Mrs. Miyali’s Broliguez’s body convulsed one final time before going still. She was so covered with fungal growths that, from a distance, you’d think she was a burn victim. The readout on the ECG at her bedside warbled and yawed like a dying bee. Her husband had died about twenty minutes before. The Broliguez’s eldest son, Quatémo, was flatlining, only Jonan was too busy helping Ani with Mrs. Broliguez to dart back and shut off the young man’s ECG.

“No!” Ani yelled, beating her fist onto Miyali’s stomach. “No! No! No!”

The portly corpse wobbled a bit from the force of her blows. Black ooze dribbled up from the impact sites, staining Mrs. Broliguez’s hospital gown. Though Jonan couldn’t see the woman’s skin, from the sound of it, her entire torso was breaking down, like a moldy blueberry—mush and hyphae.

Mush and hype.

“Ani, please,” Jonan said, “get a hold of yourself!” Reaching out, he grabbed Ani by the arm and held her back. Ani’s arm trembled in his grasp for a moment, but then she turned her head to look him eye to eye then broke down and wept, sinking to her knees.

She pressed the helmet of her color hazmat suit against the edge of Mrs. Broliguez’s bed.

“No!” Ani said. “No!”

“Ani…”

Jonan couldn’t bear to see her like this. Her pain was his pain, and he would do anything to make it stop, even if that meant fucking manhandling her.

Sometimes, a person just needed to be hugged.

Bending over, Jonan pulled Ani onto her feet and then wrapped his arms around her the best that he could.

“I’m here for you,” he said. “I’m—”

—But to Jonan’s shock, Ani writhed in his grasp. She turned halfway around and then pushed him away.

Outside the Broliguez’s room, the custom emergency sounds Jonan had rigged for Ward E’s many rooms were all going off.

It was a replay of the earlier death waves—dozens of people passing away in one fell swoop, felled by the plague. Only here, the tragedy was doubled. Yesterday, many of the dying had been sitting up and talking, the Green Death’s advance held at bay by Dr. Skorbkina’s mycophage treatment.

But, over the past hour or so, all of that had fallen apart. As early as that morning, mycophage recipients had begun to take ill once more. As evening dawned, they’d been dropping like flies.

Just like everything else.

“It’s over, Jonan,” Ani said, broken and defeated. The bangs of her long, dark hair were miserably matted against her forehead.

Jonan had never seen her like this before, and he never wanted to see her like it ever again.

She shook her lowered head, letting her arms go slack at her sides. “The darkness is everywhere, now. The Light’s all gone. Was it even there to begin with? I… I don’t know. O, my Holy Angel, I don’t know! I don’t know.”

Jonan felt miserable—and not just because the love of his life was having a crisis of faith. His face was clammy, flushed with heat that Jonan wanted to blame solely on the PPE. He could feel his hair-gel dissolving in his sweat, taking all the bounce out of his hair.

Both their cheeks were sunken beneath their eyes, shadowed by circles of exhaustion.

“It’s only the first waves of mycophage recipients that are dying off,” Jonan said. “The military is still administering the mycophage to people as we speak.” He tried putting on a smile to hide his tears. “Maybe—”

“—No, Jonan,” Ani said, looking at him askance. She turned her head slightly, staring past him, rather than at him. “No more. No more maybes.” She looked at him. “The mycophage isn’t working. I don’t know why the fuck it even seemed to work to begin with, but, I doubt I’ll learn the answer to that mystery before the reaper comes to me.” Her voice cracked. “I’ve been an idiot. My… Queen’s mercy, my mother was right. This is the end. This is how the world ends,” she whispered, “alone and afraid.”

Jonan reached out to her. “Ani—”

“—No,” she said. “Stop, Jonan.” She pushed his arm away, rebuffing him. “Please. Stop.”

Jonan swallowed hard. “Alright, then,” he said. “I’ll stop, just… please,” he begged, “tell me: what can I do for you?”

She stared at him for a while. She smiled, once—dearly, deeply—but didn’t say anything until long after that smile had withered and died, like the Broliguez family’s corpses.

“Could you check on my Mom, please,” she said, barely above a whisper.

Jonan bit his lip. “We can do it together,” he offered.

But Ani shook her head. “No. I…” Tears pooled atop her cheeks. “I can’t. I’m too scared. I don’t want to go in and see her just… lying there.”

“She—she might still be a—”

“—My own father failed to recognize me, Jonan. I don’t understand how I went through that and came out of it walking and talking when I should have been a blubbering wreck like I am now.” She looked him in the eyes. “I don’t wanna see my Mom look at me like I’m a stranger.”

