Andalon wasn’t affected by the slowed time. She cowered at my feet, too scared to look ahead, even as she glowed with power for me to channel.
I couldn’t blame her.
The fungus was fighting back. It had pulled out all stops. Freeing the zombies from its influence was no longer cutting it. The darkness kept coming, unflagging and rapacious, hellbent on stealing back control. But that was only half of the battle.
The other half was the actual battle itself.
I can’t believe I didn’t see it earlier, I thought.
It was only with my sped-up thoughts that I was able to notice and realize just how right Andalon had been when she’d told me the fungus was “fighting back”.
The fungus wasn’t just fighting against our efforts to stop it. It was literally fighting back. If you shot at it, it fought back! And screw the infectious disease route! When the fungus fought back, it fought with tooth and claw—and tendril—and it didn’t matter whether it was a person, a zombie, an abomination or a wyrm. The fungus responded to violence with violence. Pain and terror gave the darkness an inroad. Even attacking zombies was enough to trigger the fungus’ response—and its response was to make every nearby Type One patient go feral.
No wonder that the zombie state spread like wildfire! Trying to fight it would only feed the flames.
Unfortunately, that left only one option for me: necromancy.
“It can’t take control if you have control, Mr. Genneth!” Andalon had told me—brand new knowledge, courtesy of &alon’s spectral blue flames.
For all its frightful power, when it came to control over the human mind, the fungus couldn’t beat Andalon in a head-to-head confrontation—at least not when I was helping.
It was use it, or lose it. So, I used it.
All of the zombies whose souls had been stolen by the fungus? They no longer had any minds to speak of, so there were no ethical issues to stop me from taking control of their empty shells. I’d made the lost ones my puppets, and they weren’t going to hurt anyone anymore—not as long as I had something to say about it.
It was time to turn destruction into construction!
My zombie-puppets began to obey my commands as time sped up again. I turned them away from the hospital. The fleeing civilians were blameless. They weren’t the ones to blame for the violence. I steered the hordes away from the people and toward the soldiers, but I didn’t sicc them on Vernon’s men.
I was better than that.
War won’t end unless one side assents to peace. And I, for one, would be happy to do the honors.
I ordered my zombies to stand firm and lock their arms together, forming a protective wall. They soaked up the bullets like sponges.
There were hundreds of them, and I controlled every last one. They were my toy soldiers, and their motions were mechanical perfection.
That, more than anything else, made the soldiers take pause. Suddenly, the gunfire they’d been directing at the crowds—and one another— petered out. Everyone else realized what was happening—the zombies were forming a human shield against the bullets—even though no one understood why it was happening. But the why didn’t matter here. All that mattered was that the zombies weren’t attacking people, because that gave anyone who still had a mind the opening they needed to get the hell out of there.
Unfortunately, the angry transformees out in the Garden Court had other ideas.
A fresh round of screams belted out over the courtyard as twin cannons of blue and gold pataphysics blasted across the garden. Soldiers and black metal lattice were hurled through the air. Armor broke open as bodies crashed into the street.
And overhead, the silver-eyed wyrm soared.
Aerostats came roaring out of the mini-hanger in the corner of Garden Court Drive. They trained their guns on the wyrm as they rose up off the ground.
Then they fired.
Impacts sparked along the wyrm’s ochre hide. The bullets fell like flashing rain.
They might as well have just sprayed water at it, for all the good it did them.
Roaring in anger, huffing out spore streams this way and that, the silver-eyed wyrm swam through the air. It whipped around, like a bear charging at its prey.
Floating up, Andalon stuck out her arms in the wyrm’s direction.
“Wyrmeh, no!” she cried. She looked down at me. “Mr. Genneth, can you—”
“—No, no.” I shook my head, “I’m already at my limit!” My whole body was shuddering.
No matter what, I had to keep the zombies under my control. That was the only way any of us were getting out of this alive. I didn’t know if I could hack into a wyrm the way I could into the infected, and, unfortunately, now was not the time to try. In the half minute or so since I’d asserted necromantic control, I hadn’t picked up so much as a single new blot of magenta aura appearing to my wyrmsight—the tell-tale sign of a person turned zombie.
“I, I’m sorry, Andalon,” I said, “I have to hold them, or else—”
—Off in the distance, there was a tremendous boom. A split second later, incendiary munitions exploded at the wyrm’s flank, shredding heat and flame.
“No!” Andalon screamed.
Green clouds spewed forth, cutting through the falling red. Silver eyes swept through the cloud as the plexus-shrouded wyrm spiraled through the air. The energy currents flashed as the wyrm spun like a drill. It slammed itself into the hull of the nearest aerostat, launching it like a billiard.
The careening aircraft crashed into the aerostat behind it, knocking it right into the wall of the hospital’s left wing, engine-first. The engine burst as the aerostat crashed. Glass shattered, stone collapsed. Metal groaned.
