Contents

Foreword

PART ONE

PART TWO

PART THREE

PART FOUR

PART FIVE

Acknowledgements

Corporate Body

Published by Cemetery Gates Media

Binghamton, New York

Copyright © 2023

by R. A. Busby

All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under the copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in, or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise) without prior written permission.

My Dark Library #6

For more information about this book and other Cemetery Gates Media publications, visit us at:

cemeterygatesmedia.com
twitter.com/cemeterygatesm
instagram.com/cemeterygatesm

Cover Art: Truborn Design

Cover Design: Carrion House

Title page illustration by Ryan Mills

To Louis, arrow and starfish.

Foreword

The My Dark Library series of novellas that I curated for Cemetery Gates was a quest to discover new voices in horror representing a variety of sub-genres of horror. Our journey took us through an apocalypse with L. P. Hernandez, psychological horror with Chandler Morrison, a ghost story with Kelsea Yu, a crime noir murder mystery with Tim McGregor, a gothic tale of suspense with P. L. Watts, and now finally, body horror with R. A. Busby.

Are you ready for this one?

I’m not quite sure you are. When I saw Busby’s submission, I knew exactly what I was getting into. You see, I had read a few of Busby’s stories before and they got me. They got me, good!

Body horror is R. A. Busby’s specialty.

To prepare for your Corporate Body reading experience, I’m advising you not to skim details that make you squeamish. I dare you to allow your mind to meander over those visuals conjured up in Cronenberg-esque color; see the ooze, sense the discomfort, feel the pain.

The title page artwork masterfully executed by Ryan Mills is every indication of where you’re headed right now. Strap yourself in. Challenge yourself to hang in there no matter how much you want Busby to lift her foot off the gas. You’re all in now. I’ve already gone on this ride and it was so wild and so shocking, I had to make sure others would get their ticket punched.

Thank you, horror readers, for your investment in the My Dark Library series. We have enjoyed every bit of this project and we’re seriously entertaining the idea of Season Two with 6 more novellas. We have heard your requests for more and we would never leave you wanting. But for now, please enjoy this last offering as the perfect note to leave you on…just make sure you haven’t just eaten or you just might lose your lunch.

Sadie Hartmann

February 2023

PART ONE

Apothecary, n. The physician’s accomplice,

undertaker’s benefactor,

and grave-worm’s provider.

—Ambrose Bierce

***

NOTE: DUE TO THE CONFIDENTIAL NATURE OF INFORMATION CONTAINED WITHIN THIS DOCUMENT, NAMES, LOCATIONS, AND IDENTIFYING SPECIFICS NOT OTHERWISE REDACTED HEREIN HAVE BEEN CHANGED IN COMPLIANCE WITH LSKDJFLKAD AND LASKDJFALSDKFJ AND THE FEDERAL HEALTH INSURANCE PORTABILITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY ACT OF 1996 (HIPAA).

***

Try not to scratch.

No, really, try not to scratch. Before we’re done here, you and I, even before you get to the end of this page, you’ll probably have scratched yourself at least once. Possibly a few times. Perhaps you’re sensing a small pruritic tickle right now, an annoying place where a seam rubs your shoulder or where the label in your underwear chafes.

Try not to squirm. Try to ignore your itch. You can’t. In fact, the more you think of the itch, the worse it gets, and soon you find yourself acutely alive to the movement of hairs, the brush of lashes, or each delicate, tickling sweep of your clothing against your skin. It’s something your brain normally filters out, but you’re aware of it now, aren’t you? Go ahead. Scratch.

I bet you did. Writing this, I had to stop and do the same, so I guess we’re twinsies.

These days I use a hairbrush, an old-school wooden model with stiff black bristles, and when I rasp it over my skin, I groan with relief, relishing the pleasurepain moment when that sting brings blissful release from the itching. If you’ve ever scratched yourself to bleeding, you understand what I mean. It’s so damn sweet.

I hold the brush in my hand now, thinking of my father. It used to belong to him before he went bald and gave it to me, and amazingly, the lab drones here in the compound let me keep it. I don’t know why. When they gave me one last chance to grab my stuff—supervised of course by Carl, the DrugCorp security beefcake who planted himself like a meat clot in my doorway—I grabbed my dad’s old brush and anything else I might need. Clothing. Books. Headphones. Toiletries. This journal.

I’ll never see my place again. I’ll never see my dad again. I’m almost sure of that. The odds are…well, let’s say they’re definitely bad.

So. Did you do it? Did you scratch? You know, simply from reading about it? If you did, I’m sorry to break this to you, but don’t congratulate yourself on being an empath. The compulsion to scratch or yawn when someone else does it springs from something fundamentally deeper, the activation of neurochemicals buried in some primal wrinkle of our reptilian brain. No, older than that. Our worm brain.

You see, it wasn’t until the itching began that I realized something might be wrong.

***

Like most professional lab rats, I got involved with DrugCorp strictly for the money. Oh, sure, I spouted some line of bullshit in my intake interview for the [RED ewe rsdf sdf s ACTED] research study about helping my fellow humans, the importance of testing drugs before releasing them on an unsuspecting public, providing crucial information to pharmacologists and physicians, preventing future Thalidomide babies, and so on. Still, in the back of my mind—hell, in the front of my mind—I was calculating the number of dollar-store Happy Fun Ramens I could buy with the money in my wallet that minute. The answer was “Not too damn many.”

I can’t eat that shit any more. That ramen. The noodles remind me of—well. Not now. You’ll find out.

As you’ve probably figured, the pandemic wiped me out. Not only me, of course. Me and sixty-seven million other Gen Zers who weren’t doing so hot even before Covid, and especially not after the Delta, Omicron, and Tau variants hit us one right after another. Christ. Our whole generation got our asses kicked by a Frat Row of coronaviruses.

After leaving high school, I entered the bio program at [REDACT  fjkfj ED] University all brimming with freshman confidence that any STEM career I signed up for would be a moneymaker. Hadn’t that been the advice our guidance counselors always gave us? Three years later, I finally realized my undergrad education by itself was basically worthless.

Too late, I discovered that even an entry-level job—such as being a DrugCorp lab drone—required a postgrad degree. One or two of them. This was not a point my academic adviser had made super-clear to me when I was an eighteen-year-old dude for whom chest hair was still a brand-new thing. Now I understood why only forty percent of the students at this university actually graduated—and why I wouldn’t be among them.

It cost me thirty thousand dollars to figure that one out. Not counting credit card debt for textbooks and supplies.

So hey. I’m curious. If you’re a DrugCorp whitecoat reading this—like Jayesh, maybe, or even Perky Meal Card—are you folks up to your asses in debt too? I mean, you had to get those double degrees I was talking about, and that costs money. Is that the reason you decided to work for them?

I wonder if you sat for your interviews with this corporation and tried to answer the HR rep’s questions thoughtfully when all your mind could focus on was the salary schedule, the retirement benefits, the health care coverage. Definitely the health care coverage. If so…I don’t blame you guys. Not a bit. I’m guessing you didn’t read the fine print any better than I did. You simply signed, hoping there wouldn’t be a hidden hook to bite on.

But there was. We all understand this now.

Anyway, in the weeks after I dropped out of my program, I spent hours poring over Internet articles with clickbait titles like “Top Ten Most Lucrative Majors” and “Moneymaking College Degrees.” You know. The ones that contain about 5% genuine information and 95% SEO keywords. With every passing day, I felt my soul die a bit more.

The problem was this: Even if I wanted to go to community college to learn the wonders of HVAC repair or become an EMT, that option would cost me money I didn’t have, and it’s not like they guaranteed you a job. In the meantime, I had developed this habit I’d gotten pretty used to called “eating.”

By that point in my ruined academic career, I’d already tracked down the plasma centers near the university that would pay you for your body fluids. After bleeding into a bag for two hours, I’d usually take the fifty bucks they gave me and spend it at the restaurants down the block. After awhile, this exchange seemed increasingly cannibalistic, as if I were eating myself.

Worse, as a dropout, I wouldn’t be allowed to live in the university’s dorms. When the pandemic hit, most of my friends moved back home if they were local. The ones who weren’t stuffed themselves into tiny apartments with about a dozen roommates and prayed no one caught Covid. Spoiler alert: Almost half of them did.

When my own money withered away, there wasn’t even a closet to beg for. I guess I’m glad, given how events turned out. By the 2022 quarantine—and the harsher one in ’23—my friends all came to despise each other with the white-hot fury of a thousand suns. Captivity will do that. Trust me, I know.

All in all, I suppose I was lucky. My dad still lived at home, puttering around in the workshop he’d built in our garage and wishing he hadn’t retired. The year before I took off for college, Mom died of breast cancer, and Dad never really got over it, not in the deep way where it counted. Her stuff was still hung up neatly in the closet, just like she was going to walk in anytime and slip on her old green sweater.

I couldn’t go back there. Not to live, anyway. Swallowing my pride would be a familiar meal, to be sure, but on Dad’s salary, I’d only be a burden to a good man on a fixed income. I’d done enough to disappoint him already.

Ultimately, working the friend-of-a-friend network got me a place, if you call a backyard RoughShedd a “place,” but at least the shed had four walls, a generator, spotty WiFi, and an army supply cot with a blanket. And no, in case you were wondering, it didn’t have plumbing. I showered at the Y and did my business in an orange construction bucket rim-lined with pool noodles and filled with kitty litter.

Desperate times call for desperate measures.

***

Like many of my generation, I soon figured out a simple truth: Finding a job becomes a job. The year after I quit college, I must have completed about 2908792387598345 online applications. Walmart. Amazon. Target. In-n-Out. McDonald’s. No luck. At that point in the pandemic, places were laying off workers, not hiring them, and this meant waiting weeks to hear if I’d landed an interview.

That was the reason I worked my way over to JobsList looking for gig work: I needed something to do while lingering in employment limbo, the purgatorial days between turning in an online application and accepting the fact that I’d been ghosted again.

JobsList featured the usual possibilities for gigs, half of which I couldn’t do without a car. That left out Lyft, Uber, or DoorDash. As for the rest, some were…unusual.

Wanted: On-Call Help for Emiliano. All Personal Duties to Help Emiliano. Must Work Flexible Hours. Must Like Tattoos.

Urine Drug Screen Collector. Must Be Licensed to Drive RV. No arrest record.

Dog Poop Removal Specialist Wanted Now! Will Train.

Keep Old Woman Company All Day. No fingerprint requirement. Must like Tucker Carlson.

Join Hoarder House Cleaning Crew. Must Bring Own PPE. Masks a Plus.

And that, dear readers, is how I found DrugCorp. In among the ads for construction, delivery, part-time window cleaning, urine collection, and naturally, helping Emiliano, I stumbled on this:

Phase I through IV Research Study, Interested Participants Needed, Can Earn Up to $3000.

I’d been at the plasma center scrolling through my phone when I came upon the JobsList ad, and by the time the techs were shooting my freezing red cells back into me, I understood that for once, luck had run my way: I apparently lived in the best city in America for being a professional lab rat.

There were other places with labs, mostly university towns, but not like this one. Austin had PPD, and Dallas had Labcorp, and of course there were Pfizer in New Haven and Celerion in Tempe and Lincoln, but this shitty town had DrugCorp. It was like discovering Lebron James played for your local basketball team. Research for interested participants? For that money, you bet I was interested.

***

[A few hours later]

Had to take a break to scratch. I ran the bristles down both my arms and across the top of my head and even over the tops of my feet, but there’s a place inside my ear I can’t reach even when I try to stuff the bristles into my head, and it’s driving me insane. I have dreams of scratching myself raw and then jumping into a tub of cool rubbing alcohol. Even the dream of that sweet, sweet sting makes me shiver. I swear, I got a little hard. God. The DrugCorp goons won’t let me do it. I understand why, but still. Tomorrow I’ll hoard some salt packets from my dinner tray and try scrubbing myself with them.

I’ll avoid the pores. I swear, I really will.

The front of my father’s hairbrush is wearing down. It’s becoming bald, just like him.

Does he miss me?

***

Two weeks later, I was filling out DrugCorp patient intake paperwork. Very exciting. First Name: Nicholas (Nick) Last Name: [Redacted]. Address: [Redac sdf  sdf  adf  adf ted]. Health insurance provider: Bwahahaha. None.

Browsing around the Interwebs on Reddit and other sites, I’d found a decent amount of information about being a research test candidate. Not surprisingly, I guess, there were entire online communities devoted to the subject complete with YouTube channels and videos.

Some of the lab rat pro tips didn’t apply to me, such as the no-shit advice to not be on drugs before you signed up for a drug study. As for the tip to let seventy-two hours elapse between getting drunk and showing up to your appointment, I couldn’t remember the last time I splurged on so much as a six-pack. I was a clean machine, especially by college student standards. As far as water, I already drank lots, and since I never worked out and couldn’t afford actual protein, high creatine levels in my bloodstream weren’t a problem.

And naturally, I wasn’t pregnant.

Still, the advice to show up early for the appointment time proved rock-solid. Even though I walked into the DrugCorp screening offices forty-five minutes before the first available slot, the lobby was already crowded with other interested participants. There we sat, filling out the intake forms on our industrial clipboards, a roomful of dudes aged 21-65, all with a BMI between 18.5 and 25. I was older than the bottom age cutoff, but it was the BMI requirement that worried me. Nervous, I drank more water, hoping to add another eight ounces to myself before the weigh-in.

At the thirty-minute mark, my legs jitterbugging the pee dance, I turned to the guy next to me, a thickset man with a dark mane silvering at the sides. “Hey,” I said. “You know where the bathroom is?”

The man lifted his gaze from the magazine balanced on his knee. “Don’t tell me,” he said. “You’re a first-timer. I can always spot ‘em.” Behind his mask, twin tufts of his moustache bristled from the seams on either side like they were trying to peek out. His weathered skin was pocked with pitted scars from old acne, but his deep brown eyes were unusually kind.

I nodded.

“First things first, son,” the man explained, his voice low and gravelly. “Don’t take a piss unless the lab drones are collecting a sample. If your well’s running dry when they give you their little plastic shot glasses, you’ll lose your place to someone else. Second, don’t talk to anybody here until you’ve officially been selected for the study.” He reached into his pocket for a pair of half-rimmed reading glasses and peered at the magazine again.

I glanced around the room at the other men. Most of them looked like me. Bored. Restless. 21-65 with a BMI between 18.5 and 25. “Why not?”

Moustache Man leaned in closer. Through the fabric of his mask, I caught the slight whiff of chewing gum or mouthwash, something minty and clean. “One in four,” he muttered, cocking his chin at the others.

“Sorry?”

“One in four. It’s DrugCorp’s ratio. You see, for every open research slot, DrugCorp usually calls in four candidates during the screening. You understand. To ensure they have plenty of choices in case someone drops out. Bottom line, son, you’re in a battle royale with all these other assholes here, including me. Only reason I’m talking to you is I’m pretty certain all the pumpkin pie I ate over the holidays put me over the top BMI number, so my chances of getting into this study are slim. Unlike me.” He patted his stomach with a rueful chuckle. “If I thought I had a real shot, though, I’d simply tell you the bathroom’s right down the hall to your left.” With that, he turned back to the magazine. I sat back and resisted the urge to pee.

And this was how I met Charlie. Charlie Parker, like the brilliant jazz musician. Later on, after everything happened, I’d think to myself that he was an early Bird who got the worm, but the joke doesn’t seem too funny to me now.

Bet it won’t be funny to you either.

***

Charlie had called it, all right: He didn’t get in. “It’s my damned BMI, Nick,” he grumbled later. “All that crap I ate over quarantine didn’t help.” He gripped his paunch, and even with his mask on, I imagined I saw a rueful grin. The next time I ran into him, he’d whittled himself down about ten pounds from walking and cutting out the afternoon beers.

