Sarah Massey, a senior at Jacksonville High School, placed 1st in the 11th/12th grade prose division of the Regional Office of Education Writing Talent Search.
Squirm
It starts with an itch, a little itch that the host just couldn’t scratch. That’s how they knew that they had been infected. No one knew about it at first, and public officials blamed it on an outbreak of mosquitoes. After a day or two red bumps appeared on the infected person’s body, which only proved to us all that the itch was caused by a bug. Doctors prescribed anti-itch cream they worked for a while, until the red bumps came back. They came back bigger, about the size of a quarter, and grouped together on one part of the body, the forearm, mid-back etc. The urge to scratch is almost unbearable people wrapped bandage or gauze around the area and told themselves not to scratch every five minutes. Some broke the skin and began to bleed, but after a trip to the doctor, a stern word about infection and a promise the itching would stop in a few days, they felt better.
Weeks pass and the bumps finally went away, this time for good, but the itch stays. Scratching had now become a part of everyday life because people couldn’t go ten minutes without it. The CDC finally got involved when people were scratching away layers of skin trying to relieve the itch. Hospitals used morphine and sedatives on patients to give their wounds time to heal, but they found that people were scratching in their sleep. The thing that baffled doctors is that the wounds never bled. It was as if something was blocking the blood from coming to the surface. Tests were done and it was found that blood vessels connected to the layers of missing skin had been closed off by pieces of the patient’s tissue. Analysis showed that small scrapings of the muscles, and in some cases organs surrounding the wounds, had been used to patch the vessels as soon as they were broken. Researchers praised this as a medical miracle and proposed it as a cure for anemia, others said it was a new stage of human evolution, but most people thought it was an infection that was spreading rapidly. It had only been three months and a quarter of the world’s urban population had red bumps.
Four weeks after the red bumps disappeared and as a young American dermatologist coined it, The Squirm, began. The Squirm consisted of the feeling of something moving inside the body and small worm-like shapes swimming quickly across the host’s skin and then disappearing from sight. Online videos of The Squirm filled every social media site to the point most of them crashed under the capacity of uploads and views. At home attempts to catch the ‘crawlers’ and cut them out became popular, often leading to significant blood loss and in some cases death. This shocked people. How could open wounds exist but self-inflicted ones bleed? At this point the infection was no longer a source for curiosity, it was now a source of calamity.
Unlike the red bumps, The Squirm never goes away. If anything it became more frequent. A month after The Squirm initially began, the worm-like entities could now be observed every 15 to 30 minutes, and scientists noted that not only had the frequency increased but the diameter and length as well. When the first picture was made public, news stations across the globe displayed a blown up photo from a smartphone taken by an exchange student in London. A small translucent head could be seen poking out of the open wound on her left knee. It couldn’t have been any larger than a number two pencil and its mouth was like a sucker from an octopus limb filled with rows and rows of sharp teeth. People were told that if they saw this on their body or red bumps they should seek medical help immediately. Hospitals overflowed with cases of red bumps and open wounds in every country. Even though no deaths had been reported caused by the infection but fear was rampant. The widespread panic was used as an excuse for the strange behavior the afflicted were exhibiting. They were irritable and withdrawn, becoming enraged at the slightest offense and removing themselves from the comfort of friends and family. They craved things they would have never dreamed of eating, things like pen caps, wrapping paper, blankets, and hard plastic. Strange ridges appeared on the back of the neck and spine pushing the skin in the pattern of a lobster’s back. Those who had scratched away the skin on their neck exposed a bone colored shell. No efforts to remove the shell had been attempted at that time.
Five months after the first appearance of the red bumps the incubation period began. Scientists had finally caught up with the infection to give it a name to its stages of developments. Stage one was officially named ‘red bumps’ because besides scratching, red bumps were the only symptoms in the stage of the infections. Stage two consisted of the disappearance of the red bumps but increased urge to scratch. Open wounds also appeared in the stage as well as the inability to bleed from them. Stage three brought about the beginning of The Squirm, during research of this stage scientists found that the early red bumps were actually egg sacks. When the afflicted scratched and broke the skin, the eggs escaped into the circulatory system where they would later hatch and become the worm-creatures. They were determined to be female and bit off pieces of flesh from around the body. They produced an enzyme that made the process painless and also allowed them to block off blood vessels much like a skin graft by mixing it with regurgitated flesh from their stomach that took up almost 90% of their body. This ability caused the open wounds on the infected but could not prevent blood loss in self-inflicted wounds that were not situated around the former egg sacks. Stage four introduced the invasion of the brain, symptoms of which were abnormal behavior, craving inedible materials, and self-induced isolation. MRI scans revealed that this was caused by intrusions in the brain and an introduction of hormones that affect the synapses between the brain cells. The ridges on the back of the neck housed the only male of the species that was responsible for the effects on the brain. It had been determined that the male cannot be removed without destroying the brain stem and killing the victim.
Stage five is incubation. The infected suffers high fever, increased appetite, and a dangerously low metabolic rate. Severe depression accompanied by lack or want of exercise increased fat reserves around the body, which is fed on by the females. Autopsies on the females at this stage showed them all to be pregnant. They carried their fertilized eggs in their stomachs where they absorbed nutrients from the consumed fat. Once the eggs are fully formed they are placed in protective pouches beneath the ridges on the males back. No one wanted to know what happened when they hatched.
Almost one year after the first signs of infection the sixth and final stage began, hatching or as it’s more commonly known as, death. Both the male and females were found to be dead at this stage, killed by a toxin released by the male. The eggs then hatch and feed on their father until there is nothing left but an empty shell. Their nursery is abandoned and the larvae make their way out of the body. Their paths are random, some burrowing through the brain to escape through the mouth while other colonies burst from the neck or tunnel their way out of the ear canal. The host eventually succumbs to their internal injuries and dies within a matter of hours after the hatching. The larvae can survive up to 72 hours outside a host body and have been found scaling vertical surfaces and swimming in reservoirs and underground aquifer.
Once a host body is found, the larvae burrows into the skin and begins a form of asexual reproduction by splitting itself in half until the parts become microscopic. It was never found how the larvae creates only one male out of hundreds of females but those become the creatures behind The Squirm and the ridges on the back of the neck. These ‘clones’ form a protective sphere of mucus around themselves mimicking an egg that built up under the skin causing irritation and the red bumps. The cycle repeats and repeats from bumps to squirm to larvae to death over and over again.
It’s been 2 years 6 months and 14 days since the red bumps first appeared, about the same time that a small meteorite struck Atlanta, Georgia right outside a major airport. It had been theorized that larvae inside the meteorite made their way onto various planes and infected major cities around the world. It takes an average of 10 months for the infection to run full cycle. After the first 10 months, 1.7 million people died, after 20 months that number had doubled. There were six billion humans on Earth, and if the pattern continues they’ll all be gone in seven years and five months.
I heard all of this on a news broadcast, warning people that the second wave was only days away and to isolate themselves to avoid infecting others. I don’t have days left. I’m curled up by the now empty refrigerator where I spent the last week and a half trying to appease those never-ending cravings. I couldn’t stop even though I knew I was only feeding them. I am so weak I can’t even crawl into the other room to use the phone to call my mother. There are small worms swimming inside of my eye, it won’t be long until it bursts.