“Howle…” he said, “I still don’t know if any of this is real, but… I know how you’ve helped my daughter. I expect you to do so again. What DAISHU has done is unforgivable,” he said. He clicked his tongue. “My Ani is too soft. She won’t be able to take it.”

“What?” I asked. “What do you mean?”

Again, Alon was a strong man—fit and lean. Despite everything else, he took care of his health. Other than Larry the Transformee Janitor, Ani’s father was the only person I knew who I thought might stand a chance against Dr. Marteneiss in an arm-wrestling match. But, here, on this hillside, overlooking a vision of a city lost to time, he was utterly broken, like a prisoner of war. He lowered his gaze, throat tightening.

“That General Marteneiss,” he said, voice cracking, “he must be on DAISHU’s payroll. The things he did. The things his scientists did…” Alon spat on the ground, as if the words were unfit to swallow.

I bit my lip.

This was not good. Not good at all.

Andalon and I shared a nervous glance.

“I believe you, Alon.” I nodded at him.

“What is there to believe?” Yuta asked.

“Yesterday,” I explained, “a military leader—General Vernon Marteneiss—stationed his troops at the hospital. He intends to make WeElMed into his headquarters. Earlier today, with my second sight, I saw that the General and his men were guarding something in the laboratory—a transformee, like myself, and they weren’t just guarding him, they were hiding him. Vernon is hiding something. I just don’t know what.”

“Then it’s a good thing you found me,” Alon said, twice thumping his fist against his chest. “I saw it all.”

“Tell me everything,” I said.

Alon’s expression turned grim. He looked me in the eyes, lowering his voice to a whisper.

“Howle,” he said, “they were experimenting on us. They took me, they took others, they plucked us out of our beds and put us in that hell. I was losing my memories. I was scared out of my mind. And they… they…”

“What?!” I roared, bolting to my feet, in full panic-mode.

I desperately wanted this to be just Alon’s usual hyperbole, but it wasn’t. I sensed his memories opening up to me, filling me in with all the gory details.

By the Angel what was Vernon doing?

I wanted to reassure Alon by telling him that Heggy would never let her brother get away with it, but I couldn’t. Vernon was a general; Heggy was just another doctor.

I figured I might as well see it for myself. Running my hand down in a line in the air, I opened up a slit in the mind-world, linking it to Alon’s memories. As soon as it was connected, I stuck my fingers in the slit and spread it wide. Our surroundings parted at either side, like curtains drawing away from a movie screen, only, instead of the proverbial silver screen, we saw Alon’s memories, as witnessed through his eyes.

The “footage” was spotty and erratic. I attributed this to the fact that, at the time, NFP-20 had been—as Dr. Skorbinka would have put it—“making evil borscht” of Alon’s brain.

I wanted Andalon to look away.

Even Yuta gasped.

We saw more than a dozen patients restrained on examination tables which had been steeply against the room’s walls, lined up one after another, all the way around.

We saw the zombies. We saw Sylar, the transformee, rip the zombies to pieces with his psychokinesis.

In between flickering moments, Alon’s memories showed a girl on a shiny metal table in the middle of the room. She was bound to it, restrained, and lost in a drug-induced stupor. She looked like a human sacrifice laid out on an altar.

I screamed. “Nina!”

No no no no no…

I clawed through Alon’s memories, instantly slicing them to ribbons. I couldn’t bear to see any more.

A case of literary theft: this tale is not rightfully on Amazon; if you see it, report the violation.

“This was worse than the worst case scenario…” I muttered.

“What were those horrors?” Yuta asked.

“It’s like Alon said,” I replied, running my hand through my hair. “Apparently, General Marteneiss is kidnapping our patients and performing experiments on them—without their permission!”

At least, I hoped he was having them kidnapped. I don’t know what I’d do if I found out he was doing it with the assistance of WeElMed’s staff.

Yuta’s eyes bugged out in his skull. “Why would your leaders do that to your own people?”

I was about to say, “I don’t know,” but stopped myself mid-word.

I knew exactly why he was doing it.

The General’s words flitted through my mind, and since we were currently inside my mind, that meant they blared over the landscape, as if the Hallowed Beast itself was roaring them.

Either we figure out why WeElMed isn’t overrun with zombies and use that secret to save what’s left of the world, or this city and everyone and everything in it is going to be nuked until even the atoms are blown to smithereens.

“What is a nuke?” Yuta asked. “And atoms? I don’t know those words.”

