorders presented in suicidal, benign or malignant psychopathic behaviors.

  VARION: Don't sweat the small stuff.

  As Borland often said, "The world went ape back in the day."

  Thanks to sensationalist media the public called it the Variant Effect.

  CHAPTER 6

  Hyde willed the van to go faster from where his wheelchair was locked in place behind the driver. But the traffic had frozen around them, was barely moving. He could see that through the many tinted windows. They'd barely made two blocks before the gri
dlock. As they stopped and started, edged forward and stopped again, exhaust fumes crept in and mixed with the strong vapor from the disinfectant he used on his hands. The smell reminded him of BZ-2 gas. It was making him nauseous.

  He just wanted to get back to the nursing home, shut the curtains, latch the door-they wouldn't let him lock it-and plug into War Eagle. He was at Level 42 in the online combat simulator that passed for a life in Hyde's-life. He was not a happy man. Hyde spent most of the year in isolation. His condition left him prone to infection and alienation. He was on permanent suicide watch.

  Twenty years had passed since the day after and while it crossed his mind, he couldn't quit now. He swore an oath with other survivors back in rehab and even when most of them ate their guns, he wouldn't. His word was all the Biters left.

  There were times he wanted to write that word on a bullet andÖ But War Eagle took him somewhere he could use his skills despite his handicaps. People spoke to him blindly over the headset and called him captain without clenching their teeth on a mouthful of puke. He knew he was nothing to look at.

  Hyde's doctors hadn't expected him to live. He frequently laughed to himself that they were about 90 percent right.

  He considered the term Skin Eaters to be misleading. While it described the end result, 'Biting' was the most memorable part of his experience with them. The actual 'eating' was done somewhere calm and shadowy after the skin was carried far from the victim's screams.

  While the pack held you, Alpha Biters broke the surface of the skin with incisors and canines; ripped up an edge they could set their molars in before using all their strength to tear it off in strips. There was evidence that some used tools, broken glass, jagged metal-but that was rare. Biters bit and started ripping.

  It was Borland's fault.

  He was a hard drinker back on the regular force. Hyde was too in the days before, but never on the job. They joined the Variant Squads at the start of the day, and when the pressures built up and sent people scrambling for crutches, Borland was already there. Hyde understood the bagged-boys needing to crank up to fight people who wanted to eat their skins-but they needed captains for leadership. Someone had to stay sharp taking 20 cranked men and women into danger. Amyl nitrates, PCP, crack and alcohol were the crutches of preference back in the day.

  Cranking stoked bravado and numbed the conscience. Bagged-boys had to gun down grandpas and little girls tricked out on Variant-presenting any number of violent or homicidal compulsions and phobias. Cranking was also rumored to guard against the Variant Effect, so it was tolerated.

  Varion accumulations had risen to toxic levels in everyone the day before. If you hadn't taken the drug to cure your social ill, you were getting it in the food and water. Biters were just one form of Variant Effect. Others acted on impulses that ramped up paranoia to murderous extremes or threw people into repetitive frenzies of behavior that ended in heart attack or stroke. It was anxiety personified.

  Hyde rinsed glasses back in the days before. He enjoyed the soothing repetitive ritual. To him the water was life and trouble. The cup was his mind. Fill it up. Dump it out. Feel better. He almost wished the Variant Effect had presented in him that way.

  After the Biters skinned him the rinsing compulsion was gone. He was lucky and didn't catch the dermatophagia as Biter victims often did. Instead he had anxiety attacks set off by damaged nerves registering phantom pains and sensations. At such times his throat closed, his heart hammered and he was crippled by an overwhelming urge to seek cover-to hide. The attacks were a manifestation of his damaged condition and awareness that he was a skinless freak that should be dead. It wasn't the Variant Effect; it was perfectly natural terror.

  His career ended. The scarring left his legs atrophied-forced him into a wheelchair and allowed only brief forays upright with canes and braces. Hyde didn't debate early retirement. His peers suspected that the Biters had poisoned him, thought their Variant was lurking and would someday turn him. When Biter victims turned it happened quickly, often during skinning-his coworkers knew that. And it didn't matter that two decades had passed since the attack. They feared him because he was ugly. Probably drew straws to drive him where he needed to go.

  The Biters had taken most of Hyde's skin and the removal was anything but surgical and neat. The ripping action took connective tissue and muscle too. Hyde's lips, eyelids and scrotum had gone in the bargain. In many places they had stripped him to the hypodermis. He should have died. The doctors cultured grafts from underlying layers of dermis. They were afraid that disturbing any remaining skin would send Hyde into shock. That left him with skin in the crack of his ass and between his toes. The cultured sheets of dermis did well enough for patching things in broad sections, but it hardened and cracked at the joints.

