Steel Spores

The Steel Spores








Professor Watt can feel the steel inside of him, can feel it travelling through his veins in microscopic lines that will soon thicken from strands to spears until he cannot move and is frozen to the spot, a mess of flesh and metal and carmine. It will tear through him like a saw, mincing arteries and splintering bone in its unstoppable wake. He will scream and roar and claw at the walls and the floor as his insides are carved and crushed by the steel. He will begin to bleed as the first of the pipes break through his outer tissue, spilling blood and gastric juice before him, soon to be followed by another spear and another and another until he is a carmine mess, gore streaming from the numerous wounds on his body as he lies face down, unable to scream, his vocal chords severed and diced and only allowing but the faintest gurgle.

Unless he is lucky enough that the metal will begin to form in his heart. Lucky enough for the steel to thicken quickly and cut through one of the heart's essential chambers, tearing it open in a rush of internal gushing and killing him instantly with minimum pain. He can also be equally fortunate if it begins below his brain, shooting up to it and spearing straight through, severing an important nerve and cutting it off from the rest of his body, shutting everything - agony, anxiety, horror - down in a millisecond. This is the relief that he must pray for.

The laboratory is silent, the windows being soundproof. If the frames had housed normal glass, Watt would hear the pleas and distraught cries of his workmates as they battered away at the pane, begging for him to stop as they tried to break in. Luckily, he cannot hear them, and with them out of view behind him, they cannot distract him. He is slightly irritated; with them being scientists like himself, they should realise that they are wasting their energy rapping on the glass. Even if they did break through the reinforced material, he is infected, and that is that. For this disease, this steel that is spreading inside of him, it is unstoppable. He is a terminal case, and so is anyone else who comes into contact with the particles, inhaling them or exposing an open wound to them.

Once they are inside of someone, the particles multiply and use their host’s veins and arteries to take their initial, harmless shape. They cluster at arterial crossroads, gathering their strength before spreading out with malicious intent. Then they thicken, becoming more jagged and erratic and painful, cutting open the veins and arteries that had housed them and let them develop in the first place. With this display of treachery, the spears expose the rest of the body to their brutal wake, severing soft tissue and essential organs randomly. This horrific attack does not stop until the blood has cooled down, when victim is dead. Then the steel rests.

Damn the government. Damn them for assigning him to this case, for assigning him to his death. He was supposed to be studying the infection, not hosting it. He was supposed to be working on a cure. Now, all it looks like he will be working on is what he will do in his last moments.

How had all his started anyway, this infection business? No one really knew, just noticed that a lot of people were dying in extremely horrific ways around a specific patch of fungus, a fungus that sent mists of spores into the air when disturbed, a fungus that was rapidly going from being unheard of to spreading all over the world and being feared by all. And the steel, well, it wasn’t really steel. It was some sort of unidentified metal, but the papers had coined it the Steel Infection because that was the metal that the fatal spears most resembled, and that name stuck.

Watt was unluckily enough to come into contact with the steel spores due to his own arrogance and negligence and youthful naivety. He had not secured the safety seal right away after opening the container containing the deadly particles like he was supposed to, and had then tripped over himself several minutes later whilst holding this container. They spread across the room in a mist of grey, and were quickly destroyed by a very vigilant security machine, though not quickly enough. They had gotten inside of the professor, of this he knew right away; he had cut himself on several occasions whilst playing with his new and incredibly vicious kitten, and in doing so had created plenty of points of entry around his arms.

Watt sighs as he reviews the facts that are now more relevant to him than ever: the steel begins to multiply instantly upon contact with warm human blood. The average case taking up to thirty minutes until the first pangs of pain begin, then ten more minutes before the organs are being lacerated, and a final few more before the outer tissue is pierced, the draining of the body beginning. Most people last only a few minutes in this final stage, though a few recorded subjects had survived up to a quarter of an hour.

