Infected

Chapter 23

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“I understand the precarious nature of the situation,” Amos said. “I just think that Murray is taking this too far. It’s one thing to keep a lid on something — it’s quite another to be completely understaffed. What the h.e.l.l happens if a hundred Martin Brewbakers suddenly pop up, and no one is prepared for it, let alone warned it could happen? You think a bomb is a terror weapon? It’s nothing compared to hundreds of Americans going psycho on each other. What happens if we keep this a secret until it’s too late to do anything about it?”

He walked back to his station, leaving Margaret to stare at the half body. The constant decomposition had partially relaxed Brewbaker’s talon hand — where it had once stood straight up, it now hung at fortyfive degrees, halfway to the tabletop. His blackening, liquefying body didn’t have much time left.

Margaret wondered about Amos’s comment; if there was some rogue lab with the technology to genetically engineer a parasite that could alter human behavior, wasn’t it already too late?

CAT SCRATCH FEVER

Perry awoke with a scream. His collarbone raged with pain, like he’d dragged a razor blade across the thin skin atop the bone, peeling back flesh like a cheese grater rubbed across some Cheddar. The fingers of his right hand felt cold, wet and sticky. A sunrise beam of light pierced his half-drawn curtains, lighting up the window frost crystallized on the pane. His room filled with the hazy glow of a winter morning. In the dim light, Perry stared at his hands; they looked to be covered with chocolate syrup, thick and tacky-brown. He fumbled with the lamp on his nightstand. The bulb’s glow lit up the room and his hands. It wasn’t chocolate syrup.

It was blood.

Eyes widening in horror, Perry looked at his bed. Thin streaks of blood dotted the white sheets. Still blinking sleep-crust from his eyes, he ran to the bathroom and stared in the mirror.

Trickles of dried blood and finger-smears of the same streaked his left pectoral, clotting in his thin blond chest hair. He’d torn the skin during the night, digging into the flesh with his fingernails, which were caked with blood and bits of dried skin. Perry looked down at his body. Blood smudges, some wet, some tacky and some completely dry, covered his left thigh.

With a sudden start of horror, he saw bomb-run droplets of blood on his underwear. Pulling the waistband out, he looked down. A sigh of relief — no blood on his t.e.s.t.i.c.l.es.

He’d torn into himself during the night, ripping away at the itches with an abandon that didn’t exist during waking hours. How had he not woken up? “Sleeping like the dead” was an understatement. And despite more than thirteen hours of sleep, he still felt tired. Tired and hungry.

Perry stared at himself in the mirror. Pale skin, nearly white, smeared with streaks of his own blood dried to a reddish black, as if he were the canvas for a child’s finger painting, or perhaps some ancient shaman bedecked for a tribal ritual.

The rashes had grown in the night. Each was now the size of a silverdollar pancake, and had taken on a coppery color. Perry craned his neck, trying to use the mirror to see the blemishes on his back and a.s.s. They looked okay, which was to say he hadn’t scratched them raw during the night. In truth, they looked anything but okay.

Not knowing what else to do, Perry took a quick shower to wash off the dried blood. The situation was f.u.c.ked up, obviously, but there was little he could do about it now. Besides, he had to be at work in a few hours. Maybe after work he’d actually break down and make a doctor’s appointment.

Perry scrubbed up, then applied the rest of the Cortaid, being very careful with the raw wounds on his leg and collarbone. He applied BandAids to both areas, then dressed and made himself a whopping breakfast. His stomach groaned with a ravenous hunger, more intense than his normal morning cravings. He made five scrambled eggs, eight pieces of toast, and washed everything down with two big gla.s.ses of milk.

Overall, the rashes felt fine, although they looked worse than ever. If they didn’t itch anymore, they couldn’t be that big of a deal. Perry felt certain the rashes would subside by day’s end, or at least be on their way out. Confident his body could handle the problem, he gathered up his battered briefcase and headed to work.

NERVES

Margaret looked at the readout with disbelief.

“Amos,” she called through the biosuit’s tinny microphone. “Come here and take a look at this.” Amos glided over, as unaffected by fatigue as ever, and stood next to her.

“What have you got?”

“I finished the a.n.a.lysis on samples taken from all over the body and found ma.s.sive quant.i.ties of neurotransmitters, particularly in the brain.”

Amos leaned forward to read the screen. “Excessively high levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin . . . my G.o.d, his system was out of control. What do you think did this to him?”

“That’s not my specialty, I’ll have to check into it. But from what I do know, excessive levels of neurotransmitters can cause paranoid disorders and even some psychopathic behaviors. And I’m not sure there has ever been a case doc.u.mented with levels this high.”

“The growth is controlling the victims with natural drugs. I wish we could get our hands on a live victim so we could see the insides of those d.a.m.n growths. This is twice now we’ve had victims to examine, but both times the growths have been completely rotted out. It’s almost as if the person who created these things intentionally added the rotting aspect, so it would be harder to examine the little b.u.g.g.e.rs.”

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