Then he froze, half-chewed food hanging in his mouth.
The round, yellow-orange yolk glistened, surrounded by a bed of white. Orange. Orange that at one time had been a baby chicken, growing in a shell.
Growing. Growing. Growing.
Grown.
The toast dropped to the floor. It landed butter side down.
What the hell had he been thinking, eating a pile of eggs and worrying about work when he still had these fucking things inside him? He pulled back the towel’s edge to examine his thigh, exposing the wound that had helped knock him out cold for two straight days. The shower had cleared away the dried blood, leaving fresh pink scar tissue with only a small, dark red scab-pebble in the middle. The wound looked healthy. Normal. The whitish growth that had caused his itching was long gone.
It was gone…but the others weren’t.
He sat at the kitchen table and pulled his right knee to his chest, getting a good, close look at his shin.
The orange-peel skin was gone. What had taken its place didn’t make him feel any better.
Where a circle of thick, pebbly, orange skin had once been, a peculiar triangle now lay. A triangle that was under his skin. Each of the triangle’s sides was about an inch long.
The skin covering the strange triangle had a pale bluish tinge to it, the same color as the blue veins in the underside of one’s wrist. But it wasn’t really his skin. There was no break in the skin that wrapped around his leg, that covered his whole body for that matter, but somehow what covered the blue triangle just didn’t seem to be his. It felt tougher than his own.
Near each of the triangle’s three points was a quarter-inch slit pointing to the triangle’s center. They reminded Perry of the slits in a homemade apple pie-if, of course, apple pie were triangular, made of human skin, and held a bluish tinge.
What the fuck was it?
Perry’s breath came in rapid, short, shallow gasps. He had to get to a hospital.
His father had gone into a hospital. His father had never come out. The doctors didn’t do a fucking thing for his father. Jacob Dawsey spent the last two months of his life slowly shriveling up on a hospital bed, good-for-nothing doctors sticking him full of needles, poking and prodding and testing. All the while his barrel-chested, 265-pound father shrunk to a six-foot-five, 150-pound living mummy, a character out of some childhood nightmare.
Perry had gone into the hospital once himself, right after that Rose Bowl injury to his knee. Damn doctors were supposed to be able to fix anything. Turned out they couldn’t. Months later a second set of specialists (and there’s always plenty of specialists for an All-Big Ten linebacker, thank you very much) said the first doctors had screwed things up, that Perry might have continued his career if they’d done things right.
But this wasn’t a blown knee. This wasn’t even cancer. Cancer was a semi-living mass of flesh. The thing he’d pulled out of his leg had been alive, it had moved on its own.
And there were six more. Six more that had grown unhindered for two days, while he’d been unconscious. It had only taken three days for the things to go from a little rash to a squirming horror, and another forty-eight hours to transform into these bizarre triangular growths. What the hell might they become in the next twenty-four hours? The next forty-eight?
Perry rushed to throw on the first clothes he could find, grabbed his keys and coat and headed for his car.
Hospital time.
Definitely hospital time.
32.
Margaret waited for Dr. Cheng to come to the phone. She didn’t like to be made to wait, but it was hard to be upset when Agent Clarence Otto’s strong hands worked her bunched-up shoulder muscles. She was still in the director’s office, except now she was sitting in the big-girl’s chair. Murray was on his way back to Washington. Amos was taking advantage of the downtime to get some sleep in one of the hospital’s empty rooms.
Cheng was a bit of a bigwig at the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. She didn’t know the man from Adam, but she had to admit it was fun to hear people at the main CDC office jump when she called. One phone call from Murray opened a lot of doors.
“This is Doctor Cheng.” Margaret shook her head slightly. She’d expected an Asian accent. This guy sounded like he was from Bakersfield.
“Doctor Cheng, Margaret Montoya.”
“How can I help you today, Margaret? It seems you’ve got something important to discuss, important enough for the director to call me and tell me to make sure you get everything you need.” He sounded annoyed, as if her call had pulled him away from something that he thought was very important.
“Yes, Doctor Cheng. I’m actually CDC myself.”
“Really? I wonder why I’ve never heard of you. Do you work in Atlanta?”
Margaret grimaced at the question. “No, actually, CCID in Cincinnati.”
“Ah,” Cheng said. There was a lot of contempt and derision loaded in to that single syllable.
“Doctor Cheng, I need some information on your Morgellons task force,” Margaret said.
“You bothered me for that?”
“Afraid so. We’re working on a related disease.”
“Must not be much of a relation,” Cheng said. “Because there is no disease. Just a lot of crazy people who have convinced themselves they have bugs crawling under their skin.” He sounded about as compassionate as a guy opening up the gas valve at a Nazi death camp.
“I’m more interested in the fibers.”
Pause. “Yes, well, there is something strange there, but it hardly merits all the attention. I’ll tell you, I wasn’t thrilled to be put in charge of this mass delusion. Fibers in your skin don’t make you crazy, although I will say that the pain suffered by some victims seems very real. A few have genuine fibers that seem to be created by their own bodies, but for most of them these ‘fibers’ turn out to be carpet fibers, clothing fibers, things like that. They convince themselves they have this infestation, they scratch themselves bloody, and these tiny fibers get stuck in the wounds. Hardly an epidemic.”
“But you’ve seen some of these ‘genuine’ cellulose fibers growing out of the skin, yes?”
“We have found a few, yes,” Cheng said.
“I’m hoping you have a database on those claiming to be infected, particularly those who actually show the fibers.”
The question seemed to anger Cheng. “Of course we have a database, Doctor Montoya. We’ve sent out bulletins to all medical professionals, asking them to report anything that fits in to the myriad symptoms of these Morgellons victims. Tell me what you’re working on. If it’s a Morgellons case, it falls under the purview of this task force. You should be reporting it to me.”
Margaret slunk into her chair and rubbed her eyes. This wasn’t going the way she’d thought it would.
“Margaret,” Otto whispered. She opened her eyes. Now he was on the other side of the desk. He pointed to her, then held his left palm down at waist level. His right hand whipped back and forth in front of his groin, like he was spanking an imaginary person bent over in front of him. Then he pointed at the phone. “Go on, girl, whip that ass.”
Margaret nodded. That’s right. I’m in charge now, I’m not this guy’s bitch. If anything, he’s mine.
“I haven’t got all day, Montoya,” Cheng said. “What are you working on?”
“Afraid I can’t tell you, Cheng,” Margaret said. “You’re not cleared to have that information. And in this instance you’re reporting to me. You did hear about the executive order, didn’t you?”
A pause.
“ Didn’t you?”
“Of course I did.”
“Good. I don’t have time for this. Either stop being an insufferable prick or I’ll just call the CDC director and let him know I can’t get you to cooperate.”
A longer pause. Otto had moved on from slapping the imaginary booty, and was now “riding the pony.” He looked ridiculous, a big grown man, CIA agent, in the black suit and the red tie, twirling in a circle with an expression of affected ecstasy on his face. Margaret couldn’t help but smile.