This is another of my older stories I decided was worth giving an update and polish and re-introducing to the world. The last one, Better Not Tell You Now, I mostly just did a new copyedit on, but this one got a full update. It was original set in roughly 2008 (when it was written,) but one of the characters wound up becoming a side (for now, anyway) character in the Olive Tree Academy series, so I needed to bring the timeline forward several years. This now takes place starting in the summer of 2019.
This story has an unusual origin. I originally wrote it in 2008, specifically to submit to a short story anthology with a very specific theme. It didn’t make it into the book, but I was very happy with how it came out.
The anthology’s unique theme was this: they presented a group of old stories that are now in the public domain. The assignment was to pick one of those stories and write something entirely new, but inspired by that original story. I chose “Caterpillars” by E.F. Benson. That story is where this one gets its title, and the caterpillars themselves are essentially the same ones as in Benson’s original story.
The rest, though, is all new…
Cancer Inglisensis
“Another beer, boys?” Dorie asked.
“Sure,” said Shawn. “He’s buying.”
“No,” Ethan said, rolling his dark, almond shaped eyes. “I’m not.”
The middle-aged waitress stood, smiling, waiting for them to finish their routine. When they at last figured out who was buying the beer, she trotted off to grab their bottles. Ethan knew she’d bring a menu with them; she always started pushing food once you hit your third drink.
As soon as Dorie was gone, the visitor they’d been waiting for slid into the booth next to Ethan.
“About time you showed, motherfucker,” said Shawn. “I thought you went home for the summer and we were gonna have to settle for gettin’ drunk tonight.”
“Heaven forbid,” said Eddie, widening his eyes and shuddering in mock horror. He pulled a rolled-up baggie from his jacket pocket and passed it to Ethan under the table.
Ethan handed two folded bills back, putting the baggie into his own pocket. He ran a hand through his shaggy, glossy, black hair in an unconvincing show of casualness. He wondered why they bothered with the under-the-table charade; everyone in the pub knew what it meant when Eddie Strathmann sat down at your table.
Ethan and Shawn hurried through their final beer, ignoring the menu. Ethan left Dorie a generous tip, and they headed out.
“Bruh, you’re outta Doritos,” Shawn called from Ethan’s kitchen two hours later.
“‘Cause you ate ‘em all, jackass,” Ethan shouted back through a mouthful of cold chicken wing. “There’s Pop-Tarts in the cabinet over the blender. Grab those.”
“I don’t want fuckin’ Pop-Tarts,” Shawn whined. “I want fuckin’ Doritos. The jalapeño ones.”
“Well, we don’t have any.”
“Let’s go get some, then.”
“The store’s all the way over the bridge, and it’s like eighty-five degrees outside,” Ethan said. “Grab the Pop-Tarts and get in here, so we can start the movie. I heard there’s robot tits in this.”
Shawn banged the cabinet door closed and returned to the living room. He slumped onto the floor beside Ethan, slamming the little box down in front of him. Shawn’s ginger curls and pale, freckled face made him look much younger than his twenty-one years; the pouting over the snack selection further reduced him from little boy to spoiled brat.
“You done with your tantrum?” Ethan asked, brandishing the remote control.
“I’m not havin’ a tantrum,” Shawn said, struggling with the foil bag to get to the toaster pastries inside. “Who buys fucking blueberry Pop-Tarts?”
“Will you shut up about the goddamn Pop-Tarts?” Ethan groaned.
“I would if I had Doritos,” Shawn replied.
Exasperated, Ethan put the remote back on the floor. “Come on,” he said.
“Huh?” asked Shawn around a mouthful of sticky pastry.
“We’re getting you some Doritos so you’ll shut the fuck up.”
“Shit,” said Shawn with his mouth full, the bright green bag of tortilla chips already open as they stepped out of the grocery store.
“What?” Ethan asked, using a finger to scoop Ben & Jerry’s Chunky Monkey from a little cardboard container.
“I just remembered,” Shawn said, looking into the bag. “I don’t like this kind.”
Ethan shot Shawn a look, but didn’t say anything. As they crossed the parking lot, a woman standing by her car sneezed, hard, several times in succession, losing her grip on the bags she was transferring from her cart to her trunk. Canned goods and apples rolled across the pavement, and a half-gallon jug of milk cracked and ran like white blood. “Dam-bit!” she yelled, her voice stuffy-nose thick. She sniffed, then began to pick up the cans, dripping with spilt milk.
“Think we oughtta help her?” Shawn asked.
“No way,” Ethan said. “She’s sick. I’m not catching anything.”
“It’s just a cold,” Shawn said.
“Lotsa things start out as just a cold,” Ethan said. “Next thing you know, you got pneumonia. No fucking way I’m goin’ anywhere near her.”
“Can we go back and buy some different Doritos?”
“No. You had your chance. My ice cream’s already half melted in this heat.”
They walked along the sidewalk of Juniper Avenue until they got to the overpass that would take them back into Herneshorne, Ethan’s neighborhood. At the highest point of the curved bridge, Ethan paused and flashed a roguish smile.
Shawn didn’t notice and walked into him. He yelped, stumbling back before regaining his balance. “Why’d you stop?”
“Dammit,” Ethan said, rubbing at the melted ice cream on his shirt. “But look.” He pointed looked down at the traffic speeding along the freeway under their feet.
“What about it?”
Ethan held up his half-eaten carton of ice cream, his eyes sparkling with mischief. He held it over the railing for a few seconds, then let go. The ice cream bomb plummeted toward the road below, where it splattered across the windshield of an ambulance with its lights and siren on.
Seconds later, red and blue lights flashed behind the ambulance. “Shit,” Ethan said, turning to run.
Shawn ran back toward the store, and Ethan continued in the other direction, toward home. He’d just cleared the bridge when he collided with something and fell. Looking up from the sidewalk, his stomach gave a lurch as he found himself sprawled at the feet of a uniformed police officer.
The radio in the cop’s hand made a scratching noise, then someone on the other end spoke. You see anyone up there?
