As a walking corpse, I’d learned that my panic attacks could no longer knock me unconscious. Unfortunately, that did not mean I was immune to the rest of their effects.

As I fast-walked down the hallway, it started with wheezing. I wheezed softly at first, but then louder and louder. I was like a salmon swimming upstream, only the water was air, and it was too much for the fish to breathe as it darted away from the slobbering bears upstream, leaping out of the water like a skipping stone as it fought to live with all its will.

It stole out of sight through the nearest vacant bathroom door, into a spacious porcelain cave meant for one and one alone, clicking the lock shut behind me.

I was blinded by light. Everything seemed to spin. I let the ventilation fan’s white noise enveloped me like an oncoming fog.

I was greeted by the familiar sensation of my chest tightening. Pressure mounted. Everything felt stiff.

I couldn’t breathe.

I ripped off my visor and the face mask underneath it. I pulled off my hairnet and tossed it onto the floor.

My legs buckled. I pressed my back flush against the door. My jaws clenched, and my unlucky tongue got caught in the middle—between my teeth. My mouth filled with pain and blood. I gagged as I swallowed the blood, spitting some onto my gown and the white, vinyl floor. I sank downward in little spurts. The back of my PPE gown scraped and squeaked against the door with each drop.

I guess the dead can die.

I let my head go slack. It was like dying all over again.

Seeing Kurt like that… it was like someone had shoved a rat-king down my throat. The thing slowly began to twitch and claw as seconds turned to minutes and the ramifications of what I was seeing had begun to slam into my mind.

Beneath the fluorescent lights, somewhere in the white noise between the door and the toilet boil, time lost its meaning.

Panic attacks had that effect.

It took a while before my tonic immobility gave back the control of my hands and arms. It happened at the same time as my shallow, stumbling breaths popped back into a more normal pattern. Immediately, I tucked my legs in, wrapped my arms around my knees, and cried.

As I sniffled and gasped, I caught my reflection glancing at me from the mirror over the sink on the wall opposite the door. It seemed so far away. So high. It added to the illusion that I was watching myself from somewhere outside myself, peering at myself as I hid huddled behind my knees, like some kind of sick joke.

I wiped the tears from my eyes.

Then my stomach exploded.

Toppling forward, I crawled across the grout and the cold tile, coming face-to-face with the water in the toilet. I grabbed the bulky plastic toilet bowl with both hands, lurched forward and dry heaved. Dregs of stomach acid and leftover noodles burned up my throat and into my mouth. Fire stung at the wound in my tongue. But with my panic attack in the rear-view mirror, all I could think about was Kurt. The images came flooding back.

Images of his body distended to inhuman proportions. Images of his skin sloughing away from the advancing fungal textures.

I heaved again, nothing going.

Images of his thick, flaccid tail lolling through the back of his gown, its tip sweeping side to side across the floor.

One more heave, and then I was done. I rose to my knees and pushed myself up, bracing myself against the toilet seat. I made for the sink, turned on the tap as cold as it would get, and then washed and drank.

This can’t be happening.

I splashed water on my face.

It’s not possible. It’s not possible.

I splashed again, rubbing with my fingertips—my cheeks; my nose; the circles beneath my eyes.

I. Went. To medical school.

Imagination divided the world into the possible and the impossible, and the line between them was clear. If man were made to fly, he’d have evolved the wings to do so.

I pushed on the sponge dispenser. A gob of pale blue goop spilt into my hand and then crackled, shriveled, and popped as it began to solidify. Air holes bubbled out of it, and in seconds, I held a sponge in hand, which I then used to wipe the blood off my gown and the floor. Going back to the dispenser, I pressed a button. A dab of solvent dripped onto the sponge, which I then plopped into the sink. The sponge combined with the water and melted away, taking red blood with it. I barely noticed the sound of water anymore, only the silence left in its wake as I shut off the tap.

If a man came back from the dead, it’s only because he wasn’t as dead as we thought he was.

I gripped the porcelain sink to keep myself steady. Its edges were beveled and slippery smooth. My eyes wandered up to the mirror. My face was flushed red; my unkempt bangs drooped and dripped.

“People don’t transform into snake monsters,” I whispered.

I stared my reflection in the eyes.

“You’re not turning into a monster,” I said.

I stood up straight and wiped some water from my mouth.

