The Skunge (10 page)

Rudy pulled out his phone and started clicking away pictures, getting the angles. Plenty of closeups, trying to catch the way the light sparkled off the glinting threads. He frowned at the pics. Even this phone, which had cost more than a decent dinner downtown, couldn't get what he needed.
We need color, span, and scope. If this thing is as bad as you say it is, and you can get those pics, along with a couple of pieces of inside info, we'll make sure you get paid enough to make your eyes pop.
That's what the dirtbag from the gossip site had told him. Apparently horrifying diseases were as interesting to their slavering readers as the latest celebutante sex tape. However, he couldn't very well use the flash—someone might notice, and then he would be in the hottest of soups. Patient confidentially wasn't just next to Godliness at Hollywood Presby; it outstripped it by several orders of measure.

He wanted to get paid. Needed to get paid, if it came to that. After the last disastrous run of cards at the clubs downtown, he was down a few thousand (well, maybe more like ten or so), and Pop wouldn't be opening his wallet for that much. Not after having to pay off the family of that girl, the one Rudy had groped in the—

The bathroom. The answer to so many of life's problems, and the solution to Rudy's current dilemma.

He wedged open the bathroom door and flipped the switch. Snowy LED lighting fanned outward over the bed, more than bright enough to get some good—

Rudy stopped. The light washed over the bed. The empty bed. He stepped toward it, sure that his eyes had tricked him. When he heard the sound from behind him, he turned, already knowing what he would see.

Neumann looked like a man skinned in swamp plants. His skin was a ruin. Cracks had opened in his flesh, allowing more of the stuff to burst out of his body. Thorny greenish-black tentacles waved from open wounds. His eyes glowered with pain, madness, and no humanity.

Neumann stalked forward, dragging loops and whorls of the stuff with him. He left wet green-red footprints behind him, and even as Rudy's heart hammered in his chest, he stared at the footprints and thought
shit, I better not be stuck cleaning that up.

"Hey man just chill, OK?" Rudy felt fear-sweat dripping down the crack of his ass. The smell in the room was ripe and rotten, like a sewer pipe had burst. "Just hop back into bed, and I'll talk to the nurse about getting you some nice dope to help you relax. How's that sound, huh?"

Neumann stepped closer. Rudy recognized that look in the man's pain-ravaged eyes; the crazed look of a junkie living on forced cold-turkey. The look of a man willing to skin someone alive with his bare teeth just to get another fix. But, Rudy thought frantically, what does Neumann want? Rudy had an uncomfortable notion of what that would be. Neumann was in pain, and like all humans, he wanted to share his pain. To spread it around in an attempt to relieve himself of that grinning, capering monkey. Rudy had been the unlucky soul to have shown up now.
Why,
thought Rudy,
you big bohunk bastard
,
couldn't you have waited until that old bitch Gottselig showed up to clean out your bedpan?

Neumann tried to speak, but his mouth was packed with threads, and only garbled moans emerged.

Rudy reached down into his scrubs and brought out his very against rule-and-regs pepper spray. He held it up triumphantly.

"Not so fast. Look what Papa Rudy has for you, beautiful." He lunged forward and gave Neumann a full three second blast in the eyes. The only response was a muffled, hoarse shouting and then Neumann was shambling toward him, faster than Rudy would have thought possible. Neumann landed on him like a writhing, living, rug.

The guy sounded like a bull in full rut, grunting his rancid sewer breath down into Rudy's face. His strength was crushing—his arms like banded steel, wrapped around Rudy, crushing the air out of him like a squeeze-bottle.

Rudy screamed, but his voice was lost, robbed of its breath.
Come on, you stupid cunts
! He stared at the door, willing a nurse's face to pop up into the glass, her mouth a surprised O, calling for security.
Oh God hurry, please, Jesus this guy is strong
. At this point he would have welcomed even a verbal beatdown from Gottselig—he would accept it and hug that old bag hard enough to make her Crocs pop off. Rudy's leg kicked spasmodically, and connected with an IV pole. It rolled briskly toward the bed, striking a table on the way. The tablet that had been laying on the table crashed to the floor, but it wasn't loud enough.