“Yeah,” said the cop, looking down at Ethan and smiling. “I got one of them.”
Sure it’s them?
Ethan saw the cop take in the ice cream splattered across the front of his T-shirt. The cop smiled. “Yeah,” he said. “It’s them.”
July in Barrow City was way too hot for a suit of any kind, especially an ill-fitting, itchy, wool one, but Ethan didn’t own another. He hadn’t worn it since his grandmother’s funeral three years ago; wearing it now made him remember the long illness that had killed her. Thinking about it, the ugly jacket grew hotter still.
Ethan had been terrified of sickness, even before seeing cancer gradually eat his grandma away, leaving scarcely anything for the family to bury. Waiting in the hall for his turn before the judge, he kept coming back to this fear, and to the fact that if he’d stopped to help the woman with the sniffles pick up her groceries, none of this would have happened. Even if he’d still thrown the ice cream off the bridge, it would have been later; it wouldn’t have been an ambulance he hit or, at the very least, not the one with a cop driving right behind it, while another one lurked up by the bridge in the perfect, unlucky, spot to catch him running away.
He kept playing the if-onlies over and over in his head until he felt dizzy. Then his thoughts would go back to his grandma. Back and forth, round and round, pacing the courthouse hall in his uncomfortable suit.
One of the elaborate wooden doors opened, and a man with a clipboard looked out. “Ethan Nguyen?”
Ethan stood, his court-appointed lawyer beside him, and together they stepped into the courtroom.
The hearing didn’t take long. Both lawyers told their sides of the story, and though the public defender did an admirable job of making excuses for him, even Ethan knew there was no choice for the judge but to find him guilty. When the time came, he took a deep breath and waited for the axe to fall.
The nameplate on the judge’s bench read: Amanda Fallows. Ethan couldn’t help but think how much it sounded like gallows. She wasn’t old, probably in her mid-thirties, but she struck an intimidating figure draped in her black robe and stern expression.
“What concerns me most,” Judge Fallows said. “Is it was an ambulance you vandalized. Not only could you have caused a serious accident, you could have prevented someone already in a life-threatening situation from reaching the hospital.
“This is your first offense,” the judge went on, the look on her face saying she knew it was more likely the first time he’d been caught. “And the law doesn’t indicate jail time.”
Ethan felt his shoulders relax.
“However,” she continued. “I want you to appreciate the gravity of your actions. I’m sentencing you to one hundred and fifty hours of community service, to be served over a period of no less than six months. You will be volunteering in the cancer ward of the hospital of your choice.
“Your honor,” interjected Ethan’s attorney. “May I ask why six months?”
“I’m glad you asked, counselor,” the judge said, favoring him with a haughty smile. “I believe it necessary for this young man to witness, firsthand, the suffering of others. I want to make sure, Mr. Nguyen, that you don’t just stack bedpans for a few weeks. Six months should be enough time for you to get to know some of the patients, to see some recover and others decline. Six months will close the distance of that overpass for you, and allow you to appreciate the realness of other people’s lives.”
Six months of working in a hospital. It was all Ethan could do not to drop to his knees and beg the judge for any other punishment.
He left the courtroom feeling numb. “That wasn’t so bad,” the court-appointed attorney said to him as they were leaving. “Community service isn’t too awful.”
Ethan didn’t say anything.
Ethan stood outside Airmed Hospital. The building looked so clean and safe, with its façade of bright, white concrete and sparkling glass, situated amid a beautiful garden.
The well-tended lawn surrounding Airmed was so nice, in fact, that people with no connection to the hospital or its patients often took walks through its flower-lined paths and ate their lunch on the iron benches spread throughout the park-like grounds. Ethan observed close to a dozen such people, taking advantage of a glorious summer day to spend some time outdoors in the sun.
To Ethan, the hospital looked like nothing but a giant box of germs, waiting to be freed. He looked up at the marble statue of the Celtic goddess Airmed, for whom the hospital was named, thinking it ought to be Pandora, instead.
He took a deep breath, let it back out, and headed up the sidewalk toward the main entrance.
The glass doors slid open with a shunk and Ethan stepped through, feeling like he was entering an ancient killing arena. The woman sitting behind the polished wood reception desk was about fifty, with short, dyed-red hair and too much makeup. A word-search book sat open on the desk, an American flag ballpoint pen clutched in her taloned right hand.
Ethan cleared his throat. It wasn’t an artificial gesture to get the receptionist’s attention; he felt like his throat was drying and closing, collapsing in on itself. The woman tore herself from her puzzle and glared up. “Yes?” she asked. There was lipstick on her teeth.
“I-” Ethan began, then had to pause, trying to work up more saliva. “I’m supposed to start my community service here today,” he managed to croak out.
She laid the pen down and looked him over, clearly wondering what he’d done to earn the sentence. “What’s your name?” she asked drily, pulling a folder from a rack built into the desk.
“Ethan Nguyen,” he said.
Her over-painted eyes widened. How almost every person in America could be so baffled by a name so common it was essentially the Vietnamese equivalent of Smith he’d never been able to comprehend.
“N-G-U-Y-E-N” he spelled, not waiting for her to ask.
“Here you go, Mr. Nugin,” she said, handing him a sheet of paper from the folder. He took it, not bothering to correct the mispronunciation.
In most world mythologies, the hero went down to reach the Underworld. Across the lobby from the reception desk, Ethan pressed the button beside the elevator doors to summon the chariot that would instead carry him up to the Hell of his own personal epic on the sixth floor.
“Ethan Nguyen?” said a young woman in violet scrubs when he was about halfway up the long corridor that led to the nurses’ station.
He wondered if she’d guessed who he was because he looked scared and confused, or because he was Asian. She’d pronounced his name right, though, so he gave her the benefit of the doubt. He nodded.
“I’m Jen. Come with me,” she said, smiling. She had short, bouncy, dark hair and deep green eyes; he’d probably have been very attracted to her had he not been so terrified he felt like he might throw up.
