The Skunge

by Barr, Jeff

  Blood streamed from his body. Inroads of pain burned in his muscles like hot wires. He staggered and fell, splashing back into the water, his mind whirling. He snuffled up water and began to cry.

  "Hey man, you OK?" A jogger, clad in expensive-looking spandex shorts and tank-top, leaned down. His face showed equal parts compassion and prurient interest. His dog, a lean black hound with triangular upraised ears, growled deep in its throat. "Shh Basie. Do you need me to call an ambulance, dude?"

  Christian tried to focus on the man, but his eyes ran with water and his thoughts caromed around his skull like a buzzing insect. "Help. Help me," he choked out. His throat was clogged, like he had tried to swallow a handful of weeds.

  The jogger ventured a step closer, peering at him over the blade-like lenses of his sunglasses. His eyes widened as he saw something he didn't like, and he almost tripped and fell in his hurry to move away. "Actually, nevermind. Sorry, but I'm actually running a bit late." He gestured up the trail, as if to illustrate the fact. "And I have to be at work in a couple hours, so—" The dog strained at the leash, hackles standing straight up, foam flecking its jaws.

  Christian wheezed and gasped. "I killed someone. I have killed people. Help me."

  The dog lunged, yanking the jogger along behind it. He tripped and lost hold of the leash. The dog landed on Christian, snarling and biting and clawing. "Basie, get down! Stop it!" The dog ignored him and powered into Christian, muzzle snapping inches from his face.

  Christian struggled against the dog's wiry muscle, forcing his arm up between his face and the dog's jaws. The dog's long white teeth clamped into the muscle of his forearm, digging and tearing at the meat, scraping against bone. Splatters of blood flecked its whiskers and the white patch on its muzzle.

  Christian's vision turned red, and he snarled and whipped the dog from side to side, trying to shake it loose. The dog hung on, like something that had grown from Christian's own flesh. He felt movement under the skin of his arm, and the dog let out a started yip. It tried to disengage, but tendrils of fibrous material had extruded from Christian's arm and planted themselves in the dog's face. More had found its throat and plunged themselves into the fur there. A series of muffled barks emerged from the dog, and its teeth let go. Christian grabbed the dog by the ears and pulled it back to his own face. He puked out a long, veined tentacle straight into the dog's mouth.

  "Basie!" The jogger lunged forward to grip the dog around the middle. He pulled, but Christian—or whatever was growing in Christian—was far stronger. It pulsed and flexed like a long muscular worm. The dog fought to dislodge it, shaking its head, biting at the tentacle stuck down its throat. Then the dog exploded. Gobbets of black-furred flesh blasted in every direction. Warm blood splattered Christian's bare flesh and steamed in the morning air.

  The jogger fled, screaming, and Christian's consciousness swirled down the darkness as he crumpled to the ground.

  That night, after dark, Christian stumbled through the doors of the emergency room at Hollywood Presbyterian. The clock read nine-fourteen P.M. His skin burned and writhed as if trying to tear itself off his body. The people in the plastic seats took one look at his lurching, twitching gait and shifted away, drawing into themselves, pulling their legs under their seats. Looking anywhere but at him.

  He stood, panting, just inside the door. Tattered ropes of the alien thread hung off him in wild garlands. A deep red moss covered one side of his face, and threads grew from his mouth, the corner of his eyes, his ears. One of his arms had fused to his body, stitched with the fungus that crawled over his skin.

  "Are you frightened of me? You should be," he rasped. He tripped and almost fell into a family of four. They cried out and covered their heads. A boy of about four stared up at him with wide brown eyes until his parents grabbed him by the arm and yanked him back. "It's because you recognize a dying man when you see one, isn't it!" he shouted at them.

  He had come here to die, if he could; his body and mind welcomed the end. But something else—what he carried like a dark, fertile seed—had decided otherwise.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Jynx's neighborhood was even worse than Sugar's: a rotting, tumbled maze of cracked pavement, stinking alleyways, and abandoned cars. The building looked like something that had died and begun to rot while still standing. Six floors of cracked sandstone the color of bone, the bottom floor choking under a mat of creeping ivy that crept up the sides of the building like an infection. Jynx lived on the top floor, above the clutching fingers of the ivy.

