COPER

by Harold Chester
1998 - All Rights Reserved
Rob was driving home from work when his left arm fell off.
He had just pulled out of the company driveway onto the main
road, and as he straightened out the steering wheel he felt a
sharp pain in his shoulder. With a wet sucking noise, his arm
separated from his shoulder and fell down onto the seat between
him and the door.
As he stared down stupidly at the arm on the seat beside him, its
edge as red as raw hamburger, a horn blared beside him. He
steered the car back into his lane.
Everything seemed to be far away, as if he were in a dream, and
he felt numb.
He looked over at his shoulder, but saw nothing but the empty
sleeve of his green short-sleeved shirt. Why wasn't he bleeding,
he wondered. He had to get to a hospital. But he was dizzy and
wasn't sure that he could drive too much longer.
A few minutes later, he made it to his house. Skidding into the
driveway, the rear end of the car slammed into the dark green 100
gallon rolling trash dumpster and knocked it over as the car
shuddered to a stop.
He opened the door and vomited onto the driveway, the vile taste
and smell of the yellowish bile making him even more nauseated.
Grabbing the dead piece of flesh that used to be his left arm, he
staggered to the front door and banged on the bottom of it with
his foot.
The door swung open and his wife stood there, her eyes wide.
"Sally?" he said, then the darkness enveloped him as he sank to
the ground.
* * *
Gradually he became aware of the noises, the brightness and the
faint antiseptic smell. The sheets that covered him were cool,
and smooth against the skin of his right arm and feet. He opened
his eyes and blinked a few times as the white-coated doctor
standing by his bedside came into focus.
"I'm Doctor Cotesia. You're at the Cooperdale Specialty Clinic.
We treat the employees of Truetech Consolidated Chemicals, where
you work," the doctor said.
"What's happened to me?" Rob said, then looked down at the empty
space under the sheet to his left where his arm should be. "What
happened to my arm?"
"There was too much tissue damage, I'm afraid. We couldn't
reattach it." Dr. Cortesia made a note on his clipboard. "We
really don't know what's wrong, yet -- we've never seen anything
like this. It could be some strange new disease, something
genetic, perhaps even some kind of chemical exposure."

Rob shook his head, still woozy. "Chemical exposure? I work in

Accounts Payable!"
"I'm sorry, Mr. Pearson. There's not a lot we can do right now. I
ran several tests while you were unconscious, and hope that those
will tell us something. In the meantime, your wife is coming to
take you home. Until we know more about your condition, I think
it's best that you stay at home and don't go out of the house."
Before they could leave, Sally had to help him put on his
clothes. During the ride home in their minivan, his wife was
strangely silent. She moved almost jerkily, and brushed her long
black hair away from her eyes several times. She grinned at him a
few times, but her eyes were dull.
She touched his left shoulder, near his neck, and squeezed, once.
"It's going to be okay, Rob -- really."
"It's going to be tough on the rest of them at the office. You
know that John's already out sick; I don't think that they can
handle the load with both of us gone."
"Always thinking of other people, aren't you? That's one of the
reasons I love you so much. Sally smiled. "I've made arrangements
with your boss, Maddy; she's going to let you telecommute. I've
already got the software installed."
"What if this is chemically related? Your job there is working
with all those chemicals!"
"I'm an entomologist, not a chemist. You know that. I may work
with some of the chemicals, but we all take the proper
precautions. Besides," she said, "it may not have anything to do
with chemicals."
They were home a few minutes later. The clinic wasn't very far
from the plant, he thought. Sally showed him how to log on
remotely, and he spent the next few hours working.
He got up and stretched, his arm straight up in the air, and felt
unsettlingly unbalanced. He stumbled a step, then opened one of
the double french doors of the study and went into the living
room.
Narration from the television caught his attention. "The
Ichneumonid wasp is a parisitioid." On the screen, a wasp landed
on a caterpillar. It stung the caterpillar viciously.
"What are you watching, sweetie?" he asked his wife, who was
sitting on the sofa.
Sally clicked the remote, turning off the television. "Nothing
much. You know me, anything about bugs and I have to watch it.
That's my job." She paused.
"Listen, Rob, sit down here beside me." He complied. "You
remember what we were talking about before, about having kids?
You said we should go ahead, and I said we should wait until we
were both better established."

"I remember," he said.

She ran her hand down the side of his face, down his neck, to the
top of his shirt. "I think it's time," she said, and she began
unbuttoning. When she had unbuttoned his shirt, she pulled it off
for him and threw it on the floor. She took his arm and led him
back to the bedroom.
The bedroom was bright, the light from the late afternoon sun
streaming through the blinds. Sally shut the blinds, then
squatted down beside him as he stood there by the bed. She pulled
his pants down to his ankles, waited while he stepped out of
them, then pushed him down on the bed.
"On your back, Dear," she said. "We're going to try something
different." She pulled her dress over her head, and he was
startled to see that she was naked underneath. Laying down beside
him, she began to kiss his neck and rub her nude body against
him, and he felt himself grow hard.
She straddled him, and slid down to engulf him. Her pelvis ground
into his, and she began to ride him hard, her large breasts
bouncing, her dark nipples hard. He was lost in the pleasure of
the moment, and forgot all about his arm.
Fifteen minutes of an eternity later, he heard her begin to
breath harder and moan louder. She pumped faster, then began to
grind their crotches together in short circles. Their bodies were
slick with sweat. He felt his own need building, getting closer.
She cried out, and he felt her shudder as she orgasmed. An
instant later he came to his own crescendo, and climaxed with
spurts of white hot fire. This was it, he was certain. He knew
that they had started their babies this time.
Sally fixed supper that night, chicken, rice and corn. Rob had
been so hungry that his stomach ached, and he tore into the food
with a vengeance.
In between bites, he asked Sally, "Have you talked to your cousin
lately? How's John doing?"
"Melanie said that he's doing better. Some kind of virus or
something. He's still weak. He should be okay by next week, the
doctor says."
Rob envied Sally for her close relation with Melanie. No one was
that close to him, except for Sally. He had never known his birth
parents, and his adoptive parents had been killed in an
automobile accident while he was in college. That was one thing
he had in common with John, he supposed. Neither one of them had
close relatives -- heck, any relatives that he knew of.
The rest of the evening was relatively normal; watching
television on the couch. When they went to bed he slept very
little, tossing and turning most of the night.
Rob spent the next week at home, working from his remote terminal
and eating prodigiously several times a day. He was constantly