Anyway, that first drug study turned out to be a pretty easy gig—a short-term examination of a carbohydrate-heavy diet’s effect on the absorption of [RED sdf sdf ACTED], a medication to treat [REDACTED]. For a few overnight stays, four OPVs –that’s “outpatient visits” to you newbie lab rats out there—and a follow-up video call or two, DrugCorp paid me three thousand dollars in spendable American cashola.

Yeah, I took twenty mystery pills, endured a few minor headaches, and got stuck for blood draws 938475983475 times, but honestly, after a year donating plasma, where the needles were roughly the size of boba straws, the injections at DrugCorp were a piece of cake. Was I worried about side effects from the mystery pills? A little. Not as much as I was worried about the side effects of hunger, though.

Over the few months, I did a lot more studies. DrugCorp wouldn’t allow you to do back-to-backs without a break (“Stay Clean In Between!” the clinic posters advertised), so after a study wrapped up, I’d pick up gigs from JobsList. For about the first time in forever, I had actual money in my bank account at the end of the month.

I ran into Charlie a bunch, and soon enough, we fell into a routine where we’d look out for each other. Not being a phone app guy, Charlie had missed out on some online listings for available study opportunities, so I’d forward those along to him. The next week, Charlie might tell me how he’d heard through the grapevine about a study focusing on dudes in my age range. Perhaps we’d gossip about the clinics with the shittiest food or talk about weird side effects from the drugs. In short, Charlie and I became kind’ve a team. And every few weeks, I’d find Charlie in the DrugCorp lobby in his usual spot between the magazine rack and the fake potted palms. He always gave me damned good advice.

Well. Almost always.

“First off, Nick, you gotta bring a hoodie,” he told me, “because the patient rooms are always freezing. Pack some of those noise-canceling earplugs for the overnight inpatient visits, for sure as God made little green apples, there’s some asshole who’ll spend all night snoring. And Nick—if you’re planning on listening to your gizmo,” he added, nodding at my phone, “then use those air buds or ear pods or whatever the hell you call them. Keep your eye on ‘em so they don’t get ripped off when you’re taking a crap. Folks will do anything for money.” Over his half-glasses, Charlie’s dark eyes looked solemn, but even through his mask, I could tell he was smiling. Some people are like that.

Charlie ultimately told me about the [reda askh l  odf asdf  asdfcted] study, and even now, my guess is that one of you lab coats or your associates tipped him off about it in advance. Based on what transpired later, something tells me this was officially a big fucking no-no. Passing that info under the table might not be a HIPAA violation, but it’s some variety of protocol breach, I’m sure.

Given what finally happened…well. It’s bad. Very bad. Even CIA-coverup bad, the kind that ends up with some person disappearing, probably me. And while we’re at it, IS ANYONE IN CHARGE READING THIS? ANYONE? MR. PRESIDENT? SURGEON GENERAL MURTHY? BECAUSE REALLY, YOU MIGHT WANNA DO THAT.

***

[NOTE: ALL ALLEGATIONS CONTAINED IN THIS DOCUMENT PERTAINING TO THE ACTIONS OF THE CORPORATION PSEUDONYMOUSLY REFERRED TO HEREIN AS “DRUGCORP” HAVE BEEN NOTED AND ROUTED TO APPROPRIATE CHANNELS AS PER PROTOCOL. FURTHER DOCUMENTATION MAY BE FOUND BY CONTACTING PIDUFOAIDUFOIAD ADFAF.]

***

Anyway.

When Charlie told me about this study—this big one—he shot a quick look at the other potential test subjects hanging out in the lobby. “Keep this on the QT,” he growled, the fabric of his mask blurring his words a little.

“I’ve never heard of this.” I ducked my head into my hood like some Assassin’s Creed cosplayer and kept my hands positioned near my mouth. “Where’d you hear about it?”

Charlie let out a reproving tsk. “I got my sources, son,” he said. “I keep my ear to the ground, is all.”

I thumbed through my phone. There was nothing on the GuineaPigs message board, the StudyBuddy app, the various subreddits—not one whisper about this study, not even a peep. “You must have some damned good ears, then.”

Charlie shrugged. “Study’s in the developmental stage, I guess. Anyway. Here’s what you do,” he said, and told me.

As I’d suspected, the study was pretty intense. There was a general call for healthy males, 18-65, BMI 20-29.9. Something-something stem cells, something-something derived treatment for Alzheimer’s, something-something anti-aging treatment. It involved a minor surgical procedure. But the final requirement, written on a yellow Post-it in Charlie’s neat backward-slanting handwriting, really caught my attention.

“Holy crap, Charlie. A forty-week study? First two and last five inpatient? You’ve got to be kidding me. Even forty days would be a shitload, but forty weeks? What the hell?”

He tapped the Post-it with his pen. “You forgot to look at the punchline, son.”

At the bottom, Charlie had included a string of numbers written the old-fashioned way with the 7s crossed and the 1s capped off with a little serif. I frowned. “What’s this? The study reference number?”

He chuckled. “Not exactly.”

“Then what?”

“It’s what they’ll pay you.”

***

I remember I stared at the note in my hand for a long time. People in the DrugCorp lobby came and went; a bored man plucked a copy of Entertainment Weekly from the rack and thumbed through it. The blaring television in the corner played some talk show, and between ads for drugs like Meflexyn or Siurenta or Afocoximab—names that seemed to me like words spelled backwards—a group of women on the program argued about whether pregnancy should be considered a disability or a preexisting condition. After a moment, I met Charlie’s gaze. He looked back at me calmly, his fingers laced between his knees.

“You want to go step out for a bit?” he said, cocking a thumb at the door. “We’ve got at least a half-hour till they call us.”

Outside, the air felt crisp as a green apple, the type of bright, cold winter day that always reminded me of places like Colorado. I realized then that if did this study, I could actually afford to move to Colorado. I could afford to move—well, anywhere.

My voice cracked when I tried to use it. “Why are you doing this?” I finally asked. Again, I stared down at the numbers, still not believing what he’d written. “I mean, if we both try to sign up for this—well, we’d be competing with each other. Battle royale against all the other assholes, right? Including you.”

“Yeah, possibly,” Charlie said, rubbing his chin. “I considered that, I’ll be honest. But ultimately, I suspect DrugCorp’s looking for a pretty wide spectrum of test subjects here. My hunch is for this gig, they’ll want every flavor. Old farts like me. Babes in arms like you.” He gave a small chuckle. “Besides, Nick, despite the figure on that note, I don’t assume they’ll have too many rats to choose from. After all, even if they’re working remotely, who the hell can manage to take off weeks from their job? Two kinds of folks: Old farts like me. Babes in arms like you.”

I nodded. “I appreciate your thinking of me.”

“Anytime,” said Charlie. He pulled down his mask and put a yellowed pipe in his mouth, but I noticed he didn’t light it. Clinics test for nicotine—well, not nicotine, exactly, but cotinine, the chemical it breaks down to in your bloodstream. It takes a while for it to flush itself out. He held the pipe reflectively and then added, “Besides, who the hell else am I going to tell?”

Charlie had a family, or at least he’d had one once. He didn’t talk about his people, not really, but it showed up in little mentions here and there. I thought Charlie might have a sister who lived somewhere like Portland or Sacramento, but I wasn’t sure. Anytime we came close to talking about family, I noticed he deftly steered the conversation down other paths, and I didn’t press him. As for me, I’d told him minor stuff about my dad, but in trying to say more, I’d found my mouth ran out of words.

My dad. God, do I miss him.

I suppose all fathers dream of founding dynasties. Legacies. Immortality through one’s children. My father had wanted me to be the President, run the Boston Marathon, give him a grandchild or twelve, or at the very least to be happy and safe and reasonably successful. All my life, my father had this buoyant confidence that despite everything, I’d worm my way through life’s minefields and come out safe on the other side.

My dad had been wrong. I hadn’t succeeded. I’d done none of those things. The quiet, reflective way my father ran his hand over the grey stubble on his chin and looked at the floor when I told him I dropped out made me want to scream. To tear something to pieces. To rage and rail. To do anything but cry before this good man who still loved me, but who’d found me less a son than he had hoped for. Or deserved.

“So,” asked Charlie after a moment, the bright yellow Post-it suspended between his fingers like a promise. “You in?”

I stuck out my hand. “Okay,” I said. “It’s a deal.”

***

[Later]

Stopping to itch again. As of the last week or so, I’ve needed to scratch more carefully with the brush. At first I scraped it all over myself like I was a dog at the groomer’s, but in the last few days, my skin has erupted with these—well, I suppose they’re some sort of cyst. Atomic pimples, maybe. They sit right below the surface, small flesh volcanoes with hard centers, little nodules running hotter than the dermis that surrounds it. Imagine the kid you knew in high school who had the worst acne you ever saw, each cheek a Vesuvius, the guy who didn’t dare to run his fingers over his face because something there might finally burst with the pressure, and his cheeks would flow with yellow tears of pus.

(For the record, that high school kid was me.)

The largest and most painful cyst squats now like a dark purple cone between my navel and my dick, a hot ball the size of a baby’s ass. My abdomen is drum-tight from being stretched, and the top of it looks almost shiny. My mind kept returning to a picture I’d seen on a Reddit subforum once, an image of a man whose leg had swelled from gas gangrene. Necrotic black blisters had formed all down his thigh until it looked as if it crawled with leeches. They had to cut the leg clean off.

What will be cut from me?

The purple swelling on my stomach itches. Right now, I’m stopping to dig my fingers into the skin nearby just for some proximal relief.

I can’t bear to run the bristles directly over the cysts anymore. The last time I tried, it was like splashing battery acid on my flesh. I was sitting on the toilet when I did it, and in the chaotic singing pain thereafter, the world seemed to fold in upon itself, and when I came to, I realized I’d simply blacked out from sheer shock. I wasn't aware that was a thing.

But it’s not the pain stopping me, although it would be a highly effective behavioral deterrent all by itself, as everyone who’s ever studied classical conditioning knows quite well.

No. It’s not the pain.

It’s my skin. Or rather, what’s inside my skin. It—wouldn’t like it.

Not at all.

***

“…And as the technicians have explained, your initial inpatient visit at our clinic here will last approximately two weeks.” The doctor granted us a cursory nod. “After then, you’re free to go home for a while, conduct your everyday routines, live your lives. Well, with a few minor modifications pertaining to caloric intake, heart rate during exercise, things like that. No drugs, no nicotine, no caffeine.”

“Damn,” said Charlie. “Not even coffee?”

The doctor smiled then, revealing a row of small square teeth. “You do understand, it’s crucial to follow study protocol.”

I nodded obediently, looking around the inpatient room. Charlie sat across from me, positioned on the edge of the patient bed. The DrugCorp staff had lowered the beds to normal height and added patterned blue quilts and a few plants here and there so the place wouldn’t seem quite so clinical, but the effect was spoiled by two vital signs monitors, twin silent sentries on slender chrome stands. After a moment, Charlie nodded too.

“Wonderful,” the doctor said. His hands were puffy and white, the fingers full and fleshy at the knuckle and tapering to pointed, narrow fingertips at the ends. I half-expected them to twine and twist around each other as he spoke. His head had gone entirely bald, and his eyes, sunken deeply into his cheeks, appeared only as two black spots on either side of his oddly flattened nose. “Your attendant…” he murmured, consulting his clipboard, “Yes. Your attendant Jayesh will be here in a few moments to explain the procedures in more detail.” He smiled again, nodding to us politely as he left. “If you need me, my name is Dr. Helminth.”

***

[NOTE: “DR. HELMINTH” IS A DESIGNATION CHOSEN BY THE AUTHOR IN RE: THE ATTENDING PRIMARY, DR. [RE ladfj   ladf lsDACTED]. FURTHER INFORMATION PERTAINING TO DR. [RE nbnbnbnbnnDACTED] MAY BE FOUND IN DOCUMENT #[LSAKDFJLADK]

***

Although Charlie and I had been in a few studies together, we’d never shared a room. It was a little awkward, to be honest. He rested against the headboard, positioning the pillow at the small of his back, and I saw how thin and hairless his legs looked sticking out of his old-man boxer shorts. Not knowing what to say, I gathered my shaving kit and went to the bathroom to unpack.

Here, any efforts to make the joint less blankly institutional had been abandoned. A Pyurhand soap dispenser hung next to a brushed-chrome paper towel holder and a black call button labeled “PRESS IN THE EVENT OF MEDICAL EMERGENCIES.” Two sets of industrial white towels and washcloths filled a rack beside the shower, and next to the toilet was a sturdy handrail. The entire place smelled faintly of bleach and fake pine.

Well, industrial or not, at least this bathroom was better than my homemade paint bucket toilet. It even had a tub.

I’d told my landlord—technically, the guy who owned the shed I lived in—that over the next few months I might be gone for a while, but I wanted him to hold onto the rental for me. To his credit, the landlord was cool about it, especially since I offered to pay in advance. Yeah, laying out the money took a bite out of my hard-earned JobsList savings, but from what I estimated, I would be able to afford a lot better after this. Still, I needed to be certain I had a place to stay when the study was done. You know, a bird in the hand.

Talking to my father had been harder. After the lab drones had outlined the major details and set the inpatient schedule dates for the stay-overs, I splurged for a cross-town Uber and paid Dad a visit, bringing along a pizza so it wouldn’t look like I was showing up simply to freeload.

Awkwardly I knocked on the door, not wanting to use the key I knew he’d hidden beneath my mom’s geraniums. Christ. What’s the etiquette for being an adult kid coming home, anyway? Does anyone know?

When he came to the door, Dad seemed surprised to see me, but glad. From looking at the TV table, it was apparent he’d settled down with his customary Scotch for an hour of second-guessing Jeopardy and working the crossword from the evening paper before going to bed.

The paper. God. Does anyone get the paper anymore besides my dad? Thinking of it now fills me with infinite grief. The way he’d folded it so that the edges met. The little golf pencil he’d laid beside the puzzle. The napkin for his drink positioned carefully next to the green needlepoint glasses case my mom had made him one Christmas.

I’d learned about the world from my dad. He used to sit on that same couch by the bookcase and read me stories about everything in the universe, from stars to starfish.

I miss him.

Over pizza, I explained to my dad how I would be out of touch for a few months coming up. I told him, somewhat untruthfully, that I had secured something like an internship position through a major company who was doing investigative studies and laboratory work in a burgeoning branch of stem cell research. Yes, they would accept me for the job even though I had technically discontinued my undergraduate education. Yes, it presented an incredible professional opportunity, a real chance to network in the science field, possibly get my career back on track after a brief academic blip. Where was this research being conducted? Well, it would be off-site, a relatively remote area with spotty cell coverage, so I hadn’t wanted him to worry if he tried to contact me and I wasn’t available for a while.

My father frowned, running his hand over his chin. “So it’s like Jurassic Park? At the beginning when they’re out in the middle of nowhere?”

I nodded. “Yeah, basically. It’s for the same reasons—issues of biocontainment, not wanting to propagate stuff that might, you know, mess up the ecosystem.”

Over the years, my father’s eyes had faded a bit, the blues in them growing somehow less defined around the edges, almost blurry, but their expression had always been sharp. “What exactly are you studying out there, Nick?”

I squirmed uneasily. To be frank, I didn’t entirely know. During the orientation session, the DrugCorp techs had gently discouraged anyone from taking notes (“We’d like to preserve our project’s confidentiality for now, as we’re sure you understand…”), and their information had walked a deliberately careful tightrope between “open legal disclosure for informed consent by patient” and “utter fucking obfuscation.”