He followed Jen into what appeared to be a break room for the nurses, where she had him fill out a stack of paperwork. One page was a waiver freeing the hospital from any liability should Ethan contract some horrible illness from one of their patients. His hand paused over the signature line on this one.
Jen noticed his hesitation. “Don’t worry about that,” she said with a dismissive shake of her head. “This is the cancer ward. Nothing contagious around here.”
He tried to nod, but wasn’t sure it worked. He signed the waiver, his signature a good deal more jagged than usual.
“I’ll give you a tour of the ward,” she said, after he was done with the paperwork. “Then you should have about an hour left. You’re doing two-hour shifts, three days a week, right?”
Ethan nodded again, and followed her out of the break room.
She showed him the nurses’ station, the supply closets, the broom closet. She showed him where the mops, buckets and paper towels were kept, and vivid scenes of puddles of vomit waiting to be mopped up played out in his mind’s eye. The tour included the locked drug cabinet, and he noticed the names on several of the boxes and bottles were for antibiotics. Nothing contagious around here, she’d said; he’d known that was a load of crap.
Jen also explained the hierarchy of the ward, and how to tell each person’s job by their uniform. The nurses wore violet scrubs, Like Jen’s, while the patient care assistants wore dark blue. Doctors wore white coats over either professional clothes or green scrubs. Volunteers, like Ethan, wore street clothes.
At last, the tour took him where he knew it would: the patient rooms. Door after door lined two long hallways, each leading to one or two people lying in beds or sitting in chairs, looking out windows. Windows, he noted, that didn’t open, trapping every germ and microbe inside.
Staphylococcus, Streptococcus, E. Coli, HIV, CMV, PCP, MERS, MRSA. Ethan could almost see, almost feel the millions of invisible monsters swarming around him, ready to take him down, ready to consume him whole.
“This is Mrs. Rock,” Jen said, gesturing to a frail old woman lying in one of the beds. “She’s a regular.” She smiled warmly at Mrs. Rock, as though she were a loyal customer at the corner deli.
Mrs. Rock offered up a crooked smile, one side of her mouth showing far more of her long, yellow teeth than the other. She seemed to take no umbrage at being referred to as a regular.
“Mrs. Rock,” Jen continued. “This is Ethan. He’s going to be helping us out for a few hours every week.”
“Hello, Ethan,” she greeted, holding out her hand.
He took the barest tips of her fingers in his and let her lead him in a weak shake. “Hi,” he tried to say, but the volume came out so low he wasn’t sure even Jen could hear him, let alone this sick old lady.
Mrs. Rock seemed to take him for shy, and didn’t appear any more offended by his distance than she had by Jen’s declaration of her as a frequent flyer.
“Poor thing,” Jen said, once they were back out in the hall. “She looks smaller every time I see her, like it’s just eating her up.”
Ethan didn’t have a response to that or, at least, none he cared to voice.
“Anyway,” she said, her tone back to its original brightness. “You have…” she looked at her watch. “Forty-five minutes left. Let me show you what you’ll be doing for the rest of the day.”
His assignment was stacking books onto a cart and then wheeling it to the hospital’s library on the first floor. As he was leaving for the day, Jen told him next time he’d be picking up the cart from the library, filled with a new selection of books and magazines, and taking it around from room to room, offering fresh reading material to the patients and taking back the items they’d finished with. He’d have to spend the majority of his shift in direct contact with the patients; he wondered whether the judge had requested this assignment specifically.
On his way home, Ethan’s bus made a stop on Bridge Street, in front of the courthouse. It took all of his will power to resist the urge to get off the bus, go inside, and beg Judge Fallows to lock him up rather than make him go back to the hospital.
“I bought the last one,” Shawn said.
“No you didn’t,” said Ethan. “I paid for the last two.”
“I got the two before that.”
“We’ve only had two.”
“Tell you what,” Dorie interrupted. “I’ll go get your beer, and you boys figure it out by the time you’re ready to go.” She walked to the next table, leaving Shawn and Ethan to finish their squabble.
“C’mon,” Ethan said. “Cough up.”
“Bruh, if I buy I won’t have enough for my half of the weed.”
Ethan rolled his eyes. “Fine,” he said. “But this is the last one.”
“No problem,” Shawn said, looking over Ethan’s shoulder toward the door. “Eddie’s here.”
“Evening, boys,” Eddie said, sitting down beside Ethan.
“Hey, man,” Shawn said.
“Got something special tonight, if you’re interested,” Eddie said.
“Like what?” asked Ethan, sitting up straighter.
Eddie pressed the bag into Ethan’s hand under the table. Ethan looked down toward his lap. “Looks the same to me,” he said.
“Oh, but it’s not,” Eddie said. “It’s called Majik Vision.”
“No shit?” asked Shawn, leaning forward across the table. “I’ve never heard of that. Is it new?”
“Sure is.”
“Where’d you score that?”
“Never you mind. But I’ve sampled it. More than just sampled, if I’m being perfectly honest, and it’s exquisite.”
Ethan hesitated. “I don’t know,” he said. “Someone’s having a cash-flow problem.” He glared at Shawn. “You got any of our regular shit on you?”
“Ethan,” Shawn whined, looking around and leaning forward so as not to be overheard. “We can’t turn down something brand new. No fuckin’ way.”
“Fine,” Ethan said, exasperated. “How much?”
It was a good deal more than their usual and, since Shawn was short, or at least claiming to be, Ethan put up most of the cash himself. “I’m keeping all the leftovers,” he declared, as Eddie headed off to his next customer.
Eddie hadn’t been kidding about the quality of the expensive, new, strain. Ethan was glad he’d claimed dibs on the rest of the bag; Majik Vision might be the key to getting through his sentence.
“Ethan,” Jen said as soon as he stepped off the elevator.
“Hey, Jen,” he said, trying to maintain the illusion that he wasn’t high as a kite.
He took his time getting the cart. The drugs were helping, but he still wasn’t eager to spend more time around patients than necessary. He stalled in every way he could conceive, chatting with the cute library volunteer, straightening the books on the cart. He considered stopping by the bathroom, but a public bathroom in a hospital was even scarier than the rooms of cancer patients.
