He was unmoved by anything I said. “You are the one that made the selections.”
My face dropped.
“We know about it. We know about your sacrifices to your pagan god. Very well. Make your selection…which of the females goes with you and which stays here?”
I jumped up and a gun was pointed in my face. Janie and I were held at gunpoint.
“Please…don’t do this to us,” I begged him.
“Make your choice,” he said.
“If you’ll only listen-”
“Your choice.”
It was pointless to argue. I suggested taking me, but that wouldn’t do either, I was informed. Only two of us would see the Medusa, the third would stay behind.
“Very well,” the man said. He pointed at Janie. “This one-”
“No! No! Get the fuck away from her!” I shouted. “Not her…not Janie…”
“Then this one?” he said.
I swallowed, nodded.
“Nash!” Mickey cried, “Jesus Christ, what are you doing? Are you out of your fucking mind, you sonofabitch? I belong with you! You know I do-”
Two more guards came in, they took hold of Mickey and held her down. She fought. She screamed. She clawed. But in the end, the man took a syringe with a long needle from the black box and jabbed it into her throat, depressing the plunger. Shocked and shaking, Mickey was put back in her seat. Her face was wet with tears.
“This is fucking crazy!” I shouted. “We’ve done nothing! We’re no threat to you! We’re not fucking infected! Take us somewhere! Anywhere! Put us in quarantine together! Just get us out of this fucking lab!”
The man was unmoved by anything I said. It meant nothing to him. He stood there like some kind of fucked- up automaton from a B-movie, just staring at me through his visor. Now and then, through the darkened bubble, I could catch a glimpse of a face in there. But I couldn’t see it. I couldn’t see his eyes and they were what I most wanted to make contact with.
“The effects should begin shortly,” he said.
Mickey was curled up in her chair, shaking, her eyes glazed with horror. She looked like she was in shock.
“But she’s not infected!” Janie said.
The man and his guards stepped to the door. It slid open behind them. “On the contrary,” he said. “Your friend has just been injected with a mutated, lethally hot strain of the Ebola-X virus. As we speak, her system is being flooded with millions of viral particles.”
The door slid closed.
This was my hell, my pay-off. All that selecting and sacrificing had led here, down a very dark path to this awful moment of betrayal. I felt dead inside, used-up, hopeless. It took some time before I could even look at Mickey, at the broken deceived thing she now was. Her gaze was enough to make me want to put a gun in my mouth.
“You’ll pay for this, Nash,” she promised me. “In the end, you’ll suffer like I did. You’ll die horribly and you’ll die alone.”
13
Within thirty minutes it began.
Janie and I wanted nothing better than to comfort Mickey, ease her mind somehow, make her realize that she was our friend and we stood by her regardless of what had happened…but we couldn’t. She was infected with Ebola-X and we didn’t dare come into contact with her. Not that it would have mattered. Mickey hated both of us. She wanted us, and particularly me, to know agony.
Within minutes, the real Mickey was…gone.
That shocked look in her eyes, she just sat there shaking. She did not respond to anything we said. It was like she had not just been shot up with Ebola, but with some sort of sedative.
We kept calling her name, trying to snap her out of it, but she did not seem to realize we were there.
And then, like I said, within thirty minutes it began.
She went limp in her chair, head lolling to one side, limbs dangling. She was still shaking and as we watched she began to convulse violently, these little broken agonized sounds coming from her throat. Her eyes slid shut. Sweat ran down her face and you could smell the hot stink of it as her fever spiked. Her entire system was under attack. It was devastating.
She sat there, slumped in that chair for a time, not moving or making any sound, then the convulsions began anew. Blood began to run from both nostrils. Her lips peeled back from teeth that were red-stained. A mist of blood came from her mouth. She jerked upright, hands gripping the arms of her chair. Then her eyes snapped open and they were a brilliant, translucent red.
Janie cried out.
It wasn’t so much like Mickey was infected by Ebola-X, but literally possessed by it.
She tore at herself, tearing at her skin with her nails. She ripped her shirt open and her breasts and belly were contused with rising sores. She yanked out locks of hair from her head. She screamed with a deranged shrieking sound.
It took her with amazing speed.
Her face-so pretty, so darkly sensual-began to contort like the muscles beneath it were no longer working in conjunction but fighting against one another. The left side began to sag, the right side twisted up in some grim corpse-like rictus. In classic Ebola this was due to brain damage, soft tissue destruction and the dissolution of connective tissues…but with this mutated form of X, I began to suspect it was something even worse.
Her flesh popped with red sores, it went from that lovely olive hue to one that was discolored, mottled, set with livid contusions that seemed to spread out as we watched. Blisters bulged on her face, her legs, from one breast. They popped open, spewing drainage. And as each one popped, dozens more took their place until her face was unrecognizable, just a twisted mask of jellied flesh. Then she began to bleed. It came out of her eyes and mouth, trickled from her ears and bubbled from her pores. She fell to her knees, vomiting out profuse amounts of tarry black blood and poisoned bile.
She let out one last agonized scream.
She gyrated on the floor, head thrashing wildly from side to side and tossing loops of blood over the floor, up the walls, onto the clear plexiglass door where they ran like rain drops. She squirmed face down on the floor, moving with such wild contortions that she seemed practically boneless. Then she rose up on her knees straight as a post and threw herself at the door, striking it with her face and hands, making splatting sounds, and sliding down the glass leaving a greasy smear of blood and macerated tissue.
She trembled and went still, seemed to deflate as if the air was let out of her.
Long before any of that happened, Janie and I were clutching each other, pressed into the corner.
“Why don’t they take her away, Nash?” Janie wanted to know. “Why don’t they just take her away?”
I didn’t know. The room was a slaughterhouse of blood and leaking fluids. The stench of drainage, blood, and infection was hot and nauseating.
Easily a half an hour later, Mickey began to move.
Her corpse began to tremble.
She had to be dead. She had crashed and bled out, the virus burning through her. Then she sat up, her back to us, staring out the plexiglass door through the mess she had made on it.
“Mickey?” I said.
She stood up painfully and turned to look upon us. Her black hair was greasy with blood, filthy plaits of it hanging over her face which was bulging, distorted, like hot wax that had cooled too quickly, settling into all the wrong places. One eye was sealed shut in a web of tissue, the other was huge, bulging from its raw socket like a bleeding, raw egg yolk. Her lips were sealed shut with strings of flesh on the left side of her mouth, but on the right
