Infested

 

The man’s arms had abandoned him first. You knew that much walking into the scene. It was common knowledge, I mean. The room was pitch black before they hauled in the floodlights. Once we got those plugged in, we realized the goddam building didn’t have any power, anyway, so we had to go break out the portable generators. Let me tell you, dragging them sumbitches up ten flights of stairs wasn’t any fun.

It was way past lunch when we got the lights turned on and examined the room proper, and sure enough, there the vic was, plastered to the floor and the wall. A pair of black and brown hole-strewn lumps spread out on either side of him, right from where the shoulders ought to have turned to arms. Holes covered the flesh.

“That him?” Jackie asked.

“No, that’s his mommy,” Saul grunted. He swatted the kid’s arm with the back of his hand. “Obviously that’s him.”

Jackie rubbed at his forearm, said, “Well sorry, boss.”

I knelt near the corpse, prodded at the thing’s torso. A faint rustling could be heard, responding to me. The flesh pulsated and bulged near where my finger had been, and then receded. If I hadn’t seen it a thousand other times, I’d have crawled out of my skin just then.

A couple seconds later, something crawled out of the vic’s skin. A thin line of black tears spilled down his cheekbone. Only, it wasn’t liquid. I stood, stepped back, and dropped a lit match over the corpse. It caught immediately; the Pests were highly flammable. It was about the only good thing I had to say about them.

The one coming out from his eye got caught in the updraft; half its body lifted upward, curved sickeningly in the air. With what must have been great effort, it dragged itself back down through his eyelid, disappearing from view.

I smirked. It’d be dead before too long.

“Go ahead and evac whoever’s still living in this dump,” I said, walking back toward Saul and Jackie. “Get the demo team moving. I want this shit hole doused and lit up like the goddam Fourth of July by four this afternoon, no later, understand?”

Jackie gave a salute. Saul flipped me off. I returned both gestures.

Downstairs, I stood inside the sanitation chamber we’d set up, a glass-like fixture attached to the front door of Lot 12-B. I stripped down to my birthday suit and dumped my clothes into a high-heat compartment; they’d be brought to the highest temp they could without catching fire, and then run through a wash before a final round of heat. I’d been told there was some sort of UV light bath that happened somewhere in the middle, too.

As for me, I got the human equivalent to that treatment. Standard protocol.

I stood in the hot, dry, simulated wind, a vortex of invisible fire enveloping me. Just when it got to be too much to bear, the wind petered off. Shortly after, a torrential downpour spilled from the ceiling, focused jets of hot water lambasting every square inch of me, angled into every crook and crevice. The force of the water was enough to hold me upright, and thank god for that, because I was about ready to collapse, let me tell you.

The water died off, and I had a few moments to catch my breath before the hot air returned. And it was in the middle of my hot air bath that I saw it. One spindling black speck pinwhirling its horrid legs; it unraveled, stretched to its full length of six inches, and cartwheeled through the air toward me.

“What the fuck,” I said aloud.

The heat was supposed to kill those goddam things.

I dropped to my knees and rolled under it as it ribboned through the air overhead. I shuffled on my hands and legs to the wall and started smacking it.

“Skin worm!” I barked in time with the beat my hand made against the duroplastic. “Skin worm! Fucking skin worm!”

One of the boys in hazard suits clocked my alarm and, a second later, spotted the thin black line flying through the air above me like a miniature Chinese dragon. All bets were off, then. The heat rose. And rose. And rose. I started to sweat like a goddam pig. My skin reddened. Blisters bubbled up on my flesh. The pain was undeniable. A full two minutes skated by before I realized I’d been screaming my throat raw. The heat got in through my mouth and dried me out quick. I mean, I was spitting blood, let me tell you.

Through all that, the fuckin’ worm just kept keeping on. The heat kept rising. And rising. Last thing I saw was a thin layer of skin sloughing off my hand as I tried to claw my way out of that goddam oven.

I came to a few days later, wrapped up like a mummy and drugged out of my mind. That worm was contained in a thin plastic card, suspended as though in amber. They showed it to me midway through recovery.

It was part of a new breed. Heat resistant, apparently.

I didn’t ask at the time what had happened to Lot 12-B. Didn’t quite have my marbles together then. It’s been about a week since the last of the skin-grafts were taken care of, and I finally got the braves to look into that building.

It had gone up in flames, just like I’d ordered it to. A month and some change since Lot 12-B. You wouldn’t think it if you lived your life through the news reels, but deaths related to the Pest had risen exponentially over the past few weeks. I’d stopped receiving updates from the suits; it was the nurses who had tipped me off. The newest waves of the Pestilence were all highly heat resistant. Only, we hadn’t adjusted our standard protocol to account for this. How’d I know that?

I could see it.

I stood at the window in my hospital room, watched as one residence after another went up in flames. Day after day, another inferno jettisoned thousands of Pests into the sky. Day after day, they spread like pollen over the city. Over the region.

As I sit at my window watching the world’s curtains draw to a close, I feel next to nothing. Not even the voice recorder clutched in my fist.

After all, touch is the first sense to go, once you’re properly infested.