Even with my not-quite-a-degree-in-bio, I wasn’t certain I understood all the moving parts myself, and some of those parts…well, let’s say DrugCorp certainly intended to get its money’s worth.

Sitting on the old plaid couch with my dad, I tried to appear as if I knew what I was talking about. I babbled something about stem cells. About age-related telomere lengths, focusing on the relationship between telomeres and the cognitive impairment of memory. About the importance of those cells for cellular regrowth. I stressed that these therapies needed living human tissue to provide full regeneration and minimize rejections of organ transplants. On a roll now, I ventured into a discussion of totipotent blastomeres. I may even have used the word “biomarker.”

Throughout this disquisition, the lines between my father’s eyebrows deepened until they looked like twin trenches in his face. “So this research, Nick. Whatever it is. Let me see if I get it. You’re going to figure out if you can grow special stem cells and transplant them into folks? And this will do what, exactly? Prevent those tello-whatevers from wearing out?”

I cleared my throat. “Well…sort of. You see, when our DNA replicates, the ends of the chromosomes—that is, the telomeres—lose a little bit of information each time. When our cells divide and divide, eventually the tips of the chromosome…” I waved my hand, trying to recall the right words. “They get…”

“They get frayed. Like the ends of a shoelace,” my dad said.

I nodded. “Yeah. Yeah, like that.”

“So what you need is an aglet.” At my puzzled look, my father chuckled and flicked the crossword. “What’s a five-letter word for ‘the hard plastic end of a shoelace’?”

“Ha. Aglet. Got it.”

He waved a hand. “So this research is going to make it so the telom—those things—never wear out no matter often they’re copied? Not like making a mimeo or a carbon,” he said, “but like those PDF files you can print again and again from your computer and it’s the same each time?”

I told you the man was smart.

“Well, Dad, it’s a little more complicated, but—”

“Don’t mind me, Nick. Of course you understand it. That’s the important thing.” My father nodded. “I’m only trying to follow along. Tell you this, son. If you discover how to untangle the strings in an Alzheimer’s brain, I’ll be damned relieved to hear it. Can’t tell you how sick I am of using Sudoku and the crossword to ward it off.” He glared at his newspaper. “If you can slow aging so I can return to work, that would be even better. I feel like an old man here, just puttering around the house and keeping your mom’s plants alive. Least I figured out how to run the washing machine all by myself. ‘Bout damn time.”

I didn't know what to say.

“In any case,” my dad continued, “I’d love to see the results. You science folks usually write these things up, don’t you? And publish the findings in a journal? Well, when it’s ready, I would be honored to have a copy. Autographed by you.”

“Oh—absolutely,” I said. “Absolutely. It would be—wow.”

He took a last sip of Scotch. “I’m proud of you, Nick. You’ve really turned things around.”

My throat closed then. I pulled out my phone, pretending I had something more important on it than Animal Crossing. “Well,” I said. “It’s getting a little late, and my Uber’ll be here in a few, so I’d better haul myself back. I just wanted to drop by and let you know, Dad, so you wouldn’t worry.”

As I headed to the door, I gave my father a hug—another surprise for him, I guess. I hadn’t really embraced him since Mom died. For a moment he stood there, arms held out like wings. Then he hugged me too, a good dad hug, his hands reaching around my shoulders in the same familiar way they always had, but against my fingers, my father’s back felt insubstantial, light and full of bones as a winter bird.

PART TWO

The cut worm forgives the plow.

—William Blake

Now comes the fun part, by which I mean the absolutely fucking horrible part.

We spent the next day getting acclimated to the DrugCorp facilities. Twenty dudes, including Charlie and me, had been taken out by private shuttle the night before. I’d known the facility would be isolated, but I hadn’t realized how isolated. By my rough guesstimate, we were at least thirty miles away from the town of [reda slisdjf   lsl scted], and the last ten of those were pure packed dirt, to judge by the grit of the road under the shuttle tires. Though I had done a decent amount of backcountry hiking with my dad—a childhood that seemed as remote as this place—I’d never had a clue these roads existed.

On the way, Charlie nudged me in the ribs. “Take a look out the window,” he muttered, glancing around. The shuttle cabin was lit up, and only our reflected faces showed, so I cupped my hand to see the night beyond the glass.

“What am I supposed to be—” I began, and then I spotted it. Placed every fifty yards or so were large roadside signs reading “DANGER: RESTRICTED AREA” and “UNLAWFUL TO ENTER WITHOUT DIRECT PERMISSION OF THE AREA INSTALLATION COMMANDER” and most grimly, “USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED.”

I turned to Charlie. “Well, I guess they’re more effective than ‘Beware of Dog,’ right?”

“Hmm,” he grunted. “It’s the one about explosives that worries me.”

“I didn’t see it.”

“I did,” he said.

So there was that. And once inside the DrugCorp compound, it became clear that despite the civilized trappings—the pretty park with the mountain view, the seasonal flowerbeds, the Debussy playing over the intercom in the lobby, the tasteful rooms in gentle greyish blues—this wasn’t your average clinic.

For one, we patients had no Internet. The assistants had politely explained that any cell phones or smart watches would be confiscated—some mumble-mumble about preserving corporate research, proprietary procedures, and so on—and the facility sat so far from tower range anyway that our cells would have been useful mostly as paperweights. Knowing this, I’d left mine in an old trunk beneath my army cot in the shed and figured it was as safe there as anywhere.

Oh, sure, we had Wi-Fi—very, very limited Wi-Fi—and a whole supply of e-readers with titles from Shakespeare to James A. Michener to Stephen King, if you found yourself in a literary mood. We had tablets with pre-installed apps and a library of movies and podcasts and games, but all these options were chosen by DrugCorp. If you wanted to browse TikTok, fire off a witty Tweet, or even check your email, you were shit out of luck. I was glad we’d be here for only two weeks.

On the second day, we were admitted to surgery.

***

“Now,” said Dr. Helminth. “Before we proceed, we’ll need a biological sample.” He gestured to the technician, who wordlessly handed us a little cup labeled with our names and patient I.Ds.

“What kind of sample?” Charlie’s voice sounded gravelly. He hadn’t slept well, I knew, because he had been tossing and turning and shuffling his pillow all night. I had always been a light sleeper, so every time he did this, I woke up wishing I’d remembered to bring an eye shade and earplugs like he’d advised me. “Is it urine you want? If you do, I just got back from the head. I’m afraid you’ll have to wait before I can prime the pump.”

Dr. Helminth smiled that square-toothed smile. “Not urine. Semen.” He cleared his throat and added, “If you prefer any…assistance in delivering the sample, we do have a variety of materials for your convenience.” He gestured to the tablet I held in my hands. Both hands, you pervs.

“Thirty-one flavors of porn, huh?” Charlie chuckled, a weary sound. “Gotcha. But why do you docs need a semen sample?”

The doctor smiled again, a little less enthusiastically this time. His small eyes were black and expressionless as rocks. “It’s part of the research protocol,” he answered smoothly.

Charlie’s gaze met mine, and in that moment, I almost read his thoughts. In other words, they ain’t telling us shit.

“So,” Dr. Helminth said, forging on. “You’ll be prepared for minor surgery. Nothing too extensive. Previous patients in the first iteration of this study compared the process to the excision of a lipoma or to a simple biopsy. You will be given full anesthetic, naturally, so we’ll need to restrict food and drink for at least eight hours prior to the procedure for your safety, but all this is strictly routine.” He consulted the materials on his clipboard.

“Well, what…I mean…” I began, my gaze drawn to those oddly boneless fingers. “Where are you going to—what exactly are you cutting?”

Dr. Helminth allowed himself a tight smile, no teeth this time. “The procedure involves an incision of approximately five to six centimeters in the lower abdomen.” He gave his pen a businesslike click. “And that is where we will introduce the biological material under investigation.”

I shot Charlie a quick look. Let me try some more with this pompous asshole.

“That’s amazing, Doctor Helminth,” I said. “Like, how does it work? Is the biological material… contained in something?” I widened my eyes, hoping I looked admiring. I probably looked psychotic. I didn’t have a mirror.

“Hm,” said Dr. Helminth, considering, and the initially skeptical look left his face. “To preserve the introduced material while keeping some degree of coordinated interface with the host body, we have developed an artificial culture system to be the central containment locus—a biological container, if you will, composed of epithelial cells as the base for pluripotent placen—well, we’re getting quite technical.” He returned to the tight smile. “Do forgive me. To put it in a more patient-accessible way, we want to ensure this biological sample finds a happy human home.”

“But what—”

“Please don’t be concerned.” Dr. Helminth held up a hand. “This procedure has been extensively studied prior to this phase, let me assure you. This is merely the latest iteration, and we’re hoping it’s the final draft, if you understand. Now,” he said, returning to the clipboard. “For a time, of course, you will be taking immunosuppressives to ensure the biosample propagates appropriately, but unlike with organ transplants, you won’t have to take them for a lifetime. It’s only to get things off to a nice, healthy start.”

Charlie had been sitting back in his bed, his arms crossed over his chest. “I’d like you to go over the side effects one more time, if you wouldn’t mind. Explain it to me like I’m five, doc.”

Dr. Helminth’s eyelid twitched, but he gave us that smile again. “Delighted. First, there will be routine discomfort at the incision site. Later you may experience some aftereffects of the medication and procedure.”

Charlie nodded. “Such as?”

“Well, slight abdominal cramping on the day following, and for two weeks or so you may experience some fatigue or nausea as your system adjusts to the biosample. Still,” said Dr. Helminth, “this symptom tends to diminish gradually, particularly if you remove yourself from olfactory triggers. To mitigate stomach discomfort, we typically recommend a diet rich in mild, starchy carbohydrates—breads, rice, and so forth. Simply make sure to give the cafeteria staff your blue lunch card, and they’ll take it from there.” Now finished, Dr. Helminth looked at the door.

Charlie nodded again. He was in no hurry. “Then what?”

The doctor shifted his weight impatiently. “Mr…ah, Mr. Parker, no doubt the technicians will be glad to go over your questions in detail. Currently, this is a phase of the research we are still in the process of determining, and individual patient responses have been highly variable. Thus the importance of this study.” He nodded and turned away. “On behalf of DrugCorp, thank you for your cooperation.” The door shut firmly after him.

***

“I don’t like this,” Charlie warned me when Dr. Helminth had left. “Nope. I have a bad notion about this one, Nick. And if so, then I’m damn sorry I got you into this, son. I really am. I hope it’s nerves. I’ve never liked surgery much.” He leaned back into the parsimonious pillow of his bed and sighed.

I reassured Charlie he had nothing to be sorry about, at least not about me. I was a big boy, after all. More to the point, I was a big boy with big debt. If I made it to the end of the forty-week study, I’d have enough to last a lifetime. Oh, I would still have to work, but whoever said money can’t buy happiness was probably born rich. Maybe it didn’t buy happiness, but it bought something almost as good: security.

With money, I could confidently afford to sign up for community college and learn the wonders of HVAC if I wanted—or hell, even return to the university and finish my degree. I could live without worrying that the next stupid thing—a missed bus, a traffic delay, a sprained ankle, or even forgetting to turn on my alarm—would kick off an avalanche of other problems.

As it now stood, if I had any of these issues, I might be out of a gig. If I couldn’t do my gigs, I couldn’t make rent, and if I couldn’t make rent, I’d be kicked out of my shed. What was worse, I’d be shit outta luck for any other housing, because the word “eviction” isn’t one your future landlords want to see on a routine background check. And if I became homeless? Well, we all understand where this is going. No, scratch that. Poor people understand where this is going. Rich people just see these events as minor irritations. Guess they are, to them.

With money, I could hold out for a good job. I wouldn’t have to take a seven-buck-an-hour grind or two. Hell, I might even get a job that offered me real health care and a few sick days into the bargain. Perhaps you’ve never done this, but there have been times I’ve gone to work with more virus in my body than actual human cells. Yeah, even during Covid. In case you were wondering. Gotta eat, you know.

You know what else it buys? Options. I hadn’t had a lot of those lately. I’d almost forgotten what those were. For the first time in a while, I allowed myself to think about the future. About what it meant. About what our life is for. Do we just work? Is that it? Just work until we die? Is that our legacy?

I didn’t think so.

And Charlie? He could live out his years in something resembling actual peace. “I don’t have any kids,” he’d mentioned once. In the quiet way he said this, I sensed a story sadder than he wanted to tell or I wanted to hear.

“When I was your age, I thought I’d make big changes. Leave a mark on the world.” Charlie’s face had stretched into a smile so painful my eyes started to prickle, and I looked away from him out the window. “But that’s not the hand I was dealt,” he said, “or not the way I played it. So if I ever get sick or senile—hell, I would be lucky to afford a cardboard box beneath a bridge somewhere like an old troll and wait out my time till I became worm food.”

I was looking at the same fate if I was being honest. About the only difference was that I still had my dad, but he wasn’t a young man anymore. “No worries,” I told Charlie. “It’s going to be fine.”

And then I sat back and imagined having a life.

A real one.

What that might be like.

***

The procedure really wasn’t too bad. Despite not waiting until I died to donate my body to science, I’d never actually had surgery, not even for my wisdom teeth. When they wheeled me into the operating room, Dr. Helminth slid a transparent plastic mask over my face and told me to count back from a hundred.

I only remember a black nothingness, and then a sense of floating underwater, adrift in a warm and salty sea of red, breathing in and breathing out. I was being squeezed, slowly and rhythmically. The tide pushed me toward a patch of light, and then the darkness dropped again.

I awoke in my own room, and in the dim clinic lights, I noticed the guardrails had been raised on either side of my patient bed so I didn’t fall out. My gut seemed wrenched and torn, and below my navel, my muscles ached and itched even through the bandages down there. Across from me, Charlie let out a series of heavy, sighing snores and muttered into his pillow.

Things improved when I finally managed to turn myself over to the cool side. Thank God for the guard rails after all. Did you ever try to rotate your body without using any of your abdominal muscles? Good luck with that.

At last, I slept.

***

In the dream, they were cutting me open.

Over my head shone the bright lights of an operating theater. People in blue hospital gowns bustled around me, anonymous under surgical masks and lowered face shields. On the expanse of skin below my navel, an attendant was drawing something, but I sensed nothing more than the pressure of his hands. “I’ve got him marked now,” he said, and soon another figure leaned into my view. Dr. Helminth. I couldn’t see his little teeth below his mask, but I knew they were there.

“Recite the human taxonomic rank backwards, including our embryonic subgroup,” Dr. Helminth ordered, putting a mask over my face.

“Um…” I began. “Sapien. Homo. Hominidae. Primate…I can’t remember…the embryonic subgroup. Is it deuterosome? I’m not sure,” I muttered, and sank deeper down.

Then came a faraway sense of being scratched, and fingers probed and twiddled inside me. I was raw and meaty. My abdomen was an open mouth.

“Metzenbaums again, please,” the doctor ordered. “What are the O2 sats?” In the background, I heard the express checkout scanner at the Foodorium grocery store on the corner. It made regular chimes like beep-beep-beep. Twelve items or less. Push button for customer assistance.

“Fewer,” my father said, twiddling a worn golf pencil for his crossword between his fingers. “Twelve items or fewer. Unless items are essentially countless, like stars in the sky, you shouldn’t use less.”

Hands thrust into me like children digging in the sand for buried shells, and in my pelvis I sensed the yank and twist of hands pushing and tugging. My intestines were shoved out of the way like nosy puppies.

The doctor reached out, fingers fleshy and boneless in their white surgical glove. “Hand me the ovipositor.”

From the steel tray, the attendant passed him an instrument, a thick, transparent rubber thing the shape and length of a paper towel tube. One end of the tube met in a trio of v-shaped flaps like a sandworm’s mouth.

