It was Jonan’s first time wearing a hazmat suit, and hated it. It was uncomfortable, and Jonan was deeply uncomfortable with being uncomfortable. He nearly started praying to god—any god at all, even the discount ones—to beg them to keep him from ever having to do it again, but he didn’t, because gods didn’t exist, and he really didn’t want to demean himself by pretending otherwise. Most importantly, Ani was there with him in Room 268, and if she caught him even thinking about praying, she’d never let him hear the end of it.
There was no rule that said that loving someone else meant having to hate yourself.
So, instead, Jonan settled for something only slightly less unreliable than prayer: making dreams come true—and not just any dreams, but monsters’ dreams, and even scoundrels’ dreams, too. There was no rule that said that awful people couldn’t have dreams.
And I should know, Jonan thought, seeing as I’m one of them.
Jonan had half a mind to rip his epidermis off, all the way down to the papillary stratum underneath, in the hopes it’d make the sweaty, stifling awfulness of his hazmat stuff’s confines even an iota more bearable. But he didn’t, because that would be unsafe. Also, it wouldn’t deal with the real troublemakers: the pesky nerve endings at the top of the dermis which were responsible for his current discomfort.
On the plus side, at least the transformees weren’t causing trouble; they were still grappling with the shell-shock leftover from the hallway fight. Then again, at this point, they’d probably surpassed their collective lifetime quota of troublemaking several times over.
The transformees had dragged Mr. Twist—the shit-your-pants terrifying mascot-wyrm abomination—back into the room, one slice at a time, and then covered his remains with several partially-eaten sheets. They lingered over the body like morticians at a mortuary. Why that was, Jonan couldn’t tell. Maybe they were ashamed of what had happened—as they should be, Jonan thought—or maybe the transformees resented mascot-guy for having helped the humans put an end to the little uprising.
Whatever the reason, Jonan didn’t give a shit. The creatures were keeping their distance—well, all but one of them—and that was what mattered. He just really wished the transformees would stop stealing peckish glances at the corpse of a soldier who, after helping secure the transformees in 268, had dropped to the floor, stone cold dead. Back when that first happened, Ani—in her wisdom—had sent a text to Dr. Howle to ask for his recommendation about what to do, only for the neurotic neuropsychiatrist to give the rather unhelpful advice to just let the transformees eat the dead guy. Considering the dead soldiers’ brothers-in-arms had been in the room at the time, to help keep the transformees in good behavior, Dr. Howle’s words only made things that much more awkward. All of the soldiers had walked out in disgust.
“We can stand guard outside,” one had said.
It left Ani and Jonan with only one other healthcare professional at their disposal. To her credit, though, she was totally unfazed by the macabre turn of events.
That nurse must have seen some really scary shit.
“How’s it coming?” the transformee asked—Kurt, was that his name?
For, like, the third (fourth?) time, Kurt craned his neck over to Jonan.
“Fine,” Jonan said.
He was at Kurt’s bedside because it turned out the transformee was in need of Dr. Derric’s particular set of skills.
It was just another burden of being talented.
At the moment, all of Jonan’s allocatable real-time memory was buried in the screen of the console at Kurt’s bedside. The device was in terminal mode—a blissful abyss of white text on the black background. Terminal mode was quite useful for when you were trying to hack into a local access network, as Jonan presently was. Had the world not been ending, hacking into the hospital’s IT network like this would have gotten Jonan in a considerable amount of trouble. But, the world was ending, and everyone who would have cared was dead, or a zombie, or worse, so, yeah… he was gonna get off scot-free.
“You’re sure this is going to work?” Kurt asked.
Jonan groaned quietly. His fingers’ play on the console’s keyboard ground to a halt.
“The technical side?” Jonan said. “Absolutely. But, whether or not you get what you want,” he added, “that’s an entirely different story.”
Responding to the Kurt guy’s mouth-noises meant having to look up from the lines of white code scrawled across the console screen’s black expanse. The transformee currently sat in a comfy-looking coil in the middle of the half-broken wreckage of what had once been his metal bed frame. Kurt’s face was bulging out into a noticeable snout—a plus, as far as Jonan was concerned, if only because it lessened the creepy, skeletal look of the transformee’s noseless face. Still, the way Kurt’s human flesh was sloughing off his body was pretty fucking awful to look at.
