Infected Page 52

“I mean, what are you doing in my body?” He pushed himself to stand up, using the arm of the couch to support his weight. Again the pause, the lumpy sound.

w e not know

Perry leaned heavily on the couch, head hanging down so low that his blond hair dangled in front of his face. His leg throbbed, thumpthumping off the inside of his skull and back down again.

“How the fuck can you not know?”

Pause.

Lumpy sound.

They were full of shit. That was the only answer. They had beamed

into his body — or grown out of some evil mushroom or something — and they had to be there for a reason, didn’t they?

As he waited for their answer, he tried to listen more closely to the lumpy sound. He focused, and caught occasional words, but they came so fast he couldn’t recognize them. It was like trying to see individual stones on a highway shoulder while driving at sixty-five miles per hour — you could see them for a second and know what they were even if you couldn’t identify them. It was as if they were scanning for the right words. Scanning their limited vocabulary, perhaps. Scanning through . . .

w e not know

. . . through . . .

w e not kno w why w e

ar e here

. . . through his brain.

They weren’t just in his body, they were in his fucking brain, using him like a computer to call up data.

“Is that what I am to you?” Perry screamed. “Am I some kind of library?” Spit flew from his mouth and his body shook in rage.

Pause.

Lumpy sound.

He sat in vibrating frustration, unable to do anything or help himself in any way while the Triangles searched for an answer.

He screamed so loud that vocal cords ripped and snapped, “What are you doing in my head?”

w e ar e tr ying to find wor ds and things to talk with you

A rocket shot of pain raced up from his thump-thumping ankle, bringing his thoughts back to his strange leg wound. He needed some more Tylenol. He drew a deep breath, steadied himself and took an experimental hop toward the kitchen.

The good foot hit the ground firmly, but the motion jarred the bad leg. A new, fresh round of pain flashed bright and loud, seemingly generous in sharing the shock with every part of his body.

Play through the pain. It was intense, but now that he knew what to expect, he could control it. He could block it out. He could be tough. He made the eight hops to the kitchen counter, gritting his teeth so hard that his jaw muscles began to feel the burn.

He focused, took a deep breath, and looked down at his muscular leg — jeans dangling in two long denim flaps, dried blood flaking off his skin, little pieces hanging like red dandruff from his blond leg hairs. He’d fucked up the works pretty good, but what did it matter? He’d be dead soon anyway.

He grabbed the Tylenol bottle off the microwave top and shook out six pills. He gulped them down with a handful of tap water from the sink. He hopped back to the couch and gently sat down, grimacing against the pain.

It occurred to him that he still hadn’t called work. What was it, Saturday? He’d lost track of the days. He didn’t even have a clue how long he’d slept.

A thought struck him. Where the hell had he contracted this Triangle disease? As far as he knew, he might have gotten it at work. Obviously the Triangles started small. Maybe they were airborne, or maybe they were delivered via an insect bite, like malaria.

Or maybe he was right about being a guinea pig, and maybe work was

in on it. Work, and perhaps even the apartment building. That sounded logical as well. Maybe everyone in the apartment building was stuck inside right now, contemplating the newfound guests growing in their bodies.

The things must have come from somewhere. They’d landed on him, or an insect — or even something artificial — had delivered them.

Did that mean these things were custom-built for people? They were getting along a little too well with his body for this to be some fluke of nature. His body hadn’t rejected them, that was for fucking sure. No, he doubted this could be accidental. Either more people in town or in the building had the same disease, or someone had singled him out as an experimental host.

Perry’s mind swam in a tar pit of possibilities. He tried to put the thoughts away, because he simply didn’t want to think about it anymore, didn’t want to think about how fucked he was.

The pain in his leg eased a little as the Tylenol took effect. He felt cold. He hopped to his room and threw on a white University of Michigan sweatshirt, then hopped back to the living room and sat on the couch. He wasn’t sleepy, wasn’t hungry — he needed a diversion to keep his thoughts away from the Triangles. He reached for the remote control and clicked on the flat-panel TV. The Preview Channel said the time was 11:23 A.M.

He flicked through the channels, not finding much. Infomercials. Scooby Doo. Basketball, Wolverines at Penn State — if it had been football, maybe, but he couldn’t focus on basketball right now. Seinfeld reruns. Soon the NFL pregame shows would be on for the Saturday game, and he would be riveted to the TV. That would let him forget. And after the pregame, the games. But for now, a television wasteland. He was about to give up when he hit the jackpot: a Columbo movie.

He’d seen this one, but it didn’t matter. Columbo — with his old basset hound in tow — shuffled his way about yet another mansion, rumpled tan trench coat hanging from him like he’d just hopped off of a freight train full of hoboes. He was trying to climb down from a balcony and was stuck in the nearby tree (which the killer must have used either to get into the bedroom or to get out of it). The basset hound waited patiently at the base of the tree; Columbo awkwardly fell to the ground. As

Chapter end