Something large and liquescent slithered through the walls of Hubert Wreckam's penthouse suite. Covered in cold sweat, Wreckam glanced nervously at the triple-thick panes. Had some member of the diseased masses that slid over the sidewalk below broken in? Wreckam wrapped a tissue around his fingers (germs were everywhere, even here) and hit the intercom button.
"Garamond, get in here," Wreckam snapped. "Now." Either his imagination had taken over, or his nostrils detected a sickly sweet decay-scent. He snorted. The contract security game gave no third chances, and damned few second ones. Only those grounded in reality reached the top, as Wreckam had. That meant that the stench was as real as his shortness of breath. "Stellheim, you too," he added. Garamond and Stellheim were the only two people he (sort of) trusted.
Wreckam waited, tapping his fingers on the glass tabletop. Waiting had always put a nervous tic in his left eyelid. But he waited now. Footsteps should already be coming down the hallway. Garamond and Stellheim should be getting their quick antiseptic showers and slipping into disposable gowns, like Wreckam demanded. Instead, he only heard what sounded like an over-ripe melon splatting on a drum-head from within the walls.
"Where the hell are you?" he barked into the intercom.
Nothing. Not a 'yes sir, Mr. Wreckam'. Not even a whiff of Stellheim's disgusting citrus-and-pepper aftershave. So much for loyalty – despite Wreckam paying Garamond and Stellheim an annual hundred and ten G each to be glorified babysitters. Wreckam's disgusted lip curled. Years ago, he had seen to everything himself. He still could.
His eyes fell on the bicycle track that he had, long ago, installed for Caitlin, his only daughter. You didn't taken care of that, did you? a mocking, whiney voice inside his head asked. Dark-haired Caitlin, green eyes all shiny on her ninth birthday, had insisted on getting one of those dangerous two-wheel things. Wreckam had looked at her thin-lipped features, the mirror of his own. It made him think of his own youthful misadventures; that made him decide that an indoor track would have protected her from virus-carrying mosquito bites and poisonous auto fumes and outside's awful lurking germs. That worked out well, the voice said, dripping with sarcasm.
"I hired Garamond and Stellheim to take care of things," Wreckam muttered. He hated the voice, always pointing out failings that he wanted to forget.
"Too late."
Wreckam grimaced. An iron will could master the annoying voice. "Go away!" he snarled. The whiney voice chuckled nervously. He felt it weaken, but it still remained. "Now!" Wreckam demanded. The nagging presence dissipated, leaving as the only mark of its passing an odd ache in his jaw.
A new sound caught Wreckam's attention. Something behind the solid oak door of his private office/retreat whimpered with a wounded-puppy sound. Wreckam frowned. Only he ever entered his private sanctum, where he kept the reminders of his pre-Wreckam Security youth.
Wreckam reached for the telephone, ready to call the guards. The machine produced no dial tone. The damned phone and intercom (made in China, you couldn't trust anything made in China) must have malfunctioned. What good were fancy electronics anyway? He had risen by hiring tough, by charging high and paying low – not by using all the data mining and computer mumbo jumbo that his younger competitors did. Wreckam put his head back and shouted for his assistants, a lion's roar of command. The walls' heavy oak paneling swallowed his voice as a snowfall absorbs footsteps. He snarled at his own stupidity for trying, at his assistants' laziness for not coming.
Wreckam wrapped the tissues about his entire hand (germs hadn't gotten him yet, a tribute to his caution). Standing to one side, he opened the door. "Who's there?" he called, pretending he did not hear the tremble in his voice.
More pained whimpering answered him. That sound pushed psychic buttons that he preferred remain unpushed. Obviously, someone intended to play elaborate head-games. Some business rival? But how could anyone know how that sound would effect him? His darkest secret had remained his alone for over two decades. He damn sure didn't believe in ghosts. But why did he let an obviously fake sound so wrap its cold claws about his guts?
"Who's there?" he repeated. Again, only a pained sobbing replied. Wreckam clicked on the windowless room's cold fluorescent lights. What he saw took away his remaining breath. What sprawled across the floor simply could not. But there it was: Caitlin, dead twenty-three years next Friday, lay on his Persian carpet, between the cabinet that held his old racing trophies and his Spanish leather sofa. Only this Caitlin lived. She looked like she had before she died ... except that the septic right leg that had killed her now ended just above the knee.
Had someone drugged him into a maze of hallucinations? Had he lost his mind? No, Hubert Wreckam's head was as reality-anchored as ever.