No nurse at the window, no help for Rudy. His face was inches from Neumann's. As he watched, the threads hanging out of Neumann's mouth twitched and began to move. They wriggled blindly, like worms, seeking, reaching. They entered his mouth.

Rudy tried to scream again, but found he could not.

CHAPTER FIFTEEN

The cure is worse than the ill.
Something Sugar's mother would say whenever her daughter complained about cough medicine that tasted bad, or a spoonful of Castor Oil, or any number of her home-brew remedies. One of those quaint old aphorisms parents love to trot out at the slightest provocation. Sugar had never really considered the meaning of the words—but now she had ample opportunity.

Palmetto had been there two weeks. Fourteen long, painful days spent melting in the heat of the apartment, watching TV, reading the same sentence of the same book over and over, the words a senseless crawl like insects across the page. And, of course, the treatments.

"Oh, fuck
me
. It can't be morning already." Jynx moaned. With a muffled curse, she pushed aside the tubes and sat up on the couch, clutching the IV pole. Dehydration had turned her into a shambling, emaciated vampire. Her hair looked like it belonged on a corpse, her skin as sallow as a slug. Her fingernails were cracked and split and the color of nicotine. She joked about marketing a shade of nail polish called 'Depression Yellow'.

Sugar pried her eyes open, squinting at the clock through the LA sun streaming in through the balcony door. "It's two in the afternoon." The first thing she felt was relief; today was not her day.

The thick scent of pot clung to everything like a damp layer of dust. She imagined wiping a credit card across her skin and seeing it come away with a scum of congealed smoke. She rolled over and fired up the bong, sucking in the sweet smoke until she imagined her lungs swelling, almost splitting along their seams. Skeins of the smoke drifted in the golden light, and she watched it for long seconds before letting the smoke escape from her mouth. Her skin tingled.

Jynx sat staring at the muted TV with desperate eyes. Her turn again today. Dark circles like negative chalk outlines surrounded her eyes.

Dr. Palmetto emerged from the bedroom, rumpled as ever. He grunted at them and disappeared into the kitchen. Sugar took another hit, and with her mind sufficiently fuzzed, turned up the volume on the TV. Tension in the Middle East, authorities were monitoring a new strain of influenza emerging in Asia, a office shooting in Oklahoma. Sometimes she thought the world would be better off starting over, going back to the old-old ways, with not enough people in the world to rub up against each other. A
tabula
more-or-less
rasa
. And new reports, something called the Skunge—a new disease that had started cropping up around California. Distinguished by thred-like growths through the skin, and—Sugar snapped the TV off.

"I don't think I can take another day." Jynx leaned forward and began refilling the bong. Long crooked lines of fresh pink scar tissue, along with fresher crimson lines, peeked over the bandages covering her arms. "I really don't."

"It's working, isn't it?"

"It's killing me." Jynx's eyes met Sugar's. They gleamed with standing tears and unvarnished truth. "It hurts so bad."

Sugar rubbed at her own semi-healed cuts. They ached, which was still better than the raw burn when the cuts were fresh. The truth was, she was getting a little tired of Jynx's complaints. Dr. Palmetto was helping her, for free, no strings attached, and all she did was complain. Sure, it hurt. But what kind of treatment could it be if it didn't?
The cure is worse than the ill.

Palmetto brought out the coffee. He poured a generous dollop of Canadian Rye whiskey into his cup, and smacked his lips over it. Jynx didn't touch hers, instead staring morosely out the window like a heroine in a gothic novel. Sugar drank hers down to the bottom—it was strong and sweet.

"Christ, I feel like ten pounds of shit in a five-pound bag," Palmetto said, scrubbing at his face. He had a week's worth of beard scruff, and it made him look like a genteel hobo. "I'm going to go prepare. Jynx, drink your coffee."

"Can't we just skip a day? Please?" Jynx scratched at her arms like a junkie, her body betraying her mind. She needed more treatments. Without them, the Skunge would grow back. They had tried skipping before, and the disease came on even stronger.

