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Leucochloridium paradoxum.
Dicrocoelium dendriticum.
Bad dreams flash behind his eyelids. Something crawls along his spine.
Galactosomum lacteum.
(…the cercaria reaches maturity inside the host’s body within 1-2 days. At this point it is motile, and will maneuver itself using a tail towards the central nervous system, where it will then proceed to anchor itself between the heart and lungs, and begin influencing the host’s behavior.)
Burrowing. Biting. Chewing. Latching. Slithering through skin.
¡Despiértate!
He wakes up screaming and clawing at nothing but the cold night air. Red digital numbers next to his laptop read 3:22 AM.
Diplostomum pseudospathaceum.
Valdelobos was always far too small to him.
In spring he used to hunt in the woods. Abuelo taught him the six-shooter but he preferred to play knight. The old man smoked bitter tobacco while he trailed loosely behind, mud splashing around his ankles and a twig-sword raised high. He was Don Quixote, his lance unbreakable and his armor catching the sunlight scattering through trees. Once in a while he tripped and fell face-first in the dirt, then Sancho and Rocinante and Dulcinea del Toboso all evaporated into the morning fog.
His grandfather sat on a tree stump to skin the rabbits for pelt and meat. Unpleasant as blood was, he still drew closer to watch.
Carotid. Saphenous. Trigeminal V3 still firing.
Abuelo’s hands were shaking as he pulled the skin off the dead little thing. He dropped the knife to the ground - the blood dripping off it was tar-black. Its eyes twitched.
“San Miguel Arcángel, defiéndenos en la lucha. Sé nuestro amparo contra la perversidad y asechanzas del demonio…”
The old man crossed himself. Once. Twice. Thrice. He leaned over his grandfather’s shoulders to see what happened, fascination outweighing fear.
“Que Dios manifieste sobre él su poder, es nuestra humilde súplica…”
A high-pitched screech like a deflating rubber tyre shot through his ears, and a ball of something with too many limbs came tumbling out of its ribcage, trailing viscera behind. It scuttled into the undergrowth right as the shotgun went off, buckshot uselessly pelted against the dense foliage.
They later burnt everything they caught that day.
Ampulex compressa.
Yellow light buzzes overhead. The circuitry here is old but somehow persisted for half a century. He doesn’t know how Saddler managed to get all this equipment for his lab, he doesn’t really want to know.
He’s cold and hot with sweat from the nightmare, spine screaming at him for sleeping in a position so impossibly contorted it would make a snake cry. Dry mouth. First instinct: cigarette.
No wonder he’s not making it past thirty.
(Hormonal activities in the hypothalamus, hippocampus, amygdala and motor cortex are significantly altered. Increased 5-HIAA residue found in host samples indicate elevated levels of 5-HT, but its correlation with heightened hostility and aggression remains to be seen…)
Luis staggers over to the sink and splashes some water like a wet dog soaking in a puddle. The sight in the mirror confirms he’s practically a wet dog: hair tangled, eyes sunken, less of a Don Quixote and more of a Dead Quixote. The shirt he spent the last three days in is just as clammy and disgusting.
In spite of all this he finds himself grinning at the reflection. The other Luis looks terrified.
Maybe it’s his bloodshot eyes. Mierda , he can’t find his zippo.
He sparks a cig by the flame of his Bunsen burner and crumples back into the lab chair. Some sleazebag in college taught him how to blow smoke tricks, but he never had the patience to practice. The smoke dissipates overhead in a yellow haze, too thin to dispel the jaundice.
There’s an itch in his chest cavity. Menthol just scratches the surface where his airway begins and nicotine sinks into acetylcholinergic neurons, but the itch scuttles and Luis isn’t sure he can go back to sleep anymore.
Toxoplasma gondii.
Valdelobos could burn for all he cared.
He disappeared the morning after, the boy that stood through the night while his home and abuelo were swallowed by flames. Secluded villages often have a strange momentum to time, and Valdelobos forgot him soon enough.
He’s never going back there!
He wore his only ironed shirt to employee Picture Day - turns out the ever-elusive Umbrella needed PR sweetener from time to time, and Lab Six needed new members. He might’ve tried to comb his hair (only for rare occasions), if the damn comb didn’t snap in half instantly.
