by Nick Cutter
Q: C. elegans worm?
A: It’s a roundworm. About a millimeter long. Caenorhabditis elegans, but everyone just calls it C. elegans. During its lifetime it exhibits many familiar signs of human aging: reduced movement, wrinkling, tissue degradation, decreased ability to fight infection. I was trying to locate genes that might slow down the human aging process.
Q: A noble ambition.
A: Yeah, well. I was blinded by science.
Q: How did Edgerton know of you?
A: A lot of researchers sniffed around the program, right? They figured they could poach a recent grad—someone willing to do the scut work.
Q: So Edgerton sought you out?
A: It was more a situation of mutual desperation.
Q: What drew him to you?
A: Like I said, the fact that I came cheap and didn’t have any other options. But I had done work with the C. elegans worm—which bears about the same similarity to the hydatid as a minnow does to a great white shark. And neither creature is anything like what Edgerton bred.
Q: He bred? Didn’t you both work on the mutated specimen?
A: Listen . . . I’ll always carry the guilt. I could tell you that the outcome was unknown—that I was pursuing science—and if I’d had an inkling of what was to come I’d’ve burned that lab to cinders. After all this is over you’ll send me to prison. I deserve that. Deserve more, but for some crimes there exists no fit punishment. I was part of it, but I was the lesser part. On every level.
Q: How so?
A: Clive Edgerton is a genius. He’s also ratshit crazy, pardon my French, possibly a sociopath, but undoubtedly a genius. Even though my IQ is likely higher than most people’s in this room, I was no more than Clive’s lab monkey. I can’t see biological processes the way he does. Can’t see the chains in order to break and reorder them. So I knew what we were doing, yes—theoretically, anyway—but I didn’t create any of it. I can’t.
Q: But you knew?
A: Yes.
Q: And you told nobody?
A: That’s right.
Q: Why?
A: Trade secrets. We were working on something that, if successful, would have been a billion-dollar enterprise. Edgerton was working under a grant from a biopharmaceutical company. Secrecy was crucial.
Q: So crucial that you’d risk lives?
A: We didn’t know lives were at . . . We’re talking about one of the three holy grails of modern medicine: a cure for male pattern baldness, a method to reverse the aging process, and a means to lose weight without effort. If anyone invents a pill that you can pop at night and wake up with a fuller head of hair or the crow’s-feet diminished around your eyes or five pounds lighter? There’s no saying how much that could be worth. Clive used to cite that old motto: You can never be too rich or too thin. He’d say, “If I can make the rich thin, they’ll make me rich.”
* * *
16
TOWARD MIDNIGHT, Max stood down by the shore. The sky was salted with remote stars. The beach was a bonelike strip unfurling to the shoreline. The sea advanced up the shore with a series of minute sucking inhales. It sounded like a huge toothless creature swallowing the island.
Newton joined him. His hand thrummed against Max’s bare arm. His fear leapt the threshold between their bodies—Max felt it now, too.
“We shouldn’t have done that to the Scoutmaster.”
“He’s sick, Newt.”
“I saw that. But not a closet. Am I wrong? Not that way.”
“You did it, too,” Max said tiredly.
Newton swallowed and nodded. “I did. It could have been what my mom calls a coping mechanism. You know, when things get rough, we do things to make it better. Or just to distract ourselves. Do you think that’s what it was, Max?”
“We got carried away, Newt. That’s all.”
Last summer, Max had shared his house with a family of shearwaters—a much fleeter version of a puffin. They colonized the cliffs overlooking the Atlantic, nesting in the rocks. But due to a population explosion, shearwaters had begun to nest in the houses of North Point. They’d chip away the Gyprock exterior, tugging loose Styrofoam and pink insulation to make room for their nests.
A family of shearwaters made one above Max’s bedroom window. In the morning he’d crane his neck and see the daddy shearwater poke his head out of the hole he’d chipped in the house’s facade, darting it in both directions before arrowing out over the water to hunt.
