Making a decision, I gave a short nod. “Okay. I’ll trust you, as I don’t have a better idea of what is going on or what to do. But what do I need to do? How do I stop him? Just go in and kill him?”

The spokesman shook its head. “No. You would lose that fight as you are now. Your own body and mind would rebel against you in the Rot’s presence. First you must be cured, and time grows short. Come closer and kneel.”

****

I felt my mind breaking as Oscar loomed over me. I couldn’t make myself get up again or fight back, and even trying to close my eyes failed. It had control of me now, and it wanted me to see everything.

I stared in horror as Oscar shucked off his clothes to reveal his pale, flabby torso and quivering thighs, all glistening with a thickening translucent liquid that was beginning to look less like sweat and more like whatever ichor was binding together the rotten walls around us. As if in confirmation of this thought, his skin began to blossom in a dozen places with dark sores that quickly puffed up before rupturing and sending black pus oozing down his body, the trails it left sowing new rows of these same sores. I tried to scream as some of the pus fell onto me, burned into me, but I had no voice. Only my eyes and my mind and my ability to feel.

He was a garden of weeping, festering wounds now, but his transformation wasn’t over. As he leaned closer to me, a dark line appeared down the middle of his face, his torso, and traveled on to his groin. Then that line deepened and split as his body spread wide over me like a burst pea pod, revealing not blood and organs, but mounds of turgid grey flesh infested with thousands of green-grey worms. These worms milled and ate and writhed restlessly for a moment before stopping—as though they sensed the new meat below.

That’s when they began to fall on me, first in ones or twos, then in dozens. Hundreds. I couldn’t move, and dear God, I couldn’t stop them.

I couldn’t stop them from burrowing beneath my skin.

****

The small creatures circled around me, taking off their gloves to reveal tiny pink hands of the same mottled flesh as what I had already seen. The spokesman explained that the way they cured someone of the Rot’s influence was by taking it on themselves. It was dangerous, and some of them always died in the process, but their kind had the ability to resist the Rot until its influence faded away. As I kneeled and placed my hands on the asphalt of the road, they immediately bent forward and put their small, cool hands on mine.