Blood (and purple) trickled down his leg. He set the tweezers on the counter and yanked free a rolling wad of toilet paper, which he pressed firmly into the wound. The paper turned bright red. The bleeding quickly subsided.
Perry gently lifted the wad of bloody paper. The stabbing tweezers had ripped through the orangish skin, leaving a thick, torn piece sticking up from the center.
This thing had to go, and it had to go right motherfucking now.
Play through the pain.
He fastened the tweezers around the flap of orange skin, squeezed tightly, and yanked as hard as he could. Ripping, clawing pain shot through his leg, but he smiled with satisfaction as the orange flesh tore free. More blood spilled to the floor.
He held the piece of flesh up to the light. It was thick, thick like the skin on one of those fat Sunkists, the kind that are as large as grapefruit. Thin white tendrils stuck out from the sides like a thousand minute jellyfish arms. The fleshy thing was ripped and torn in a dozen places, but had come off in one solid piece.
He set it aside and dabbed at the wound with fresh toilet paper. Despite the pain, he felt surprisingly good, like he’d finally taken control of the situation. The newly exposed flesh seemed incredibly sensitive, and even the slightest touch hurt. Tiny rivulets of blood slowly ran from the wound’s edges.
But something wasn’t right. He stared at his bloody thigh, and his in-control feeling faded away-this wasn’t over, not yet. A discolored, pale whitish patch the size of a quarter sat in the wound’s center.
It seemed perfectly round, but bits of normal flesh swelled up around it and covered the edges of the white patch. Perry used the pointy tweezers to poke at the white growth-it seemed firm, yet flexible.
As the cold feeling of panic grabbed hold of his brain, he realized that he didn’t actually feel the poking tweezers. He didn’t feel them, because the whitish patch wasn’t him.
When he pinched at it, the normal flesh around the edges easily peeled up and away from the white spot. The white spot was a separate… thing…from his own skin. It was as if a rounded plastic button had spontaneously grown within the muscles of his thigh.
He pushed the loose flesh from the edges of the white growth. The thing’s shiny coating made it look like a piece of bone china.
Did cancer look like this? Maybe, but he was pretty sure that cancerous flesh didn’t make perfect circles and didn’t just spring up in a matter of days.
Cancer or no cancer, the sight of the milky white growth stirred a primal fear in his soul, as if a rusty bear trap had clamped down on his heart, pinching it shut, preventing it from pumping. He tried to master his breathing, tried to calm himself.
He carefully slid the tweezers under the whitish growth. The points scraped against his raw muscle, but he ignored the pain. He lifted the tweezers from the underside-the hard growth tilted within his flesh, but it stayed anchored into his leg. Blood pooled each time he moved it.
He carefully used his fingers to pull his flesh back as far as it would go, probing underneath with the tweezers. Like putting your hands in your pocket and being able to “see” what’s there, Perry felt a stem-a stem that extended farther into his thigh, anchoring the white thing in place.
Doctor time.
Definitely doctor time.
But first, he wanted this thing out of his leg, and he wanted it out now. He had to remove it; he couldn’t stand to leave this fucking thing in his flesh for even one more second.
With the tweezers centered on the unseen stem, Perry pulled up gently. As he lifted the growth, he felt the stem’s length via a strange combination of sensations from his thigh muscles and resistance against the tweezers. The whitish mass pulled free of his flesh with a pop of inrushing air. Thin blood trails arced from the open wound, splashing against his leg and adding to the red and purple streaks on the worn tile floor, but the stem stayed firmly anchored deep in his thigh. Agonizing pain crept up his leg, but he ignored it, kept it distant from his consciousness.
He had to do this. It was time to turn the Magnificent Seven into the Big Six.
Keeping the tweezers firmly gripped on the strange stem, he yanked up as hard as he could, yanked with the strength of a condemned man fighting for his life.
The tough, resilient stem stretched and stretched and stretched, until the tweezers-gripped head was a good two feet above his thigh. It stretched thin like taffy, bits of blood and clear slime masking the milky white color.
The stretching slowed, then stopped.
With a snarl, Perry pulled harder.
The unseen anchor ripped free; the stem shot out of his leg like a rubber band and wetly slapped against his wrist.
He looked at his thigh. A narrow opening, smaller than a pencil and already closing, sank down into his raw flesh like a tiny black hole. A rivulet of blood poured out, pushed up the tube like squeezed toothpaste as the thigh muscles expanded and closed the hole.
A smile broke across Perry’s face. A feeling of primitive success coursed through him, as did a limited blast of hope. He turned his attention to the strange white growth, the rounded head pinched firmly between the tweezers, the stem-or tail, or whatever the hell it was-wrapped wetly about his wrist, held to his skin by bloody slime.
He moved his hand toward the light to get a better look at the growth. As he rotated his wrist, marveling at the strange thing, he felt a brief tickling sensation, almost imperceptible, like the smallest mosquito trying to land.
Perry’s eyes shot wide open with revulsion. He felt his stomach churn and his adrenaline surge…
The white thing’s tail squirmed like a snake trapped in a predator’s grip. With a shout of fear, Perry threw the tweezers into the bathtub where they clanked against the white porcelain and clattered near the drain. The squirming, wet, wiggling, white thing remained wrapped about his wrist, the tail tickling his skin as the heavy, round, plastic-button head hung limp and free, swinging wildly with Perry’s every movement.
Perry screamed, both in disgust and in panic, and violently snapped his wrist as if he were flinging mud from his fingers. The white thing hit the mirror with a little splat. It looked like a moving piece of cooked spaghetti hanging loosely from the glass. Still writhing, its desperate motions smearing wet slime across the mirror, it slowly started to slide down.
That thing was inside me! That thing was alive! It’s STILL alive!
Perry instinctively slapped hard against the mirror, his huge hand rattling the glass with a loud bang. The squirming growth erupted as if he’d slammed a soft-boiled egg. Thin gouts of thickish purple gel spewed across the mirror. Perry yanked his hand away. Bits of white flesh, now limp and saggy, covered his palm, as did globs of the purple goo. Curling his lip in revulsion, he quickly turned to grab the towel that hung from the shower curtain rod- too quickly. His sudden move tangled him in the pants still hanging about his ankles. His balance gone, he fell forward.
He reached his hands out to brace his fall, but there was nothing to grab before his forehead smacked against the toilet seat. A sharp crack reverberated off the narrow bathroom’s walls, but Perry was out before he even heard the sound.
23.
Martin Brewbaker was no more. Wednesday, less than three full days since he’d been shot to death, and all that remained was a pitted black skeleton missing the legs from the knees down. That and delicate gossamer mold that now grew in little patches not only on the skeleton and on the table, but in spots all over the BSL-4 tent. Even Brewbaker’s talon-hand had finally relaxed. It lay on the table, finger bones crumbling into a jumbled pile. Cameras inside the tent provided pictures-both live and still-that let Margaret watch the corpse’s final degenerative state.