  That left him prone to infection. The first days after, he almost died so many times that he lost count. In the end, those areas they'd worked on around his back, buttocks, thighs and torso were a Frankenstein's patchwork of partially failed skin grafts. Eventually he took himself off the waiting list for a face transplant. One doctor said they were growing him a set of ears and he just laughed and said unless the ears were six feet tall and had sleeves he didn't want them.

  A fresh rage ran through him, curled his skinless hands in knotted scars. This was Borland's fault. The drunk got him skinned and the bastard kept him alive after it.

  CHAPTER 7

  Borland tore his eyes away from the blood angel-freed; he took two staggering steps into the hall then opened himself to his spooks. Nobody had a choice back in the day. He had to do his job. People got wild with the Variant Effect. Once it presented, there was no turning back. And skin eaters were the worst.

  I shot an old woman in the face. He took a drink. I popped a kid's head with a crowbar. He staggered. I set a man on fire. He took another drink.

  Skin eaters had to work fast to reach alpha status before their injuries killed them. That competition ripped scarlet slashes across their faces; skinned their naked chests and bodies. It was awful what they did to each other. But often the squad got there when the Variant had just taken hold. When they still looked like people in the neighborhood.

  That's why the squad got cranked. And getting caught was bad, of course. Losing was not an option you could contemplate without a head full of something. But winning was impossible to face clean and sober. The skin eaters still looked like people at first, and without the Variant Effect, you knew they would still be people: sitting down to dinner, going out for a drink, reading a newspaper or singing at a third grade Christmas Concert.

  Borland sipped the whiskey, walked along the hall away from the elevator.

  You had to kill everything that came your way. Out of bullets, use a hammer. No hammers? Knock them down and use your heels. Just kill them. Kill them.

  Even that, he could take. He could justify. Bunch of damn strangers with bad luck. Better them than me. Put them out of their misery. It was for the best.

  But all of that was just empty talk when your own squad got skinned. When bagged-boys you cranked with got turned and you had to put them down.

  Borland first signed up for the special Variant Squads because he was up to his ass in debt and they offered hazard bonuses. The squads were formed from metro police and emergency service first-responders who were dealing with anything from obsessive-compulsive hand washers at the bottom of swimming pools to trichotillomaniacs in full limbic storm knocking down unsuspecting pedestrians and yanking the hair out of their scalps and groins. The anorexics died off early, and a shoot-on-sight rule was adopted for pyromaniacs. Drug and gambling addicts took care of themselves. In time the special squads rated the Variant Effect based on a scale of destruction. Variant intensified neuroses, every anxiety or primitive compulsion with unpredictable results. None of it was good, but some was hell on earth.

  The worst had been around for quite a while before it showed its skinless face. Nobody knew it was happening. Like so many obsessions, their rit
ual was done in secret.

  Borland took two good pulls on the bottle, slipped it into his jacket. He staggered over to the wall and braced himself against the memories.

  Dermatophagia was a compulsion to eat hangnails, scabs and dead skin to reduce feelings of stress and anxiety. The Variant Effect turned it into a whole new subclass of humans.

  Skin eaters fell into three categories:

  Kamikaze self-ritualized, gnawing and picking their own extremities to the bone, or at least until blood loss killed them. They were only dangerous if you tried to stop them. The treatment was induced coma or sympathetic bullet.

  Biters were every which way ugly and were shot on site. They were semiconscious, with ape intelligence. The limbic storm increased the dermatophagic response to stress, while turbo-charging the survival instinct. That left a large terrified primate that could only relieve its anxiety by eating other people's skin.

  They traveled in hunting packs, working together, seeking out relief for their discomfort as a group. They communicated with gesture and body language, and by the varied vocal expression of their single obsession: "Skin." They used the word: hissed it, barked it, and howled it for everything. "Skin" kept the pack together on the hunt. "Skin" focused them on their prey.

  Close proximity to other Biters led to violent interaction. Skin fights. They settled scores and worked out the pack hierarchy by getting into each other's faces. There was an Alpha male or female leader, sometimes more than one. Since skin eating caused and cured their problems, such competitive skin fights left them ragged and raw from the bellybutton up. Some were so degraded by competition and interaction that they were stripped to the muscle. No lips, ears or eyelids. Monsters. They didn't live long; but they lived long enough. The treatment: shoot on sight.

  The third kind, Stalker, was possibly the most dangerous of dermatophage. They looked and behaved like anyone. The Variant Effect on them was more subtle and extreme. They retained their characters and humanity and rationalized their obsession. Awareness demanded survival, so the relief of their stress, their ritual was performed on victims in secret always, in hidden places-sometimes in the privacy of their own homes. The treatment: Kill them if you could find them.