Infected (23 page)

A lumpy sound.

Perry waited for their answer, wondering what they were up to.

what do you mean

The voice was monotone, short and to the point. No inflection, a steady stream of syllables that shot forth almost too fast to understand. It was nearly comical, like the voice of an alien in a cheap sci-fi flick—the ones who spout trite and overused lines like “resistance is futile” and “you humans are inferior” or other such drivel.

“You know damn well what I mean.” Perry felt more than a little frustrated. Not only were these things anchored inside his body, but they were playing dumb to boot. Another pause, more scratching, more lumpy sound.

what do you mean

Perhaps he’d been too generous when he called them “intelligent.” Maybe they weren’t playing dumb. Maybe they were just plain stupid.

“I mean, what are you doing in my body?” He pushed himself to stand up, using the arm of the couch to support his weight. Again the pause, the lumpy sound.

we not know

Perry leaned heavily on the couch, head hanging down so low that his blond hair dangled in front of his face. His leg throbbed, thump-thumping off the inside of his skull and back down again.

“How the fuck can you not know?”

Pause.

Lumpy sound.

They were full of shit. That was the only answer. They had beamed into his body—or grown out of some evil mushroom or something—and they had to be there for a
reason,
didn’t they?

As he waited for their answer, he tried to listen more closely to the lumpy sound. He focused, and caught occasional words, but they came so fast he couldn’t recognize them. It was like trying to see individual stones on a highway shoulder while driving at sixty-five miles per hour—you could see them for a second and know what they were even if you couldn’t identify them. It was as if they were scanning for the right words. Scanning their limited vocabulary, perhaps. Scanning through…

we not know

…through…

we not know why we

are here

…through his brain.

They weren’t just in his body, they were in his fucking brain, using him like a computer to call up data.

“Is that what I am to you?” Perry screamed. “Am I some kind of library?” Spit flew from his mouth and his body shook in rage.

Pause.

Lumpy sound.

He sat in vibrating frustration, unable to do anything or help himself in any way while the Triangles searched for an answer.

He screamed so loud that vocal cords ripped and snapped, “What are you doing
in my head
?”

we are trying to find words

and things to talk with you

A rocket shot of pain raced up from his thump-thumping ankle, bringing his thoughts back to his strange leg wound. He needed some more Tylenol. He drew a deep breath, steadied himself and took an experimental hop toward the kitchen.

The good foot hit the ground firmly, but the motion jarred the bad leg. A new, fresh round of pain flashed bright and loud, seemingly generous in sharing the shock with every part of his body.

Play through the pain.
It was intense, but now that he knew what to expect, he could control it. He could block it out. He could be tough. He made the eight hops to the kitchen counter, gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw muscles began to feel the burn.

He focused, took a deep breath, and looked down at his muscular leg—jeans dangling in two long denim flaps, dried blood flaking off his skin, little pieces hanging like red dandruff from his blond leg hairs. He’d fucked up the works pretty good, but what did it matter? He’d be dead soon anyway.

He grabbed the Tylenol bottle off the microwave top and shook out six pills. He gulped them down with a handful of tap water from the sink. He hopped back to the couch and gently sat down, grimacing against the pain.

It occurred to him that he still hadn’t called work. What was it, Saturday? He’d lost track of the days. He didn’t even have a clue how long he’d slept.

A thought struck him. Where the hell had he contracted this Triangle disease? As far as he knew, he might have
gotten
it at work. Obviously the Triangles started small. Maybe they were airborne, or maybe they were delivered via an insect bite, like malaria.

Or maybe he was right about being a guinea pig, and maybe work was in on it. Work, and perhaps even the apartment building. That sounded logical as well. Maybe everyone in the apartment building was stuck inside right now, contemplating the newfound guests growing in their bodies.

The things must have come
from
somewhere. They’d landed on him, or an insect—or even something artificial—had delivered them.

Did that mean these things were custom-built for people? They were getting along a little too well with his body for this to be some fluke of nature. His body hadn’t rejected them, that was for fucking sure. No, he doubted this could be accidental. Either more people in town or in the building had the same disease, or someone had singled him out as an experimental host.

Perry’s mind swam in a tar pit of possibilities. He tried to put the thoughts away, because he simply didn’t want to think about it anymore, didn’t want to think about how fucked he was.

The pain in his leg eased a little as the Tylenol took effect. He felt cold. He hopped to his room and threw on a white University of Michigan sweatshirt, then hopped back to the living room and sat on the couch. He wasn’t sleepy, wasn’t hungry—he needed a diversion to keep his thoughts away from the Triangles. He reached for the remote control and clicked on the flat-panel TV. The Preview Channel said the time was 11:23
A.M
.

He flicked through the channels, not finding much. Infomercials. Scooby Doo. Basketball, Wolverines at Penn State—if it had been football, maybe, but he couldn’t focus on basketball right now.
Seinfeld
reruns. Soon the NFL pregame shows would be on for the Saturday game, and he would be riveted to the TV. That would let him forget. And after the pregame, the games. But for now, a television wasteland. He was about to give up when he hit the jackpot: a
Columbo
movie.