Despite his effort to kill time, he still had an hour and a half left when he got back to the ward, all of which would be spent peddling books. The task of returning the cart, according to Jen, was reserved for the next poor community service schmuck, so he wouldn’t be able to knock off early to return the cart.
He started with the first door on the right past the nurses’ station. It was a single right now, an elderly woman spending a couple of days on the ward for observation after having one of her kidneys removed, along with the tumor attached to it. “Hi, Mrs. Brown,” Ethan said, pushing the cart into the room.
“Oh, it’s the little Oriental boy,” she said, which was even more irritating than people not knowing how to pronounce his last name. She meant nothing by it though, he knew, and so he took a breath and ignored it.
“Want anything to read?” Ethan asked, parking the cart inside the door.
“Oh, I don’t know,” she said. “What have you got on that wagon?”
“A little of everything,” Ethan said.
“You got any Reader’s Digest on there?”
He located one, took it from the cart, and approached Mrs. Brown’s bedside. He started to hand it to her, but jumped back and let go before she got a hold of it. He bent to pick it up, sure he’d imagined the thing he’d seen. Shaking his head as though to clear it, he stood back up with the magazine. “Sorry about that, Mrs.—”
He froze, wide eyed.
“What’s the matter?” she asked, oblivious to the huge bug that had crawled out from under her covers.
How can she not see it? Ethan wondered. It was about four inches long, and the yellowish-green color of an unhealthy glob of snot. There were ugly, irregular bumps all over its wriggling body. It looked more like a like a caterpillar than anything else but, instead of the spindly, insectile legs of a caterpillar, this thing had crablike pincers along its disgusting body.
The pincers dug right through the thin fabric of Mrs. Brown’s hospital gown with every crawling, multilegged step. They drew no blood, but appeared to sink deep into the crepey skin on the other side of the gown.
She looked where he was staring, right at the bizarre insect. “What?” she asked again, sounding confused.
Realizing he must be hallucinating from the weed, Ethan stammered “Nothing, sorry.” He handed Mrs. Brown her Reader’s Digest and turned, walked hard into the cart, recovered, then pushed it out into the hall.
It took a few tries to open the door to the next room with his shaking hands.
“Hey,” the man in the front bed said, looking up from the Stephen King book in his hands. He looked only a few years older than Ethan.
“Hi,” Ethan said. “You need anything new?”
“Oh, no,” said the man. “Thanks. I’ve got a ways to go in this one, and I’m leaving tomorrow. He might want something, though,” he suggested, gesturing to the other bed.
The person in the bed was sleeping, the blankets pulled high. He was so thin and frail it was difficult to discern a body under the covers at all.
“I think he has a magazine he’s done with,” the man in the front bed went on. “Maybe you can swap it for another issue of the same?”
Ethan nodded at the suggestion, lacking a tactful way to argue with it. He crossed the room, which felt like it grew hotter and stuffier the closer he got to the sleeping patient. Once he reached the bed, he looked on the nightstand for the magazine, but found only a Jesus brochure someone had dropped off.
He was about to walk back to the cart and leave when he noticed the corners of several glossy pages poking out from under the blanket; the patient must have fallen asleep while reading. He glanced over, and saw the other man was watching, seeing he’d found the magazine. He couldn’t ignore it now.
He looked at the face on the bed in front of him. Wisps of grey hair fell across a blemished, pockmarked scalp. The man’s eyes darted back and forth under his closed lids, dreaming. There was just enough of one skinny shoulder visible above the blanket to tell Ethan the man’s hospital gown had either slipped partway off or was absent all together.
Ethan reached toward the magazine, hoping to retrieve it without touching the old man’s skin. He pinched the protruding corner of the pages between two fingers and pulled, but it wouldn’t budge. He tried not to think about the glossy paper sticking to the man’s clammy, bare chest.
Knowing he had no other choice, Ethan moved his fingertip-hold from the magazine to the thin, blue, thermal blanket and pulled it down to where he approximated the bottom edge of the magazine would be. He then repeated the gesture with the beige blanket underneath the blue one. At last, nothing remained but a white sheet between him and the magazine.
He yanked the sheet back. To his horror, at least a dozen caterpillars swarmed up and down the man’s right side and across to the middle of his bony chest, all at least twice the size of the one he’d seen on Mrs. Brown, some close to a foot long.
Ethan jumped back and cried out, leaving the magazine. He knew from his experience with Mrs. Brown, and from the confused look the guy with the Stephen King book gave him, that nobody else could see the vile creatures. He knew he must be hallucinating, but knowing this didn’t make him any more capable of picking up the magazine. He grabbed a random periodical from the cart, threw it down on the bedside table, and all but ran from the room.
Caterpillars crawled over both patients in the next room. Mrs. Smith, in the front bed, had three of them on her chest, while Miss Claridon, who was new on the ward, had one in her hair.
When he got to Mrs. Rock, he found her covered from head to toe. She chatted merrily from underneath them, oblivious, while small ones wriggled in and out of her nose and mouth.
Ethan left the cart where it sat, ran to the bathroom, and threw up. He told Jen he was sick, and left for the day. He needed to get home and wait for the Majik Vision, whatever the fuck it was, to get out of his system. Then he was going to find Eddie and kick his ass.
Ethan returned to the hospital on Saturday expecting things to be back to normal. The germy, disinfectant-reeking hospital still terrified him but, as long as there were no more monster caterpillars, he thought he could handle anything else.
They were still there.
The man who’d been sleeping with the magazine was asleep again, the insects still swarming across his side and chest. There was a new patient in the room with him, almost as young as the last one. Caterpillars crawled over his face and jaw, leaving bloodless gouges in his skin like footprints in wet sand.
Mrs. Rock had deteriorated since he’d last seen her; she was too weak to sit up, wasting away at an alarming rate. The caterpillars weren’t just crawling on her anymore.
They were eating her.
