Before I begin, please do not attempt to look up the details of my story online. I have changed some details to protect myself, but an intelligent reader could unearth the truth. I am trusting you. You don’t want to get involved.
I make a living as a pathologist. I am working on my doctorate in plant pathology, specifically. It’s like the lamest version of the coolest job ever. I work with bacteria and viruses!...in crops. Long periods of boredom, punctuated by moments of vague academic curiosity.
It wasn’t always this way.
I was working for a crop physiologist in central Nebraska. There are always new diseases emerging in the heart of America’s agriculture industry, as genetically modified plants and a warming climate alter the genetic ecosystem year to year. Our lab was always busy, and my boss was always on my ass about it. He would force me to work long nights preparing samples – always holding my graduate thesis over my head like my own personal sword of Damocles. One slip-up and he would drown my career.
I despised it. And I despised him. He deserved what happened.
We had gotten a sample from a farmer named Dean Grayson near Hemingford. There wasn’t much to it – just some illegible handwriting on a note taped to a Walmart plastic bag. I glanced at it, and tossed it aside. The bag was sealed airtight with what appeared to be most of a roll of duct tape.
That’s what the non-educated do, when they send in a sample. Even if it’s something harmless like Soybean leaf blight people treat it like it’s the next Ebola, and that their skin is going to slough off if they get any on their shoes.
On the contrary, most pathogens are harmless to people.
I cut open Dean Grayson’s plastic bag, and peered inside. It appeared to be an uprooted corn plant, only a few weeks old. The leaves were darkened and had a few lesions on the outer leaves. I figured it was Northern Corn Leaf Blight, which had been getting worse the past few years in the Nebraska Panhandle and nearby Wyoming.
I cut off one of the more grievously afflicted leaves and, using gloves, swabbed the tissue on several different agar plates: potato dextrose, casein hydrolysate, tryptone, sorbitol – all good growth mediums to help diagnose a pathogen. We had a few other types of plates in the fridge, but we rarely used them. No plant pathogen would grow on them anyways.
After that, I left the sample in the fridge, still wrapped in the plastic bag. I spent the next 12 hours dealing with my boss. He’d brought a plant riddled with aphids into the greenhouse, and now half the plants growing in there were infested. Of course, it was my responsibility to spray for them, which meant I had to get suited up to avoid breathing in the putrid, toxic fumes. It took well into the evening to exterminate the pests, but I took a grim pleasure in their unavoidable fate. They would die by a force they couldn’t even discern, let alone understand.
By the end of the ordeal, I was sweating, exhausted, and irritable. It was dark out, and I stopped by the lab, still wearing my hazard suit, so that I could get changed. It was then that I noticed.
Nothing had grown in the agar plates. That was weird. At that point in my life, weird was still interesting. I know better now. There are some things which should not be investigated.
Forgetting in an instant my foul mood and my exhaustion, I opened the plates in the sterile hood and looked at them carefully for signs of growth. There was nothing – the surface of the plates was smooth and undisturbed.
To my annoyance, an aphid had hitched a ride on the sleeve of my suit, escaping the pesticide in the greenhouse. I shook my hand to fling the bug off, and the little insect landed in one of the agar plates. My bad mood returned, and I pushed the now-contaminated plate to one side of the hood.
I decided I needed to streak the pathogen on a wider assay of plates, including the blood and brain/heart infusion agar from the fridge. We kept it on hand for the weird stuff – mostly anthrax, which would come in on root and soil samples on rare occasions.
I was going to need a new leaf, though, so I went to grab the bag from the fridge. When I picked up the bag, however, a thick, viscous fluid oozed out through the hole I had cut, and spattered onto the shelves within the fridge. I remember crying out in disgust, because a particular globule had nearly landed on my arm. In that instant, I felt like I saw something in the drop, but I was quickly distracted by the odor.
