Eat'em (15 page)

Chapter 32

The sound of gunfire startled me awake. I thought it was gunfire. The loud “BLAM!” blended so perfectly with my dream. The retired lineman held his hands up in a plea for mercy, “Whoa!” He said, “Jacob you don’t want to…” I aimed the pistol at Parsons’ nose and pulled the trigger. I awoke in a classroom to the hush of suppressed laughter.

“Jacob, yes?” Dr. Reeder loomed over my desk. His arm ended in a balled fist, squeezed so tight that the freckles on the back of his hand made his flesh look like a crinkled page of connect the dots. “Usually I don’t mind my students take a nap in my class. It’s your grade, after all. But even I won’t be interrupted by snoring.”

“Yes sir,” I said. “Won’t happen again.”

I lifted my head from the notebook I’d been sketching in to keep awake. So much for that.

Eat’em chimed in, something about my ruining Karl Marx, and when I turned to Dixie, she quickly looked away. I felt her stare return to me as I rejoined the classroom.

“We’re discussing the needs of the many versus the needs of the few, yes, Jacob?” Reeder said.

“Sure.”

             
So badly I wanted to speak to Dixie, but what words would I have to offer? Lies were impossible to come up with and the truth would be impossible to believe. I kept my distance from her between classes and resented Val for making me come.

My mouth opened as she silently followed the herd out of biology, but voice refused to part from my chest. She walked away without a word, as I expected. As I deserved.

“Jacob,” Professor Kempter startled me. My heart chased Dixie out the class, but I weakly lingered behind unable to do anything but watch the door shut on me and the teacher.

I slumped onto a maraschino cherry colored stool by Kempter’s desk, dropping my book bag with a thump on the cracked linoleum tiles. My day-to-day life quickly became tolling on my emotional wellbeing. I’ve shot a man and I stabbed two more. I witnessed the death of a beautiful blonde, who’d come back from the dead only to tear some poor homeless man’s throat out and be shot down by police. The only reason I wasn’t in prison was because a couple other folks broke into Parsons home to eat the man for whatever reason. Lucky that. Dixie wouldn’t talk to me. I couldn’t talk to her. And Eat’em… for all that is good and holy in the universe… recently discovered masturbation.

Which he did.

Frequently.

In spite of my reasonable requests and offers of reward.

Kempter either didn’t notice my heavy mood or didn’t have time to express empathy. She hobbled to the door, peaked outside, and locked it before returning to her desk. Usually, she moved rather gracefully despite her large shape, but as she sat on the large leather chair, she seemed exasperated and out of breath. She opened the bottom drawer of her desk and pulled out the familiar bloody Deftones shirt.

“Where’d this come from?” The question might have come off as accusatory, but it didn’t. Perhaps it was because she was a woman of science, or perhaps I naively trusted her, but her demeanor was that of someone genuinely curious, maybe even concerned. Definitely not threatening. “It’s not from a dog, Jacob. Is it?”

“I can’t say.”

“Whose is it, Jacob?”

I looked into Kempter’s deep brown eyes. They weren’t the same color as my mother’s, but they reminded me of them. The shape and softness behind her look. I felt compassion like that from only one other person. And I missed her.

“I wish I could tell you,” I said. “But the truth is, I don’t really know. That’s why I brought it to you. I was hoping for answers, myself.”

“Jacob,” Kempter’s voice lowered to almost a whisper. “I want you to know something. Whatever is in this blood is dangerous. I don’t know if it’s a plague or a curse, but you need to avoid it.

“Its more than just an infection,” she chewed on her thumbnail before continuing. “I don’t fully understand how it works yet, but I can tell you this – I discovered – you discovered a new type of parasite. I can see it in the blood. Some kind of micro-organism. It latches onto the cells and seems to organize them. It acts almost like a stem cell would. It gets the body to start creating cells it needs. Muscles become stronger. Fast twitch fibers are improved. Fat tissue is broken down. Weaker cells are eliminated. The parasite actually attacks cancer cells. This is why you observed the rapid healing properties. Its amazing. Unlike anything I’ve ever seen.”

“I thought you said it was dangerous?” I asked.

“Yes,” she shifted uncomfortably. “Those are just the side effects. It is doing something else. Something bigger. I’m still trying to understand it. The parasite seems connected. Like some kind of neural network. Even spread across multiple hosts, the parasite stays connected.”

