Spores

by Ike Hamill

(Jake)

  “It’s frostbite, that’s all,” Jake said.

  “I’ll warm up some water,” Leonard said. The pan clanged when he put it atop the woodstove.

  “I’ve seen frostbite before,” Patrice said. “Your skin should look white or yellow. I’ve never seen blue before.”

  “You need to keep him warm,” Marie said.

  “No shit, lady,” Leonard said. He poured some water into the pan.

  “Not too hot,” Patrice said.

  “Don’t worry about it,” Leonard said. “I won’t get it too hot.”

  Andrew walked over to Marie. Jake blew into his hand and listened over his shoulder to the conversation between Andrew and Marie while Patrice and Leonard argued about the optimal water temperature.

  “If it’s the infection you were talking about, what do we do to stop it?” Andrew asked.

  “You can’t reverse it, as far as I know, but you can keep it from developing. He’s going to want to seek the cold. His strain will only develop in the cold, just like mine wants the heat. When it takes over his will, he will do everything he can to stay out in the cold. That’s when you’re going to have to force him to stay in the heat.”

  “That’s bullshit,” Jake whispered.

  “What?” Patrice asked. “You have a better way?”

  “Huh?”

  “We’re trying to figure out when this water is one-hundred-and-five degrees. I say we put it on our arm, like a baby bottle.”

  “It’s fine, I’m sure,” Jake said.

  “It can’t be too hot,” Leonard said. “That will damage your skin worse than nothing. We want to get the blood flowing without burning you.”

  “It’s fine,” Jake said. He wanted to listen to what Marie was saying. Whatever it was, she had finished. She was going back outside and Andrew was returning to them.

  “What did she say?” Jake asked.

  “She said that you’re infected and you’re going to get irrational and try to get back into the cold.”

  “That’s crazy,” Jake said. “The last thing I want is to go out in the cold.”

  “Let’s not rule anything out,” Leonard said. “Maybe it’s like the way that rabies makes people fear water even though it’s what they need most.”

  “That’s a myth,” Patrice said. “Rabies just makes it hard to swallow.”

  “Still,” Leonard said. “I don’t think we can rule it out.”

  “For the record, I’m with Jake,” Patrice said. “Can we all get back on the ‘She’s Full of Shit’ train?”

  “What else did she say?” Jake asked.

  “The infection is going to make you go back out there because that’s where it develops. I guess it needs your body to be at a particular temperature. Once it gets control of your brain, it will make you struggle and lie to get cool,” Andrew said.

  “Like her?” Leonard asked.

  “Pardon?” Andrew asked.

  “Didn’t she just pretty well describe herself? Since she came here, she has spent most of her time trying to stay away from heat. She’s out there right now without any gloves and with her jacket wide open. She wants us to keep Jake warm, but why not her?”

  “She has the opposite infection, she says,” Andrew said. “For her, she has to stay cool.”

  “Which could be a lie just like she was telling us to watch out for,” Leonard said.

  “Why, though?” Jake asked.

  “Maybe it all works like she said, but just the opposite. She’s getting taken over and forced to stay cold, and she wants us to cook Jake to get him in the right state. We could be falling right into some reverse psychology bullshit right this minute,” Leonard said.

  “So now we’re buying into this bullshit?” Patrice asked.

  “I don’t know. Who the fuck knows?” Leonard asked, throwing up his hands. When Jake reached to test the warmth of the water, Leonard gently brushed him aside. Instead, Leonard dipped a finger in and shook his head. “Not yet.”

  Andrew was pacing in the middle of the room.

  “Time for a re-think, guys,” Andrew said. “We were going to self-impose a quarantine, right? I think we’ve answered the question of whether we’re infected. What’s happening to Jake’s hand is not normal and maybe we’re all going to have symptoms soon. I’ll still take the blame if anyone comes up with evidence about Tyler, but I don’t think I’m going to have to. That body is in the wind, literally. We hike out, fess up about Jake’s infection, and we let the doctors handle this.”

  Leonard sighed. “He may be right.”

  “It’s just frostbite,” Jake said.

