Hive

Booze, drugs, depression, tobacco. Hayes knew all about the tobacco-thing, because he’d been smoking for nearly thirty years now. So he knew that one and understood it and realized like anyone else that you lost a minute or five or whatever it was every time you lit up.

But he never saw it that way.

He looked on it by the months and years. That he was buying himself a plot of cemetery earth, shovelful by shovelful. But it didn’t stop him and it didn’t slow him down. The nicotine had him and it was a pure and senseless thing that was more than just a simple physical addiction, but something destructive in the soul that saw its own end and welcomed it.

So, he understood there were things that took your life slowly. But there were also things that ate away your life in big chunks, in heaping spoonfuls. And what was laying on the cot in the sick bay the next morning was definitely one of them.

Lind.

Or maybe not Lind at all.

Sharkey had him strapped down and he was sweating and feverish and his skin was bubbling like hot fat. Actually bubbling. You could say in your mind that they were blood blisters or water blisters, but that didn’t cut it and you knew it. Just as Hayes knew it. What he was looking at, what Lind had become, was something akin to the little girl in that old scary movie. The one who puked up green slime and had the Devil in her.

“What the hell’s wrong with him?” Hayes asked.

“You tell me,” Sharkey said. “I can’t explain the lesions any more than I can really explain his state of mind. I would guess this is something psychosomatic, but -”

“Yes?”

“But to this degree? This is out of my league, Jimmy.”

She had wisely shut the door now to the sick bay and the outer door to the infirmary itself. Lind was just laying there, staring up at the ceiling, his mouth opening and closing. He was making a gulping sound in his throat like a beached fish.

Hayes swallowed down whatever was in him that made him want to turn and run. He swallowed it down and went over to Lind. He looked terrible. His flesh was white as a toad’s belly and the oddest smell was coming off him . . . a sharp chemical odor like turpentine.

“Lind? Can you hear me? It’s Hayes.”

The eyes blinked, the pupils hugely dilated, but nothing else. There was no sense of recognition. Anything. Lind’s mouth snapped close and then his lips parted slowly. The voice that came out was windy and echoing, unearthly . . . almost like Lind was speaking from the bottom of a very deep well. “Hayes . . . Jimmy . . . oh, Christ, help me Jimmy, don’t let them . . . .”

He stopped, making that gulping noise again. Although he was restrained, his hands were flopping madly about, looking for something to grasp. Horrified as he was by all of it, Hayes was seeing another human being in a terrible plight and he put his hand in Lind’s own. He almost immediately pulled away . . . touching Lind was like laying your hands on an electric cow fence. Hayes could feel the energy, the electricity thrumming through the man. It seemed to be moving in waves and he could feel it crawling over the back of his hand.

Lind took a deep breath and that energy died away. Thankfully.

Now all Hayes was aware of was the actual feel of Lind’s flesh against his own. It was hot and moist and repulsive. Like handling some reptilian fetus that had been expelled from its mother’s womb in a breath of fevers. Lind’s hand was like that . . . smooth, warm, sweating toxins and bile. It took everything Hayes had in him not to pull away.

“Lind . . . c’mon, old buddy, you can’t go on like this, you -”

“I can hear you, Jimmy, but I can’t see you, I can’t see anything but this place, this awful place . . . oh, where am I, where am I?”

That voice was making a rushing, hollow sound that human lungs were simply incapable of. Hayes couldn’t get past the notion that it was coming from very far away. It sounded like it was being accelerated across great distances.

Hayes looked over at Sharkey and she chewed her lip.

“You’re in the infirmary, Lind.”

Lind’s hand played in his own, felt pliant like warm clay, something that might melt away from body heat. “I can’t see you, Jimmy . . . Jesus Christ, but I can’t fucking see you,” he whimpered. “I . . . I can’t see the infirmary either . . . I see . . . oh I see . . . “

“What do you see?” Hayes asked him, thinking it might be important. “Tell me.”