Dominant Species Volume Two -- Edge Effects (Dominant Species Series) by David Coy

local anesthetic.
It took her awhile, but she found a bottle of Novoloid in a box of miscellany
from the infirmary and prepared a syringe with it. She also found a pair of forceps
and some glue. That was good; she hated doing sutures and glue was so much
better. She gathered everything up on a stainless tray and carried it over,
keeping it out of Mike’s sight as much as possible.
    “This might sting a little.”
    She swabbed the area with a sterile pad then slipped the needle
under his skin just at the base of the knot. She injected about a third of the
anesthetic then picked two more spots around it and put in the rest.
    She waited a minute then touched the area with her fingers. “Can
you feel that?”
    “Not very.”
    “Okay. You won’t feel a thing. You might hear a little scratching
noise but don’t let that scare you.”
    “Okay.”
    Although he was trying to hide it, Donna saw the fear in his face quite
clearly. There are some emotions a child just can’t camouflage with a stiff
lip, especially fear.
    “It’s okay, Mike,” she said gently. “Just relax.”
    Using the scalpel, she started at the base of the knot and worked
around it in a neat semicircle. The skin parted cleanly and a little stream of
blood ran down his neck from the incision. She blotted the area once with
gauze, then using the tip of the scalpel, lifted the flap of skin covering the
object. The skin came away easily revealing a spherical, yellowish and bloody
grub. She scowled and grasped it gently with the forceps. She lifted it out and
knitted her brow at it briefly. When she dropped it in the steel tray, it made
a rubbery plonk sound that only her guts
could hear.
    She flushed the pocket with antiseptic solution, swabbed the area
once more to dry it, then using the thin applicator ran lines of glue over the
incision to seal it. The glue dried and bonded instantly, then she pressed the
area with another swab and held it there to halt a remaining trickle of blood.
    “All done.”
    “That’s it?”
    “That’s it.”
    “What was in there?” he asked, trying to reach her with his eyes.
    She wanted the word to spread as fast as possible. Anyone with one
of those things in them would run full steam to the clinic when they found out
what it was. That’s what she wanted. She wasn’t going to pull any punches.
    “An insect larva—a grub. It would have eaten its way out of your
neck once it developed the mouth parts to chew with.”
    “Really?”
    “Really. And it would have hurt, believe me.”
    “Wow.”
    She removed the dry swab and covered the area with an adhesive
bandage.
    Before he left, she gave him an injection of Trilicine and a half
dozen tablets of the same to fight infection. When she looked for the Xercodan
in the kit she found the bottle gone. It didn’t take her long after that to
figure out why the kits in the containers were wet; someone had stolen it. She
gave him a tin of aspirin instead.
    She told him to get everybody he knew who had those knots on them
over to the clinic as soon as possible. When he left, she issued a Med-alert
from the data center and posted it on the company bulletin board in each
shelter describing the symptoms of the infection and the process for removing
the parasites. She hoped they’d all see it. The company bulletin board wasn’t
the most popular appliance in a shelter.
    She was in business before she’d even unpacked. They came running.
The extractions went smoothly. By the end of the day she had an alcohol-filled
jar of about twelve of the little bastards drifting in it and several
appointments the next day to remove at least four more. She hadn’t done
complete physical examinations and serum workups on the patients who came in,
and she saw a couple of cases of yeast-like epidermal infections and one Rigger
had a wet cough that sounded ugly. Another had a discharge from his nose the
color of grass. She’d scheduled follow-ups to see those individuals the next
day; this wasn’t