“I created it using cells from your Healer’s Garbs,” Kian explained nonchalantly. “It’s the ultimate specimen. The best efforts of the Tainted Generation can’t destroy it. Not even me. I’m quite proud of it.”
Zeke checked the others and was relieved they seemed just as puzzled, staring back at the Infectologist.
“I’m sorry,” Ugo started, rising from the couch. “Are you admitting to creating the disease?” he asked.
Kian turned to Ugo and gave him a look. “I thought I made that clear.”
“But… why?” Zeke asked.
After clearing his throat, Kian stuffed his hands in his pockets and asked Zeke, “Is there any answer I can give you that’ll make you okay with the idea of me contaminating innocent people with an abnormal infection?”
Zeke’s silence answered for him.
“That’s what I thought, so what is the point of asking me?”
Gill took a step toward Kian, and it was enough for him to engage.
The Infectologist pulled his hand out of his pocket, which was locked in a complicated sign. As he swung it to the side, a torrent of black sludge shot out and turned a corner, exiting the room.
Multiple pain-stricken screams reverberated from afar, followed by violent coughing and hacking. Gill’s main chef, Sylvie, came running into the living room in a panic. “Gill!”
Gill glowered at Kian and stormed off, moving briskly with his huge body. He and Sylvie were out of the room in seconds.
Before anybody had time to finish processing the attack, Kian pulled his mask down, unveiling a diseased mouth — a collection of pale red sores ringed around his dry, cracking lips and white patches on his sunken cheeks. He broke into a smile that not even a mother could love, showing off black gums and cavity-ridden brown teeth.
Aida started moving and was assaulted by a swarm of flies rocketing out of Kian’s mouth. The flies spread throughout the room, attacking the rest. Zeke ducked under the swarm and detected a muscle mass forming on Kian’s back. It was a tumor, and it was growing quickly.
It gained a human-like shape, plucked a piece of chalk from Kian’s pocket, and expanded backward, reaching a door behind Kian and closing it. The tumor began drawing a sigil.
“He’s trying to escape!” Akachi shouted and dashed through the storm of flies, stretching his hand forward, a careless move that he would soon regret.
Without any hassle, Kian stepped out of the way while sticking his foot out, and Akachi easily fell for it. He tumbled and rolled across the floor as Kian’s tumor opened the door, revealing a barren, dark landscape. The tumor slammed the door shut and vanished as soon as Akachi entered.
Kian was far from done. He opened his mouth again, filling the room with more flies, and added to the mix of infestation were a grumble of maggots cascading from the corners of his eyes and a plague of rats spilling from his sleeves.
Zeke and Violet hopped onto the top of the table, swatting the never-ending parade of buzzing flies, making it increasingly difficult for Zeke’s already cluttered mind to think clearly.
Through the hurricane of insects, he squinted and saw Wade lose his balance in the mayhem. He was instantly overtaken by a wave of rats and disappeared into a sea of rodents and maggots.
Zeke couldn’t see a single spot on the floor that was not covered by a pack of scuttling rats and coats of writhing maggots. They were climbing over one another as more were produced as if Kian was some kind of cloning machine.
The commotion swelled as the maggots were eating into the rats, squeezing tiny squirts of blood out of them and making them hiss, squeak, and move more hectically.
With the sea level of rats rising, Ashlin prepared to make a hand sign.
“Don’t hurt them!” Aida screamed at Ashlin and tackled her.
They both fell onto the ocean of rodents, grunting and wrestling as they slowly drowned.
“Ahh! They’re in my ear!” Ugo screamed as he was panicking on top of a couch.
“Mora!” Zeke shouted back.
Violet touched his shoulder and said, “I got him. You go after the asshole.”
Zeke squinted forward and saw Kian running up to the door behind and cleaning the sigil off it.
“Vesklepios!” Zeke called for his Garb and then shot out a blue thread from his sleeve that wrapped around the wagon-wheel chandelier. He swung blindly through the flock of insects and hit the door header by the end of his ride.
Kian was already following his escape route.
Slapping off the rats and maggots climbing over his Garb and face, Zeke got up and chased the culprit.
