The darkness was so deep, it was difficult to tell if his eyes were open or closed. Was it not for the fact that he could feel his eyelids blinking, he would not have known at all. It was a darkness he had never experienced before.

Most places, no matter how sealed, had cracks where light would seep through, letting a splinter of sunshine in, and revealing the contents of the room. This room had none of that. It was sealed tighter than a bank vault.

His eyelid movement wasn't the only thing he could feel, however. He could feel his wrists bound tightly with a cold steel. Most likely police style handcuffs, and they kept his arms outstretched and tight.

He could feel the wooden table beneath him that held him off the floor, but there was no way of knowing how far off the floor he was. Without the power of sight, he may as well have been fifty feet off the ground.

His ankles were bound, as well, but it was more of a kind of shackle that kept his legs pinned to the table. A similar type of steel was looped around his waist, completely pinning him to the wooden table beneath.

He tried to listen for any sound that might give evidence of where he was, even to the point of holding his breath, but to no avail. He could hear no traffic, no livestock, not even a television or radio in another room to give him an idea if he was the lone occupant.

That question was soon answered with the sound of a door swinging open within the dark room.

The door did not let any light into the room, showing that indeed, the room next to this one was just as sealed off from the outside world. It made him wonder how isolated he was.

A single footstep rang out in the blackness just before a light switch clicked and the room flooded with light.

The man squinted against the blinding light. His pupils were dilated to the point of experiencing pain at the introduction of any light, no matter how dim.

A dark figure walked into the room and made his way to a workbench located right next to the man's bed, but he didn't speak a word, or even look in the man's direction.

The figure wore a long white lab coat. There was nothing professional or sterile about it that he could see. It was wrinkled, old, and worn through in places. The clothes underneath were little more than a dime store shirt and slacks.

The man's blonde hair was well groomed, and stylishly cut, but his facial hair was unshaven and coarse. He had all of the appearance of a man trying to give the illusion of being a doctor or scientist, but fell short.

The man in the lab coat carried in his hands an antique style brown medicine bottle with no label, along with a small bowl filled with a small handful of cotton balls.

He set the items down on the nearby workbench and sat down close to the man in the bed, making use of a small stool left there at an earlier time.

The man lying on the bed opened his mouth to speak, but soon had a rubber-gloved hand placed over his mouth to stifle him.

'I already know who you are, Troy,'� the man in the lab coat explained. 'I must, however, ask you to be quiet and not speak or open your mouth, please.'�

The man in the lab coat spoke with a heavy British accent. It wasn't one of those guttural, low life accents, but was rather very proper as a man with a higher education and place in social stature.

He kept his hand over Troy's mouth while using his other hand to take the cotton balls out of the small bowl he had brought in.

'My name is Doctor Ellison Parker. I worked for the British government up until just s few years ago, studying an unknown phenomenon in humans, before the grant was pulled and the study was declared useless.'�

Doctor Parker set the cotton balls down next to the bowl on the bench, and promptly poured a small amount of liquid from the bottle into the bowl.

He stared intensely into Troy's eyes. The Doctor had beaming blue eyes that were icy and distant. Troy had never seen such an intense pair of eyes in his life.

'You have been infected, and must be treated.'�

The one free hand of the Doctor's dropped a solitary cotton ball into the bowl. Once that was accomplished, he searched the workbench for the precise implement.

A small pair of tweezers.

He lifted the saturated cotton ball from the bowl and brought it close to Troy's covered mouth.

The doctor leaned in close to Troy's ear and whispered, 'I am going to put this in our mouth. It is a medicine that will clear the infection. It will burn, but is necessary to keep the spread of the disease, as it is transmitted as an airborne pathogen from the mouth. Do you understand?'�

Troy understood, but he clamped his jaw tight. If this were true, he would find himself in a real hospital, not a madman's dungeon. There was no way he was going to allow this to happen.

The doctor smiled.