“Hand me the sack, please,” the doctor said. Or was it sac? I really couldn’t tell. Into his other hand the attendant placed a purplish oval mass the size of a human heart, an organ surrounded by a thin translucent membrane resembling the inner skin of an egg. The purple mass beat in time with the grocery self-check machine’s constant blips. They are one, I thought. They are in sync.

Brusquely, Dr. Helminth slid the beating sac into the end of the tube nearest him. Into my deadened lower body he placed the tip of the instrument, and I felt a sudden pressure at the edges of the incision. A stretching. An insertion. It was in me.

He squeezed then, his expression blank and abstract, fingers rolling one by one down the shaft of the device with the calm detached precision of a milkman at an udder. His entire hand surrounded the tube, moving slowly downward, and at last, I sensed something slide inside, an object hard and full of pressure and pulse, and I started to squirm.

In the background, the beepings from the supermarket checkout machine came faster. “See?” my father said. “Countless.”

A voice spoke up near my head. “Doctor, I think we may need to—”

“Not right now.”

“Doctor, all due apologies, but we may need to adjust the levels here based on the BIS readings I’m getting from the patient, because…”

That was all I can remember.

***

The next day, the itching began.

Below my navel, the bandages lay like a hard lump over my flesh, taped down across my shaven navel and crotch. Dr. Helminth came in early to examine the incision, his lightless eyes receding into the pale dough of his cheeks. His fingers over my bandages were clammy and moist.

“Very nice,” he said. “Quite good progress.” He consulted his clipboard. “And how do you feel?”

I blinked and tried to sit, but the wrenching yank in my gut told me this would be a terrible idea, so I let myself sink back into the pillow. Dr. Helminth reached under the bed and pressed a switch to elevate me to a semi-sitting position.

“Thanks,” I said. “I think I’m fine. I mean, other than this.” I gestured at my abdomen. “It’s a little itchy, though.” I moved my fingers as if to scratch at the bandage, but the doctor clucked his tongue reprovingly and pushed my hand away.

“No, I’m afraid you will have to leave it alone for now, Mr. [redact adlkfj  ed]. Please refrain from touching the incision site, removing the bandages, or coming into contact with the area around it—” He stopped there, biting off the words with a smile.

“I understand,” I said. “I get it. Gotta observe procedure, right?”

Dr. Helminth nodded. “Right.” With a sniff, he handed me my tablet and drew the curtain closed.

I shifted, trying to find a comfortable position where I wasn’t going to slide down. From the next bed over, I heard the clatter of curtain rings and Dr. Helminth’s brusque greeting.

Charlie didn’t answer.

***

He woke up sometime later, shuffling to the bathroom and staying there for a hundred years or so before coming out looking grey and deflated. His eyes were still sharp, and he looked me over a hell of a lot more thoroughly than Dr. Helminth ever had.

“You feel as much like shit as I do?” he asked, his voice a raspy whisper. “I haven’t been this—this bone-weary, I guess, since my last days in Kuwait.”

“You were in Kuwait?”

“Yeah,” he sighed, lowering himself to the bed. Like me, he was trying to sit without bending at the waist. “The desert. The fucking desert. Everyone hated it. Everyone but me. Hell, I was fine with it. Didn’t look much different from the place I grew up, except it had fewer Circle Ks.”

“Where did you grow up?”

“Luning. Little town in Nevada. Middle of nowhere, even when it was thriving. The only thing in Luning anyone ever remembers nowadays is the rest stop off the 95, the one with the trees.” He smiled. “Anyway, some stuff happened in Kuwait right before the end of operations over there. This one day, a group of us came upon this flaming jeep—or not flaming, exactly. It had blown up.”

I knew jack shit about the military, so I said, “Was it like—I don’t know. A rocket launcher hit it, or something?”

Charlie shook his head. “Nah. An IED, if anything. Land mine. The jeep had driven off the road into the desert, and that shit was all full of mines. Anyway, the damn thing got blown to bits, and the wreckage was strewn everyplace, but by the time we came by it, the flames were mostly out. Well, right by this hunk of metal that probably had been the hood, I spotted something. At first, I took it to be a burned tree with twisted branches. Like I said, though, it wasn’t exactly Oregon out there in the desert, so that whole tree thing didn’t make sense. Not till I got up close and saw the teeth did I realize I’d been staring at a person. What used to be a person. It was his lips, you understand. They’d pulled back from the heat so it almost looked like he was snarling. He’d been crawling away when the fire took him.”

“Jesus.”

“He was crusted in ash. An ash-man. A man of coal. And he died trying to get the fuck out of there, as anyone would.”

“Was he—” I stammered. “Was he one of ours?”

“Possibly,” said Charlie. “Right about then, I figured something out. I realized I didn’t give a shit if he was ours or not. I didn’t care if he hated America’s guts. Hell, I do myself sometimes. For all our flag-waving, it sure seems to me we go to war mostly so rich assholes can get even richer. And that ain’t me. And that ain’t you. And the dead man? Definitely not him. He was a person, is all. Someone who didn't want to die that way. I could relate.”

I didn’t know what to say.

Charlie shook his head. “Well, that night, I got drunker than I ever had before in my whole life, and each time I swallowed, trying to erase the memory of those charred black lips, I tasted meat and gasoline. When I woke up the next morning, I felt almost as bad as I do now.”

Below my bandages, my skin began to itch again.

***

When the incident happened, it didn’t seem like anything much at first.

For most of the day, we stayed in the room together, Charlie and I, watching old movies on the closed-circuit TV, but by evening we were both hungry enough to dress for dinner, which in my case meant throwing a robe over my hospital gown.

Even though we’d gotten there late, the cafeteria was lightly populated. Other than a few functional tables with clusters of patients here and there, the room seemed mostly deserted. I suspected most of the other lab rats had elected to eat in their rooms rather than hobble down the hallway bent over like question marks, as we had.

Charlie waved to a few guys at a nearby table, the one closest to the service window. Then, trays in hand, we eased ourselves down in the seats and started on our baked chicken and peas.

When the man behind me first began to scream, my instinctive reaction was to think he’d found a problem with his food. Waiter, what is this fly doing in my soup? Oh, sorry, sir. I believe it’s doing the backstroke.

Out of pure reflex, I turned in his direction, wrenching my gut as I did so. I hissed and turned back abruptly, clutching at my bandaged stomach. Jesus.

The screaming man was one of the older patients I’d seen at breakfast and dinner, a pleasant-faced sort with a somewhat pouchy face and rimless glasses, the kind you assume works as an accountant or insurance agent. Seeing him, you knew he’d probably started balding in his forties but hadn’t minded because it made him look even more like a dad. He was the type who built birdhouses in a backyard shed redolent of cut wood and tung oil.

Now, though, the man stood by the self-serve table near the service window, the one that held tasteful grey containers of silverware and condiments. His face had turned the color of old cheese, pale greenish-cream, and he looked as if he were straining just to breathe.

With a stuttering gasp, he let out an inarticulate cry, a harsh “KAAAAAAA!” like the sound of some predatory bird about to plunge upon a worm, and his hands shot out, fingers stammering over the neat holders for ketchup and mayonnaise. One container of forks spun to the floor and landed with a dull clang, silverware spilling everywhere.

We all froze. From inside the kitchen came voices and punctuated sounds of alarm. “Where is…no, don’t be an idiot. Go and get…” a man barked. I didn’t hear the rest of what he said. Another patient, an older guy who reminded me of Grandpa Simpson, stood up unsteadily from the table beside ours. “Paul?” he began, his thin and querulous voice lost in the sound of shouting, the rush of stamping feet from the kitchen. “Paul, what’s the matter? Why don’t you just—"

“KAAAAAAAA!” the man cried again, and then bellowed, “IT ITCHES! IT WON’T STOP! It…won’t…stop! Make it stop! For God’s sake, for Christ’s sake, won’t someone make it stop? Make it stop! Make it STAAAAP! Make it STAAAAAP!” The man’s face reddened hideously. His seeking fingers clutched and clutched, and I saw the brief gold flash of his wedding ring as his fingers formed into claws, nails ripping and tearing at his skin, scratching his flesh until it dripped bright red. “Make it STAAAAAP! MAKE IT STAAAP! KAAAAAA!” A thin runner of spit fountained from his lips and dangled there.

“Paul, why don’t you just come—” Grandpa Simpson said, but the man only turned to him and screeched, his mouth stretched open all the way. Grandpa fell back a few tottering steps on legs as thin and uncertain as a colt’s and would have tumbled if Charlie hadn’t grabbed his elbow just in time.

With an abrupt grunt, the man reached out to the few upright containers left on the table and grasped a jagged handful of forks. His glasses, hanging askew on his nose, now slid down his cheeks and clittered on the floor. They landed beneath a colorful business infographic about the Heimlich Maneuver, the words ADULT CHOKING typed in bright red across the top.

With another cry, he wrenched at the neck of his hospital gown. The seams purred apart and the gown fell to the ground unnoticed as he stood under the harsh fluorescent lights of the cafeteria, scrawny and naked except for black nylon socks that pooled around his ankles.

Like all the rest of us, he had a bandaged abdomen, the shaven strips of hair across his belly looking white and surprised above the gauze, which shone red now with fresh, new blood. The man drew in a breath, and then another, scraping and stertorous. Then he beat his hands against the table like an angry king demanding food, the forks in his fist clanging against the metal surface.

Then, with a sharp, decisive thrust, he turned the tines toward himself, and before I realized why he might be doing that, he slammed the handful of forks into the reddened bandage, stabbing at the center of the blood spot over and over and screaming, “IT WON’T STOP IT WON’T STOP IT WON’T STOP! KAAAAA!”

Then he raised the forks up high and plunged them hard into his eyes.

For a suspended second, we all froze. One fork, slightly bent, dangled from his face like a ghastly Christmas ornament, stuck into the part of his cheek my grandma had called the apple. I must have made some sound, some gasp or choke of protest, because he turned to me, staring at me with his sightless eyes, and when he did, I swear I saw the end tine poking neatly into the center of his iris. Right there in the black.

Bullseye, I thought. He hit the bullseye, great shot great shot fifty points to Gryffindor, and as the security team finally descended upon him, he continued to stare at me with those dead and draining eyes and screaming his birdlike “KAAA! KAAAA! KAAAA!” over and over until they faded down the hall leading to the central med unit.

I took a shuddering breath and vomited everything I had onto the floor.

***

“What the hell just happened? Seriously?”

We hadn’t really spoken after dinner. No one had. The rest of the security team had come a-running, three guys with shoulder radios staticky with chatter and cross-talk. They’d fanned out, bellowing at the flustered attendants to bring wheelchairs and get us the hell back to our rooms ASAP. Charlie and I hadn’t waited for the wheels; we’d just plain gone.

On his side of the room, Charlie was painstakingly folding his sweats in thirds and then into a tight bundle he managed to roll into itself so it all stayed together. He’d been doing this for twenty minutes, folding and unfolding. Now his clothes were arranged along his bed like a winter logpile, unlike the disorganized crap cluster I’d scattered over my chair.

“I don’t know,” Charlie responded, not turning around. Even from the back, he seemed older than he had two days ago. The sharp bones of his scapula jutted upward from his back like folded bird’s wings, and from the front, he looked—well, almost swollen.

I wasn’t sure if this abdominal distension was some normal aftereffect from the operation, but the bulge of belly he’d always griped about seemed to have blown up a bit in the last hour. My own stomach felt shrunken by contrast, but to be honest, it was difficult to tell. 

“I don’t know,” Charlie said again. “But I’ll tell you this. That gut feeling I had before? It just got a shitload worse. I’m worried. You should be too, Nick.”

I had the same worry. I’d gotten it the moment I witnessed a bent fork dangling from an old man’s eyeball.

“I’m just spitballing here.” I leaned over, trying to get a look at Charlie’s face. “Could it—that guy’s reaction—could it have been like this thing I read about in psych class, this phenomenon where patients who’ve had surgery hallucinate when they’re taken out of their familiar surroundings? You know, like being in a hospital? I mean, I read that it happens a lot to folks who are older. No offense. I mean, what I want to say is—” I stammered. “I think they get disoriented or something. I think it’s called…”

“Sundowning,” Charlie supplied quietly. “Yeah. I suppose it could be that. But I don’t believe so. You remember the blood tests they gave us all before we even hopped on that shuttle? Well, one happened to be a test screening for those plaque things in your brain, the ones you get if you have Alzheimer’s. They were weeding folks out left and right, at least in the room I was in. I noticed lots of the weedouts were old geezers like yours truly who’ve got nothing better to do than be DrugCorp’s favorite living pincushions. Hell, I was damn glad I made the cut. Could be I have more marbles than I figured I did the last time I forgot my keys in my pants.” He let out a sarcastic grunt and kept on folding.

I remembered the conversation I’d had with my father, the one where I babbled on about science and tried to sound as if I understood what I was talking about. The subject of this DrugCorp study? Why, the cognitive impairment of memory and the degradation of DNA over time. The problem of aging bodies. They’d brought this up specifically, along with a few other things. Decaying telomeres like the frayed ends of a shoelace. The promise of stem cells in tissue regeneration, growing whole new parts. Totipotent blastomeres. The need for human hosts to ensure…to ensure what? I hadn’t paid attention. Not enough, anyway.

Almost unconsciously, I ran my hand over the bandages below my waist and thought of a mild-mannered accountant stabbing himself in the eyes with a fork. His glasses, now not needed, had fallen on the floor. I thought they might still be there.

What the hell had just happened?

“Well,” I said. “What if it wasn’t caused by—you know, the experiment. What if he had a seizure or something?”

“They screened for seizure disorder too. You were there.”

“Then what about—oh, fuck it, Charlie. Maybe the guy simply went batshit crazy, all right? People do that.” But as I said it, I recalled that five hundred-question mental health screener they’d made all the DrugCorp lab rats plow through before even clearing us for a study in the first place.

I’d taken one almost exactly like it for a psych class years ago, probably the same course that covered sundowning. We’d been in a giant lecture hall. I’d asked the bored-looking TA what kind of jackass would actually answer ‘yes’ to questions such as “Sometimes I see things around me that other people do not see,” or “At times, I feel like hurting others.” The T.A. stared at me and said, “Seriously? You would be astonished by how often patients say, ‘Thank God someone finally understands.’”

Charlie shook his head decisively. “No. No, he didn’t go nuts. And he wasn’t sundowning. He wasn’t batshit crazy. And you know it.”

I did.

“So the question isn’t what the hell just happened,” said Charlie. “The question is, what are we going to do about it?”

***

As it turned out, Charlie’s idea was getting the fuck out before it got too late.

“You don’t understand,” he explained when I reminded him we had less than a week to go before the initial phase was over and they’d just release us. “I don’t know what that man’s problem was, but let me tell you, it sure wasn’t penciled in on their activities agenda.” He rubbed his craggy face and sighed. “You saw how long it took security to get there, Nick. The kitchen staff looked like they just shit themselves, and for at least a minute—a long damn minute, as I’m sure you’ll agree—it was a goddamned clown car in there.”

This was undeniably true.

“Security?” Charlie laughed. “Security wasn’t anticipating jack shit.”

“It didn’t seem like it.”

“Hell, no. Half of them were probably out at the loading dock taking themselves a cigarette break. My guess is that they were expecting a bunch of weak-ass post-ops to be good little boys and eat their chicken and peas. Maybe grab another pudding cup if they felt like living large. They didn’t expect a clusterfuck of those proportions.”

“Yeah,” I said, “but still, why can’t we wait? Like, hang tight, keep our heads down, and simply hold on a few days just unt—”

Charlie shook his head and looked at me, and his look was wise and sad. “Because, Nick. They will never let us go. Can’t you see it? They will never let us go.”

