Infected (19 page)

The strange thing was how he didn’t itch anymore. In fact, now that he thought about it, he hadn’t itched a bit since waking up on the floor, except for a scratchy growth of bright red beard that itched plenty.

Trying to keep his newly clean feet from stepping in the gunk on the floor, he moved over to the steam-covered mirror. He used his hand to clear a patch. The water-beaded reflection showed beard growth, looked like two days’ worth.

Jesus…just how long had he been out?

Wrapping a towel around his waist, he walked into the living room and turned on the TV. Channel 23, the Preview Channel, always listed the time and date in the bottom left-hand corner of the screen.

It was 12:40
P.M
. But it wasn’t Thursday, December 13. It was December 14.

Friday.

He’d been unconscious since returning home from work on Wednesday. Somewhere in the vicinity of forty-eight hours. Almost
two full days
.

That wasn’t passing out, that was a fucking coma. Two days? He’d lain in a pool of his own vomit for two days? No wonder he was so hungry.

Perry grabbed his cell phone. Sixteen messages waited for him. Most of them probably from Sandy, wondering if he planned on showing up for work.

Work. Counting when he’d been sent home, he’d missed
two full days
of work. He was probably fired by now. There was no way he could stroll in at 1:00
P.M
. on a Friday. What a great story this would be:
“Sorry, boss, but I tripped in my own bathroom, clunked my head on the toilet seat and slipped into a coma while lying in a puddle of my own sick.”

Perry sat down on the couch and sorted through the messages. Sure enough, two were from Sandy, seven were from Bill, the rest hang-ups from telemarketers. Four of the work messages were from Thursday. Bill sounded concerned. On the final message from Friday, Bill said he was coming over to see if Perry was all right.

Perry erased the messages. He turned off the phone’s ringer; the last thing he wanted to do was talk to anyone, even Bill. Perry moved to the front door. Sure enough, tacked to the outside was a note.

Two days. He’d missed two days of work. What the hell would Dear Ol’ Dad have said about that? Nothing good, Perry knew that for certain. He’d make it up to Sandy. If he had to work double shifts and weekends for the next three months with no overtime, he’d make it up. Concussion or no concussion, there was no excuse for missing that much work. He couldn’t just call her. That would be cowardly. He’d drive in right away and take his medicine face-to-face. After, of course, he got his ass to the hospital.

His stomach growled. He had to get some food first.

In minutes his last two eggs were frying up in a butter-coated pan. The smell drew loud grumbles from his stomach and made his mouth water. He dropped two pieces of bread into the toaster, then crammed a third piece in his mouth and chewed ravenously.

Before the eggs finished cooking, he reached into the cupboard, pulled out the last of the Pop-Tarts and wolfed them down. The toast popped up as he slid the eggs onto a plate. He jammed a piece of toast into the first yolk, and took a big, satisfying bite. His stomach rumbled again—happily, this time—as he finished off the first egg and raised his toast to puncture the second yolk.

Then he froze, half-chewed food hanging in his mouth.

The round, yellow-orange yolk glistened, surrounded by a bed of white. Orange. Orange that at one time had been a baby chicken, growing in a shell.

Growing. Growing. Growing.

Grown.

The toast dropped to the floor. It landed butter side down.

What the hell had he been thinking, eating a pile of eggs and worrying about work when he still had these fucking things inside him? He pulled back the towel’s edge to examine his thigh, exposing the wound that had helped knock him out cold for two straight days. The shower had cleared away the dried blood, leaving fresh pink scar tissue with only a small, dark red scab-pebble in the middle. The wound looked healthy. Normal. The whitish growth that had caused his itching was long gone.

It was gone…but the others weren’t.

He sat at the kitchen table and pulled his right knee to his chest, getting a good, close look at his shin.

The orange-peel skin was gone. What had taken its place didn’t make him feel any better.

Where a circle of thick, pebbly, orange skin had once been, a peculiar triangle now lay. A triangle that was
under
his skin. Each of the triangle’s sides was about an inch long.

The skin covering the strange triangle had a pale bluish tinge to it, the same color as the blue veins in the underside of one’s wrist. But it wasn’t really
his
skin. There was no break in the skin that wrapped around his leg, that covered his whole body for that matter, but somehow what covered the blue triangle just didn’t seem to be his. It felt tougher than his own.

Near each of the triangle’s three points was a quarter-inch slit pointing to the triangle’s center. They reminded Perry of the slits in a homemade apple pie—if, of course, apple pie were triangular, made of human skin, and held a bluish tinge.

What the fuck was it?

Perry’s breath came in rapid, short, shallow gasps. He had to get to a hospital.

His father had gone into a hospital. His father had never come out. The doctors didn’t do a fucking thing for his father. Jacob Dawsey spent the last two months of his life slowly shriveling up on a hospital bed, good-for-nothing doctors sticking him full of needles, poking and prodding and testing. All the while his barrel-chested, 265-pound father shrunk to a six-foot-five, 150-pound living mummy, a character out of some childhood nightmare.

Perry had gone into the hospital once himself, right after that Rose Bowl injury to his knee. Damn doctors were supposed to be able to fix anything. Turned out they couldn’t. Months later a second set of specialists (and there’s always plenty of specialists for an All–Big Ten linebacker, thank you very much) said the first doctors had screwed things up, that Perry might have continued his career if they’d done things right.

But this wasn’t a blown knee. This wasn’t even cancer. Cancer was a semi-living mass of flesh. The thing he’d pulled out of his leg had been
alive,
it had moved
on its own.

And there were six more. Six more that had grown unhindered for two days, while he’d been unconscious. It had only taken three days for the things to go from a little rash to a squirming horror, and another forty-eight hours to transform into these bizarre triangular growths. What the hell might they become in the
next
twenty-four hours? The next forty-eight?