The smell was like nothing I had ever experienced. I’ve dealt with more than my fair share of decomposing plants, and I know the smell of rot. Rot is a sickly-sweet, yet rancid odor. There is no mistaking it. But this smell was different. It was sort of like a hearing a melody, but you can’t remember where you heard it. Yet, you know you have heard it before. This smell was like that. I recognized it, but couldn’t place it. It left me feeling uneasy.
I moved the bag to the counter, and peeled apart the sides of the plastic bag, now coated in mustard-yellow ooze that contrasted starkly with my deep blue gloves. The inside of the bag was nothing but what I took to be some sort of bacteria. The corn plant that was previously inside was completely gone. I had seen some stem blights create a polysaccharide slime exudate, but nothing on this scale. Even bacteria have trouble digesting cellulose, and this plant had disappeared in a matter of hours. That shouldn’t have been possible.
I carefully moved the bag of oozing fluid to the hood, where I made another discovery. The plate on which the aphid had fallen was likewise covered in the dull yellow slime, in a perfect circle near the edge. The aphid was gone. I would have attributed it to bacterial contamination from the insect, but it had only been a few minutes. No pathogen known to man grew that fast.
I decided to run some diagnostic tests on the yellow ooze. I walked to the reagent shelf to grab the usual methods – hydrogen peroxide, some indicators, and a few staining dyes. I wanted to look at the pathogen under the microscope, to get an idea of the cellular morphology. It was while I was facing away from the hood that I thought I saw something yellow in the corner of my eye. I glanced over, but didn’t see anything. I must have been getting tired, I told myself.
My array of tests was completely useless. Test for catalases with hydrogen peroxide? Negative. Starch hydrolysis? Negative. None of the common indicators told me anything about the strange yellow slime that had consumed the corn.
I prepared a gram strain, heating the sample on a slide and treating it with crystal violet and iodine. At least I could figure out whether the sample was gram positive or negative. If it was purple, it would be positive, and red would mean negative. It would also let me see the individual cells under the microscope. The final step involved heating the slide to kill the cells and fix them to the glass. When I passed the slide over the open flame of the Bunsen burner, however, the yellow ooze almost seemed to recoil, before letting out an angry hiss and acquiescing to the heat.
Undeterred, I transferred the sample to the microscope. Yet, I saw no cells. In fact, I saw no color other than yellow. There were no individual units that I could discern. This left me even more unsettled. Even the bizarre slime molds have individual cells visible under magnification.
By now, it was morning, and as I was disposing of the slide I thought I saw my boss come in. “I cleaned out the damn green house. Have you seen this sampl-“
It wasn’t my boss. It wasn’t anything. I could have sworn I saw someone come in, and only he had the other keys. I felt something else now, as if some malevolent persona were observing me. I resolved to finish in the lab as soon as I could.
I returned to the hood to find another discovery, one that horrified me. I had succeeded in culturing the pathogen. A few plates had filled almost to overflowing. Blood agar, brain/heart infusion, and a few others that all contained living media were all stained sickly yellow. I felt in that moment as if I could see movement in the plates, sloshing around as if to escape. I was unnerved.
I began to destroy the plates, and the bag. Whatever was growing there, I didn’t want to know anymore. Dousing the hood in a concentrated Clorox solution we kept for cleaning, I laughed out loud as I triumphed over whatever creatures were growing inside. Biology has its limits; chemistry always wins in the end.
It was then that I remembered Dean Grayson, the farmer who had sent the sample in to the lab in the first place. I scrambled to find the note with his information that I had so cavalierly thrown into the trash the afternoon before. I strained to read his handwriting, but could only make out his phone number and the words ‘…strange…call as soon as…’
I resolved to call him immediately. It was early in Hemingford, but I hoped I could reach him. The phone rang and rang; only picking up after almost a whole minute.
“Speak.” Said a voice through the phone, instantly setting my hair on end.
“Mr. Grayson? This is, er…this is the Central Nebraska Plant Pathol-“
The voice interrupted me. Looking back, I almost felt like it didn’t come from the phone. “Stop.”
