Biohazard

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 the lips had sunk away, leaving a grin of gums and teeth.

“Nash,” she said and it sounded like her throat was filled with wet leaves. “Do you wanna fuck me again?”

Janie cried out and I think I did, too. I held her tight against me as terror filled both of us. I looked upon Mickey, the abomination she had become, and I was literally speechless. It felt like the inside of my mouth had been sprayed with oil. I could not seem to get my tongue to work to form words.

Mickey came forward, pus dribbling from holes in her face. She gripped one breast in her bloody hand and squeezed it. It was the most obscene thing I’ve ever seen. Because when she squeezed it, it bulged then ruptured open, black juice and liquefied tissue running down her belly.

“What’s the matter, Nash? Ain’t I good enough to fuck?” she said, getting so close that the heat and stink coming off her made me retch with dry heaves. “Ain’t I hot enough? Ain’t I? Ain’t I? Ain’t I?”

God only knows what might have happened next.

But the door slid open and two men in orange suits led her out of the room. She went willingly with them, sensing that she was now part of them and not part of us. They had an orange suit for her. She stepped into it. Rubberized boots went over her feet. A helmet went over her head. The respirator was turned on. I could hear the hollowing hissing of her breathing.

Faceless as the others, she walked off with them.

That was the last I saw of Mickey.

There was no doubt what was going on by that point. There could be no doubt. I could hear Price’s voice in the back of my head: You see, Nash, when a hot virus infects its host, what it’s trying to do, essentially, is to convert that host into virus. But he had said complete, successful conversion was impossible. But he’d been wrong because that’s what was happening here…beneath those orange and blue spacesuits there were no people, no healthy organisms of ordinary flesh and blood, but walking, functioning, thinking masses of hot virus, viral imitations of human beings and nothing more.

They had nothing to do with Janie or I.

They were in league with The Medusa and they were waiting for it to come, their savior, their prophet, a new god for a seriously warped new world.

Janie and I had not been assimilated yet. That made us dangerous. That’s why those figures in the spacesuits had backed away from us when we entered the complex: it had been revulsion and fear. Fear of infection. Fear of contamination. For they feared healthy, normal bodies with their active compliments of antibodies as much as we feared Ebola.

Janie and I were nothing but disease masses now, infections to be eradicated. We were the abnormal ones.

After a time, two forms in orange suits returned. One of them carried the black box.

“It’s time,” the one with the box said.

“Don’t do that to us,” I said. “Please. Just kill us. Destroy us. Don’t shoot us with that virus.”

“We’re not going to do anything to you,” the man said. “When you are converted, it will be she who touches, she who welcomes you into the fold.”

He was talking about The Medusa.

“Please,” Janie, said, tears running down her face. “Don’t hurt us. Don’t hurt us.” She put her hands to her belly. “You can’t. I’m pregnant.”