You are counting your porch change and laughing to yourself, still pumped from those happy memories of blowing up Titan Labs. What a perfect scene. So distracted by the warm thoughts, you don't even realize you are scratching your leg raw, carrying on and just scraping away until, finally, you are snapped back to awareness by a terrible burning sensation. One too many nails to the skin.
You know better than to keep clawing, and try to ignore the itch, but some twenty minutes later you are back at it. You scurry to the bathroom, quickly unfastening your belt, tugging down your pants in an itch-fit, desperate to figure out what is wrong with your leg.
There it is: a giant red welt surrounding a puffy bulge of flesh.
"What the fuck?" You murmur to yourself, only to realize in that instant that it's a flea bite. From the squirrels.
You decide to go on ignoring the itch, let it heal itself, but you keep finding yourself scratching at it hard. There is little relief. An ice pack cools it, and you start to think it's okay, that the swelling is gone, but you are quickly back to scratching. A small blood stain soaks through your pants.
Pants drop once again: you've torn the skin around the bite and the red bump is bleeding. A red bump surrounded by a swollen white patch. You put a bandage over it to try to keep yourself from scratching and giving yourself an infection, but it itches so bad. You can't sleep. You swallow a whole handful of sleeping pills. Everything goes quick.
The next day the itch is gone. Thank god; you had worrisome dreams, and still felt nervous on waking. If only you could remember what the dreams were. It doesn't matter now.
Relieved and ready, you walk into the bathroom to shower and brush your teeth. The leg does ache a little, feels kind of stiff, but at least the itching is gone. You get your dirty pants off, wondering how you'll deal with the stain, but stop at the knee, shocked: the bandage sits in the middle of a sort of greenish black layer of scab, an imprint the size of your palm. When you touch, gingerly, it is just cold, soft, sort of numb.
You forgo the shower and call the local free clinic. Is this serious? It is hard to say, and you cannot afford to waste money if it isn't. They schedule you in for an appointment for a week from today. That's the earliest they can fit you in. Just apply some soothing cream and keep an eye on it.
With no itch, you almost start to forget about it, but a few hours later you get a whiff of a rotten smell. You check the garbage bin, but it is empty. The drain. The toilet. No matter where you go, it seems to follow, but why? You don't want to look, but you do: the green-black spot is growing, now twice as big, and it smells foul.
You no longer care what it costs to get this looked at TODAY, NOW, and rush to the emergency room. The taxi fare is killer, and eats all the cash you have on hand, but you're too freaked out to worry about it. You sign in, but the whole place is full of people in more dire straits than you. You're made to wait for a few hours. No one wants to sit next to you. That stink.
Finally, you are shown into a small area with a cloth curtain. Dressing gown tied around the back. A woman in a white coat with a clipboard waits.
"How long did you say this has been like this? Just a day?" the doctor rubs her head in puzzlement. "Well, it's necrotic; all this tissue is dead. I have never seen anything like this before. You say you suspect squirrels that live near you home? No, it's not plague as far as I know. We are going to have to quarantine you and start an IV drip. Start you on antibiotics."
The doctor is shocked when she comes back to check on you and you are dead. No one expected you to die so suddenly.
Suddenly to them... you spent the last two hours gurgling on a yellow froth that had worked its way up from your intestines.
You're wrapped in special plastic body bag that inflates like a balloon from the massive out-gassing of your rapidly decaying body. You've become an object of serious derision and stress at the hospital: no one knows how to dispose of your body.
Government officials are called in. FEMA types. Their scientists are infected and die the same way you had when they try to examine your body.
Black goo on a gelatin skeleton.