"What's in there?" Adam asked her again.
"The truth." Wan and frail, Vera leaned an arm on the bathroom door. "Or at least its consequences." She began to twist the knob open.
"Wait! I'm not sure I want to have anything more to do with this." He stepped back, feeling the walls closing in. As opposed to the bright living room, this narrow corridor, dim as a tunnel, seemed out of place with the rest of the apartment, like it belonged to a different construction altogether. "I... I only came to see you. Get proof that I wasn't delirious."
"You can't hide forever."
"It's not about that." He would have noticed an unpleasantness in the air sooner if it wasn't for the constant and distracting wailing, growing louder. "Unlike yours, my family is still here. They need me."
"And us? We need you too." She stood motionless for a moment as if weighing what to say next. "I've been trying to get the team back together, but they won't listen. Maybe you'll convince them to—"
"To do what?"
"Face this!" Vera coughed and lost her balance; she'd have fallen if Adam hadn't held her, wrapping her arm over his shoulders. "I am scared, honey."
"Me too," he admitted, meeting her eyes.
"They are everywhere. Inside us, even."
"Please, stop." To keep listening would mean leaving behind his ordinary life forever.
"We all looked up to you in the team. I know if you call them, they'll come, and we can fight back."
"Do you need to lie down?" It surprised him how little she weighed. Underneath her baggy pitch-black clothes, she must have been all skin and fragile bones.
Vera kissed him on the mouth. Her dry lips felt cold against his. "After all these years, I finally get you to hold me in your arms," she put her hand on his shoulder and straightened up her back, finding her own balance. "Reality is always more disappointing than fantasy."
Is she confusing me with Santiago? He wondered, unsure of what to do next.
"Before I met Santi, I might as well have been a Landing Signal Officer waving you with neon paddles to make a move." She smiled. "But, you only had eyes for Evelia."
Where was all of this coming from? Why had she said nothing about this? Did his friend know? What could she gain from this confession now? To sway you, answered a voice in the back of his brain. She's toying with your feelings to trick you into doing what she wants. All women are the same.
"Vera, listen," he murmured. "I am leaving—"
Once she opened the door, the stench hit him like a punch in the nose. It was that same unnatural smell from the underground parking lot, but tenfold stronger.
"Perhaps you're telling yourself this is the fetor of corpses rotting in the stagnant black water of a sewer, but that's your mind trying to give meaning to something incomprehensible to us." She stared at him. "I described it as the torn out insides of a Lovecraftian octopus splattered over the tall, slimy cliff of a forsaken British beach. But hey, I always wanted to be a writer as a kid."
"Jesus Christ! Close the door!"
"No." She shouted, covering her mouth and nose with her forearm. "See for yourself."
Adam struggled to move. All he could do was keep himself from retching.
"Vera, please."
"Look!"
He raised both arms in front of him as if to cover his face from a powerful gust of wind pushing him back. More powerful than the odor was the fear crawling inside his mind, seizing his every thought. Whatever awaited him in the bathroom couldn't be worse than this anxiety, right?
That's the lie, he told himself.
And then he saw it.
While Vera had said reality was more disappointing than fantasy, he was now sure that reality would always surpass even the most terrible of nightmares.
Half hidden behind a stained shower curtain, the unnameable thing standing in the bathtub, chained to a bidet, had been human at some point. But not anymore. Although it was naked, Adam could not tell if the creature was male or female since it had a stump where its sexual organs should have been. Most of its bonny body, covered with scabs and dried blood, had long thick lumps protruding under its skin.
Dear God! What happened to its arms?
A thin but resilient membrane kept the humanoid upper limbs tight against its torso, restraining him from using them.
"I don't know what they are," Vera said. "But this is what they become once the metamorphosis is complete."
He'd seen the millipedes break their skulls from the inside, stared into the blackened eyeballs of the parasites' hosts, but the last step of the transformation exceeded his own fears.
The fiend's concave chest and bulging stomach; its cysts enlarged as big as the fingers of a grown man, clenching shut the abomination's eyes and mouth; those deformed ear sockets spiraling down to where the brain was... And that wail, that inhuman cry of unfathomable pain!
It was all too much to bear without losing a bit of sanity.
Vera closed the door.
"They are spreading, and they are coming to get all of us."
Adam's legs gave way. After that harrowing experience, he should have been too scared to speak, but, instead, a miry calm engulfed him. "Why do you have something like that in here?"
"In part because I love him." She shrugged, trying to hide the pain in her voice. "Or I did when he was human."
"Who was he?" He asked and regretted the question right away.
"Does it matter now?"
"I guess not," he replied, more concerned about leaving than anything, but his legs refused to move. He moistened his lips before he continued, "You said in part. Is there another reason to keep that creature alive?"
"Yes. I'm returning them the favor. They are experimenting on us, so I am playing the mad scientist too."
"Are you saying this is some sick experiment?"
"I... am not sure." She sighed. "What I figured out is that the survivors of the Red Christmas are the only ones who see what's happening. They blinded the entire country somehow."
"Are we...?"
"Immune?" She finished for him. "I can only hope. Everyone seems oblivious to this madness but us. Have you noticed how the city changes? Caracas has become a macabre and twisted version of a Rubik's Cube. Walk down the same road as always, and you'll find yourself somewhere else entirely. The squatter areas have grown so large shacks are blocking the highways now. They are trapping us in these labyrinthine streets. Am I right to think you've seen this?"
He nodded. I even got lost in my apartment building two nights ago, he thought but didn't say. Instead, he asked her, "What do we do?"
"See this?" She produced a small notebook from her pocket. "I have evidence and notes here, but they are pieces of a larger puzzle. And I need everyone on the team to help me reveal the truth."
"Vera, there is no one left to listen."
"Not true!"
"And even if someone with power and means remains unaffected by this plague, would they care?"
"You cared!"
"Only after you showed me that... demon."
"We must find out what happened the night of the Red Christmas. We haven't been the same since then. I think it's all connected. The monsters, the government, everything."
"Let's say we do this, and I'm not saying I will. How do we know we can trust Ernest or Santiago or any of them?" Adam got back to his feet. "After I climbed thirty flights of stairs to get to you, seeing floor after floor of charred walls and ashen corridors, I didn't think I could—"
"Wait. No." She shook her head, nervously. "They fixed all that. They turned the East Tower into a residential building years ago. That's why I moved here."
An uneasy silence fell over them for an instant.
"Vera, when was the last time you left this place?"
"Someone brings me food; my downstairs neighbors recommended the delivery service I use."
"Most of the lower floors are empty. It's been that way for over a decade."
"Impossible," she stammered.
"And there are government offices below us."
"What?"
The horror distorting her face was too sudden to stir any suspicions about her. She was as much a victim as him.
"Vera, we need to get out of here," said Adam as a fire alarm started blaring outside the apartment.
To be continued...
What I've come to learn is that the only thing harder than to write is not to write.