"Daddy," Caitlin moaned. "Daddy, help me." Caitlin's lips barely moved as she spoke.
Wreckam clenched his fingers into a tight fist. What should he do? Did he dare accept what he saw as real? That would be tantamount to admitting that there were things beyond his control. Wreckam couldn't… wouldn't… do that. But still…
"Daddy," Caitlin called.
Wreckam's gaze fell to the dark floor. He had never believed such crap. But he could never mistake anyone else's voice for Caitlin's. "It's a miracle," Wreckam whispered; the evidence all lead there. His eyes locked hers. "I'm here, punkin." Wreckam would worry about 'how' and 'why' later. He entered the room, leaving open the door behind him. "I'm here."
Caitlin turned her face away from him. That gesture was an icy spear through his guts. "Caitlin?" He did not even try to deny the pleading in his voice.
Caitlin turned back toward him. "It's coming for me, Daddy," she begged. "Don't let it get me." She looked up at him, her eyes wells of suffering. "Not again."
"Again?" Wreckam frowned. "What's coming?"
"It," Caitlin moaned.
Wreckam started. The sound inside the walls neared the vent across the room. Whatever it was, it crawled and clambered, a sickly serpent festering in its own looping coils. Whatever it was, it threatened Caitlin.
Wreckam's eyes scoured the room. Once, he had owned the best hunting rifles made. But rifles can go off when you don’t want them to, so he had given them all away to business partners, bureaucrats who could help with government contracts, to Arab sheiks looking for another head the decorate the walls of their lice-infested palaces. A lack of conventional weapons didn't render Hubert Wreckam helpless. Hadn't he proven that years ago, knocking heads in Thailand and Burma? Before, that is, the dripping touch of a begging Bangkok leper's hand had finally shown him what a pestilent stink-hole the world really is and he had retreated to his private bubble.
He strode across the room to the glass case that held the trophies from his long-gone racing days. Hands still wrapped in tissue, he opened the case. He lifted the walnut based brass trophy he had received after setting the Hampton Speedway track record. He hefted the trophy – solid, like the cars had been back then. The trophy could bash in the head of whoever tried to mess with Hubert Wreckam.
"Daddy will protect you," Wreckam cooed to Caitlin. He turned toward the grate, trophy drawn back as a club. He waited, each breath coming with a brush-on-a-snare drum roughness.
"Why did you fail me, Daddy?"
Caitlin's words stabbed him with a gimlet pain. A sour taste filled his mouth. Wreckam lowered the trophy, reeling. He hadn't meant to do it. It just … happened.
The rattling inside the wall inched nearer the grate, oozing with a semisolid sliding.
"I couldn't help it," Wreckam whispered. Speaking the words pierced him with a knife-edge pain, but he spoke them anyway. He drew the trophy back to 'ready' position. "It will never happen again."
"Promise?"
"No matter what." He meant those words – this was the time to make up for his past failure
The sound, inches short of the grate, echoed in his ears. What makes you think bronze and wood will work? the nagging voice whispered. Who knows what kind of nightmare might come to end your miracle?
"A kind I will stop," Wreckam snarled. Steely resolve filled Wreckam's being. He grimaced and held high the heavy trophy.
The grate fell away, clattering to the floor with a metal-on-hard-wood rattle. What had been inside the wall dripped out in all its great gangrenous repulsiveness. It flopped across the floor, a beached eel of two rigid sections joined in the middle. Its progress marred the floor with a black-fleshed, suppurating snail-trail as it struggled forward.
Wreckam gasped. The decay-reek rising from the writhing horror filled his nostrils. His stomach churned. The last twenty-three years peeled away.
A younger Hubert Wreckam stood over Caitlin, tossing in her uneasy sleep. Her missing leg was attached, like it had been twenty-three years ago. Only it oozed putrescence even worse than he remembered.
Why had he ever bought her that damn bicycle? The one she had fallen from and twisted her leg? At first, his distrust of docs (reeking of patients' germs) had kept him from calling for help. But then her leg had turned from pink and strong to black and putrid, and Wreckam had finally convinced himself that she needed help.
A dozen times, he had resolved to call for an ambulance. But Caitlin lay between him and the telephone. With each attempt, he had frozen three steps toward the phone, unable to pass the black and bloated member that was her leg. Locked in chains of disgust, he had done nothing except listen to Caitlin's rough and ragged breathing. He had listened to it gurgle and wheeze until, lungs choked by the corruption that spread from her gangrenous leg, that breathing stopped.
