Seed of Evil by Greig Beck (great reads .txt) 📕

There came a soft mewling again and then a rasping sound. Wainright leaned closer. “I didn’t catch that, Billy.”

“Alllloooverrr.”

“All over?” Wainright repeated. “It hurts all over your body?”

“Yesssss.”

Wainright felt a growing knot of anger in his stomach. He straightened and turned to Mary. “How long has he been like this?’

She shook her head for a moment, and he noticed her eyes were wet as she stared at her son. “Days.”

Wainright scowled. “He’s been in this condition for days? How could you…?”

“He wouldn’t let me.” The words came in a rush and her eyes slid away from her boy’s to his. “It just began as a coarse rash. But it got worse, then this started growing all over him.” She clasped her hands together as if begging him. “He wouldn’t let me tell anyone. Made me promise.”

“I’ll need a sample.” Wainright reached into his bag for some gloves to pull on and also found a disposable hypodermic needle. He gently laid a hand on the boy’s upper arm and felt the strange texture beneath his fingertips. It didn’t feel like skin at all and more like exposed bone or maybe even something akin to tree bark.

He’d read about afflictions that resulted in a thickening and hardening of the skin’s epidermal layer. But this seemed beyond anything he had ever seen or heard of before.

“Just stay still for a moment, Billy.” He pressed the needle into the arm, but the point wouldn’t penetrate the skin. “Damn.” He drew it back, looking at the tip. He’d have to find an area that wasn’t so calcified.

Wainright looked back at the boy who had pulled the blankets back over himself. He went to peel them back again.

“I haven’t quite finish…” The boy suddenly lunged at him.

Wainright pulled his hand out of the way just as the needle-sharp teeth came together in the air where his fingers had just been.

“My God.” He leaped to his feet, staring.

The boy pulled back beneath the blankets and kept his small yellow eyes fixed on Wainright. The doctor felt his heart thumping in his chest. The kid looked like some sort of vicious animal retreating into its burrow. He swallowed noisily.

“I’ll, ah, need to do some analysis, Mary. I have no idea what it could be right at this moment. I’ll consult the medical texts when I get back, and also make a few calls.

“I still need…” He quickly crouched to grab Billy’s bedpan, “…this.”

Billy grumbled as he retreated fully into his nest of blankets, and Wainright looked briefly into the bedpan at the small, speckled logs—it certainly didn’t look like a human bowel movement. He was confused and a little frightened.

“Mary, do you know if he ate anything, or came into contact with anything strange?”

She seemed to search her mind for a moment, and then looked up. “The mine. All the kids go and swim at the mine, as it’s the first time it’s been flooded in years. Billy said when the water dried on him it made him a little itchy.”

Wainright knew the place; the Angel Mine was just outside of town, and though home to a disaster way back early in the century and all closed up now, sometimes the ground water percolated to the surface and created an oasis. It was rare, but it would be irresistible to kids on a hot day, he bet.

“Okay.” He started for the door and once outside pulled it shut. He lowered his voice. “We’ll need to send him to the hospital. Get professional care from experts and some decent food into him. We can’t have him lying here like this all day.”

“But he doesn’t,” she whispered. “He goes out at night.”

“Goes out? Like that?” His head pulled back on his neck. “How, where?”

She looked up at him, moon-eyed, and slowly shook her head. “I don’t know where. But I hear the window open…about midnight.”

He waited but she just went back to wringing her hands. “Okay. Ah…” He held the bedpan and looked around. “Do you have…?”

“Yes, yes.” She bustled away.

Wainright looked down at the boy’s bowel movements again. They were dry, oval, and had white flecks through them. He’d seen coyote scat before, and it reminded him of that.

He was hoping for some sort of container or bag but Mary came back with just a cloth that she draped over the pan. It wasn’t sealed but he didn’t think it’d make a mess as long as he kept it upright.

She then led him to the door and stood to one side, watching him. With his medical bag in one hand and the bedpan in the other, he could only nod and give her his most reassuring smile. “Don’t worry, Mary, we’ll sort this out.”

She nodded. “Please…”

He paused.

“Please help us,” she whispered.

*****

Ben Wainright sat back from his desk for a moment and pondered his next move. There were other children affected, lots of them, and it now seemed to be some sort of outbreak of…what? He had no idea, but after examining Billy’s excrement, he found it contained nothing but digested protein, fur, and animal bones. It seemed the boy’s night-time foraging was where he was getting most of his sustenance.

His old filing cabinet was now near full of cases, and he knew it was time to admit defeat. He pulled out the small, black leather-bound address book he had in his top drawer that all physicians kept. It contained emergency numbers for everything from fires and flooding, to nuclear bomb fallout. It also had the number for the Communicable Disease Center—termed the CDC—that had been around since the mid-40s, and he had never thought he’d ever have to call in his life.

He circled the number and lifted the phone. This was out of his hands now.

*****

Ben Wainright was there when the vans arrived—dozens of them, all black. He felt like some sort of informer, handing over a list he had drawn up that identified the families, where they were, and then assisted in allying those