I heard the truth of it in his voice. Yeah, he believed it, all right, but even more, he knew it.

“You watch,” he said. “Before breakfast time tomorrow, you’ll have your answer. Mark my words.”’

“How will I have my answer?’

Charlie ran his hand over his chin. “We won’t be allowed down to the hall, is what. A few minutes or so beforehand, my guess is that an announcement’s gonna come over the loudspeaker, or it’ll be passed along by the attendants, but either way, it’ll say something to the effect of, ‘Due to yesterday’s unfortunate events, yadda yadda, the dining room is shut down today while they investigate the situation—just temporary, you understand, nothing to be worried about, and here’s your breakfast on a cart. Oh, and from an excess of concern for patient safety here at DrugCorp, all social activities have been temporarily suspended for today and tomorrow, and the rec room will be closed.’” He peered out the window. “They may let folks outside to take a stroll,” he said, “but probably not. Most of all, they won't want us to discuss what happened. You know. Like the way we’re doing now.”

As he spoke, he rifled through his wallet, pulling out his driver’s license and a bank card or two. From the ring of keys he’d brought with him, he took only a pair—the ones for his car and his house, I guessed—and stuffed them into his shoes below the insole pads.

“What the fuck are you doing, Charlie? Where are you—”

He held up a hand. “Don’t ask, don’t tell.” Without saying more, he put on the shirt he’d worn when we’d gotten here, a long-sleeved tee, and over it, his bathrobe. “You don’t need to know where I’m going. But it sure as hell ain’t here.” He looked me straight in the eye. “Nick, I’ve lived through some shit, and the reason I kept living at all was mostly because I listened to this,” he said, and pointed to his gut above the bandage. “And right now, it’s giving me some bad, bad news. Worse than I’ve had in a while.” He scanned the countertop, looking for anything else to leave behind or take along. “And between you and me—and only between you and me, mind—I’m going to call a friend of mine when I get back to civilization. Not a veteran. A veterinarian. First thing I’ll ask her is what the hell they stuffed inside of me, and can she get it out.”

“But—” I began. “Why a veterinarian? Why not check into a hospital or a quick care or something? I mean—”

He was already shaking his head. “You don’t suppose I thought of that already?”

I supposed he had. And now that I considered the issue myself, I realized it would be surprising if DrugCorp didn’t have—well, let’s call them ‘lines of communication’—kept open between themselves and every major hospital network around the country. Oh, sure, no doubt for boringly practical reasons—distribution networks, supply chains, drug reps, and the like—but it wasn’t out of the question for DrugCorp to put out the equivalent of an APB for an older man presenting with signs of unusual abdominal surgery. Hell, an email or two might do it.

“Bottom line, I’m listening to that gut of mine and I’m getting outta here. And Nick, I’m advising you to do the same.” He sat down on his bed facing me. “I feel…well, I feel like shit for putting you onto this. Goddamn. I’m sorry, son. I mean it.”

“No, no,” I said, feeling awkward. “No, don’t apologize, Charlie. Seriously. I needed the money, same as you. You meant well.”

“Yeah,” he chuckled. “But we all remember what the road to hell is paved with, don’t we? Anyway, I don’t suppose the powers that be will really notice until possibly lunch tomorrow, if I get lucky.” He nodded at his wallet and remaining keys. “That should keep them occupied. If they don’t suspect I’ve gone AWOL, they’ll piss away some time searching the grounds and the complex first. Besides, we just underwent an operation. They’re expecting us to be nice and quiet, at least for tonight.”

I gave a disbelieving snort. “Tonight? What the fuck, Charlie, you’re leaving right now? Like, simply sneaking out and humping it through the desert, thirty miles back to [sladf llasdf la]? How the hell do you intend to do that, dude? You can barely walk.” I cocked a chin at his gut, which now looked obviously distended, an old man’s pooch jutting out below the limp terry belt of his bathrobe. It worried me, if you want to know the truth.

“No. I’m not heading through the desert.” He peered outside again. “However long I make it on the road, I bet I wouldn’t last a minute in the desert.”

When he said this, I remembered the signs he’d seen from the window of the shuttle, the ones about explosives, and I understood with a near-certainty he was recalling the soldier in Kuwait who’d turned to ash and snarling teeth. “I’m going to go as far as I can down the supply road leading from the loading docks,” he said. “I should be able to do it. I mean, this is a drug facility, not a maximum-security prison.”

I hadn’t even noticed a supply road. “But they probably have cameras, or at least something on the outside. Flood lights, or whatever. And what about the money? What about…?” My hands flopped uselessly to my sides. “Jesus, Charlie, just be safe, okay?”

He smiled, the lines in his cheeks deepening into canyons, vast desert barrancas. “If I assumed we could get away with it together, I’d ask you to come with. As it is, I’m only going to tell you to leave when you can, Nick. As soon as you can.”

So you know what? I teetered on the verge of accepting. The words rose to my lips.

And then I thought of my father in our living room, puttering along with his Sudoku and scotch and his stories about starfish. Of him reading to me as a boy. Of the sudden hopeful light in his eyes when I’d lied about the research position. I thought of the slim, golden chance to become the son he believed I already was. I remembered his eyes, so sharp and so wise. And so kind.

If you’re reading this—if anyone ever reads this—here’s what I want you to do. Okay? Think of every single person you have known. Your parents. Your spouse. The bored guy at the supermarket who bags your groceries and looks annoyed all the time. The partner you lost your virginity with. The wide-open eyes of your firstborn child. The face of the one who holds your heart inside their hands.

Got it?

There will come a final time for you to see them.

For every first, there is a last. You might not know when. You’ll take your bag. You’ll wave at them at the doorway one morning when they go to work. You’ll let them off at the curb at the airport and see the doors slide closed behind them. You might call out some casual farewell like, “See you soon.”

Then you won’t.

This time, I knew. Or thought I knew. If it wasn’t the last time I would ever see Charlie, well—it was damned close.

But.

But I might still have a chance to see my dad. To make him proud of me. But only if I stayed. Only if I saw this thing through until the end.

When the knock at our door came, we both jumped like conspirators. I glanced over at Charlie and he nodded.

“Yeah?” I called, my voice cracking a bit. “Come on in.”

One of the attendants poked his head in. He told us the dining hall would be closed in the morning (“We’re still cleaning up, as I’m sure you understand, right? Such a terrible thing”), but there would be a breakfast cart coming around bright and early and he wanted to take our orders. “Don’t you love that?” he exclaimed, handing over little blue meal cards to fill out, and even I, not exactly a super-perceptive person, could hear the false tinny clang in his voice. “It’s custom room service for you guys!”

Charlie nodded. “Nothing but the best from DrugCorp,” he said dryly.

***

Spoiler alert: I was wrong. It wasn’t the last time I saw Charlie after all.

I only wish it had been.

Other spoiler alert: They did have cameras.

***

As it turned out, our planning meant no more than a fart in a windstorm, as Charlie might say.

Might have said.

They took him out of here screaming. And yes, while it’s a non-zero possibility Charlie is still alive somewhere in this facility, my gut tells me he’s gone. I can feel it.

Goddammit.

Goddammit all to hell.

***

They caught up with Charlie the very same night he made his big break. By the time DrugCorp security brought him back, he looked drained and grey, with two bright spots high on his cheeks you might’ve taken for the flush of good health, but a second inspection would’ve told you differently.

I was awakened by the room door opening and the low evening lights coming on. One of the attendants was bringing Charlie in—the quiet, gentle one who was hardly older than I was. I liked him. “Come on, Mr. Parker,” the attendant murmured, uselessly trying to keep his voice down.

Then Charlie’s voice came ringing out, loud and querulous. “Where’s Abby? Did she make the gingerbread cookies like I asked? Sammy—say, you’re not Sammy. Who are you? Were we in the same unit together?”

“I’m—I’m your attendant here. My name is Jayesh. Mr. Parker, sir, please let go of the cur—”

With a rattling yank, Charlie pulled aside the curtain around my bed and gave me a sharp, focused stare. Get it? his glance said. Play along, son.

I played along. It wasn’t difficult, for example, to look confused and half-awake. Method acting, don’t you know.

The attendant explained that the surveillance detail had spotted Charlie wandering outside, and not until later did I learn he’d made it almost six miles away before the DrugCorp goons figured it out. When they’d caught up with him, he was relieved to note that their badass security force was driving a golf cart.

“Thank God,” he said. “Not exactly the kind of thing you’d use to chase down Charles Manson if he escaped from prison, am I right? Anyway, hat’s off to you for that idea you had about sundowning. I ran with that.” Charlie nodded. “Pretended to be a disoriented old man looking for his family Christmas party. It seemed to work. I notice they only sent Jayesh and the other guy. Whatshisname. Mr. Peppy Meal Card. They weren’t expecting trouble, and what the hell. I didn’t give ‘em any. They’re good kids.”

By my reckoning, Charlie didn’t look in any shape to give trouble to anyone, even a weak fourth-grader, but I kept my trap shut. No purpose in saying it to him.

But I’ll tell you. His face. It was worrying me. For one, the bright hectic spots on his cheeks looked even more pronounced, and the rest of his complexion had turned the sick grey of mushroom soup. What was worse, his belly was—a problem. It felt far too tender to move or even touch, and helping Charlie swing his legs into bed without making him bend at the waist took the better part of twenty minutes. It was harder than you’d assume. Finally he settled down, his arms wrapped around a pillow for support, and I drew my curtain again.

***

I may have mentioned that I’m a fairly light sleeper. Always have been. Normally, I’d lull myself into unconsciousness by listening to podcasts on low volume, a constant human sound reassuring me of my essential connectedness to the rest of the world, but I’d forgotten to bring headphones. After the fourth or fifth time Charlie got up to use the toilet, making pained hissing sounds every time he returned to bed, I lost count. Around then, I suppose I drifted off into some dream.

Before me was the red dirt road that led all the way from the DrugCorp compound. The headlights of a golf cart flashed irregularly behind me as it crested small hills, trying to pin me in its beams. I wove and ducked, dodging out of sight, but every time I veered out of the dirt track into the desert, I ran up against red-lettered signs bolted to the barbed-wire fencing:

“DANGER: RESTRICTED AREA”

“UNLAWFUL TO ENTER”

“MUST LIKE TATTOOS”

“USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED.”

“IT’S THE ONE ABOUT EXPLOSIVES THAT WORRIES ME.”

“IT’S THE ONE ABOUT EXPLOSIVES THAT WORRIES ME.”

“IT’S THE ONE ABOUT EXPLOSIVES THAT WORRIES ME.”

I awoke to the sound of screaming.

***

I suppose I’ve put this part off.

Guess you’ll see why.

***

At first, I didn’t understand what I was seeing. Charlie lay naked next to the toilet, his eyes squinched tightly closed and his lips pulled away from his teeth in a rictus of agony. His breath hissed out in hard little pants as he curled into himself, hugging his scrawny knees with their knobs of bone.

When I saw the back of him, my initial thought was that he’d grown a tail. It looked like a dinosaur tail, some thick, segmented thing speckled all the way down its greyish surface with fresh red gouts and clots of slime. Charlie’s hands were smeared with blood. And something fouler.

Then I realized what part of him that thing was coming out of.

He’d been trying to grab between his legs for it, whatever it was. To reach for it and yank it from himself. Out of himself.

“Jesus, Charlie,” I said. “I—I think that’s your large intestine or something. Don’t—don’t reach for it, all right? Like, don’t pull it. Just listen to—”

Then the thing emerging from him began to thrash and hiss.

Over the sound of Charlie’s screams, the greyish body whipped back and forth, its length striking the porcelain urinal with a moist and meaty smack. It shuddered and spasmed, snaking around the edges of the toilet. Its head looked softly conical, and atop it swayed two dark bulbous projections at the ends of fleshy stalks that waved like fat pink fingers. The stalk-things shifted apart, then came together. Only when they stood side by side did I understand what they really were.

They were eyes.

They were looking right at me.

“Nick,” Charlie wheezed. His jaws clamped down, and he spasmed in a sudden thrust that bounced his head against the wall by the door. “Nick…for God’s sake, please…”

I had already stumbled toward the sink, my fingers frantically searching out the black call button near the sink. When I found it, I jammed the heel of my hand into it again and again, calling out for the doctor, for Jayesh, for anyone to come.

Charlie lay in a spreading pool of blood and purple-brown chunks I took at first for feces. Now, on further reflection, I think they were more parts of Charlie. He looked up at me in misery, but his sharp, smart eyes were furiously dark, the whites entirely obscured by what I thought was blood. Burst vessels in the sclera.

Then Charlie screeched, clawing at his face, and I remembered the fork man. Mr. Kaaaa. Looking at his eyes, I jerked back when I saw something slide across his pupils with an easy, boneless grace, a delicate thing, threadlike, wet, and pink.

Then it crawled out of his eye and slithered down his cheek.

Charlie’s breath was hoarse, ragged, a guttural gasping, the veins like garden hoses standing out in his neck. He reached out for me blindly, one hand whipping about like the thing that had slid out from inside of him, that greyish tube of flesh lying quiescently on the floor now, maybe dying, its black stalk eyes still staring at me, and I remembered Mr. Kaaa’s abandoned glasses, lost beneath the poster in the lunchroom saying ADULT CHOKING.

From somewhere in the room, I heard a person screaming, and it may have been me. I backed up toward the door, but the edge stuck into my ass and I couldn’t find my way out.

I thought about running. Good God, you know I did. Right down that red desert road into the night and straight on till morning.

But then I looked into Charlie’s eyes again. What was left of them.

Then I bent down and embraced him, hiding his face in the hollow of my chest so I wouldn’t have to see what had become of it, and tried hard not to think of what might still be crawling out of him. I held him in my arms, my fingers curled about his shoulders, and I was reminded of the fragile bones of my father’s back. I held him as the attendants came for him and took him away from me. I held him as he screamed and spasmed, bled and wept.

And died.

PART THREE

We fat all creatures else to fat us, and we

fat ourselves for worms.

—William Shakespeare, Hamlet

This is what made me want to be a biology major: I learned we have aliens inside us.

No, literally. This isn’t Area 51 bullshit. You do have aliens inside you. Right now. You personally.

In almost every single cell of our bodies, you’ll find these little organelles in the nuclei called mitochondria. Yeah, mitochondria, powerhouse of the cell. Glad you remembered junior high biology. Mrs. Test Tube will be so very proud to hear it.

Your eighth-grade science teacher may not have taught you this part, kids. Mitochondria are a wholly separate life form. They are not us. They do not share our DNA. They have their own, and it’s different from ours.

They are aliens.

The word for them is endosymbiont. A life within our life.

We carry these creatures inside us. Eons ago when we were nothing more than prokaryotic cells ourselves, we merged with this thing, this other cell. Don’t know why. Don’t know how. Perhaps we ate it, or it entered us as a parasite. Or a virus. That would be ironic. Or maybe we were the parasites who formed around it. Either way, we fused together somehow, doing the Mesoproterozoic version of swiping right on Tinder.

We gave this alien shelter. We gave it propagation.

In exchange, it gave us power. What power, you ask? Why, the ability to use oxygen for energy. Burn, baby, burn. Amazing what a little fuel can do.

We’ve been gestating this tiny alien life inside us for 1.45 billion years. You have about 100,000 trillion of them in you right now.

Understand this much: We are a corporate body.

***

Also this: Humans and worms share an ancestor. We have thousands of genes in common.

We’re family.

***

I can’t stop itching. When it gets bad enough, the attendants give me over-the-counter antihistamines. Not too many. In the meantime, they’ve bandaged my hands to stop me from scratching everywhere, which makes wiping my ass into a hunt-and-hope nightmare. With more itching involved, if I may be so indelicate.