He thought of stories he’d heard about people having acid flashbacks. Was the strange weed still in his system, sending these random, horrible images to his brain?
He managed to get through his two-hour shift. On the way home, he stopped by the dingy little head shop where he and Shawn bought pipes and rolling papers. He stepped through the beaded curtain inside the front door and into the store.
Bongs of every size and shape imaginable filled the display shelves behind the counter. Novelty Tobacco Pipes declared the sign that never failed to amuse him.
He approached the glass counter filled with decorative lighters and iron-on patches shaped like marijuana leaves, and waited for the clerk to notice him. “You have any of that system-cleanse tea?” he asked when the dazed looking kid behind the counter finally looked up from his phone.
“Yeah,” he said. He grabbed a small box from behind the counter and placed it in front of Ethan. “Need anything else?”
“Nah,” Ethan said. After this experience, he didn’t think he’d have a use for anything else from this store in a good, long while.
“Job interview?” the kid asked as he rung up the tea.
“Not exactly,” said Ethan. He tapped his debit card against the reader, took his tea, and left.
“You sure you don’t want a beer?” Shawn asked. “It’s rude to make a guy drink alone.”
“You mean it’s rude to make you pay for your own beer,” Ethan snapped.
“Whatev,” Shawn said, then downed half his latest bottle of PBR in one. “I don’t know what’s up your ass lately.”
Caterpillars, Ethan wanted to say, but didn’t. He’d drunk the vile tea every day, but was still seeing the horrid creatures. Worse still, it wasn’t only in the hospital anymore. Today, he’d seen them crawling up and down the back of a woman in the grocery store, and when he’d gone in to renew his car registration, the lady at the BMV had a pile of them on top of her head like some sort of nightmare tiara.
When Dorie came to their table to tell them she was taking over for their waitress who’d gone home for the night, she had one sitting on her right tit.
They were everywhere now, and Ethan was beginning to panic. He didn’t say any of this to Shawn, however. He knew he should, seeing as Shawn had smoked the same weed as he had, but he couldn’t bring himself to talk about it. Besides, he rationalized, if Shawn were seeing shit that wasn’t there, he’d be the first to run his mouth about it.
Ethan kept thinking how he’d insisted on keeping all the leftover weed for himself, wondering if the negative side effects only came from repeated exposure. Then he thought about Eddie, and how he’d said he’d “more than tried it.” That implied repeated use, didn’t it? He still wanted to kick Eddie’s scrawny ass, but he also wanted to find out if he, too, was hallucinating or whatever the hell it was Ethan was doing.
He got his wish in short order, as Eddie entered the bar to make his rounds. He started at Ethan and Shawn’s usual booth near the door. “Gentlemen,” he said as he slid in across from Ethan.
“I need to talk to you,” Ethan said without preamble.
“So talk.”
“Outside.” Ethan made a move to get up, and Eddie slid back out of the booth. “Stay here, this won’t take long,” Ethan said to Shawn, who looked confused.
Eddie followed Ethan out onto the Sky Street sidewalk. “What’s up?” he asked.
“What the fuck did you sell us last time?” Ethan asked.
“I told you,” Eddie said. “It was called Maji-”
“Horseshit,” Ethan interrupted him. “I’ve been fucked up ever since I smoked that shit.”
“You don’t look stoned now,” Eddie reasoned.
“I don’t mean stoned,” Ethan explained. “I’ve been—” He lowered his voice. “I’ve been seeing shit.”
Eddie didn’t say anything. Ethan saw something cross his face, some hint of understanding, maybe even relief. It was obvious: Eddie was having the same problem. “What are you seeing?” he said at last.
“You’re honestly telling me you don’t know?” Ethan asked, looking Eddie dead in the eye.
“No. I… I have no idea.” He looked Ethan in the eye when he said it, but he was blinking like a nervous tweaker.
“Fine,” Ethan said, giving up on Eddie coming clean. “Then at least tell me what it really was.”
“As far as I know,” Eddie said. “It was a new strain, perfectly clean.”
“Well, it wasn’t, and I need you to call your supplier and find out what it was.”
Again, Eddie didn’t say anything, but Ethan could see a lot going on behind his nervous eyes.
“If you don’t,” Ethan went on. “I’ll make sure your other customers know I got bad shit from you. I know you don’t want me to do that.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said. He didn’t sound like he meant it.
“Good,” said Ethan. “Don’t bother stopping by our table again until you know.”
By Tuesday, Ethan had seen the caterpillars on eight more people, including a little girl who had them all over her body. When he arrived at the hospital that afternoon, Jen was at the nurses’ station, crying.
“What’s going on?” he asked, but he knew. This was the cancer ward; someone had died.
“Mrs. Rock,” Jen answered through a tissue. “She went about an hour ago.”
Ethan was no good at sympathy. He made his best sad face and nodded solemnly, hoping it was enough.
“It was so bad, Ethan,” she went on. “It just ate her up.”
Ate her up. He remembered thinking that’s what it had seemed like with his grandma years ago, that the cancer had eaten her away, bit by bit. He didn’t think that was quite what was poking at him now, though. There was something else about that word, ate.
And then it hit him. The last time he’d seen Mrs. Rock, the last time he’d seen the caterpillars on her, they’d been eating her. Could it possibly be…? “What kind of cancer does the older man in room 603 have?” Ethan asked. The sleeping man with the magazine.
“Liver,” she said, looking confused at the question.
“And the new guy in the room with him?” He was pretty sure she wasn’t supposed to answer questions like this, but he was damned well going to take advantage of her being too emotional to realize that right now, and get the answers he needed.
“His is unusual,” she said. “It’s in his face, in his sinuses and jaw.”
Ethan felt sick. “Mrs. Brown,” he said, more to himself than to Jen. Her cancer and caterpillar didn’t line up. She’d had kidney cancer, but the caterpillar had been on her chest.
“She was here for kidney cancer,” Jen said. “She was released after her surgery, but she was readmitted yesterday.”
“The other kidney?” Ethan asked, knowing what the answer was going to be.