  “I’m not sure,” Patrice said. “Let’s try the water and see if his hand looks better.”

  “Yeah, okay,” Leonard said.

  Jake pushed up his sleeve. Above his wrist, the skin transitioned from blue, through white, and then to pink.

  “Looks like a bomb pop,” Patrice whispered.

  “Man?” Leonard said, frowning and shaking his head.

  “Sorry,” Patrice said.

  Jake waggled his fingers and started to lower them towards the water.

  The banging on the door stopped his hand.

  “Don’t do that!” they heard Marie from outside.

  “That lady gets creepier by the minute,” Patrice said. “Ignore her. We don’t know what her game is.”

  Jake understood the way he looked when he saw the faces of his friends. He looked like a little kid. He was a toddler with a scrape, looking to his father for assurance that the Neosporin wouldn’t sting. Patrice nodded to him. Leonard shrugged. Andrew stayed back, watching over their shoulders.

  Jake lowered his fingers into the warm water. His shoulders dropped as he exhaled.

  “I don’t know what I was…” Jake started to say. His thought was cut off by his scream. Fire and then freezing cold jolted up through his hand.

  Chapter Fifteen - Panicking

  (Leonard)

  AS HE SCREAMED, JAKE jerked his hand from the water and clutched it to his chest. Leonard saw a flash of white, like the blue had been driven from the man’s fingers, leaving only bone-white flesh.

  “The feeling returning,” Leonard said. His voice was lost in the chaos. He wanted to tell Jake to put his hand back in the water and wait out the pain. When he had come out of the lake, Leonard’s extremities had all been numb. The heat from the wood stove had brought both feeling and pain. It was just something that had to be suffered through in order to get back to normal. It was no use trying to tell Jake though. Patrice had snatched a towel from the back of a chair and was pressing it into Jake’s good hand to help him dry off.

  Jake was still screaming and looking down at his hand that was protectively cradled against his chest.

  “Acid!” was Jake’s first intelligible word. “It’s acid,” he screamed.

  Patrice was trying to calm him down, advancing on him again with the towel.

  Leonard looked down at the water. His only thought was that somehow between the time when he had tested it, and when Jake had dipped his fingers in, the water had grown far too hot. He reached a finger slowly towards the water to test it.

  “Don’t!” Andrew said as he moved around Patrice and Jake.

  “It’s not acid,” Leonard said.

  Still, Andrew batted his hand away and he grabbed the pot from the stove. Before Leonard could object again, Andrew was dumping the water into the basin that led down to the French drain.

  Jake’s screams had diminished into a low moan.

  “It’s not acid,” Leonard said again as he moved by Andrew to join Patrice.

  “Just let me see it,” Patrice was saying to Jake.

  It was like Jake couldn’t hear him. The man was trapped in a nightmare that consisted only of himself and his hand. He jerked away when Patrice reached forward to try to touch his arm.

  “Jake!” Leonard shouted.

  The man’s eyes came up. They were still the eyes of a child.

  “Ja
ke, you have to get on top of it, yeah? Get ahold of it. Let us see.”

  “It’s terrible,” Jake said between clenched teeth.

  Leonard braced himself as Jake pulled his protective hand away. Despite his effort, Leonard was still shocked backwards by the sight. The flash hadn’t been bone-white flesh, it was just bone.

  On the end of two of Jake’s fingers, the flesh had been stripped. All that was left was the tips of bone projecting from blue skin. Even the pads of his fingers, seen in cross-section now, were blue all the way down to the white bone.

  “Jesus,” Patrice whispered.

  “You gotta be shitting me,” Leonard said.

  “Jake, give me your hand,” Patrice said.

  “That’s contagious. Be careful,” Andrew said.

  Patrice ignored him. He grabbed Jake’s arm by the wrist and used his other hand to guide Jake towards a chair. “Len, in that cabinet.” He gestured with a nod. Leonard knew exactly what to expect. He went to the cabinet under the window and found a first aid kit. His own grandparents had kept the same one—an enameled white Johnson & Johnson first aid kid, circa two-million years ago. Leonard brought it to Patrice as he cracked it open and swung the metal lid. At least the contents weren’t as old as the container.