EUROPE - LABORATORY SIX - DREAM TEAM
The banner stretched wide in their cluttered little lab, but everyone wore their biggest smiles. There was him, Sarkowitz, Mavrogianni, Kallahan, a few others whose names he never bothered to learn. Umbrella holds no sentimental value for him anyways, it’s always been a means to his own end and not an entity to devote himself to.
Dr. Serra-Navarro. Dr. Serra. He liked the sound of that.
He’s still not wearing the fucking tie his boss gave him though - it’s yellow dots on green fabric, for fuck sakes. That’s a Sancho Panza tie, he’s got better taste than that.
Sacculina carcini.
The itch won’t go away.
The cigarette disintegrates into miserable gray ash before he can take one last drag. So instead of steadying his nerves, his last smoke only served to piss him off even more. 3:26 AM is already a volatile time for his overactive mind, now paired with the irritation writhing through his veins makes him want to slam his head against the concrete wall.
When was the last time he had a good night’s sleep since he came back to Valdelobos?
Everything here makes him sick: even before he took up Saddler’s offer (more or less out of a desperate need for sanctuary), the village itself was a dying organism. Necrotic birds perch on septic trees against a cyanotic sky, it’s too late for a vaccine - the only way to cure Valdelobos is to excise it from the mountains like rotten flesh, something not even his scalpel could manage.
His laptop whirrs low and somber, and Luis flicks through old research articles without actually absorbing any words. Miracidia. Larvae. Incubation .
(A byproduct of [sic] chemical signaling is prolonged activity of tyrosine hydroxylase, typically a rate-limiting enzyme in dopamine synthesis. In rodents, an increase in dopamine induces loss of aversion to environmental stressors, something that can be experimentally demonstrated with a marble-burying test. Rodents become restless, reckless, acting in ways that are more likely to cause the parasite to be ingested by definitive hosts.)
Academic nonsense. Posturing. His research outpaces his peers by at least a decade - the fact that no one acknowledged that back at Umbrella might be one of the reasons why he packed up and left. Given time, he could’ve cracked NE-α’s endocrine signaling, if it stopped at discoveries…
The itching turns to scratching. Dr. Serra turns his head and coughs up blood.
Myrmeconema neotropicum.
He had nowhere else to go.
Interpol is on the hunt, he can’t hide in Madrid. The safehouse in Seville already got swept up. There was only one place left.
He ditched the lab coat, ditched “Dr. Serra-Navarro”, ditched his C.V. - a PhD isn’t worth shit in the mountains of rural Spain. Luis was smart enough to know how to be on the run: burner phones, switch cars and take detours. Luckily, the heat was off his back soon enough, he was just a blurry face in a scratched out old photograph. His “dream team” couldn’t cough up his name in exchange for a lighter sentence even if they wanted to.
At night the black eyes of that rabbit stared back at him from the endless road.
He accidentally ran over a young buck in a stolen car some distance away from the mountains. The thing shuddered under his tires, let out a high-pitched wail, then crawled out from beneath. It was moving on its antlers, which were now clearly appendage-like growths protruding from the poor thing’s skull. Luis fired a few shots from his Red9 into its body. The deer split open and ran off, each half in a different direction.
He should’ve reversed all the way back to Madrid then and there.
Valdelobos wasn’t how he remembered it, but then again he remembered little; maybe there weren’t so many black-clad disciples wandering about before, why should he give a damn? Without Umbrella, the police, or the constant nagging from IRBs and directors begging for research grants, he could finally settle down and concentrate on what mattered the most: las plagas.
Plasmodium falciparum.
Cigarette ash falls through his fingers, still carrying heat from the smoke.
Pain burns him awake, if he could scream through a mouthful of blood, he would. Air betrays him in a way he never imagined possible, because now he’s left to grapple with oxygen and fear like catching bubbles in a hurricane.
The parasite pierces his insides with jagged edges, he feels like a kid’s origami project being torn apart.
(...migrates towards the host’s central nervous system, homing in on specific substrates on neuronal tissues that provide an anchoring point for the parasite. This way, the larva avoids attacks from the immune system. Long-term neuro-immunosuppressive effects were observed as the parasite directly interferes with CRH levels within the HPA axis, the mechanism for its ability to do so remains unclear…)
The cough hits him like a sledgehammer in the chest, sending him tumbling onto the floor. He falls in a messy heap, legs tangled with the chair. Warm blood bubbles up the corner of his mouth.
He must’ve hit his head on the way down. Shadows flit across his vision until they congregate, congeal, consolidate into the silhouette of Fr. Bitores Mendéz. Church bells ring in his ears.
