Contagious (23 page)

Postal workers. That’s who.
He drove the truck’s right wheel into a frozen rut in front of the Franklin place. Yesterday this had been a mud puddle filled with chunks of brown ice. That was because it had been fifty degrees for two straight days. If you don’t like the weather in Michigan . . .
John stuffed the Franklins’ mail into their metal mailbox, then drove to the next house. Houses were pretty spaced out around here, at least a couple of acres apart. The next house belonged to Cheffie Jones. Cheffie had always been a little off. Hit in the head in an industrial accident or something. Pretty much kept to himself. Plenty of time to buy shit on eBay, though—John put four small boxes into Cheffie’s supersize mailbox. Sometimes Cheffie came out to get his mail and say hello. John looked toward the house, but didn’t see any movement. He started to drive on, then stopped short and looked back.
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 shit 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 muffled voices of a man and a woman. Those voices were connected with one of the new flavors.
They were cutting into her
face,
for fuck’s sake. Agony, pure hell, but was it any worse than the fire rippling through her entire body? Shit, 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 God? If not, how else could she hear it? But really, it didn’t matter who was speaking, because the voice promised her that the pain would stop.
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, fucking with her face, her once-beautiful face. She felt them cutting.
Which one was hurting her this bad? Dr. Braun? That Mexican bitch? 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 muffled 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 bloody 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.
God 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 God, 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 hell 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.”
Betty waited. She waited until she felt the scalpel slide in again, waited until she was sure she felt it hit her cheekbone.
She waited for that, so she knew
exactly
where it was.
Keeping her head and body as still as she could, Betty Jewell slid her hand out of the cuff.
Margaret watched Amos’s
deft, delicate technique as he cut away the rotting flesh, searching for another crawling nerve.
The high-powered magnifying goggles mounted in front of her visor showed Betty’s open wound with amazing detail, a super-closeup landscape of blood vessels, muscle, veins, bone and black rot. And amid all that, something moving. So
tiny.
Dendrite-like arms seemed to stretch out like an amoeba’s pseudopods. The arms contracted, pulling the body forward, the tail dragging behind.
Just like the camera mounted in Margaret’s helmet, the magnifying goggles would record their own feed. Judging by the rapid rate of rot, watching that video might be the only way she could study these things because they wouldn’t be around for long.
And neither would Betty, unless they could do something drastic.
“This isn’t like Dawsey at all,” Margaret said. “Unless this is some larval stage, something that was already over before we examined him.”
“You’ve got me,” Amos said. “Wait, here’s another one. Look at that, crawling along the afferent nerve. Let me get it out of there.”
Margaret watched closely. Amos’s scalpel danced around a second patch of black rot, cutting it out in a neat circle.
Then a flash of red. A blur, something that looked huge through the high-magnification glasses. That sudden movement, like it was flying at her face, made Margaret rear back.
She heard a snap and a gurgling sound.
Margaret whipped her right hand up and under the magnifying goggles, knocking them off her head.
Betty Jewell sat up.
Not all the way up—her right hand remained locked in the cuff, but her bloody, skinless left hand waved free, holding a scalpel.
Amos’s gloved hands clutched frantically at his suit-covered throat, grabbing, trying to claw through the black PVC. Blood sprayed against the inside of his visor. Drips of it leaked down the black suit’s outer surface, leaked from the small hole in his suit.
He took a half step back. Betty lunged forward again with the scalpel, her restrained right arm making the movement awkward and off balance. The scalpel’s tip sliced through his suit, just above his left pectoral.
Betty gathered her strength for another strike.
Margaret grabbed Amos’s shoulders and yanked him away from the trolley. She pulled far too hard for the confined space—they smashed into the trailer wall and fell to the floor. Amos landed on top. He kicked and kept grabbing at his throat, gloved fingers trying to reach inside the hole and tear it open, but the blood-slick PVC fabric wouldn’t give him purchase.
“Amos! Get off me!” Margaret pushed and pulled at the small man, trying to free her legs.
She looked up to see Betty slide her knees underneath her body. The girl rose up, kneeling on the autopsy trolley, right arm still trapped by the cuff. She leaned toward the cuff, then crossed her skinless left hand over the inside of her right elbow.
“Oh, God . . . ,” Margaret hissed.
