“Hurrrrrtssss! Gahhhh!” That was John Morris. It had to be.

Gabriel grabbed his cane and hobbled out into the hallway, wincing from his sore tailbone. He had to see what was going on. The scream sounded again, so high-pitched and dreadful that it made Gabriel’s intestines want to tie themselves in knots and strangle his stomach. As Gabriel made his way down North Wing, many of the other residents worriedly peeked out of their doorways. At the other end of the hall, Dana seemed to be in a panic.

John Morris wasn’t bedbound anymore. He was in the hallway, crawling on his hands and knees, the tubing still connected to his stomach like a long, plastic leech. He was screaming, coughing, and whimpering. His inhalations were so rough that it sounded as though his lungs were about to burst. In addition to the black wormlike veins and charcoal eyes, his skin was albino-white with ugly yellow sores spread all over him in a polka-dot pattern. A sickening puddle of perspiration trailed behind him. He was almost unrecognizable. He looked like an alien.

Morris’s charcoal-black eyes focused on Gabriel. “P-pl-please, Detective. You… help me.”

Chapter 20:

Evolution

Morris wasn’t interested in the nurses racing in his direction, stopping only to put on protective gloves, gowns, and masks. He stared steadily at Gabriel. “Help… me… plleee… pleeeassse. Hurts…” He crawled toward Gabriel. His breathing became harsher.

Gabriel looked over his shoulder, hoping that someone else was there, that Morris was calling for a nurse behind him. No. There was no one else.

“Gaahhhhh!” Morris gripped his stomach.

Gabriel took a deep breath and hobbled forward on his cane.

“Schist!” a male nurse yelled. “Stay back! We’ve got this!”

Ignoring the order, Gabriel continued forward. His ankles trembled beneath him.

“Get back, Gabriel! You’ll get infected!”

“No.” Gabriel cleared his throat. “I don’t think it’s airborne. The symptoms don’t add up. There would be more noticeable inflammation in the nose, throat, and—”

“Stay the hell back, Schist!”

Morris went into a coughing fit. He collapsed onto the floor, gagging and gasping for air. The black veins on his skin heaved in and out like water balloons. The stench of his sweat was so putrid that Gabriel almost fainted.

“Hurrtssssss…”

A group of nurses, including Dana, crowded around Morris and pinned him down so he couldn’t crawl anymore. The nurses held Morris down as if he were a tackled linebacker at the bottom of a dog pile. They wore masks, gowns, goggles, and gloves. They were prepared for anything.

But they weren’t prepared for the Black Virus. Morris screamed, but it wasn’t a scream of pain. It was a battle cry. Suddenly, all of the nurses flew into the air, thrown back like scraps of a fragmentation grenade. They slammed against the walls on either side of the corridor. One male nurse’s wrist was crushed beneath the weight of his own body, and the bone emitted a crack so loud that Gabriel winced. Six adults had been casually tossed aside by the elderly victim of a terrible disease. Gabriel stood there, terrified and shaking.

Morris was on his knees again. His arms were swollen, filled with bulging, vein-covered muscles. He had the biceps of a bodybuilder, not a sick old man. Before Gabriel could get a better look, Morris collapsed again. His new muscles disintegrated and evaporated into rancid-smelling steam. Morris released a long groan. It was as if his arms had been filled with air, and then someone had let the air out.

Gabriel fought the urge to retreat, thinking that maybe there was something he could do. Perhaps he could talk to Morris and get him to calm down. Gabriel could explain that he was working on a cure.

“Help… Guhhh…” Morris groaned. “Pleeeease…”

Four of the nurses got up and tackled Morris again. Dana ran back to her medcart, probably to retrieve some kind of sedative.

Morris wailed in agony, his charcoal-colored eyes nearly popping out of their sockets. He wriggled, desperately trying to get free. Bloody abscesses popped up all over his exposed skin, overtaking the yellow polka-dot sores and covering him like red Dalmatian spots. Seconds later, the abscesses burst. Blood sprayed the nurses’ gowns and dribbled down Morris’s body, covering their protective gloves.

Gabriel recognized those abscesses. There was only one thing they could be: methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, or MRSA. But he’d never seen them form so quickly. They couldn’t form that fast.

“Hold still, John!” the male nurse shouted.

