by Jason Parent
As the sounds around her dulled, Clara thought she heard a familiar bell. The sterilization chamber? Someone was coming in. God help her for thinking it, but she prayed whoever it was would hurry, even if it meant another’s infection.
Sergei turned toward the sound. He let out a low growl as his razor-blade teeth sawed through his cheeks, widening his mouth into a grotesque clown grin. He raised his right arm, pointing an elongated finger at someone Clara could almost make out in her peripheral vision.
Then, Sergei’s arm began to change. The transformation was slight at first, something off about the appendage that Clara couldn’t quite place. The strands of hair on his arms began to stir. They broke away from their roots and stitched in and out of fresh holes they bored through his skin or inchwormed across his pallid-purple epidermis.
Large lumps formed beneath his skin. They ran like termites under bark, all in the same direction, toward his fingertips. Sergei’s skin itself unraveled next, tearing itself free from the muscle and sinews beneath it. The muscle followed. Huge swaths of raw, bacon-like meat slithered like snakes toward Sergei’s fingertips, where a bundle of organic materials were congregating. The strips narrowed as they moved, gained speed, and weaved their own fibers into long tendrils. His tricep looked like a beef rib with a chunk chewed out of it, bits of tendon and gristle clinging to what remained. Blood seeped out of his wounds, but no drop hit the ground. Instead, the blood formed a horizontal stream that followed in the path of the living, squirming tissue.
That organic clay formed five long, spaghetti-thin tentacles, one for each finger, that whipped and snapped at the air like live wires. All the while, Sergei smiled his wicked, animal grin. That smile widened when he thrust his hand and skin tentacles at uncanny speed in the direction of the incoming someone.
Clara heard a man scream. The wailing sent chills through her bones, reinvigorating her drifting mind. She pulled with everything she had at the hand around her throat but barely succeeded in getting the mutant scientist’s attention. Her own attention waned. Her chin once again began to nod. Her eyelids closed even as the eyes under them bulged.
She was running out of chances to save herself. She summoned whatever strength she had left.
Into her leg.
And kicked.
Sergei howled as her knee drove into his chin. His gnashing bottom teeth stabbed into their upper counterparts, breaking and chipping like a picket fence caught in an avalanche. His bloated black tongue was caught in the middle. It was severed, spurting deep-purple blood. The toe of her flat dug into Sergei’s stomach and shoved him back.
Clara fell free – a minor victory, she knew, but a start. She landed on her buttocks and scrambled away from Sergei and his flopping-fish severed tongue.
I kicked him. However, any wonder that realization induced was quickly quashed when she turned to see the source of the screams. Already gasping for air, Clara choked as she took in air too quickly. She swallowed a scream of her own then keeled over and coughed out vomit.
The tentacles had embedded themselves in a security guard’s face and neck, tenting the skin where they didn’t shred it. They pulsated like the prongs of a stun gun, but the prongs she saw were made of flesh and muscle. The guard jerked as though electrocuted. Dark red-purple clumps of plasma resembling clotted blood ran in one direction like cable cars down organic wire, each one tunneling into the guard’s face and scurrying beneath the skin. She could see them mounding the flesh of his neck as they moved down it, only to disappear under his shirt collar.
The guard was seizing, much in the same manner that Sergei had. He collapsed onto the floor.
Clara tried to rationalize what she’d just seen, quivering and hugging herself close. There’s no goddamn science that’ll explain that. No fucking science at all.
Her head spun. With his free hand, the forearm elongating at the elbow, the abomination that had been Sergei swiped at her. Clara’s arms ached as she scuffled out of reach on her palms and buttocks, her legs dragging along for the ride.
But the Sergei-thing hadn’t been swiping at her after all. It picked up its tongue, which was somehow still animated, opened a freakishly wide maw, and gobbled down the thick muscle as if it were a gummy worm. When finished, Sergei grinned wide, flashing red-lined teeth at Clara.
Then he reached for her. Clara froze. The room blurred. Sounds dulled, as if she’d been immersed in water. Everything began to spin, faster and faster. She wanted off the ride.
A loud blast stopped the man-creature’s forward momentum. What was left of its head tilted sideways. Sergei’s scalp had been blown clean off. It slid down the wall to her right.
Or slithered.
Still, the man-creature came, a chicken sans head.
Darkness. For how long, Clara couldn’t be sure. Two more gunshots – at least two that she had heard. She hadn’t seen Sergei fall, but one moment, he was standing in front of her, and the next, he was lying prone. The gunshots had seemed kilometers away. Any alertness inspired by the sudden noise faded as quickly as it had come. It had lasted just long enough for Clara to see a stranger rushing to her side.
My savior. She had no time to consider whether his actions or the black cross on his forehead made her see the man in such a way before she drifted into sleep.
Chapter Eleven
Dante had never once tried to trick himself into thinking he was some kind of hero. Like everyone else at the research center, he’d been hired to do a job, plain and simple. Unlike everyone else, Dante was authorized to use any means necessary to complete his work. He’d been given a directive, nothing more, nothing special, and certainly nothing worthy of role-model material.