While I could have started lecturing him, I happened to recall something I’d learned in my elementary school studies of world religions. With any luck, Yuta would be familiar with it.

“Are you familiar with the sutra of the Acorn and the Mountain?” I asked.

“Yes,” Yuta said, with a nod. He crossed his arms. “Two barashai deduce there must be some irreducible, indivisible substance within the depths of matter, else the contents of an acorn sliced sufficiently finely could be rearranged into a structure even larger than Mt. Aoi.”

“Well,” I said, “they were right. All matter is made of minute particles. We called them atoms. The atoms are like bricks; everything else is made from them.”

At this point, I was basically reciting the explanations given in that docudrama on the Crownsleep Nuclear Power Plant disaster.

“A terrific amount of energy is bound up keeping those atoms together.” I glanced down and shook my head. “We discovered how to split the atom—”

Yuta furrowed his brow. “Then the atom is not indivisible.”

“Yes and no,” I said. “It’s more like, it can be divided, but nature very much dislikes it when it is divided.”

“Dislikes?”

I nodded. “It releases a huuuuuuuge amount of energy. Horrifyingly destructive. A nuclear bomb channels that destruction to devastating effect.”

I turned to my reimagining of the ancient Costranak capital.

“Like this,” I said.

A second sun bloomed on the horizon, impossibly bright. The explosion swept a destroying wind across the land as a death’s-head cloud mushroomed over old Vaneppo. Trees bowed and snapped, stripped of their leaves. Air tore across the horizon, followed by the all-consuming blast. The primeval wooden buildings vaporized. Ash rained as the sky burned.

After a few seconds, when even I couldn’t take the devastation anymore, I transported the three of us to my Main Menu. It took a moment or two for my eyes to adjust to its endless dome of serene sky. Afterimages of the nuclear blast still flashed in my vision.

Yuta was the first to speak. There was horror in his face, yet it was not as stark as I thought it would be. His look of shock was mostly free of any surprise, as if he’d seen destruction of this magnitude before.

“Not even gods deserve such power,” he said, nearly speechless.

“Andalon does not like big scary boom-boom,” Andalon said. “It’s… horrible…”

Yuta nodded in agreement, clasping his hands together, dark blue sleeve against dark blue sleeve. “Nothing good can come from putting them in the hands of men,” he said.

“I agree with you,” I said, only to shake my head. “Unfortunately, they are in our hands.”

“So,” Yuta said, “this is what shall happen to your hospital if this General Marteneiss fails to find what he seeks.”

“Yes,” I said, nodding grimly.

Yuta clicked his tongue in dismay and disgust. “What Marteneiss has done is unconscionable,” he said, “and yet…” he shook his head, “considering the stakes, one could argue that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.”

“That’s wrong!” I said.

“It is,” he replied, “and yet, it isn’t. Though I do not agree with Marteneiss choice, his logic is sound.”

Alon huffed. “Logic breeds monsters,” he said.

I stared at him, quite surprised.

“For once, Mr. Lokanok,” I said, “I think I agree with you.”

“Logic does breed monsters,” Yuta said, concurring, “but it can also slay them.” He nodded. “As it is written in the Lengthiness Road, both good and evil quiver beneath power and the will to use it.” He looked me in the eyes. “It is up to us to make our decisions, Dr. Howle, and it falls to us to deal with their consequences.”

“You can say that again!” I yelled, slicing my hand through the air. I could picture all the awful ways in which Vernon’s choices could snowball, and then those very things happened right in front of us.

“People are going to find out about this!” I yelled. “They have a transformee in there, as well as zombies and who knows what else! It’s only a matter of time before they lose control.” I shook my head in dismay. “WeElMed’s gonna witness the mother of all riots, and just in case anything manages to avoid burning to the ground, the nukes will be there to take care of the rest.”

My work with Andalon would literally go up in smoke.

And then, somehow, things got even worse.

A window opened in the air, showing my physical self out in Thick World. There was yelling in the background.

It was Ani.

My body-self and I recoupled our consciousnesses.

Ani had been running. She’d run out from around the corner of a hallway like a runaway train. Her shoe soles squeaked on the vinyl as she skidded to a stop.

Behind her PPE, I saw tears streaming down her cheeks.

“Genneth!” she yelled. “It’s my father! He’s gone!”

Of course she couldn’t find him. He was dead, and my mental doppelganger was talking to his ghost.

“Fudge!"

“Fudge!"