'I can get your mouth open, you know. Don't fight me, Troy.'�

The doctor set the cotton ball back down on the workbench and reached for a new tool. He raised a shiny piece of surgical steel in front of Troy's face.

'Do you know what this is, Troy? It's used in gynecology to spread open a woman's vagina. Sure, it's not small enough to get in between your tightly pursed lips and clenched teeth, but it's nearly impossible to break. All I have to do is make one swift motion and break through every tooth in the front of your mouth, and then I can just spread it open. Understand?'�

Troy's breathing intensified as he struggled to get more oxygen through his nose, but it was doing very little good. His entire body was shaking in fear and his clothing had become drenched in sweat. His fearful eyes gazed into the doctor's eyes as he shook his head 'no'.

The Doctor moved his hand from Troy's mouth over to Troy's forehead and held down firmly as his other hand raised the instrument high above Troy's mouth. The doctor closed one eye to aim as well as he could.

Troy opened his mouth ever-so-slightly to utter a plea, 'No, please.'�

The instrument came crashing down with all of the doctor's strength, smashing through Troy's teeth. Troy could see the blood from his own mouth splatter all over the instrument as the doctor quickly spread the tool open and lock it into place.

Troy's mouth throbbed with the sharp agony of his shattered teeth, and his hot blood ran freely into the back of his throat, choking back his whimpers of pain.

Troy pulled against his cuffed wrists to no avail.

Doctor Parker retrieved his medicinally-soaked cotton ball from the bench with the tweezers and dropped it urgently into Troy's mouth.

Once it was in Troy's mouth, Parker quickly smacked the instrument that held Troy's mouth open to dislodge it, sending it sailing across the room.

Parker immediately placed his hand back over Troy's mouth to hold the cotton ball in place.

Now it was the doctor, too, who was sweating, and his eyes were wild with rage and a touch of insanity.

'Listen to me, Troy,'� he growled angrily. 'Right now, the liquid feels cool in your mouth, but very soon it will become hot, and then it will sting. You have to be ready for that and make sure you do NOT swallow the cotton ball. Do you understand?'�

Troy locked his entire body into place. His fear had grown. He nodded.

The coolness of the medicine had mingled slightly with the hot blood giving varying sensations in his mouth, but it was starting to warm up to be equal with the blood temperature.

A wave of shock shot through his body, forcing him to contract all of his muscles. His breath quickened to a pant through his nose as the sensation changed to burning.

His mouth felt on fire, and it continued to grow hotter. The stinging sensation went to an extreme as he tried to force the cotton ball out of his mouth.

Troy screamed against the doctor's firm hand. His awareness of anything else in the world but pain had slipped away as his stomach lurched up to expel the object from his mouth.

Troy could feel blisters rise up in his mouth, rapidly filling with fluid as the sound of searing flesh could be heard through the doctor's grip on Troy's face. Through his accelerated nostril breath, he could smell flesh burning as if it were being burned with a soldering torch.

His writhing on the table increased as terror shot through him, pulling against his restraints as the doctor continued to keep a firm hold on him.

The steel strap that held Troy down at the waist was cutting into his flesh against the struggle, and the handcuffs were drawing blood as he pulled and twisted against them.

Still, the screams continued for a moment more as the burning sensation began to subside.

As Troy relaxed his muscles, fighting back gave way to sobs. The doctor's hand eased away from Troy's mouth, and still the sobs were muffled, as Troy's mouth was sealed almost entirely shut by blistering.

The doctor retrieved his tweezers and fished around the blistered flesh in Troy's mouth for the cotton ball until he found it, extracted it, and dropped it onto the floor.

Tears blurred Troy's vision, making it difficult to see the doctor as more than a blob of white lab coat distorted against a hazy background.

'The reason that it hurt so much, Troy, is that the infection was in you for a long time. It took a lot to burn it from you, and it had to take some flesh, as well, in order to get all of it out.'�

The doctor produced a scalpel from the workbench and quickly pointed it's sharpened tip into Troy's mouth, breaking open enough blisters for Troy to be able to breath a bit through his mouth.