I begged Jayesh to leave my index finger and thumb free to hold a pen, and thank God he did, even though he warned me it would probably be wise to keep this journal hidden. At least writing in it takes my mind off the itching. Helminth tried to convince me that what I’d been feeling was nothing more than delusional parasitosis, or in layman’s terms, he believes I’m full of shit.

But his flat black eyes cut away from me when he said it.

He can’t look me in the face anymore. Not after what happened to Charlie.

***

Charlie had been right. They didn’t let us go.

More to the point, they didn’t let me go. I don’t know about the others. Perhaps we’re all still in the DrugCorp compound, sitting quietly behind our locked doors, but…well, after Charlie, I have to wonder. It’s goddamned silent around here lately.

Could be I’m the only one. Last man standing.

I kind’ve think I am.

Before I got—well, the way I am now—they took me back to my place for one final chance to snag any shit I would need, since it seemed my DrugCorp inpatient stay would be longer than the two weeks originally planned. A hatchet-faced attendant named Carl drove me back, and even though this guy was dressed in plain blue scrubs like the rest of the medical staff, something told me his real job was putting people in the hospital. He stood at the door of my RoughShedd and gave me twenty minutes. Under supervision.

Among other things—clean underwear, my headphones, the book I’d been reading—I managed to grab up my dad’s old hairbrush, the one I now use to scratch myself. Even though I thought of pocketing my cell phone, I knew it would be the first thing Carl would confiscate. Why even bother?

Besides, who could I call? Fucking Ghostbusters?

Instead, I settled on taking this journal, one of those classic black leatherbound books with a built-in pen my dad had bought me several Christmases ago to hold all my brilliant genius insights. Since I hadn’t had any of those, I’d put the journal aside for years and kept it, too guilty to throw it out, too unaccomplished to fill it in. I opened the flap. In his shaky cursive, my dad had written a quote from Kahlil Gibran: “You are the bow from which your children as living arrows are sent forth.”

I thought about this for a while. A very long while.

***

Over the next few weeks, I existed in a holding pattern. The attendants brought me my food whenever I wanted and let me watch or read anything in their library, and every evening, permitted me to walk along the grounds—under supervision by Carl, naturally. In all that time, I saw no other patients.

Yeah, Charlie, you were right. Group activities have been put on permanent hiatus. Damn. There goes the bingo tournament. Still, in those hours I passed alone, the silence was just too silent. Perhaps we had exercise periods at different times. It would make sense if they didn’t want us talking, but…it didn’t feel like there was anyone else in this compound. No other patients, anyway.

For the first months, I had some wicked flashbacks to the early days of Covid quarantine. The isolation. The binge-watching. The restless unease of being trapped inside four walls. About a week or two after the operation, I developed a bout of serious daily nausea, so right after hurling my breakfast—those mild, starchy carbohydrates of song and fame—I slept like someone had slipped me roofies. I’d wake up around ten with my hair in wild tangles and my brain tired and dumb, but by noon, I’d generally be fine, and then the fun would begin the next day.

My thoughts circled back to Charlie, how he’d come from the bathroom looking drab and depleted, but when I examined my own face in the mirror, I actually looked pretty healthy, all things considered. Glowing.

Still, at night, I kept awaking to the memory of Charlie lying on the floor. To that ghastly grey thing quivering in the corner. To those black-tipped stalks that turned on me like angry little eyes.

And behind Charlie, the bloody toilet bowl full to the brim with a host of pink and writhing worms.

I didn’t tell you that before.

Sorry.

***

Then everything changed.

Here is what happened.

I wanted to take a bath. Just a stupid fucking bath. My skin had been driving me crazy all day, and although I’d looked all over for my dad’s brush, it didn’t seem to be anywhere, and it’s not like these patient rooms were the Taj Mahal. There were only so many places it could be.

The only thing that sounded good was a deep soak to ease my aching, itching skin and scrub at it awhile with a warm washcloth. Afterwards, I hoped for some genuinely restful sleep without the sense of something creeping in my flesh.

You know what that’s like. The creeping.

Perhaps it’s a little tickle by your ankle, some twinge on your hand or the back of your neck where your hair hits your collar. You look over, expecting to spot an ant, probably the tiny kind, but there’s nothing. You scratch anyway, maybe poking a pencil down your back, assuming it comes from some half-invisible shirt fiber brushing against you in a draft from the air conditioner.

Then it happens again.

The technical term for this sensation is formication, from the Latin word formica, meaning ant. (It also means “your grandma’s ugly kitchen counter from the 70s,” but that’s a different kind.) In brief, it’s the feeling of bugs crawling on your skin.

Or under it.

Are you squirming now?

Sorry. I have to scratch myself awhile. God, I wish I had my father’s brush.

In any case, whenever I brought up this subject of self-care, Helminth discouraged the bath idea, especially in the last week or so. He explained that at this point it would be better to stick to very quick showers or simple sponge-offs. If I found those difficult, he added, he could have an attendant do it for me. He could call Carl, perhaps, if such assistance were desired.

I did not desire such assistance.

“Fuckit,” I said, and dug in my clothes pile for my towel and a dry pair of sweats for later. Managed to find the brush while I was there. Bonus.

***

I stood before my reflection, not quite understanding what I saw.

In the bathroom, there were two mirrors. One of them hung above the businesslike plastic sink, a relatively small thing with an industrial steel frame meant for shaving, grooming, or quick peeks to check for stray boogers clinging on for a ride. The other, which I’d basically ignored until now, was fixed on the back of the door so you could see how fetching your hairy ass looked hanging out of a hospital gown.

I had made the mistake of taking off my daily uniform of sweats and t-shirt right in front of it and caught sight of myself in full naked glory for the first time in weeks.

They were everywhere. The swellings. I had touched them. I’d seen a few. I hadn't seen them all. Not at once, and not when they were so big. Over my chest, my legs, my stomach, the crook of my knees. Everyplace I’d been itching, in fact. With my bandaged hands, I just hadn’t gotten a sense of their dimensions. Not until now.

Some bulged below the skin like walnuts; others were halved grapefruits or bisected tennis balls. In my armpit sat a pair of them, one atop the other. Another rested in my groin. It was larger than my actual balls and nearly their shade of dark pink, but the largest one swelled from my lower abdomen beneath my partly-healed surgical scar.

But there was more.

At the top of each swelling yawned a little pitted hole, a crater, a pore of some kind opening like a tiny, seeking mouth into my flesh.

“Fuck me,” I whispered to the empty room. “Fuck…me.”

Does it surprise you that I simply turned away from my reflection and started up my bath? You know, lined up my shampoo, my soap, and my washcloth on the side of the tub and never gave one more goddamned moment to those—swellings, or buboes, or whatever the fuck they were?

Oh, sure, I tried to avoid looking at them, but I’ll tell you this. I’d gotten much better in the last few weeks at not reflecting on the stuff I couldn’t change. My dad. Charlie’s death. This place. These things. Buboes. Whatever. I hung my bathrobe on the hook above the mirror so I wouldn’t see myself again, and then I stepped into the bath.

The water rose around me gentle as a kiss. With an audible groan of release, I let myself sink into the warm embrace of the bathtub and relished the hypnotic thrum of the water as it flowed over my feet and licked my back and shoulders. Sweet, I thought. So sweet. I ducked my head under the water and let myself relax and simply float.

The next thing I remember, I was writhing on the bathroom floor in an electric nerve-pain so exquisite and pure it sang like high notes on a manic violin. My cheek was pressed against the pink and blue industrial tiles, and I smelled the scent of fake pine from the cleansers the custodial staff always used. From where I lay, I could spot an old smear of dried blood on the underside of the toilet. Another one was speckling the bottom of the tank. Some undisturbed corner of my mind coldly analyzed these spots and determined they must have come from Charlie.

Someone was screaming. On the floor was a long fingerswipe of gore streaked through with thick yellow streams of bile. I saw my index fingernail had bent almost backward and now dangled by a little twist of flesh like chewed bubblegum, and realized I had clawed my arms and shoulders nearly raw—understood I was still doing it, my fingers scrabbling over my chest, my abdomen, at that third ball between my legs, scratching and raking, and the one who was screaming was me; I was the one screaming, and from beneath my skin, I was screaming.

I was screaming beneath my skin.

Beneath my skin, I felt them start to move. The swellings were alive.

They were not merely wriggling now, tickling me with little itches in a delicate exploration of antennae across skin, probing like gentle hairs for any signs of quiver or twitch. No. They were spasming, squirming, spinning in my flesh, savaging the tissue around them in their blind myoclonic madness inside of me, and I screamed again and could not stop. I remembered the bird-man, the one who howled “KAAAA! KAAAA!” before stabbing his eyes out with a cheap cafeteria fork. Make it staaaaap, I thought. Make it staaaaap.

And below the screaming and the mad sounds, I heard them.

I heard them speak to me.

the water the water the water

no air

we could not breathe

help us help us help

PART FOUR

The worm has turned.

—Old saying

“We call them ‘fuseworms,’” Dr. Helminth explained.

***

Later he said, “I don’t expect you to understand. As a nonscientist, it would be difficult for you to realize the full implication of this research effort. It is more than groundbreaking. It’s—”

Helminth let his voice trail off, but his silence told me all I needed to know. In the moment before he had stopped speaking, those flat black eyes of his shone out with a cold spark of pure avidity. Whatever the results of this inquiry, he wanted this. He wanted this badly. This project could earn millions, even billions. Perhaps it was worth a Nobel Prize or two. Still, the greedy flash revealed one more thing: This research was his baby. His legacy. His chance at immortality.

And every father wants that.

***

As you can guess, I’m writing this conversation a good while after it took place, for reasons I’m sure you’ll figure out soon enough. When Helminth said this, I was lying in my nest—I’ll explain, I swear—and he was standing over me, clipboard in hand, pen clutched between those yielding pale fingers wrapped like boneless tubes around it.

I remembered the dream I’d had. The stark, bright lights of the operating room. The beeping sound of the Foodorium’s self-check. Twelve items or less. Fewer. His white hand squeezing a thick, transparent tube with an end like the mouth of a sandworm.

Hand me the ovipositor.

The tip. The pressure. The insertion. What had he put inside me?

It had been no fucking dream.

I clamped my mouth and kept the scream inside me too. When I was able, I raised my head—but not too much—and murmured, “Your research must be so complex, Doctor.”

When Helminth spoke again, it was as if the stream of his thoughts had been running on an endless loop of speculation, dream, and resentment, a constant silent mind-track waiting only for a chance to voice itself. “Targeted organ regeneration,” he remarked crisply. “Human cells developed within an animal embryo. Cultured all the way to fruition from the merest cellular sample. Brilliant research.”

“Oh—absolutely,” I said, trying to understand. “That’s amazing.” I tried to envision this. “So you were…putting human cells in animals? To grow human organs? Like…spare parts?” I didn’t know if this guess was even close. More to the point, I couldn’t see how it fit together with what they’d done to me. To Charlie. To all of us.

Helminth chuckled mildly. “Somewhat crudely put, but accurate. We were exploring the use of embryonic animals as growth sites for high-demand human organs intended for transplant. As you know, donors are in perpetually short supply. Being able to meet that demand would be transformative. The research was brilliant,” he said. “Brilliant. So naturally those experiments were met with bureaucratic resistance. And naturally, NIH cut off the funding.” He gave a bitter little sniff.

After a moment, Helminth continued. “Fortunately, there were other sources more than willing to underwrite our efforts. Well-funded sources. You understand, people so often assume defunding research is the same as preventing that research, but no. The two are not the same.”

“So you found…deeper pockets?” I said and tried my best to make it sound admiring.

“Indeed.”

I thought about my RoughShedd, of thousand-room mansions, of Happy Fun Ramens. I remembered my plasma, golden as movie popcorn, hanging in a bag I’d bled into just so I could eat. I thought of billionaire penis rockets in space. I wondered how many ramens just one of those rockets could buy.

Would people like that be willing to pay for their own lab-grown replacement parts? Some hearts or lungs or nuts or whatever they wanted? I believed they would. I could hear the ad copy now. (“It’s locally sourced!”) I imagined a giant sterile DrugCorp lab filled with jars of fetal pigs growing clones of human organs.

“So these donors must have been visionaries,” I said. “Interested in the real discoveries. The ones you made.” This was only a shot in the dark, but I had nothing to lose.

In answer, I caught the briefest twitch of Helminth’s smile. “They were interested in the real research. Growing organs was only a preliminary step, but I had—well. A further idea. A more ambitious approach.”

“More ambitious?”

He nodded. “You see, it’s one thing to replace an organ. But what if you never needed to do so? What if the body could simply…renew itself? Forever?”

I frowned. “How would it do that? I mean…”

“Up to a point, our bodies do this job quite well already.” Helminth shrugged. “We get cut, we bleed, we scab, we scar, and then we heal. Natural course of things. This goes on for a long time. Then inevitably, we age. Our muscles degenerate. Our joints begin to weaken. Our brain plaques increase. Our hearts stop beating. Our kidneys shut down.”

“Okay, I see, but then why—”

“This process is common to nearly every living creature,” he said, almost nostalgically. “But not to all of them. You perhaps did not know this.”

I perhaps did not.

“In fact, some animals possess certain genomic features that render them effectively immortal.”

“But then how—”

“And investigating the research into organ regeneration, I conceived of a revolutionary idea. What if we could modify our own cellular mechanics at the level of the stem cell and ultimately create—well. A new and improved model. A better human. An entity whose cells never degenerated, never wore out despite however many copies of itself it made. One that simply kept on living.” His eyes glittered. “Don’t you suppose this might have some commercial appeal?”

I did. Definitely to the penis rocket crew.

“When it came to me,” said Helminth, “the solution was absurdly simple.”

Through the veil of fatigue and horror, I struggled to find the memory of that first orientation meeting in the conference room where Helminth had outlined the basics of the drug study for all of us lab rats. Charlie had snagged a few free donuts from the table in the back and sat beside me in the hard plastic chairs to watch the PowerPoint presentation. As for myself, I had glommed onto the ten-dollar words Helminth was using so that when I talked to my dad, I’d sound like I knew what I was talking about.

What was a five-letter word for the end of a shoelace?

“What solution was it?” I managed, and bit back the retort, What did you put inside me, you fucking bastard?

***

“First,” Dr. Helminth began, “I started by investigating [redacted re dac ted redacted redacted red act ed  r ed ac te d redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted and connected this with [redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted  redacted ] and then pluripotent adult stem cells in planarian regeneration [redactedredacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted d] and of course, like certain varieties of marine animals such as starfish, [redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted re dacted]  of worms have the ability to regrow themselves infinitely even if cut into tiny bits[.” redacted red acted redacted redacted redacted redacted]He chuckled. “Chop their heads in half, and they’ll regrow two more, each with its own memory. [redacted redacted redacted redacted reda redac ted r ed acte d  re da ct ed red acted  reda cte d r eda cted cted redacted] I mean, humans already share approximately 70% of their DNA with certain species of deep-sea worms already, so really, it was relatively simple to [so redacted redacte d  red acted  reda c ted  reda cted  redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted] constant cellular renewal. [redacted redacted redacted redacted redacte d red acted  red acted  red acted  reda cted  red acted   redac ted  re dac ted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted] So this, naturally, is where our research began: not by putting human stem cells in animals, which would prove somewhat cumbersome, but rather, by putting pluripotent worm cells into [redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted] neoblasts [redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted] telomerase [edacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted redacted r edacted redacted redacted redacted redacted.”

***

I didn’t understand everything Helminth said. I can’t remember it all. I’m sure I blocked it out in a DrugCorp version of PTSD. Call it “post-traumatic species disorder.”