Still, he chose only the jobs that suited his conscience. And he insisted on the leeway to accomplish them how he saw fit. Both he and his employer preferred it that way: he liked having the control, and his employer…. Something about willful, blissful ignorance and plausible deniability.
The less contact, the better, Dante always thought when he considered his employer. Its representatives, with their silly pointy hats and upturned noses, were quick to wash their hands of the likes of Dante when his services were no longer required. Holier than thou. He smirked at the irony in their condescension. That condescension ran deep. He often wondered how many crimes they’d secretly orchestrated or had otherwise been complicit in, how many commandments they’d chosen to ignore, all to keep their hands clean, their souls sanctified, and believe it or not, the world safe.
He wondered: Did that make him a sin eater? Dante didn’t care for the comparison. His conscience was clean even if theirs weren’t. The problem is in the people, not the principles.
But those people always paid, half when the job was started and half when it was completed, and they paid well. Money for Judas. Another comparison that made Dante’s skin crawl. No, Dante lacked any delusions about what he was: a specialized hired gun, a man who got things done, a killer when he needed to be, a philosopher when he could afford to be.
When that man-thing shot marionette strings from its fingers and began to play with its puppet, Romanov, Dante became the man he was hired to be. He dove for his gun purely on instinct, and he fired it for one reason only.
To kill.
So why am I helping this woman? The scientist was passed out on the floor beside a slithering mound of gore, blood-filled bubbles popping like adolescent pimples. His mission came first, self-preservation came second, catching a string quartet at some hole in the wall later that evening came third, and finding a decent stromboli in all of Siberia came fourth. She never should have made the list.
Despite that, he crouched and scooped her into his arms. He looked at her gaunt facial features, her chiseled jaw with teeth grinding even in her sleep as if fighting some demon of her mind through a nightmarish playground – a restless subconscious, something Dante could empathize with. She seemed de
serving of his pity, and though he doubted she would want it, he gave it freely. And when the lines of her troubles gave way to a smooth, placid face, Dante saw her in a new light.
He placed her gently in a wheelchair he assumed belonged to her and delicately swiped her hair from her face. She was beautiful, he thought, but not at peace. She mumbled something incoherent then began to snore. He wondered what sins she kept locked away in secret.
Dante chuckled, but his smirk soon vanished. Only then did he consider that the woman may have just infected him.
“Relax,” he told himself. Easier said than done, but if he was infected, he could do little about it. At least she hasn’t grown jellyfish stingers like that headless porca vacca. Besides, I don’t feel any different…for now. Dante knew little about biology. He knew nothing of incubation or gestation periods or any other period between contracting a disease and the time its symptoms first showed, but he was smart enough to know that just because the woman hadn’t turned into a body-contorting freak didn’t mean she wouldn’t, particularly since she was still unconscious.
His gut told him she wouldn’t, and his gut had gotten him that far. He had faith in it. Again, Dante had to laugh at the irony – he was showing faith in his hunch and in that woman though he showed his employer’s people none. The woman seemed content in the brief time he held her. He was not so far gone to be lost to humanity. That made him content.
He stared at the woman, hoping she would find peace from what disturbed her mind, the trials of her day seemingly over. Then the click-clack of tapping stilettos sounded against the clean room’s heat-welded vinyl flooring. Dante looked in the direction from which the sound had come and realized his trials were only beginning.
“Madonna!” he cried. What he saw could not be real. Maybe he was sick, starting to hallucinate. He blinked and rubbed his eyes, but the scalp of the scientist whose head he’d blown to bits was still crawling toward him. Eight jagged bone appendages made of sculpted cranium, four to each side of the pulpy-haired membrane, carried the hide of flesh and matted hair with increasing speed toward Dante. It was eyeless, earless, noseless, yet somehow alive and somehow knowing exactly where he was. The scalp crab clacked closer.
Dante had seen a lifetime’s worth of atrocities and didn’t lack for imagination. But that scientist’s mutation and the thing scuttling toward him strained the boundaries of his sanity. He wondered if he was experiencing the beginnings of disease.
He set his jaw and decided that whether or not he was going insane, he would not let that thing get any nearer. He raised his pistol, and with the accuracy of a professional, he blew the ugly abomination to hell. He watched with uneasy pleasure as the scalp crab blasted apart. Even imaginary fuckers can be killed with real bullets.
One mound had become three smaller segments. He stared at them, half expecting the revelation of a punch line, like some old hidden-camera-show host making his presence known or a random pie jammed into his face. The scraps of head and hair weren’t moving. He grimaced as he scrutinized one particularly bloody fragment, upturned so that its red, stringy underbelly was exposed. Dante was beginning to think he had imagined the whole ordeal and had wasted a bullet on dead flesh.
I’m losing it. This belief became so ingrained that when the upturned human morsel sprouted new crab legs, he howled with laughter. The appendages thrashed in the air, unable to correct themselves, like the legs of an upside-down turtle unable to right itself. Still laughing, he watched the newly formed scalp crab pop off its back, land on its feet, and rush him. Its two new friends also rose on crab legs and joined the assault.