For a moment, Jonan paused. Scraping off his own skin was starting to feel enticing again.
And safety? he thought. That ship has already sailed!
Jonan ripping off his skin to stop the sweat and the heat wouldn’t have been that much more dangerous than being in the deathly monsters’ den that Room 268 had become. Unfortunately, because Ani was there, Jonan’s desire to please her was butting heads with his inclination to protect her (and himself) by getting them the hell out of there.
“Was Dad right?” Jonan mumbled. “Should I have gone to law school, instead?”
“My brother is a lawyer,” Kurt said, in that friendly demeanor of his.
“Stop talking,” Jonan said.
Dr. Derric let his thoughts drift back into the lines upon lines of code he was fiddling with. Sometimes, he wished he had one of those fun learning disabilities that gave a person to hyperfocus on a task for hours and hours on end, but the downsides—unreliability, social incompetence—just weren’t worth it.
Still, at this place and time, staring at the console screen was a much less awkward state of being than living in the moment like Ani was doing, interacting with the transformees, helping them with their bullshit, and putting up with their ever-curious, mystified stares.
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Ani was doing the important work of talking to the creatures. Her good bedside manner made her highly qualified for this task.
And, wouldn’t you know it, Kurt was staring again.
“Could you please stop staring?” Jonan asked, without turning his head away from the screen. “It’s distracting.”
Jonan could hear Kurt’s breaths, each one of which was dusted and perfumed with millions upon millions of deadly, wall-eating, nurse-melting spores, actively spreading them through the room with passing second.
Jonan tried to ignore all that, but it was hard.
A couple minutes later, Jonan made the triumphant final keystroke: a tap of a single finger.
“And done,” he said.
Pushing off the floor with his feet, Jonan rolled his wheeled chair away from Kurt’s broken bedside. He swung the metal arm bearing the console toward the bed, bringing within reach of Kurt’s claws.
But the transformee just stared at the console apprehensively.
After all that pestering, really? Jonan thought.
“Couldn’t you have just given me permission to use the videophone system?” Kurt asked.
“No,” Jonan said. “It’s not that simple.” And that was the truth: it really wasn’t. Yes, it could have been, but ALICE was mounting a vicious security crackdown on any and all communications coming out of the transformee sequestration areas set up by the late Harold Hobwell. Worse, the AI had patched over the exploit that, for years, Jonan had used to create and maintain fake administration accounts in order to give himself unfettered access to all the goodies hooked up to WeElMed’s network, such as security cameras, and ALICE had been making it really difficult to get the upper hand on her. Difficult, yes—but not impossible, as Jonan had just proven. And not only had he succeeded, he’d also ensured that if, for some crazy reason, someone noticed and cared about what he’d done, had they had the wherewithal to track the account to its source, the honeypot trail would lead them right into Room 268, with all its hungry transformees just waiting for an excuse to chow down on fresh meat.
“Uh…” Kurt held his clawed hands over the screen, hesitant to touch it. “What do I do?”
“Just tap the phone icon and type your loved ones’ name into the search box,” Jonan said. “If they’re here, you’ll be given a phone number. Call that number.” But then, Jonan sighed. “Just… be careful. You might not like what you find.”
Kurt carefully did as Jonan instructed him. A moment later, the screen turned black.
A videophone call dialed up. A couple seconds later, the call went through.
“Angela?” Kurt said, his neck craning back in shock. His voice was a musical whisper.
As hard as it was for Jonan to look at the screen, not looking was simply unthinkable.
Fuck, Jonan thought.
Angela was sick. Really sick. She had thick, nasal cannulas stuck into her nostrils, just to give her enough oxygen to breathe. It made her look like a high-altitude aerostat pilot, only without the helmet, or any of the glory.
“K-Kurt…?” Angela said, in a voice so fragile, you’d have thought the slightest touch would have turned it to ash.
Kurt wept. It was an arresting sound—eerie, yet beautiful.
Suddenly, Jonan felt gritty volcanism bubble up between his heart and his throat. Without noise or fuss, Jonan quickly got up from his chair and stepped away. He briefly turned off the microphone in his hazmat suit as he turned to face the wall. He made it just in time, right as the coughing fit struck.
He didn’t want Ani to see.