“No,” Jen said. “It looks like they didn’t catch the kidney cancer in time, and it metastasized to her lung.”
He wasn’t hallucinating. He’d never seen monster bugs before, hadn’t seen anything on his first day in the hospital. It still had to be the weed that had somehow triggered this curse, but he was now, somehow, able to see cancer.
“Ethan?” Jen asked, through a long tunnel. “Ethan, are you all right?”
It was the last thing he heard before he fainted.
Judge Fallows wouldn’t change his community service assignment to something else, and she refused to let him go to jail instead. “What would you do if I just didn’t show up?” he asked, pacing the tiny conference room while the judge and his public defender followed him back and forth with their eyes, as though watching a tennis match. “Would you send me to jail then?”
“No,” she said. “I wouldn’t. I clearly made the right choice in your sentence, if it’s affecting you this strongly. You’re becoming a better person.”
“I am NOT becoming a better person!” he roared, slamming his hands down on the conference table. “I’m going fucking insane!”
The judge gave the lawyer a stern look. “Calm down,” the lawyer said. Ethan went back to pacing.
“So, if you wouldn’t have me arrested and thrown in jail for refusing to go back to the hospital, what would you do?”
“I’d have a uniformed officer show up at your door every day, take you to the hospital, wait until you’ve worked your two hours, then take you back home.”
“You wouldn’t,” Ethan said. It was ridiculous; he wasn’t important enough for the city to spend money paying a cop to drive him back and forth to do volunteer work.
“Watch me,” the judge said, narrowing her eyes. “We’re done here,” she added, looking at Ethan’s lawyer. She stood and left the conference room.
Ethan felt on the verge of tears. When he noticed the tiny yellow bug clinging to the seat of the lawyer’s slacks when he stood up, the tears came. “Thanks for nothing, asshole,” Ethan said, now mad at himself, too, for letting this dickhead see him cry. “And get a prostate exam, ay-sap.”
“It wasn’t very long ago, though,” said Dr. Michaels, continuing a conversation Ethan had missed the beginning of. “People believed cancer was contagious.”
“Really?” asked Jen, falling for his look at my big doctor-brain schtick.
“Absolutely. People would seal off a room where someone had died of cancer, and never use it again, for fear the next person to sleep there would ‘catch’ it.”
“Wow,” she said. “It’s hard to imagine people ever believed such a thing.”
Ethan turned from the doorway of the break room and headed downstairs to get the book cart. Try as he might to repress them, he kept hearing Dr. Michaels’s words over and over in his head. He thought about the caterpillars. How did they get there? Could they transfer from one person to another? He sang “Row, Row, Row Your Boat” to himself the rest of the way to the library and back to drown out the doctor’s voice in his head, not giving a rat’s ass if people thought he was a lunatic.
Once he was back on the ward, however, singing children’s songs to himself wasn’t exactly an option anymore. He went among the patients as usual, watching the caterpillars devouring them. He found himself keeping an even stricter eye on the horrible things than before, watching to see if they showed any sign of wanting to migrate to other available bodies.
And they did.
The first time he saw it happen was on Saturday, in the room of a patient named Mr. Gibbon. Knowing the odds of his surviving the multiple cancers throughout his body, Mrs. Gibbon had been spending more and more time on the ward, sitting beside her dying husband, clutching his hand as though she could anchor him to life.
Ethan, waiting while Mr. Gibbon’s roommate read his way through the back of every novel on the cart, saw it happen. One of the caterpillars covering the dying man’s body lifted what Ethan assumed was the head-end, and waved it around, as though looking for something. Then, after a few seconds, it locked its gaze on Mrs. Gibbon. It dropped back to its crab-feet and sped across the blanket, toward her. It dropped over the side of the bed, and out of Ethan’s view.
Ethan’s patient was still reading book covers five minutes later when Mr. Gibbon fell asleep. His wife stood, telling his sleeping form she was going to go to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. Ethan saw the caterpillar then, clinging to the front of her skirt.
On Tuesday, he saw a caterpillar transfer from a patient to his daughter, and saw another race across the floor, trying catch a janitor in the act of cleaning one of the patient bathrooms. It missed the janitor but, once he was away, the vile bug raised its head and looked around, searching for another victim. Ethan gave it a very wide berth as he left the room.
Knowing the caterpillars were aware and eager to spread their destruction, Ethan was more terrified than ever to be in the hospital. He tried to tell himself being able to see them gave him an advantage. It was little comfort as he watched one drop onto a teenage girl from a tree, saw a man eat one in a restaurant along with a forkful of fettuccine alfredo, and found one lurking inside a candy vending machine, curled around a pack of gum. It wasn’t long before he lost the ability to sleep.
“Ethan?” a voice said. He thought it might be Jen. “Ethan?”
His head jerked up; he’d dozed off standing in front of his cart. He hadn’t slept more than a few minutes at a time in over a week. “Yeah?” he asked, hoping she hadn’t noticed she’d woken him up.
“Oh, good,” She said. “For a minute there I thought you were going to pass out again.”
“No,” he said. “I’m fine.”
“Are you sure?” she asked, looking concerned.
How bad do you have to look, Ethan wondered, to worry a nurse who works with dying people all day? “Yeah,” he said. “I just haven’t been getting much sleep lately.”
She looked like she might be about to ask him why, but didn’t. Instead, she gave him a sympathetic smile then left him to his books and exhaustion. He started pushing the cart again, toward the next room in line.
“Hey, Dorie,” he said, entering room 618. He’d urged her to get a mammogram as soon as he’d figured out what the caterpillars meant; she was in for a lumpectomy.
“Hey, lifesaver,” she said, cheerful as usual.
“I’m not,” he said.
“You are,” she insisted. “I wouldn’a had that test if it wasn’t for you. I don’t know how you knew.”
“Working here, I guess,” Ethan lied. “Makes you think.”
“Like I said,” she said. “Lifesaver.”
She took a Cosmopolitan from him, and he moved on to the next room. He handed out a James Patterson novel to a man with caterpillars covering his chest over both lungs, and a fishing magazine to his post-op roommate who was currently caterpillar-free as far as Ethan could see.
