FORTY-ONE: LENNY

 

On first glance, the thing that came slithering out of Zooey’s CSF looked like a combination of a giant centipede and something out of the Alien movies.

I’d never seen anything like it under the microscope. It scurried up the wall of the ventricle in front of me with what was left of Astro still clamped in its mouth, turned around, and clung there, gazing back at me with a greedy, eager appetite. Its facial features were coming into focus now: narrow beady eyes and a twisted grin.

“Hasn’t anyone ever told you that it’s impolite to stare?” it asked with a sneer.

“What are you?” I asked.

The thing stopped and frowned at me. “What’s that?”

 

 

“How did you get in here?”

The thing’s grin widened, showing long rows of tiny, layered teeth that came together like a zipper. “That’s not an easy question to answer,” it said. “I’ve been on the road a long time. You wouldn’t happen to know where we could get something to eat, do you?”

“‘We’?”

“Well, yes. I never travel alone.”

Off to my right there was a rippling sound, and I looked down and saw that the cerebrospinal fluid was filled with whole colonies of organisms identical to the one in front of me, infesting the entire ventricle and spreading out through the meninges in all directions. Now the sluggish yellow fluid and the dead white blood cells and neurons all made sense. Whatever this thing was in Zooey’s body, she didn’t have any kind of natural defense against it, zero immunity, because nothing like this had ever been inside of her before.

“How did you get in?”

“I might ask you the same question.”

I shook my head. “I’m not the one making her sick.”

“Oh, I’m not just making her sick, Einstein. I’m killing her. Thanks to you.”

“What?”

“You and your buddies left the door wide open in the blood-brain barrier,” it said, with sickening smoothness. “We just slipped right through. It was easy.”

“How did you get in her system to begin with?”

“Always asking questions, aren’t you?” it said, and all the humor fell out of its voice, leaving it sounding low and nasty. “Well, if I had to generalize, I guess you might say our most common vector of infection is bad clams.”

“You’re...” Then I recognized it. “Vibrio vulnificus.”

“Nicely done,” it said drily. “I’m impressed. Too bad it won’t do you any good. Or her.”

“I still don’t understand how you got in. She’s allergic to shellfish. She’d never eat you.”

“Not on purpose, maybe.”

“But then how—”

“Look around you. The world’s a dirty place. And it sure isn’t getting any cleaner up here.”

“Yeah, but—”

I stopped and looked up. One by one, the monitor screens that lined the walls of the third ventricle were shorting out, cutting over to static for a second and then going completely blank, burying this entire part of the brain in darkness. It was getting hotter in here by the second. Flickering skeins of electrical current sparked and leapt erratically through the synapses around me, and way off in the distance I could feel the faint, juddering thump-thump of Zooey’s pulse as it became more irregular.

“Looks like we’re really heating up the joint now,” the vibrio chortled, and now its grin looked almost demonic. “The immediate forecast doesn’t look good.”

“Leave her alone.”

“Too late for that. We’re everywhere.”

I checked the digital readout in my dive mask and saw that it was down to eighteen minutes and counting before I started reverting back to normal size.

Then the lights went out.