by Brian Hodge
He washed his hands, scooping and drinking some of the lukewarm water. He ran his hands along his face. It felt…different, textured. The skin burned. He pulled his hands away, saw smearings of blood in both palms.
He peered into the cracked mirror above the sink.
Years of intense mental training could not have prepared him for the shock he felt upon beholding his reflection in the mirror. His vacant gaze held petrified, his mind drowning in extreme distress as he surveyed the battered landscape that was now his face.
The numerous bug bites there had swelled to a point so severe that his skin had begun to split open, a multitude of bleeding cracks forming, the bizarre picture looking much like a road map of highways and interconnecting towns. Within a few of the sores small mosquitoes fed, drinking the seepage from his skin. In one large sore on his cheek, the blood had clotted and gave home to a hatched maggot that squirmed and fed on the fleshy meat of his skin.
Terrified, John screamed and clawed at his face, the pain on par with the severe mental anguish now lashing him. He filled his palms with running the water, splashed his face over and over again, the searing pain similar to that of a horrible sunburn. The pain and discomfort grabbed hold of John Kessler and brought him down to the cracked tiles of the bathroom floor, eventually taking complete hold of him and again whisking him away from the waking world, back into the world of his dreams where the nightmares could be more easily confronted.
A loud thump jarred John awake. He startled, ignoring the lumpy feeling in his head. He scrambled up, the world spinning around him. He felt a fever inside, a heat within his ravaged body, a chill riding the surface of his skin. He put his ear to the door, then opened it and quietly stepped into the foyer. “Hello?” he whispered.
A slight, muffled moan came from behind the door in the hall.
He gripped the small brass knob, opened the door. A set of cement steps disappeared into a cellar. Very carefully John planted his feet on the first step, and slowly descended the stairs. The sun—which was beginning to rise—sent faint orange beams through the small windows at the top of the basement walls, enough to illuminate the corner of the room at the bottom of the steps.
“Hello?” he said. A pained moan answered him from somewhere across the dark portion of the cellar. He reached the bottom step and stopped. The growing sunlight hadn’t spanned across the entire length of the room yet, making it difficult to see. He took his next step with caution, anxious to help, and be helped.
It hit him with no warning: a monstrous horsefly, on him like a tidal wave, knocking him to the ground. Twice the size of a cat, the head amassed with coarse black hairs, the thing peered at John through eyes constructed of a thousand bulging segments before whipping its long spiny legs around his face and neck with alarming speed.
John grabbed hold of the insect and yanked it away, his fingers squeezing tightly against the clickity-clack of its bony, bristled appendages. A hot, putrid stink emanated from the rudimentary lungs of the malformation as it extended a six-inch feeder towards his face like a cartoonish hypodermic needle. John turned his head to one side in effort to avoid the probe, still holding tight as the thing twisted and danced in his grip, the sonorous resonation of the vibrating wings upon its back scraping his fingers.
Then, on the nape of John’s neck: something warm and wet. Touching him.
Slowly…sliding…across…his…skin.
Mustering a hidden strength, he threw the giant horsefly against the wall. It slammed hard on the concrete, stuck there momentarily then fell to the ground, leaving a stain of green blood behind like a piece of crazy art. He rolled away from the probing wet thing and spun around to investigate.
What met his gaze was a vision so grotesque, he had trouble deciding if it were real, or a scene from some sick movie.
As beams from the east found their way through the windows, enough now to illuminate the entire basement, he could see two bodies, each nearly hidden beneath a frothing blanket of tremendous maggots. The fly larvae—each two to four inches long and some even longer—were squirming in a frenzy, thrilled to have human hosts. John tore his sights away, hearing for the first time the wet, slithering, munching sounds they made. Soon the terrible realization of what touched him on the neck came shining through. A maggot—nearly half a foot long—crawling away from the burrowing party to investigate.
He looked back at the bodies. They were big. Muscular.
Dean and Mike. The boys from the gym.
