by Barr, Jeff
No matter when you talked to Palmetto, he sounded like he had just woken up from a nap. But this time of night was his prime-time; when he finally answered his phone, Sugar could hear clinking, restaurant sounds and a big group of people whooping and laughing and having a hell of a time.
"Mm, yello?" Palmetto's voice, buttery with Scotch and Pall Malls.
"Dr. Palmetto, I need your help."
"And this is?" Sugar pictured him: what was left of his hair in disarray, his old-style glasses crooked on his face, the bemused grin, the tumbler of Chivas.
"My name is Sugar. We met on the set of—"
"I remember you, dear." He slurped from his drink. "The little blond with the big—"
"And I remember you, Dr. Palmetto. You said anytime I needed anything, to give you a call."
"And now you need something—anything—and here we be." He slurped at his drink and smacked his lips.
"Yes. Can you come now?" He said nothing, but she heard the clink of a lighter. "I have money." Still no answer, and she felt a trickle of cold fear. Not just for Jynx—but a sneaking, wormy fear for herself. She didn't exactly have Blue Cross, and from what she'd seen from Jynx, it was going to get worse before it got better. Much worse. There were a few other doctors friendly to industry people, but Palmetto was something they were not: discreet. Other doctors and their staff would talk. Word would get out. The terror of her body undergoing these changes was dim in comparison to the fear of embarrassment she would face when this got out. And, of course, she would be done in the business; any hint of disease like this would mean instant and complete banishment from all film sets. She took a deep mental breath. "And maybe if you treat me—us—right, we can talk about other forms of payment."
Palmetto made another wet smacking noise over his drink, and her stomach curdled. "Us, you say? You, and another girl?" He dragged it out, the ice clinking in his glass. "What's the address?"
He arrived an hour later, reeking of booze. Any cop pulling him over on the expressway could have just stuck a breathalyzer into the car and gotten a reading off the charts. There was dirt under his fingernails.
After insisting on another drink, Palmetto told Jynx to strip. His salacious manner disappeared as soon as he got his first look.
"And how long has this been…growing?" A cigarette smoldered between his fingers, forgotten, while he tilted his head back to peer through his bifocals. He lowered a reading lamp until it almost touched Jynx's skin. "It looks like some kind of plant fiber." He brushed at it with a pencil, and Jynx winced. "I've heard of fungal infections that can grow on skin. Hell, one time up in Canada, a colleague of mine saw a lumberjack come in with a nasty cough, x-rays showing a black spot, all signs the guy was developing a big old juicy case of carcinoma. The surgeons opened him up to have a peek and they found a goddamn pine tree sprouting in the lobe of his right lung. A Douglas fir, as I recall. He'd breathed in some kind of spore, and the thing just took root and commenced a-growing. But this; this is something else." He rolled a bit of it up with the pencil and tugged. Jynx whimpered. "Tied right in there with the old nervous system. That's a new one on me. Could be a new one to medical science, unless I miss my guess."
"Well, we don't really care about getting our names in The Lancet, to be honest. We just want to get rid of it."
He peered up at Sugar. "Not too many girls in the business follow the MD rags. Pre-med?"
"I thought about it. Too many student loans."
"A shame, you'd probably make a good sawbones." He turned back to Jynx, moving the lamp this way and that to get a better view. "The way you two contracted it pegs it as an STD—though not one I've ever heard of. And I," he peered over his glasses at the girls, "have seen some shit." He sipped from his drink, almost burning himself with his cigarette, his eyes on the growths in Jynx's skin.
"Well, what can we do about it?" Sugar asked. She hated the careening, unmoored sense of fate no longer in her hands. She curled and uncurled her hands, trying to ignore the subcutaneous itching. How much worse was it going to get? And under that, an echoing thought: how much could she stand?
He sighed and stretched, grimacing at the minute crackling from his spine. The light made him look the dark side of sixty, instead of on the uphill climb to fifty-five. "To be honest, I don't have the slightest goddamned clue. My advice? Go see a doctor. A real doctor."
