I was nervous, and not just because I was worried about my family’s well-being, and Ani’s, and the uninsured patients, and the pandemic that was ravaging the world, and the fact that I and other people seemed to be gaining magic powers as we proceed along a gradual path of transformation into giant wyrms. I was worried because I was hungry, and Andalon wasn’t there, and because I had to thin my wyrmsight to the point where it was nearly inactive, otherwise I wouldn’t be able to stop myself from counting the nebulous soul-light that flowed into me every time someone died. I didn’t even need to be in the room with them for it to happen. Simply passing close enough to the dead or dying was sufficient for their soul to find its way into me. There was no point in running; the souls phased through matter, and sped up whenever I tried to avoid them, though I wasn’t able to do much in the way of experimentation, what with Jonan alongside me. So, without Andalon to turn to, all I could do was hide my fears as best as I could, and just hold out hope that more demons wouldn’t be headed my way anytime soon.
I figured that accusing Andalon of killing people would be the best way of getting her to appear to me, though that option came with the inherent risk of making her even more angry with me than she already was, which would be a giant leap in the wrong direction as far as our relationship was concerned. And, even if I found a way of summoning her that didn’t antagonize her, where and when could I sit down and talk with her?
Maybe during lunch?
Speaking of which…
I really was hungry. And not just your ordinary kind of hunger. This…
I sighed.
This was going to take some real willpower to oppose. Thankfully, I suppose I had the best motivation a man could wish for: keep yourself from eating, otherwise you’ll turn into an inhuman monster in front of your colleagues and everyone will know that you’re just as much of a hypocrite as the next guy.
My psyche was beginning to show signs of strain. Case in point: for the third time in a row, I yelped as Jonan called my name.
“Hey, Doc, are you alright?” he asked. “You’re kinda… jumpy.”
I leaned forward slightly as I glared at Dr. Derric, though I made sure to keep my distance, for safety’s sake.
“One of my patients exploded,” I said, in a wretched whisper. “I’m scared out of my mind!” (All of that was absolutely true, even if it wasn’t the whole truth.)
“Yeah, I know,” Jonan said. The horror didn’t faze Jonan in the slightest.
I looked at him like he was nuts—and, for all I knew, he was nuts. “Aren’t you afraid of death?” I asked, in a hushed tone.
“No. I’m afraid of impotence, both sexual and otherwise. Also, ignominy—and, again, both sexual and otherwise.” He glanced down at the ground for a moment. “Dr. Howle, I’m more concerned about living than dying. Though, Angel strike me, I’d freak the hell out if Ani died, that’s for sure.”
Then—to my relief—the route Jonan was taking to get us to the pharmacy dispensary brought us past something I could distract myself with by obsessing over it in a blissful rage.
In general, I tried to be as easy-going as possible, though, being somewhat high-strung, it was not infrequently something of a battle, even if most people didn’t notice the outward signs of the fight playing out inside me. However, along with forced sedation and my country’s healthcare protocols and all the insanity they brought down upon us here in West Elpeck Medical Center, there was one other part of the hospital that I simply couldn’t tolerate.
The gift shops.
“Can we take a different route?” I asked.
Jonan shook his head. “No, this route is fine.”
“It goes past the gift shop,” I said.
“What did a gift shop ever do to you?”
“It’s the principle of the thing,” I said.
“Well, we’re going this way. If it makes you feel better, you can distract yourself by explaining your stupid grudge to me.”
I huffed, but otherwise complied.
To be clear—as I explained to Jonan as we walked past the shop—I was not opposed to gift shops in general; heck, the gift shops by the museum in the upper floors of the administration building were great! What bugged me was when you allocated precious space in the Letter and Number wards for a smattering of gift shops just because one of the hospital’s biggest donors was the head of Behr’s Department Store (a subsidiary of DAISHU Retail), and only gave us access to his vast reserves of lucre on the condition that the hospital built and maintained multiple Behr’s shopping outlets on its premises, and that we had to call them “gift shops”, even though they were anything but. Oh, and none of the proceeds actually went to WeElMed.
“Alright,” Jonan said, “I see how you can feel that way. But this is a Monimega store. I fuckin’ love Monimega. They’re the GOAT of all video game companies.”
This particular gift shop specialized in the sale of console games and collectible figurines, many of which had interactive functionality with the games sold. Yes, I did happen to purchase my copy of Super Gerbil World at this particular gift shop about two years prior, but that was only because it was more convenient than driving over to the mall.