Max’s father, however, wasn’t impressed. The lawn was covered in Styrofoam and pink rags of insulation. The birds would wreck the home’s resale value, he griped—despite the fact that he’d lived in North Point his whole life and would likely die in this house. He drove to the Home Hardware, returning with a bottle of insulating foam sealant. He clambered up a ladder to the nest, shooed the birds away, stuck the nozzle into the hole, and pumped in sealant until it billowed out and hardened to a puffy crust. He climbed back down with a self-satisfied smile.
But the shearwaters were back the next day. They’d torn away at the sealant, ripping it off in chunks with their sickle-shaped beaks. Now the lawn was covered in Styrofoam, insulation, and sealant. Max’s father repeated the procedure, believing the birds would relent. But shearwaters are cousins to homing pigeons—they always come back. I should shoot them, Max’s father groused, though he could never do such a thing.
Still, he was angry—that particular anger of humans defied by the persistence of nature. He drove back to Home Hardware, returning with another can of sealant and a few feet of heavy-duty chicken wire. Using tin snips, he cut the wire into circles roughly the size of the hole. Clambering up the ladder, he made a layer cake of sorts: a layer of sealant, then chicken wire, sealant, wire, sealant, wire. Okay, birds, he’d said. Figure that out.
Max returned from school the next day to find a dead shearwater in the bushes. The daddy—he could tell by its dark tail feathers. It lay with its neck twisted at a horrible angle. Its beak was broken—half of it was snapped off. Its eyes were filmy-gray, like pewter. It’d made a mess: shreds of sealant dotted the lawn. But his father’s handiwork held strong. The daddy bird must’ve broken its neck—had it become so frustrated, so crazy, that it’d flown into the barrier until its neck snapped?
When Max’s father saw the dead bird, his jaw tightened, he blinked a few times very fast, then quietly he said: I just wanted them to find someplace else to live.
In the middle of the night Max had been woken by peeping. The sound was coming from the walls. Max padded into his parents’ room. His father rubbed sleep crust from his eyes and followed Max back to his bedroom. When he heard those noises, his face did a strange thing.
At three o’clock in the morning, Max’s dad climbed the ladder. His housecoat flapped in the salt breeze. Using a screwdriver and vise grips, he tore out the sealant and chicken wire, working so manically that he nearly fell. By the time he’d ripped it away the peeps had stopped. He reached deep inside the hole, into a small depression he’d not realized was there. He placed whatever he’d found in the pockets of his housecoat with great reverence.
In the kitchen, his face white with shock, he laid them on the table: the mama bird and two baby birds. The mama bird’s wing was broken. The babies were small and gray-blue, still slick with the gummy liquid inside their eggs. All three were still.
I didn’t know, was all Max’s dad could say. If I’d known I’d’ve never . . . I got carried away.
Max thought of this now, in relation to what they’d done to Scoutmaster Tim.
They’d gotten carried away, was all. It happened to adults, too. When you got angry and frustrated and scared enough, it was so, so easy to get carried away.
“I never seen a dead person before,” said Newton. “My hamster died. Yoda. He got out of his cage and got his neck broke by getting caught in a sliding closet door. He was just a hamster but man, he died in my hands. His neck hung all funny. I couldn’t stop crying.” Newton swabbed his wrist across h
is eyes and fetched a deep sigh. “We buried him in a shoe box in the backyard. I made a cross out of Popsicle sticks. That’s kinda dumb. Jeez. Don’t tell the other guys, huh? They’ll rag me a new one.”
Max’s father had buried the birds in a shoe box, too, lining it with lush coffin velvet. “It’s not dumb, Newt. It was the right thing to do, I think.”
“Yeah?” Newt smiled, but his expression darkened by degrees. “Do you think we could let the Scoutmaster out?”
“Kent’s the only one who knows the lock combination.”
The boys squinted at the pinpricks of light on the mainland. There appeared to be more than usual. Smaller lights zipped back and forth beneath its awning like phosphorescent ants pouring out of a neon anthill. A remote sense of calm settled over Max. A sense of Zen forbearance, even, as his body marshaled its remaining strength—as if it knew, in advance of his mind, that he’d need every ounce of it over the coming hours and days. Distantly, Max wondered if this was how men felt in a war. Even more distantly he wondered about his parents: in bed, probably, sleeping soundly with no earthly idea what was happening.