“No time for a confession,” Luis jokes with thin air, but more so with the Shadow-Mendéz in his brain, “trying to stay alive here, Padre .”
Mendéz is backlit by flickering firelight, a deeply etched memory Luis can’t quite let go of. Of all the people he can mentally picture, Mendéz is the only one wreathed in flames. Him and abuelo.
Hallucinations. Mirages. Undulating forms of arthropodic nightmare combing his brain-creases for sustenance. He blinks away the illusion to welcome tears in for a change. The parasite, seemingly discouraged by this, twists around his lungs with wrathful conviction, and he’s on the ground again till coughing turns to dry heaving. In his peripheral vision the puddle of blood steadily expands.
Maybe in true Frankensteinian fashion, Dr. Serra is soundly beaten by his own creations.
(Dorsal column-medial lemniscal pathway: compromised; spinothalamic tract: compromised; sensorimotor cortex: compromised…)
Something in that cigarette smoke must’ve aggravated the parasite, making it behave more viciously than other specimens he’s examined: maybe it doesn’t like stimulation nicotine brought, which weakens its control over the host’s central nervous system.
If he isn’t so light-headed and afraid, Luis would applaud himself for coming to this revelation. Instead of a Nobel Prize, he receives only merciful unconsciousness.
Hymenoepimecis argyraphaga.
…It was Saddler.
Luis, how did you forget? Like the foolish old knight charging towards the windmills, you mistook ambition for progress. Were you so entranced by your own research, that you missed every sign since the beginning?
…Or were you so desperate for a purpose, you’d bury yourself in work to ignore what you’re really doing?
He’s not trying to remove the parasites, Luis, he’s not trying to cure Valdelobos.
He is the parasite.
Luis, what happened to the boy who stood in front of the flames and watched his home burn? What became of the boy that wielded stick-swords, fought giants, and dreamt by the oil lamps? Did he also fade to ashes the moment you stepped into Umbrella’s doors, like the infested corpse of a black-eyed rabbit?
Or maybe just like the foolish old knight who dreamt of chivalry and adventure, who was well aware his life is surrendered to mundanity, you chose to dwell in your delusions of being a hero.
A plague of death is upon Valdelobos; Saddler - the illness, and you - the vector.
Schistocephalus solidus.
Half-conscious, he crawls up to the radiation machine that he used to dispose of sample tissue. It’s probably the most delicate thing in the entire lab, but it doubles as a coat-rack and a doorstop right now.
Alive. Eating. Hungry. Inside. Teeth and fury in his brain.
Deberías tener miedo, niñito, estás fuera de tiempo.
He tries to haul himself up the chair again so he can operate the damn machine, but his muscles give out - the parasite nearly severs something inside, his chest rattles with blood foam.
(Similar to R. nielseni and P. arcuatus ’s behavior manipulation, the parasite interferes with reticular formation’s regulation of sleep-wake cycle, making the host more active at night…)
Aunque ande en valle de sombra de muerte, No temeré mal alguno; porque tú estarás conmigo…
Thoughts fragmented-
I will not die here!
(...vulnerable to UV radiation, which makes the plaga largely nocturnal.)
Muddy boots drag around him slowly: a specter of abuelo stares down at him with empty eyes.
“Help me,” he coughs weakly into the ground, “abuelo. Help me, please.”
But the ghost doesn’t hear his voice and walks away hauling the lifeless deer he ran over, its antlers kicking and thrashing.
Keep it together, keep it together-
There’s no one to help him here. Peel away the pretense, the doctorate and the charm he wears like skin, what’s left of him except fear and pain huddled up in a darkened lab?
Luis Serra-Navarro never existed. There was only the frightened boy that watched his home burn, buried under cigarette ash, wrapped up in fairytales. He feels the parasite digging under the mask he wore for years, getting closer to the truth between his heart and lungs.
He crawls onto the bed the same way a drowning man crawls onto a liferaft - blindly, hopelessly, fingernails digging into pleather for fear of his last hope of survival vanishing. The hallucinations only get worse.
“…so proud of you, mi nieto. You’re going to do great things, eh, pequeño caballero?”
Fire. Smoke. Cinder. A scream frozen in his throat. Tears dried by the heat.
(Activation of both 5-HT2A and D2-like receptors result in serotonin/dopamine dysregulation; a variety of psychotomimetic effects are observed, the host may experience temporary euphoria, mania, psychosis…)
¡Silencio!