Then came the explosion.
— — —
Karl rushed toward the demon-sorcerers, lost in his emotions, slithering as fast as he could. He moved ungainly, like a drunken serpent, rolling, tumbling, throwing himself over obstacles, righting himself with his claws. He tried to avoid a group of running soldiers, but accidentally knocked some of them onto the pavement with his flanks.
“Sorry!” he yelled.
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Up ahead, one of the sorcerers stared at him, dumbfounded. To Karl, the figure seemed no taller than a child.
“What are you doing?!” the sorcerer yelled. “Why are you helping them?!”
“Why are you hurting people?!” Karl snapped.
The sorcerer stopped. Tears flowed from his one, still-human eye. “I—”
—Overhead, the floating Norm burst aflame. The aircraft crashed into the side of the hospital.
The Norm swooped down.
Karl’s spines twitched as distorted shouts reverberated behind him.
He turned.
It was coming from the other corner of the courtyard.
“What do I do?” the voice said.
Three new, monstrous figures had entered the courtyard. Two were serpents, like himself, though not as fully formed. The third was unbelievable. His two massive arms were even bigger than Karl’s. They jutted out at his sides, covered in minute reddish-brown scales, in stark contrast to the man’s tall, but still clearly human body.
One of the serpents raised their arms. “Don’t shoot!” he said—a male voice. “We’re here to help!”
About half of the soldiers within range began to fire on the new arrivals. The other soldiers turned their attention to the Norm.
Any remaining civilians ran, screaming.
The Norm swerved through the air, coiling above the garden before coming down for a landing. The wyrm’s momentum whipped up the green plumes spurting from the holes in its snout, whisking the plumes across the ground.
Karl turned to the sorcerer in front of him.
The sorcerer stumbled, falling onto his bottom. “I’m not doing anything!” he yelled, holding up his deformed hands. “I’m not doing anything!”
On the other side of the courtyard, the two serpentines and the arm-man ran through breaks in the black-lattice fencing, charging at two havoc-wreaking sorcerers. They swiped their claws as they tackled them.
Karl didn’t understand it. They were demons, and yet…
—He shook his head.
It didn’t matter. They were trying to stop the chaos.
A fresh wave of screams broke out as the silver-eyed Norm turned and slithered toward the hospital, and the line of zombies that stood in the way.
In that moment, Karl found his courage.
He did what Geoffrey would have done: he charged at the monster, claws at the ready, a battle-scream exploding from his throat.
— — —
Suisei couldn’t quite see what had happened, but he didn’t need to. The spurts of flame and debris he’d seen flying by as he’d stood in the Hall of Echoes had told him everything he needed to know: something had exploded. Something big.
Nothing made a situation worse quite like explosions.
“Dr. Marteneiss!” Suisei yelled. “A fire is underway. I will put it out.”
Technically, Suisei did not know whether or not his statement was true, but that was irrelevant, because it was within the margin of error. He didn’t know if anything was on fire yet, but given the situation, whatever wasn’t wouldn’t stay that way for long.
Heggy looked up and stared at him like he’d lost his mind. Considering Dr. Marteneiss was still bearing the weight of the woman leaning against her body, her judgment likely carried a great deal of weight.
“Horosha,” she said, “you…”
Suisei shook his head. “Forgive me,” he said, bowing apologetically, “but there is no time.”
And then he ran off, without another word, darting past the edge of the limping, weeping crowds that were staggering into the Hall of Echoes. Then he turned around and dashed up the grand staircase. His shoes clopped on the polished stone as he climbed. Rising to the mezzanine level, he circled around to the front of the Hall, bringing himself close enough to one of the Hall’s ornate front windows to see what had happened—and, more importantly, where.
“Lovely,” he muttered.
From the looks of things, two aerostats had collided with one another, and then with the wall of the Internal Medicine Building, opposite General Labs.
Letting out a hiss, Suisei turned to the right, scrambled up the short flight of stairs to the second floor and then set off in a run down the hallway. The windows set in the Administration Building’s old outer wall gave Suisei a view of the developing chaos. The windows flicked by as he ran.
Outside, the silver-eyed wyrm had landed in the gardens, clearing the area around it with a flick of its body. A couple of the plumes of spores wafting up from the landing wyrm’s snout caught some of the sparks coming off from the burning building. The plumes detonated like fireworks.
Suisei staggered to a stop.
The spores explode? he thought.
This was bad.
Then, to his astonishment, it got worse. The combusted clouds gleamed with tiny motes as it caught the rays of the setting sun.
The spores’ acid coating had combusted, not the spores themselves.
The things were fireproof, too?
This was very, very bad.
Why does fire have to make everything worse? he wondered.