  The buzzer was broken, so she pounded on the glass doors. Inside, the lobby sat deserted save for an old-fashioned standing ashtray and a broken-down chair upholstered in worn red velveteen. She re-dialed Jynx and got no answer. She ran back outside, looking upwards. She thought maybe she could see someone high above, looking down, but dialing the number again yielded nothing. She waved her arms, shouting, and jumped up and down. Someone across the street shouted at her to shut up. She was about to give up when she saw an Asian couple leaving the building. She managed to slide past the door just as it closed. She raced to the elevators. An out-of-order sign. Judging by the dust, it had hung there for years.

  The stairwell echoed like a bad memory, and smelled like piss and dejection. She charged upward, re-dialing Jynx's number. Still no answer. She kicked aside drifts of trash until an empty syringe rattled back down the steps, then she just hopped over the piles.

  The harder it was to actually get to Jynx, the more Sugar wanted—needed—to see her. Sugar told herself Jynx probably just needed money, or drugs, or take-out Chinese, or a pack of Marlboro Lights. Her mind skated around what had happened earlier—no sense in worrying about that now. She pushed the memory away. That feeling of

  giving birth

  extraction nagged at her, but it was tempered with pride. She had been faced with something that a few years ago would have sent her screaming into a 5150 hold at Hollywood Presby. Today? She had stepped right the fuck up and dealt with it. Negative perspiration, as her mother would say. A spasm of nostalgia ran through her. What she wouldn't give just to sit and talk to her again, like when Sugar was a kid. What would her mother make of her, now? Would she be proud?

  Wiping sweat away from her brow, the back of her neck stinging, she reached the top floor. Panting like a dog, she trudged down the dim hallway. Burnt out, buzzing or busted light bulbs left a path of shadows punctuated with tiny islands of dirty yellow light. The hallway smelled like old fried food and accumulated grime and smoke. Jynx (real name Jackie Gonzalez, a broken product of a long-departed white Angeleno and a Latina mother who, according to Jackie, spent most of her time at the bottom of a bottle) hated live cam work, and spent the money she made from movies on drugs and clothes, leaving nothing for rent.

  If I had to live here, I'd kill myself, Sugar thought, sidling past a pile of reeking garbage bags piled against the wall. Whatever happens, I'm taking her back to my place. At least she won't be living like an animal.

  Apartment 668. The neighbor of the beast, she thought, stifling a bubble of rancid giggles that threatened to spill from her mouth. The front door leaked silence like cold water. She tapped on the door with the back of her knuckles.

  "Jynx?" she stage-whispered. No answer—but had she actually expected one? She tented her fingers and pushed at the door, expecting it to open—and it did. "J? You there?" A chill skittered up her back, making her shiver. The only light in the apartment came from the windows, where the yellow moon peered in like a skull. There was no sound or movement, but it was a full silence. A waiting silence.

  "Jynx. It's me." She heard a sound from her right, and groped along the wall for the switch. Nothing. The sound moved closer, a dry slither that sent more tickling impulses up and down her back. She wasn't sure if she wanted to crawl out of her skin, or if her skin wanted to crawl off of her.

  Just as Sugar's fingers found the light switch, she felt something touch her arm.

  Grimy yellow ligh
t flooded the front hall, and Jynx stood inches away, her eyes huge and lambent as brown jewels. "Fuck!" Sugar stumbled back and hit the door, slamming it shut behind her. Her back rewarded her with a bright flare of pain where she had fallen earlier. She slid down the bright red security door and ended up sitting on the floor, shaking her head and laughing.

  "What?" Jynx asked.

  "What happened to your clothes? Girl, no matter what kind of trouble you're in, you are long overdue for a shopping trip."

  She gestured at Jynx's ragged clothing: a ripped t-shirt and a pair of yoga pants that looked like they'd been through a bear attack. The clothes dripped off her frame. She had always been tiny, but now she looked like something from a childhood eating-disorder pamphlet. "I've…been sick. Not eating. Something bad is happening to me."