Jonan weathered through the coughing without complaint. Yes, it was small in comparison to the rib-breaking calamities that shot through some of his patients, but Jonan had no doubt that it would soon grow.
Jonan had meant what he’d said: he refused to ever lie. Lies, like weakness, had no place in his world. However, omission was quite a different thing from lying, and the last thing Jonan wanted would be for Ani to spend her final days of life trying to fight for him.
Also, it didn’t help that Kurt’s wife was telling her transformee husband about their dead children.
Jonan was… not cut out for that.
Pulling out his PortaCon, Jonan logged on to the IT network using the proxy server he’d set up for himself using Kurt’s bedside console. He’d already said his own goodbyes. Well, all but one.
His relationship with his family was… cordial? That was… a word.
Last he checked, his parents were dead. His sister had told him several days ago, back when they’d first started showing symptoms. They’d been in the summer house, up north by Lt. George’s Lake. You couldn’t have picked a more beautiful place to die. The mountains would be their mourners; they’d cry their snowy lamentations over the land come wintertime.
Jonan really didn’t know how to feel about it. He certainly felt somewhat sad about it, though not excessively so. It would have deserved a nice medium-length essay post on Socialife, had there been any point in writing it. They hadn’t the worst parents, but that didn’t mean they were the best, either. And they weren’t, not by a long-shot. On the one hand, they’d been upset to learn about his intentions to elope with Ani Lokanok. On the other hand, at least they hadn’t been upset about her race; it was Ani’s poor, low-born background that had triggered their concerns. So, pretty much a wash for all concerned parties.
Jonan thought about the farewell message he’d sent his family after Jenny’s call. He’d pulled out all the stops, going so far as to record it as a videophone call, instead of his usual congenial text message. They hadn’t picked up the call or sent in a response; funnily enough, that was actually normal, almost refreshingly so. Jonan had been worried they’d respond, because then he’d have to deal with a large bolus of feelings that he really didn’t have the time to wade through.
Fortunately, there was plenty of work to keep him busy.
Looking down, Jonan stared at the console screen, waiting for his hack to work its way through to the other end of the rainbow.
Jonan didn’t feel it would have been right for him to mourn his family’s passing. The way things were, it would have been downright selfish of him to waste precious time mourning, and for once, he really wasn’t comfortable with doing the selfish thing. The discomfort made the horrors of his hazmat suit’s internal climate trivial by comparison. There was just too much to grieve for, and he was one person, with an increasingly limited amount of time left to live. How the fuck he do justice to the enormity of what the Green Death had done to the human race? “Boo-hoo, my family died, and their lives are somehow more fucking important than anyone else’s that you all have to watch my conniption fit and give me your condolences and heartfelt words.”
Fuck words, Jonan thought.
You’d need to write a symphony to do this calamity justice—a dozen symphonies.
Biting his lip, Jonan looked up and stared out the windows, watching his world go up in smoke and spores. He kept thinking back to Lark, which was odd. There was nothing he could do for Lark right now, other than to wait, and he wouldn’t jinx or indignity things by daring to pray. Also, for what it was worth, Jonan was not optimistic about the mycophage’s chances of success.
Finally, with a satisfying boop, a farrago of arcane and intricate menus filled the screen of Jonan’s console screen.
“Perfect,” he muttered.
Everything was going according to plan.
Jonan skimmed over the results of his haul with quick flicks of his fingertips across the screen. He kept searching, sifting through the list for a good minute or so before he finally got to the feed from the cameras in General Labs. Several of the security cameras were apparently out of order; static from the end of time played on loop in place of their feeds.
That wasn’t a good sign.
Still, he started to play through the footage that was available. Seconds later, he was muttering curses at what he was seeing. One after another, soldiers kept rolling bedded patients into GL. Old folks, young folks, blacks folk, blue folks—otherwise known as white, with terminal cyanosis. Yet only the soldiers ever came out.
It was almost funny.
“Dr. Derric…?”
Turning, Jonan saw that Kurt had waddle-slithered up beside him. Spotty tears dribbled down his cheeks, dripping over his deepening snout-holes.
The transformee reached out and rested a clawed hand on Jonan’s arm.
“Thank you,” Kurt said. His euphonious voice broke. “Thank you for letting me say goodbye.”