"Daddy!" Caitlin wailed. The voice brought him back to the present, a present in which Caitlin's black and poisonous leg writhed and squirmed across the floor. "It's coming for me again! Please stop it!" Her face turned toward him, eyes filled with fear. "You said it would never happen again, no matter what!" As best her feeble limbs allowed, she retreated from the advancing leg. "You promised!"
Wreckam's eyes locked on the crawling leg – festering with germs that even the damned doctors probably hadn't discovered yet. But this was Caitlin! He advanced a step, trophy at ready. Then, as though eyes formed of its decaying flesh spotted him, the leg turned and slithered toward Wreckam.
His hands fell to waist height. His former steadfastness turned to water. "I can't," he whispered. "Can't."
"Daddy!" Caitlin screamed. Terror filled her cry.
"Can't," he whispered, shaking his head. The trophy fell. It crashed against the floor, echoing with a funeral-gong's crash.

Caitlin turned away from Wreckam. "Give him another minute," she shouted, as though speaking to someone unseen. "Please!"
The fear she had exhibited vanished. A look of resignation replaced it. Then both Caitlin and the monstrous leg disappeared. A strange woman stood before Wreckam, infinite sorrow on her face.
"I'm sorry, Daddy," she said. It was Caitlin, or the woman that Caitlin would have grown into – Wreckam could never mistake that voice. "I begged until I got you a second chance," she said, gesturing toward an empty corner. She shook her head in sorrow. "They'll give no third."
"They? Who?"
Caitlin gestured toward the empty corner. Wreckam staggered. He felt as though seven tons of lost opportunities, as though everything he had ever meant to accomplish but never did, weighed on his chest. The weight became an explosion of red pain, bursting through his torso with clawed ferocity. Wreckam fell, grasping his chest. As he tumbled, he glanced toward where Caitlin had pointed. Two nude figures occupied the space, although he could tell the gender of neither. How could he, when one was only bones, and the other was a man-shaped mound of black and dripping corruption?
"Them," Caitlin said, her voice filled with sadness. Then she was gone, as though she had never been.
Garamond and Stellheim appeared in the doorway. As if they had come when you first called. It was the nagging voice again. As if something kept you from hearing.
In a flash, Garamond was at Wreckam's side. "Quick," he ordered Stellheim, his dark and deep-set eyes flashing. "Call an ambulance," he said, voice filled with steel resolve.
"What's wrong with him?" Stellheim's nervous hands rubbed together, rattling the paper of his disposable gown.
"Hurry! The boss is having a heart attack!" Garamond responded.
Stellheim dashed to the phone. He picked it up and, as though he had heard the dial tone denied to Wreckam, started to dial.
Wreckam, unable to speak, gestured wildly. Could his assistants see the monstrosities in the corner? They acted as though they did not.
"Hurry!" Garamond shouted. "He's not breathing!"
Wreckam tried to scream denial – denial of having failed Caitlin, of having failed Caitlin again – and most of all, of Garamond's lie about him not breathing. Only a choking hiss emerged.
"It's your time," the dark and bloated monstrosity in the corner gurgled. Both figures came toward him.
You got a second chance, the nagging voice said. You failed Caitlin again.
Wreckam tried to scream denial. The pain in his chest was too great.
Then the skeletal figure's bony hand covered Wreckam's chest. The black and bloated figure placed its dripping fingers over Wreckam's eyes, blotting out the light.
No third chances, said the nagging presence.
Somehow, Wreckam found his voice. "Germs never got me," he wheezed. He inwardly cringed. Could he think of nothing more important to say?
Before he could answer his own question, a black tide swelled up and swallowed him. Garamond and Stellheim were gone; so was his sanctum. He floated in infinite void. Suddenly, the pain ended. "Caitlin?" he called into the darkness, amazed at how his speech had returned.
"You failed her," a voice that sounded suspiciously like the mocking voice in his head whined from the abyss. "Twice, but never again."
Wreckam tried to, as he had always done, will the voice away.
"I don't think so," the voice replied. "And neither does your new long-term companion. Very long term."
"Companion?" Wreckam blurted. "What companion?"
"Your due for deserting your daughter."
Something slid toward Wreckam. He could neither see nor hear it, but he could somehow sense it. It touched him, a pulsating pestilential wave. Wreckam screamed and tried to push it away… it and the uncounted billions of filthy germs that he somehow knew slid over its putrescent surface.
The voice in the darkness chuckled. Then something putrid and slimy slid up over Wreckam, encompassing his entire being.

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