"Look, you know we can't afford it. They don't exactly hand out health benefits in our line of work. I'm trying to save up enough to get out of the business some day. We go into the hospital now, and not only do we lose any future gigs, so does everyone else we've worked with since. We won't just be out of a job, people will be out for our blood."
"You can't afford to just wait and see either."
"No, we can't."
"Then I think you're gonna have a bad time of it."
Jynx sank cross-legged to the floor and began to sob. Palmetto looked at her, and Sugar could see something that might have been sympathy play across his features.
"I'll do anything if you help us."
Palmetto looked at her, saw the naked challenge in her eyes, and smiled. "Anything is normally my favorite word. In this case, though; whatever you girls have, I'm not up for it." He sighed, and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. "I have an idea. But you're not going to like it. Now, what else do you have for liquor in this place? I'm thirsty as hell."
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Rudy Bickler padded down the hallway, alert for any sign of the night duty nurse. Gottselig was on tonight, according to the roster pinned to the break-room board, and she was the worst of that whole damn tribe of withered old bitches. Gottselig was the nurse's Union rep, and had no fear of Rudy's father, much less Rudy himself. She seemed to delight in getting on Rudy's case about the slightest infraction, and the sharp side of her tongue stung indeed. He crept along in his crepe-sole shoes, patting the right front pocket of his scrubs for the hundredth time, making sure he had his phone.
He peeked around the corner. The hallway in front of Neumann's room was empty, but with the air of having just been vacated. He cats-pawed down, wincing at a sudden squeak from his shoe on the lino. Nothing stirred, so he carried on to Neumann's room. The bright pink 'Infection Control' card was tucked into the chart pocket on the door, and baskets holding sterile gowns and booties sat to either side. The blinds were open a couple of inches at the bottom, for night-time checks, Nothing was stirring inside. He cracked the door and backed through—if anyone was inside, he would claim he was in the wrong room, and to anyone in the hall, it would look like he was on his way out.
Nothing but the creeping, undersea sound of a hospital room at night—the gentle click of machines, an occasional soft ping from a monitor. Neumann lay still, the only movement the steady pulses of light emitted by the machines.
I hope they have this asshole doped to the eyeballs, he is one scary motherfucker. Good Christ, but he stinks.
He crept to the side of the bed and peered down at the patient. Disgusting. Rudy liked to brag about the revolting shit he saw daily in the hospital, from the maggoty wounds of sidewalk junkies, to the seven-hundred pound sit-in the EMTs had hauled in one hot day in June. Along with half a dozen porters, they got his fat ass out of the truck and onto a special-made gurney, ready to take him upstairs for emergency surgery—just before his intestines ruptured and came farting out of his asshole, spraying blood and pus and shit literally everywhere. The smell was strong enough to knock a brass eagle off a shit-pile. It had been enough to put Rudy off his kibble for a week.
But this was worse, in some indefinable way: it was a perversion of the human body, that precious machine. Rudy was a self-professed fat slob and proud of it, but he believed sincerely in the power of the mental over the physical, and that the mind manifested itself directly in the body. He felt a wave of revulsion like a cold chill as he gazed down at the infection raving through Neumann.
The stuff had crawled its way up his neck, over the lower parts
of his face like a beard, and had extended grimy fingers upward toward his eyes. The bottom half of him had been consumed almost completely. In the dim of the room, the lights from the machines pricked up sparks of color from the stuff: poison green, noxious yellow, cyanide blue. Each color glittered like sprinkled broken glass.
Rudy pulled out his phone and started clicking away pictures, getting the angles. Plenty of closeups, trying to catch the way the light sparkled off the glinting threads. He frowned at the pics. Even this phone, which had cost more than a decent dinner downtown, couldn't get what he needed. We need color, span, and scope. If this thing is as bad as you say it is, and you can get those pics, along with a couple of pieces of inside info, we'll make sure you get paid enough to make your eyes pop. That's what the dirtbag from the gossip site had told him. Apparently horrifying diseases were as interesting to their slavering readers as the latest celebutante sex tape. However, he couldn't very well use the flash—someone might notice, and then he would be in the hottest of soups. Patient confidentially wasn't just next to Godliness at Hollywood Presby; it outstripped it by several orders of measure.