  Patrice grabbed a couple of gauze pads, putting one on the arm of the chair and opening the other with his teeth. Jake sucked in a breath as Patrice pressed the pad to his fingers.

  “Hurt much?” Patrice asked.

  Jake looked both concerned and surprised as he shook his head.

  “Must be the cold. You’re still a bit numb,” Patrice said. It was the kind of lie an EMT would give to the victim of a car crash. The object was simply to calm the injured person and not elevate their blood pressure any more than it already was.

  “I can feel the pressure though,” Jake said. “And the water hurt like a bear trap.”

  “Skin is weird,” Patrice said.

  Leonard picked up the roll of white tape and teased up the corner with his thumbnail. He handed it to Patrice, who used the tape to secure the gauze. From what Leonard could see, two of the fingers were pretty bad. They had missing flesh and exposed bone. Even the gentle care of Patrice had been pretty destructive on the bones. Dust fell from underneath the bandage as Patrice taped it in place. A third finger had some pockmarks in the blue skin. Little divots of flesh were gone near the knuckle. Leonard glanced over at the basin, wondering if maybe Jake had been right. Maybe the water had somehow turned to acid. It was too late to know. Andrew had disposed of the evidence.

  “Okay,” Patrice said. “We’ll get a mitten on your hand so you can keep these fingers together. They’re going to do fine until we get you to the hospital.”

  Patrice glanced at Leonard with that last statement—conveying that he had come around on the whole idea of getting the fuck out of there. Leonard nodded back.

  “Hold tight there,” Patrice said to Jake, nodding the whole time. “Keep this hand above your heart. We’re going to get a few things together.”

  Patrice kept nodding at Jake until he snapped out of his trance enough to nod back. Patrice was like a veteran used car salesman, not giving in until he had his customer’s expressed agreement.

  “Watch him,” Patrice whispered to Andrew. He took Leonard by the elbow and directed him towards the room they shared. Before they passed through the doorway, Patrice left Jake with another half-truth. “We’re going to find enough dry layers to keep Leonard warm on the hike out. Hold tight.”

  * * * * * * *

  (Patrice)

  “That shit is fucked up,” Patrice said as they moved into the privacy of the small room. He kept his voice to a whisper. The room was tiny and the walls were paper thin. There was barely enough room for the two men, the stack of bunk beds, and the bookshelf. Patrice pressed back into Leonard as he opened the closet door.

  “Yeah, I noticed,” Leonard said.

  “You’re going to have to wrap up in a blanket, and maybe Grandpa left a… Here we go,” he said. He came out of the closet with a relic from the past. “They might have been the Greatest Generation, but they sure as shit didn’t have the greatest taste.”

  Leonard looked at the dusty old shirt. The pattern was a checkerboard of faded red and yellow.

  “Looks like a shirt that got so much blood on it that someone tried to piss it clean,” Leonard said. “I don’t think this is going to keep me warm.”

  “Wear it under your wet jacket. Trust me, this kind of wool will keep you warm even if it’s fully wet. I should have thought of it earlier.”

  “Can we talk about what the fuck just happened out there?” Leonard whispered.

  Patrice shook his head. “Look—I don’t have any idea. I’ve never seen anything like that, and I’ve seen a ton of bad shit. Those fingers are done.”

  “Forget about the fingers, man. Can we talk about what caused those damn fingers? What he screamed seemed like it was right the first time. That water was like acid to his crazy blue hand. Maybe that’s not a hand at all anymore. Maybe it’s just a form of ice and it melted.”

  “Leonard, listen—we’re not qualified to figure out what happened. All we can do is move quickly and decisively towards people who are.”

  “You sure changed your tune fast enough. A few minutes ago, you were lobbying for staying put.”

  “This is different,” Patrice said. “That kind of trauma needs treatment. All I did was cover it up to prevent it from getting infected. We have to get him out. Now put on that shirt.”

  The seams of the sleeves popped as Leonard slipped on the old wool.

  “This thing smells like death,” Leonard said.