Troy tried to speak, 'What? What is?'� was all he could produce.

'What is it? That's the hard part to explain.'�

Troy shook his head in denial. This isn't happening, he thought, none of this makes sense.

'I worked for the British Government for many years, addressing an odd virus that transferred itself from person to person as an airborne pathogen through the mouth. It could only be transferred through close quarters, and seemingly had no effect.

'My colleagues had decided and reported that it was a harmless virus with no effect on the human body. None of them even considered my findings.

'I put together a cage of about thirty mice, and introduced one infected with the Gridgees.'�

Troy was actually listening to the madman's story, 'Gridgees?'� he asked through his mangled mouth.

'Yes, it's what I call them, the Gridgees.

'The virus spread from one to the other in a matter of about two weeks, each day I tested them for infection to check the progress. As in human cases, the virus remained dormant.

'Dormant, that is, until they became the overwhelming majority within the community. At that point, they took over the host in a frenzied act of violence, killing and eating the remaining mice.

'It wasn't quick either. The mice seemed to enjoy the murdering. It was insane.

'I tried to imagine this on a human, global scale. The Gridgees were not just a virus, they were a parasite, slowly taking control, but with enough self-control as not to give themselves away until they could not be defeated, and without a single symptom to make anyone else aware of their presence.

'The only way to know if a person is infected, is with a special light spectrum that will reflect back blotches of green just under the person's skin in the area of the mouth.

'That, and if a person has been infected before, they can see the Gridgees in another person. I don't know how, or what it looks like to them, but they can just see it.'�

The doctor reached under Troy's neck and lifted his head up to see across the dark dungeon room.

There were ten other tables, each one holding another person restrained in the same manner he was restrained, and each one sporting chemical burns around the mouth. Some of them had smashed teeth, and still others had holes in their face where the chemical actually burned through the mouth to the outside of the face.

Their faces had been disfigured by the chemical, and their faces and bodies were cut and bruised from fighting.

A new wave of terror washed over Troy, 'Are you mad?'�

The doctor laughed, 'No, Troy, they aren't dead, just sedated. They are the most extreme cases. I don't know if I'll be able to save them all, but I will try.'�

Troy's sobs started again, 'Why?'�

The doctor rested a hand on Troy's forehead, 'You will live, Troy, and you will know what to do. We have to kill the Gridgees. We have to do it before we loose all of mankind. We will eventually have enough people on our side to be able to keep their numbers under control, but until then, it's a small operation that needs to keep growing.'�

Doctor Parker sighed, 'Speaking of operations, Troy, I have one more I have to perform. The Gridgees feed and flourish until electricity is introduced to the body in high doses. There's only one way to do this.'�

Parker pulled a loaded syringe from his lab coat, uncapped it, and injected its contents into a vein in Troy's arm.

'You are going into cardiac arrest soon, Troy. You will wake up in a hospital. You'll know what to do. If you are revived, you will see clearer. What I just gave you is a tranquilizer. Good luck, Troy. See you on the other side.'�

Troy struggled to keep his eyes open against the tranquilizer, 'Other side of what?'�

The Doctor smiled, 'Conversion.'�

Troy fell asleep.




Consciousness didn't come easy to Troy. He had sensations, but little else. He felt himself on a proper mattress, but he also felt motion, a gurney?

His chest ached the most it ever had in his life. It was a sharp, shooting pain that extended down the length of one arm.

As he came to, he could hear people talking, 'Get into O.R., stat! We have another cardiac arrest here.'�

Troy struggled to open his eyes, and finally peered through one open eyelid as he came to rest in the middle of the operating room. He stared up at a doctor who was talking to someone else, 'Yeah, we got another one. I have no idea why they come in with their mouths burned out like this. There is one sick bastard out there....'�

Troy felt the oxygen mask around his mouth. He was going to make it if they could get his heart going again.