Slowly, Jonan nodded. “Okay, I’ll… I’ll go take a look. But, Ani…?” He stared back at her. “If she’s still there, I want you to be there with her, okay? Either way, I’ll send you a text.”

Ani nodded silently.

“And look on the bright side, babe,” he added, feeling terribly self-conscious, “the mycophage was able to slow the progression of the disease, at least for a little while. Your Mom’s probably still got most of her marbles.”

Ani stared at him in silence, neither smiling or frowning.

Her eyes said, “Please.” They begged him.

Jonan nodded.

Even though it went against his every instinct, Jonan obeyed Ani’s request. And as he turned around and stepped away, he heard footsteps pitter-patter behind him before Ani threw her arms around him.

He stood in place, letting her hold him for as long as she needed.

“I love you,” she whispered.

“I love you more,” he said, without turning around to face her.

He didn’t want to see more of her tears.

But then he did so anyway.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me,” Jonan said, “I’ve gotta do what my girlfriend told me to do.” And for the briefest instant, she smiled. But Jonan knew that smile died the instant he left the room and stepped out of view.

But he kept his word, leaving her to her tears, while desperately hoping that he’d be able to give her the gift of one last talk with her mom.

Hinoka Lokanok’s room wasn’t that far from the Broliguezes’, though it would be a harrowing journey. Alarms were going off all around, and fewer and fewer staff were bothering to deal with them, because so many of WeElMed’s doctors and nurses had already died, and those that hadn’t were pretty much all wishing that they had.

Dr. Marteneiss had been going around with volunteers to gather up any electronics, plastics, or pieces of metal that could be given up and fed to the matter printers to replace their nearly expended medical supplies. Ventilators, in particular, were in high demand, and not just because the Green Death was eroding everyone’s lungs. The black ooze was caustic, enough that it took only a few repeated uses before ventilators, intubation tubes, laryngoscopes and the like cracked into pieces. The staff had been taking to washing equipment with ethyl alcohol to cancel out the acidity, but they’d run out of rubbing alcohol last night, and it seemed NFP-20 had completely spoiled the yeast supplies WeElMed used for alcohol production down in the basement vats.

One of the military scientists had mentioned the spores’ corrosion was due to the acidic coating around the fungus’ spores—something about fluorine compounds gone mad. It was unlike anything anyone had ever seen before.

Just like everything else.

Out in the hallway, there was a ruckus as a nurse and a soldier fought over a gun. The patients on the floor or the benches were too zoned out and in too much pain to react in fear or surprise as the gun went off, firing into the roof.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Another soldier moved to intercept the nurse, but she managed to rip the gun out of the first soldier’s hands, and before anyone could stop her, the nurse shot herself in the head. Splotches of black ooze intermingled with the bits of brain, bone, and blood her suicide splattered on an adjacent glass wall.

The soldier who’d been wrestling with the nurse coughed hideously, panting for breath. “What the fuck…!?” he moaned.

Jonan locked eyes with him. “If they want to die, let them die,” he said, softly. “Don’t be a dick about it. Not now.”

“I…” the soldier coughed again, “I thought you people valued life! How… how can you be okay with this?”

“Just shut up and stop making things worse,” Jonan muttered. He coughed.

Ugh, my head hurts, he thought.

It was probably just the fungus, eating through his brain.

“What do you expect us to do, then?” the second soldier asked.

Noticing the man’s arm was twitching, Jonan briefly mused over which of them would be more likely to die first.

The worst part about the apocalypse, other than everything else? It took all the fun out of gambling. What was the point of making a bet when everything was melting away?

It’s fucking bullshit, Jonan thought, that’s what.

Jonan cleared his throat and answered the soldier’s question.

Rhetorical questions were oxymorons, and they were one of the few things that Jonan was happy to see go.

“For one thing, you can help dispose of the bodies,” he said, much to the soldier’s surprise. “They tend to start growing if you leave them be.”

It was something he’d noticed over the past day or so. As the hospital’s homeostasis fell apart, ordinary duties and upkeep had fallen by the wayside. The fungus had shown signs of frightful postmortem activity in some of the corpses of patients that had been carted out of the hospital and loaded into dump trucks as part of the big post-battle clean-up. Even just an hour or two of a dead Type One lying in place was enough for the fungus to start growing out from the victim’s body, extending eerily root-like structures across the patient’s bed, or sprouting fungal clubs.

“Here,” Jonan said, “I’ll show you.”

The soldiers stared as Dr. Derric walked into nearby patient rooms and turned off their whining ECGs.

“Get in here and help clean house,” he said.

“I thought we already did that,” a soldier answered.

“Macrophage duty is a life-long responsibility,” Jonan replied, flinging open the doors as he stepped out of a room.

The soldiers stared at him in confusion.