Watt will do no more waiting. He will play the suspense game no more. By the time the steel has grown and torn through his flesh, he will no longer be living. He will have bled his last drop and departed to another world in a relatively painless alternative. Well, in comparison anyway.

To his left, on the lab bench, lies the scalpel that he will sever his wrists with. As he reaches for it, he can feel that his arm has become a lot stiffer. He clasps five fingers that feel riddled with arthritis around its wooden handle and grips tightly.

His eyes go to the rabbit that he had dissected after he had exposed it to a single particle. He can see the motherboard-like structure of steel that he had separated from most of the main tissue, see how jutting and evil and agonising it looks. It resembles a mesh of barbed wire. The professor remembers the way the rabbit had squealed, had thrashed in absolute torment before he had allowed it relief and put it down. Soon, his insides will resemble that of the rabbit’s, and it will be him that will begin to thrash and twist in agony as the spears traverse through his insides. Poetic justice, he thinks.

But no, he will not get to the stage that the rabbit reached. He will be long dead by then. He will put himself down like he had done with the rabbit before the steel infection has gone the full way. He will offer to himself the same mercy killing that the animal had been lucky to receive. Sighing, he takes the blade and holds it to the light, poising it over his exposed and trembling wrist where he will make the incision. Slowly, he turns to his comrades at the window as they gaze at him in horror. They no longer rattle on the glass; they finally realise that it is futile. Freeman shakes his head and looks away.

Watt gazes at the Professor MacDonald, at the supermodel in a lab coat. He remembers endlessly gazing at her during lab times, the drunken kiss at the Christmas party, her corresponding ignorance after that. He smirks. She couldn’t give a shit about me before, he thinks. Now she’ll wont stop thinking about me for a long time.

Watt turns from them, lowers the blade and drives it into the flesh of his wrist. He begins to saw.

Nothing. No gushing or spouting of crimson. No shower of blood raining down on his face. No relief kicking in as he slowly drains away into a vivid and eternal dreamscape. Instead, there is a scratching noise, like that of two knives being dragged together. In an instant the professor realises what has happened.

The steel has solidified in his wrist. He tries to bend his arm, but it does not budge. He tries to move his hand, but only manages a slight twitch. His fingers wiggle slowly and with the brakes on, but they still work. Panicking, he takes the knife and passes it into this flawed hand. He exposes his other wrist and cuts into it raggedly, desperate and less poetic about the whole ordeal, simply trying to end it before it is too late. The people at the window can see what is happening. Most are still gazing on in horror.

More scratching of metal, more steel denying him his escape from this horror. His heart is pounding, but also feels restrained as though something is pushing up against it, slowing it down. He begins to wheeze. A pain shoots through his intestines. He drops the knife and doubles over, letting out a horrific scream as more agony shoots through his stomach. He can actually feel the gastric juice spilling over his organs and eating into them, digesting them slowly.

He tumbles to the floor, kicking and screaming and scrabbling and sending tools and beakers and test tubes and the dissected rabbit flying across the room. He grits his teeth and roars and spits and cries as the spears cut through one of his lungs and his kidney and even his little pancreas. Choking, he reaches for the knife, now fallen on the floor, determined to the end the pain fast - but his arm is longer under his control. It hangs by his side stiffly like a mannequin’s. He yelps and reaches with the other arm.

Suddenly, a crippling bolt of agony stops him in his tracks and cuts off all motor functions from his neck down as his spinal column is severed in two. He clatters to the ground like a discarded puppet.

The laceration of the outer tissue has begun. It will not be long now. Already, gore is streaming over Watt’s body and face and pooling all around him. All he can do is watch and scream into the floor as his arms and legs lay splayed by his side uselessly. Then his screams turn to watery gurgles as his vocal chords are hacked away.

His head twitching, he prays that one of the spears will plunge through his heart or his brain and deliver him from this unbelievable agony quickly.

This does not happen.








1,700 words.