Jacob Taylor
It wasn’t until the CDC identified Bacillus Aureusculum and declared it an epidemic that Ryker stopped drinking the tap water.
Three weeks before the CDC Release his husband, Uriel, had asked him to drink only from the pallet of bottled water (it had cost $581.84, plus tax) that Amazon wheeled into their garage. Uriel’s fifth graders were leaving school by the dozen—all vomiting yellow sludge, dehydrated—and the parents said drinking the tap water made it worse. And so Uriel bought enough water to last the two of them months.
Ryker didn’t trust the parents, and he couldn’t stand the thought of all that expensive plastic sitting in his garage.
“But your immune system!” Uriel said. He was right, of course: Ryker’s immune system.
“I was fine when I got corona,” Ryker said. Uriel’s eyebrows scrunched up, but Ryker didn’t want to talk about it; he never wanted to talk about the fact that he needed to get sacks of thousand-dollar chemicals fed into his veins every month to keep his body from tearing itself apart. “Have they tested the water?”
Uriel nodded.
“So I’ll be fine, then.”
***
Uriel called his parents and his sisters and his friends from university. Ryker didn’t know who to call and no one called him so instead he immersed himself in Google, with skepticism.
***
Journalists declared an emergency hours after the CDC release: “B. Aureusculum Found in Local Drinking Water,” “B. Aureusculum Kills 193 Utahns in 11 Days,” “Chlorine and Reverse Osmosis Ineffective at Removing B. Aureusculum.”
Ryker minimized the ad-ridden news articles and tried to focus on his spreadsheets, the agendas he needed to organize before Zooming into his meeting. He reached for his glass of water, instinctively, but he stopped. Ryker took his glass to the sink and poured it out, watched the clear liquid splash against soggy cheerios that hadn’t made it down the drain that morning.
The bottled water tasted like Ryker remembered it: bitter, synthetic. He fiddled with the transparent blue Aquafina label while he scrolled through an email from Heather, his boss. Her daughter had “a stomach bug.”
There would be no meeting today.
***
Ryker found vomit on the sidewalk when he left to get the mail from the silver vault three houses down. Its bright yellow seemed alien, but it was exactly as Uriel had described: “like stringy, gooey scrambled eggs.”
When he tried spraying the vomit into the grass with the garden hose, he found that the sludge had grown into the cracked concrete, clawed at the earth accumulating between the jagged wedges and the promise of more beneath. Ryker placed his thumb over the hose’s mouth, flaying the stream open, sharp and flat. The water pried the vomit free and flung its broken parts into the lawn.
Ryker couldn’t stop thinking about that sludge, rooted in his sidewalk like a weed. Vomit didn’t do that.
Even after he had dried his hands and wiped them clean with an alcohol prep pad, he felt the water cling to his skin—phantom moisture haunting his fingers. He couldn’t stop imagining yellow goop growing inside of him, rooting in his stomach tissue, fanning across his lungs.
When Uriel got home, they turned their water off at the source, rusted steel bar sliding into the keyhole buried in the earth, and they ordered body cleansing wipes from Amazon in bulk: rushed delivery.
***
Fox and The New York Times and The Washington Post and CNN and NBC and KSL and The Salt Lake Tribune wrote and wrote and wrote. Their journalists cited other news articles in the massive game of telephone journalism became, and Ryker didn’t know what to trust.
“24 Protestors Picket Governor Johnson’s Mansion after Stay-at-Home Advisory.” “B. Aureusculum Infects a Fifth of Utah’s Population.” “Boiling Water is Found Less Effective than Chlorine Treatment at Removing B. Aureusculum.” “B. Aureusculum Spreads to East Asia and Australia.” “B. Aureusculum Lethal for a Third of Infected.” “B. Aureusculum Might Now be Airborne, Doctors Suggest.”
Ryker pulled packages of disposable masks from their junk drawer from six years ago and set a box next to the keys, put bags of them back in their cars and on the table next to their coat rack—just in case. Ryker found the set of dinosaur and animal patterned masks Uriel had bought to teach with during the coronavirus pandemic. The faded pastels looked so familiar. He had spent years washing these masks, but even after the pandemic had ended, Ryker still felt like he was living in it.
