It started out as a scratch. A cat scratch, at that. The crazy kitty lanced a slash across my forearm that was deep enough to bleed. I washed it with soap and water and thought that was the end of it.
Then I woke up in the night to the scratch burning and itching like fire. I immediately got up and checked it out under the light of my nightstand lamp. It looked okay, but it hurt like nothing I’d ever experienced before. I went to the bathroom and washed it again, then put a thin layer of ointment with analgesic properties on it. It helped — some — and so I went back to bed.
But then the morning came around and woke up shocked to see that the skin had grown puffy and swollen. The scratch stood out on top of the swelling like a large, red slash. It was still seeping and oozing, rather than scabbing up. Over the course of the rest of the day, the swelling continued to grow, until my arm was almost twice its normal size. That’s when I decided to get some professional help from the emergency room.
The doctors and nurses there had never seen anything like it. They took cultures of the scratch, they drew blood, and they took a small biopsy of the swollen tissue. And what they found was that the tissue underneath the skin was completely foreign to my body. They showed me the microscope slides on a large monitor. The tissue was dark, almost black, and it contained no red blood cells at all. So not only was it not healing, it was transforming into something else.
They wrapped up my arm with gauze and gave me a heavy injection of antibiotics. They told me to come back in three days if it wasn’t better. I already had a feeling it wouldn’t be better. But I went home because what the hell else was I supposed to do?
The next day I awoke to my entire arm being encased in a hard, black shell. I could still feel the scratch on my skin, but I could no longer see it thanks to the armor that had grown over it. It was a dark chitin coating my entire arm and up onto my shoulder. What was worse, there was more of the stuff growing on my legs and abdomen. Whatever was going on had clearly spread.
I panicked then and took myself back to the ER. This time they admitted me. And they tried to take samples of the stuff growing over my skin. Only they couldn’t make a mark on it. It was harder than rock, possibly harder than diamond, and they just couldn’t get a piece of it to flake off. So they put my whole arm under a large scope, trying to get a more complete picture of the thing and what was going on.
Meanwhile, the chitin — or whatever it was — was rapidly growing over the rest of my body. I was finding it more and more difficult to move as the stuff grew and hardened. To say I was scared would have been an understatement. I knew my life was slowly bleeding away to this substance, and we still had no idea what it was or how, exactly, it had ended up in my body. A cat scratch is an innocuous enough of a thing. People get cat scratches every single day. Never had one of them developed into something like this.
They studied me. They gave me reassurances. But I could it in their eyes, the lies they were telling. They had no idea what it was and no idea how to stop it. So it was only a matter of time before it consumed me completely.
Now I’m encased in the stuff, head to toe. I can somehow still breathe, but that’s about it. I’m locked into a suit of dark armor with no way to get back out. I don’t know if I’m even still at the hospital. For all I know, I’ve been sent to a military research lab for further study and analysis.
I feel my breath getting short now. Apparently even that’s about to be cut off. So ends my tale of woe. From a simple cat scratch to a living, breathing (for now) corpse. I hope they can eventually figure this out. It won’t be soon enough to help me, though.