They were running through the main corridor, flies from the living room were buzzing around in the new space, and the rats scratched the thick glass panels on the floors.
“Plaga!” Kian summoned and put his gloved hand over to the large window by his side. The new window became a breeding ground for bacterial colonies. In an eye blink, it turned foggy and was covered in expanding brown spots, bringing Zeke to a halt as he watched the bacteria destroy the glass.
It cracked and finally burst inward, sending shards of glass in Zeke’s direction. He closed his eyes and looked away but got a new set of bleeding wounds all over his face anyway.
Kian leaped through the broken window, quickly getting to his feet after a front roll, and was dashing through the snow. Although Zeke wasn’t as smooth, he jumped out the window and got up quickly after landing on his stomach.
The pursuit in the blizzard had neither of the Healers slowing down.
Zeke shot out thread after thread to no avail. He switched to a new tactic and held his hand before him. Threads formed between his fingers, and after focusing on them, clots formed in the center of them, swelling into balls. He pulled the threads back like slingshots with his other hand and fired.
Four spheres of blood jetted and blasted into Kian from behind. Zeke was already standing over him after he hit the ground.
“It’s over, Kian,” Zeke said.
“No, not yet, Rosario,” Kian responded. “Only when I’m done.” Kian grabbed a handful of snow and hurled it at Zeke. It was a direct hit and had him stumble back.
Then, the ground began to shake as thundering footsteps approached. They turned back to find quite a surprise.
“What the—?”
The giant skeletal ape rushed into the scene, roaring and drilling its massive fist down at them. Zeke and Kian jumped out of the way.
“You can always count on Akachi and his incompetence,” Kian said happily. “Excellent.” He made some hand signs quickly and unleashed a horde of random insects at Zeke. They latched on to his Garb; consequently, the ape fixated on him.
Zeke tried to shake off the ants, termites, and grasshoppers but was forced to stop as another massive fist was speeding toward him. He outstretched his hand, and the veins twisted around it until it became a veiny hand as big as the skeletal fist. Zeke blocked the attack and crushed the monster’s hand in his veiny palm. It screeched and fell to its side, sending heaps of snow upwards.
When Zeke looked over, Kian was crouched and drawing a sigil on the snow with his finger. Zeke released the ape, dissolved his giant hand, and ran to him.
It was too late.
A wave of Mana pushed him back as Kian summoned a colossal demonic fly with strangely beautiful wings marked with unholy symbols. The Infectologist sat on top of the horrific critter as it flew up. Its buzzing was just as loud as an airplane engine.
The Healer and his summon were gone before Zeke got back up.
###
The once glamorous rustic resort was now looking more like an apocalypse bunker that failed to negate the effects of a nuclear holocaust.
This tale has been pilfered from Royal Road. If found on Amazon, kindly file a report.
The Healers stood in the dilapidated living room where insects and rats were crawling amok all over the walls and floor covered with black mold. Furniture decayed before their eyes, and pieces of the ceiling fell from time to time. Zeke felt he would feel more protected in a hazmat suit, even with his Healer’s Garb on and the mask pulled up.
Ugo, Wade (without his crocheted cap), Ashlin, and Aida’s skin were marked with tiny scratches. Akachi was the last to show up in the room and didn’t hesitate to boast about summoning a thunderbird and finding a door in record time (according to him) while stuck in a barren wasteland.
Zeke gave the others a recap of what happened out in the snow.
“Zaalzebub?” Akachi said. “Damn. When did that bastard learn how to summon demons?”
“There’s a lotta things he probably knows that we aren’t aware of,” Aida said, cautiously taking a seat on what remained of the couch with her sheathed katana in her hands. “We should’ve paid more attention to him. Then we could’ve seen this coming.”
“You wanted us to hang out with the guy who is always trying to show us photos of the most severe cases of leprosy?”
“Kian was weird…” Wade said as he wandered the room. He found his crocheted earflap in a corner polluted with maggots and started shaking it. “and a little off-putting… okay, very off-putting, but there was no reason to suspect him of being a future murderer.”
He casually put the maggot-infested cap over his messy red hair.