“Hurts! Stop it. Please stop it. Let go! Gaaahhh! Hurts meeeeeee!”

Gabriel hobbled forward. He stopped a few feet from the terrifying scene and crouched down to make eye contact with the nurses holding Morris. “Take it easy on him! Can’t you see all of this stress is worsening his symptoms?”

“Get away, Gabriel! We can’t afford to—”

Morris lunged forward, slipping free from his captors. He grabbed Gabriel’s pant leg with one hand. The smell of necrotic flesh drifted up into Gabriel’s nostrils. Morris looked up into Gabriel’s face, pleading with those steaming black eyes. His skin became yellower.

“John—” Gabriel started.

A myriad of bumps appeared on Morris’s face and hands and continued to spread over his skin, which the MRSA abscesses had painted red. The tiny bumps vaguely resembled scales, and each one had a small dimple in the center of it.

Smallpox? Horrified, Gabriel tried to pull away from the sick man’s grasp, but Morris hung onto Gabriel’s pant leg with a death grip. Gabriel had seen the way Morris’s muscles had grown, and they’d grown fast. He’d seen what Morris had done to the nurses. Gabriel’s bones were weak and brittle. If Morris threw him against the wall, he might never walk again. On top of that, MRSA and smallpox were terrifyingly contagious. Gabriel ripped his pant leg away.

Morris tried to crawl after him, and as he did, his legs and feet inflated. His legs became giant balloons of flesh. They turned to blobs that had to weigh more than the rest of his body combined. Morris couldn’t move, much less crawl.

Elephantiasis? But that didn’t make any sense.

Oily black fluid ran down Morris’s cheeks. The nurses watched with horrified expressions. Two of them took off running.

Morris sneezed. Then, he sneezed again and again, several times, releasing black globs of mucus. Gabriel backed away, legs wobbling. Morris’s rope-like veins throbbed as he gasped for air between sneezes. He started to dry-heave, and Gabriel shuffled back a few more steps. It was too late to help Morris. That was obvious.

John Morris vomited all over the floor. Emesis. He gagged then vomited again… and again. He vomited some more, seemingly emptying the entire contents of his body into one giant, disgusting black lake in the center of the green-tiled hallway.

Moments later, Morris collapsed. His fall was accompanied by the sound of a multitude of gritty little cracks. Upon landing, each of his bones shattered into a million tiny pieces. His body lost all sense of mass and resembled a deflated blow-up doll more than a human corpse.

Gabriel peered down at the black oily puddle Morris had ejected. One way or another, he needed to get a sample. As he stared, trying to figure out how to take some of it back to his room, something moved inside the puddle, making an almost imperceptible splash.

“Hey!” Gabriel shouted. “Look here! Look at it!”

The nurses staring down at Morris’s body didn’t respond. They stood nearly a yard back from their fallen patient, obviously unwilling to move any closer. They turned away from the sight and began discussing the matter amongst themselves.

Gabriel looked back at the slick, shiny vomit. Something was growing out of the fluid. A tiny sharp-toothed beak-like mouth less than a half-inch in diameter pushed upward, just above the puddle’s surface. It opened, taking in its first deep gasp of oxygen.

“Hey!” Gabriel shouted.

The nurses ignored him and began sectioning off the area around Morris’s corpse. They didn’t seem concerned about the vomit puddle several feet away. The tiny jaw snapped shut then opened. The thing squalled like an infant, so quietly that Gabriel could barely hear it over the voices of the staff but so high-pitched that his eardrums stung as if they’d been pierced by needles. Gabriel covered his ears.

“Goddammit, people!” Gabriel yelled. “Will you just look over here?”

“Please stop—” one nurse started.

Gabriel pointed. “Something’s moving inside the vomit! Some kind of creature. There’s something in there.”

Their only response was a dismissive hand gesture. Two male nurses pushed over a gurney, while the other four spread a sheet over the corpse. Until they had secured the body and the stretch of hallway near it, they wouldn’t pay Gabriel any attention. He was on his own.

The tiny jaw stretched wide open, each row of sharp teeth glimmering in the fluorescent light. Fine, don’t listen to me. See what happens. Gabriel crept closer. The beak-like mouth swayed toward Gabriel then stopped abruptly. It saw him.