Betty yanked backward, twisting to the right, throwing all her weight against the cuff.
Her right hand slid free. Chunks of sloughed skin fell to the floor with a wet slap. Momentum carried her over the trolley’s left side. She hit the white floor, droplets of blood splattering across the autopsy chamber.
Amos’s movements slowed.
Margaret managed to kick her legs free. She pushed Amos off, then stood, her back against the trailer wall.
Betty leaned her right shoulder against the sink and pushed herself up with wobbling legs. Blood streaked her blue gown, the only clothing on an otherwise-naked body. The right side of her face was mostly cut away, black-and-white cheekbone blazing under red smears, bits of jellyish rot still clinging to what little skin remained.
Margaret just stared. She couldn’t move a muscle. She wanted to run, to scream, but she couldn’t even draw a breath.
Blood dripped from Betty’s skinless fingers. She still held the scalpel in her left hand, cradled it more than gripped it, trying to keep the stainless steel steady against exposed, blood-slick muscles.
Betty smiled. Only with the left half of her face, of course, because the muscles on the right side were mostly gone.
“You
bish,
” she slurred. “Lesh shee how you like it.”
She shuffled forward, trying to keep her balance, bare feet leaving bloody streaks on the white floor.
The autopsy trolley was the only thing separating her from Margaret.
Betty reached down with her right hand and rolled it out of the way. She pulled her hand back, but her right pointer finger stayed behind, stuck to the trolley in a red and black mess of rotted meat and jutting bone.
Betty half-smiled again.
She stood only three feet away.
She took a small shuffle-step forward
Margaret still couldn’t will her muscles to move, not even a bit. Her breath returned in a sucking gasp, then shot out in a ragged scream that sounded impossibly loud inside her suit helmet.
But not so loud that she didn’t hear the gunshot.
The right side of Betty’s head, the undamaged side, exploded outward in a fist-size hole that sprayed blood, brains and bone on the back wall and into the sink. She dropped like a cloth puppet.
“Margaret!”
Clarence’s voice, muffled.
“Margaret, are you okay? Did she cut you?”
She turned to his voice. He wore his black biohazard suit. Gitsh and Marcus, also wearing suits, were right behind him. Clarence’s gloved hand held a pistol, still smoking. He knelt by her side, the gun pointed down and away from her.
Gitsh’s gloved right hand held a knife, much larger than Betty’s scalpel. He cut away at Amos’s suit, slicing it open at the chest and neck. Blood sloshed out of the cut suit as if someone had wrung out a soaked towel. It splattered on the floor and on Gitsh’s feet as he reached in to apply pressure. Marcus grabbed Amos’s legs.
“Clarence, get him on the table,” Marcus said. “His jugular is cut. Gitsh, keep pressure there. Margaret, get his helmet off!”
The men lifted Amos and set him on the already bloody trolley.
Margaret found herself standing, pulling off Amos’s helmet. Gitsh’s gloved hands stayed pressed down on Amos’s neck. Blood covered Amos’s face, matted his hair, pooled in his eyes.
His wide-open eyes.
She looked at Gitsh’s gloves. There was no blood oozing up from beneath the fingers.
Amos.
Margaret’s thoughts snapped back into place.
“Do exactly what I say,” she ordered. “Remove your hands on a count of three, then be ready to reapply pressure as soon as I say
go
. One . . . two . . .
three.
”
Gitsh pulled his hands back a few inches, where they hovered, ready to be put back into use.
No blood flowed.
The scalpel had punched in just to the right of Amos’s windpipe, then slid outward, slicing open the whole right side of his neck.
She couldn’t check his pulse without taking off her gloves, but she didn’t need to.
Amos Braun was dead.
SMOOCHIES!
Chelsea turned the knob ever so slowly. It didn’t make a sound. Neither did the door when she opened it. She crept into her parents’ room. Daddy was snoring. He always snored. Sometimes Mommy would go sleep on the couch, but not tonight. She must have been tired.
When Daddy snored, his mouth was always wide open. He looked silly. Mommy slept with her mouth closed.
Chelsea would have to fix that.
She tiptoed up to the bed, her pajama feet barely a whisper on the carpeting. Mommy wanted to make her go to the doctor? The doctor who poked her with stuff? The doctor who had the