Ashlin stared at Wade, making a face, and then looked away. “This is why you always judge a book by its cover,” she said, watching an aggressive group of maggots devour the remnants of a table chair leg. Then, she gave Aida a sour look. “If it wasn’t for you, I would’ve stopped Kian. What’s wrong with you?”
“He was using live summons,” Aida justified as she stood up.
“Which are…?” Ugo asked.
“There are two types of summons: live summons and empty summons,” Aida explained. “Empty summons are mindless creatures created without a soul, but live ones are real creatures with real souls.” Aida whipped over to Ashlin. “And you were just going to obliterate them all.”
“They were trying to eat us!” Ashlin gestured with her hands as she slowly and strenuously enunciated, “You, stupid, smelly, simple-minded, senseless dog!”
“Hey, there’s no need for that,” Wade defended as he pulled a pen from his pocket.
“Shut up. This is all your fault, you know. You let Kian sneak into the room and steal the sword,” Ashlin said and then reverted her gaze to Aida. “I think I swallowed rat droppings because of you.”
“Just go put on a new Container then,” Aida snapped back. “Hopefully, this time, you put on something that doesn’t make you look like a total whore.”
The comment earned her a swift slap to the cheek.
Zeke stepped in between the girls. “That’s enough!”
“What are you going to do about it? If I wanna slap her again, I’ll slap her again.” Ashlin said. “You think I’m afraid of you?”
“Touch him and see what happens,” Violet said.
“And we are back to trying to kill each other,” Gill said, walking back into the living room.
“Yeah. Let’s not add another murder to the kill count.” Ugo said, sweeping away a couple of dead rats with his foot. “We need to focus on this whole infection thing going on.”
“Correct, good luck on that,” Gill said as he approached and closed a door.
“Are you leaving?” Aida asked.
“Kian conjured something ugly, specially made for denizens of the Netherworld… in such a short time frame. Most of my staff got hit.” He pulled out chalk from his pocket and started drawing a sigil. “It’s nothing I can’t resolve on my own, but it will take some prudent examination before I use any spells to counteract it.”
“Are you not aware of the situation, Fatass?” Akachi said. “That goth sunuvabitch unleashed a new plague on humanity. You really gonna put the lives of demon scum over humans?”
“That’s exactly what I am doing, mate,” Gill said with a crude smile. “And they are not scum. They’re family. Family always comes first.”
Akachi scoffed and shook his head.
“You think you’re in the position of judging me for the patients I treat?” Gill said. “You really wanna die on that hill, mate?” He looked away and made a whistle, beckoning his diseased, demonic servants over. They dawdled towards the door in a straight line, coughing, moaning, and wheezing. Gill opened the door, and a hellish Realm was on the other side. Tortured screams boomed into the room.
“Gill, when do you think you’ll be back?” Zeke asked.
“I dunno, mate. But I’ll tell you this when it comes to treatment, I don’t like rushing because that’s how mistakes are made. I’m giving each of them proper care and attention.” Sylvie, not looking as sick as the others, was at the end of the line, and after she went in, Gill turned his back to the others. “Zeke, make sure everybody works together on this one, okay?”
Gill closed the door as he exited the house.
“And then there were seven,” Wade said. “Hey, that’s a lucky number, right?”
Ashlin groaned and rolled her eyes. “Humanity is doomed.”
As the air of hopelessness spread in the room, Zeke wondered if he had said something about knowing a murder would happen; Yaalon’s death could’ve been avoided.
Then, a whack on the back of his head snapped him back to reality.
“Enough worrying about what could’ve been, Mano,” Ugo said, putting his arm over his shoulder. “We need your brain to think up a solution to this mess.”
Zeke looked back at Ugo and was surprised to find himself smiling at a time like this, even if it was just a half-smile powered mainly by anxiety with a hint of despair.
“Listen up!” Ugo shouted, catching everybody’s attention. “Zeke has a plan.”
Zeke stammered as he held the stares of his audience, awaiting something good. If it weren’t for Ugo’s clutch, he probably would’ve been halfway down the snowy slope.
“Well?” Wade said, flipped his pen, and started spinning it. “What are your ideas?”