Palmetto sighed and lit a cigarette. He peered at Jynx through the smoke and the upside down half-moons of his glasses. "It's hard. I
know.
But you're going to die if we stop. If you just leave it alone, it's going to spread and you will
die
. It will grow in your lungs, it will poke holes in your organs, and you'll drown in your own blood. Is that what you want?" Sugar knew this speech was as much for her as for Jynx: tomorrow would be her turn, and who was to say she wouldn't be the one begging and pleading for a respite from the pain?

"No." Jynx took a deep breath, and coughed. "It just hurts so
bad
."

"I know. Drink your coffee."

Sugar didn't know what he put in the coffee, but it served to calm them down enough to get them into the bedroom for the treatment. Strong stuff, but Palmetto was mum on the secret ingredient. She had the distinct impression that she was better off not knowing. She was acquainted with too many junkies, and she didn't relish the idea of joining their living-dead ranks.

Once Jynx's eyes had achieved the glassy stare that meant she was ready, Sugar and Palmetto coaxed her into the bedroom. They held her hands, Sugar wheeling along the IV, speaking to her in tones reserved for frightened animals.

The room had been converted into a strange version of a hospital room. Cheap dollar-store sheets lined the floors, the bed, the walls, even the window. Palmetto had brought in Klieg lights, acquired by means he called 'midnight requisitions'. She didn't ask, but Palmetto had almost certainly added it to their bill. He had turned out to be a more honorable man than he had any right to be, but all men wanted their pound of flesh.

"You're a good friend to me," Jynx said. Her eyes were closed, and she smiled a small, secret smile. "People hate me, you know. I never knew why, but they always did. Mom, dad…everyone hates Jackie. Since she was a little girl." The smile trembled as tears collected at the corners of her eyes. "But not you." Her cool fingers found Sugar's cheek. "I love you."

"I love you too." Sugar blinked away her own tears. More followed, tracing burning lines down her face.

Palmetto flipped the switches on the Kliegs, and the room lit up like a movie-set parody of an operating theater. Jynx trembled as they lay her down on the bed. They buckled big padded leather manacles around her upper arms and calves. Her wrists and ankles were too small for the restraints.

Sugar unwound the stained bandages from Jynx's wasted body, wincing each time one stuck and peeled off scabbed flesh. Whatever Palmetto had given her, it had dialed her pain receptors low; Jynx did little more than groan whenever Sugar peeled another strip of bloody sheet away from her skin.

Palmetto pulled on latex gloves, slid on a surgeon's cap, and set two spray bottles on the end-table. One was labeled
S
, the other
V
. He held the
V
bottle up to the light, scowling at the contents, and then set it down in favor of a a gleaming scalpel. His first incision was along the back of Jynx's wrist, along the delicate red lines of her previous treatments.

"Be very careful here," Palmetto said, tilting his glasses forward for a better view. "Very careful." Sugar was used to him talking to himself as he cut. She wondered if his compulsion to speak out loud while operating was the same as her own secret desire to cut. "Dozens of tiny bundles of nerves at the wrists. If I accidentally slice through one of those, she'll never do another POV handjob video again, let's just say that." His hands were large but precise and moved with surprising elegance. He probed the length of his cut with a steel rod the thickness of the graphite part of a pencil. "Ah. Goddamn it."

Sugar didn't have to ask. She could see the black, curling line of the Skunge where it was embedded in Jynx's flesh.

"Hold her."

Sugar leaned her weight down on Jynx's arm, hands clenched white on either site of the incision. She squeezed her eyes shut when Dr. Palmetto brought out the pliers.

Palmetto reached into the wound, nosing the pliers delicately into the cut until he captured the tip of the Skunge. His knuckles blanched and the muscles of his forearm bunched as he tried to pull it free. One bloody inch came loose, then another. He wound the Skunge fibers around the nose of the pliers and began to turn, reeling it out of her body like a Guinea worm. Jynx screamed. No neighbors pounded on the walls this time. Maybe they felt something in the air. Something bad coming.