  "Your eyes look like two piss-holes in a snowbank. Meth will kill you—that's what's happening to you, you dumb shit." Sugar dusted herself off, grimacing at a rank smell from the kitchen.

  "I've never done that stuff in my life," she said. "This is something off that fucking dude, Chris, or whatever—"

  "Christian." The echo of her earlier thought, that he had somehow poisoned them both, sent a chill through her.

  "Whatever. The guy from the shoot in the Canyons." Jynx started speed rapping, running her bone-white hands through her hair and pacing back and forth. She looked like a mix between a little girl and a rambling street junkie two steps away from a final tumble into the gutter. "It started a few days ago. I got so hungry—I'm still so hungry, but no matter what I eat, I throw it back up. It's like my stomach doesn't know how to handle food anymore." Sugar stepped into the kitchen. She would find something Jynx could keep down. When the lights came on, she almost ran out again.

  The tiny room was a reeking horror. Overflowing sacks of garbage, food rotting on every surface, the sink a whirlpool of broken dishes. Boxes of cereal, their contents spilled out over the dirty floor.

  "And the itching—my God, the fucking itching—every day I think it can't get worse, and every day I'm wrong. It itches so much it hurts. I got so crazy I…I did things to myself." She pointed to the floor, where a wire barbecue brush, bristles covered with scraps of bloody tissue, lay like a discarded murder weapon.

  "Jesus, J." Sugar noticed the other girl's arms for the first time. They were covered in raw red swatches of scab, stripes of red and black and yellow. Her legs were worse; weeping red patches of bloody skin still showed the marks of frantic scratching. "We need to get you to a clinic." Sugar moved toward the bedroom, scanning the floor for something clean enough for Jynx to wear outside.

  Jynx uttered a shaky laugh. "Are you kidding me? I can't go anywhere like this."

  "Bullshit." Sugar's mind nudged her, reminding her of her own struggle from earlier, but she ignored it. "We'll find you something clean to wear."

  "You think I'm worried about the way I'm dressed?" She uttered an unbelieving laugh. "I don't have the flu, Sugar. What I have they can't fix. Look at me." When Sugar didn't turn around, her voice sharpened. "Look."

  Sugar turned, and the air was sucked out if her lungs. Jynx had raised her shirt, baring her midriff, and she looked like she had sprouted long black worms from her skin. Twisted, gnarled black ropes of tissue dangled down to the waistband of her pants. One especially thick line dripped from her navel. Jynx turned around, letting the light play over her body. A line of the threads, each half an inch around, grew from her spine. They looked moist and sticky, like they were covered in a thin layer of slime.

  "Jesus. What the hell happened to you?"

  "You know what happened! That fucking asshole had some kind of disease, and now I've got it."

  Sugar's legs trembled, and the world wobbled in front of her eyes. Get it together girl, don't fucking flake out on me now. She closed her eyes, willing the world to stop spinning. Jynx's next words started her shaking all over again.

  "I've got it," Jynx whispered in a shaking voice. "And so do you."

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  Christian roasted in a lake of fire. Every nerve ending sent painful darts of heat deep into his flesh, and above that, like a high whining buzz, the maddening itch as the threads continued to grow from every inch of his flesh. Intestinal loops and coils covered him like a suit made of barbed wire. He couldn't seem to hold on to thoughts for more than a few seconds, and the constant, crashing pain input kept his body on high alert, sending positive feedback loops of adrenaline flooding through the channels and tunnels the infection had bored into his body. He was barely aware of the other man in the room, seeing him only as a blurred, moving shape. Christian let his eyes slip closed, and a moment later the drugs took him under, into midnight-blue, pain-wracked unconsciousness.

  Doctor Jeff Chen paced tight circles beside the bed, his mind ticking over with furious speed. Christian Neumann, the victim of a horrifying, yet wonderful condition. Horrifying, because the man was in constant agony; just the tortuous way he flopped around on the burn bed was enough to prove that much. The painkillers should have blown that pain away. And at the same time wonderful: it was unknown, and no one in the hospital had ever heard of anything remotely like it, and no one he had called had heard of it, and even the all-powerful Google was reduced to a plaintive few hundred results. What could very well be a pristine, brand new disease. And, best of all, the case was—

  "Alllll Chen." Rudy Bickler clapped Chen on the back as he waddled into the room. Bickler weighed around three hundred pounds even though his job, as a porter, kept him on his feet and moving all shift. Chen marveled that even walking upwards of twenty miles a day, as porters did, Bickler hadn't managed to lose a single pound. "You lucky son of a bitch. I hear this medical marvel belongs to you."