The pressure made Zeke blurt out the first thought that came into his head: “Yaalon is always thinking ahead, right?” He moved forward, loosening himself from Ugo’s grip. “He made that video to help us avenge his murder and stop the infection, even if it could end up helping the killer, so he’d want to help us by letting us access his computer, right? There could be more useful info in there.”
“But we don’t know the password, Shortstack,” Akachi said, annoyed.
“Yaalon must’ve left a clue behind for us. Why go through the effort of setting all this up without giving us access to what can help us the most?”
“I wonder if the clue could have something to do with the weird text that appeared on the video,” Ugo said.
“What text?” Aida asked.
“When you shushed me, remember?” Ugo scanned the others’ puzzled faces, prompting him to become confused as well. “Was I really the only one to have noticed that?”
“What are you talking about?” Ashlin asked.
Ugo pulled out his cell from his pocket and opened Yaalon’s email. “It was like for a second, kinda like what asshole MeTubers do in their videos where there is this one second of white text that goes by way too fast to be read. So you rewind and pause over and over until you catch it, and then it’s something completely irrelevant.”
The other Healers gathered around Ugo and looked at the screen as he messed with the controls of the video.
“Listen up,” the Yaalon in the video said.
Ugo paused the video. “It was around here.” He let it play until a block of text flashed on the screen for about a second.
“Oh, I saw it!” Akachi shouted. “How the hell did you notice that?”
“Ugo’s brain is like a supercomputer,” Zeke said proudly as he put a hand on Ugo’s shoulder. “He’s got an eidetic memory and can pick up on things that are too fast to normally process.”
Ugo rewound the video for a few seconds and repeatedly paused and resumed it until the text covered the screen.
“¡Bueno!” Zeke exclaimed.
The blocky white text took up most of the screen and was bolded. It appeared as so:
P S R S S A A H
A W D R H S N R
S O I O H H A T
“What the hell?” Akachi said.
“That definitely has a hidden message in it,” Violet said.
Ugo lowered his cell. “I need to write it down.” He approached Wade and snatched his pen away as he was spinning it. Ugo did a double take and noticed Wade continued to move his hand as if he was still with the pen. “Uhhhh…”
“It’s okay. Just let him be,” Aida said.
“Anybody got paper?”
Violet magically conjured a piece of paper and handed it to Ugo.
He folded the paper and used Zeke’s back for support to write down the code.
“We should go get Yaalon’s computer,” Zeke said.
Afterwards, the group made their way back to the crime scene and the horror of it worsened.
Now, a fetid scent was added to the fragrance of chemicals and blood in the air. A cacophony of buzzing and squeaking filled the room, and Yaalon’s corpse was now mutilated thanks to the efforts of hungry rats and flies.
Zeke doubled over and gagged at the gruesome visage. Yaalon no longer had a face, just a bowl of meat overfilled with rats. The wound on his gut elongated, and his entire torso was opened up and being torn apart.
“He deserved better….” Zeke lamented, looking at the defaced corpse.
Violet marched across the room and grabbed the laptop. “Come on, let’s get out of here.”
The Healers left the crime scene and waited in the ruined corridor. Zeke sat on the floor with the laptop on his lap.
“I think I got it,” Ugo announced, studying the code in his hand. “It’s a rail fence cipher. Stack the groups of letters on top of each other, and you read off the message vertically, ignoring the extra letters at the end. By the way the code was organized, Yaalon used three rails to make the cipher, so three equal groups.”
“How do you know this?” Aida asked.
“Video Games,” Zeke and Ugo answered.
“You can’t be serious,” Akachi said.
“In the Professor Clayton series, there were plenty of sections where you had to solve ciphers. They were fun,” Ugo said. “I bolded the important letters of the code. Look.” He held up the note for everyone to see.
P S R S S A A H
A W D R H S N R
S O I O H H A T
“Read it vertically, and you get: Password is Rosh Hashanah.”
“So, it’s gibberish,” Akachi said.
“It’s an Israeli holiday, moron,” Violet said.
Zeke booted up the laptop and tested the password.
The laptop produced a welcoming tone.
“I’m in,” Zeke declared.