“Do you really think the boat will show up?”
“Shut up, Newt. Please.”
PART 2
INFESTATION
* * *
Lead news item from CNN.com, October 22:
FALSTAFF ISLAND QUARANTINED DUE TO BIOLOGICAL INCIDENT OF UNKNOWN ORIGIN
As of 7:15 a.m. the tiny (18-square-kilometer) island of Falstaff, 3 miles off the northern coast of Prince Edward Island, has been officially quarantined.
A memo released by the Military Attaché office cites the cause as “a biological incident of unknown origin.” This could mean an outbreak of contagious disease, fungal infection, parasite, or a water- or airborne contaminant that poses a significant risk to human and animal populations.
The military continues to mass in the small town of North Point. Sources indicate the military is working jointly with the Public Health Agency—specifically the Centre for Contagious Disease.
As yet no information has surfaced regarding either the specific cause behind the quarantine or the nature of the biological threat.
According to the military, the island is currently unoccupied.
* * *
17
THEY HAD locked him in the closet. Their Scoutmaster. The town’s only doctor. Almost unbelievably, this had happened. They’d ganged up. Kent and Ephraim, and Shelley with his ball-bearing eyes. Even Newton and Max had joined in.
You deserved it, Tim, HAL 9000 chastised. You put the boys in danger. Knowingly or not, but they were your responsibility. Remember the Scout Code.
How was it my fault? Tim asked himself. Had he invited the sick man onto the island? Had he purposefully, maliciously set events on an extinction vector? No, no. He’d acted out of kindness. He’d done what any caring person would do. He’d tried so hard, under such desperate circumstances, to make the right choices—how was he to know it would turn out so horribly wrong?
It ended in this: Tim locked in a closet, alone with his thoughts. And his hunger. And the sick sweet stink of his body.
He was resigned to the fact he’d forever be known as the Scoutmaster who’d been mutinied by his own Scouts. That ought to make “Big” Jeff Jenks bust a gut.
Tim sat with his spine flush to the closet wall and his knees drawn tight to his chest. He tested each joint for weak spots. No luck. Solid wood nailed at inflexible angles.
A thin bar of sunlight wept under the door. Tim ran his fingers along the dissolving edge of light. Hugely comforting. A link to the world outside the closet. To the mainland and the sureties it held. To his cold cellar and its shelves stocked with preserves. To the glass canister of tongue depressors in his examination room.
He breathed heavily and focused. He could untwist a coat hanger and thread it under the door and . . . what? Jab someone in the ankle? Trip one of the boys? Why bother? Maybe he deserved to be here.
There’s no maybe about it, Tim, said HAL 9000.
He was trapped. Impossibly, inescapably. Maybe it was for the best. Fact: he was ill. The boys may have been right to lock him up. It hurt tremendously that they’d done it—a sudden feral act that made a mockery of all those years they’d been together, a close-knit group under his command. And now, cooped up in here, he couldn’t help them anymore—and that scared him profoundly.
Were you helping them, Tim? Really?
“Shut up, HAL,” he croaked, sounding like a drainpipe clogged with sludge. “You’re not my pal, HAL.”
You’re becoming irrational, Tim. This conversation can serve no purpose anymore. Good-bye.
“Good. Scram. Get lost.”
Tim’s thoughts returned to his Scouts. They were running wild, a quintet of lost boys. Did they have any inkling of the peril they were in? How could they, really? Boys didn’t process fear the same way as adults, especially when it came to sickness. Their scabs healed like magic, their coughs dried up overnight. But Tim knew the frailty of human bodies; he’d seen how even the stoutest ones could collapse into a sucking pit of disease and death.
Not to mention the fact that they’d also laid their hands all over him while doing the deed. They had breathed in the air he’d exhaled in fear-sick gusts. He may have even spit at them. Dear God, had he actually spat on the boys?