“How do you know they stay connected?” I became increasingly curious. Despite sounding like the medical find of the century, Dr. Kempter’s observations had the potential to explain not only why the infected were so hard to defeat, but also how they seemingly knew who I was before we’d even met.

She continued, “I’m getting to that. This is why I believe the infection is potentially very dangerous. You already know that I used the shirt to give the infection to mice. Well actually I only used it to infect a single mouse. A male. That mouse bit a female and infected her. The parasites are blood born and can be passed by ingesting infected blood or from the bite of something already infected. After several days, the male escaped. I put a trap out and found him the next day, back broken, still alive. The female was also acting strange. She wouldn’t move, wouldn’t eat. I released the male from the trap and within thirty minutes it was as if it never happened. He was fine, fully recovered. The female too.”

“She was sympathetic?” I asked.

“No,” Kempter sighed as if about to lift a large weight. “She was dying. The pain seemed shared. So, I decided to make the experiment a little more morose. I killed the male.”

“What happened?” I asked.

“She became feral,” Kempter said. “Attacking anything. But she also forgot the things she’d learned, including the maze – she no longer cared about the maze or the rewards. It was like hitting an off switch in her brain.”

I couldn’t help but picture the blonde. The newscaster went over the grizzly attack again and again. And the curly haired roommate of Trevor. Is that what I’d seen?

“The female,” Kempter continued, “what happened to her was a result of losing the consciousness of the one that infected her. It’s like traumatic brain-rot. Once infected, either you share the same mind as all the others, or you have no mind at all. Those are the only two options. Breaking the chain… only seems to create aggression on both sides of it.”

As she spoke my heart began to race and her room opened up to me. Once again I found myself with no peripheral vision. One hundred-eighty degrees of clarity in all directions. Every stain, crevice, and texture became focused. I could read every word on the chalkboard over Kempter’s shoulder at once and simultaneously see every pore on her face. My vision grew perfectly crisp. Then I blinked it away.

“Jacob,” Kempter snapped her fingers. “This parasite, if it’s able to infect people, it could be worse than the plague. It could be worse than any natural disaster humanity has ever known. If the same goes for the mice and the chain is broken, everyone downstream would do the same thing she did.”

I stood and grabbed my backpack. My stomach churned as if I couldn’t digest this new bit of information. Like the knowledge had gone sour and my body fought to reject it. I asked, “Is it possible for memories to be transferred through a bite?”

“Memories, ideas, consciousness, I don’t know,” Kempter said. “I don’t know if it could be passed to humans, but if so the effect could be disastrous. Were you ever able to find the girl that was attacked by the dog?”

“YES!” Eat’em shouted. “Jacob, let’s go!”

“Jacob, this is not something to mess around with. If you know something we have to report it.”

Easy for her to say without blood on her hands.

Chapter 33

Clouds rolled across the open sky like a heavenly mountain range. Twenty minutes earlier the campus was under lockdown for a tornado watch and a malevolent shield of scorched atmosphere blocked the midday sun. Hail pelted the earth with unfaltering hatred. Electricity rippled from one cloud to another as a premonition to a storm that never came.

Now I sat under a sky so friendly it was almost impossible to imagine the darkness that came and went. Students flooded from the buildings behind me as if in anticipation of more chaos. Though, this time of year, chaos was typical.

Every person that walked by was another of Kempter’s mice. My mind went wild with the thought of them turning to me, revealing their darkened eyes, judging me for what I had done to disrupt their unit, whatever it should be called. Family. Cult. Colony. I pictured them as fire ants and I kicked their pile.

Val said he wasn’t going to school, and I figured he’d have been by to pick me up already, but still I waited for his Mustang to round the corner into the school’s parking lot.

“What is this?” a notebook slapped against my lap. My notebook. My sketchpad. Dixie stood at the other end, pointing down at a picture I drew during our philosophy class.

The picture was of Dixie sitting on her bed and myself with my arms flung wildly over my head. Dixie’s finger pushed down on the pad, extended in the direction of a little character I’d drawn on the floor, looking up at me with large sorrowful eyes. It was Eat’em.

“What is this?” she said again, not a hint of emotion in her cadence. “This thing right here. You drew it. I want to know what it is.”

“It’s nothing,” I said, snatching the book from her, closing it and shoving it into my bag.

