I was about halfway done eating Lt. Colonel Adam Kaplan’s thighs when I came back to my senses.

I had become death, the destroyer of worlds.

No.

This wasn’t supposed to happen.

No. No no no.

Pushing myself off the ground, I knocked the Lt. Colonel’s half-eaten corpse down the street with a swing of a psychokinetic club.

I didn’t even scream. I just ran down the street, away from the courtyard, sobbing rivers.

What have I done…?

The air was steeped in death’s sweet stink. Even for a pastry-loving sweet tooth like me, the scent was overpowering. Things like masks or rebreathers hardly took the edge out of the stench.

Even from around the corner, I could hear the engines rumbling like bottled thunder inside the trucks lined up in front of the Administration Building. The noise reverberated off the old, tall façades that lined the streets, masking the sound of Adam’s fall. Had I not eaten him as quickly as I had, he would have screamed, drawing others.

That was just one of the million thoughts jostling around in my head as I ran.

I didn’t look back.

Part of me wanted to run around the corner and divulge my sins to the soldiers on duty, but I didn’t.

I didn’t want to inadvertently make more victims.

Holy Angel, what had I done?

I didn’t just have a potbelly. I had a pottorso. Everything between my waist and the base of my neck was a bloated backpack. Adam’s body was dissolving inside me, like sugar cubes in a glass of sparkling wine. I could feel my body tugging at his flesh, sending in tendrils to absorb and ply.

I was counting the seconds until the changes set in.

I ripped off what remained of my hazmat suit’s half-melted headpiece. Without a heartbeat or the need to breathe, I was keenly aware of the soft, fizzing sound my corrosive saliva made as it continued eating away at the suit’s bright green plastic. That, and the boots’ rhythmic clacks on the stone pavement.

Boots my dead feet couldn’t feel.

I dashed through the nearest set of double doors. Ironically, they led me into General Labs—the ground floor, that is. The glass slid out of my way as I approached. I paid no attention to the screen above the door, nor to Werumed-san and his multilingual greetings.

Even here, in one of General Labs’ rear hallways—the very definition of “off the beaten path”—the hospital was packed with people, sick, helpless, frightened, and dying people. The mask dispenser that had been set up by the entrance had been knocked over, along with the bulky unit of waste receptacles nearby. I picked a mask up off the floor and pressed it against my face, not knowing whether it was fresh, and not caring in the slightest, though the sweet scent wafting into my nostrils told me it probably wasn’t.

Things started blurring together. I felt dizzy.

Shoving myself off the door, I darted down a side corridor, frantically searching for a place to hide. I could feel the pressure building inside me, in my body, in my soul. Tears curdled in my eyes.

The Lt. Colonel was sinking into me. The transformation had repurposed his flesh, making it mine. Biomass percolated into me, creeping along in sheets and wriggling slivers.

Spotting a stairwell, I flung open the door and staggered in. A tide of stale air belched up from the resonant abyss, thick with a dry stifling warmth.

My legs gave out at the landing. I toppled forward. I slowed time as I fell, weaving a psychic toboggan beneath me, curling its front up to exert force against my fall.

Sparks flew as my forcefields scraped against the hard edges of the old metal steps. I slid down, belly first; a water slide without the water.

It was a descent in more ways than one. I wasn’t just descending to the first basement level, I was descending into moral darkness.I was descending into humbled wretchedness. I was sinking—drowning.

Came down hard, screaming in slow motion as I bounced off the floor and ricocheted off the wall of the adjacent hallway. I let time run like normal once I’d skidded to a stop. The one of my legs that hadn’t broken yet cracked from the impact. The severed lower half of my right leg jostled about as I settled to a stop, lolling along the floor at tragicomic angles.

I wanted my wife. I wanted my kids. I wanted my son. I wanted my sister.

I wanted the mother I’d never known.

