It was blood.
Eyes widening in horror, Perry looked at his bed. Thin streaks of blood dotted the white sheets. Still blinking sleep-crust from his eyes, he ran to the bathroom and stared in the mirror.
Trickles of dried blood and finger-smears of the same streaked his left pectoral, clotting in his thin blond chest hair. He’d torn the skin during the night, digging into the flesh with his fingernails, which were caked with blood and bits of dried skin. Perry looked down at his body. Blood smudges, some wet, some tacky and some completely dry, covered his left thigh.
With a sudden start of horror, he saw bomb-run droplets of blood on his underwear. Pulling the waistband out, he looked down. A sigh of relief-no blood on his testicles.
He’d torn into himself during the night, ripping away at the itches with an abandon that didn’t exist during waking hours. How had he not woken up? “Sleeping like the dead” was an understatement. And despite more than thirteen hours of sleep, he still felt tired. Tired and hungry.
Perry stared at himself in the mirror. Pale skin, nearly white, smeared with streaks of his own blood dried to a reddish black, as if he were the canvas for a child’s finger painting, or perhaps some ancient shaman bedecked for a tribal ritual.
The rashes had grown in the night. Each was now the size of a silver-dollar pancake, and had taken on a coppery color. Perry craned his neck, trying to use the mirror to see the blemishes on his back and ass. They looked okay, which was to say he hadn’t scratched them raw during the night. In truth, they looked anything but okay.
Not knowing what else to do, Perry took a quick shower to wash off the dried blood. The situation was fucked up, obviously, but there was little he could do about it now. Besides, he had to be at work in a few hours. Maybe after work he’d actually break down and make a doctor’s appointment.
Perry scrubbed up, then applied the rest of the Cortaid, being very careful with the raw wounds on his leg and collarbone. He applied Band-Aids to both areas, then dressed and made himself a whopping breakfast. His stomach groaned with a ravenous hunger, more intense than his normal morning cravings. He made five scrambled eggs, eight pieces of toast, and washed everything down with two big glasses of milk.
Overall, the rashes felt fine, although they looked worse than ever. If they didn’t itch anymore, they couldn’t be that big of a deal. Perry felt certain the rashes would subside by day’s end, or at least be on their way out. Confident his body could handle the problem, he gathered up his battered briefcase and headed to work.
18.
Margaret looked at the readout with disbelief.
“Amos,” she called through the biosuit’s tinny microphone. “Come here and take a look at this.” Amos glided over, as unaffected by fatigue as ever, and stood next to her.
“What have you got?”
“I finished the analysis on samples taken from all over the body and found massive quantities of neurotransmitters, particularly in the brain.”
Amos leaned forward to read the screen. “Excessively high levels of dopamine, norepinephrine, serotonin…my God, his system was out of control. What do you think did this to him?”
“That’s not my specialty, I’ll have to check into it. But from what I do know, excessive levels of neurotransmitters can cause paranoid disorders and even some psychopathic behaviors. And I’m not sure there has ever been a case documented with levels this high.”
“The growth is controlling the victims with natural drugs. I wish we could get our hands on a live victim so we could see the insides of those damn growths. This is twice now we’ve had victims to examine, but both times the growths have been completely rotted out. It’s almost as if the person who created these things intentionally added the rotting aspect, so it would be harder to examine the little buggers.”
Margaret rolled the concept around in her brain, but it didn’t take hold. She was already suspicious of the growths’ incredible complexity-another theory began to take shape.
Amos pointed to the screen. “The growth either produces or causes to be produced excess neurotransmitters, which create reproducible results. Brilliant. Absolutely brilliant.”
“There are other variances as well,” Margaret said. “There was seventy-five times the normal level of enkephalins in the tissue surrounding the growth. Enkephalin is a natural painkiller.”
Amos thought for a moment. “That makes sense. It’s hard to tell with all the rot, but it looks like the growth causes a lot of damage to the surrounding tissue. Whoever engineered the growth doesn’t want the host to feel that damage. The level of complexity is astronomical.”
“Amos, you don’t have to root for the little buggers,” Margaret said, a dressing-down tone in her voice. “We’re here to stop these things, remember?”
He smiled. “It’s hard not to be astounded. Come here and take a look at what I’ve got under the ultraviolet microscope.”
Margaret shuffled to the device, where Amos had been working for the last thirty minutes. Her Racal suit zip-zipped with each step as if she wore children’s footed pajamas.
She peered into the microscope. The sample looked like a normal nerve cell. Amos had done a perfect job of isolating and preparing the tissue: fingerlike dendrites, stained and glowing electric-blue under the ultraviolet light, reached out and over the thicker axons. It was the same connection that provides signal communication for every animal on the planet.
“It’s an isolated cluster of nerve cells,” she said. “Where is this from?”
“I found it near the eighth cranial nerve. The rot is working its way through there, but I was able to find a few relatively clean areas.”
Inside the awkward biosuit, Margaret frowned. The eighth cranial nerve, or the vestibulocochlear nerve, was where signals from the ear entered the brain.
“It’s heavily damaged, shows signs of decomposition, but still obviously nerve tissue,” Margaret said.
Amos remained quiet. Margaret looked up from the microscope.
Amos leaned forward. “You’re sure?”
Margaret wasn’t in the mood for games, but she took another look anyway. She could see nothing unusual.
“Amos, if you’ve got a point to make, please make it.”
“The cells don’t belong to Martin Brewbaker.”
Margaret stared blankly, not understanding the statement. “Not Brewbaker’s? Why are you looking at other samples? If they’re not Brewbaker’s nerve cells, then whose…” Her voice trailed off as the significance hit home.
“Amos, are you telling me these belong to the growth?”
“I performed protein sequencing on the black thorn and the vein siphon. The results turned up some unknown proteins, definitely not human. So I took some samples from around the body and ran the same sequence. I found high concentrations in the brain-that’s how I discovered the cluster on the cranial nerve. I found the protein in other places, but no more nerves, only remnants of that peculiar rot. There were high concentrations in the cerebral cortex, thalamus, amygdala, caudate nucleus, hypothalamus and septum.”
Margaret felt overwhelmed. Much of the brain’s higher functions remained a mystery, even in this day of rapidly ascending scientific knowledge. The sections of Brewbaker’s brain infected with the rot composed part of the limbic system, which was thought to control memory storage and emotional response, among other functions.
What the hell was the growth doing in Brewbaker’s brain? It already had him controlled with the neurotransmitter overdose, didn’t it?
Amos continued. “What you’re looking at here is the only sample I’ve found that wasn’t completely decomposed. I’ve never seen proteins like this, so I assume they’re synthetic, man-made. If they’re natural, they’re nothing I’ve encountered. I’ve searched all the academic and biotech databases and found nothing similar. That means if the proteins are synthetic, someone is keeping their research well guarded, which doesn’t surprise me considering the vastly advanced technology we’re dealing with.”