MicroHorror

The life of a submariner is one bereft of privacy or dignity. The air stinks of human odors and there is no place to stand where you are not touching another fetid male body. Men sleep next to each other in tiny bunks and the toilet is a pipe in the floor. There are no secrets.

On this trip, one man had a secret–in his perception, a minor one. He’d lied to the doctor. He was asked whether he’d been in contact with any wild or feral animals. He had been bitten by a bat. It was just a little cut and he didn’t think he wasn’t worried. It was just a little tiny cut.

But soon the little cut became a festering abscess. The doctor drained it of a sickening pus, the stench of which turned the stomachs of a dozen men. The worst should have been over, but was not. He was infected with an antibiotic-resistant superbug and it was eating away his flesh.

He was in trouble. Anyone who causes himself to be incapacitated can face a court martial and since he lied to the doctor, he would likely spend the next year in a military prison. He was furious. He didn’t blame himself. He blamed that stupid doctor. The doctor didn’t drain it right. The doctor should have shot him full of antibiotics when the abscess first formed. Or something. He was in agony and didn’t feel like thinking rationally. The abscess grew fast enough to watch the swelling and had to be drained by the hour. His body was now little but an incubator for the revolting disease that had taken over.

Furious with his doctor, he lashed out. He attacked the man and cut his flesh, rubbing pus into the wound. He fled. The doctor rushed for a shot of antibiotics and found the cabinet empty. He had stolen them.

Security was called. He used the same tactic against them, smearing putrefaction in their eyes and mouths. His mind broke. Snapped. He ran through the submarine, assaulting trapped people. He needed only to scratch, rub, and run away.

Despite the packed quarters and the total lack of privacy he was able to blend into the homogeneous crowd of stinking, exhausted men. He liked to go for the eyes. There, the infection would set in fast. He would sneak up behind a guy and scratch his eye with a pus-covered finger. A guy would bump into somebody in the corridor, and two days later his eyes would be rotting out of his head.

He was finally apprehended when he was too sick to move, but that wasn’t the end of it because he had smeared disease on every surface he could reach. And worse still, some of the men who had been infected through cuts, who could still see and had some limited movement, became mad with panic. They saw inevitable doom and were enraged at the lack of medical treatment. They began to spread the infection as well.

The sub declared a medical emergency and headed to rendezvous with a surface ship. But it was getting harder to keep the thing running. It’s an extremely complicated machine. The simple task of surfacing requires a coordinated effort by numerous people. Seamen were being trained to do jobs they had never done before, in the hope that they would make it to the rendezvous. It was looking like they might not. The man had targeted essential staff, and by rubbing pus in their eyes he had temporarily blinded them. Even if their bodies were destined to win the fight, the inflammation would leave them unable to function in the mean time.

Soon, the sub was adrift. A handful of people struggled, blind, to get it to the surface but a crucial person passed out. The sub descended to the ocean floor. Rescuers found nothing but corpses bloated with pus, their faces contorted in expressions of heart-wrenching agony.