The Skunge (11 page)

Jynx convulsed, fighting to pull away from the pain. When a knot of Skunge lodged in the hole in her arm, she cursed in liquid Spanish.

"Almost there. Almost," Palmetto chanted. He eased the bloody, knotted line from her body. It twisted, trying to yank the pliers from his hand. His knuckles whitened and sweat stood out on his forehead. Jynx's body locked in an improbable upright bridge, only her shoulder blades, forearms and ankles touching the bed. Minute crackling sounds came from her body, like a small fire burning inside her.

With one last twist of the pliers, Palmetto yanked the last of it loose. The end trailed off into wisps of black thread no thicker than human hair. Palmetto tossed the pliers into a steel bowl. Sugar handed Palmetto the vinegar bottles.

When Jynx saw the bottles, she shook her head, first slowly, then with increasing fervor. "No.
No
. Please,
please
don't, not yet, I'm not ready, I—"

Sugar moved to Jynx's head and tried to hold her in place, speaking to her, trying to catch her attention, but the girl's eyes were on Palmetto and his bottles. Jynx shook, her skin pasty with shock and fear. Her teeth chattered and she spasmed as if fired with random bursts of electricity. "Please, I love you Sugar, don't let him do this to me again." Sugar tried to smile, but tears blurred her vision as she placed a balled-up pair of socks into Jynx's mouth.

Palmetto held the
V
bottle so that the nozzle was almost touching Jynx's kin, and sprayed a stream of raw vinegar into the wound. He moved the bottle up and down the length. Pink liquid formed a stream that overfilled the gash in Jynx's arm. The vinegar spilled over and pattered to the floor.

Jynx's screams were inhuman, the sound of something primordial hauled out of her deepest being. Sugar sobbed inaudibly, her face turned away.

"Soap, please," Palmetto said. Sugar groped for the bottle marked
S
and handed it to the doctor. He sprayed it directly into the wounds, coating them until the blood and tissue took on an oily, rainbow-hued sheen under the lights. He examined the cuts with a large magnifying glass, and apparently satisfied, took a drink and whispered to Jynx.

"Be strong."

Palmetto brought out the salt. Jynx whimpered.

CHAPTER SIXTEEN

Dr. Chen was excited. More than excited: hyped up higher than a crackhead who'd found a twenty on the sidewalk. Until today, Chen had been looking down a long, dark tunnel. Years of indentured servitude in the LA County hospital system. A nice, safe career, a nice safe marriage, a nice safe two kids and a nice safe retirement still in debt up to his eyebrows.

Then Neumann had landed in Chen's lap like a big, fat, juicy gift from God. Neumann was going to make Chen's name in the medical community. He was going to be famous, and he was going to publish, and he was going to have a real career.

More patients had presented with the same condition. At least three, in varying stages of infection. As far as he was concerned, every one of them was a medical marvel and another rung in the ladder to his new life. Soon he would have to call in the yellow-suits at the CDC, but who cared? Chen's name would be inextricably linked to
the
most horrifying disease in recent history. He had been Googling it all day, and poring through years of medical journals and not a whiff of anything remotely similar. Very good news indeed.

Chen's Syndrome. Chen's Disease. Or he might decide to take it old school, call it something like Degenerative Subcutaneous Fibrosis. Maybe something Latin. People were going to remember it, and a little pomp never hurt.

He rounded the corner and pushed through the doors of the Burn Ward. The nurses had argued the point, but he had insisted. He was hoping the infection control protocols would keep Neumann from picking up anything else while under his care.

The paramedics had a name for burn victims: crispy critters. As in,
hey, check out the crispy critters we just brought in, I think one of them is still smoking.
LA's freeway system spit them out with horrifying regularity.

The ward was quiet, save for a few moans and groans from the patients that hadn't gotten enough meds to keep them submerged in their sugary dope dreams.

The lucky—or unlucky, depending on your point of view—who survived the high-speed accidents got hooked on the strongest narcotics inside of two weeks. It saved their lives and their sanity, but left them with a lasting legacy of tortuous addiction and misery. Once the insurance stopped paying and they could no longer get their dope, they started down a long road that usually ended in rehab, jail-time, or early death.

Another patient moaned in pain; maybe he should do a little poking around and make sure no one was skimming the drug supplies and making the patients pay for the slack. It wouldn't be the first time. Hopefully, Bickler would be involved. Chen would see that he was sent to the basement with the Materials trolls. Or better yet, the Morgue. A more than suitable place for a brain-dead jerkoff like Bickler.

He checked the chart hanging on Neumann's door. No changes, and the comments ranged from the incredulous to an obdurate refusal to believe the evidence. He scanned the list of other physicians who had checked in: Froshhaug, that ass-kisser, Goldberg, thought he was
so
smart, Shumacher, with her blond hair and icy blue eyes and supercilious air. More. But, most importantly, there at the top: JEFFREY CHEN, MD. A name people would remember for years.

Upon entering, his first confused thought was he had somehow gotten the wrong room. Maybe someone had switched the chart. He wouldn't put it past one of the other docs—if he were in their position he would be seething with jealousy. But no, he remembered the room well enough—and the smell of Neumann, a mix of open sewer and rotting vegetation.

But the bed was wrong. Instead of seeing the tortured, lumpy shape of Neumann, the covers were almost flat, except for a lump in the center. The color of the sheets was wrong too: not standard hospital white or the new pale green offered in private rooms, but instead a rich, dark, wine-red. Chen strode to the bed and peeled back the sheet, grimacing at its heavy, wet feel.

Chen had seen enough blood and guts to immediately recognize what lay in the bed. A soup of bone fragments, organs, and visceral fluid. In the center, the bloody lump of Bickler's head, his features halted in a frozen scream.

