#tsijbm

and if you look clooooseee enough...

Aylin tried to chew her nails and was thwarted by rubber gloves and a veil of clear plastic.

Ugh. These hazmat suits.

She hadn’t ever needed to wear one until now, her work had only recently brought her into contact with things worth sequestering oneself from. Things like—

A pile of grimy black grit squelched under her foot. The smell was sun-baked roadkill and copper-soaked mold.

—things like that.

Clammy rubber and plastic and sterilizing chemicals weren’t so bad after all.

Between those scents, something fresh seeped through the filter in Aylin’s suit. Four pounds of ground beef sat in the bottom of a bucket she held above and away from the corrosive mold, wafting blood and myoglobin. She took care to keep it from swinging, lest it knock into an infected wall, become infested itself, and rapidly decay from her fingers. Every moment she stayed here was a risk that her own suit’s safety mechanisms would fail, and it too would corrode into nothing.

“Jackie?” she called into the apartment.

Her voice was muffled by the sprawl of black. It lay on every surface like a massive, frayed blanket, torn open in some places, bunched up in others. It choked the windows and ate the curtains with a crisscross of tendrils that could be seen from the outside, swallowing up most light attempting to pass through. Twinkling green dust shook from blobs of infectious gunk on the ceiling. They fizzed like sparks when they hit the floor. Spores, maybe.

The only other features were little green orbs pushing up from the blackness at irregular intervals. Almost like eyes. Eyes that one half of her wanted to crush the underfoot, and another half wanted to tread carefully around.

She decided to stay put. “I don’t have a lot of time. Ten minutes, that’s all. Less, now.”

The apartment’s interior was difficult to discern in the smothered light. She’d never see Jackie from here, not in his state, but was hesitant to try poking around. Rocking back and forth on her feet, mindful of her bucket, she twisted her head so the attached flashlight’s angle would change. With luck, an errant shadow would reveal the outline of a table, chair, couch, or humanoid crouched behind one of the three. And with no luck… Well, if she had to go in, she ought to remind herself where things were.

“You can’t stay in here anymore,” she spoke again, “The structure is falling apart. The rest of your neighbors have evacuated. And if you don’t come willingly you’re going to get, uh… Incinerated.”

No reply.

She bit back a curse. God dammit, Jackie, we’re running out of time.

Of course, it was possible she was already out of time. That she was calling out to a corpse lying in the refuse. Last she saw him, he was half-covered in tar black flesh. It could have easily progressed beyond the point-of-no-return by now.

Or maybe he’s not a corpse, maybe he’s a monster. Perfectly camouflaged, stalking closer—

No, Aylin commanded the train of thought to stop, squinted into the dark, and cursed whoever gave her such a weak flashlight, You’d have seen his eyes by now.

“I brought food. I’m sure you can smell it. See it. Whatever.”

Unless his eyes were eaten, too.

“You’ll have to follow me outside to get it.”

Movement! Small and twitchy, just enough for her paranoid mind to catch.

Aylin angled her flashlight towards it. “Jackie?”

That had better be Jackie.

Her light wasn’t hitting anything. Or maybe Jackie was just pressed against a wall and wasn’t casting a shadow.

Aylin dug her hand into the bucket and scooped out a handful of meat.

“I know this is probably terrifying but… But it’s the best chance we’ve—that you’ve got.” She stopped short of saying it might turn up something useful or spare him from being eaten alive. That would be irresponsible. “I’ll give you once piece now, the rest on the way.”

A chunk of the wall moved. It seemed to inflate, first, with a moist wheezing noise, before a human-shaped section ripped and peeled away from the rest. Green blisters and glittering spores sloughed to the ground with a chorus of wet thuds as the figure rose from sitting or crouching. A thick sheet of black bunched around pale ankles, tendrils still clinging and digging into the skin as they pulled away. The whole apartment seemed to groan and whine, though that might have been the poor, tortured wooden beams crying out.

It was Jackie, alright. Aylin didn’t know whether to sigh in relief or wince in horror.

There was still human skin underneath the black crust, but they were pale islands in a sea of otherworldly, parasitic darkness. Islands that were slowly shrinking, and mostly concentrated in the extremities, based on what she could see beneath his mold-eaten clothes.

He still had eyes, but they were squinted to slits.

“Oh. Sorry.” Aylin angled her flashlight away from his face.

Jackie’s eyes widened to perfect roundness. Last she’d seen them, the scleras were an inflamed pink. Now, that pink had deepened to solid, blood red crisscrossed with dark hairline veins. His pupils, which had been constricted to flea-sized dots in the light, widened to an unhealthy looking degree. He sighed and blinked as if clearing the light’s lingering afterimages from his eyes.

“Yeah, sorry. I know.” She paused. “I brought help.”

Jackie’s pupils darted to the meat in her palm, to the bucket, and to her face again. He tried to say something, but it came out garbled beyond comprehension.

“It’s downstairs. Everyone else is gone, and everything’s been sealed off, so all that’s left is to go.” Aylin spoke slowly, watching for any sign that Jackie didn’t like the sound of this plan. It would be all too easy to set him off while he was already miserable, and she’d lost one shirt to one of his increasingly common foul moods only a day prior. She did not want that fate to befall her hazmat suit. Or her flesh.

It would also be city-wide catastrophe–level bad if he decided to turn his ire to the people waiting for them outside, let alone to her.