He wanted to get paid. Needed to get paid, if it came to that. After the last disastrous run of cards at the clubs downtown, he was down a few thousand (well, maybe more like ten or so), and Pop wouldn't be opening his wallet for that much. Not after having to pay off the family of that girl, the one Rudy had groped in the—
The bathroom. The answer to so many of life's problems, and the solution to Rudy's current dilemma.
He wedged open the bathroom door and flipped the switch. Snowy LED lighting fanned outward over the bed, more than bright enough to get some good—
Rudy stopped. The light washed over the bed. The empty bed. He stepped toward it, sure that his eyes had tricked him. When he heard the sound from behind him, he turned, already knowing what he would see.
Neumann looked like a man skinned in swamp plants. His skin was a ruin. Cracks had opened in his flesh, allowing more of the stuff to burst out of his body. Thorny greenish-black tentacles waved from open wounds. His eyes glowered with pain, madness, and no humanity.
Neumann stalked forward, dragging loops and whorls of the stuff with him. He left wet green-red footprints behind him, and even as Rudy's heart hammered in his chest, he stared at the footprints and thought shit, I better not be stuck cleaning that up.
"Hey man just chill, OK?" Rudy felt fear-sweat dripping down the crack of his ass. The smell in the room was ripe and rotten, like a sewer pipe had burst. "Just hop back into bed, and I'll talk to the nurse about getting you some nice dope to help you relax. How's that sound, huh?"
Neumann stepped closer. Rudy recognized that look in the man's pain-ravaged eyes; the crazed look of a junkie living on forced cold-turkey. The look of a man willing to skin someone alive with his bare teeth just to get another fix. But, Rudy thought frantically, what does Neumann want? Rudy had an uncomfortable notion of what that would be. Neumann was in pain, and like all humans, he wanted to share his pain. To spread it around in an attempt to relieve himself of that grinning, capering monkey. Rudy had been the unlucky soul to have shown up now. Why, thought Rudy, you big bohunk bastard, couldn't you have waited until that old bitch Gottselig showed up to clean out your bedpan?
Neumann tried to speak, but his mouth was packed with threads, and only garbled moans emerged.
Rudy reached down into his scrubs and brought out his very against rule-and-regs pepper spray. He held it up triumphantly.
"Not so fast. Look what Papa Rudy has for you, beautiful." He lunged forward and gave Neumann a full three second blast in the eyes. The only response was a muffled, hoarse shouting and then Neumann was shambling toward him, faster than Rudy would have thought possible. Neumann landed on him like a writhing, living, rug.
The guy sounded like a bull in full rut, grunting his rancid sewer breath down into Rudy's face. His strength was crushing—his arms like banded steel, wrapped around Rudy, crushing the air out of him like a squeeze-bottle.
Rudy screamed, but his voice was lost, robbed of its breath. Come on, you stupid cunts! He stared at the door, willing a nurse's face to pop up into the glass, her mouth a surprised O, calling for security. Oh God hurry, please, Jesus this guy is strong. At this point he would have welcomed even a verbal beatdown from Gottselig—he would accept it and hug that old bag hard enough to make her Crocs pop off. Rudy's leg kicked spasmodically, and connected with an IV pole. It rolled briskly toward the bed, striking a table on the way. The tablet that had been laying on the table crashed to the floor, but it wasn't loud enough.
No nurse at the window, no help for Rudy. His face was inches from Neumann's. As he watched, the threads hanging out of Neumann's mouth twitched and began to move. They wriggled blindly, like worms, seeking, reaching. They entered his mouth.
Rudy tried to scream again, but found he could not.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
The cure is worse than the ill. Something Sugar's mother would say whenever her daughter complained about cough medicine that tasted bad, or a spoonful of Castor Oil, or any number of her home-brew remedies. One of those quaint old aphorisms parents love to trot out at the slightest provocation. Sugar had never really considered the meaning of the words—but now she had ample opportunity.
Palmetto had been there two weeks. Fourteen long, painful days spent melting in the heat of the apartment, watching TV, reading the same sentence of the same book over and over, the words a senseless crawl like insects across the page. And, of course, the treatments.
