Free Contain by Saul Tanpepper Page B

be helping him heal.”
    I frown at her. My knowledge of
anatomy from sophomore biology is pretty basic, but from what I
recall from Missus Abramson's lessons, I know that white blood
cells are responsible for fighting off infections. I ask her if
that's what she means.
    She shakes her head. “Not white blood
cells. Not cells at all.”
    “ Then what?”
    There's another long pause. Finally,
she says, “That's what we've been discussing. We just don't know. I
personally have never seen anything like them before. They're
clearly not natural.”
    She gestures toward the contraption,
inviting me to come around the desk and take a look.
    I step over beside her. There's no
eyepiece to look into. Instead, the image is reproduced onto a
small LCD screen that had once been part of Kari's digital camera.
In the field of view, I can see several blurry disc-shaped objects,
which I take to be red blood cells.
    “ This is Eddie's blood?” I
ask.
    She nods and points to a syringe on
the desk. “I drew it this morning.”
    “ What are those spiky black
blobs? They look like sea urchins.”
    “ That's what we don't
know.”
    I shrug. “So?”
    Doc Cavanaugh removes the glass slide
and wipes it clean. Then she takes the syringe and squirts a little
fresh blood onto it and places it into a microwave. After running
two or three seconds, it starts to bubble.
    “ Now watch.” She places the
slide back onto the stage. The destroyed serum is a debris field of
amorphous clumps, not a single intact red blood cell in sight. Only
the larger black blobs and smaller fragments remain. As I watch,
the blobs start to quiver, then move about.
    I gasp and stumble backward against
the wall. “What the hell?”
    “ Keep watching.”
    A moment later, long, thin, spindly
appendages emerge from each orb and begin to wave about. Again, I
gasp in horror.
    After a moment, their movements become
coordinated, purposeful. They begin to gather the destroyed cells,
teasing apart the clumps and reorganizing the pieces.
    “ In about an hour,” Dad
says, “you'll have nothing but functional blood again.”
    Doc Cavanaugh nods. “This is what's
happening inside of Eddie. Not just in his blood, but in his skin,
too. And, I believe, in his lungs, his eyes, his nose. Everywhere
there was damage.”
    “ Whuh— What the hell are
those things? Where did they come from?”
    I edge away from the scope and the
syringe full of blood, which she's still holding in her hand. I
keep expecting it to start oozing out and coating her fingers,
smothering her and everything as it expands. All at once, my skin
feels itchy. I scrape my hands over my arms, as if I'm covered in
bugs.
    “ They look
like . . . spiders.”
    “ Not spiders,” she says,
shaking her head. “But what exactly they
are . . . .” She shrugs. “They're clearly not
organic, or else they would have been destroyed by the
microwaves.”
    Synthetic. That was the word I'd heard Dad say when I was
standing outside the door.
    “ You think they're
manmade?”
    They both nod.
    “ And you have no idea where
they came from? How long they've been inside of Eddie? How they got
there, or why?”
    “ No. But we do know that
they were present two weeks ago when we first got the scope
converted. Eddie donated his own blood for a sample, but the image
quality was too poor. We thought the blobs were some sort of
artifact.”
    “ Are they
infectious?”
    “ We don't believe so.
They're not present on the surface of Eddie's skin, not in his
saliva or urine. They're too large to be airborne.” She glances at
my father, and he nods after a moment. “Not everyone here has
them.”
    “ Who doesn't?”
    “ We only know for sure one
person: Your friend Bix. I managed to get a sample from the bloody
tissue paper he discarded the other day up in the common room.
They're not in his blood.”
    Dad steps forward to grab me as I feel
the floor tilt beneath my feet, but I swivel away, slamming my
thigh painfully into the