Story #261 - Flu Shot

Flu Shot

As it turned out, “they said it was going to be alright” was small comfort once the #@!$ hit the fan.

The large growth on my right arm spoke to just how bad things had become over the last week, and my symptoms – nausea, aches, fever, and all of the rest – had increased to a point where they were almost unbearable. Of course, no one had initially taken my plight seriously, and they were still ignoring what I knew were the reasons for it.

“No one,” they’d all said, chins in hands and eyes amused, “gets sick from a flu shot.”

A part of me wanted to stand, wanted to struggle off of the couch and show the medical community just what had happened to me, but depth of my suffering was just too heavy. Part of it was my low threshold for pain, but I knew this went deeper, went to a place that I couldn’t find.

Not looking at my arm had become the biggest focus of my life, avoiding the thing that was slowly taking over my body, making me into…what?

I took a deep breath, mind running over the thing that had started it all. It wasn’t as though I’d gone to “flu shots R us” down on the corner – this had been sponsored through work and administered by one of the registered nurses in the company. He wasn’t someone I’d recognized, though, which struck me as odd. Asking around, I’d been told that no one else had ever seen him either, but no one else seemed to find him as creepy as I did. It was the eyes, I decided after I left work, rubbing my upper arm, the eyes were what had told me there was something more to him than a simple health nurse – and not something I wanted to know anything about.

Three days after the shot, I’d taken ill. I’d always been convinced that getting the damn things was going to give me the same illness it was trying to prevent, but what happened to me seemed excessive, violent. “Sick” didn’t do it justice, and it was all I could do to get from the couch to the bathroom to vomit – there were several times I didn’t even make that desperate crawl.

Passing out came next, slipping around consciousness as though my mind was trying to avoid getting caught. It was three – or four – days after I’d been shot that I noticed my arm, noticed what had started to happen.

Thanks to the self-medding I’d been doing, I started by poking at it, running my hands over the greenish bulge that seemed to originate deep underneath my skin. Flexing my arm had made it grow, made it pulse with a strange rhythm that held my eyes. It might have been all the drugs in my system, but I’d have taken an oath that it started to glow ever so faintly, to pulse with the pounding of my heart. Grabbing it, I’d attempted to force it back where it came from, but all that got me was another trip facedown onto the couch.

Now things were taking a turn for the worse. The bulge wasn’t going away, and the last time I’d made it to the bathroom, I’d seen green veins spiderwebbing across my chest, replacing the blue I was familiar with.

I grabbed for the phone; this had gone far enough.

***

“What the hell is this?” Doctor Blaine Rath had never, in twenty years of licensed medicine, seen anything like what was happening to the man in front of him. Even the five years of unlicensed medicine he’d practiced in country far away from the civilized West hadn’t given him any reference material for what he was seeing, for the greenish lumps that covered the patient they’d brought him.

His expertise was in the unknown, mostly because no other doctor at the hospital would touch it with ten-foot pole, and he was the new kid on the block. Blaine actually enjoyed it, but so long as he kept his face drawn and didn’t say much about it, no one tried to take it away from him. Doctors could be such crybabies.

“Whattya got?” Gren Walban grunted as he banged the door to the examination room open. The fat man was one of his oldest friends, and knew more about medicine than all the “professionals” Blaine worked with combined.

“This,” he said, turning from the patient’s twitching body.

“Hah!” Gren barked a laugh. “Super-flu!”

“Super-flu?”

“Damn straight. All the signs. Check his records – he got a flu shot a week ago, I’d wager, and started feeling like crap not long after. Sure, that stuff they put in you is dormant, but that doesn’t mean it can’t be reactivated by a stray protein sequence. The condition is rare, I’ll give you that, but there’s no denying it once the lumps show up.”

Blaine nodded. “Prognosis?”

His friend shook his head. “He’s not coming back from this, at least not how he was.” Gren’s eyes went wide. “Tell me you did what I asked, though – tell me you sedated –“

Movement from the patient stopped Gren in mid-sentence, and Blaine watched as the man on the table jerkily rose, joints flexing at impossible angles and face twisted. Sedating the man had been next on his list of things to do, but he’d become too interested in the legions on the patient’s body, and the needle was still sitting, full and ready, on the table by the door.

“Here!” Gren called, and Blaine turned just in time to catch the twisting silver spike, then lunged forward and jammed it into the green man’s neck. Angry red pulsed over the green on his body, as if trying to fight off the large dose Blaine was injecting. After a moment, the struggling form went limp.

“Idiot!” His friend snorted, moving to stand beside him. “Now, let’s get him out of here. We need to get down to work.”

He nodded. Dissection wasn’t his forte, but this was for science.



- D