Infected Page 32

It was just a strange rash, that’s all. He’d go to the doctor and get it cleared up. Might take a shot or two, but it probably wouldn’t be worse than the gonorrhea and syphilis tests he’d had in college.

Gathering his courage, he let his fingers explore the area. It felt firm and unnatural. This wasn’t something a shot of penicillin could clear up, because it wasn’t just on the surface. He felt something inside his s.c.r.o.t.u.m, something that had never been there before, something just under the thick orange skin.

A coppery chill hit Perry as he realized, suddenly and with perfect clarity, that he was going to die. Whatever this s.h.i.t was, it was going to kill him, slowly, as it grew into his sac and up into his d.i.c.k. A terror sat

inside him now, growing just as surely as the Magnificent Seven grew, creating a dark, cold, shaky vibration in his soul.

Breathe, he told himself. Just breathe. Control yourself. Discipline. He forced himself to let go of the nasty, growing, firm lump and the thick orange skin. That peculiar mental fuzziness overtook him again, and he stared at the wall with a blank expression.

Without conscious thought, he clutched the tweezers and viciously jabbed them into the side of his thigh. The needlelike points slid effortlessly into the skin and poked out through the top of the scab-wound. Perry screamed in pain; his mind cleared — he realized both what he was doing and what he had to do.

He ripped the tweezers free. Bright red blood streaks flew in all directions, landing on his linoleum floor like tiny threads, as did thin wet strands of a much darker red, so dark it looked . . . purple.

Blood (and purple) trickled down his leg. He set the tweezers on the counter and yanked free a rolling wad of toilet paper, which he pressed firmly into the wound. The paper turned bright red. The bleeding quickly subsided.

Perry gently lifted the wad of b.l.o.o.d.y paper. The stabbing tweezers had ripped through the orangish skin, leaving a thick, torn piece sticking up from the center.

This thing had to go, and it had to go right motherf.u.c.king now. Play through the pain.

He fastened the tweezers around the flap of orange skin, squeezed

tightly, and yanked as hard as he could. Ripping, clawing pain shot through his leg, but he smiled with satisfaction as the orange flesh tore free. More blood spilled to the floor.

He held the piece of flesh up to the light. It was thick, thick like the skin on one of those fat Sunkists, the kind that are as large as grapefruit. Thin white tendrils stuck out from the sides like a thousand minute jellyfish arms. The fleshy thing was ripped and torn in a dozen places, but had come off in one solid piece.

He set it aside and dabbed at the wound with fresh toilet paper. Despite the pain, he felt surprisingly good, like he’d finally taken control of the situation. The newly exposed flesh seemed incredibly sensitive, and even the slightest touch hurt. Tiny rivulets of blood slowly ran from the wound’s edges.

But something wasn’t right. He stared at his b.l.o.o.d.y thigh, and his incontrol feeling faded away — this wasn’t over, not yet. A discolored, pale whitish patch the size of a quarter sat in the wound’s center.

It seemed perfectly round, but bits of normal flesh swelled up around it and covered the edges of the white patch. Perry used the pointy tweezers to poke at the white growth — it seemed firm, yet flexible.

As the cold feeling of panic grabbed hold of his brain, he realized that he didn’t actually feel the poking tweezers. He didn’t feel them, because the whitish patch wasn’t him.

When he pinched at it, the normal flesh around the edges easily peeled up and away from the white spot. The white spot was a separate . . . thing. . . from his own skin. It was as if a rounded plastic b.u.t.ton had spontaneously grown within the muscles of his thigh.

He pushed the loose flesh from the edges of the white growth. The thing’s shiny coating made it look like a piece of bone china.

Did cancer look like this? Maybe, but he was pretty sure that cancerous flesh didn’t make perfect circles and didn’t just spring up in a matter of days.

Cancer or no cancer, the sight of the milky white growth stirred a primal fear in his soul, as if a rusty bear trap had clamped down on his heart, pinching it shut, preventing it from pumping. He tried to master his breathing, tried to calm himself.

He carefully slid the tweezers under the whitish growth. The points sc.r.a.ped against his raw muscle, but he ignored the pain. He lifted the tweezers from the underside — the hard growth tilted within his flesh, but it stayed anch.o.r.ed into his leg. Blood pooled each time he moved it.

He carefully used his fingers to pull his flesh back as far as it would go, probing underneath with the tweezers. Like putting your hands in your pocket and being able to “see” what’s there, Perry felt a stem — a stem that extended farther into his thigh, anchoring the white thing in place.

Doctor time.

Definitely doctor time.

But first, he wanted this thing out of his leg, and he wanted it out now. He had to remove it; he couldn’t stand to leave this f.u.c.king thing in his flesh for even one more second.

With the tweezers centered on the unseen stem, Perry pulled up gently. As he lifted the growth, he felt the stem’s length via a strange

combination of sensations from his thigh muscles and resistance against the tweezers. The whitish ma.s.s pulled free of his flesh with a pop of inrushing air. Thin blood trails arced from the open wound, splashing against his leg and adding to the red and purple streaks on the worn tile floor, but the stem stayed firmly anch.o.r.ed deep in his thigh. Agonizing pain crept up his leg, but he ignored it, kept it distant from his consciousness.