When coronavirus hit, the people Ryker thought were friends turned out not to be. His mother, the only family he had left, had died the second year of the pandemic from covid-related pneumonia. She, like Ryker, had cells that confused her organs for parasites and sent antibodies to tear her body’s own tissue apart.
Now, Ryker lived through Uriel. Uriel’s friends became Ryker’s friends, and Uriel’s family became Ryker’s family.
***
Uriel’s elementary school called him one day to tell him that he had mail, and he came home with a box full of Amazon mailers and multicolored envelopes. Ryker sat on the couch next to him as he opened each one.
Uriel’s students had sent him hand-written letters with drawings of cartoon characters and self-portraits and wild depictions of Uriel throwing Expo markers into the trash can. They had sent him hand sanitizer and Frooties and middle grade novels from Amazon with printed messages slipped in the mailers. His students asked him to read to them on Zoom, and they warned him about the water, how “Aure” was coming for the bottled water next, how none of it was safe.
Some of his students wrote to Uriel from their beds, sick with the bacteria. Some of his students wrote from quarantined homes.
Uriel worried about the ones who didn’t write.
Ryker held Uriel as he opened his bag of Frooties and unwrapped each neon piece of candy with care, handing all the purple ones to Ryker because he knew Ryker liked those best.
“Do you think they’re right about the water?” Ryker asked.
“They were right about the taps.”
***
The vomit Ryker had sprayed into the grass resurfaced and clumped back together into a webbed mass of slimy egg-yolk tendrils that crawled around the yard. He could see its tendrils reach forward ever so slightly, by the millimeter, and grip the ground in front of it to pull itself forward. When Ryker went out, sometimes just to get a breath of outside air, he found the vomit somewhere new: nestled with the daffodils, climbing up tree bark, weaved between the blades of seeding grass.
Once, when Ryker caught the vomit on the walkway, inching from the lawn to the flowerbed, he dumped a bottle of undiluted weed killer on it. He didn’t care that the excess ran down the concrete and pooled in his lawn. He just wanted the vomit to soak the poison up.
The next day, Ryker found the vomit spread across the front of his Siberian Cypress like a spider web, as if drying out in the sun.
***
The city started rationing distilled water when a microbiologist discovered that Bacillus Aureusculum had invaded even the bottled water, just like Uriel’s students had warned. The tiny spores the bacteria formed could fit through the finest of filters and withstand the UV radiation, the heat, the chemical treatment—everything. Evaporating and collecting the pure water vapor was the only way to be sure the bacteria didn’t follow the water into the bottle.
“Our numbers are on the list,” Uriel said.
Ryker rubbed his thumb across the thin pixelated numbers on his Aquafina bottle’s rippled top, just below the expiration date: 0615RQ080121. A single digit could have saved their lives, but this specific number meant that their water had been bottled after Bacillus Aureusculum had begun squeezing past Aquafina’s Reverse Osmosis filters at whichever of the company’s forty plants their pallet of water originated.
“Is this a death sentence?” Ryker asked, twisting the bottle in his hand, trying to see the microscopic spores that now lived in his stomach.
Uriel took the plastic from his hands and set it next to the computer, where the list of lot numbers glared back at them like Ryker’s monthly lab reports. That night, Uriel held Ryker, and they cried. The water meant to kill them left their bodies and evaporated, leaving behind crystals of salt.
***
While Ryker sent emails and paychecks, he listened to Uriel read to his students over Zoom. He started one of the three books his students had sent him from Amazon. Uriel leaned into the sentences and gave voices to the characters. He breezed through chapters, and Ryker forgot that he was supposed to be working while he listened to his husband’s voice.
Ryker smirked at the way one of his students said “Mr. Velasquez” as they said goodbye, how they insisted on saying Uriel’s full name instead of just “Mr. V.”
It was then that Ryker wished they had talked about having kids more seriously.
***
The vomit came for Uriel first.
