abriter l'essaim

A Small & Scary story.

The lights burnt through the thin flesh of my eyelids. A dull ache that settled in the sockets and remained throbbing as my vision started to return. A canvas, white, pristine. I could hear the sharp beeping of medical equipment. As more of the room came into focus the beeping steadily grew faster. I didn’t know where I was. I tried to move but thick leather straps held me to the bed. My body was covered in saturated bandages. It stunk of medicine, iodine. I twisted and contorted my neck trying my best to see the rest of the room. A leather strap, a larger version of the ones that held my limbs was tight around my neck. only allowing a few inches of certain movements. Not enough to assess all of my surroundings. The straps felt as if they tightened, loosened and tightened again around my extremities. Slowly, inconsistently.

“Where am I?” my voice groaned out of me like a bullet leaving a rusty bore. Within seconds an intercom flipped on with a loud

Click.

“Private Desmond. You are in quarantine.” The voice was a woman's, though garbled by electronic distortion it was soft despite its annoyed demeanor and insistence on enunciating every word.

“Have I asked this question before?...Wait, quarantine for what?!” It hurt to speak, each syllable burnt the inside of my throat and forced out a cough.

Click.

“You have.” Sounding less annoyed this time.

I'm a private? In the military? I remember little pieces of myself. A barn I used to clean every weekend. Parents? I must have had them, why wouldn't I? I could see their outfits. Overalls a stocky male build. A floral dress, lean almost frail. But not their faces. It blurred into the background of the memory like smudged ink across a page. The name Desmond meant nothing to me. Like it wasn’t mine. None of this felt mine. Anything that lingered felt like a fantasy, the day dreaming of a bored mind, not like a memory.

“What happened to me?” Coughing through the question, I hoped for the best. What could be the best? I fear whatever the best was, it lived nowhere near me.

Click.

The intercom switched on again, followed by a pause of the EKG beeping and electronic static. “Private. Desmond, You were exposed to a contaimentiant while on duty with your employer.” As my senses started to come back to me, a burning sensation rippled across my skin, like an earthquake ripples through the ocean it came with a low droning hum that bounced around my ear like severe tinnitus. Muscles twitched and pulsed at each trigger of my nerve endings. I pulled the restraints, the leather rubbed against the wet bandaging and the pain wrapped around my arm and began to swallow it. The hum, crescendoed into a scream.

“Please refrain from moving too much.” Her voice coming through the intercom was all that helped me establish my surroundings. it came from behind my head.

I laid still, catching what little breath I had. The pain would slowly start to subsided, and almost euphoric feeling, simply existing without pain. The hum followed, lowering in volume in violence.

“You said contaminants. What kind? Why am I bandaged?” My voice was getting more used to speaking again, and as it did I was able to apply the appropriate amount of venom to each word. I felt alien. The memories, my body, I spoke, and understood each word but I could not place where I had learned them. I knew about school, but did I attend? I must have. I peered at my right foot, sticking just out of a cloth blanket that only covered from my waist down. I wiggled my toes frantically. I could see them moving under layers of this wet tissue paper like wrapping.

Click.

“The kind your employers are very sensitive about. I am not authorized to tell you more in that manner. Though I can reassure you that you are being watched very closely. The bandages are simply to help the healing process, and contain possible infection.” I could taste the horse shit drip out of her mouth, even through the intercom. I grit my teeth, I was a blank man, and I was being lied to by a blank woman.

“You can't tell your patient what he’s suffering from?!” The burn that had waned to an ember, grew to a blaze in my throat as I yelled.

Click.

“Private You are not my patient. I am here to observe.” Her voice once again drifted into annoyance, like I was a bother to her.

“I can't remember anything. besides faded pieces of scraps of memories. You keep calling me Private and it means nothing to me. What happened to me, lady?” Despite the pain of pulling at the restraints I fought against it as I spoke. This didn't feel right. She didn’t respond quickly, just ear bleeding silence punctuated with the electronic beeping of my own heart rate. “At least let me see someone who knows me? My parents? A wife?” The silence continued. I could feel little twinges in my flesh, like muscle spasms, across my entire body. My guts felt as if they were moving within their nest. It was enough to conjure bile. I lurched my head to the side and spit it across the floor.

“I feel wrong. Please. This all feels wrong.”

Click.

The intercoms finally switched back on. “Please stop pulling on the restraints, You may cause serious damage to yourself.” The silence marinated before she started to speak again. “You are being taken care of, Private.”

“Can you tell me how long I've been in this bed..” I was cut off by her.

Click.

“I can tell you very little, I could give you your full name. Ivan Fredrick Desmomd. You were born August 7th 2007.” She was reading it off a list, her cadence betrayed that. I didnt even know what year it currently was, my birthday meant nothing. My name didn't shake loose anything else in my head. Instead my guts just squirmed harder, rippled through my skin and up to the back of my head. The spasms getting stronger alongside that damn sound. I couldn't hold back the groans that I exhaled, like smoke from a cigarette.

