Bradley trailed two fingertips down his lesion covered arm. Dead skin flaked away at his touch causing blood to well up. Gradually it filled the cracked white channels and streamed toward the ground in rivulets like bloody tears.

He let them splash against the floor in tiny red sunbursts. There was no pain, almost no feeling at all—and that was worrying. It mean that virtually all the nerves had been damaged badly. If he lived in a comic book world, his destiny would lay in experimenting on himself and becoming a hero or a villain. As it was he was probably going to lose the arm to his shoulder.

Tentatively, he thought about wiggling the fingers on his left hand. They responded to his command but as he watched, he noticed that that their reaction time was slow and they looked clumsy. He brought both hands, one swollen and scaly in appearance, the other normal, and compared them, moving one finger at a time. In its awkward and graceless motion, Bradley could almost see his left hand shutting down and dying.