After they had rationed their city-issued distilled water. After they had sent all their clothes to a local laundromat and they came back fully bleached—but safe, supposedly. After they had replaced showers with damp towelettes that left the body feeling somewhat sticky—clean but still dirty. After Ryker stopped drinking the distilled water because he just didn’t “feel thirsty” and Uriel worried B. Aureusculum had dehydrated Ryker.
After every worry and precaution, Uriel still spewed out yellow, mucousy sludge that splattered across the kitchen sink and spilled over the counter’s edge, hanging over the floor like vines from a tree.
Ryker tried to hold Uriel, but Uriel pushed him back. “I won’t get you sick,” he said, vomit dripping from his lips. So Ryker brought him wipes instead and watched as Bacillus Aureusculum took root in their drain.
***
A botanist studying the vomit reported that the body acted much more like a fungus than a bacterial formation. The microbiologists dismissed the botanist completely, though, because the cells that made up the vomit did not have a true nucleus; the microbiologists thought Bacillus Aureusculum acted more like a virus because it had shrunk its cell structure so much that it required the presence of other cells in order to reproduce: it became dependent, parasitic, in its resistance to chemicals and radiation and heat and hyperfiltration.
Ryker didn’t care what Bacillus Aureusculum was; he just wanted it out of his husband and out of his home, but he still sifted through articles and reports on the disease because that night Uriel slept in their bed, crying silently in pain, and Ryker restlessly watched the vomit crawl across the kitchen counter, millimeter by millimeter. It snatched a pile of Frooties left on the counter and sucked them into its body. It passed the box of disposable masks and the car keys and the pile of letters from Uriel’s students that named it “Aure,” as if to smell them for nutrients.
“What are you after?” Ryker asked it, tracing each movement with his eyes as hours passed. “I never had much to start with, just Uriel.”
When Aure crawled back into the sink, Ryker finally fell onto the old twin mattress in their guest bedroom and cried, with only the words of strangers to comfort him.
***
The doctors didn’t know what to think about Aure, called it “bacterial activity” along with the fatigue and dehydration and jaundice and everything else they couldn’t explain quite yet. When Ryker finally got a nurse on the line at the virtual instacare, he asked her for antibiotics, and she shook her head. “They don’t work. None of them.”
“Should I take him to the hospital?”
“Is he breathing and conscious?”
Ryker nodded, and she told him no.
“What do I do about the vomit?” Ryker asked.
“Don’t touch it.”
***
When Ryker called Uriel’s family, he learned that his mother was the only one without the bacteria. Uriel’s father lived at the hospital waiting for a new liver while his younger sisters lay in bed, sipping distilled water from bottles their mother picked up from no-contact distribution stations.
“I can feel the puke building in my stomach,” she said. “There won’t be anyone to take care of us when it comes out.”
“Do you hold your daughters?” Ryker asked.
“I wouldn’t let death stop me.”
***
“I miss you, Uriel,” Ryker said into the darkness, setting a bottle of distilled water on the nightstand.
“I won’t get you sick, Ryker.” Uriel lay beneath blankets, his voice the only indication of life.
“I’m already sick. I always have been sick.”
Uriel cried.
Ryker pulled up the covers and slid onto the bed next to Uriel and held him like Uriel and held Ryker so many times before. “I just need to be with you now,” Ryker said.
***
When Aure came for Ryker, it didn’t come from inside of him.
As he lay with Uriel, his veins three days overdue for a jab and the sting of foreign chemicals, Aure crept under the door and up the side of the bed. It nestled between the two lovers and rested as they slept. Then, as dawn peeked through the blinds, Aure climbed from Ryker’s arm to his chin. Its tendrils spread his lips apart, and the creature dove down Ryker’s throat to feed on the moisture within.
***
One microbiologist touched the vomit after it spilled out of her husband’s mouth. Her husband passed within hours, and she could feel nothing. She prodded the strands of clumped bacteria with her gloved fingers and watched the cells communicate with each other to crawl up the latex, reach for her skin.
The microbiologist dug an old fish tank from her shed and scooped the thing into the glass, its cells too slow, too young, to react with any real resistance. She gave it water from the tap and overgrown zucchini and put plywood and her husband’s rubber weights on top to keep it from getting out.