Off to the side, Suisei saw Larry, Dr. Rathpalla, and Nurse Costran lumbering across the ruins of the military’s makeshift encampments, chasing after the silver-eyed wyrm, which was slithering toward the Hall of Echoes and the wall of zombies that stood in its way.
A shiver ran down Suisei’s back as a terrifying bellow rent the air. Dr. Horosha’s eyes widened as he watched a large transformee—unknown to him—ungainly slither across the greenery and onto Garden Court Drive. The transformee shoved soldiers and vehicles out of the way with thrusts of his claws and undulations of his body and tail, though that might have also just been his attempts to keep himself upright.
Suisei ran faster, pushing his speed enhancements to the max. He passed several late-stage Type One patients, wandering aimlessly through the hall. Their minds were almost entirely gone, the fungus having scoured them clean of everything that made them who they were. Their souls had been whittled down to the elements, leaving only a geography of naked grief, drowned in incognizant terror. Suisei could sense the fungus’ energies thrill within their bodies.
The sheer power left him feeling lightheaded.
The levels of power at work were astronomical. His own abilities were a pittance in comparison.
It’s a miracle I’ve even been able to last this long, Suisei thought. Though, it was nowhere near as much of a miracle as how Dr. Howle—a male ingénue, if there ever was one—managed to keep up with it all.
Suisei wanted to pray, but he was terrified that no one was left who could hear his prayer.
He had to climb another flight of stairs before he reached the level where the aerostat had crashed. The stench of spores, ash, and flame were his compass, as were the many screams.
The aerostat had crashed into part of a number ward—Ward 9. Like every other ward—letter or number—Ward 9 had long since abandoned its intended purposes, having given itself over to housing NFP-20 patients. The impact had opened a massive hole in the wall—broad, and diamond-shaped. The vinyl floor crumbled away where it met the outdoors. The aerostat had torn through several of the Ward’s inner walls, strewing red-hot debris in every direction. A short path of devastation scraped a shallow depression in the vinyl, only to dead-end where the aerostat’s engine had exploded. The vehicle had burst in two, setting everything on fire.
A couple of nurses ran about, carrying fire extinguishers.
“Quick,” Suisei yelled, “run!” He waved his hand, beckoning people to the Ward’s double-doored exit. “Get out of here!”
A nurse in wildly stained red scrubs lured toward him.
“What are you doing?” she yelled. “You get out of here!”
One of the fire extinguisher nurses ran up to some flaming medical curtains and sprayed them, only for the extinguisher to explode as a spore cloud burst free. Chunks of the extinguisher’s contaminated tank crashed into the walls. One tore through another nurse’s torso, instantly killing him. The screams of the fire extinguisher nurse were cut off as the corrosive spores ate through her clothes and skin. Her abraded corpse fell, splitting the spreading spore cloud in half. She hit the floor with a thud.
Suisei nearly pissed himself at the sight of the spores spilling out into the flame-heated air.
“Run!” he yelled.
And this time, the healthcare workers listened.
Then, without a moment’s hesitation, Suisei ran into the cloud. The spores parted to either side, like solar wind against the planetary field. The impossibly small, vivid green particles glinted in the daylight like dust in the dawn. Against them, his electrostatic barrier’s normally unseen pataphysics were traced out for all to see.
The outer edges of the cloud caught fire, sending an explosion propagating inward. Before the conflagration could consume the rest and blow him to smithereens, Suisei wove a whirlwind in the air. The vortex sucked in the spore cloud, thickening with green as it pulled the spores in, away from encroaching flames. Suisei made the necessary adjustments on the fly, turning the currents inward to compress the spore cloud into an increasingly small region of space until it was an apple-sized mass of quivering green semi-liquid substance. Bending down, he picked up a stray, singed plastic cup from the floor and set it down on top of the dust, right as he dismissed the spell.
Suisei could already hear the plastic starting to sizzle as the spores’ acidic coating began to eat away at its confinement.
Or was it the floor that was melting?
“Shit,” he muttered.
He could slap himself later, when he wasn’t in the middle of a raging inferno next to a cup of explosive spores.
From his coat pocket, Suisei pulled out some hand sanitizer. Bending it on either side, he broke the plastic flak releasing the alcohol-based fluid within. He then poured onto the spore pile after briefly lifting the cup.
Bases cancel acids.
He noticed the spores’ green color faded the instant they made contact with the alcohol.
He covered it up again. The sizzling seemed to slow.
He just hoped that also meant it would no longer explode when ignited.
Suisei had to force himself to ignore the new waves of pataphysics he sensed whipping across the Garden Court.
The fires needed to be put out before it couldn’t be stopped. The hospital should have had its own fire department, but they hadn’t arrived, which Suisei assumed was because they, like most people, were dead.
So, with the greatest reluctance, Suisei dismissed his electrostatic barrier and got to work.