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Martin can’t bite back another cry of pain as Jon twists the corkscrew further into his leg. Tim has a cool washcloth oh Martin’s head and behind his neck while Sasha fans him with her clipboard, but it’s all providing little comfort.
“Last one, then you’re finished,” Jon soothes. “Ready?”
Martin takes a breath and another shot of the bourbon Jon keeps in his desk, then nods. Jon lines the angle up with the hole and begins to twist. Martin is biting down on his sweater to keep from screaming.
“Stop squirming .”
“It hurts!”
“I’m sorry!”
Martin actually almost laughs at that. “You’re terrible at this,” he says through gritted teeth.
“Well, you’re going to have to cope with it.” Martin tries his best, but the pain is too much, and he finds that he can’t stop thrashing. “Hold him down,” Jon snaps to Tim. He’s muttering apologies and encouragements, but that kindness gets him little other than a knee to the jaw. As Tim staggers backward, fingers bloody from his split lip, Jon drops the last worm from Martin’s body into a glass jar.
“You’re done now,” Jon reassures, audibly out of breath. He takes his hand in a gesture that’s as comforting as it is uncharacteristically intimate. “Let’s get you lying down. You’re a bit pale.”
Tim and Sasha gingerly help Martin to his feet and then to the cot, where he lies on his back with his feet elevated on a pillow. After a few moments, he starts to look a little less peaky, so Jon beckons for Sasha to sit in the chair before him.
“You’re next, I’m afraid.”
“Lucky me.” She plops down in front of him and lifts her skirt slightly to expose her calf. There’s only one, which Jon pops out quickly and as painlessly as he can with the corkscrew. She barely even reacts. However, he knows that she certainly didn’t get off easy. Most of the worms that feasted on her had attacked her face and are slowly burrowing through her cheeks and jaw. It’s going to be at least as bad as Martin’s extractions, if not worse. The corkscrew feels so, so primitive. He might as well be letting leeches suck the ghosts out of her blood. It’s barbaric.
“Tim,” Jon beckons quietly, gesturing to the empty space in front of him. “Will you sit here? Sasha needs to put her head down so I can get to the holes and I think she might be more comfortable with you than on the concrete.”
Without a joke or quip or flirtatious remark, Tim does as he’s told, allowing Sasha to place her head in his lap. Instinctively, he starts to stroke her hair.
“Remember to breathe, okay?”
Jon is “sterilizing” the corkscrew with isopropyl wipes from the first aid kit as thoroughly as he can, though he isn’t completely happy with it even when it’s as clean as he can get it. “Let me know if you need me to stop. I’d rather take a break than have you move and make the scars worse.” Her face falls at the word “scars.” They’d all known that the wounds were too deep to just heal over like nothing had ever happened, but now she’s picturing her face marred by a dozen holes, a reminder she’ll have to see every day of this horror she’s endured. She wonders if there will be a day in the future, even distantly, where any of them will be able to look at her face and not see this ugly, brutal night in the pockmarks.
She doesn’t know to be careful what she wishes for.
Jon gently sanitizes the side of her face with the alcohol, fingers falling into grooves that weren’t there before.
“Are you ready?”
She takes a deep breath, squeezes Tim’s hand, and nods. “Get those bastards out of me.”
“That’s my girl,” Tim praises. He lets her squeeze the feeling out of his fingers as Jon chases the first worm, wipes away tears as he skewers it and retracts the corkscrew as slowly as he can. It’s methodical, detailed work that requires a steady hand and intense focus, not to mention a strong stomach. It’s no wonder they’ve chosen Jon. He’s actually gentler than he seems, too.
He evicts 10 worms from her cheeks and jaw, plus the one from her leg. He has her check herself over twice more, tells her that they need to be very very sure they’ve got them all. Sasha is positive. It’s not just that she can’t see them anymore or feel them wriggling, but there’s a feeling that has lifted. Like a sense of foreboding and illness that, now that the worms are out, has dissipated into a sore sleepiness.
“That’s all of them,” Jon finally announces. “How do you feel?”
“Like a rat nibbled a bunch of holes in me,” she says, light but pained. “But I’m alright.”
“You did well. You were very brave.” That praise coming from someone who doles it out as infrequently as Jon means a lot.
“Move over, Martin,” she commands once Jon has bandaged any of the wounds that are bleeding. There’s certainly not room for both of them on the cot, so Martin lays the quilt down on the floor and piles his pillows around it to make a nest of sorts.
“It’s like you’ve got a little members club lounge over there,” Tim jokes.
“Yes, well, I’m ready to grant you admission.” Jon cleans that corkscrew like his life depends on it. He’s probably right.
“Do you need my lap?” Sasha asks.
“Or mine?”
Tim shakes his head. “Maybe a hand to hold.” Martin and Sasha each grab one, which makes him smile. Jon waits patiently until Tim has had time mentally to prepare. “Level with me, guys. What’s this going to feel like?”
Sasha sighs. “Mostly a lot of pressure. It’ll sting at first, but then he’ll be so deep in that you stop being able to feel it so much.”
