But the pain was not through with me yet. It spread across my groin, scalding like acid. I can't even begin to describe my horror as it passed through my genitalia and then into my left leg, once again racing down and feeling as if it was burning my bones away.
I could not stop screaming.
The speed with which it spread through me seemed to be increasing. In moments, my left leg, like my right, was strangely limp, and I found I could no longer hold myself upright. I flopped backward just as the pain and burning began to climb up my spine.
I began to be racked by spasms that set my legs thrashing about, but they no longer bore much resemblance to legs. They rippled and squirmed, they seemed to slither across the floor. My right sock had now slipped completely off and the obscenely pink flesh it had revealed did not resemble a foot. There were no signs of toes or nails, or ankles and soles, only a featureless fleshy tube tapering gracelessly to a rounded tip. Worse, it had begun to itch mercilessly.
By now, the siren could be heard on the street below and the screech of tires braking on asphalt. I hoped the paramedics would hurry.
My co-workers, my office-mates, had backed as far away as they could, and panic spread among them.
'Oh God! Look! His skin is writhing.'
'What's happening to him?'
'It's like his bones are melting!'
'Do you think it could be catching?'
That last question sent some of them fleeing to the elevators and the rest strained to back yet further away.
I wanted to sit up and gain control of myself, but I could not. The strange tide of transformation continued unabated and the pain seemed to be increasing. I fear my yelling had degenerated into bursts of sound that hardly resembled anything human. I was exhausted, my throat raw from screaming at the top of my voice. My cries now were more a harsh bleating and moaning.
Strangely, no matter how my body was being changed, I could feel my heart steadily beating. It was a hypnotic rhythm that was at once petrifying and weirdly reassuring.
The feeling of something coursing through me had now reached my neck and shoulders, and spread rapidly into my arms. I was still thrashing about, but it was as if I had been trapped inside my head and was being forced to watch as everything about me — everything that went into my concept of me — was irrevocably changed.
Then, suddenly — mercifully — the pain stopped.
And I looked over to see my left hand, which had been flailing uncontrollably, and saw no hand at all. My eyes grew wider as I stared in terror. It looked as if some giant pink worm was crawling out of my coat-sleeve.
There was a commotion over by the door and three paramedics came bustling through, pushing people aside. Two maneuvered a gurney and the third carried the medical bag. But even as they approached, I felt/heard/guessed the final transformation occur. My head sank back squishily and I knew that my skull had just gone the way of the rest of the bones in my body.
As the lead medic knelt by me, I attempted to speak and tell him I was in no pain. I could not lift my head, yet I still was under the delusion that I would be able to communicate. I was wrong. What issued from my mouth was a gelatinous baritone belch, accompanied by a horrible stench.
I think I was as shocked as the medic.
Certainly his face revealed his disgust. 'What the hell is this?' he asked angrily.
Shaw stepped up and stared at me with consternation. He cleared his throat and, after a few false starts, he managed to say,'Until a few minutes ago, he was our co-worker, Mr. David Thompson. This is his desk. He was sitting there working quite normally before whatever. happened. began. er. happening.'
'Are you telling me this is a human being?' asked the medic.
'Yes, as far as I know,' said Shaw.
Had I been able to control my movements, I would have embraced him then and there. I was filled with gratitude. I tried to lift my arms and found that it did set the worms into motion. The pink protrubances seemed to leap up from the floor like writhing tentacles, but I had no control.
The medic jumped back, a look of fear on his face. Shaw and everyone else backed further away as well.
I tried again to speak, but this time all I managed was a noisy exhalation of noxious gases.
I then discovered that it was very difficult to get a breath. It was as if some giant was sitting on my chest. I gasped.
The medic approached again. Tentatively, he reached out to me, trying to take my wrist, but I really no longer had one. He stopped that movement, and then placed a stethoscope on my chest. He face relaxed a little when he heard my heart beat.
'What happened?' he asked aloud.
Shaw shrugged. 'I don't know. He was working at his desk and then cried out, as if in pain. He fell to the floor and began to writhe about, and, over the course of several minutes, he seemed to collapse in upon himself. We tried to help him at first, but the changes were dramatic, startling, and frightening. His thrashing about became dangerous and we all had to pull back. That's when I called for you.'
'We'll take him in,' said the medic. He gestured to his companions. 'Load him on the stretcher.'
What happened next might have been funny had it not been so macabre.
The two other medics collapsed the gurney, placed it by me, and moved to lift me onto it. They each took an arm — or what used to be an arm — and pulled, but the transformed limbs just seemed to stretch impossibly and the bulk of my body lay where it had been.
The lead medic moved in to help. They folded my long tubular limbs atop my body. The three of them got their arms under my torso and what had been my hips, and tried to lift me up.
I guess it was like trying to move a puddle of Jello with toothpicks. They tried several times before realizing it wouldn't work.
Finally, they simply rolled me over the edge and up onto the stretcher, rearranging my limbs as best they could and using my clothing as a sort of sling.
Mercifully, they threw a sheet over me as they rushed the gurney to the elevator, to the ground floor, the waiting ambulance, and, at last, to the local hospital with sirens screaming.
It has been some hours now. They checked me in, put me in a private room, and left me here. I wish I could say I lost consciousness, but I did not.
The strangest thing was that my mind remained my own. No matter how traumatized I had been, the cessation of pain brought a kind of detachment, almost as if I was floating above myself. I did not understand my transformation, but I then became curious.
If I had no skull, what was protecting my brain? What remained of my face was pressed into the bed with some amount of my own flabby body forcing it into the padding, yet I had a sense that I was unharmed. If I had no ribs surrounding it, how did my heart continue to beat? Yet it did, with a strangely reassuring regularity.
I concentrated on moving one of my limbs — what had been my right arm. It twitched.
I focussed my thoughts on reaching up to touch my face. The appendage hesitantly squirmed toward my eye.
I knew an illogical sense of jubilation. For the first time since the onset of the pain, I began to sense that I might have some minute, fragmentary, miniscule, bit of control over something.
Ever so slowly, painstakingly, I guided my right arm. When it finally, tentatively, brushed my face, I discovered two things.
First, that I could still feel things with the limb, changed though it might be. In fact, the sensation of touch seemed to have been enhanced — as if the entire limb had the sensitivity of a fingertip.
Second, what had been my skull was not completely gone. A hard but malleable kind of gristle formed a protective cage around my poor human brain, a cartilaginous cranium, and some kind of similar ridges protected my eyes.
My mouth, however, had been transformed into a lipless, toothless maw that seemed to exude a viscous liquid. My nose was simply gone — not even nostril slits remained.