“I completely agree,” I said, “but that still doesn’t absolve Behr’s Department Store of sticking commercialism in our already over-commercialized healthcare system.”
“Oh, that’s cute,” Jonan said. “Look, they’ve still got the ad up for Burugi Hunter Tri. Someone needs to tell them about the Green Death.”
For once, I agreed with him.
I shook my head in disappointment. “I still can’t believe the Church partnered with Monimega to make that ridiculous series.”
“That’s right… it’s Church-endorsed,” Jonan said. “Still, it’s a fantastic game.”
“That’s not the point!” I snapped.
Jonan scoffed at me. “You really are on edge today, aren’t you?”
I felt like screaming all my very-justified-reasons for why I felt on edge, but I managed to keep a lid on my rage. Instead, I directed it inward, toward the Church’s marketing department.
Just the tagline for Burugi Hunter Tri was enough to indict the whole enterprise:
Power up with Rousas’ Blessing one more… dinosaurs and all.
Back in the 1770s, when Marvel Jenkins proposed his theory of evolution by natural selection, one of the bigger points of contention was that there was no way mankind could have descended from apes—let alone ones that migrated into the Burugi savannah—because, surely, the dinosaurs there would have eaten them. The swift feathered sailants, with their vicious toe-claws; the terrifying great drakes—giant heads, savage teeth, and absurdly tiny arms; the gregarious raptors that stalked the Polovian woodlands, terrifying the little herbivores. Theories of men crossing the Strait of Edrùg by boat would be sunk by claims that the sea monsters would have eaten them. That, of course, was before we knew sea levels had been lower hundreds of thousands of years ago, during the last Ice Age.
The irony, of course, was that at the same time as the civilized world was rebelling against the notion that ancient man could have overcome the great beasts of the world without divine intervention, Jacob Rousas Sr. was hard at work proving them wrong. The railroad tycoon was not going to let claws, feathers, scales, horns, or sharp teeth stop him from building the world’s first intercontinental railroad.
I think it said a lot about my religion that Rousas Sr. was declared a Lucent—a holy man—by the Church, one to whom the people could pray if they desired him to intercede on their behalf and provide them with the Triun’s blessing for hunting dinosaurs for sport. To this day, we spoke of a “Rousas sale” whenever a large amount of munitions went on sale to the public. Some of the more rebarbative Neangelical denominations had gone so far as to declare Rousas Sale Day a holiday, just to spite the Angelical Church’s more liberal flank.
The story has been illicitly taken; should you find it on Amazon, report the infringement.
Thanks to Rousas Sr.’s railroad and munitions business, the glorious Second Trenton Empire was able to obtain the sweet, sweet lucre that was ‘obviously’ pre-ordained to it by God. In this case, the lucre took the form of rich alluvial gold deposits in the Burugi wastes, south of the Strait of Edrùg and the Pillars of Haim. The Strait—named after one of the Polovian gods of old—lay south of the woodlands and steppe of southern Polovia. According to myth, the demigod hero Haim propped up the earth on the other side of the Strait in mighty mountains, using the bones of the dragons of the seas that he slew in order to quell the raging waters that sought to sink the land back beneath the waves. Trapping the dragons’ bones beneath the mountains kept them from ever returning to life and wreaking havoc on the land once more. (Admittedly, this didn’t have much to do with the Lassedites, but… it did illustrate that figures from Polovian mythology could kick some heinie, and—moreover—that they didn’t need help from a railroad/munitions magnate to get the job done. My old Polovian grandmother—may she rest in peace—would have heartily approved of both these illustrations.)
An inhospitable wasteland of rocks and dust called the Burugi separated the Strait of Haim from the great powers of the Tzebaban Gulf. The stocky shrubs and crooked trees that grew in parts of the Buguri that weren’t awash in seas of sand had more protective scales than a pangolin. Their spines and thorns that could put a shark’s teeth to shame. But, when it came to hostility, the vicious theropods that stalked the Burugi’s herds of horned herbivores put the rest of the region to shame.
