Anyone else remember that scene from The Mummy with the flesh burrowing scarab beetles?
Yeah, me too.
Day 3
"Hey Desmond, wanna see something gross?"
"Why the fuck would I- HOLY SHIT NO, NO NO, GO AWAY! NO, NO, OHMYGOD, THAT'S SO GROSS, STOP IT, STOP IT!"
"But it's so weeeeeeird! I'm literally not doing any of that!"
"YEAH WELL STOP IT, JUST. STOP. IT. DON'T TRY AND TOUCH ME WITH THAT!"
"Stop being a baby, Desmond! See, it did stop! You hurt its feelings"
"Oh man, fucking pardon me for flipping out over the virus playing with your damn hand like a ragdoll. Man, I feel fucking terrible"
"You should, asswipe"
Alex used his other hand to gently run it over the one that moments ago looked like it was going through something out of The Exorcist. "It's okaaaay, it's okaaay. He didn't mean it, it's okaaay" he cooed at his own hand, as if the gestures would encourage the virus to resume doing it's creepy ass shit of creepy ass shittery. Whatever it was gonna do, Desmond backed away from the scientist, wanting to put as much distance between himself and that.
"Dude stop talking to it like that" Desmond hissed. "It's not a damn puppy!"
"Yeah well it doesn't mean it doesn't have feelings" Alex shot back.
"Since when did it get feelings?!"
"Whenever it decided to copy mine! I've told you! It's a replicating virus. It's supposed to be acting like this"
"Yeah, then next it's gonna burst out of your chest and I'll have a killer xenomorph on my hands!"
Alex just rolled his eyes at him and resumed encouraging his freaky Frankenstein project to keep doing that replicating shit. Which meant….It was tearing apart his bones, muscle, and veins…Just everything, then filling the space with itself. That was the explanation Desmond had been given a long, long time ago. But seeing it in action was super gross.
Alex had just walked up to him, shoved his hand in his face, and got to see Desmond flip his shit about it. Skin wasn't supposed to bulge like that. Nor were bones supposed to look like they were going to break out of said skin. Nor was anything supposed to be inside a hand in general like that. Desmond had seen enough movies to know how this shit went, and oh god it never meant anything good. This was a bad horror movie in the making that he really wanted to get away from.
"Desa-mundo!"
"What?" Desmond barked as he whirled around. "What do you fucking want now?"
"Nothing" Alex smiled. "Except I am in some incredible pain as the insides of my arm are being devoured. Holy fucking hell" and the scientist' happy expression turned to one of pain as he dropped to the ground.
The next couple hours were primarily filled with Alex on his side clutching at his arm in agony. Just looking at his arm, it was pretty easy to see why. If the really creepy and gross movements in his hand was bad, the absolute carnage in the rest of the attached limb was worse. It was like the one arm was trying to go Hulk on Alex but was failing miserably. Muscles bulged in all the wrong ways, solid bone could sometimes be heard snapping. At one point the virus didn't know where to go with itself, so it just casually split open skin to take a quick breather.
That was the absolute worst part. It was absolutely, the xenomorph moment from Alien. The sound it made was stomach wrenching, a large shhip and there was a tear in Alex's forearm with inky black tentacle things wiggling out of it. Both Alex and Desmond spent a few minutes screaming at it in absolute horror. Then when it retracted back into Alex's body and closed the wound it caused, both men remained screaming just for the hell of screaming at that point.
But alas, the virus didn't stop there. Once it stopped finding things to consume and recreate in the one arm, the virus moved right along, over the shoulders, the ribcage, the collarbone…and right over to the other arm that was still intact. And thus, several more hours were consumed by never ending pain on the incredible man of science playing host to one insatiable Blacklight.
"Is it worth it?" Desmond eventually asks as the lights dim in their hovel, signifying that the late night had arrived. "Is it really, really worth it still?"
He asks this in their growing darkness, throats raw from screams of terror, or earlier vomiting induced by the pain or fear respectively. Both, sick to their empty stomachs. Both, done with science for one night. Both, growing ever fearful of this awakening, toxic beast sitting onside the one. And in that growing dark, in all of that, the creator whispers back, a response lost on another convulsion of his entire being. He tries again, in a rough, scratchy voice. A response Desmond knew he would hear.
"Undoubtedly. Now..the real fun is happening….Start a report"
End Day 3
Now go back and read that nice and slow with all the visuals in your head. And if you haven't seen The Mummy, you can look up the beetle scenes on Youtube. You'll know it when you see it.