Contagious

Was the front door open?

It was. He was a good hundred feet away, and it was a little hard to see, but it looked as if something covered in snow was blocking the door.

Fifteen below zero, and the front door was open.

John put the postal van in park. He reached into his bag and pulled out his Taser. Could be a burglar in there. Did Cheffie have a dog? John couldn’t remember. He had a schedule to keep, but he didn’t feel right ignoring an open door in weather like this. He cautiously approached the house.

“Cheffie?” he called. Out here you really didn’t want to approach a house quietly. People took gun rights seriously in northern Michigan. You made a lot of noise and let them know you were coming, so as not to be mistaken for a robber if the home owner was sober, or for a deer if he was exceedingly drunk.

The door was open about eight inches. Underneath a light coating of snow, something long and thin and black blocked the door. John walked up on the porch for a closer look.

It was a hand.

A black, skeletal hand.

Despite a thick layer of blue post-office winter wear, John Burkle sprinted back to the van in near-Olympic-qualifying time.

BETTY JEWELL’S FACE

Betty Jewell picked the worst possible time in the history of mankind to wake up.

Eyes still closed, she wondered how many flavors of pain there were. Baskin-Robbins didn’t have s.h.i.+t on her.

Stay still.

She didn’t know where those words came from. Not her ears. With her ears she heard the clinking of instruments and the m.u.f.fled voices of a man and a woman. Those voices were connected with one of the new flavors.

They were cutting into her face, for f.u.c.k’s sake. Agony, pure h.e.l.l, but was it any worse than the fire rippling through her entire body? s.h.i.+t, did it even matter which was worse? Either one was enough to make her put a gun in her mouth and pull the trigger if it meant the pain would stop.

Betty, you have to save your soul.

Her soul? Couldn’t she just save her face? You don’t need a soul for senior pictures.

Oh, gawd, did it hurt. So much pain.

Kill them, Betty. Kill the people who are hurting you. Then all your pain will go away.

That voice. So beautiful. Was it the voice of G.o.d? If not, how else could she hear it? But really, it

For that, Betty would do anything.

Her right cheek rested on a hard pillow. They had put her on her right side, left arm still behind her in the cuff. The man and the woman hovered over her, f.u.c.king with her face, her once-beautiful face. She felt them cutting.

Which one was hurting her this bad? Dr. Braun? That Mexican b.i.t.c.h? It didn’t matter, they were in it together. They would pay together.

She slowly opened just her right eye. She saw nothing but blue. They had covered her face with a napkin or something. It felt as though the napkin also covered her left eye. Could she open it? She decided not to—she had an advantage only as long as they thought she was out. Whatever the napkin was, it didn’t quite reach to the table. If she looked down the table with only her right eye, she could see just under the napkin all the way down her right arm, all the way down to the leather cuff that held her fast.

She moved her left foot very slowly—they had uncuffed her feet to turn her on her side.

With all her weight on her right shoulder, she couldn’t pull her right hand without making her whole body lurch. But she could pull the left hand if she did it very, very slowly.

Just a little bit at a time, real slow, a steady, gradual increase of pressure.

“This doesn’t make sense,” the man said. The rubber suit m.u.f.fled his voice, but she could make out his words. He sounded very close, like he was leaning down right over the top of her covered face.

“She doesn’t have triangles,” the man said. “She doesn’t have the colored fibers of Morgellons. So what’s causing this excessive cell death?”

Betty kept pulling. It hurt. A new flavor added to the dessert bar. She felt a tearing sensation. Without a sound, she kept pulling, kept applying constant pressure. Skin slowly sloughed off her hand, allowing her to pull the hand through the cuff, like sliding off a b.l.o.o.d.y black glove. She felt chunks of ruined skin bunching up on the cuff’s far side. She knew she should have been horrified, but it was too late for that.

G.o.d helps those who help themselves.

She needed to act.

Without her skin, things would be slippery. She’d have to get it exactly right.

“Margaret, look at this!” the man said. “I... oh my G.o.d, I see something. There’s something moving in here, something really tiny. Put the magnifiers on, look.”

He took the Lord’s name in vain. Sinner. Betty heard the zip-zip of a rubber suit as the woman moved to stand next to the man.

“What the h.e.l.l is that, Amos?” The woman’s voice. Also right in front of her, also hovering right over her face. “It looks like... it looks like a nerve cell.”

“This is amazing,” the man said. “You can see it moving. It’s hard to tell with all the damage, but I think it’s following the V3 nerve toward the brain.”

Betty felt her left hand slide all the way inside the cuff. She didn’t pull it out, not yet, but now she could anytime she chose.

“Cut it out of there,” the woman said. “Maybe these things are what’s causing the rot. If we can get them out, maybe we can stabilize her.”

“Sample tray, please,” the man said. “Crawling organelle isolated and removed. Examining. Object tears into smaller pieces.... Margaret, look! These pieces look sort of like... muscle fibers. They’re... they’re moving on their own.”

“Get another one out of her face,” the woman said. “Let’s get some side-by-side video of these.”