Edgerton was an only child. His parents passed away in an automobile accident while he was attending graduate school. By all outward signs he lived for his work.
His fellow researchers remember him as a hardliner known to play fast and loose with scientific ethics. One oft-reported incident—especially telling in light of the events at Falstaff Island—recounts an evening when Edgerton was discovered by campus police at his alma mater. He’d snuck into a lab using a stolen passkey and was discovered in the process of destroying the work of his closest rival, a senior by the name of Edward Trusskins. Trusskins had been working on a skin graft technique involving lab mice. Edgerton was caught red-handed, as they say, with a syringe of strychnine.
Despite this infraction and the chilling mind-set it signaled, he was soon pursuing his work at another institute. He was simply too talented. He also could be convincingly sincere when circumstances compelled it.
There are those who say the best scientists occupy that dangerous headspace teetering at the edge of madness. By this definition Dr. Edgerton was most certainly a world-class scientist.
Edgerton’s work with the hydatid worm rivaled what Dr. Jonas Salk did for immunology in the 1950s—not in terms of its immediate social benefit (all Edgerton actually created was the most adaptable and survivable parasite known to mankind), but in his successful genetic manipulation of this planet’s simplest life-form.
He took a simple planarian worm and unlocked its genetic code. In doing so he allowed it to modify its basic anatomic and gastric substructure in ways heretofore thought impossible for any life-form. He enabled the hydatid worm to adapt to its environment on the fly. His stated aim was to rob the worm of its natural defenses in the interests of quarantining it within its host… what he accomplished was the exact opposite.
He opened a genetic Pandora’s box.
When his hydatid was confronted with a cliff, it grew wings. Confronted with an unbridgeable sea, it grew gills. Its adaptability enabled it to mutate in a dizzying variety of ways. Just like snowflakes, no two of Dr. Edgerton’s hydatids were exactly alike.
His worms broke down into two broad categories. In the interests of distinction let’s call them “devourer worms” and “conqueror worms.”
Some species of tapeworm will enter into a parasitic symbiosis with their hosts; they can live in the host for years, eating only enough to survive. But even unmutated hydatids do not behave this way: their genetic imperative is to populate and eventually overrun their hosts, overtaxing their immunodeficiency systems and essentially starving them to death.
This rarely happens; even the worst hydatid infestation can be flushed out with proper medication. But the video footage recovered from the Edgerton lab indicates that the modified hydatid is both extremely hardy and extremely aggressive: it spawns far faster, devours far more, and grows far larger.
As such, it is the equivalent of a Kamikaze pilot: its appetite quickens its own extinction cycle.
The mutated “devourer” hydatid does two things: eats and reproduces. After the infestation reaches critical mass it begins to consume the living tissues of its host—this behavior distinguishes it from the common hydatid, which is incapable of digesting anything beyond waste matter. A devourer will consume protein, fat, muscle tissue, even bone marrow and the vitreous jelly of a host’s eyes. This accounts for much of the “wasting” effect on its host: they come to look like longtime starvation victims in a matter of hours.
The devastation is intensified by the fact that every molecule of nourishment a devourer consumes serves a singular purpose: to make more of itself. A devourer eats and lays eggs. It is not uncommon for a devourer colony to reach a critical state after an incubation period of only a few hours.
It is simply impossible for a host to take in enough nourishment to satisfy a devourer colony—whatever the host eats produces more creatures seeking more nourishment…
24
KENT WAS dreaming.
He was on the ocean with his father. Night was coming on. The eerie smoothness of the water, not a wave or ripple, was what made Kent realize that he was dreaming.
Kent was thinking about a girl in his class. Anna Uniak. Anna was pretty and trim and he was sure his father would approve. He often looked at Anna out of the corner of his eye—she sat one seat ahead and to the left of him at school. The light would fall through the classroom window and pick up the fine downy hairs on her cheeks. It looked like peach fuzz, Kent thought. He could eat Anna’s skin just like that—just like a peach…
The sky was strung with strange clouds. A dull crimson and hanging very low, bleeding into the setting sun. Kent thought he could see shapes in them—sinuous squirmings as if the clouds were coming apart in the face of the ocean wind, or giving birth to multiples, or something else he could put no name to.
His father wore his police uniform. His badge winked in the guttering embers of the day’s light. His father’s wrists, projecting from his sleeves, were wasted looking and his fingers too skeletal.
“It’ll be a long night,” he said. “And goddamn, I’m hungry.”
A flock of birds—not the ever-present gulls but jet-black, arrow-eyed ravens—flew overhead, shadowing their boat. Kent could hear their tortured cries and see their rotted beaks. Some kind of white, cindery dust was drifting down from beneath their wings. It fell through the air in little white ribbons, just like in a ticker-tape parade.
Fear stole into Kent’s heart. He wished he wasn’t so scared—his father had taught him that fear was a useless emotion. Fear is just weakness exiting the body, he’d said to Kent on many occasions.
But there was something wrong with the whole scene: the menacing shapes lurking within the clouds, the white things drifting down… and his father. His father—
The police uniform hung off his body. He lurched toward Kent with his arms outstretched—stick arms that wouldn’t have looked out of place on a concentration camp prisoner—his fingers just clattering bone. His face was all cheekbones and bulging brow and parchment-thin skin stretched to the point of tearing.
“A long night!” this starved apparition screamed at him. “A looong and hungry night! Yummy yum yum!”
His father reached for Kent, bony hands clawing round his shoulders, digging in, piercing the skin. Jeff Jenks leaned in and his skin now came apart: rifts appeared in the fabric of his face, fine lines like cracks in bone china, and then those rifts all met and began to wriggle and suddenly Kent was staring into a face made up of hundreds of white pulsating tubes.
“Nobody loves me,” his worm-father sang sadly. Writhing alabaster worms dripped off his lips and into his mouth, thrashing contentedly on the Swiss-cheesed root of his tongue. “Everybody hates me; I’m going to the garden to eat you.”
Kent toppled into the bottom of the boat with his father atop him. His father’s face fell apart in sections. The abominations detached and squirmed down his collar, pattering onto Kent’s upturned face like warm raindrops. They found his mouth and nose and ears and eyes, infiltrating them with greedy abandon.
“This is only fear entering the body,” his father said.
NEWTON WAS the one who suggested they make a list.
His own survival instincts told him this was the wisest plan. When the world was crumbling around your ears, your best bet was to set yourself a few simple tasks to focus your attention on. While you were working on those tasks, your mind had a chance to cope with the situation. If you could just get past the initial shock—the shock of death and of sudden isolation—then maybe a better plan would come to you later.