He turned the knob of the next door in line. This room was a single: an elderly man in about the same shape as Mrs. Rock had been. On Ethan’s last shift, the caterpillars had been feasting on his flesh the way they’d eaten Mrs. Rock toward the end. He’d had known the man wasn’t long for the world, and so wasn’t surprised when he entered the room to find it empty.
What did surprise him, however, was the mass of caterpillars piled on the bed, writhing and twisting as though looking for the body they’d once engulfed. They were huge, most of them at least a foot long, fattened on the old man’s flesh. He’d never seen so many of them before in the absence of a person; he didn’t know how long they could survive without a host.
Almost as though they’d heard his thoughts, several of the monsters on the surface of the pile lifted their head ends and whipped them around, straight at Ethan. He froze, not sure what to do. More and more of them lifted and turned, staring him down. Then, all at once, as though someone had fired an unheard starting pistol, they all jumped from the bed.
Some of them were large enough for the dull, heavy thump of them hitting the floor to be audible. The pincers of their feet dug into the linoleum as they moved across it at speed, stampeding toward Ethan.
He screamed and ran, not caring no one else on the ward would be able to see what he was fleeing from. He bolted down the hall, the horde gaining on him. He headed for the sanctuary of the elevator at the end of the long hallway, dimly aware of people staring or calling out to him. The doors of the elevator opened as he ran, and a doctor stepped out into the hall. He lunged out of Ethan’s way as he barreled into the elevator and banged the close doors button with the side of his fist.
And close they did, but not before the majority of the swarm of caterpillars heaped into the metal box with him. They engulfed him, crawling over his body, their pincer feet feeling like razors as they bit into his flesh.
The elevator didn’t stop until it reached the lobby, where it dinged as the doors slid open. Ethan crawled out, gasping for breath. A young man in blue scrubs rushed to him, asking what had happened, trying to help him stand.
Ethan’s voice felt stifled in the breathless way of trying to cry out within a dream.
He drifted in and out for a long time, seeing events in flashes. He was in the hospital’s emergency room, lying on an exam table. He was sliding into a big, white tube, then rolling down a hallway in a hospital bed, IV’s snaking out of both arms. Next, there was a bright white light above him, a hard table underneath, a face in a surgical mask leaning in.
The world blurred into another image, but this one held longer. It was Jen’s face. “Hey,” she said. She smiled, but it wasn’t the smile she normally gave him; it was the soft, sad one she used with the patients. The dying patients.
“Hey,” he croaked, wondering how long it had been since he’d used his voice.
“You know where you are?” she asked.
He nodded.
“Good,” she said, brushing hair from his eyes. “You haven’t been too aware of what’s been going on for a while.”
“Where is it?” he asked, knowing she’d know what he meant.
She didn’t answer; nurses weren’t allowed to give diagnosis information to patients. He looked himself over as well as he could from his position, but saw no caterpillars. Was it possible they’d gotten rid of it all? He didn’t want to get his hopes up; there had been so many of them.
Jen couldn’t tell him, but a doctor came into the room with answers soon enough. He had tumors in his brain, pancreas, and lymph nodes. He’d been hanging out in the cancer ward long enough to know it was a death sentence.
I believe it necessary for this young man to witness firsthand the suffering of others, the judge had said.
It doesn’t get more firsthand than this, Ethan thought.
Twelve months. According to Dr. Michaels, he had one year to live. If he was lucky. One bad decision with a pint of Chunky Monkey had landed Ethan on death row. Thanks a lot, Judge. Thanks a lot, bugs.
Thanks a lot, self.
They’d performed surgery to remove the largest of the tumors in Ethan’s brain, but two others were inoperable. He was on chemotherapy for the pancreatic cancer and lymphomas. It was all just for show. Even though he could no longer see them, he knew the caterpillars were there, eating him away from the inside, making a meal of him as he’d watched them consume so many others.
His parents had wanted transfer him to a hospital near them, in Toledo, but he was putting them off. Barrow City was where he knew people, where he really felt at home. And, if he were being honest, he didn’t want to spend his final days watching his mother weeping at his bedside. They still visited, but it wasn’t all day every day, as it would have been at home.
Shawn visited about once a week, walking up and down the hall with him. Ethan had recently finished his first cycle of chemotherapy, and he was still weak from it; he had to stop to rest at the visitor’s lounge at the end of the ward for half an hour before he had the strength to walk back to his room. The change of scenery and the exercise were good, though.
They’d just started back up the hall when Ethan saw it: the first caterpillar he’d seen since they’d infected him. It scurried out of one of the rooms then stopped, sniffing around in an all too familiar way. It looked at Shawn, then zoomed up the hall toward him.
Ethan didn’t even think before he jumped in front of Shawn, shielding him.
“What the fu—” Shawn muttered as Ethan pushed him aside. Ethan dove at the approaching bug, sending his rolling IV stand flying. The needle yanked out of his arm, and blood spurted across the white linoleum floor. He slid through the blood and across the bug’s path, blocking Shawn.
And it worked. The bug attached itself to Ethan instead. The nurses and care assistants were already descending upon Ethan, asking what had happened, helping him back to his feet, shouting to one another to grab a wheelchair for him. “I’m fine,” he kept arguing. “I just fell down.”
“What was that all about?” Shawn asked, once Ethan was settled back into his bed and they’d confirmed him to be unharmed from his fall.
“I can’t explain,” Ethan said. “But you shouldn’t visit here anymore. It’s not safe.”
“What do you mean?” Shawn asked.
“I can’t explain that, either. It’s just not safe.”
Shawn looked like he wanted to argue, but he didn’t. He left, and didn’t come back.
Lying in his bed a week later, Ethan thought about all the people he’d seen with the caterpillars on them, not just here in the hospital but out in the world. He thought about Dorie, calling him lifesaver. He was glad he’d been able to help her. He knew, though, there was no saving himself. None of his cancers were operable, including the new one in his right calf bone, the one he’d blocked from Shawn.