Perry rushed to throw on the first clothes he could find, grabbed his keys and coat and headed for his car.

Hospital time.

Definitely hospital time.

CALLING DR. CHENG, CALLING DR. CHENG

Margaret waited for Dr. Cheng to come to the phone. She didn’t like to be made to wait, but it was hard to be upset when Agent Clarence Otto’s strong hands worked her bunched-up shoulder muscles. She was still in the director’s office, except now
she
was sitting in the big-girl’s chair. Murray was on his way back to Washington. Amos was taking advantage of the downtime to get some sleep in one of the hospital’s empty rooms.

Cheng was a bit of a bigwig at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. She didn’t know the man from Adam, but she had to admit it was fun to hear people at the main CDC office jump when she called. One phone call from Murray opened a lot of doors.

“This is Doctor Cheng.” Margaret shook her head slightly. She’d expected an Asian accent. This guy sounded like he was from Bakersfield.

“Doctor Cheng, Margaret Montoya.”

“How can I help you today, Margaret? It seems you’ve got something important to discuss, important enough for the director to call me and tell me to make sure you get everything you need.” He sounded annoyed, as if her call had pulled him away from something that
he
thought was very important.

“Yes, Doctor Cheng. I’m actually CDC myself.”

“Really? I wonder why I’ve never heard of you. Do you work in Atlanta?”

Margaret grimaced at the question. “No, actually, CCID in Cincinnati.”

“Ah,” Cheng said. There was a lot of contempt and derision loaded in to that single syllable.

“Doctor Cheng, I need some information on your Morgellons task force,” Margaret said.

“You bothered me for
that
?”

“Afraid so. We’re working on a related disease.”

“Must not be much of a relation,” Cheng said. “Because there is no disease. Just a lot of crazy people who have convinced themselves they have bugs crawling under their skin.” He sounded about as compassionate as a guy opening up the gas valve at a Nazi death camp.

“I’m more interested in the fibers.”

Pause. “Yes, well, there is something strange there, but it hardly merits all the attention. I’ll tell you, I wasn’t thrilled to be put in charge of this mass delusion. Fibers in your skin don’t make you crazy, although I will say that the pain suffered by some victims seems very real. A few have genuine fibers that seem to be created by their own bodies, but for most of them these ‘fibers’ turn out to be carpet fibers, clothing fibers, things like that. They convince themselves they have this infestation, they scratch themselves bloody, and these tiny fibers get stuck in the wounds. Hardly an epidemic.”

“But you’ve seen some of these ‘genuine’ cellulose fibers growing out of the skin, yes?”

“We have found a few, yes,” Cheng said.

“I’m hoping you have a database on those claiming to be infected, particularly those who actually show the fibers.”

The question seemed to anger Cheng. “Of
course
we have a database, Doctor Montoya. We’ve sent out bulletins to all medical professionals, asking them to report anything that fits in to the myriad symptoms of these Morgellons
victims
. Tell me what you’re working on. If it’s a Morgellons case, it falls under the purview of this task force. You should be reporting it to me.”

Margaret slunk into her chair and rubbed her eyes. This wasn’t going the way she’d thought it would.

“Margaret,” Otto whispered. She opened her eyes. Now he was on the other side of the desk. He pointed to her, then held his left palm down at waist level. His right hand whipped back and forth in front of his groin, like he was spanking an imaginary person bent over in front of him. Then he pointed at the phone. “Go on, girl, whip that ass.”

Margaret nodded.
That’s right. I’m in charge now, I’m not this guy’s bitch. If anything, he’s mine.

“I haven’t got all day, Montoya,” Cheng said. “What are you working on?”

“Afraid I can’t tell you, Cheng,” Margaret said. “You’re not cleared to have that information. And in this instance you’re reporting to me. You did hear about the executive order, didn’t you?”

A pause.

“
Didn’t
you?”

“Of course I did.”

“Good. I don’t have time for this. Either stop being an insufferable prick or I’ll just call the CDC director and let him know I can’t get you to cooperate.”

A longer pause. Otto had moved on from slapping the imaginary booty, and was now “riding the pony.” He looked ridiculous, a big grown man, CIA agent, in the black suit and the red tie, twirling in a circle with an expression of affected ecstasy on his face. Margaret couldn’t help but smile.

“Fine,” Cheng finally said. “What do you need?”

“What I need you to do, right now, is call up your most recent reports. And I’m looking for dates of first symptoms, as reported by the patient. So I’m not interested in people who said they’ve been suffering for ten years and just came in.”

“I understand what ‘date of first symptoms’ means,” Cheng snapped.

She heard keys clacking as he worked his computer.

“We had a case in Detroit two weeks ago,” he said. “A Gary Leeland. Visited his primary caregiver, reported the fibers growing out of his right arm. Multiple sores from scratching. Then…two cases in Ann Arbor, Michigan. These are less than a week old. Kiet Nguyen, art major at the University of Michigan. And Samantha Hester, who brought in her daughter, Missy, to the same physician, actually.”

Margaret scribbled notes furiously, even though she’d have Cheng email her all the files. “When? When did they call in?”

“Nguyen was seven days ago, Hester was six.”

“And have you had any contact with them?”

“As a matter of fact, yes. I personally examined Missy. Girl had a tiny fiber sticking out of her right wrist. I removed it, gave her a full examination, she had no other rashes, fibers or marks of any kind.”

“How long ago was that?”

“Four days ago. Delightful little girl. I’m actually flying back there later today to examine her again.”

“No need for that, Doctor Cheng. I’ll be in Ann Arbor and I’ll examine her.”

“Oh really? And do you know what you’re looking for?”

“Yes, Doctor,” Margaret said. “I know exactly what I’m looking for. How about Mister Nguyen?”