The next morning, the vomit had grown, and the zucchini was gone—one night, eight hours. Only the hard-shelled seeds remained, and even those the vomit gripped like a toddler sucking candy. The fish tank looked like pumpkin flesh.
She clipped a section of the pumpkin flesh and watched spores shed their linings and invade the zucchini seeds, devour them, transform them. Parasites.
The microbiologist posted pictures and observations on Facebook and Twitter and everywhere she could, and Ryker, when he woke next to Uriel, devoured the microbiologist’s words like zucchini seeds.
***
When B. Aureusculum really did take root in Ryker’s stomach and fan across his lungs, he didn’t notice. He didn’t feel the way the bacteria slowly changed each organ in his body from flesh to bacterial mass. In many ways, he felt better than he had before: stronger muscles, clearer mind.
Ryker assumed that the vomit had finally crawled down the kitchen sink drain, leaving them in peace.
The receptionist at Ryker’s clinic would have called to reschedule his missed appointment, but she had passed weeks prior. Ryker would have noticed his body start aching, his muscles start failing—he would have driven to the clinic and paid out of pocket to get those burning chemicals back inside of his body—but somehow, Aure made him feel strong while everyone else slept or died.
***
Uriel grew sicker, and Ryker couldn’t do anything except take him to the hospital once Uriel got “bad enough.” So, on Ryker’s way to pick up their ration of distilled water, he decided to stop at Uriel’s elementary school. He thought it might help Uriel cheer up if his students sent him any more mail.
In the parking lot, Ryker found dozens of yellow mounds of bacteria crawling towards the school’s dew-covered lawn. These were bigger than Aure. Faster. He could see their progress in feet instead of millimeters.
Ryker parked his car and stared at the creatures. As two of them touched, they seemed to fold into each other as they moved.
Ryker jumped when a kid knocked on the passenger side window. He rolled down the window.
“Where’s Mr. Velasquez?” the kid asked, rolling back and forth on his scooter.
Ryker looked at the school and then back at the kid. He didn’t recognize the kid, but he had dropped off food for Uriel’s class parties before. “He’s sick.”
“Oh.” The kid looked down. “Are you sick too?”
Ryker shook his head. “I don’t think so.” Ryker leaned against his door staring at the creatures. It took Ryker a moment to realize that they had changed direction. Instead of moving towards the lawn, they crawled towards Ryker. They crawled towards the kid. “They’re coming,” Ryker said. “Can you get home from here?”
“It’s OK,” the kid said. “They don’t get me sick.” He reached down and held up one of the creatures, which wrapped its yellow tendrils around his arm.
“Put it down!” Ryker said. He grabbed a face mask, left his car and tried scraping the creature off the kid’s arm. “These things kill people.” The creature wrapped around the disposable mask and latched onto Ryker’s hand, leaving the kid.
“They kill other people,” the kid said and started crying.
Ryker pried at the creature and flung it on the grass, wiped the creature’s sticky residue off on his jeans. “Hey, hey,” Ryker said, crouching down to the kid. “How long have you been out here?”
The kid buried his face in Ryker’s shoulder and cried, and Ryker cried with him.
***
Ryker brought the kid—Jordan—to visit Uriel, and Jordan held Uriel’s hand at his bedside with a grip like iron. The two of them watched over Uriel as he slipped in and out of sleep, barely conscious, the whites of his eyes yellow with jaundice.
When Uriel’s speech slurred, Ryker knew it was time. Jordan insisted that he come to the hospital too, and Ryker didn’t object.
Ryker picked up Uriel’s body, surprised by how light it had become just a week after throwing up. He strapped Uriel into the passenger’s seat and drove to the hospital, where a nurse dressed in plastic from head-to-toe—after hearing of Uriel’s unconsciousness, his slurred speech, his jaundice—wheeled Uriel through double doors, past dozens of seated patients waiting for the doctor.
The receptionist told them to go home after Ryker signed the paperwork. “We’re too full,” she said. “We can’t take visitors.”
And so, Ryker said goodbye to Uriel without actually saying goodbye. Jordan held Ryker’s hand as they walked out to the car, and Bacillus Aureusculum lived within their guts, feeding off their disease while they grieved.