Luke used a Tensor bandage to lash his brother’s heels together, then tied them to the bench. He hacked another Tensor in half and tied his wrists down. He could only hope that the restraints, plus the coldcocking dose of Telazol, would keep Clayton immobile while Luke inspected his arm.
“Let’s see what we’re dealing with, brother of mine.”
Luke found latex gloves and a pair of medical shears in the first-aid kit. He slit Clayton’s sweater up to his shoulder. Bandages covered Clayton’s entire arm. They were encrusted with some kind of paste that smelled faintly of honeysuckle.
Luke cut the bandages away, starting at Clayton’s shoulder. The flesh was pale and sweaty. But as Luke pulled the wrappings back, things began to change.
Pencil-thin threads of black appeared. They darkened Clay’s flesh like tattoos. These gradually knit into a band of solid black, roughly four inches above his elbow.
Luke touched that flesh with his finger. He had a lot of experience with frostbite, which could turn skin black, but this wasn’t it. Frostbite turned flesh pulpy and pestilent. The flesh of Clayton’s upper arm was firm, just terribly discolored.
“What the hell what the hell what the hell…”
He snipped and gingerly peeled the bandages away; they trailed strings of gummy translucence like strips of duct tape whose glue had softened in the sun. The flesh beyond the black layer—about two solid inches—was the chalky white of processed lard. No arm hairs, no freckles or blemishes.
“Jesus, Clay. What have you done?”
He’d cut around the elbow and a few inches down the forearm when Clay’s flesh became opaque. The sight reminded Luke of bacon grease stored in a glass: a top of hardened grease that gave way to clearer fat studded with burned bits of bacon. A few more snips and he was peering into Clayton’s arm: a gray, gelatinous sheath of flesh—was it even flesh anymore?—that displayed the blue tubes of his veins.
The shears were gummed with translucent ooze. The bandages came away much easier now, anyway. He could peel them off with his fingers.
LB poked her head around Luke’s hips. “Go on,” Luke warned her. “Scat.” The dog tucked her tail and retreated to a corner, watching him fearfully.
When Luke uncovered Clayton’s hand, black dots popped before his eyes.
He could see bones. That wasn’t the worst of it. Clayton’s flesh quivered like Jell-O fresh from the fridge… and yet it didn’t seem squishy, as Jell-O would be.
A chrysalis, he thought. I’m seeing the same process that happens inside a cocoon, when a caterpillar turns into a moth… or a pollywog turns into a frog. A transformation so intense that everything melts and is reborn.
Clayton’s swollen fingers ended in stubs. Strips of medical tape sloughed off each one… Why had Clay taped them? His finger bones appeared to overlap one another, like photographic negatives set slightly off-kilter—
Clayton’s arm tensed. His hand curled into a fist.
His eyes were still closed.
Was there a ghost of a smile on his face?
His hand uncurled. Then something perfectly awful happened.
With a gluey suck, Clayton’s fingers… unfolded.
9.
CLAYTON’S FINGERTIPS BENT BACK from his palms, each digit trailing a runner of ooze.
He’s folded them down, Luke realized in horror. They grew longer and longer and he got scared so he folded them over themselves and taped them down. It was the only way to convince himself it wasn’t happening.
He pictured his brother doing it. Teeth gritted, gagging back his horror, gripping each terrible finger and bending it into his palm, then taping the doubled-over digit tight.
His fingers unkinked one by one; they looked like pocketknives unfolding. Fully outstretched, each finger was monstrously long: the pinkie at least six inches, the others longer than that. They were skinny and cruel, spread on the bench like the tines of a garden rake.
The tips were wide and spoon shaped, with large nail beds. The perfect mulch in which to cultivate dark, sharp nails.
It was a hand Luke had seen before. A hand that, as an adult, he’d convinced himself couldn’t possibly exist.
But here it was. Grafted onto—growing out of—his brother’s own flesh.
He would cut the fucking thing off. Not just the hand, the whole goddamn arm. It revolted him at a subcellular level. He thought that—and his thoughts were unfocused on this item, perhaps even a wee bit delusional—well, that if he took the infected arm off, maybe he could save Clayton. Excise the cancer, save the rest. Even though his brother was a miserable shit, Luke had to salvage what he could. The dog, Alice, even his brother. Everything else he would abandon to shriek and gibber down here at the bottom of the world, alone in its misery.
As he stood debating this, still grappling with the sight of his brother’s horrible appendage, Clayton’s hand clenched again. A sudden spastic movement as if it had been hit with high voltage. Luke backed out of its range, watching pop-eyed. The wrist swiveled, those snakish fingers hooking the edge of the bench. With a convulsive flex, they tightened. The flesh of Clayton’s wrist stretched like carnival taffy. The ulna and carpal bones pulled apart with a meaty thok. The fingers crawled forward, reseated their grip, and contracted again. The realization dawned on Luke.
It’s tearing itself off.
The skin of Clayton’s wrist stretched and thinned, then began to rip apart. It did so noiselessly, like fork-tender beef. There was no blood at all; in that way it was as clean as unscrewing a hand from a mannequin. Luke knew this sight should bother him much more than it did—but now, right this minute, it didn’t seem nearly as strange as it ought to. That his brother’s hand was pulling itself off, amputating itself from the limb it had been attached to since birth, didn’t seem that unnatural at all. It wasn’t really part of Clayton, was it? It was infected. So in a way, Luke was happy to see it go—sort of like watching a tumor excise itself before a surgeon was forced to do it.
Clayton’s body juddered as his mutinous hand jerked and clenched, the last few tenacious rags of skin shearing through as it snapped forward, free now, the wrist trailing off blue ropes of nerve and veins filled with blackened blood. The hand went limp as soon as it had detached, the fingers relaxing. Gravity carried it off the edge of the bench; it hit the grate with a smack. Disgusted, Luke kicked it under the bench.
A sense of numb duty drove him to bandage up Clayton’s wrist stump—there was no blood at all. Events were happening too swiftly; his mind was struggling to process them. His one simpleminded ambition was to drag Clayton’s body to the Challenger, but the immensity of that task filled him with a bone-deep exhaustion. And even if he dragged him there, what then?
…skritch, skritch, skritch…
10.
THE NOISE HOOKED ITSELF to motes of dust, which drifted lazily through the air to Luke’s ears.
…skritch…
A playful scrape at his thighs. It was just LB, of course it was. The dog was trying to get his attention. But no—he could see LB in the corner, watching him with obvious concern.
…skriiiitch…
His overalls tightened a few inches below his groin. A thrilling tension. It reminded him of his first sexual experience in eleventh grade with Becky Sue Morgentaler. Becky was a good Baptist girl—she refused to take Luke’s pants off or to actually touch him down there. But she’d permit his hands to roam freely under her sweater while she grabbed his jeans midway down his thighs and pulled with aching pressure, drawing the denim tight over his throbbing erection.