In his relief, he lost consciousness.



Troy woke in a recovery room to sounds of the afternoon bustle of the hospital in full swing. Nurses hovered around the other patients in the room, constantly monitoring their condition.

A nearby nurse looked in his direction to see his eyes fluttering open, 'Penny? Get Doctor Hallitry and let him know his patient is waking. The cops will want to talk to this guy right away.'�

A young nurse rushed out of the room with only a nod as the nurse who spoke came close, 'Mr. Dorsten, my name is Dana, I am your nurse. Are you in any pain?'�

Troy gazed at the nurse's face, blinking several times to shake away the anesthetic. The skin around her mouth pulsated with tiny dots of light. As she opened her mouth, a strange glow emanated from inside.

Troy's eyes widened. What am I seeing? The Gridgees?

Troy reached out a firm hand and grasped the nurse by the forearm. Immediately, the woman's veins stood up and pulsed a sick green color around the area of his hand.

The nurse looked down at him puzzled.

Troy strained to speak through his mangled mouth, 'You, Gridgees?'�

The nurse yelled back over her shoulder to the other nurses, 'He's delusional! Get a tranq ready!'�

Troy released his grip from the woman and relaxed into his pillow, 'No. Sorry. Dreaming. Groggy. Fine.'�

She walked away hurriedly, announcing to the other nurses to watch him closely til the doctor could arrive.

Troy considered his position and wondered if what he saw was real. It was something he had never seen before, and it happened just as Parker said it would.

There was something definitely going on.

Should he spill his guts? Should he tell the truth about what happened? What if what Parker said was true?

The world could be at risk.

Troy rolled his head to one side to attempt to look out the window when he noticed it. A vase of flowers tagged by the florist who delivered it right next to his bed. Raised up out of the blooming buds was small envelope calling his name.

Troy reached and opened the envelope. The note inside said, 'Troy, reserve judgement until you have a chance to see for yourself. If you get to the bottom of things, you can call me.'�

He tried to chuckle, but his lips were too damaged to allow them to stretch out, and instead cracked and started to bleed.

No laughing any time soon.

Troy thought, Get to the bottom of things? What can that mean?

Troy lifted up the vase of flowers. On the bottom was a phone number.

He picked up the phone next to his bed and dialed the number.

As the phone rang on the other side, Troy's mind raced. This was all maddening. He was going insane.

The phone picked up on the other side and a voice with a very familiar British accent answered, 'Hello?'�

Troy gurgled through a message as best he could, 'I found one. You need a nurse?'�

There was a moment of silence on the other end before the doctor responded, 'You found one already? In a hospital? Dear God, Troy. They are spreading faster now. I'll take care of it.'�

The doctor hung up.

As Troy laid back down in his bed, the doctor from the hospital was by the bed with a police officer, ready to ask questions.

'Can you tell me what happened to you, Mr. Dorsten?'�

Troy shook his head, I had the Gridgees, but now I am cured. I don't remember anything else.'�

The cop and the doctor looked at each other, 'Gridgees?'�

Troy turned his head away, 'You'll find out. The Gridgees are here for everyone.'�

Doctor Hallitry motioned to one of the other nurses, 'Go tell Nurse Dana and tell her I want her to escort Mr. Dorsten back to his room with the officers. I want him under constant observation. We may have another delusional on our hands.'�

The younger nurse approached the doctor, 'Sir, she's not here and no one saw where she went. I don't understand it. Maybe she took ill. It's okay, though, sir. I will escort Mr. Dorsten, myself.'�

Troy smiled. The Gridgees had a new enemy.

How many are there? Where do they hide? Where did they come from?

It didn't matter to Troy, he wanted to burn each one of them out of every mouth he could find.

And he would...

One person at a time....

Want to comment on this Short Stories? Sign up to Edit Red and you will be able to comment on Short Stories and get access to: Upload your own stories and poems, get readers and their feedback, promote your work...