Chen's terrified mind struggled to digest what he was seeing. Something had torn Bickler apart. Left him nothing more than a wet red parody of human remains. Chen flashed back to the first time he had ever seen a dead human being; year one of med school. Chen and the other students, smiling and joking and sure of immortality, had filed in to the morgue. Chen had thought nothing of the formaldehyde stink and the rotten metallic cold. A shape lay on the table, shrouded in a white sheet. Chen stared, they all did. Then the instructor had entered, rubbing his dry hands together, and promptly whipped back the sheet. The final sheet, the one that everyone faces at the end. Chen's childhood ended the moment that the sheet settled back on the dead yellow flesh below. The thought had slammed into him with the weight and speed of a train: he was mortal, everyone dies, and no matter what we think of ourselves, we step over the bones of everyone who lived and died before us, only to join them in the ignominy of death.

Until today, that was the only time Chen could remember being truly frightened.

The door whispered closed behind him. He stepped back, his hand outstretched to push his way out. Instead, his hand sank into a hot, moist, living mass of—

He spun, a scream locked in his throat. Neumann loomed over him like some perverted dream of HP Lovecraft. The man's head had split open, exposing a frenzied, squirming nest of slimy red tentacles. Mats of brownish red matter like moss covered Neumann's features. Hands purple with scabrous growths like tiny flowers. Each growth opened and closed like a tiny mouth.

Chen's bladder let go with a gush, and the last thing to pass through his mind was that maybe a steady, boring job wasn't the worst thing in the world.

CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

"Are you sure you and Jynx were infected at the same time? Hers is far more advanced. Can you think of any reason why that would be?" Each evening, after the day's treatments were done, Palmetto took his palliative drink out on the postage-stamp balcony. Sugar had joined him, letting the breeze wash over the bare skin of her arms.

"I got a little less of…him on me at the video shoot. But not so much. I can't think that would make such a difference."

"Hard to say. Empirical evidence aside, I would tend to agree given the astounding growth rate of the stuff." Palmetto stared into the sunset. "Without examining the guy who gave it to you, I'm not sure what else I can discover about the condition. Has anyone called you back about him?"

"No one who knows where his is. Maybe Monty does, but no one can find him either."

They drank in silence for a time, lost in their own thoughts.

"I'm tired, Sugar," Palmetto said finally.

"I know. So am I."

"I'm almost sixty years old. I can't keep up this work for much longer."

"You won't have to. You said yourself that Jynx looks like she may be on the way to being cured."

"Yes, she
may
be…or it could come back stronger than ever. I'm past the pointing of making guesses. Now we sit back and hope that whoever makes these decisions decides in our favor."

"Why, Dr. Palmetto, you old softy. I never figured you for that kind of guy. Next you'll be telling me to pray to God to heal me."

Palmetto leaned forward to regard her over the smudged lenses of his glasses. "With the things I've seen and the things I've done, I would be a fool not to believe in God, because I sure have seen hell. But don't expect any favors from Him; he's got as much interest in us as we do in sand fleas. He could decide to flick us off the skin of this world without sparing a thought. Or he could just leave us here to wallow."

Sugar regarded him solemnly. "Hallelujah, amen."

Later, as Jynx slept her deep, drugged, sleep, Sugar tossed and turned. Her sheets clung to her sweaty skin. Her dreams were troubled; Palmetto chased her through the apartment holding sloshing plastic squeeze-bottles that spit fire when he pulled the trigger. Then she watched Jynx flying around the building, waving cheerily at Sugar through the windows. Sugar tried to wave back, to signal, to tell her it was all a trick, she had to come down right
now,
but she couldn't speak, because her mouth was full of flowers. Squirming flowers. For the first time in years, she dreamed of her girlhood in California. In her dreams she wept at the shooting pains in her legs, in her belly, her crotch, and vomited into a sink while staring at herself in a mirror.

Seconds, minutes, hours later, she snapped awake. Water was running somewhere in the apartment. The bathroom. Jynx was gone from the couch, and a terrible vision formed in her mind: Jynx, tired of the itch and the pain, the madness of the Skunge…suppose she had crawled into the tub, turned the taps, and opened her wrists?

Sugar crept down the hall. She stepped around accreted drifts of clothing sitting along the walls. From the bathroom, the sound of water splashing. Suppose she opened the door to Jynx bleeding out, eyes full of mute appeal, the water pink but darkening to red? Or worse yet, Jynx pale and withered, bloodless, dead already, eyes open and staring into eternity. What then?

Her first thought as she stepped into the jungly air of the bathroom was:
Oh God, there is blood everywhere.

Jynx stood at the sink. She drew a razor blade down her arm, re-opening a long pink river that bloomed red and topped its banks with blood. The oldest alchemy, turning flesh into blood. Jynx dug in the wound and from across the room Sugar heard the blood squelch and bubble around her probing fingers. Gore smeared across her chin and freckled her face. She pulled out inch after inch of ropey black matter. She giggled as she drew it out, and Sugar watched them coiling around her tiny pale hands, moving on their own.

Sugar walked to the bedroom, threw clothes in a bag and stalked back to the bathroom. "Come on. We're going to a hospital. We can be at Hollywood Presbyterian in fifteen minutes if we call a cab."

When they turned around, there was Palmetto, hunched and guilty. He opened his hands wide, palms up.

"I wish I could have helped you more. This thing, it's got to be killed at the root; all of it at once. That's all I can tell you."

Sugar hugged him with one arm, the other holding Jynx. She inhaled the smoky, boozy scent of him, and committed it to memory. He would be gone by the time they returned; and they would never see him again. The knowledge was written on his face in worried lines. "Thank you. Wish us luck."

"Luck," he said solemnly. As the door closed behind him, he rubbed at his eyes."You're going to need it."

CHAPTER EIGHTEEN