The problem was not that Jackie would die if a fight broke out.

The problem was that Jackie would win.

“Truck’s out back where the dumpsters are. You’ve got to go straight in or they’ll fire.” And I’d rather not be melted alive with you.

Jackie’s reply was a thick, wet wheeze that was probably intended to assure her that he was well aware of the stakes. He shuffled up to her until they were scarcely a foot apart and gingerly took the beef from her hand. He was not anywhere near as careful as consuming it.

As his infection had worsened, his appetite rapidly swelled into an insatiable famine Jackie couldn’t afford to slake, one Aylin had to hastily manage for him while she got professional help, lest he starting hunting the animals in his apartment walls. He’d take about anything these days, but high protein and sugar foods kept him at ease for the longest. And even that had not always been enough. “Have you eaten since I left? Can you even move in there?”

No answer.

“Damn.”

He coughed.

She offered him a bit more food, recalling days spent riddled with strep throat, consuming anything soft and warm to soothe the ache. “We have to hurry,” she paused, considered him for a moment, “…You go ahead. I’ll tell you if you’re going the wrong way.”

Aylin gestured to the door and stepped aside. It cast a rectangle of light that illuminated motes of sparking, glittering green dust but otherwise failed to dispel the darkness. Jackie stared at it long enough that she worried he was going to slink back into the dark to be immolated—or do something drastic—but then, mercifully, he began to walk.

As he exited the apartment, Aylin followed and closed the door behind her.

They took the elevator down and Aylin took the liberty of lightening her bucket. She fed Jackie hunks of meat as fast as he’d eat them while she explained how this was going to go down, and while he snorted or raised gunk-crusted eyebrows at a few of the procedures, there was no protest.

Their footsteps echoed off the walls of the empty lobby as they left the lift. Everything had been cordoned off in preparation for Jackie’s arrival. Dark shadows stood along the perimeter of the building, blurred by the opaque tarp stretched over the windows and walls. Watching. Waiting. Sometimes a figure would materialize behind their observers for a moment, stalk along behind them, and retreat further away after a moment.

What were they saying out there? She knew what they were doing, but they had not allowed any technology to go in.

If their plans were changing, she was in the dark, and something went wrong in here, they were in the dark.

All she’d been given was a hazmat suit, a bucket, and exactly ten minutes before the place was set ablaze. (She figured she had about five, now.) The time restraint was simple enough to parse, but after some thinking, Aylin figured the only reason for the tech restriction was because their parasite could either use or destroy them. And do it consistently enough that it was pointless trying to bring anything more complex than her light in.

She looked back at Jackie, who squinted at the outside. “In case you do anything stupid,” she answered the unspoken question.

He made an indignant noise in reply.

“Not that you would, of course. More beef?” she offered.

This time, when she dropped a wad of flesh into his palm, she noticed it began to decompose the moment it touched any blackened skin.

Eesh.

Jackie looked away from her, focused his attention on the lobby and began to stare at all the corners of its interior like he was searching for something. Taking it all in, she realized.

It had been infested, dank, and cheaply built before Jackie had invited the inter-dimensional infection in, but it was still home. A home that was about to be leveled, reduced to ash. Another home he was about to leave behind.

She let him ruminate on that a moment before she got his attention. “We’re running out of time.”

Jackie swallowed. The sound was horrendous. Aylin worried he might have dislodged and swallowed a chunk of himself. He tried to speak, his discomfort clear even in his slurred words, “Yesh. A, now.”

His cooperation confirmed, she led him out to the back. In lieu of litter and dumpsters were gun-toting, flamethrower-wielding guards watching the door. The whole place was bathed in white thanks to the protective shield of airtight plastic stretched over every surface.

This was the most nerve-wracking part. The part where Jackie might decide not to leave. Or decide to break out of the barriers. Too intimidated, maybe. Suddenly enraged at an inopportune time, perhaps.

At the end of the alley, a transport truck was wedged in between the apartments and the building adjacent. The back was open, wafting chilly air. The guards lined up along the walls stared expectantly from behind opaque masks, and tightened their holds on their weapons, but did not breathe a word. They had strict orders not to.

There was an expectation that Aylin was a monster tamer of sorts. That she alone could keep Jackie from carving off the heads of the people nearest, and any unauthorized move on their part could set him off.

She hoped that was true.

“Alright,” she said, “Just into here, and I’ll see you again once we’re there.”

Jackie stopped in the doorway and turned to stare at her. The veins on his eyes seemed to swim. She wondered if they even were veins.

Trying to interpret his meaning before their escorts got anxious, she replied smoothly, “I’ll be on a truck right behind you, I promise. I came this far with you, I’m not going to abandon you now.”

His stare lingered a moment longer before he turned around and stepped outside.

Heart hammering in her chest, Aylin followed behind and watched him take his sweet time getting into the truck—another point at which he hesitated, at which he stopped to look at her. She gave him the bucket and pressed rubber-gloved hands against his. A risk, but a worthy one. “I’ll be there. I promise.”

He tried to say something that came out as a low, wet groan. Then he slid his hands away from hers, took his bucket and backed into the truck willingly, even as the artificially chilled air made his breath fog up. (A precaution, something to slow him down.)

Aylin considered telling him everything was going to be okay, but hesitated a moment too long. Just as she opened her mouth, the guards swooped in to close, lock, and secure the doors.

Now it was her turn to be shepherded into her designated spot.