“What’s a macrophage?” one of them asked.

Jonan decided to be gracious and attribute that to the mind-eating fungus that was likely chowing down on the soldiers’ memories right this second.

“Now, if you’ll excuse me, I made my girlfriend a promise,” he said, “and I intend to keep it.”

The soldiers left Jonan alone as he walked down the hall. Turning at the corner, he was halfway to Ani’s mother’s room when he passed by Lark’s door, which had been left ajar. Within, the ECG was screeching rapidly.

Tachycardia.

Fuck, Jonan thought.

Jonan’s view of the hallway blurred as he rushed through the plastic tunnel in front of the door and stepped into the room.

Lark was seizing, frothing at the mouth. He shook in bed, rattling the frame. One of his IV lines came unplugged. The stand toppled, crashing onto the vinyl floor.

“Nurse!” Jonan yelled. “He’s—”

—But then Dr. Derric stopped himself.

Everyone was so overtaxed. It was folly to expect the staff to respond to things like usual.

It was a frenetic scene.

Glancing at the readouts on the bedside machines, Lark’s SpO2 was in the shitter. Jonan shot his eyes around, looking for a laryngoscope or an intubation tube, but not finding any.

He checked the cabinets.

“Fuck!” he cursed.

They were empty. All empty.

With a cough and a groan, Jonan ran out of the room and into the one on the opposite side of the hall. The patient inside was very dead, with a bloated mass like a giant puffball emerging from a crack in their skull. By a twist of good fortune, an intubation tube was conveniently located in the corpse’s throat, with the attached squeeze-pump sticking out from the body’s mouth like an empty soda bottle. A scalpel lay on their chest, near a gaping wound that had been cut into the patient’s throat—likely a last-ditch effort to clear the patient’s airway.

Grabbing the squeeze-pump, Jonan pulled the intubation tube out of the corpse’s throat. The tube was covered in slime, spores, and other unmentionable horrors. Jonan darted over to the sink to wash it off, only for the pipes in the wall to snap and groan as he turned on the water. A moment later, a fibrous, tar-like wad of black ooze splattered out from the faucet, along with a puff of green spores that instantly began eating away at the sink’s metal basin.

“Fuck,” Jonan cursed.

Walking up to the corpse, he grabbed the edge of their gown, lifted it up, and wiped down the tube. The caked-on ooze cracked and squished as he rubbed it off, revealing an intubation tube that looked like it was on its last legs.

But it was good enough.

Jonan turned his head down the hallway and yelled “clean up in Room 112!”—the room’s number—as he ran out of one quarantine tunnel and into another.

Jonan felt like his ribs were dripping lava.

Rushing into Lark’s room, Dr. Derric wrapped one arm around Lark’s head, holding it steady in the crook of his arm, and then used his other arm to unceremoniously jab the intubation tube down the singer’s talented throat. He felt resistance.

Something was blocking the airway!

Lark responded by making some involuntary choking noises.

This was good. There wasn’t much Jonan could do for multi-system organ failure, but choking?

That, I can fix!, he thought.

Grabbing the pump, Jonan pulled the tube out slightly, then squeezed the pump hard and rammed the tube back into Lark’s throat—but gently, of course.

And then he let go.

Dr. Derric flinched as the suction pulled a glob-mass of black ooze and worse out of Lark’s throat and into the intubation pump’s innards. Beneath his elbow, Jonan could feel Lark’s diaphragm spasming, so he stepped back and pulled the now-useless intubation unit out of the singer’s throat and tossed it in the general direction of the sink.

To Jonan’s relief, Lark keeled over the side of his bed and wretched, hawking up the stuff of nightmares. The motion snapped off the ECG’s electrodes, but just by looking and listening, Jonan could tell that Lark was breathing again. Yes, his breaths were ragged and each one made the singer’s face contort in pain, but at least they were breaths.

Running around to the other side of the bed, Jonan helped Lark lay back down. Lark’s body was emaciated and frail. A glance at the singer’s legs showed more fungal hyphae than muscle in between his skin and bones.

Lark’s breaths were shallow and rasping. His eyes twitched. Cyanosis and deathly pallor fought for dominance of his skin tone.

He needed a ventilator.

Jonan ran up to the door and yelled. “I need a ventilator!”

But no one came.

Bending over to pick up the intubator—which had landed on the floor—Jonan hurried over to the sink, praying to all the gods that didn’t exist that the sink would work.

He turned on the faucet.

“Beast’s teeth!” he hissed.

It worked!

Jonan started washing out the tube and pump. The wash water turned black, stinking of sweetness and death and earth. But then Lark spoke, and Jonan dropped everything.

“D-Doc… please,” Lark panted. “C’m’ere.”