…
Eumermis pangodiensis.
Is it over?
He wakes up this time, no longer screaming and clawing at the shadows in his mind, but finds warm tears sliding down his face.
The radiation accelerator whirs as it powers down, its display screen shows a fragmented parasite presumably fried by UV rays. Pain bleeds through his senses and dyes his vision red, but at least it’s not because he’s face down in a puddle of his own blood.
I killed it .
He killed the parasite before it got too close to the truth, to what Luis Serra-Navarro really became. He slides off the bed and staggers towards the mirror to examine himself, only to collapse halfway before making it there. He crawls the rest of the way.
There’s a long, thin scar from the machine running down his chest. He can’t help but wince when his hand moves over it, but warmth is returning to his limbs: his own warmth. It feels good to breathe for himself again.
A dark, disheveled husk of a man stares back at him in the mirror. Luis rinses away the bitter taste of tobacco and bile, and the man blinks at him as if to question his sanity. The mirror ripples, the figure changes: a mud-splattered little Don Quixote with his wild hair and stick-lance, a sleep-deprived researcher on his 6th cup of coffee, an old hunter with a rabbit slung over his shoulders, a priest, an aristocrat, a deer with pitch-black eyes.
Do you remember me? They ask, one after the other like a zoetrope, do you hide from me?
Do you deny me?
Do you fear me?
Do you regret me?
He’s not going to run this time.
Your work is far from done , the deer sings, Saddler lives. He hollows Valdelobos from the inside out. Excise him. Cure us.
In the reflection of the mirror he spots muddy shoe prints behind him, and the image of his abuelo hauling the dead deer comes back like a fever nightmare.
This is your curse, Luis Serra-Navarro. You’ve brought death upon this village, and so you shall die in its arms. For all your ambitions and dreams you were nothing but a boy lost in the woods, and you’ve come home to find it a pile of ash. Now it’s time to wake up, a black dawn is waiting with fury in its clouds.
Heat of tears dissipates from his face and only then he realizes he’s crying again, both hands gripping the edge of the sink with white knuckles. Not so much out of sadness but rather loneliness - he’s content with the fact that Luis Serra-Navarro never existed and never will, just a scratched-out name on a scratched-out photo, just a boy that read and played by himself. All that made him and ever will be of him is destined to die alongside him on this broken island, and he’ll be nothing more than a wisp of cigarette smoke.
Valdelobos is like a maze: you can walk and walk until you think you’ve freed yourself from its confines, only to stumble right back to the beginning.
But he’s not worried about that either; maybe a piece of the parasite is still left alive in him, struggling to survive. Because in spite of knowing all this - in spite of the fact that he’ll more than likely die forgotten and alone, he wants to make a break for it. To run away. To live.
He runs a hand through matted hair: he looks like something the possum dug up from an unmarked grave, but he’s smiling at the other Luis in the mirror. A lopsided, darkened grin he used to pull whenever he felt like getting his way with others - sunken with wrinkles that frankly have no business on his face. (But you know what they say: Cuanto más arrugada la pasa, más dulce es la fruta .)
Luis Serra is a dead man with a purpose, the most dangerous type of man on this godforsaken island.
***
When the knife slides into his back, he doesn’t quite panic like he thought he would.
It hurts, sure, and he knows what a fatal injury is like because it feels no different than culling animals back at Lab Six. But at the end of the road he’s strangely comforted by the blond American holding his zippo lighter.
What do you think, Leon?
Blood-tinted vision through hair covered in viscera and sweat doesn’t quite obscure Leon’s focused gaze, Luis thinks muddled thoughts and wants to reach up to brush his hand against the other’s face. He forgot to give him a proper Spanish greeting, and that’s one too many missed opportunities to kiss the idiot that freed him, doubted him, thrashed him around, punched him, saved him, and stayed with him till the end.
People can change, right?
His unfinished business is in good hands now, he can see it in the agent’s eyes. Leon’s come too far to be killed by a petty little parasite, or a super soldier, or even Saddler himself. He can hand over the task of sending his old home to hell, he can rest . The girl - Ashley, she’ll make it out alive too, she’s too dignified to put up with him in the afterlife.
The damned ghost of a plaga finally stops squirming in his chest. The disease called Valdelobos finally relents. He closes his eyes and returns to the long dream of a young boy in the woods, alone, playing knight with a stick.