hungry. At the end of the week he had gained twenty pounds.

"You know," Rob said, as he shoveled cereal into his mouth, the
morning sun shining through the dining room window, "I'm just
hungry all the time. I may have to go back to the doctor and ask
him about this. Has the doctor called you at work or anything
since I've been home?"
Sally smiled at him. Her green eyes seemed particularly shiny,
almost glittering. "No, sweetie. Don't you think I'd tell you if
I'd heard anything?"
Rob smiled back. He reached behind him to scratch his neck, and
his other arm snapped off, hitting the floor with a dull thud. It
jerked a couple of times, flopping like a fresh caught bass torn
from a lake, then was still. He screamed until his throat was
hoarse, while Sally helped him out to the van and drove him to
the clinic.
* * *
"Same as before," Dr. Cortesia said, as he examined Rob. "No
blood vessels severed, no visible atrophy. I don't know what to
tell you." The doctor paused, pursing his lips. "Your left side
has healed well," he said, "No trace of infection." Rob looked in
the mirror and saw the new pink skin on the stump on his left
shoulder.
"There has to be something you can do!" Rob said, his voice
rising.
"Well, ordinarily, we'd try to do something with prosthetics, but
there's been so much nerve damage that it's not feasible in your
case. On a positive note, I've given your wife some voice
recognition software, so you can still work from home."
Rob slumped. "Yeah, right, work from home. It doesn't matter that
I don't have any damn arms -- at least I can still work."
"Get a hold of yourself, man!" the doctor said, then coughed.
"Er, sorry. What I mean is, you have to take control of yourself.
This is a nasty business, all right, but we'll do everything we
can for you. The company is going to pay for a nurse to come and
stay with you during the day while your wife is at work."
Sally took him home. That night, she made love to him again,
mounting him and riding him hard, scratching his sides with her
long, red fingernails. He fell to sleep immediately afterwards,
emotionally and physically exhausted.
His days and nights after that were numbingly similar. He would
work on the computer every day, and watch television every night.
During the day, the company-hired nurse in the crisp white
uniform would help him dress, eat and perform his other bodily
functions. At night Sally would help him. Despite what had
happened, he was still ravenously hungry, and gained another
twenty pounds in the next week.
On the morning exactly two weeks after his left arm had taken
leave of his body, he rolled over in bed and his legs remained in

place. Rob looked down at his now limbless body and moaned, tears
streaming from his eyes. When his nurse arrived a few minutes
later, she and his wife picked him up and carried him out to the
van.
* * *
Dr. Cortesia was walking beside him as an orderly pushed the
gurney Rob was lying on down the hall. Sally was walking on the
other side, her face strangely void of emotion.
"I have good news for you, Mr. Pearson. You're going to finally
find out what's been happening to you."
They went through a pair of double swinging doors and entered a
ward lined with hospital beds on both sides, at least fifteen
beds along each wall. Nude patients with limbless torsos were
strapped to each bed. His friend, John, was in one of those beds!
They stopped beside the bed John was in. "Hi, John," Sally said,
brightly. "You'll have to tell Melanie I said hello when she
comes by."
"God, Rob, they got you, too," John said, his voice weak. "I'm so
sorry."
Something was strange about John's body, and not just the lack of
limbs. Rob looked more closely, and saw that something, or some
things, about the size of guinea pigs, were moving under John's
skin, like lumps being pushed along under a carpet. Rob tried to
talk, but only squeaks came out.
The orderly pushed the gurney to the first empty bed, and the
doctor and orderly picked Rob up and deposited him, naked, in the
middle of the bed.
"It's time, Rob," Sally said. She quickly and efficiently
stripped off her clothes, then stood in front of him and did a
short bump and grind in a grotesque parody of sexuality.
Crawling onto the bed, Sally straddled him so that her hips were
over his stomach. "Don't bother getting up, Dear," she said, and
laughed. He peered down, chin on chest, and watched in horror as
a tube the size of his fist in diameter extended from her groin.
It stabbed into his belly, and the pain almost made him pass out.
It would have been better if he had fainted, because a moment
later he felt each pulse as a dozen larvae were pumped into his
body.
When she had finished, Sally climbed off and stood between the
doctor and the orderly, an arm around each of them. Antenna
extended from all three of their heads. "That's my Rob; he can
cope with anything -- such a great little coper. You know, Rob,
you're going to be a great father."
----------------------------------------------------------------Harold Chester, his wife, kids and the ubiquitous dog
live in Central Oklahoma. Harold has lived in the
Phillipines, Japan, Korea and various places in the

United States. He's been a soldier and a sailor, and

currently works as an Information Technology Architect.
This story is his first sold. Write to him at
[email protected], or visit his newsgroup at
news://news.sff.net/sff.people.lthwc.