“That’s not so bad.”
“Thenit’stheworstpainyou’veeverfelt,” Martin rushes in one hurried breath, torn between his desire to be honest and his desire not to scare him.
“What?”
“Well, as the—the worms are pulled out, they… well, they sort of clamp down? And move all around, trying to resist removal. Going in is easy, but pulling them back out is…” He shudders. “I can’t describe it.”
“I’m going to be as delicate as possible,” Jon reassures. He’s trying for comforting, but he’s pretty sure his tone just sounds exhausted. He’s tired. His head is pounding from this stress. Not to mention that his own worms, dozens of them, are burrowing their way deeper and deeper into his body, chomping excruciatingly at whatever they can find.
He shifts to sit up a little straighter and the movement to his hip aggravates one of them, sending a wave of white-hot pain through his hip so strong he sees stars for a moment.
“Jon?” Martin calls when he cries out, clearly not as asleep as Jon had thought. “What happened?”
His face is damp with sweat when he shakes his head, unable to open his eyes just yet. “Nothing,” he replies. “Sorry. I moved wrong.”
Tim frowns. “Are you sure you don’t want to go next?”
“If I do, then we’ll all be too shaky to get to you. Better that I do the three of you and then you can work together for mine.”
Though none of them love that answer, there isn’t a better one, so they simply nod. Tim’s worms are mostly concentrated to his hands and left arm. Unable to hold his hands, Sasha places his head in her lap and toys with his hair while Martin rubs his back in small circles.
Tim starts screaming nearly as soon as Jon touches the hole with the edge of the metal. It startles him, but he doesn’t flinch.
“I’m sorry,” he apologizes rather than snapping at him for the noise or berating him for being dramatic. “I know, and I’m sorry.”
“Just keep going, Jon. You’re doing great.” Martin offers him a small smile. At least he’s been forgiven from the pain he’d been required to inflict.
Tim’s pain tolerance is significantly less than the other two’s. He requests frequent breaks citing that he feels like he’s going to faint, like he’s going to be sick. Jon gives him all the time he needs, but he can’t shove from the back of his mind that every minute they delay the end of this is another minute longer his own worms have to burrow, and they’re already in so deep. He can tell. He feels them writhing around, their carnivorous little teeth scraping bone. He’ll be lucky to walk away from this with his pelvis in tact.
By the time he’s pulling the last worm out of Tim’s palm, he’s seeing double from his own agony. “How d’y’feel?” he tries, but it comes out slurred and stilted. Tim frowns.
“Erm, not great. Are you alright? You look peaky.”
Jon nods, but there’s nothing to it. Without a word, he stands from his chair, a wave of pain so blinding ripping through his hip that he cries out and collapses to his knees.
“Jon!” Martin is the first at his side, scanning him for any injuries aside from the obvious. He’s ashamed that he hadn’t noticed how poorly Jon looked before. He’s pale, his entire body covered in a thin sheen of sweat despite shaking chills. When Martin places a hand to his forehead, he’s shocked to find an insidious, ominous sort of heat there.
“He’s burning up,” Martin announces.
“Just need to get the worms out,” he begs. “Please, get them out. They’re eating me.”
The group wastes no time getting Jon lying down flat on his back. “Where are they?” Martin asks, corkscrew in hand. His were the least shaky when they compared them side by side, so this responsibility belongs to him.
“Everywhere.”
They think he’s exaggerating until they realize he isn’t. His face and hands are covered, which was to be expected. However, Martin follows the wounds up his arm until he can no longer roll up the sleeve and has to remove his whole shirt. Jon is remarkably malleable for that, even if he did cry out in pain the whole time. It broke Martin’s heart.
With Jon’s shirt neatly folded off to the side, Martin’s eyes widen. Holes everywhere . They have to take off his dress pants, too, in order to reveal the ones that are at his hip and thigh. They’ve barely left anything on his left side untouched.
“Jesus Christ, Jon,” Martin whispers. He turns to Tim and Sasha, who are looking on in pained disbelief. “We’ll need more corkscrews. Find them, sanitize them, and come back.”
They scurry off to find them while Martin pours Jon another shot of bourbon, then a third. “This is going to hurt an awful lot.”
“It already hurts,” Jon manages through a tight jaw. “I want them out. I feel so—so ill.”
Rot. Decay. Infection. Martin shivers at the thought of what all might be coursing through Jon’s system right now. Even with his meager 6 worms, he’d felt like hell. He simply can’t imagine how ill Jon must be. He presses a hand to his forehead again, hoping to find that he was wrong about the fever but only managing to confirm it. He reaches for the washcloth that Tim had been using on Martin’s forehead to keep cool and dips it in the bowl of water. He makes a slight mess aes he wrings it out, then places it over Jon’s burning forehead.
“We only found one corkscrew,” Sasha announces as they barge back into the room so loudly that Jon flinches from the way it spikes his headache, “but there were tweezers in the junk drawer.”
“Anything; anything. Hurry.”
Tim is quick to start sanitizing his tool: of course, the tweezers. They’ll take the most force to use, and he’s got abnormally strong hands.