He’d seen this one, but it didn’t matter. Columbo—with his old basset hound in tow—shuffled his way about yet another mansion, rumpled tan trench coat hanging from him like he’d just hopped off of a freight train full of hoboes. He was trying to climb down from a balcony and was stuck in the nearby tree (which the killer must have used either to get into the bedroom or to get out of it). The basset hound waited patiently at the base of the tree; Columbo awkwardly fell to the ground. As he struggled to rise, the Mandatory Rich Person walked up and accosted him with the ever-so-familiar, “Have you taken leave of your senses, Mister Columbo?”

who is there

Perry almost jumped out of his seat when the Triangles spoke. “What?” he said, looking around the room, eyes darting to every corner.

who is there

Dread filled Perry. Was someone here to finish the experiment, perhaps kill him and dissect him? Or maybe take him away? Did the Triangles know something he didn’t?

“What are you talking about?” Perry said. “I don’t see anyone, there’s no one here.”

new Voice newww

voice new voice

The TV droned with Columbo’s nasal growl. “Sorry to disturb you again, ma’am,” Peter Falk said to the Mandatory Rich Person, “but I was wondering if I could ask you just a few more questions.”

Columbo. They heard the TV. A laugh escaped Perry’s lips, which surprised him. The Triangles didn’t know what television was.

Or maybe…maybe they didn’t know what
reality
was. More accurately, they didn’t know the difference between fantasy and reality. They couldn’t see a thing, but they could hear. They didn’t know the difference between a real person talking and sound from the television.

“That’s Columbo,” Perry said quietly, trying to figure out how to handle this new plot twist. He didn’t know what good this information would do him. It wasn’t like it could save his condemned ass, but something in the back of his head told him not to let on about the TV. Perry decided to trust his instincts and turned the set off.

who is columbo who

“He’s a cop, a police officer.”

Perry felt the now-familiar pause and the burst of lumpy sound, which grew so loud he almost winced. The Triangles worked his brain like a big thesaurus, hunting for meaning.

In a way, the searching was worse than the pain, worse than seeing the things under his skin, even worse than hooks wrapped around his bones or the creatures sucking nutrients from his blood. They scanned his brain, using him like wetware, like their own personal computer.

The concept hit him with force. If they could scan through his brain, through the chemical-storage processes that locked memories down, then this was some seriously advanced shit. Perhaps they didn’t know what TV was, but
something
was going on here that was beyond the cutting edge of science and

no cop no cop no cop n o no not tell him we here no no no no no

The Triangles’ burst of words interrupted Perry’s thoughts and filled his soul with a wave of fear that ripped through him like a blast of November wind. His adrenaline surged against some perceived threat even as he realized it wasn’t
his
fear, but
theirs,
the Triangles’ fear. Something about the rumpled Columbo had them scared shitless.

no no no no no

coming to get us

Their fear felt corrosive, almost tangible, a jet-black snake squirming and writhing under the grip of some heartless bird of prey.

“Take it easy!” Perry winced at the bizarre feeling of alien emotions coursing through his own mind and body. “It’s okay, he’s gone, I got rid of him.” He thought it might be easy to make the fear go away if he told them about TV, told them there was no police officer

coming to get us

in the apartment, but his instincts told him to keep that trump card. He might find some use for it later.

cop is gone cop is

gone no no no

“He’s gone! Now take a chill pill and shut the fuck up!” Perry’s hands involuntarily went to his head, trying to hold in his brains against the pounding tumult of shouts and anxiety slashing through his skull. Contagious fear. Perry felt the cold fingers of panic wrapping around his chest. “He’s fucking gone! Now relax and
stop screaming in my head
!”

coming to GET us

They sounded different, and not just because of the fear. They actually had some
tone
to their words now, something deep, and a certain slowness that he found vaguely familiar.

he’s coming to GET us

He
felt
their terror. It was nothing like the emotionless monotone he’d first heard—they’d increased their intensity, or maybe just lost their restraint.

no TELL him we here

“I won’t tell, okay?” Perry lowered his voice, tried to relax himself in hopes that it would, in turn, relax them. “It’s okay, he’s gone now, you just have to take it easy.”

thanks thanks thanks

The claustrophobic fear instantly vanished, as suddenly as if he’d been in a dark room and someone had flicked on the lights.

coming to GET us

“Why the hell do the police scare you so bad?”

Why were they afraid of the police? That made no sense. Perry supposed this might mean he wasn’t alone, might mean that someone knew about the Triangles and wanted to destroy them. But why hadn’t he heard about it? Surely the police couldn’t keep a secret like this from the press. And how could the Triangles know of hostile police in the first place? They’d grown from nothing, all the while in his apartment—they had no contact with the outside world. Could they have some preprogrammed memory of potential threats?

They didn’t recognize the words
cop
or
police
right away—they’d had to scan and scan hard to find the meaning that frightened them so badly. But they found something in Perry’s Unabridged Brain Dictionary, something that they knew. At least, they
thought
they knew.

“What do you mean, he’s ‘coming to get’ you? Does someone know you’re here?” Perry felt the Triangles search his mind, his memories, for the right words. The more they searched, the more familiar he became with the feeling, like an eye slowly adjusting to the dim light of a dark room.

men are looking for

us KILL us yikes Yikes

YIKES

Yikes? The word stuck in Perry’s head. Yikes. They used the word
yikes.
And they had shouted it along with
kill.
Why were they suddenly talking so funny? The monotone was gone—there was actual inflection in the words. The speech had taken on a slower, dreamier quality, to the point where the Starting Five talked almost with a drawl.