Infected

He had to do this. It was time to turn the Magnificent Seven into the Big Six.

Keeping the tweezers firmly gripped on the strange stem, he yanked up as hard as he could, yanked with the strength of a condemned man fighting for his life.

The tough, resilient stem stretched and stretched and stretched, until the tweezers-gripped head was a good two feet above his thigh. It stretched thin like taffy, bits of blood and clear slime masking the milky white color.

The stretching slowed, then stopped.

With a snarl, Perry pulled harder.

The unseen anchor ripped free; the stem shot out of his leg like a rubber band and wetly slapped against his wrist.

He looked at his thigh. A narrow opening, smaller than a pencil and already closing, sank down into his raw flesh like a tiny black hole. A rivulet of blood poured out, pushed up the tube like squeezed toothpaste as the thigh muscles expanded and closed the hole.

A smile broke across Perry’s face. A feeling of primitive success coursed through him, as did a limited blast of hope. He turned his attention to the strange white growth, the rounded head pinched firmly between the tweezers, the stem — or tail, or whatever the h.e.l.l it was — wrapped wetly about his wrist, held to his skin by b.l.o.o.d.y slime.

He moved his hand toward the light to get a better look at the growth. As he rotated his wrist, marveling at the strange thing, he felt a brief tickling sensation, almost imperceptible, like the smallest mosquito trying to land.

Perry’s eyes shot wide open with revulsion. He felt his stomach churn and his adrenaline surge...

The white thing’s tail squirmed like a snake trapped in a predator’s grip. With a shout of fear, Perry threw the tweezers into the bathtub where they clanked against the white porcelain and clattered near the

drain. The squirming, wet, wiggling, white thing remained wrapped about his wrist, the tail tickling his skin as the heavy, round, plastic-b.u.t.ton head hung limp and free, swinging wildly with Perry’s every movement.

Perry screamed, both in disgust and in panic, and violently snapped his wrist as if he were flinging mud from his fingers. The white thing hit the mirror with a little splat. It looked like a moving piece of cooked spaghetti

That thing was inside me! That thing was alive! It’s STILL alive! Perry instinctively slapped hard against the mirror, his huge hand rattling the gla.s.s with a loud bang. The squirming growth erupted as if he’d slammed a soft-boiled egg. Thin gouts of thickish purple gel spewed across the mirror. Perry yanked his hand away. Bits of white flesh, now limp and saggy, covered his palm, as did globs of the purple goo. Curling his lip in revulsion, he quickly turned to grab the towel that hung from the shower curtain rod — too quickly. His sudden move tangled him in the pants still hanging about his ankles. His balance gone, he fell forward.

He reached his hands out to brace his fall, but there was nothing to grab before his forehead smacked against the toilet seat. A sharp crack reverberated off the narrow bathroom’s walls, but Perry was out before he even heard the sound.

23.

PARASITOLOGY

Martin Brewbaker was no more. Wednesday, less than three full days since he’d been shot to death, and all that remained was a pitted black skeleton missing the legs from the knees down. That and delicate gossamer mold that now grew in little patches not only on the skeleton and on the table, but in spots all over the BSL-4 tent. Even Brewbaker’s talonhand had finally relaxed. It lay on the table, finger bones crumbling into a jumbled pile. Cameras inside the tent provided pictures — both live and still — that let Margaret watch the corpse’s final degenerative state.

She hadn’t felt such a black sense of foreboding since her childhood, during the ever-so-deadly p.i.s.sing contests between the United States and the Soviet Union. Mutually a.s.sured destruction, the promise that any conflict could rapidly escalate into full-blown nuclear war. Bang. Dead. Done.

She’d only been a young girl, but more than smart enough to grasp the potential disaster. It was funny, really, that back then her parents had thought she understood because of her high intelligence, as if only a gifted child could comprehend the imminent threat of nuclear war. But, as they had in years before and had in years since, probably always would, adults mistake children’s innocence for ignorance.

Margaret knew exactly what was going on, and so did most of her cla.s.smates. They knew the Communists were something to fear, something more tangible than the Thing Under the Bed. They knew that Manhattan, their home, would be among the first places destroyed.

Why do people think the end of the world is such a difficult concept for a child to understand? Much of childhood is spent in fear of the unknown, in fear of creeping shadows and lurking monsters and things that promise a long, ugly, and painful death. A nuclear war was just one more boogeyman that threatened to take them all away. Only this boogeyman also scared her parents and all the other grown-ups, and the children tuned in to that frequency of fear as surely as they tuned in to Bugs Bunny.

You could run from a monster, you could dodge the boogeyman, but the nuclear war was out there and out of their hands. It might come at

any moment. Maybe when she was on the playground at recess. Maybe when she sat down to dinner. Maybe after she went to bed.

Now I lay me down to sleep, I pray the Lord my soul to keep. If I should die before I wake, I pray the Lord my soul to take.

That hadn’t just been an abstract prayer in those days. It had been a possibility as real as the sunset. She remembered living in constant fear of that unknown. Sure she played, went to school, laughed and carried on with her friends, but the threat was always there. Each thready white contrail in the sky was a potential first finger of doom.