by Tim Curran
Poor Mr. Smith, I knew him well.
McKenna and Stein stood there watching the techs strap Smith down to a gurney. He had lost it. Flipped right out during a containment op in Forest Park. He and his partner, Mr. Coombs, had slipped into the house of a Sgt. Donahue, retired, and when the worms started coming out of him, Smith had lost it. He drilled not only Donahue but two members of the biocontainment team.
It was a mess cleaning that one up.
Now poor Mr. Smith, heavily sedated, was off to points unknown for a good long rest.
They’re sending that poor shit to the Resort, McKenna knew. They’re going to pick his brain apart. Reconditioning, they call it. But brainwashing is brainwashing.
It was another busy day for Stein and McKenna, who, along with two other teams, were sweeping the greater Chicago area. The Old Man had decided he did not like them using 9mm weapons—too messy, slugs flying about drilled into walls and might be found—so they were equipped with .50 cal smoothbore tranquilizer pistols with Ketamine darts. All the ERT cleaners were armed with them. Their 9mm silenced pistols were only for emergencies.
The Warehouse had two incinerators operating now and they had personally watched the containment boys feed a dozen disease vectors (bodies) into the flames.
McKenna was tapped.
Down in Jackson Park not three hours ago, they’d entered a building on a tip and found a dozen infected ones. It was a little dicey there for a bit as the hosts, drooling and delusional, became violent and came at them with everything from kitchen knives to hammers. Maybe the worms were giving their hosts some survival instincts in order to protect themselves. Regardless, the hosts had been foaming at the mouth like they had rabies.
They all went into the incinerators after the containment team sterilized the area.
The real disturbing part was that Cave told them later that none of them were Iraqi vets. However they were infected, it must have happened here and probably within the past week.
Afterwards, McKenna sat alone with Stein and tried to get him to talk about running so he could get some more evidence on him over the wire, but Stein wouldn’t utter a word.
As they watched the techs wheel Mr. Smith away, McKenna said, “I wonder where they’re taking him?”
“You know damn well where they’re taking him,” Stein said. “Same place we’re going when this is done.”
“Maybe you, but not me. They have faith in me. I’m good.”
“Don’t you wish.”
McKenna smiled… then frowned.
DETROIT: 8 MILE AND JOHN R
12:53 A.M.
The infestation spread…
“Now that you paid, baby, you can play,” the girl said.
Charles Kingle couldn’t believe his luck. It had been months since he’d dared show his face on 8 Mile ever since those two undercover cops had set him up on that soliciting charge. And it had been a set-up, make no mistake of that. A few phone calls and his lawyer had dispensed with the entire thing (along with a warning, of course, for Kingle to stay off 8 Mile after dark, to not even show his face around there in the light of day—a Lexus in that area marked him as a target for hoodlums and cheap cops). So for many months, Kingle had taken his business elsewhere, noticeably Jefferson Ave and Woodward, but it was never as exciting.
Now he was back.
It didn’t take long to pick up some street goodies. A little trolling and the girls were ringing your car in, sniffing, horny, and hungry for green. That was a turn-on, especially when they started getting territorial fighting for the right to be used.
Nothing sweeter than that, Kingle thought.
Except for maybe when he got one of them in the backseat of his high-dollar ride.
This girl, certified street goodies, just wanted to please. She didn’t seem to mind when he was rough with her, when he put his hands on her and hurt her. She liked that and she told him so, staring up at him with those glassy drugged-out eyes. He got on top of her first, pumping her savagely until she started making those fine squeaking sounds he liked. She was thin and long-limbed, a delicious brown with heavy round breasts. And she was pregnant, judging from the tight mound of her belly. Kingle didn’t know why, but he really liked that and he always had.
Then she got on top of him because that’s how he liked to finish off and seal the deal.