With the help of an awful-smelling herb of Odensky extraction, Rousas Sr. won the Great Dinosaur War of 1792 by creating traps for the Burugi’s massive predators, where his mercenary adventurers would slaughter the animals en masse, paving the way for Imperial clerics, merchants, and colonists to plant roots in the land and mine the alluvial gold deposits that lay in wait in Buguri’s dry, dry soil. The most successful of the gold bugs was that contemptible old slave-owning plantation agriculture magnate, Lester Cardermake, who, in concert with Rousas, ended up hunting the great animals to the brink of extinction. Anyhow, the point of all this was that, both now—but especially two-hundred twenty-eight years ago—Trenton settlements in the Burugi were wild, lawless places, where the only law was the weight of gold.
Yet, when it came to chaos, the scene at the dispensary where Jonan and I arrived almost put the Burugi to shame—not to mention all the period TV dramas that strived to recreate its anarchic splendor. There was really only one law in the dispensary: under no circumstances may a physician prescribe medication for their personal use. All other regulations were mere suggestions.
In summary: a bunch of greedy, self-righteous folks forced themselves into a place where they probably shouldn’t have been—and no, I didn’t mean just the dinosaurs.
While Jonan waited in a line leading to one of the dispensary’s three service windows, I stood off to the side, trying my best to stick to the ten-foot-distancing rules. Most people seemed content with semi-compliance, at best. Somewhat to my surprise, many of the people waiting in line were patients of the well-to-do variety, dressed in fine leather shoes and ironed blazers or dresses. The expressions on their faces—many of which were unmasked—exuded self-righteousness and a sense of entitlement. It made Jonan seem downright decent by comparison.
I walked up to the window with him once Dr. Derric’s turn finally came. The woman working behind the thick, plastic window gave me a look, amplified by her white nurse’s cap, curly hair, and aggressively horn-rimmed glasses. Her ID tag identified her as Mildred.
“I’m sorry sir,” she said, in a nasal voice, “but you have to wait in line just like everyone else.”
“I work here, Ma’am, and I need medications for my patients,” I explained.
Sighing, Mildred briefly closed her eyes. “I’m sorry sir, but you’ll have to wait in line just like everyone else.”
“It’s okay, Mildred,” Jonan said, “he’s with me.”
“I see.” She nodded. “So, what’ll it be Dr. Derric?”
“For me?” Jonan answered. "Miforol.” He looked over to me. “And another order for my colleague Dr. Howle.”
Mildred was not amused by Jonan’s blatant defiance of her words, but she settled for glaring at him for a moment. The sequins on her glasses glint beneath the buzzing fluorescent lights overhead.
“Also, I suppose you’re here for … the usual?” she asked.
Jonan nodded. “But of course.”
Mildred leaned forward, crossing her arms atop the countertop. “Can’t,” she teased. “It’s being rationed.” The woman was positively beaming with delight.
Clearly, these two had history, and it looked like Mildred had been long awaiting Jonan’s comeuppance.
Jonan nodded. “Touché.” He titled his head slightly, raising his gaze in thought. His eyebrows peaked as he found his solution. “Well, then,” Jonan said, bending forward, “I hereby invoke the first half of that favor you owe me.”
“You can’t be serious!” Mildred snapped, slapping. “We’re in a pandemic, and you’re going to pull that over me, now, of all times?”
Jonan nodded sincerely. “Favors rapidly appreciate in value during times of crisis. Call me a price gouger if you will, but I’m cashing in on what I’m owed.”
Leaning back, Mildred shook her head and groaned. She muttered under her breath as she turned around and retreated into the dispensary’s depths.
“What’s the usual?” I asked Jonan.
“Dietary supplement,” he explained. “Concentrated essence of awesomeness.”
I rolled my eyes, but didn’t press the issue further. I had no intention of prying into other people’s personal medical issues, especially given how much I was trying to hide my own.
I didn’t want to be a hypocrite.
Mildred was quite good at her job; it took her barely a minute to return to the service window. She slid a stack of pill containers and medication-filled IV bags into the little chamber beneath the plastic window. Jonan pulled out the first batch and handed it to me. Mildred followed up with another batch, along with a small bottle of pills that Jonan quickly pocketed into his coat.
I managed to catch one of the words on the bottle’s label: barbicane. That was a kind of painkiller. I wondered what else those pills had in them.
“I really shouldn’t be giving this to you,” Mildred said.
Jonan smiled.
Mildred rolled her eyes. “Anything else?” she asked. She tapped her nail extensions on the countertop.
Actually, yes, there was something I wanted to ask. “Is the shortage as dire as things suggest?” I said.
Mildred smiled slightly. “How kind of you.”
I couldn’t tell whether she was being sincere or not.