My heart beating, I swallowed and replied. “Stop? Stop what? I was taking a look at your sample and I am worried that-“
“STOP.”
The line went dead after that. I tried to call back, but no one answered. My heart was beating furiously, at this point, and I tried to take stock of my situation. Whatever had been in Dean Grayson’s corn had an unnatural affinity for living material. That’ shouldn’t be possible – but somehow I knew that it knew what was alive and what was a nonliving nutrient recreation. As far as I could tell, it took all organic matter equally – even the aphid had been consumed. I was fortunate that I hadn’t gotten any on me when it splashed on the fridge.
Horrified, I sprang to me feet and sprinted back to the lab as I realized the magnitude of my error. Inside that very fridge were thousands of samples – mostly plants from hundreds of farmers. The amount of organic matter in that fridge was substantial. I knew I had to sterilize the fridge before something unthinkable happened.
But I was too late.
My boss was in the lab, a furious look on his face.
“What the hell is going on here!?” He demanded, grabbing my shoulder.
I gasped for breath, “I don’t know, but I’m going to fix this.”
“Damn right you are! This place is a mess! The hood looks like a disaster zone! And what’s this shit coming out of the fridge? Did you spill something in there too?”
I gazed, horrified, at the refrigerator. Oozing evilly from the seams and edges was the yellow slime. I could only imagine how much must remain inside. It formed a puddle on the ground, and as I watched, it seemed to grow with every foul drop from the fridge.
“You are going to clean up every square millimeter of this place, you hear me?” My boss said, still staring me in the eyes.
“Wait, you don’t understand!” I cried. Behind him, the ooze seemed to quiver with excitement, and it began to spread towards us.
“I’m not done talking!” My boss had said. “You are going to clean this place up, and then you are finished! You hear me? You will never work in a lab again! I knew from day one you were trouble, and a failure to boot!”
The yellow puddle had reached his shoes, and what happened next will remain in my memory for the rest of my life. In seconds, the yellow had spread up his calves, under his pressed tan pants, staining them from the inside out.
He began screaming, trying to pull away, but he was rooted in place.
“Help me, damn it! I can feel it! It’s inside my legs! Help me!”
I stepped back, pulling away from his grasp. All my tension, all my rage at this stain of a man was coming to a head. I didn’t have any last words for him; I just let go. It consumed him in seconds, engulfing his head and pouring down his still-open mouth. I scrambled back, almost falling over.
The yellow amorphous mass trembled and strained to reach me. There was still a human shape where my boss had been – a grotesque mockery of a human being. Ooze dripped from its raised appendages as it sought to consume me as well.
I screamed, and ran for the far wall. From the sterile hood, another mass was raising – the Clorox hadn’t killed it at all! It rose in a stalk about a foot above the countertop, and made a movement that I felt was turning to face me. I felt as though it were looking at me, though it possessed no eyes. All the terror that had come before was nothing compared to what I felt in that moment, as I faced an entity I barely perceived, let alone understood.
It was then I laid eyes on the Bunsen burner, still connected to the laboratory gas supply. I turned on the gas, letting it flow freely into the air of the lab. I lit the burner, and left it running. The entire lab would go up, consuming the yellow stain and everything nearby.
As I made for the door, the sickly stalk turned again to face me, and through the flames and I could have sworn I heard it speak.
The fireman and the police department confirmed my story that the laboratory fire had been an accident, and they determined that the strange dissolved carcass of my former boss had died in the chemical explosion. They mused that he had been responsible for the fire, though I never suggested as much.
According to the Box Butte Nebraska county sheriff, Dean Grayson had gone missing without a trace. He was never found.
I am deathly afraid of unknown pathogens, now, and refuse to take samples from the public. I worry that whatever that thing was isn't unique, or that there are more out there, reawakening from ancient slumbers by the changing world around them.
I worry we should stop.
Submitted February 25, 2016 at 09:53AM by FakDendor http://ift.tt/1QeLBYp nosleep
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