Jonan ran up to Lark’s bedside. “I’m going to intubate you again,” he said. “I’ll keep you breathing until—”

—The singer just barely managed to lift his arm to contravene Jonan.

“I c-can’t talk with a fucking… tube in my throat.”

Lark’s blackspot eyes rolled over to look at Jonan.

“I gotta get this off my chest,” he rasped.

At that moment, Jonan realized he was breaking one of his rules for medicine: don’t get attached to the patients.

Time and again over these past few days, Ani had shared with Jonan her concern that he was numb to the death and horror in their midst. She was worried he was holding it all in, and that he was setting himself up for a major emotional breakdown.

Obviously, Ani was right on the money, but he couldn’t just open up and admit that to her. Jonan wanted to be strong for Ani, for her sake, and if that made him guilty of toxic masculinity, it was a distinction he’d bear with pride.

Jonan had to fight to keep his hands from trembling.

It wasn’t just that he was upset that his favorite singer was not long for this world. Lark’s impending death was but the final straw in a litany of failures unlike anything Jonan had ever experienced.

Jonan was terrified of failure, and only sheer stubbornness had kept him from drowning in it over the past week. But, like WeElMed’s supplies of ventilator, Jonan’s endurance had run out.

The deaths of the patients hurt him, obviously. Death was bad, especially when it brought about the end of the world. But, to Jonan, the hustle and bustle of the city and wilderness’ unvarnished glories were just ornamentation—diversions to distract and entertain.

Ani was his world. He’d lived most of his life chasing after profit and creature comforts, but then little miss Lokanok had come around and given him something to really live for.

And I’ve failed her.

He let her hope die. Was it unreasonable to expect himself to single-handedly keep Ani’s sunshine smiling? Absolutely. But she was worth it, and if Jonan Derric could do everything else, he should have been able to do this, too!

Jonan wept.

He’d failed her, just like he’d failed Lark.

“Fuck…” He breathed through his teeth, clenching his fists tight.

He looked down at Lark.

At that moment, Jonan remembered my earlier words: the transformees can interact with the spirits of the dead.

He wondered if they could help him; if they could help Lark.

“I suppose you know you’re dying, right?” Jonan asked.

Lark nodded. The singer coughed horribly. Blood and ooze dribbled over his lips.

“I’ve got my last words,” Lark said.

“There’s…” he shuddered as he coughed. “Oh God…” his arms trembled. Tears twinkled at the edges of his still-bright eyes. “I…” he gasped. “I made a recording of me… singing opera.”

Jonan’s eyes widened. “Holy shit…” he muttered. “Do you have it on you?” he asked.

Lark tried to nod, but simply clenched his eyes shut in pain. “In me. My… chip.”

Here, Jonan saw something he could do—a way he could give fate the finger as the fungus dragged the world into the fuming pits of oblivion.

“It’s not too late,” Jonan said. “You can still be heard. You have an incredible voice, Zongman. I could play the recording on the PA. Everyone in the hospital would hear it. You don’t have to take this secret to your grave.”

Lark barely shook his head. “It wouldn’t matter. Wouldn’t be… me,” he said, softly.

Jonan furrowed his brow. “What? What are you talking about?”

“I could give it to you,” he said, “but I won’t. It’s hidden… and it’s got to stay hidden. Its wings are… broken. It’s… not gonna fly.” His lips puckered. “Not me. Not what I want. Not me.”

“W-What?” Jonan sputtered. “Lark! Zongman! Please!” Jonan coughed. “Don’t fucking do this to me! Give this one win, please! Please! Your music means the world to me. It gave me a reason to keep on living when I thought there was nothing left for me. Let me repay you for that. Please! Don’t give up. Don’t give up!”

Lark’s body shuddered. His head tilted back, shriveled muscles straining one last time.

“M-Music school…” Lark said, “Didn’t flunk out. I quit.”

“Wait, what?” Jonan said.

Lark’s mouth opened wide, gasping for breath that wouldn’t come.

“I should have been born a woman,” he muttered. Then his eyes and lips fluttered, ooze, spores, and spit frothing from the singer’s mouth as he fell into another grand mal seizure.

Dr. Derric refused to let his favorite singer’s last words be a cliffhanger. He spent the next few minutes battling against Zongman Lark’s failing body. He got out the defibrillator, then intubated him and pumped and pumped and pumped, yanking out his console and yelling a text message at Dr. Marteneiss to bring him a ventilator come hell or high water.

Miraculously, Dr. Marteneiss arrived a couple of minutes later, and with a ventilator to boot.

“Get him stable, for the love of God,” Jonan said.

“Where are you going?” Heggy asked.

“I’ve got boyfriend shit to do!” he’d said, walking off in a huff.