Virus by Ifedayo Akintomide Page B

times its normal size
and it leaked a pus like substance. Bright light lit the inside of
the house and he could hear noise coming from the television.
Victoria was still up.
    He fumbled with the lock for what
seemed like an eternity before he finally got the door open.
Victoria turned on her seated position on a plush leather couch.
She was a buxom beauty with hazel eyes and full pouty lips, which
broadened with a smile when she saw him.
    Her smile disappeared the instant
she noticed the sick look on his face and the ashen color of his
skin.
    “Darling what is wrong with you?”
She gasped leaping off the sofa and racing to his side. He pushed
past her without responding and staggered to their
bedroom.
    “OH MY GOD!!!” She wailed. That
puzzled him for a bit until he realized she had just spotted his
arm. He had the sleeve rolled up to the elbow, so his swollen arm
was now in full view.
    Glancing at it as he stumbled to the
room, he was shocked to discover that his arm was now a reddish
brown color and very knobbly looking, with tiny holes through which
a white pus like fluid seeped out.
    He began to heave as he approached
the bedroom door. He made it as far as the door of the bathroom
before throwing up violently. A thick darkness loomed around him as
soon as he was done. The last sound he heard was his wife’s
frightened cries before he passed out.
     
    Morning
     
    Tunrayo and Wole walked to school in
silence. Their greetings had been quiet and rather perfunctory.
From the shadows under her eyes, Wole could see she had not gotten
much sleep. It occurred to him that he probably did not look any
better.
    He spent most of the night tossing
and turning. He cried quite a bit too. Chike had been a stubborn
goat sometimes but he had had a good heart. He wondered how his
parent’s were coping with his loss.
    His eyes closed as he considered it.
They opened a couple of seconds later as he came to the decision
that he would not dwell on it. Getting through the days ahead would
be hard enough without fixating on something he could nothing
about.
    The tall wrought iron gates of the
school loomed ahead. The sight of them filled their hearts with
dread. Their eyes moved inexplicably to the teak tree on the left
side of the dusty road. The incidents of the day of Chike’s attack
flashed before their eyes in Technicolor and they both shivered as
they realized that Eze could have attacked anyone of
them.
    It could easily have been him or
Tunrayo lying dead now. Wole sighed and walked through the gate
with Tunrayo following slowly.
     
    Victoria was beside herself with
terror as she watched half a dozen doctors and nurses racing around
her husband’s bed. There were three needles stuck into the veins of
his arms feeding him medicines intravenously. He was breathing when
she dragged him into the hospital in the early hours of the
morning. Now he gasped for breath.
    That fact was horrifying in itself
but what was even more horrifying was the blue, black and reddish
color of his skin. In addition, several orifices had opened along
both sides of his abdomen, and they opened and closed like the
gills of a fish every couple of seconds. The most horrible part of
that was, each time they did, greenish pus seeped out.
    The doctors were thumping hard on
his chest. His heart had just stopped. Big hot tears poured out of
her eyes. He was gone. Deep within her, she knew no amount of chest
pumping would revive him. Her husband was DEAD!
    She retreated into the corner of the
room as the doctors battled to revive him. Sinking down into a
crumpled heap on the thinly carpeted floor, she continued to sob.
Her greatest wish now was that her own heart would stop beating.
With Makinde gone, she had no reason to continue living.
    A horrendous itching on her left
wrist caused her to pause. She examined her wrist closely. Her
first thought was that something on the carpet bit her. But she was
wrong. A crescent shaped set of marks marred the milky brown