The heat coming off her young body was intoxicating. She was like a furnace going from hot to molten and he was melting underneath her as he gripped her ass and she pumped away. She kept at it, pushing her breasts into his face and he was licking them, squeezing them, biting into them until he tasted blood which was a sweet dark wine on his tongue and she didn’t scream or fight or cry out like the others. That was exciting, too, so he bit harder, knowing he’d never reach climax until he she screamed in pain because that’s really what it was all about and it was only at moments like this when it was getting close that he allowed himself to admit it.
He bit into her nipple and her entire body shuddered.
A slick, sweet-smelling sweat that was cool-warm covered her naked body and…dear God, it had never been like that before. Not sweat, but nectar and honey, cloying and thick. He lost his head as he plummeted into exotic realms of ecstasy.
And it was then, as he came, that she gripped his face in her hands and brought her mouth closer to his own, opening it, letting her tongue slide slick and greasy into his mouth…only that tongue, which tasted like sugar, was filling his mouth, wriggling and crawling, and then it was down his throat, pushing deeper and deeper.
By then it wasn’t pleasure but horror.
A horror mixed with pleasure.
The worm in his throat detached a single segment of itself which was basically an egg case, and then…
Oh God, oh God, that feels so good… so good…
And then if there truly had been pain or discomfort, he forgot about it all as the larval worms inside him, sensing a warm and hospitable environment, allowed digestive juices to dissolve their individual egg capsules which set them free. They parasitized him immediately. Each worm, taking advantage of the fact that Charles Kingle was still reeling from the endorphins flooding his system—chemically triggered by the mother worm’s sweet scent—got down to work as he lay there in a mindless euphoric state. They burrowed into his abdominal walls and, within minutes, they had appropriated their host’s chromosomes. Hijacking genetic codes in his DNA, they directed the formation of viruses which invaded healthy cells, using the genetic machinery of each cell to reproduce themselves millions of times. When the nucleus of each cell was leeched and crowding with viral bodies, the cell burst, releasing the viruses. The purpose of the viruses was not to make Kingle ill, but to force his cells to create new proteins which would effectively cripple his immune system. Once that was done, the larval worms could control the host without interference.
And once that was accomplished, and it took only mere hours, the worms fought for complete dominance of the host, knowing only one could succeed.
By then, Kingle would be tamed.
Enslaved.
He would be a biological vessel which existed only to cultivate and propagate the worm within and to infest others with its spawn. Stuffing himself primarily with well-marbled juicy red meat, the worm itself would grow at an unprecedented 500% each day, its self-fertilized eggs filling each proglottid to the bursting point. Kingle would not know he had been parasitized. He would be rewarded for the proper behavior—the getting of food and the protection, the mothering of the worm within—and punished for anything that deviated from it. The worm would do this by mastering him as a drug masters an addict. When he was good he would be rewarded with chemical neurotransmitters released from his endocrine glands which would mimic the effects of heroin and cocaine; when he was not, these secretions would be withheld and he would know a punishing agony.
Within fifteen minutes after initial infestation, the organism once known as Charles Kingle ceased to exist.
&nb
sp; 1:16 A.M.
And spread…
After Kingle, the woman once known as Shara Pontre was picked-up by three white men in a van who were drunk and looking for a little fun with the same girl. Parked in an alley, she stripped for them, watching their eyes as they drooled over her large, firm breasts. They giggled. She performed oral sex on each in turn until they were all wonderfully hard and ready. Then she took them all at the same time. She mounted one, while a second penetrated her roughly from behind and she slid her lips over the penis of the third.
She brought them all near-simultaneously to orgasm like they’d never known before, and by then it was too late.
The after-euphoria of cheap, emotionless sex usually faded within minutes, she knew, replaced by guilt and anxiety. But not this time. The worm within her, using her own altered biochemistry, made her sweat out chemicals that were sweet and intoxicating, causing the midbrain neuroreceptors of all three of her johns to produce euphoric levels of dopamine and norepinephrine, making them feel more relaxed and easy than they had ever felt before in their lives.