“You’re not turning into a monster,” I said, louder than before.

I opened my mouth and took a deep breath.

“You’re not tur—”

—Something moved. Inside my mouth, something moved, and not in any familiar way.

I leaned toward the mirror to get a better look.

Past the blood clot coagulating on my tongue, tiny, black rivulets moved across the back of my throat, flowing over the oral mucosa and the channels of my palate like drops of ink.

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“No,” I moaned. I shook like a sprinkler head. “No, no no, no no no no…”

I had to get my clothes off. I yanked off my PPE gown and gloves in one fell swoop, peeling it off like a second skin. But I didn’t stop there. I tore off my coat and flung it to the floor, my fingers fumbled and trembling as I undid my bowtie and then my shirt’s collar buttons underneath it. Pop. Pop.

Each button freed was a relief.

Pop. Pop. Pop.

My shirt and bowtie joined my coat on the floor, as did a flurry of little particles—like medical snow. On instinct, I whisked them off with swipes of my hands, but then stopped as I realized what the flakes and threads were: hair; bits of skin.

They’d peeled off my torso.

Staring at the mirror, I opened my mouth to scream, but all I could manage was a stifled whimper. Slowly, I slid my fingertips down the cold, hard glass.

Where the skin had flaked off my chest, the flesh below was dark and violet. Like a flower of evil, it blossomed across my chest, erupting from my sternum and spreading up to just past my clavicle. A viscous ichor covered it, halfway dried.

Looking down at the detritus I’d shed, I spotted two, pill-sized nubs on the floor next to my coat. Staggering, I nearly hurled all over again as I realized that those nubs were my nipples. They’d sloughed off.

My body had shed them like old scabs.

At that moment, my medical training finally took over. This let me survey my transformed chest with something like detachment. Or maybe I was just disassociating.

The rash—if you could call it that—was pretty much the same as what I’d seen on Merritt and Kurt. Aside from the location, the only other noticeable difference was the color. Merritt’s were green; Kurt’s blue; mine, a dark violet—almost black, but not quite. Bits of dark goop lingered at the rash’s periphery where the skin had turned necrotic. The dark flesh at the center had pushed up at my skin, prompting it to peel away like an onion’s outer rinds. Dark tendrils wormed their way out from the edge of the rash, traveling beneath my skin, en route to conquer the rest of my body, starting with my torso.

I ran my fingers across my changed chest. My new skin felt my fingers every bit as much as my fingers felt my new skin. It was warm to the touch. And not just that: it had an unexpected texture as it brushed against my fingertips. Looking more closely in the mirror, I realized there was a minute diamond pattern etched into the skin. Each diamond was maybe a third of the size of my smallest fingernail.

Scales. They were scales.

And they were mine. They were a part of me now.

It was all a part of me.

The room spun. Adrenaline raced alongside my heart.

Kneeling, I ransacked my coat pocket, pulled out my personal console and yanked the stylus from its storage slot.

It was the sharpest object I had on me.

Gritting my teeth, I stabbed the stylus into my chest, not knowing what would happen. I guess I hoped to crack it, or maybe pierce it or mar it somehow. It wasn’t right. It shouldn’t have been there. I was human, darn it! I wanted it off!

It barely even tickled. Had I not done it to myself, and watched myself do it to myself, I don’t think I would have noticed it.

I did it again, this time with my eyes closed. Other than the slightest sense of pressure from me trying to stab myself with a console stylus, I would have thought I was scraping the stylus against a wall of concrete. Opening my eyes, I saw that little pencil shavings of the stylus had trickled down my chest and onto the floor. Startled, I lost my grip on the stylus. It clattered onto the tile. But as I reached down to pick it up, my tongue suddenly spasmed. It was like a cramped muscle, except it didn’t hurt.

Leaning over the sink, I dared to open my mouth and look inside.

The mirror clearly showed the wound on my tongue: I’d bitten part of the way through the tip. As the next spasm came, tendrils wriggled out from the cut in my tongue, reached across the gap, plunged into the other side. My tongue spasmed as the tendrils tensed up, and spasmed again as the tendrils pulled the severed parts back together, sealing the wound from within.

Gagging—nearly choking—I fell to my knees. I was powerless to stop a couple more dry heaves from wracking my body. All I could do was press my palms onto the cold white tiles on the floor and beg for it to end.