The body farthest from him appeared to move. He could not be sure for the blanket of larvae seemed to have a complete, collective life of its own. But then he heard the moan, the same syrupy grunt he’d heard moments earlier. The guy was alive.
Do it, you have to. Ignoring the continuous threat of mosquitoes and flies and the pain he was in, John leaned over the body and used his swelled hands to scrape the maggots away from the face and neck of the bodybuilder. They fell away by the dozens, their slimy bodies foaming through his fingers like big wet Alka-Seltzer tablets.
The body moaned again, tried to say something.
John peered into his eyes. Dean. John’s nerves jangled like fire alarms. “Dean…what is this? What’s happening?”
Eyes closed tight, the bodybuilder’s jaw jittered. “The shed…”
“What? What about the shed?” John pleaded. Dean struggled to get another word out. Raspy whispers sputtered from his ballooned lips before he fell silent, and John went cold inside for knew at that moment that Dean had uttered his last words.
John loosened himself from the fear that paralyzed him, realizing now that his presence could not save his friend. He spun and hurried back up the stairs, skin exploding with white-hot pain, his head throbbing mercilessly. Once upstairs he stumbled as quickly as his numbed legs could take him, through the kitchen (past the obscene meat-statues) and outside to the backyard.
Looking out into the faint morning, he saw a large aluminum shed edging the perimeter of the woods, its white surface splotched with jagged patches of rust. One of the two doors was slightly ajar.
The shed…
The rising sun brought faint tinges of color to the previously lifeless scenery. The wind moved, carrying with it a few dead leaves that floated across his footsteps. He listened to the sound of his own harsh breathing, and he shivered as a terrible aching cold passed through his bones, his fevered mind playing games with him.
Never thought my summer fling would be like this.
Did you bring any ‘bug off’?
Shut up, asshole.
He walked to the shed, heart slamming.
When he reached it he stopped for a moment, hesitant. He tried to gaze into the small space the open half provided, but saw only blackness.
He brought his right hand up, gripped the rusty handle and slowly opened the door.
At first he wasn’t sure what he’d found. Inside were about a dozen white plastic pails, the industrial kind made to hold cement or tar but end up being filled with soap suds for washing the car. Many of them had been tipped over, their contents spilled. One pail at the shed’s entrance had contained a large quantity of packaged hypodermic needles. The others held vials—thousands of them—filled with a brownish liquid. Many were shattered, the contents spilled out onto a plastic tarp lining the floor of the shed.
Mosquitoes and flies and beetles and moths and…
…and…ants and slugs and toads and bees were in there feeding on the brown syrupy liquids.
And they were growing, right before John’s eyes. The ants, their spiny legs extending out an extra three inches. The slugs, twisting and turning into hunks the size of hotdogs. One spotted toad appeared, tipping over a bucket, its legs thick with muscles, the body distended and swelling to the size of a large melon. In the upper right-hand corner of the shed a web had been spun as wide and as large as a small blanket, a large dark spot partially hidden beneath the center of its translucent cover.
John took a step forward, looking
at the canisters. They’d been labeled with masking tape and black magic marker: Anadrol. Bolasterone. Dehydralone. Hexalone.
He recognized those names, had heard them mentioned from time to time at the gym during conversations of protein shakes, amino acids, and other bulk-forming supplements.
Steroids. The gym-boys were dealing steroids. And the woodland creatures were feeding on them.
Hey John, those mutated insects you partied with last night are nocturnal. The sun’s out now, my friend. Best not stick around to see what the daylight’s gonna bring.
The warmth of the morning sun grew suddenly cool on John’s back. At the same time a dark shadow appeared across the ground in front of him. A sickening wave of terror welled up in his blood as the shadow grew larger, menacing.
Something was sneaking up behind him.
He spun around quickly to defend himself, screamed with terror.
And at the same time, Jill did the same when she beheld his monstrous appearance.
John clutched his chest. “Jesus! You scared the shit outta me!”