“It doesn’t look like nothing. It definitely didn’t sound like nothing. So what is it? Some sort of gremlin?”

“I am not a gremlin,” Eat’em screeched. He climbed my pant leg and stood at the edge of the bench where I waited for Val’s car. He pointed to her with a long bent finger and said, “You can’t feed a gremlin after midnight! You can feed me anytime you want to, yes. Tell her, Jacob!”

“This thing,” Dixie said. “This is what you were yelling at. What is it?”

“It’s nothing,” I said. “Look, it’s no big deal, okay.”

“Not a big deal?”

“No,” I said, “it’s a metaphor.”

“I’m not a metaphor!” Eat’em said. “I hate you both!”

“This is not a metaphor,” Dixie reached for my bag, but I pulled it away and tucked it behind myself. She jabbed me in the chest. “You weren’t yelling at a metaphor. What were you yelling at? Tell me. I deserve to know.”

“Nothing,” I said. “Myself.”

“Yourself?”

“Yes,” I said, “myself. I was yelling at myself.”

“For what?”

“For, I don’t know. For not kissing you back.”

“Oh that’s just adorable,” she didn’t sound like she meant it. Whatever word she substituted with adorable was probably four letters and rarely uttered by nuns. “Scoot over.”

I made room and Dixie sat beside me, forcing the demon onto my lap.

“I kept your secret, didn’t I?” Dixie said. “Even from your uncle, by the way, who’s quite the little interrogator, you know? I think I deserve to know what’s in your little drawing.”

“No,” I said, “no, no, no. I’m getting a little tired of everyone asking me questions all the time.”

“Can we get donuts?” Eat’em asked, pointing across the parking lot to a bakery that just lit up with a sign reading
Hot Donuts Now!

“No!” I yelled at Eat’em.

“See!?” Dixie said, “What was that?”

“Nothing!”

“Nothing? You just yelled at your pants. What’s on there?” She swiped her hand over my jeans and Eat’em rolled to the side, letting out a “What the? Hey!”

At the risk of Dixie’s frisking, I stood and stepped away from her, keeping myself between her and the demon.

“Why are you afraid of me?” she asked. “You told me you were involved with a murder that’s all over the news, and did I go to the cops? No… No I didn’t. And when Valentine grilled me did I tell him? No.”

“Why not?” I asked. “Why haven’t you? Because you like me? What happens when you don’t anymore?”

“What?” she shoved me. “Because I like you? And when did you become so full of yourself? What happened to Mr. Humble? Mr. Uninteresting?”

“He’s still uninteresting,” Eat’em said, keeping cover.

“For your information,” Dixie continued, “my not telling anyone has nothing to do with whether I like you, which I don’t know why you would still think I even do after you stormed off on me and haven’t spoken to me in weeks.”

“What then?” I asked.

“Well, stupid, let me think about it for a second. Maybe it’s because I believe you.”

“Do you?”

“Sure,” she said.

“That’s reassuring.”

“Look, honey, why shouldn’t I believe you? It’s not like you’re the only one in the world who’s seen weird things.”

“And what have you seen?” I asked.

“I saw a grown man breakup with an invisible gremlin once,” she said.

“He’s not a gremlin.” My cheeks burned bright with embarrassment. I wanted to reach out and grab my words, put them back into my mouth and swallow them forever.

I sighed and took a seat once again on the bench. Dixie sat beside me, closer now, and said, “Then what is he?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

Eat’em climbed onto my lap and extended his hand in the international gesture for a handshake. “I’m an Eat’em, yes!”

“He’s a demon, maybe,” I said begrudgingly. “His name is Eat’em. He’s been with me as long as I can remember.”

“A demon?” Dixie asked dryly.

“Yeah, but not an evil one,” I said.

“Of course not.”

Eat’em cleared his throat and thrust his hand out further.

“He wants to shake your hand,” I said. I felt stupid. Like I was introducing my imaginary friend to my crush.

“Of course he does,” she said, “where is he?”

“He’s standing on my leg.”

“Well, nice to meet you, Eat’em,” she said reaching out, greeting the air like a lunatic, pretending to shake with the demon four inches from her hand. “I’m Dixie.”

Eat’em grabbed hold of her pinky. “Nice to meet you.”

“Oh my god,” Dixie’s face turned pale beneath her heavy rouge. “He’s really real.”