“Seriously? ‘HBRS’? You know that looks like ‘Hubris,’ right, honey? The DOD’s gonna think you’re angling to be the next Einstein.”
“Who says I’m not?”
–Dr Ava Sherman. Manchester, New Hampshire. 5 Years Before.
----------------------------------------
“Mother!” a nurse shouted. “This one won’t stop shaking and we can’t figure out why!”
She went over to the patient. Male, late thirties, if not early forties, and advanced necrosis of the skin. His eyes were dimmed but not hollowed, and stitches in his chest had been ripped during the seizures.
Mother dabbed her finger into the wound and gave it a sniff. The taste was unmistakable. “You’ve been abusing Wrath, haven’t you?”
The patient grit his teeth.
She turned back to the nurse. “Tie him down and give him a hundred milligrams of saline straight into the spinal cord.” That would offset the chemical deficiency.
No sooner had this patient started to level out than another voice rolled her way.
“Please, Mother!” a doctor called out. “This woman’s leg won’t reattach like it’s supposed to!”
The fault was amateurish to her experienced eyes, as they had accidentally rotated the limb by about five degrees during the rejoining phase. She pressed her arms against bone and crunched down with all her might. The patient grunted as her flesh moved like clay.
“She’ll need compression and rest,” Mother said. “The nerve endings won’t form again for a few days.”
An echo rolled down the hall. “Hollow!”
Mother recognized the patient on sight. Well over three hundred pounds, he was one of the more colossal workers who’d been subjected to construction work. The kind of rezzer so large that the standard-issue distribution diet couldn’t keep pace with his body’s demands, and with a form of employment that never paid him enough to get ahead of his own hollowing.
Staff and patients alike shrieked as the gargantuan hollow stumbled down the hall, but Mother maintained her serenity. Where all others ran, she faced the patient head on, meeting the empty, white gaze of HBRS-15.21 in its purest form with her hardened own. She would not let it claim victory here.
As the patient made his predictable lunge, she sidestepped the attack and delivered a riposte to his leg. He floundered into the ground with a smash.
Mother threw all her weight onto his back and secured his arms between hers. “Handcuffs!”
A pair of doctors rushed over and tied the patient’s arms in place. His teeth clattered this way and that until a nurse managed to throw a bag over his head. The troupe began the arduous task of shepherding him back to the rehabilitation center.
Mother let out a sigh. Of all the work in her medical center, triage was the most demanding. Like bailing water out of a sinking ship a cup at a time, the holes kept forming, and the Hollowing kept rising. It couldn’t be helped. There weren’t enough qualified physicians in Pandemonium, and rezzer anatomy was as foreign to them as anyone else.
Except her. Mother knew every nuance of HBRS-15.21. There was no one more qualified to patch these holes and handle the infinite threat of the Hollowing. Everyone else was gone, whether through the outbreak, or the destruction that followed.
If you stumble upon this tale on Amazon, it's taken without the author's consent. Report it.
That was why she could not lose.
* * *
“Thank you, Mother,” Elsa said. “You didn’t have to do this yourself.”
She patted her on the forehead. “We take care of our own here. You know that.”
Mother went back to stitching. Elsa was one of her more recent nurses, and was still adapting to her work in post-hollow rehabilitation, but between her previous job as a maiden in Elysium’s Lust pits, and an injury she gained during her HBRS-15.21 exposure, her lungs filled with fluid over the course of the day, and had to be sliced open and drained, thrice a week, lest her own mental degradation accelerate. Mother had made a habit of personally overseeing the procedure whenever she had the chance. Her people deserved to see that they mattered.
As the last stitch fell in place, Elsa began to cry. The reddish fluid ran down her cheeks, a mix of tears and blood.
“Don’t cry, Elsa,” Mother said. “We’re done for today.”
“I’m sorry, but I can’t! Every day I feel the pressure, and every breath keeps getting worse and worse. I can’t do this anymore!”
“I’ve told you before, there are options. We could apply a stent to let it drain naturally, or we could contract a Hunter to find a worthwhile replacement.”
“Oh sure,” she mocked. “One is to carry a bag filled with shit everywhere I go, and the other will force me back to Elysium just to pay off the debt. Such good choices!”
“They’re the only ones we have.”
“No, they’re not. I’ve been talking to some of the others, and they told me about the basement. I know.”
Mother said nothing. Every power broker in Pandemonium had their secrets, and she was no exception. Not all patients were guaranteed to survive, and not all operations ended in success. Beneath the refuge of Mother’s Grace was a labyrinth of freezers and laboratories, and it was in those hidden cells that she performed the necessary acts to keep Pandemonium afloat.
“You shouldn’t ask about that,” Mother said at last.
“It’s okay. You can trust me. I understand why you do it.” Elsa closed her eyes, and a fresh wave of fluid spilled free. “Which is why I’m willing to join voluntarily.”
Mother’s chest tightened. To see Elsa speak this way hurt more than she could know. She was really coming to like her, and her sad, innocent eyes reminded her of Evelyn. It would be devastating to see Elsa go.
But Mother was also the matriarch of this hospital, and could not show weakness under any circumstance.
“Is that what you want, Elsa?” she asked. “You really want to let it end?”
She shook her head. “Anything is better than this. Even nothingness. I can’t keep living like this!”
“Living”. What a strange and ineffable concept to those who had never truly known it. Rezzers weren’t like their human frames. They were just dead meat puppets with a semi-functioning cerebrum attached. Parasites whose hosts had long since died out. Could they ever contemplate such a phenomenon?
Mother reached into her lab coat and pulled out the bottle of her private pills. Hades had his Sins in Elysium, and she had her Bliss. Where the Sins stimulated parts of the native nervous system to give them a heightened sense of emotion, Bliss performed the opposite. It was her crowning achievement of rezzer-specific medication. A drug that could give them the one thing they couldn’t gain naturally: peace of mind. A single pop, and even the most nourished undead would drift off into a state of comfortable hibernation, never to return if the regiment was maintained.
“Are you absolutely sure you want this, Elsa?” Mother asked, her tone firm. “There’s no going back once you’re down there.”
She met her in the eyes, unblinking. “Yes.”
“Then take one of these.” She handed her the pill.
Elsa gripped the Bliss between her soft, fragile fingers. For a moment, the two just sat in silence as the severity of the act weighed on them. She might not have known what was to come next, but Mother had stared enough hopeless patients to know the burden that she was subjecting them to. Her research was seldom clean.
Elsa swallowed the pill. “Thank you for everything, Mother.”
“It is I who owes you. You’re braver than you know, Elsa, and our kind owes you a debt that it will never be able to repay. Thank you for your sacrifice.”
Elsa nodded. Within minutes, her eyes glazed over one last time and her awareness became expunged.
Mother threw a sheet over her face with a sigh. How many more would have to be sacrificed on the altar of science? Her operation in the basement was a far cry from that which she had rebuilt in secret out east, but there was no telling just how many of her patients had been dragged down below, never to be seen again.
All for the greater good, of course. Understanding the mutations that HBRS-15.21 inflicted required experimentation, and there were no subjects more efficient to utilize than rezzers. Every development, from the Sins of Elysium, to Bliss, to her breakthroughs on nutrition science, had all come at a high blood toll.
And still it had not been enough.
One of her surgeons entered, his arms and scrubs caked in blackened viscera.
“What is it?” Mother asked.
“We have a visitor.” He gulped. “It’s Hades.”