Part of him—a shockingly large part—was okay being in here. Perhaps he was unfit for command. Fact: he was paralyzed with hunger. He kept catching whiffs of cotton candy from someplace. His eyes blinked uncontrollably. He kept hearing his mother, dead six years now, calling him home for supper. Timmy, chowder’s ready!
Eat, said this funny little voice. It wasn’t HAL or the Undervoice. This one was different—sly and insistent, like baby rats clawing the insides of his head.
But there’s nothing to eat in here, he told the voice.
Sure there is. There’s always things to eat, silly.
The rats kept clawing, clawing; before long they’d claw through the soft meat of his brains and scratch through the bone of his skull. Tim pictured it: his skull bulging, his scalp and hair stirring with antic life, the skin splitting with the sound of rotten upholstery as a tide of hairless pink ratlings spilled from the slit, slick with blood and grayish brain-curds, squealing shrilly as they sheeted clumsily down his face, past his unblinking eyes, bumping and squalling over his lips spread in a vacant smile.
Okay, he answered that funny niggling voice. But what should I eat?
Oh, eat anything, it said with cold reasonableness. Any old thing you can find.
The closet was wallpapered. Who the hell wallpapered a closet? The paper was torn in flimsy tatters. He tweezed a curl between his fingers. It ripped down the wall with a lovely zippering sound.
He placed the strip of wallpaper on his tongue. The ancient paste was vaguely sweet. He swallowed hungrily.
Lovely, the voice said. Just lovely. Now eat more.
Tim did as the voice asked.
Peeling and eating and peeling and eating.
The funny little voice was easy to obey. It didn’t ask for much and what it did request was simple to accomplish.
Just eat.
And eat.
And eat.
A body settled against the other side of the door. Tim licked his paper-cut lips; his tongue had gone thick and gluey with paste. He whispered:
“Max? Is that you?”
Silence.
“Newt? Ephraim?”
A song—sung in a low mocking warble:
Nobody loves me
Everybody hates me
I’m going to the garden to eat worms, to eat worms
Big fat juicy ones, long thin slimy ones
Itsy-bitsy crawly-wawly woooorms.
The singer was plugging up the space between the door and the floor.
Shelley?
Tim’s precious bar of light vanished in heart-stopping chunks.
“No,” he moaned. “
What are you doing? No, please, no, please don’t . . .”
He pushed his fingers under the door to dislodge the barrier but his fingertips met with resistance. Next came the whooonking sound of duct tape stripped off a roll. The last meager particles of light filching under the door disappeared entirely. Tim sat in total darkness.
He opened his mouth to beg for his light back. It was all he had, for God’s sake. The childlike plea died on his lips. Somewhere down inside of him—not too far down, either—he could feel that relentless squirming. His teeth snapped shut.
EAT.
The voice wasn’t so small or funny anymore.
Tim did as it said. He wept softly without realizing.
18
SHELLEY PLACED the tape back in the kitchen drawer. His heart was beating a little heavier than normal. His eyes were hot and watery with dull excitement. The Scoutmaster was making faint pleading noises from inside the closet.
Shelley tried very hard not to laugh. He did not think the Scoutmaster’s noises were very funny—Shelley didn’t find anything funny, really. Not ever.
He inhaled through the alcohol-soaked gauze over his mouth and nose. He understood the danger—he could practically see the microscopic eggs ringing the scotch bottle’s rim, the one Kent had drunk from last night. He saw the eggs hovering in the cool air above the dead man’s chest. This didn’t scare him. If anything, it excited him.
He glanced at his handiwork on the closet door. He’d wedged two dish towels underneath and taped them in place. Now the Scoutmaster had no light at all. If the other boys asked why he did it, he already had an excuse: Shelley had heard the Scoutmaster’s consumptive hacking and sealed him in so they wouldn’t all get what Tim clearly had.
Shelley opened the cabin door and slipped quietly outside. A fine band of golden light striped across the horizon. The others still slept round the fire.
He went round the side of the cabin and found a spiderweb suspended between the east-facing wall and the overhang: an intricate hexagonal threadwork hung with beads of morning dew.