Then she had them.
They were helpless.
She was a blazing sun and they were caught in her gravity sink. As she hovered over each of them, whispering things to them, they experienced something quite like a near-death experience. As her worm slid into each of their mouths slowly and lovingly, sacrificing a segment in each, they knew a sharp, uneasy sensation of fear…then a chemically-induced calmness and tranquility as if the light at the end of a tunnel, a warm and comforting light, was reaching out for them, enveloping them, filling them with a sense of well-being unlike anything they had known before, fusing them with something larger and grander than their individual petty lives.
Shara watched as the larva took possession of them.
She felt absolutely nothing, only a vague interest which was not her own but that of the parasite within her. Now and again, something like dread or horror would spike within her but her worm would block it instantly.
She watched the bodies of her johns squirm as their eyes remained glassy and unfocused.
It had been that way for her and millions of others by that point.
After fifteen or twenty minutes, she went outside and sought new hosts. She had very little trouble in finding them. By the time the night was over she would have infected twenty-three more individuals who themselves would do much the same. Up and down 8 Mile, Shara Pontre and the other worm hookers spread the seed that would be carried from one end of the city to the other.
1:38 A.M.
And spread…
When Buchmiller finally got him in the patrol car, Pulson was an absolute mess. He was ranting and raving and when he got that out of his system, he just sat there, breathing, making a choking, sobbing sound deep in his throat like he had seen something that had completely stripped his gears.
Buchmiller figured he had. “I want you to relax,” he told him. “It’s out of our hands now. The feds are taking over the scene and we’re nothing but bystanders. Ronny? Look at me. Goddammit, I want you to look at me.”
Pulson’s black face was beaded with sweat, his eyes huge and staring. “You don’t know what I saw in there, Sarge.”
“You already told me.”
He just kept shaking his head. “I…I…I…”
“Easy now.”
Pulson swallowed. “Davy’s dead. Davy’s fucking dead and I couldn’t do a goddamn thing about it.”
“Sometimes you can’t. That’s the awful part of this job: sometimes you just can’t.”
Buchmiller stuck a cigarette in his mouth, figuring Pulson was about as close to shock as anyone he’d ever seen. He lit it for him and Pulson pulled hard off it, coughed out a cloud of smoke. He hadn’t smoked in four years but at that moment he couldn’t seem to remember the fact.
“They were everywhere, Sarge. Everywhere. It was like…it was like a fucking nest in there. A nest.”
Buchmiller listened while Pulson went through it one more time, squeezing the poison out of his soul. They’d received a call. Screams from inside an empty building. A crack house, that’s what they figured. Maybe someone in there was getting beaten or murdered, you could never tell on 8 Mile. You always expected the worse. They went in and the place was full of derelicts and junkies. Except they weren’t the usual sort. They took down his partner, a dozen or more of them falling on him. Pulson emptied his 9mm into them. He kept shooting but more kept coming.
“I killed four or five of them.”
“Okay.”
“I thought they were dead.”
“Right.”
Pulson took a drag from the cigarette, caught somewhere between hysterical laughter and tears. “They went down. I saw them go down. Then… they were moving. Moving, Sarge, they were fucking moving. Except… except it wasn’t them. It was what was inside them. Worms, Sarge, big white worms… I saw one crawl out of guy’s mouth. It was big… like a fucking snake.”
Buchmiller nodded. “Okay. Now forget it.”
“What?”
“You heard me. Forget it. When we get back to the station and you get your feet under you, you’re gonna write this up. But you won’t say shit about worms. You read me on this?”
“But—”
“But nothing, Ronny. You got a kid, don’t you?”
“Yeah, but—”
“How old?”
“Eight, but—”
“You wanna be around when he’s ten? When he graduates from high school?”
Pulson nodded slowly, still confused.
“Then you write it up like I say. Got it? No fucking worms. Nothing. Just a crack house with a crowd of whacked-out homeless people. They attacked. They overwhelmed you and your partner. You shot out of self-defense. Then you ran out and called it in. Okay?”