“Jon, mate, you look awful.”
“He’s running a high fever. We’ve got to move quickly.”
“Why didn’t you say anything?” Sasha asks softly. “You placed yourself last on purpose.”
“I’m going to take the most time,” he explains pragmatically. “Better to save it for last.”
Sasha flips the washcloth to the cool side and strokes his hot cheek with her thumb. She’s wiping away either a tear or a drip from the washcloth, but he feels too fuzzy to know which it is.
“Ready, boss?” Tim asks. Jon, wildly unprepared, nods, then grits his teeth hard as Tim reaches into the hole with the tweezers. And reaches. And reaches. Fishes around a bit, gradually feeding more and more of the metal into his leg until he finally hits resistance and grabs it hard. With a horrible popping sound, a worm, wildly engorged, is plucked from the hole. It’s so large that Jon can see the little barbs on its body, the ones designed to prevent its removal. They’d scraped the inside of his leg badly, but even with that new pain in mind, relief washes over him like a wave.
“Christ, there’s so many of them,” Martin breathes.
“And they’re in deep . I thought I wasn’t going to be able to grab it.”
“Why are they so fat?”
“They’ve started eating,” Jon says. He’s got no proof; he just Knows. “Chewing, digesting away my muscle. Chipping away at bone. They’re going to break me down into compost.”
“That’s not going to happen, Jon,” Martin says firmly. “Now. As fast as you can. Don’t stop for anything.”
And they don’t. They don’t stop when he rolls on his side to vomit into the trash bin, nor when he begs them to take a break because he can’t see anymore. They push through him saying the cruelest things he can think of, pointing out all the things they hate most about themselves. Maybe, if he makes them hate him, they’ll leave him to die in peace. They don’t stop when he passes out from pain, nor when he wakes up crying and repeats that cycle twice more.
By the time Martin pulls out the last worm, it’s larger than the hole it burrowed in through. He gives it one final tug, then places the whole thing into Jon’s jar. The jars had at first been a lighthearted attempt to add a little mirth to such an awful situation, but now it’s just hard to look at Jon’s, twice as full as the others.
“Ngh,” he moans. Martin taps his burning cheek lighty. “It hurts.”
“We got them all,” Martin promises. Doesn’t it feel better?”
He nods. With as much pain as he’s in, feverish and barely conscious, even this is better.
“Is he still feverish? Has it gone down at all?” Sasha asks. Martin checks, and though it’s difficult to verify without a thermometer, he still feels uncomfortably, near scarily warm.
“It’s still pretty bad. I think we need to get him some paracetamol and a rest.”
“I’d like to stay with him if you lot want to go home,” Tim says. “It’s been a long day.”
“Are you joking?” Sasha challenges. “Go home alone, after all that? No, thank you. I’m staying here and sleeping with the fire extinguisher.”
“I suppose that’s all of us staying, then,” Martin says. Together, they set up the cot once more and settle Jon into it. They find instant noodles and coax a few bites into him so he can take a dose of flu tabs. He drinks as much water as he thinks he can keep down. With all those conditions met, Martin scoops Jon off his place leaning against Martin’s shoulder and lays him down on the cot. He accepts the quilt so greedily that Martin takes off his jumper and places that on top, too.
“Do you need anything?” Martin asks. Jon shrugs, then shakes his head. “You hesitated. What can I do?”
“I’d, erm. I think I might feel better—or rather, warmer, or maybe calmer if I—”
“Jon.”
“A cup of tea?”
Martin laughs lightly. “Is that all!” He stands, and Sasha follows with the fire extinguisher. No taking chances, but things at least feel safe for now. Jon allows himself to rest his eyes until Tim clears his throat.
“You really should have said something earlier, you know,” he says. Jon flinches, preparing for a lecture that doesn’t come. “But I understand why you couldn’t.”
“Thank you.”
“No, Jon. Thank you . You were amazing. Like a surgeon.”
He pales. “Ugh. I’d rather not think about that, if you don’t mind.”
“Sure.” He reaches over and searches for a part of Jon that isn’t bandaged. He settles for his right hand and grasps it, squeezes feather-light. “You saved us.”
“You’re—well, of course. I put you in this mess. I’m responsible for anything that happens to any of you at work.”
“Jon. Say what you mean.”
He hesitates. “You’re my friends. And I care about you.”
“Aw, Jon, you softie,” Sasha taunts from the doorway. They’ve successfully returned with a mug of still-steeping tea, tempered with cold milk. He grabs it gratefully despite Martin’s warnings that it’s hot. He drinks for so long that Martin thinks he might drain the cup dry in one go.
“I’m so glad everyone’s okay,” Martin says. He might be making too early a call on that, but they’ve survived, at least, and for now, that’s all they can really ask for.
“Get some rest, Jon. We’re all here.”
He decides he’ll quickly shut his eyes. Between Tim’s hand holding his own, Martin’s shoulder to lean on, and Sasha draped across Tim’s lap, extinguisher pointed at the door, he decides it’s alright to let go for a moment.