Tears coated Jill’s eyes. “John…what h-happened to you? What’s going on here?”
Relieved—although his heart hammered like a machine gun—he grabbed her hand. “Let’s get the hell outta here. I’ll explain later.”
A mass of slate-colored clouds rushed in covering the tops of the Catskills, creating a barrier that prevented the rising sun from stretching its bright rays out across the mountains. As a result the fog thickened, moisture building up in the cool morning climate. They rode in Jill’s car, John in the passenger seat spending the past ten minutes explaining the events of the night to her.
Jill scratched a few mosquito bites on her hand as she drove, then broke her attentive silence. “You really think it was the steroids that mutated the bugs?”
“Yes.”
“If it did, then…do you think there’s anything else that may have been affected?”
John stared blankly ahead. “I don’t know, maybe…” He sat up, suddenly aware of the familiar surroundings they passed through. He peered out the driver’s side window towards a familiar shady hollow on the left side of the road. The golden retriever was no longer there. A trail of blood and dust led into the woods.
The dog had been dragged away. He shuddered.
“John? What’s wrong?”
“Nothing, I…” he said, shaking his head.
“What? What is it?”
“I…I have to take a leak…” It’d been a good twelve hours since his last piss.
“We have to get you to a doctor!”
There’d been a rise in John’s spirit when the two of them finally escaped the cabin…but with what happened next, it proved John’s enthusiasm to be nothing more than false hope.
An immense shadow loomed out of the fog. It sounded like a lawnmower, John thought at first. A flying lawnmower. The car shook as it passed overhead, the leaves in the trees whipping about in the sudden grasp of a furious wind. For a second John thought it might’ve been a low-flying helicopter. But if any vehicle of flight had been flying just above them, it no way could’ve been big enough to eclipse the sun. Jill screamed, jammed on the brakes as the world around them winked away and turned black. Then, as quickly as the granite-like darkness consumed them, daylight rose back into existence, and the engine-like rev curtailed away into the shroud of fog and cloud cover.
But it was still close by, for although the great shadow vanished and the sound was distant, they could still feel a sharp resonation in the air.
A roar.
Jill inched the car forward.
The earth shook as something huge landed in the road just ahead of them.
When the nighttime fades, the creatures of the day will come out.
She stopped the car. Locked the doors. They sat there trembling. Waiting for whatever fate the approaching creature had for them.
And that’s when the maggots started hatching beneath John’s skin.
The Rash
When Jim Dunitz saw it—after his wife Sharon helped him pull his shirt off because he’d complained about a burning sensation on his skin—a feeling of fear and dismay welled in him. Tears collected in his eyes. He pressed a hand against his cheek and coughed, staring at his naked chest in the bathroom mirror.
“What is it?” Sharon asked in a nervous tone he’d never heard from her before. She glimpsed his face for a tense moment before her eyes triggered back into the mirror. “Any idea how you got it?”
Whatever it was. “It’s a rash,” he concluded. “Haven’t you ever seen one before? Must’ve gotten it in the woods.” His impatience was a direct progression of his growing fear, plus his frustration with her. He saw no choice but to take it out on her. “I’m just as shocked as you are. I’d felt a burning sensation. But…I didn’t expect it to be this bad.”
He gazed hypnotically into the mirror. The rash had made a map of his torso, red continent-shaped blotches with white crusted shorelines, the skin peeling away to unveil welts of inflammation. He attempted a grin, to mentally write off the hive-like reaction as something conventionally contagious, poison ivy, poison oak, poison something-one-might-catch-in-the-woods-while-camping. But this rash…it was different. It seemed not to carry your everyday, commonplace symptoms. It not only swelled, it glimmered, as though it had been given a finishing polish by the contaminate that’d put it there.
Outside the wind rose, and for a moment he felt a cold draft seep through the pane, across his vulnerable skin. He shivered as the eaves creaked under the pressure of the gale. His eyes darted past the window, then uneasily back to the mirror.
