“Sounds to me like Aeon is playing God down there.”
“That is false, Senator. We are only correcting for His errors.”
–Dr Ava Sherman. Arlington, Virginia. 5 Years Before.
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Liam opened his eyes.
For a moment, the world was buried in a haze and his mind was at peace, but then a heavy burn coursed through his veins. Liam moaned and rolled, but the pain did not recede. His skin was on fire from the inside-out, and his limbs were so weak. Oh God, make it stop.
He blinked through the nebula of torment, and his eyes formed recognition again. There was a creature in front, its face a motley of rotted flesh and scars. A single beating red eye stared into his own, the other buried beneath cloth.
“You alive for real this time?” it asked before flicking him in the face.
Liam gasped. “What the bloody hell, Kurt!?”
“Yep. Definitely awake now.” He stood up. “Hey, Leah! Liam’s alive! See for yourself.”
Liam grumbled. His head felt like it’d been thrown under a truck, and his body wasn’t much improved. He tried to breathe deep, but a sharp poker of agony tore through his chest. What the hell had happened!?
Like water in a brook, the memories of his anguish came dribbling back. Liam remembered going to Leah after Buttercup’s funeral, and getting jumped by that hollow. He remembered the insignificant scratch on his arm, and the sting it left behind. He remembered the look in Leah’s eyes when he said he felt fine, and the panic that followed when his fever started to grow. He remembered being told to lay down. He remembered them saying that it would all work out. He remembered knowing the lies for what they were…
Then there was nothing.
Liam again studied his environment. He’d been taken into a bedroom. The sheets of the bed were immaculate, and the shelves were freshly dusted where the sun tore through. An IV bag had been strung onto a beam above, with blackened liquid dripping down.
“Back to the land of the living, huh?” Leah said as she staggered into the room, an arm to her abdomen.
“What happened?”
“What do you think? You almost died.” She leaned against the wall and coughed. “Do us a favor, and don’t do that again. It’s been a long night.”
Liam rubbed his scalp. “I don’t understand. How’d you cure the infection?”
“Wasn’t easy. We tried everything to bring the fever down, but none of us are doctors, and even if we knew the exact type of meds you needed, they’re all expired.”
“I thought you said there was no cure for the Hollowing.”
“There isn’t. You wouldn’t have lasted more than a few hours had this been that.”
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“Then what created the infection?”
She pointed to his chest. “You were shot, genius. What? Did you forget about the piece of lead that tore through your gut?”
Liam looked to his stomach and felt the fool. His bandages were drenched in red and the smell of pus was overwhelming, yet somehow, some way, the fear of turning into one of them had overridden every other concern in his life.
“But I was scratched,” Liam pointed out.
She shrugged. “Turns out that was just a scratch. Soft cells don’t grow under fingernails, so the only way the Hollowing spreads is if they’ve been picking their teeth before swiping. It happens more often than you think. I’d say that maybe one-in-ten scratches leads to infection, give or take.”
“All the trouble you’ve been putting me through, and you’re telling me that the risk was that low the whole time?”
Leah rolled her eyes. “Well, I don’t know, Liam. If I told you that every time you fell off a cliff, there’s a ten percent chance you’d die, would you want to hang out on the edge?”
He went mum. She had a point there.
“Anyway,” Leah continued. “When we realized that you were going septic and not hollow, I came up with my own dumb idea. Way I figured it, the infection must have come from some foreign bacteria, and there’s nothing that kills microorganisms better than rezzer blood. Damn near spent a gallon of my own on you.”
Liam noticed the IV again. He traced the dark liquid that lay within, down the tube, and straight into his veins. Had they gone mad!?
He yelped and tried to claw the tubing free, but Kurt anchored him in place.
“Relax,” Leah said. “I’m O-negative and we pasteurized the blood before use. Vaughn taught me the trick. If you cook it at the right temperature, Soft cells die off, leaving only Hard cells. Makes for good weed killer, though it probably would’ve murdered you outright if we’d left it alone, so Mastermind took my bad idea and made it good. He did some math and guesstimated the right amount we had to dilute my blood to keep your own from becoming too toxic. Next thing you know, we’d created our own homebrew antibiotic.”
Liam considered the miracle that had occurred. “Do you have any idea the medicinal properties your blood must have to cure sepsis this quickly?”
She waved a hand. “Don’t get ahead of yourself. It was still a terrible idea. What we did was on par with injecting bleach to fight the flu. We could’ve fucked up the distillation and infected you anyway, or you could’ve died the moment my blood entered your veins. I don’t think that Hail Mary would work a second time.”
“Christ.” He fell back into the pillow. All his energy was drained after thinking so much, and Liam wanted to go back to sleep. His eyes closed and he felt the world fade again.
“Yeah, yeah, rest up,” Leah ordered. “We need you to get better so we can keep m-m…” She paused, her tone suddenly tense. “Moving. We need to keep moving.”
* * *
It was days before Liam could stand again, and almost a week before he could walk on his own. They had been fortunate enough to get him on his feet before his muscles could atrophy. He was in far from stellar condition, but with the aid of a team of immortal superhumans at his beck and call, his recovery had gone far better than could be expected.
The same couldn’t be said for Leah, however. Draining her blood had created more problems than she had first let on, especially since she’d been wounded badly herself beforehand. What had started as a rare stutter became more frequent, and there was something particular unsettling every time it occurred. Liam had known his fair share of people who stuttered. This was different, as if her mind was seizing mid-sentence. Her once confident march had also slackened into a stumble the longer they walked, and her skin had blanched whiter than normal where it wasn’t wrinkling in rot. With each passing day, she looked less human than the one before.
But it was her eyes that really gave Liam pause. Where Leah had once had bright magenta irises that burned with ferocious intensity, they had thinned out like watered down wine. The fire was down to embers, and only a glazed, withered soul remained.
It didn’t take a genius to see what was happening. The Hollowing was a continuous process. Like the monsters that hunted them, it could be slowed, it could be stalled, and it could even be temporarily reversed, but it could never be stopped. Not even Leah could keep ahead of its crushing weight forever.
It was only a matter of time before she hollowed for good.