All I could do was lie there. Exhausted from what had happened to me in the bathtub and whatever they’d done to me thereafter, it required a massive effort to think, to impress ideas on my memory, to stay awake through the pull of the pain and the drugs and the experience and remember, remember, remember. For once, I wished I could take notes.

In the meantime, I had my father’s journal.

Here’s what I got.

They were growing people.

As I’d explained to my dad, each time our chromosomes divide, they lose information at the telomeres, the little chromosome ends that wear out more and more with every replication. Those worn-out telomeres are the cause of cellular decay. Aging. Alzheimer’s. Death. As my dad had observed, those telomeres need aglets.

Helminth had found some. He’d found a way to make those telomeres last forever.

To make people last forever.

Well. Some people, anyway.

“Effectively speaking,” Helminth said, “our process eliminates the Hayflick limit as a factor in cellular reproduction, because the use of telomerase with human somatic cells effectively immortalizes them. In other words, with our process, any cell can simply divide and divide without limitation.” His voice became lighter, seemed to float above us like a golden cloud.

Divide without limitation.

Like a PDF. Just make copy after copy after copy. No more aging. No more death.

If you had the money.

And if you didn’t? Perhaps it was more like a disease. A parasite. I remembered my mother, her relentlessly dividing cancer cells that turned her breasts to tumors.

“But why?” I said, half-raising myself from the floor to look at him better. Inside me, the—the other things—shifted in protest, and I settled back down. “What is it really for? Jesus, is it really…?” I was going to say really just to make wealthy dickwads immortal, but knew it would be the wrong tactic.

“What is it for?” said Helminth, and I realized he was offended at the question. “So many applications, of course.” He looked at his watch. He was done with me. “But mainly one. Obviously, our research has implications for longevity. However, we can do more than merely grow an organ or two. Of particular interest to our very largest donors is that this process allows us to create—well, let’s just call it a reliable workforce. A very reliable workforce.” He crossed his fingers, looking entirely satisfied.

“A workforce?” I flashed for a moment on the JobsList postings. What was Helminth’s crew creating? An army of dog poop removal specialists? Urine-collecting RV drivers? On-call help for Emiliano? Tucker Carlson fans?

“A very reliable workforce,” Helminth repeated. “You must understand how important that is. In light of the Great Resignation, I’m sure you see the need for a workforce that corporations can count on to—well. To work.”

Stunned, I could only nod and think of JobsList.

“Bottom line,” he said, “the world needs workers. Ones that never wear out. Ones that need little training. Ones that never complain or demand bathroom breaks or time off for good behavior. A reliable worker for a distribution center, perhaps, one for whom insurance and safety considerations are essentially immaterial.” Helminth chuckled. “Given climate change, a labor force such as this will be even more relevant. Why, we could send them to clean up Chernobyl if we wanted.”

Must Bring Own PPE. Masks a Plus! I thought, and bit the inside of my lip to keep myself from screaming.

“And of course,” Helminth added with a final click of his pen, “given the probable future progress of the pandemics, our new beings will function very well as drug test subjects.”

***

When Helminth finally left, the room was silent.

Almost.

I didn’t like the light turned on these days. There were so many reasons why.

Let me explain.

***

After my abortive attempt to take a full bath—you remember, the one that ended with my screaming on the bathroom floor, shades of Charlie and Mr. Kaaa the Fork Man—they wheeled my ass out of there with a quickness. As the med-bed rolled down the corridor, I understood that at least one of my guesses had been dead right, no pun intended: all the other patient rooms were dark. I was the last man standing. Or in this case, the last man screaming.

They hustled me into the surgery, and without any gentle murmurs to count back from a hundred, they clapped a plastic mask onto my face, and out I went.

When I woke up, I was in my old room again, but things were…different.

For starters, the place was almost empty. Oh, my chair was there, and the table. The vital signs monitor was there (lonely for its twin now that Charlie was gone), but both the beds had been taken out altogether.

And as for me? Why, they had placed me on the floor. Yeah, straight on the tile, laid out on a cushiony pad made from a double set of gym mats covered with hospital sheets and at least one middle layer of those crinkly blue pee pads for good measure. As for the monitor and IV, they’d lowered the stands to kiddie level. For a moment, I felt the oddest sense of shrinking.

They had placed me on my side, my legs drawn up in a fetal position, my head propped up on a foam positioning block. With a shock, I understood that this was to help me breathe.

You see, I wasn’t able to move much. I could take a breath and let it out. I was able to swallow, move my eyes, and shift around a little bit, but this was about all. And it was about then I noticed I was naked, not like the hospital gown had ever done much except breeze my backside. At least they gave me one hell of a warm down blanket, I thought, soft and silky as golden baby hair.

That’s when I realized it was no blanket. It was a cocoon.

And it was coming out of me.

I tried to understand, to be rational and calm, but my breath was catching in my throat, and I couldn’t breathe because I was breathing too fast, if this makes any sense.

What the hell had they put in me?

That was when I’d called for Dr. Helminth.

Bellowed for him, actually.

***

[Later. Much later.]

Dad, if you ever read this journal, I want you to understand something, okay? It didn’t hurt. I know it sounds like it must have hurt. It really didn’t. I swear, it really didn’t.

God, Dad, I hope you never read this.

If you do…remember that I love you. I always have. I always will.

***

For a few hours after Helminth left, I didn’t move. I didn't have much choice.

That’s when I noticed something was moving. It wasn’t me. It was my skin. Moving by itself.

I’ve mentioned before about being covered with red blotches. Buboes, I’d called them, little purple-red skin volcanoes topped by a tiny caldera mouth like grey-rimmed pores. Those buboes were rippling now, bubbling like cheese on lasagna, and they’d grown larger, their taut skin surfaces transparent.

And below them moved the other things. So many things. Squirming.

You remember how in dreams you try to scream, but you can’t?

I know.

From my mouth came a wheezing gasp, a proto-scream, a silent dream scream. Below my neck, my body was not my own. It moved of its own accord, and when some horrible, speckled column abruptly jerked up near my stomach with a momentary contraction, it took me a moment to realize that I was watching my own upper leg coming toward me.

As I lay there, my back heaved and flexed, stretched and thrashed, my legs pulling up to my straining stomach again and again, tensing my frame like a slingshot pulled taut before it let me go, my muscles loosening in sweet release for just a few soothing seconds of respite before the clutching happened again.

In rhythmic pulses, the pressure around my abdomen increased and released as if being squeezed like that tube Helminth called the ovipositor, the thing he’d put inside of me to deliver that heart-shaped package that throbbed and thrummed in time with the machine I’d imagined was the self-checkout at the Foodorium’s express lane. Less. Fewer. Countless as stars.

I may have crapped myself.

And when the first golden thing emerged from me, I screamed.

***

The last one took a while. By the end, there were thirteen.

Thirteen golden things. Thirteen golden ones all linked to me, their tails buried deep inside the pores in which they had grown. The pores I’d grown them in.

Their heads had come out first, swaying and poking with the resolute blind questing of a turtle for the sea, a bird for the beak. They dangled out of me like dates on a palm or drops of sweet, wild honey from the comb.

Their skin, warm and delicate as blisters, encased a body of living amber gold the color of plasma. The last one to emerge was the largest. From the red swelling growth below my navel where the stitches had been, she emerged head-first into the world, shoving herself out of me the way a woman shucks off a too-tight girdle from around her curving hips.

Hanging from me, the golden ones moved and waved below my ribs, gently bumping each other, drawing into themselves in tiny squirming segments before expanding outwards. On either side of their heads were twin dark spots. They were not eyes, I thought, but more like pores for light.

Their proboscises delicately sampled the air, the sheet below me, the touch of my hands, each one seeking, bodies meeting, twisting, and finally resting in fleshy, flaccid splendor on my belly, chest, and legs where they dangled from me like a row of golden penises.

I curled about them on the mat. My tears were hot as they fell on their perfect amber skin.

My children.

I had never seen anything so beautiful.

***

Later, they awakened. Or I did. By that point, each of them had ventured out of me, dropping fully out onto the mat and leaving me oddly empty and bereft. The pockets in which they had grown hung empty from me now like a row of deflated balloons, all wrinkled and sad. They’d clustered close to me and to each other beneath the golden fibers of the warm cocoon I’d spun from my flesh, skin upon skin, tail over tail. Outside, the world was silent and asleep, and there was no one in the universe but us.

I stroked their silken skin with a single finger. Their tiny backs arched to meet me.

I perceived their voices in my mind, a murmur gentle as the beating of their hearts. It was the pattern of their thoughts. They thought of warmth and breath, the scent of my flesh, the gold of our cocoon.

And then I saw them wake. All at once, their golden heads lifted from the surface of the mat, and from them came a low hum. I felt it in my bones, a deep oscillation, a dark pulsation at the edges of perception. It felt as if I was hearing the music my blood made from inside my body. The song of my flesh. They were singing it back to me.

They reared up, those black light-pore eyes all fixed on mine, and the largest of them was in the center. It was she who’d wakened first. And I heard them, God, I heard them, and they said

we                               we                               we

we                               wewewe          we                                           we       we

we                                                                   we                   we

Their heads moved in unison like a corps of dancers, turning toward me. Learning my thoughts. Working my words. Meshing with flesh. Seeing me. Knowing me. Remembering what I knew. Knowing what I remembered. And then I heard their golden voices say

daddy              daddy                          daddy

daddy                                daddydaddydaddy                   daddy  daddy

daddy                                                              daddy                          daddy

daddy

***

They are sleeping. Or at least, I believe it is sleep.

Now I can write. Jayesh passed me my journal hidden underneath my breakfast tray, explaining he’d lifted it before the other attendants had cleared the furniture from the room, thank God. He is so kind.

It took me a day or so after—what would you even call it? Their emergence? Their hatching?—to move again under my own steam, to stretch myself, to go to the bathroom. If I want, I can take a real bath now. I actually do, but I never leave my children for long. I don’t want anyone to inspect them, especially not Helminth.

As I may have mentioned, in the hours after they first came out, they preferred to stay half-inside me. They would sleep, their tails embedded in my flesh, their heads poking from the little pores I now realize were their airways. I assume they breathe through their skin, but I can’t tell. They do breathe.

And they eat.

What comes out of me—out of the pores, anyway—is a steady trickle of whitish fluid. In some lights, it looks almost pearlescent, a liquid smelling of the earth or the sea. When they feed, they burrow back inside me, blindly nuzzling through the hair on my chest or the strands of the cocoon to nourish themselves.

And in that moment, I realize they are literally made of me. They are built from my flesh. Endoparasites. Endosymbionts. They ate my body to make their bodies. They took my flesh and turned it into gold.

They are me. I am them.

My children.

***

“You have to eat, Mr. [reda   cted],” Jayesh admonished. “Please. Dr. Helminth has been asking questions. I’ve done what I could to allay his concerns, stop him from examining you personally, but…please. You have to eat.”

He had come in with the breakfast cart, entering after a soft knock on the door, his face furrowed with concern as he saw me lying naked on the floor covered only by the cocoon. “Are you comfortable, Mr.[redanncted]?” asked Jayesh, moving to the thermostat on the wall. I saw he found it hard to look at me, but when he did, his frown deepened, and I knew it was because I’d lost a little weight. Okay, a lot of weight.

“I understand it might be difficult to eat right now,” Jayesh added, glancing briefly at the IV monitor stand in the corner, “but…well, you don’t want them to put you on TPN. Really.”

I frowned. “TPN?”

“Total parenteral nutrition,” said Jayesh, almost apologetically. “Dinner through an IV tube. Dr. Helminth has mentioned this as a possible treatment option if conventional methods don’t work. Please trust me, Mr. [red  acted]. It’s not fun.”

“Okay,” I sighed. “Chef’s choice, Jayesh. Hey. Thank you for running interference with Helminth. I’m serious. And for God’s sake, please call me Nick, all right? I owe you big-time, so we should probably be on a first-name basis. I mean, if you want to be. What do you recommend?”

I started with the protein shake, some vanilla thing tasting like a cross between melted ice cream and melted plastic. Still, it was better than nothing. At least I was able to make it go down and stay there. As of late, eating sounded oddly unappealing, a bizarre alien act of crushing muscle and plant tissue between exposed bone bits in your mouth and mingling it with digestive juice. Yummy.

Jayesh bent down to take the remains of the protein shake, and I noticed his eyes running over the delicate gold filaments of the cocoon. It lay like a cloud over everyone, the others resting beside me in a content little row like baguettes in an oven.

For the last day or so, they’d begun to venture farther away from me when it was light. At night, they came close to me to sleep. They no longer needed to half-crawl back inside the empty pockets in my skin, though some simply preferred it, as did the last and largest one I’d grown below my navel. She liked it there and stayed there when she could. The golden queen. I had named her Victoria.

Jayesh’s eyes met mine, and they were full of kind concern.

“Is there anyone I should contact for you, Nick?” His voice was barely audible. “Someone who—would help you, just in case you—” Jayesh broke off.

I looked up at him. “I’m not sure,” I said, matching his whisper. Were there cameras? I thought it was a distinct possibility, but I wasn’t sure. At the very least, there might be audio recorders. “Maybe my dad?” I whispered his name, his number, and Jayesh repeated them back as he pretended to take my pulse and vitals.

“Why are you doing this?” I asked him. “Why go out of your way?”

After a moment, he glanced at the golden ones beside me. “You care for them,” he said, and it was not a question. “You love them.”

I nodded. There was nothing more to say.

With a furtive glance over his shoulder, Jayesh bent close and lowered his voice again. “I overheard them talking,” he murmured. “Doctor Helminth and the others. What are you going to do, Nick?”

I frowned. “What am I going to do when?”

“When they—” Jayesh gestured helplessly at the sleeping ones. “When they take them away. For the experiments.”

“They wouldn’t—” I began. “They wouldn’t do that.”

***

Spoiler alert: They would.

Later, I woke to the sound of the door swinging open. Dr. Helminth entered, stepping briskly over to where I lay surrounded by the dozen golden ones who’d ventured out onto the mat. “Good evening, Mr. [redacted],” he said in his officious way. “Please count to ten for me,” Over my face, he slid the anesthesia mask, and before I could react, the world fell black and silent, and I could not sense my golden children’s voices or their hum.

***

I don’t remember much of the next twelve hours. I only know it wasn’t good.

When I finally came to, I was in my room, lying in the same place I’d been when they had drugged me. It wasn’t me Helminth had wanted. He’d left me there alone like a forgotten sock.

Jayesh had been right. It had been the children. He had taken them. My children.

I awoke to the deepest loss in my life, a loss that ripped my heart in two, and when I understood the depths of this betrayal, my legs simply folded underneath me, and I collapsed like a stringless puppet and howled. I bellowed in rage. I remember I pounded at the locked door, slamming my fists into the wood until some small bone in my hand gave way, and now I can’t sleep.

I listened and listened, and at a great distance, I caught the faintest sound of my golden ones, my children, their little sweet pips and peeps, their voices, their low hums. And then

then I heard       o god o god o god

hisses          hisses and

screams

and screams                      why

screams               fear                         why      why

fearpain                       no                    no nono

daddy where

And then a silence worse than anything.

***

Perhaps you’ve wept like I did. Like boiling rage.

Have you ever noticed how hot those tears are? How caustic? My eyelids are almost swollen shut now, and I can’t touch my nose without wincing.

The golden cocoon is in shreds.

***

At the end, I realized I was weeping for them all, for all the golden ones with their soft voices and their gentle hums, but also for the rest. For Charlie with his warm brown eyes and logrolled t-shirts. For Mr. Kaaa. For my father with his Sudoku and his glass of evening Scotch.