Pulson was staring at him.
Buchmiller licked his lips. “Listen to me, kid, and hear me good. You think it’s strange that the feds arrived before our own back-up units? This city is all of a sudden thick with feds. They’re monitoring our radio calls. They have jurisdiction.”
Pulson stared out the window. There were dozens of men in black windbreakers and others in white spacesuits dragging bodies out of the building. They were being bagged and loaded up into a white delivery truck.
Buchmiller wiped sweat from his brow. “Those people are Department of Homeland Security, Ronny. At least, some of them are. The others…I don’t know. But they’ve all got the same spooky eyes. They think there’s some kind of outbreak in there. I told them you never went inside the building. That Davy did and when you went to his assistance a bunch of crazies poured out after you and you drove them back inside. They’re gonna question you, son. You better stick to my story or they’ll take you with them. They have the authority. And if they take you with, you won’t be coming back.”
Pulson was looking really scared now. “How do you know that?”
“Call it a gut feeling.”
“But I was just doing my job. This is a free country for chrissake.”
Buchmiller barked a cynical laugh. “Yeah, you tell yourself that on the Fourth of July when you wave your flag. Until then, don’t be so fucking naïve.”
“Okay.”
Two men in windbreakers approached the car. They looked dangerous.
“It’s all or nothing right now, Ronny,” Buchmiller said.
“Okay.”
Buchmiller unrolled his window.
“We need to speak with Officer Pulson,” one of the DHS thugs said.
“Sure,” Pulson said, feeling the bullshit inside him rising to the occasion. “Not much I can tell you. I lost my partner. He went inside and they came out, crazy and shouting. I opened up…”
Within forty-eight hours, 52% of Metro Detroit was infected.
CLEVELAND, OHIO:
ST. CLAIR AVE, CHINATOWN
2:16 A.M.
How he slipped in unnoticed, Raymond Ho did not know. Only that suddenly, it seemed,
he was there and everyone seemed to see him at precisely the same moment: a tall, reed-thin man with a bald head, wild eyes, and a three-piece suit that was ragged and filthy with dried vomit and bloodstains. It was all bad enough, but those eyes—glossy black, wide and unblinking—were what put a chill up Ray’s back. Running the Peking Buffet until three in the morning, of course, they often got some strange types in there. But this guy… damn… now he was something.
He stumbled forward, an awful sickening stench wafting off him that was equal parts body odor, medical waste, and a sickening sweet odor that was pungent enough to curl eyebrows.
Aw, Christ, Ray thought, and it was looking like an easy night tonight. Now here comes trouble.
There were about fifteen people in the buffet and the crazy man (which was how Ray began to think of him) moved right past them, knocking two drunken women out of his path, moving straight past the steam tables of General Tso’s chicken and Crab Rangoon and making for the Mongolian Barbecue in the back.
“Hey!” Ray told him, coming up behind him. “You can’t be in here. You get out of here or I call the police.”
But the crazy man kept going and Ray grabbed him by the shoulder, and he spun around and smashed Ray right in the face. It was no gentle love-tap either. It knocked Ray to the floor, several of his teeth feeling very loose, blood trickling from his mouth from a split lip.
Several patrons, bless them, went to Ray’s aid. A couple burly college-age kids went at the crazy man, taking hold of him but he was out of his head and tossed them around like they weighed about as much as feather pillows. By then, people were vacating the premises.
That’s when Bobby Tran got in the act.
Bobby was a security guard, a former Golden Gloves boxer with a second-degree black belt in a Korean martial art called Hapkido who spent his weekends as a competitive kickboxer. Ray had seen him put some pretty big boys to the canvas. Six-foot-three inches and 230 pounds of sculpted muscle, he could intimidate the best.
Bobby grabbed the crazy man around the throat, pivoted quick, and flipped him up and down.