I wanted to take the people I loved and wrap my arms around them and hold them tight, proud that there was no safer place than in my embrace. I wanted Pel to tell me what I needed to do to make everything right again. I wanted Jules to give her snarky deconstructions of my daily foibles. I wanted to duel my son in a ScudRacer match, knowing that the last It’s-It was at stake—the ice cream treat that couldn’t be beat. I wanted the balm of life as it ought to be lived.

But I couldn’t have that, could I?

I rasped and gurgled as I landed on my belly. The lower extremities of my hazmat suit were little more than plastic bags filled with loose, oblong stones.

My powers had killed a person once before, when they’d been hijacked by the demon that Frank Isafobe’s spirit had become. But this was different. I couldn’t excuse this as an accident. It was all me.

The narrative has been stolen; if detected on Amazon, report the infringement.

I tried to get up, but my legs wouldn’t work anymore.

I dragged myself forward, pulling with my hands and claws. Pataphysics bulged along my arms as I pulled myself forward.

I was terrified someone might pass me and see.

My body shivered—a presentiment of imminent change.

And yet…

Looking up, I saw the room numbers beside the doors.

1Ba315. 1Ba316. 1Ba317.

Even if I’d been able to make it to Suisei’s group in time, it wouldn’t have soothed me. It wouldn’t have brought me comfort. There was only one place I could have gone, only one person I had left to turn to.

A friend was a light in the darkness; a chance to be understood, and a reminder that you weren’t alone.

But I was dangerous. Deadly even.

This was my fault. My mistake.

I’d been haunted by demons. Demons of secrets; demons of lies; demons of empty promises, plague, excrescence, and death.

I wanted to exorcise them all. I wanted to shrive myself to my most trusted friend, someone who wouldn’t hate me for what I’d done, even if I deserved it.

But who was I to put that burden on his shoulders? It was my fault. Brand shouldn’t have had to suffer for that. Electric wisps crawled beneath my skin in a strange mirror of my tears and sweat.

And then—once again—fate made my decision for me.

“G-Genneth!?”

Dr. Nowston had stepped out of his lab in Room 1Ba318, covered head to toe in a hazmat suit of his own.

We even wore matching colors.

“Brand…,” I panted, “no… please… get back!” I jutted out my arm at him.

The pressure in my body crescendoed. Skin, bone, and muscle rippled out from between my shoulder blades, all the way down to the tip of my tail, wound up in the suit’s oxygen tank space.

Brand didn’t say anything. He stared at me. For an instant, there was shock in his eyes, but then it subsided. Stolid determination took its place.

He grabbed me in both arms and helped me up.

I was too torn to physically rebuff him. All I could do was moan, “No… it’s not safe.”

He looked me in the eyes. “So?”

And then he dragged me into his lab.

Change ran rampant through me. My flesh burbled. I groaned, but that groan leapt into a yelp as pain shot up through my tail and sent me tumbling forward onto the floor, taking Brand along with me. The pain squeezed my hands, as if my suit’s gloves were caught in a vise—and the vise was tightening.

I sprawled out on the laboratory floor, straining my limbs. I was a boiler ready to burst.

And then I did.

Tears ripped loose all over my suit, and every inch was blessèd relief. My hips bucked. Room temperature air swept in through a tear at the back of the suit, touching my tail. Compared to the suit’s stifling heat, the stale laboratory air might as well have winter’s icy spume. My gauntlets popped. Swaths of plastic dug into the valleys between my fingers. Another tear shot out as I lengthened. The lab’s tiled floor pressed against an exposed part of my belly. I yelped in surprise at the unexpected cold, pushing off the ground with a reflexive psychokinetic burst that flipped me onto my back. The changes came to a halt right as I felt a row of somethings twinge down the middle of my back, along my spine.

I looked up. Brand had risen into a kneeling posture. He hovered over me, his eyes fixated on me, twitching left and right as he took in my every detail.

Slowly, he shook his head. His mouth was as wide open as the door right behind him.

“Holy shit,” he said.

And though it might just have been the glare of the fluorescent ceiling lights off the visor of his yellow hazmat suit, I could have sworn I saw a twinkle in the pathologist’s eyes.