Mildred shook her head. “I’d like to tell you,” she said, “but I can’t.”
“That reminds me!” Jonan said, clapping his hands together. “Speaking of shortages, Mildred, I’m also going to be cashing in the second half of that favor you owe me now.” Jonan pulled his console out of his PPE pocket and tapped its screen several times. The inner surface of the service window lit up, displaying the details of Jonan’s patients. “Here are my patients,” Jonan said. “I expect them to get a bit more than their allotted share of the indicated medications, starting”—he glanced at the digital clock on his console—“now.”
Distressed, Mildred flicked her finger across the service window, scrolling through Jonan’s list. “Dr. Derric, you can’t seriously expect me to—”
“—Oh, I do,” Jonan said, with a nod, “or would you rather me spill the beans about your little… indiscretion?” He pursed his lips in insolence.
Mildred blanched. “Angel’s toes, for a charmer, you really are a dick,” she said, with a shake of her head. “Fine,” she added, “you win.” She turned away.
“That’s what I like to hear,” Jonan said, “also, and it’s Dr. Dick,” he added, putting one of his hands against his visor, as if he was about to yodel. “Also also,” he leaned forward, raising his voice, “make sure it’s a Prescott product. They pay me extra when I prescribe their drugs!”
After a minute or so of stunned silence—me being the stunned one—Mildred came back out with more pill bottles.
“And my patients’ medications?” he asked.
Mildred scoffed and rolled her eyes. “They’re going to kill me for splurging on them, you know.”
Jonan smiled. “Thank you kindly.”
We stepped away, making room for the next person in line. All the while, I stared at Dr. Derric—blond and brash.
Blond and brazen was more like it.
I shook my head in disbelief. “Are you an imp in a human suit?” I asked. “I mean…” I ran my fingers down my PPE visor, “I honestly can’t believe you. You—” stuttering, I pointed at Mildred behind me as we continued to walk away, “did you just blackmail her?” I hissed.
Jonan shook his head. “No.” Raising a finger, Dr. Derric began to lecture me. “Blackmail, by definition, is the use of threats and intimidation to prevent an individual from lawfully engaging in a licit occupation.” Jonan pressed his hand to his chest. “What I have on Mildred involves knowledge of her engaging in unlawful activities, though not of the kind for which I would be in legal jeopardy for not having brought to the attention of an authority.”
I glared at him as we walked. As we passed out of Ward E, we removed our PPE, except for our masks, which we would continue to wear even on the Administration Buildings’ upper levels.
“My father was a lawyer, Dr. Howle. His sage advice was this: a good lawyer strives to follow the spirit of the law, but a rich lawyer knows how to find that spirit and slit its throat.”
“You’re like a comic book villain. You even sell out for Prescott!”
“Anyone with half a brain knows that Prescott’s activities tend toward the unconscionable. I endorse the money they give me, not the ghoulish routes they take to get it. Personally, I think we would all be better off if they cleaned up their act, but, until then, I will keep taking their money. Moreover, in this particular case, Presscott’s versions of miforol and the other antifungals have been proven more efficacious than the generic, and I’m not going to settle for anything less than the best for my patients. More importantly, donazole, endafungin, and zintomicin all have particularly narrow therapeutic windows, so a small reduction in dosage level, no matter how well-intentioned it is,” he tilted his head, “such as what would happen when supplies are being rationed—is tantamount to wasting the medicine altogether. Were these medications developed by experimenting on the Prelatory’s political prisoners against their will? Yes. Does that make it right to waste perfectly good medicines?” He shook his head vigorously. “Not on your life. And during a pandemic? Not on your death, either.”
I stopped in my tracks, dumbfounded. I wasn’t used to such advanced levels of pragmatism.
Noticing I’d stopped, Jonan turned around to glare vexingly at me. “Now what’s wrong?” he asked.
“My idealism is having its ‘blue screen of death’ moment,” I answered.
Jonan smirked. “I’ll get your scruples a tea cozy to keep ‘em nice and comfy.”
“How wonderful,” I muttered.
“But enough chit-chat,” Jonan said. “My kinda-religious girlfriend wants me to go pester upper management for the sake of her scruples, and I’m not going to let her down.”
Jonan walked down the hallway toward an elevator, and I hurried on after him.
“You realize he’s probably going to yell at us,” I said. “A lot.”
Jonan pressed the elevator call button. “Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me,” he said.
“That’s false,” I replied, “that’s demonstrably false.”