  Patrice nodded as he gathered a couple of things they might need. He picked up their wallets and phones—the accessories of modern life that had been useless in the cabin.

  “These are cotton, but they’ll keep the wet off your legs for a bit,” Patrice said. He handed his sweatpants to Leonard. They were absurdly big for Leonard, but the drawstring would help.

  “As long as we keep moving, I’ll be fine,” Leonard said. “You think that lady is going to give us any trouble?”

  “Not if she has any sense,” Patrice said. “If she wants to stay here, that’s fine with me. I’ll leave the place unlocked for her. She wants to come with us, she has to keep up. I don’t have any problem leaving her behind.”

  “Sure did change your tune,” Leonard muttered.

  Patrice left Leonard to get dressed and went back out to the main room. Leonard had a point, and he wasn’t just referring to idea of getting Jake out as quickly as possible. Patrice was pulling back his focus to only the people he knew. Earlier that day, he and Leonard had gone out on a limb for a man they had never met just because the man had plunged through the ice on a snowmobile. Then, he had been willing to risk a quick trip out to help a woman he had just met. Now, Patrice was only really concerned with their original four. And, if he was honest, he was really only committed to himself and Leonard. He would run into traffic to help Leonard. He couldn’t really say the same for Jake and Andrew. They were merely people he had known for a good while. Leonard was like family.

  Out in the main room, Jake was hunched over and shivering. Andrew was standing behind him, arms crossed and a worried look on his face.

  “What’s going on?” Patrice asked.

  “He’s cold, but he’s asking to go outside,” Andrew said.

  “Well, get yourself bundled up and I’ll help him. That’s precisely where we’re going.”

  “You think that’s the best idea?” Andrew said. He glanced towards the door again and Patrice knew what he was thinking. Marie’s warning was coming true—Jake was indeed trying to get himself back out to the cold.

  “We’re going to wrap him up and we’re going to hustle him out. He won’t have time to get too cold,” Patrice said. “He needs help.”

  “I’m just wondering if maybe we should split up and…”

  “No
!” Patrice said. “Nobody splits up. The four of us are velcro, got it?”

  Andrew nodded. “Yeah. Okay.”

  “Jake?” Patrice asked. The man, still hunched over, didn’t say anything in reply.

  Andrew peeked through the window to make sure that Marie wasn’t on the porch, watching him. The guns that Jake had returned with were still leaned against the wall. Andrew took a few seconds to unload them and gather the ammunition.

  “Let’s go, Andrew. Finish bundling up and then help him, would you? MC Hammer, can you give them a hand?” Patrice asked Leonard as he came through the door. The sweatpants were gathered tight at Leonard’s waist and then ballooned out in every direction.

  “Yeah. In a second,” Leonard said. He had plucked his wet pants from the hook over the basin and he sat down to wrestle them on.

  Patrice took the guns, along with Leonard’s gun, and used a chair so he could put them up in the loft above the main room. There were a couple of boards up there, laying across the joists, and it made a decent hiding place for the weapons.

  “We’re taking at least one, right?” Leonard asked.

  “Just one,” Patrice said. With his jacket on, he put his own rifle in its bag and slung it over his back. Patrice glanced around to see if he was missing anything. Leonard was almost dressed, although he looked spectacularly uncomfortable in his wet gear. Andrew was mostly ready and helping to zip up Jake, who was fighting him by trying to curl in on himself.

  “Are we sure we’re going to be able to get him all the…” Andrew began to ask.

  “Velcro, Andrew,” Patrice said. He grabbed one of the backpacks and began stuffing it full of gear.

  * * * * * * *

  (Andrew)

  Patrice left first and Leonard brought up the rear. That gave Andrew the responsibility of ushering Jake up and through the door. Hunched over, Jake shivered like a man caught in a deep fever. Even on the porch, the wind clawed at Andrew’s face. He flipped his scarf around his head and considered doing the same for Jake. But Jake didn’t seem to mind the cold. In fact, when the wind whipped around them, Jake straightened up and Andrew couldn’t feel him shivering anymore. Instead of helping him with a scarf, Andrew guided Jake down the stairs, encouraged that Jake seemed a little more invigorated.