“Pvt. Desmond's… continues to… despite the… measures.” Her voice erupted through the intercom, more static than audible words. The squirm in the back of my head wriggled like a fish on dry land. Violent, panicked. The white walls flickered to Grey. “Desmond… Progress… Help…” Another errant announcement through the intercom came crashing through the room like an explosion. My body reacted by trying to cover my ears, but that only succeeded in ripping at the bandages pulling at them like a festering sunburn. everything in my periphery was shifting, pulling away from itself like the tide from shore. Though when I looked it appeared as it was.

“Is there pain medicine I can take?!” I yelled out. All the pain that shot through me was crippling. “Or something to sleep?” My breath was reaching full-tilt. Saturated with panic through the crawling beneath my skin. The hum in my ears, the aberrations in my vision.

Click.

“I'm sorry, private.” She responded quickly. I looked down at my wrists where the bandage was bunched up by the leather straps. I could see my skin, though I couldn't fathom the thought that it was actually my skin. My skin was perforated and the caverns of flesh were dilating like a dying man's pupils. little black holes, recessed into a tender reddening garden of skin. They all pulsed as I watched. My stomach churned, it wasn’t right. This couldn't be right.

“Emergence… Imminent… Desmond… Hear us?” The intercom thundered again. Vibrating through my head, shaking loose flashes of stone walls, muzzle flashes in the dark. Screaming…my screaming. It came from me like vomit from my stomach. I had no control. I was merely detritus in the riptide.

“The fuck do you mean emergence?!” I needed to know what was happening to me. My plea was deafed under the droning hum, now ever present and blaring like a tornado siren in my inner ear.

“Tell me what's wrong with me!” My insides felt as if they jumped several inches into my chest cavity. Breathing became a chore as a wheeze grew louder with each breath. The burning sensation across my skin increased, I lifted my head to look at my arms again. The black pits shifted, sharp tips jutting just above the surface began unfurling like the arms of a starfish out of each crater.

“Desmond!...Please..” The intercom sounded closer. Buried in white hot flashes of panic. My body shook violently. the walls were coming free from their homes, crumbling into psychotic dust. Pulling away in the corners to a pervading darkness that spread like mold on fruit. My heart rate skyrocketed with it, a thumping so strong it resonated in every extremity. I could feel pushing from my skin, Overwhelming pressure. Each one of the perforations stretched, expanded as it pushed something out of me. No, something climbing out of me in the hundreds. I could see the small black pits giving birth.Like watermelon seeds that fell, sprinkling themselves across the bed and floor around me. I couldn't look away. What was coming from me. Each seed shook across the floor, popping up and down like popcorn. The holes in my skin seeped a deep umber liquid that stained the bandages and the bed around me.

The pristine white walls were nearly gone now. Just a darkness that ate away at it. My eyes couldn't focus on any one thing. Faces in the dark places that supplanted the known with the unknown. It wasn’t the same place, it felt cold, untouched, ancient stone.

“We… Leave…Desmond…Lost.” Roaring thunder now a panicked voice. clear as day l, no more than a foot from the violence that that shook, thrashed my body against the cold stone floor that had replaced my bed.

“Please, someone help me.” My voice was leaving with my breath. My heart rate deafened me with each beep of the machine that transcended the rip in my own reality. The same umber liquid started to stain my gown around my abdomen. Though, where the seeds left behind puddles, this was a lake. I lurched, vomiting acidic yellow bile mixed with those tiny black seeds.

The seeds shook on the bed and floor, across me. Singing a chorus of crackling rice cereal and a hiss of escaping air.

One by horrid one, a segmented creature emerged from each. Sharp legs emerging from the body as it pushed itself free. It couldn't have been longer than my finger. Each one vaguely resembled a centipede. Arthropod in nature at the body; more cephalopod features adorned the head like a crown of playing tendril-like arms.

The stone surroundings started to fade back to white, as the white did to grey before. My stone slab, now a deep umber soaked bed I thrashed against. My weak fight against the restraints now a fury. I felt my skin pull away from itself under the force. The creatures started to climb back onto me. Skittering up the bed. I could feel each one of their hundreds of pin prick legs moving across my swollen, ruptured skin. In the center of the blossom of tentacles, a circle of teeth unsheathed from folds of hanging flesh. Thousands of tiny bites pulling and ripping at my skin. The umber liquid across my body faded to crimson as the blood poured from me. staining the bed, dripping across the chrome legs and pooling across the sheen white surface. I couldn't scream, my lungs were being devoured with everything else, every soft spot of my body infested. Pulled apart. I could see the faces of those who died to bring me out of that hell. The faces of those that might be suffering as I do now, in another sterile white room.

A stone tomb of giants where my mind was not my own. Is it now? The pain was waning. My neurons were dying, I couldn't breathe. My nerves were removed with little chunks of the deep red canyons that eldritch teeth bore into.

The beeping of the EKG was slowing. Any movement in my body, involuntary, merely the children as they devoured me. Why did we go into that place? Why didn't they let me die down there?

As the last grasp of senses faded I could hear footsteps beside me. A heavy resporated woman's voice.

“Private Desmond, Subject 23 from Team two has experienced emergence. Call containment. Keep one for study. Torch the rest with the body.”

I could hear them all sing for me as the lights faded to nothing.