Suddenly, as if by magic, my wish was answered.

Be careful what you wish for.

The spasms in my chest, throat, and diaphragm ceased. In their place, my whole body became like lead. For an instant, I thought I smelled ozone. But then something changed. There was a warmth in my chest. Feelings, connections, worries, and questions started creeping into my mind one by one.

Something had changed. Something inside me. It took a second to figure out what it was.

My chest… it wasn’t dead. Everything else still felt dead and rotting and doomed, but not my chest. The changed part… it felt… normal. And not only that…

I couldn’t feel my heartbeat.

A shiver ran down my spine. Panicking, I pressed my fingers onto my wrist, feeling out the ulnar artery. But there was no sign of a pulse.

I squeezed one of my fingers.

Nothing.

I prodded my neck, poked my shoulder, and rubbed the back of my jaw.

Nothing.

Dread dusted my shoulders like so many snowflakes.

What would happen if my colleagues saw me like this? Would they lock me away, like I had done with Merritt?

Even… even if I deserve it, I…

The snowflakes grew.

Turning around, I fixated on the doorknob.

What if someone wanted to come in?

“Oh God. Angel Angel Angel!”

I threw on my clothes as quickly as I could, fastening buttons in the wrong places, undoing them, fixing them, and then fixing them again. It was like Pel always said: I was terrible at dressing myself when I was in a hurry.

Pel.

Icy dread pierced my dead heart. I cupped my hand over my mouth and screamed. I wept.

“Holy Angel…”

Pel. Jules. Rayph.

If I’d still had a heartbeat, it would have gone AWOL.

Suddenly, I had a nightmare.

No: a full blown hallucination.

The walls around me melted away as new walls replaced them, dripping into being. I saw myself sitting on a bench in a hallway with my console in my hands, only I was like Kurt. I was long and serpentine, with tail and neck trailing in back and front. I bent my neck forward like the curve of a question mark, too tall to properly fit inside the hallway.

My console rang the dial tone of a videophone call.

My vantage point suddenly shifted. Now I was floating with my back against the ceiling, staring at the screen alongside my monstrous doppelgänger.

Jules and Rayph answered the call. Their mother was in the kitchen, lost in the zen of meal-preparation.

My serpent-self spoke. “Hey, kiddos, could you get your Mom on the screen, please? Your Dad’s got to tell her that he’s turning into a monster.”

I watched my children’s eyes go wide as they watched bloodshot darkness bloom in my monster-self’s eyes. It trickled down my skin. My body morphed and swelled.

Closing my eyes, I knelt down and hunched over, screaming into my hands. My eyes welled up. I breathed and breathed until I felt like I wasn’t about to split into a thousand pieces, and then, slowly—slowly—I opened my eyes.

I was back in the bathroom; the hallucination was gone. But I wasn’t entirely sure what was real anymore.

Gingerly, I picked up my lucky yellow bowtie. I held it tenderly, revering it, adoring it, like a relic of a Lassedite, even as my hands trembled.

If I got found out, I’d never see my family again. I’d spend the rest of my days in the dark depths of a DAISHU laboratory on a secret private island in the middle of the Irenic Ocean.

Could I run?

Who am I kidding? I wouldn’t run even if I could.

Brand, Heggy, Ani, Cassius… everyone… they’d never look at me the same way again. Heck, I’d never look at myself the same way again if I turned tail and ran away! My patients, my colleagues…

I swallowed hard.

My redemption.

Fleeing would be an act of self-betrayal myself. I’d already halfway apostatized from religion. If I apostatize the values I held dear, what would be left? What would I be anymore? I’d… I’d just be a house built on sand—a house of sand—fit only to be washed away by the sea.

“What the heck am I going to do?” I ran my fingers through my hair.

It was an impossible choice.

I wept. I made my choice, and wept for my fate.

I would not force my family to watch me metamorphose into a monster. I couldn’t. But I was too sad, weak—pitifully weak—too hideously hope-sick—to go up and abandon my post in a time of crisis.

I couldn’t leave.

I asked the Godhead why it had forsaken Merritt, Kurt, myself, and everyone else. It wouldn’t be the first time I’d asked that kind of question of the Holy Triun—the Three-in-One—and it hurt too much to keep believing that the day would come when I might finally get an answer.

“Mr. Genneth…?”

I didn’t need to look to see who it was.

Andalon.