  "That's right. And keep your voice down, please. He's awake."

  "Oh, so sorry, Doctor Chen." Chen could hear Bickler breathing: it was heavy, moist, and obscurely revolting. He could also smell cigarettes on him, and there was a tell-tale bulge in the breast pocket of his scrubs.

  "You've been talked to about carrying your cigarettes in your scrubs. The patients don't need to see that. There are people dying of lung cancer here, do you think they want to see that?"

  "Yeah, I've been talked to about a lot of things." Bickler bustled around the room, checking equipment, cords, and lines, all the while with one eyed cocked toward Neumann, who writhed and gasped. "But I won't tell if you don't, Chen." Bickler winked and popped a stick of gum into his mouth.

  "For Christ's sake, you're working the ICU, Bickler," Chen said. He felt his exasperation getting away from him and bit it back. Bickler was an asshole, but he was well liked by everyone else in the hospital, from the Materials and Logistics troglodytes in the basement to the fuscia-scrub wearing Porter army, who could turn any ordinary day into a quiet sort of hell: dragging their heels on patient moves, taking their time with plasma bags, all the snide comments and asides about Chen in front of the patients. That particular brand of shit he did not need. Not today, with a potentially career-making patient in bed shaking himself to pieces like a dog with a bellyful of razor blades. And, of course, Mr. John Bickler Sr., Rudy's father, who sat atop the almighty Board of Directors.

  "OK, just hurry up and move along please, Bickler. I have a lot of work to do."

  "Work, right. All that work standing around drinking coffee with the other em-dees, shooting the shit. I've seen you working." Bickler's fat chops jiggled as he tapped Neumann's chart tablet. He left greasy smudges on the tablet's surface, and Chen's mind chattered about MRSA infection rates and HAI numbers. He lost his patience.

  "Damn it Bickler, just get out of here and let me work." He hissed.

  "I would watch your mouth if I was you," Bickler said, his face pale and serious. Chen ignored his baleful stare. "My father isn't crazy about all you mud-people running around here in the first place. He wouldn't think twice about showing you the door. Think about that for a minute, Mr. Hot-shit em-dee."

  Chen said noth
ing, feeling his gut twist. Bickler gave him a look of almost cat-like dislike, then stomped out of the room without another word. But the way he walked told all the tale that needed telling. The next few days were going to be rough.

  The worst part was that Bickler had proved before that he had juice here at Hollywood Presbyterian: two years earlier, during Chen's internship, one of his classmates had made some comments about Bickler, after they had watched him crash an entire rolling cart of patient meals into a closed door. The interns and residents had been treated to an extended viewing of Bickler's ass-crack. A week later the guy who had made the jokes was gone. Gone from the program, and blacklisted from every other facility in the county. Last Chen had heard, the guy was slaving away in Detroit, stitching up GSW'ed gang-bangers and hating life.

  He shook off thoughts of Bickler and turned back to the chart, after giving it a good going over with antibacterial wipes. An infection, under Chen's care, was not going to happen.

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  Palmetto bugs--known in California as cockroaches—live and thrive below humanity's sight-line. They eat and breed in the underneath and in-between, in the dark spaces we rarely see and don't like to look at. They survive off scraps left by other, larger animals. But no one ever said that they aren't successful—it all depends on how you define success.

  Dr Palmetto, it was rumored, was a disgraced Floridian OB/GYN that had killed a patient, along with her unborn child, while high off his own supply of medical narcotics. Others said he lost his license selling scrip pads to make up gambling debts. Hooked through the bag on his own dope. Busted for human trafficking. The rumors were legion—but for the actors of porn in LA, he was a phone call away, cheap, and he didn't bother with such niceties as insurance: in return for services rendered, he asked only for one his three favorite things: cash, pussy, or drugs. Best of all, he made housecalls.