Bob didn’t know what he was staring at, did he?
Two people were screaming as if insanity had just tightened his grip on them and sent them over the edge. Whatever thing had just hit them, had hit them hard.
“It hurts!” Oscar screamed.
They were both in the garden in front of the villa, ready to leave. They had to wait for Miss Moretti to come back, but they had already packed. Once husband and wife were back, the two men gave them a few words to justify their departure and were ready to leave.
Bob had observed the scene from the house and he could tell that Claudia didn’t want to be left alone with her husband. When they told her that Bob was staying, she brightened up. At least her husband wouldn’t cross some hard lines with her.
Now, without any police, weaker people like Claudia were very worried about their future. Her talent was pitiful and even if her husband had become an alcoholic, she still had a lower level in both Martial and Magical Cultivation.
As soon as Oscar and Russel had tried leaving, they had fell like two plank boards. Right after, they had started screaming in pain, clawing at their pants and ripping them off.
What Bob saw made him want to puke his guts out.
The two men had many scabs on their legs and, in a crazed fury and need, they were scratching them until they found purchase on red and tender flesh. And even then, they couldn’t stop scratching away.
They screamed so hard that more than a couple of people had gathered around them, right outside the open gate of the villa. But no one wanted to approach the disgusting exhibition.
Oscar and Russel weren’t talking anymore, they just emitted screams and animalistic gurgles as if something had blocked their throats.
Bob heard another scream, this time from inside the house.
He went in and found Miss and Mr Moretti on the ground. The man was clearly a corpse already, rigid and stiff. The woman was clawing at her skin like the two men outside had been.
Bob, in response, started scratching at his knee, trying to contain the instinct to put his nails through the flesh.
He didn’t even stop to look at Claudia, but he bolted for the upper floor, to check on Lorenzo. Whatever was going on, they seemed to be all infected.
It was as if a plague had just started spreading through the city and they were the first cases, or were they?
Opening the door, Bob found Lorenzo lying on his book, with a greenish secretion coming out of his mouth.
“Oh my God!” Bob ran toward the kid and started screaming, “Lorenzo! Lorenzo! Wake up! Oh my God! Someone help! Someone!”
…
It turned out that they were not the only ones who had started suffering from this weird plague and that many more people had died. Those who didn’t die wished they were dead because they would start scratching their flesh away.
Some didn’t get sick, for some reason, probably naturally immune.
Bob was sitting in the emptied house. The servants of the Vermillion Tyrant had just doused most things around with fire, the only response they could come up with.
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Claudia, Oscar and Russel were still screaming to high heaven while Lorenzo and his father were dead.
Bob was clutching Lorenzo’s book. He had tears in his eyes, but it came to him to check the verses Lorenzo had been talking about. It would be their little memory together, something to remember the kid by.
Canto XXIX, from the 58th verse, he said.
Bob dried some tears and opened the big book on the poem itself.
Egina could no sadder sight afford,
As I believe (when all the people ailed
And all the air was so with sickness stored,
Down to the very worms creation failed
And died, whereon the pristine folk once more,
As by the poets is for certain held,
From seed of ants their family did restore),
Than what was offered by that valley black
With plague-struck spirits heaped upon the floor.
Bob had to tighten his lips, then bite them. Because reading this way really too much, even for him. How could it be… I mean, it was a wild…
He kept reading.
Supine some lay, each on the other's back
Or stomach; and some crawled with crouching gait
For change of place along the doleful track.
Speechless we moved with step deliberate,
With eyes and ears on those disease crushed down
Nor left them power to lift their bodies straight.
I saw two sit, shoulder to shoulder thrown
As plate holds plate up to be warmed, from head
Down to the feet with scurf and scab o'ergrown.
Bob, for the first time since a long time ago, let himself laugh. He stopped immediately, making sure that no one was near. But the infested house had been cleared up and curtailed. No one had any intention to come even close to one of the epicenters of the infection.
Man, I really can’t.
He was starting to tear up from reading. It was just so right, so on point. But he still continued.
Nor ever saw I curry-comb so plied
By varlet with his master standing by,
Or by one kept unwillingly from bed,
As I saw each of these his scratchers ply
Upon himself; for nought else now avails
Against the itch which plagues them furiously.
The scab they tore and loosened with their nails,
As with a knife men use the bream to strip,
Or any other fish with larger scales.
'Thou, that thy mail dost with thy fingers rip,'
My Guide to one of them began to say,
'And sometimes dost with them as pincers nip,
Tell, is there any here from Italy
Among you all, so may thy nails suffice
For this their work to all eternity.'
Bob started laughing raucously, breaking a mask he had always been so adept at donning. But this was too much, even for him. He fell forward, laughing madly, laughing and laughing.
There was only laughter in his world, only hilarity.
He would often think of the painful deaths of the people he killed before sleep, but he never let himself out in the open like he was doing right now.
There was a reason why they never managed to catch him. Even when they did, that one time, it had been luck on their part, not a slip of his.
But this?
The little kid he had just killed together with the rest of the people here loved the part of the plague in the Divine Comedy! Bob didn’t even know that there had been such a thing!
He had reincarnated in his old body, decades before he became the monster that would terrorize people without them even knowing.
“Oof, this is killing me, I swear,” he said while looking at the book and bursting out laughing again. “I swear, if they catch me right now, it will have been worth it! Damn kid, you did me good. I would have preferred something on the line of ‘liar, liar, pants on fire’. I mean, that was the signature of this little plague.”
Bob scratched his knee. The Gu plagues brewing inside his body made him itchy. Not physically, though. It was more of a mental thing. When you use your body as a receptacle of malady, diseases and poisons, you get a bit itchy, ok?
It’s like when you know your dogs has a tic and you start scratching yourself thinking that you caught it too. Pretty much the same type of problem.
Bob took the book under his arm and tried not to fall forward again because of the laughing. Then, he thought about it again and abandoned the book here. Never take risks, that was his motto
His work had just started. This time, he had a headstart on the rest of humanity, it seemed. And he would put the time to good use.
For the Plague Doctor was intentioned to finish his great work this time.
All living creatures would die this time.
And they would die a tainted death.