And then he grinned.

— — —

Even before the Green Death came to our world, I was no stranger to weird stuff. I’d once worked with a psychiatric patient who’d thought his wife was a shoe. Still, that was nothing compared to the weirdness I was now contending with.

I was lost in the wake of darkness of my own making.

I was turning into a wyrm.

No: I already was one.

Meanwhile, Brand Nowston was acting like a kid on Shrovestide morning.

Brand had gotten a pair of scissors to help cut off the rest of my hazmat suit. I had to tell him to leave the right sleeve of my coat alone, because the cufflinks contained my chip where Greg had soldered it to the fabric.

I didn’t need to tell Brand to get him to spare my bow-tie, though. He knew how much the little thing meant to me. I was a horrid sight. There was a lot more of me than ever before. A stout column of scaly, umber-purple skin bridged the spacious gap between my waist and where the upper rim of my pants would have gone. It was at least as long as my legs had been.

Any distinction between my tail and my belly was now moot. My unified tail-belly was a broad log from which my legs jutted out at either side. Everything below the middle of my thighs was gone, while what remained of my thighs was waxy in the middle and necrotic black at the edges where it crumbled away. The limbs were shrunken and thin, as if they’d been ground down by a lathe, particularly the points that bore my weight as I used them like struts to keep myself upright. Had they not been utterly dead to all physical sensation, I imagined my thigh-stubs would have felt a lot like stiff burlap sacks, but filled with rice rather than stuff of flesh and bone.

My body was now more tubelike than anything else. My belly had fallen between my legs, where it now merged seamlessly with my tail. Leaning against the cabinets beneath Brand’s countertop, I had an L-shaped silhouette, with my mostly upright forepart and my tail continuing behind me, winding like a river. Muscles in my new stretch of belly tensed to keep my forepart upright, though they were still new enough that every once in a while they went slack with a twitch, forcing me to shift my weight onto my thigh-struts, which buckled under the strain, a bit more of the flesh and bone flaking off as a result. It should have hurt beyond imagination, but it didn’t. Instead, there was the barest feeling of pressure against my underbelly as my broken femurs’ exposed cores scraped across the vinyl floor. Honestly, the sensation was more annoying than anything else, to the point that I eventually resorted to using my powers to keep myself upright and stable just to avoid it.

All my junk was gone, both front and back. I didn’t have a crotch anymore, and even if I did, there was so much more of me than ever before that I wouldn’t have had the slightest idea of where to look for it. Heck, looking at me, you never would have known I ever had anything worth covering up in the first place. As part of my new, tubular profile, everything in the junction where my upper body met my tail had been smoothed over.

“When was the last time you had a bowel movement?” Brand asked.

“I… oh.”

It was then that I realized I hadn’t used the restroom in almost a week.

The more you know.

Brand asking me about my bowel movements was a quintessentially Brand sort of question, and a perfect example of why I was his only friend.

Angel, what I wouldn’t have given to see home videos of him as a kid.

Yet as unreal as it was to feel all this, seeing it was even stranger still. Even though I saw it with my own two eyes, I couldn’t believe what I saw, because what I felt contradicted it.

If you’d asked me to point at my legs, I’d have pointed at my tail. That’s what it felt like. The neural traffic running through my spinal cord turned down my tail instead of my vestigial legs. My body had grown a new limb, and my nervous system’s proprioceptive architecture had been very busy sliding into their new configuration. Seeing it made me cognizant of the changes in a way that bodily feeling simply didn’t convey on its own. It had too many joints. My “leg” was all “joints”, now.

Fudge!

My tail wriggled and thrashed with my stress.

“Hey!” Brand said. “It’s alright. Calm down.” He pressed his hand onto the side of my torso, and slowly, I calmed, though I struggled to keep myself from going through with my deep breathing relaxation habit.

I didn’t want to infect him.

For what it was worth, though, I don’t think Brand would mind, or even notice. He was far more entranced with my changes.