“Motherfucker!” He raised his gun and took aim, then lowered it and slid it into his waistband. The weapon had only succeeded in tripling his hallucinations the first go-around, so he figured he would need to think of a different way to destroy them. His gun ineffective, Dante was weaponless.
The clean room, he hoped, could offer him a new weapon, but the scalp crabs were closing in fast. Whatever those godforsaken sons of bitches were, they were as good as dead. Dante just had to figure out a way to kill them, and since killing had always been his forte, he wasn’t about to give it up then. Those creatures were an affront to nature and an insult to his mighty-fine shooting.
“Okay, you little shits. You want some of me?”
The living flesh continued its charge. Dante charged back and raised his boot high. The smallest of the three scalp crabs was in the lead, but Dante’s aim was true. His heel mashed the critter into grape jelly that looked as though a cat had vomited a hairball into it then partially buried it in its white kitty litter, crunchy bone that Dante ground into pebbles.
The other two crab-things stopped, seeming to regard him with caution after what had just happened to their compadre.
Dante laughed, not with madness but with the satisfaction of victory over a hated enemy. “Did you like that?” he asked Crab Number Two. “I know I did.”
The closer scalp crab’s legs bent. Then it exploded off the floor, leaping into the air with amazing speed and careering right at Dante’s head.
“Whoa!” He ducked just in time to see the nasty fucker sail over him.
The other one landed on his jacket, over his heart.
The crab’s front legs sliced through the material of his thick vest like scalpels. White stuffing shot over the little monster like debris from a wood chipper. Dante gasped. He grabbed his lapel and pulled it down and out as fast as he could. The material went taut and acted like a trampoline beneath the crab’s feet, propelling the monstrosity upward. The crab spun midair and latched on to the ceiling, where it remained stationary, as if considering its next move.
“Merda! The other one.” A gut feeling told him to duck, and he heeded it. He jerked out of the way just as Crab Number Two leaped.
It flew past him and landed on the laboratory table, where it skidded across the polished surface and almost fell off the other side. It teetered over the edge, hanging by one scalpel pincer.
Dante caught movement above and returned his attention to Crab Number Three. It was moving away from him, toward its disgusting ally. The latter pulled itself up onto the table. The crab above dropped down on top of it and melted over Crab Number Two like hot pitch poured over ice cream, liquefying both, the resulting blob re-forming, reshaping. The two became one.
Dante had never had to fight off severed, transforming body bits before, but the novelty was beginning to wear thin. Hallucinating or not, he was in control of all his other faculties, and panicking solved nothing. He had only his gun and his training with which to defend himself. Dante laid down for no monster, human or otherwise.
Except, what he was seeing was real. It had to be. More than one person had seen the weirdness that had come out of the scientist who’d invaded the clean room. True, one witness was unconscious, the other dead, but that was not at his hands. Couldn’t have been. Could it?
No, losing his shit was a luxury he couldn’t afford. No matter how crazy things became around him, he had to assume that he was dealing with a new form of biological weapon and his worst fears had come true: someone had released it. He also had to assume that, at the moment, it was contained within the research center. He would have to do whatever was in his power to make sure it stayed that way.
I’ve got a job to do. He summoned his resolve. Scalp crabs just make it a tad more difficult.
The mound of gelatinous flesh once belonging to a human being was a scalp crab no longer. Like bad stock footage from an old Claymation Christmas special, the mass oozed and stretched into a long, oval-shaped creature that sort of looked like a deep-sea tube worm Dante had seen on some nature show.
The new organism was even more featureless than its preceding incarnations. Pink skin stretched so thin that it was translucent. Purple veins bulged out like those on a muscle head’s biceps after a particularly intense workout. The flesh was swathe
d with patches of hair that ran along its entire length, which culminated in an orifice at its top. The hole was opening wider and wider. It looked like a mouth.
A slender blood-red strand, no more than half a centimeter thick, rose from the orifice, growing taller until Dante had to tilt his head back to see it. It swayed side to side like a cobra entranced by a snake charmer’s pungi music. Dante spent a few seconds waiting for the creature to make its move before the worm-thing reeled.
He recognized the action for what it was: preparation before a strike. When it leaned back, the creature formed an S. Then it whiplashed forward and launched itself at Dante with speed that might have overwhelmed him had he not been ready. Even despite his quick response, the creature almost caught Dante off guard.
Almost.
He dropped to one knee as the creature bulleted over his head and splattered like putty on the wall behind him. It instantly began to re-form, the long, thin worm once again swaying to music only it could hear.
Dante averted his eyes with quick furtive glances around the room, searching for a means to battle the creature. Everything he’d seen up to that point suggested that he could not let the infernal thing touch him, and so far, he’d been lucky to avoid contact. But luck always ran out, sooner or later.
The biohazardous-waste-disposal unit he spied gave him an idea. The unit was built into the wall, closed unless manually held open. He would have to time things just right, and even then, he would need to rely on continued good fortune. With no better ideas coming to mind, he ran over to the unit and pulled its heavy drawer out. Opening like a post-office box, it swung down with a heavy creak. Carefully, he turned around again and faced the creature, keeping his body against the door to hold it open. Its hard edge rested under his shoulder blades.