"Oh, fuck me. It can't be morning already." Jynx moaned. With a muffled curse, she pushed aside the tubes and sat up on the couch, clutching the IV pole. Dehydration had turned her into a shambling, emaciated vampire. Her hair looked like it belonged on a corpse, her skin as sallow as a slug. Her fingernails were cracked and split and the color of nicotine. She joked about marketing a shade of nail polish called 'Depression Yellow'.
Sugar pried her eyes open, squinting at the clock through the LA sun streaming in through the balcony door. "It's two in the afternoon." The first thing she felt was relief; today was not her day.
The thick scent of pot clung to everything like a damp layer of dust. She imagined wiping a credit card across her skin and seeing it come away with a scum of congealed smoke. She rolled over and fired up the bong, sucking in the sweet smoke until she imagined her lungs swelling, almost splitting along their seams. Skeins of the smoke drifted in the golden light, and she watched it for long seconds before letting the smoke escape from her mouth. Her skin tingled.
Jynx sat staring at the muted TV with desperate eyes. Her turn again today. Dark circles like negative chalk outlines surrounded her eyes.
Dr. Palmetto emerged from the bedroom, rumpled as ever. He grunted at them and disappeared into the kitchen. Sugar took another hit, and with her mind sufficiently fuzzed, turned up the volume on the TV. Tension in the Middle East, authorities were monitoring a new strain of influenza emerging in Asia, a office shooting in Oklahoma. Sometimes she thought the world would be better off starting over, going back to the old-old ways, with not enough people in the world to rub up against each other. A tabula more-or-less rasa. And new reports, something called the Skunge—a new disease that had started cropping up around California. Distinguished by thred-like growths through the skin, and—Sugar snapped the TV off.
"I don't think I can take another day." Jynx leaned forward and began refilling the bong. Long crooked lines of fresh pink scar tissue, along with fresher crimson lines, peeked over the bandages covering her arms. "I really don't."
"It's working, isn't it?"
"It's killing me." Jynx's eyes met Sugar's. They gleamed with standing tears and unvarnished truth. "It hurts so bad."
Sugar rubbed at her own semi-healed cuts. They ached, which was still better than the raw burn when the cuts were fresh. The truth was, she was getting a little tired of Jynx's complaints. Dr. Palmetto was helping her, for free, no strings a
ttached, and all she did was complain. Sure, it hurt. But what kind of treatment could it be if it didn't? The cure is worse than the ill.
Palmetto brought out the coffee. He poured a generous dollop of Canadian Rye whiskey into his cup, and smacked his lips over it. Jynx didn't touch hers, instead staring morosely out the window like a heroine in a gothic novel. Sugar drank hers down to the bottom—it was strong and sweet.
"Christ, I feel like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag," Palmetto said, scrubbing at his face. He had a week's worth of beard scruff, and it made him look like a genteel hobo. "I'm going to go prepare. Jynx, drink your coffee."
"Can't we just skip a day? Please?" Jynx scratched at her arms like a junkie, her body betraying her mind. She needed more treatments. Without them, the Skunge would grow back. They had tried skipping before, and the disease came on even stronger.
Palmetto sighed and lit a cigarette. He peered at Jynx through the smoke and the upside down half-moons of his glasses. "It's hard. I know. But you're going to die if we stop. If you just leave it alone, it's going to spread and you will die. It will grow in your lungs, it will poke holes in your organs, and you'll drown in your own blood. Is that what you want?" Sugar knew this speech was as much for her as for Jynx: tomorrow would be her turn, and who was to say she wouldn't be the one begging and pleading for a respite from the pain?
"No." Jynx took a deep breath, and coughed. "It just hurts so bad."
"I know. Drink your coffee."
Sugar didn't know what he put in the coffee, but it served to calm them down enough to get them into the bedroom for the treatment. Strong stuff, but Palmetto was mum on the secret ingredient. She had the distinct impression that she was better off not knowing. She was acquainted with too many junkies, and she didn't relish the idea of joining their living-dead ranks.