An idea struck him, and he considered his a decision for a single hour before knowing, for sure, he was making the right choice. He pressed the call button by his bed, and told the nurse who came he needed to speak with Dr. Michaels right away.
“What do you mean, you want to stop the chemo?” the doctor asked, alarmed. “It’s the only chance you—”
“—I have no chance,” Ethan cut across him. “And we both know it. All the chemo is doing is keeping me in this bed, feeling like shit. I know stopping treatment will shorten my time, probably cut it in half, but I can spend the majority of those months on my feet.”
Dr. Michaels nodded gravely. “Normally,” he said. “I’d say I hate to see a patient giving up, but the choice you’re making is brave. You’re sure this is what you want?”
It was.
After a few more days without poison being pumped into him, Ethan was discharged from the hospital. The first place he went was for a walk in Brigid’s Park. He strolled along a tree-lined path, feeling better than he had in ages, enjoying the sun warming his skin, the smell of freshly cut grass on the air.
He passed an old lady sitting on a bench, tossing peas to the ducks on the sidewalk, and there it was: the first lumpy, yellow-green monster he’d seen since the one that had tried to attack Shawn. It was about six inches long, curled around the woman’s right eye.
The next one was on the breast of a woman jogging past him, yet another on an old man with a walker. He wondered whether the chemotherapy drugs had prevented him from seeing them. By the time he got home, he’d seen them on fourteen people.
It took several days for Shawn to talk Ethan into leaving his apartment again. His afternoon in the park had reminded him he was contagious; he hated even letting Shawn come close to him, but he didn’t know how to explain it in a way that wouldn’t sound like the brain tumors were causing hallucinations.
Shawn took him to the mall, where Ethan tried to avoid looking at other people. His leg had begun to throb as they walked, and he was leaning over a drinking fountain to wash down a painkiller when he saw it: a yellow-green shape, moving fast. He stood and jerked his head around to catch sight of a caterpillar racing across the floor from a man who was covered in them toward a little red-haired girl who looked about six years old.
Ethan dropped his pill and dove between the girl and the bug. He slid on his side, crossing the monster’s path, and it crashed into him. When he looked back down, it was gone; he could never see them once they had him.
“Sorry,” he said to the little girl as he stood up. “I didn’t mean to scare you.” He limped back to Shawn, who stared, confused.
After the Leukemia that had been targeting the little girl, Ethan intercepted skin cancer bound for a grocery store cashier, throat cancer trying to get a bus driver, and even a breast cancer caterpillar pursuing a new mother in the park. He developed testicular cancer after blocking a girl in a coffee shop; he assumed it would have manifested as ovarian cancer in her.
“I don’t get it,” Dr. Michaels said, reviewing Ethan’s latest scans and shaking his head. “Cancer doesn’t metastasize like this. These are completely unrelated cancers, but you keep developing new ones, and I don’t know how.”
“I do,” said Ethan. His voice had grown hoarse from the tumor in his throat.
“What?” the doctor asked, furrowing his brow.
“I know where they’re coming from.”
“You do?” Dr. Michaels asked. Ethan could tell he was humoring him, assuming the high doses of pain medications were muddling his mind.
“I got them on purpose,” he said. “Well, all the ones after my first diagnosis, anyway.”
“On purpose?”
“Yes,” he said. “You’d never believe me if I explained it.”
“Try me.”
“I overheard you talking to Jen one day, about how people used to think cancer was contagious.”
“They did.”
“They were right.”
“No, they weren’t,” the doctor argued, his scientific principles offended beyond the point of humoring his patient. “You don’t ‘catch’ cancer. It’s a—”
“—Believe me, Dr. Michaels,” Ethan said, interrupting. “I know all of the scientific explanations for cancer. You can’t be in my condition and not have heard it a thousand times from a hundred different doctors. But how it manifests in the body and where it comes from are different things. Ever since I knew I was going to die anyway, ever since I knew there was no chance of saving myself, I’ve been saving other people instead. I’ve been contracting all of these random cancers because I can see them, and intercept them from the people they’re trying to infect.”
“You’re on a lot of medication. I know what you’re saying seems to make sense, but believe me—”
“No,” Ethan said, as a sharp pain pierced his side, taking his breath. He had to wait several seconds before finishing his sentence. When he’d managed to get enough air into his lungs to speak again, he continued. “I don’t think it makes sense at all. But it’s true. I can see them. I think Eddie can, too, but he won’t admit it.”
“Eddie?”
“Yeah,” Ethan said. “If you—” he had to pause again, the pain growing steadily worse. “If you want to see them, too, go to Eddie. My friend Shawn can get you in touch. Tell him—”
“Ethan,” Dr. Michaels said, standing up and crossing his office to the sofa where Ethan sat. “Are you all right?”
“No,” Ethan gasped. “But I have to finish. Have Shawn introduce you to Eddie. Tell Eddie you want some of the same stuff he sold to me. I think you have to use it at least twice for it to work, but once you do, you can see them.”
“See what?” the doctor asked.
“The caterpillars,” Ethan said. He slid off of the couch, onto the floor. He tasted blood.
“Caterpillars?” Dr. Michaels had his cellphone out, and was calling for help, but seemed too fascinated with Ethan’s dying revelations to make him stop talking.
“Yes,” Ethan said. All at once, he could see them again, covering his body. There were more than he’d seen on anyone before. The one taking ravenous bites from his side had grown to nearly two feet long.
He saw one of them, squirming on top of the others over his abdomen, look up and turn toward the doctor. He tried to shout a warning, but he only coughed. Drops of blood stained the carpet.
He tried to speak again, but it came out as a whisper. Dr. Michaels leaned down close, so he could hear. “Find Eddie,” he repeated. “Use the stuff, and then you’ll see. But hurry,” he added. “I don’t know if your tumor is going to be operable or not.”
Ethan felt the burden of his secret knowledge fall away like the ice cream that had begun his journey. Having passed it along, he knew he was free to go.
And he did.
