As the heat wave settled in, I left the country for the city. Wherever I went I found ways to slip in, just one among hundreds of my kind. I visited all your favourite spots in turn, beginning with the most easily accessible, tents and trailers and cottages, and progressing to your open-windowed houses and apartments. I sampled different types of skin and flavours of blood and sweat, men and women and children, people sick and under stress, clean and dirty alike. I digested your flesh to achieve my aim of one day reproducing. So many bodies, yet not one came close to how I felt upon first glimpsing the skin of that farm boy. So I pursued my solitary wanderings, fleeing the other insects who were so plentiful that year.
Then one day, hotter even than the one before, I found myself flying over one of your neighbourhoods where I’d never been before. The doors of an enormous building were wide open, and I was sucked inside. The heat was stifling, a glorious sensation for one such as myself. You were all busy, united in toil. I flitted around from person to person with little real interest – until I found you. You.
The first five minutes at the factory are always the most excruciating, a torture with no end in sight. On his seat in front of the hydraulic machine, Theodore tirelessly repeats the same movements. Stretch out the left arm, like a metal claw. Grab a spring from the tray. Twist the arm forty-five degrees, clockwise. Set the unit flush in its socket. Gently place both index fingers on the heat sensors to activate the mechanism. Watch as the machine tests the spring. Commit to memory the stiffness coefficient on the screen. Remove the spring with the right hand. Pivot the arms forty-five degrees, always clockwise.
Place the coil in the funnel that will drop it into the correct box based on its measured resistance. Throw it out if defective. Repeat the cycle one thousand times per day, two thousand for a double shift.
This third possibility – asymptomatic carriers – filled Thomas with dread. He had himself been bitten by the Tabanus flos cadaver countless times over the course of the summer. Could he be an unwitting carrier? Would he develop the disease one day? Was he contagious? He knew all too well that he should have informed his colleagues, starting with Major Walker, but couldn’t bring himself to do it. He knew that his life was at risk. He pushed on in the laboratory, working twice as hard.