And for me.

They were gone. All gone.

Except for one.

***

That night, I saw him. Charlie.

“Aw hell, Nicky. Of course those sonsabitches will do it again,” he said. He was sitting at the edge of the mat, running his fingers through the tattered golden strands of the cocoon.

I half-raised myself on my elbow and stared into the darkness. My voice was still ragged from all the crying and the screams. Even whispering was proving a little difficult, but I tried. “Charlie, where are—what happened to you?”

He chuckled. “Let’s not be dumb, son. You know what happened to me. Don’t waste my time on that shit.” He waved his hand dismissively. “Look. You turned me down on my fabulous Escape from Devil’s Island plan once before, all right? I get why. Still, you’ve gotta admit it. These folks are never going to let you go, Nick. You know that by now.” The pitted skin of his cheeks looked silver in the beams of light through my window. “Why should they? You’re the only one it’s ever worked for. You got a peek at those empty rooms in the corridor.”

I nodded. Inside her pouch, I felt Victoria stirring.

Before they’d taken the others, she’d hidden there from Helminth just in time. Instinct, possibly. Or perhaps she simply knew. And Jayesh, tasked with inventorying the golden ones and removing them to Helminth’s central lab, had taken all but her. He’d been trapped, like I was, but he’d left the one he could. He did that for me. I didn’t blame Jayesh. He didn’t have much of a choice. And he had protected Victoria.

Since that horrible awakening of yesterday, Victoria had stayed coiled inside me, sleeping. Or mourning. Or simply huddled away from the winds of my rage and my sorrow. I ran my hand over her undulant bulk, the reassuring movement there that told me she lived, that she loved me.

“You’re their cash cow, Nick. Their very own brood mare,” said Charlie. “And for all intents and purposes, my friend, you’re DrugCorp property now. They own your skinny ass like the army owned mine. You’re making the fat cats fatter, just like all the rest of us slobs.”

I opened my mouth to deny him, but then shut it.

“And when they can’t use you anymore,” he said gently, “you realize what’ll happen, don’t you, son?”

I gave a bitter laugh. “I’ll be shot trying to escape?”

Charlie shook his head. “Naah. I considered that, but no. In the end, I think it’ll be more like this. Some cops’ll find your body under a bridge. You’ll be the victim of an unfortunate Fentanyl overdose or some shit. Poor young drug addict taken down in the prime of his life, and all. No one knew. He seemed like such a nice boy.” His voice was rough, but his eyes looked sad as he said it.

I could picture it. That was the thing. It would be easy enough to do. The cops would show up on my father’s front porch, their eyes cast downward, their hats removed in reverence for the dead. My father would cry. I’d known that before, but it hit me harder now.

“And if they really want to conceal evidence,” Charlie continued, “and I bet they will, the cops’ll find you three weeks later floating in the river after the fishies have eaten out your eyes—and any suspicious incisions or additions.” Something in his face made me guess he was remembering the burned soldier, the one in Kuwait. He patted my shoulder. “Okay, son. You know what to do.”

“No, Charlie, I don’t,” I said, awkwardly wiping my cheeks with the inside of my t-shirt. “I didn’t prepare for any of this shit. I don’t know what to do at fucking all.”

“You do.”

And in the silence spreading out beneath the moonlight, I suddenly did.

While Victoria slept, Charlie talked to me a long time, sometimes in his own voice, sometimes in my dad’s. But you know what? A lot of the time, he spoke to me in my own voice, and I answered him that way.

That may be the real legacy of fathers. Right there.

I hoped I would be a good father too.

The light had slowly changed from silver to the faintest blue when Charlie stood to go. He was dressed as I’d first seen him in the DrugCorp waiting room, half-rimmed glasses and all. In his hands, he held a scrap of the cocoon and ran the golden filaments between his fingers. “Damn,” he said. “This sure is a pretty thing. Did it come from them? Or did it come from you?

I shook my head. “I assume it was from both of us. From the combination.”

Charlie chuckled. “Funny,” he said. “In all my born days, I’ve never known a regular ol’ worm to make a thing like this.” His gaze fell on me again. It came to rest on the bulge that was Victoria. “You sure that’s a worm you got inside there after all? Well. I wonder what she’d change into, given time?”

PART FIVE

The smallest worm will turn, being trodden on,

And doves will peck in safeguard of their brood.

—William Shakespeare, Henry VI, Part Six

With any luck, this entry is my last. I’m taking this journal with me just in case. If I make it out of this godforsaken compound—again, with any luck—the next person to read it will have an “Esq.” after their name. We’ll be sitting in some pleasant legal offices downtown, the kind with leather chairs and real wood desks, the sort of firm made profitable by suing deep-pocket companies like DrugCorp.

And oh, do I have a hell of a story to tell them.

“Here,” I’ll say to the lawyer, handing over my journal.

“And here,” I’ll say somewhat later, opening up my shirt at the abdomen to show her my scars. My pouch. My child.

With any luck.

***

You see, Charlie was right. They were going to do it again.

I found this out sooner than I’d thought.

I’d been out for a walk that morning, a light stroll around the grounds that brought me near the part of the wall overlooking the supply road Charlie had taken on his own abortive escape. For a while now, I’d been scoping out that road. I’d take my walks at different times of the day to get a sense of who was watching it and when. It used to be Carl Meat Clot, but when it appeared that I posed no major threat, I started to see Perky Meal Card or Jayesh, who’d wave to me.

What’s more, I’d figured out enough to understand something important. Those deep pockets belonging to Helminth’s benefactors weren’t deep enough to finance more than a skeleton staff, especially with all of us lab rats gone or dead.

Except me.

I kept this in mind.

***

When I returned from my walk, I found they’d cleared out my room again. The standard-issue patient bed had been moved back. As before, it had been made up with pleasant-looking sheets and a blue quilt with matching pillows. The room smelled tangy with pine cleaner, and every trace of the golden cocoon was now gone.

I thought of Charlie running those strands between his fingers. I’d forgotten to keep any of it.

For a raw flash, I stood at the door in a cold sweat wondering if they’d found my journal this time, but I knew they hadn’t. I’d tucked it safely away into the waistband of my underwear, right below the pouch that held Victoria. That, of course, was another hurry-me-up: She was getting bigger every day. Soon, not even the baggiest sweats would conceal her.

Kids grow up so fast.

What I noticed immediately, though, was Helminth sitting on the edge of the bed with his eternal clipboard. He stood and gave me a formal nod. “So,” he said, by way of beginning. “We find you sufficiently recovered by this point, Mr. [Reda cted]. We’re very pleased with your progress. In fact…” he murmured, flipping a page of his printouts, “your attendant Jayesh has been diligent about reporting your condition. He mentioned that your overall appetite and affect are remarkably improved, and you seem in tip-top shape. Very good to hear. Very good.”

I blinked. “Sure,” I said after a minute. “Yeah, sure. Ah…thank you. I guess.”

There was the briefest skeptical flicker of his eyebrows, but he added, “We’re glad to hear you’re on board with our mission. Compliance is important, as I’m sure you know, and given recent events, we were somewhat worried about your…desire to continue with our research. We were worried about our ability to proceed with you.”

Helminth’s eyes swept up and down my frame, much thinner now than it had been when I’d first signed up for this shit, and I squirmed uncomfortably under his gaze, resisting the astonishingly strong urge to cross my arms over my stomach so he couldn’t see it.

“Right,” I said, almost a beat too late. “Yeah, um. Sure.”

In the pocket below my navel, Victoria stirred to full awareness as Helminth spoke and kept on speaking. He was clicking his pen, checking off items about pre-operation protocols, the recovery times expected for a second procedure, the certainty of multiple procedures after that.

I was their cash cow, after all, just as Charlie had said. Property of DrugCorp.

He rattled on, but his words were becoming increasingly harder and harder to make out. I tried to concentrate, but above and around it all was the sound of Victoria, a low subaural hum rising in a titanic wave in my mind from a pulsing, polyphonic drone to a full-on screaming shriek overriding all other senses.

Her sound rose and drowned them out, all the clipped and formal syllables of Dr. Helminth, the click of his pen, the shuffle of pages on the clipboard, the beat of my heart, the sound of my breath, and all the sound in my ears was the hum and the hum and the HUM and the HUM and these words forming in my brain as if chipped from blocks of sound these words these words these

hisses          hisses and

screams

and screams                      why

screams               fear                         why      why

fearpain                       no                    no nono

daddy where

and finally, hammering like a beating artery through my head, pounding so hard I was sure it would split in half, I heard Victoria, Victoria calling to me, saying

CloserCloserCloser

Closer closer

And almost without thinking, I found myself drawn nearer to Helminth.

I came close to him, as near as I’d ever been to him while conscious. I saw the flat black eyes set deeply in his face, the skull that seemed to come to an odd little point at the top of his head, the nose disappearing into the flaccid flesh of his cheeks, and

closer closer closer

Helminth may have said something. He may have asked, “What are you doing, Mr. [Red acted]?” but nothing existed but the drone and the fury and the hum…

…and suddenly I knew exactly what to do, and the thought flashing across my mind was so pure and clear that I smiled. I’m certain I was smiling. I came to Helminth and lowered the band of my sweatpants just enough to

just to

you know

(we thought)

come CLOSER

When it happened, it was quick. From the pit of my stomach I felt a hard flex, and something shot out from below my waistband. It was a long, thin tube shining like a foot-length shard of obsidian, a great black needle that launched out of me and planted itself deeply in Helminth’s straining gut, in the depths of that formless, boneless body before me, pinning him like a bug.

The needle had come from Victoria.

She hung there half-out of the pouch, clutching and pumping, pumping and clutching again as the tube emerging from her body dug deeper into Helminth’s flesh, her rippling golden skin oozing and stretching down the length of its segments, then retracting and retreating and pumping him full of poison.

Helminth’s eyes never left mine, never lost that look of shocked surprise. I saw his hands stutter up as if to beat her away, to draw out the tube wedding us together in this infernal and intimate union, but though his arms rose, they stiffened, jittered, spasmed, and fell uselessly at his sides.

With a choking gasp, he slumped down, the long thin proboscis sliding out of him with a little wet snik. The dark needle retracted into Victoria’s body, telescoping into itself like a radio antenna. Remember those? Radios? My father still listens to NPR that way. I stared at Helminth’s open eyes a moment, watching him squirm and twist on the ground, a boneless ghost, an old white thing.

But the skin of his face was turning grey already.

He was, as you’d say, worm food.

***

Gotta make this fast. Whoever’s reading this—if anyone ever does—I hope to God I made it out okay. Maybe it’s Jayesh reading this, and you found this journal somehow. If so, I’m sorry I didn’t take you out for a beer and pizza sometime like friends. You saved my life, Jayesh, and I hope I can save yours. Or perhaps the person reading this is my lawyer, and I handed this to you over your nice mahogany desk. Or you’re just some random hiker who found this journal beside my rotted bones under a creosote bush in the desert. If this is the case, please—if you can read what I’ve written here, would you call my father, whose name is [reldkfj lskadl l al dacted], and whose phone number is [###-###-####]? Please, just give him a call and tell him—tell him I loved him. Tell him I’m sorry.

If he’s still alive by the time you find this.

Fuck.

***

I thought of one more thing.

If you’re reading this, then it’s possible you’re someone—or even something—altogether different. Something altogether new. A different kind of creature altogether.

If so, this may be your story too.

Your origin story.

***

When I left the compound, it would have to be by the supply road. If they caught me, as they had with Charlie, I suspected security wouldn’t just be Jayesh in a golf cart. No. This time, it would be an actual jeep, probably one driven by my best buddy Carl Meat Clot.

And when they discovered Helminth’s body, what then?

Oh, it would be worse. Much worse. With Helminth gone, the research project was—well, it was dead meat. And as for me? Well, I was a liability now, wasn’t I? A loose end. A very loose end.

I might really be shot trying to escape.

After all, what had the signs on the road to DrugCorp’s compound said? USE OF DEADLY FORCE IS AUTHORIZED.

But if they tried to do that, I had one more card to play.

I reached into the pouch for the soft warmth of Victoria. At my touch, she gently squirmed, then settled down to sleep.

What was she, this strange golden creature? Her skin was dry and smooth, the buttery yellow of a desert poppy, a sunbeam seen through early-morning curtains.

I remembered my father sitting with me on a perfect summer day with light like that, reading to me from an old book smelling of warm brown paper. He still had it there in his living room bookshelf. I’d noticed it when I’d visited him last.

The book had been my favorite. In it, there was an old legend about a king who was jealous of a starfish. It had been foretold by a soothsayer that the king’s domain would be taken over by creatures with more children than stars in the sky, so when this first starfish appeared along the beach one day, the king, fearing the prophecy, had ordered its immediate death. “Did you do it?” the king demanded of his executioner. “Yes, my lord!” the man replied proudly. “I chopped him into bits, and then I threw him out to sea!”

Then my father explained what starfish do if they lose a limb. What lizards do if they lose a tail.

What worms do if they’re cut into a hundred pieces.

They grow.

Yes, I had one more card to play, and my father and Charlie had given it to me, as they had given me so many other things.

What had Charlie said on that dark night drive to this place? Oh, yes. He’d spotted the warning signs along the road and been afraid of IEDs lying dormant in the desert. He had been worried they’d blow him into bits, so he’d stayed on the road, and that’s how they’d caught him. He’d been afraid of the explosives.

Not me, though. Oh, not me. You see, if they blew me up, I’d just die.

But not Victoria.

“Do you see, Victoria? Do you understand?” I whispered. “You,” I said. “You are a starfish.” And would she take over the kingdom? Would she and her children be countless as the stars in the sky?

I thought they might.

What strange new creature was she, after all?

As I pushed open the door to the cold evening, the air tasted of freedom.

At the touch of my hand, Victoria arched out from the pouch and extended herself. Twisting around, she looked at me with those two black dots of eyes. I hoped she understood. I hoped she did. She was made of me. She was my child, my golden one, my living arrow sent into the world.

She was my legacy.

***

[NOTE: FURTHER SUPPORTING DOCUMENTATION INCLUDING LKASDFJ LADKFJ AND ALKDFJADLKFJ AND THE TESTIMONY OF OF LK ADJF MAY BE ACQUIRED ONLY BY DIRECT PETITION TO THE APPROPRIATE PARTIES. OTHER INFORMATION MAY BE OBTAINED ONLY BY LEGAL SUBPOENA. END DOCUMENT.] 

Acknowledgements

Very few books are written alone, and certainly not this one. Throughout writing what I called "my weird worm baby story," I've been fortunate and deeply grateful to have had some invaluable help, and I'm glad for the chance to thank them here. 

First, to Sadie "Mother Horror" Hartmann and Joe Sullivan of Cemetery Gates Media, I owe an enormous and heartfelt debt of gratitude for taking a chance on this odd little tale. Thank you for loving the "wee voices" of the golden ones, and most of all, thank you for believing I could do it. I needed that. Major thanks to Kristina of Truborn Designs for your fantastic cover and Ryan Mills for your interior artwork—you’ve helped bring this work to life.

To the Under the Tree crew—Leslie, Jamie, Robert, and Steve—I’m grateful beyond words for all the times you patiently read my emailed manuscripts. Sorry if I made it hard for you to sleep. Well, sorta.

And of course, I could not have written this without my family, who thoughtfully kept the coffee flowing and the house standing and made it possible for me to have the space and time to watch more horrifying parasite videos than I can name.

Most of all to Louis, my first, best reader. I love you always.

R.A. Busby is a Shirley Jackson Award-winning writer. She spends her spare time running in the desert with her dog and finding weird things to write about. You can follow her on Twitter @RABusby1 and check out her website at rabusbybooks.weebly.com.