“What was that?” he asked, teeth suddenly chattering. He gazed at his chest. The rash appeared to be spreading before his eyes, wandering across his skin like oil slicks wavering upon the surface of a calm tide. He squeezed his eyes closed; when he opened them the rash stopped its undulations.
“Just the wind,” Sharon said, brow arched with clear concern, perhaps frustration as well. She opened the medicine cabinet and dug through the assortment of tubes and bottles there before fishing one out.
“It’s whistling a tune,” he said. “But I can’t make it out. Can you?” The eerie words came from Jim’s mouth like water from a leaking faucet, methodical despite lacking control. He’d known what he’d heard—what he’d meant to say—but couldn’t control his mind from handling the situation in such a sudden, abstract manner. Defense mechanism he thought as the lines on Sharon’s face grew more taut, from concern to downright worry.
Clearly skirting his extraneous comment, Sharon offered her assistance, but not before fitting a rubber glove on her hand. She squeezed out a generous dollop of white cream on her finger and spread it across his back.
The pain was unbearable. Like salt in a wound, it cut through his skin and burned deep down into the muscles. He jammed a fist into his mouth to press back a scream, then started choking against two knuckles, biting down hard in attempt to divert the pain elsewhere. The wind whistled across the eaves again, and he shuddered as two thoughts crossed his mind:
How is it that I’ve never noticed that sound before?
Dear God, it’s on my back too.
“Sharon…I-I don’t like this one bit.”
She said nothing, confirming her anxious agreement with him. “If this doesn’t clear up by morning, we’ll get you to a doctor, first thing.”
Being so drawn to the redness on his chest, he hadn’t taken a good solid look at his face until now. Untouched so far, thank goodness, his complexion as clear as it’d always been. Just a contact rash, is all. Common sense dictates this. You’ve been camping for the last three days. Sleeping on the ground. Swimming in murky waters. Along the way some kind of toxic plant played tag with your torso and now you’re IT. Just hide in your hole for a few hours, count to a hundred and let the dust settle. You’ll be as good as new in the morning.
Sharon had worked the cream to his chest, coating all his re
d spots. He gritted his teeth, choking back the pain, closing his eyes and wondering if the rash had made it to…to his…
Well, it wasn’t on his arms. That was good. Sharon had moved away to toss the gloves in the tub, and was wiping her hands on a towel when Jim pulled off his jeans. His legs were free of the redness. He then slipped free of his boxers, blinking for a moment and feeling a bit queasy. He half-expected to find his groin buried in a thick, full-blooded coat of hives—his mind had been playing some serious games with him and he damn near felt a nagging itch between his legs—but there was nothing there, thank the Good Lord above who for the first time in twenty years received a prayer and a promise of confession from his long lost son, Jim Dunitz.
“What’s that?” Sharon asked.
Jim saw Sharon scoop up a glove from the tub and snap it back on. “What now?” he asked. “Jesus, what is it?” It came out more piercingly than he intended, but damn he’d had his share of scares for the day and needed no additional finds. He turned around to face her, cupping his groin before she could probe his body further. She stared at him, looking a bit startled and not sure what to make of his defensive posture. A few seconds of uncomfortable silence passed between them before the wind rattled a branch against the side of the house.
Finally, meeting her soft gaze, he said, “I’m sorry things had to come to this.”
She closed her eyes for a moment, looking uncomfortable with the situation. She hadn’t spoken to him all weekend, a continuance of their week of silence before he left with Stuart Wesley for a game of buck in the mountains. A week before that Jim had lost his job at the Mill, and although Jim knew Sharon hadn’t planned to rub salt in his wounds, he also knew that she hadn’t the time, energy, nor desire to continue their marriage any further, and that upon his return was planning to break the news of her decision to move out.
She didn’t get a word in edgewise when he got home. He barreled into the house complaining of the rash, the God-Damned-Mother-Fucking-Of-Jesus itch he must’ve picked up in the woods. It was the only way to get her to nurse him back to health before she took her things and left.