I still looked like me.

I gulped. Tears curdled in the corners of my eyes as I ran my fingers down the cold glass.

I still looked like me.

Then, hearing something buzz I looked up and around.

The restroom’s fluorescent lights flickered. My back tingled. I felt that something was wrong, but I didn’t know what until I looked back to the mirror.

“No…”

The mirror no longer showed my reflection. No, it showed a face of shattered mirrors. Different scenes from Frank Isafobe’s life played out in every piece.

Angel!

I staggered back.

If I still had a heart, it would have been racing.

The buzzing grew louder. The lights above the sinks flared like the sun, forcing me to shut my eyes.

“No!”

I opened them as quickly as I could, and then bolted for the door—only for my loafers to skid to a stop on the restroom’s tiled floor.

The ghost towered over me, obstructing the door. Its pixelated ectoplasm-flames spewed out twitching particle streams in yellows, greens, and blues. The specter’s giant, polygonal arm gleamed dully. Electricity crackled at its feet as it stepped forward, slowly lumbering toward me.

Angel, help me…

I staggered back, like a puppet in reverse. “Help!” I shouted. I looked around frantically.

That’s right, I’d locked myself in the restroom.

Fudge.

“Andalon!” I screamed. “Anybody! Help! I don’t know how to stop him! I—”

—Gagging, I fell down onto one knee.

Everything burned.

The lights flickered again as the buzzing returned with a vengeance. It was so loud, it shook my skull.

The specter was hijacking my powers!

Light whipped and lashed at the mirrors above the sinks in metallic strands of blues and golds, shattering them on impact. Glass spewed onto the tile floor like crystal snow. Ducking for cover, I hid beneath the sink. The burning feeling raging through continued; I winced with every pulse as heat burned through my body with every crack. It wasn’t as painful as the first time the specter had used my powers, but how was that going to help me?

“Andalon!” I screamed. “He’s going to kill me!”

Then, two seconds went by without any glass shattering, and I dared to crawl out from underneath the sink. Twisting around, I grabbed the rim of the sink and pulled myself up. I ran for the door as soon as I was up on my feet. I ran like a madman, and I screamed like one, too. I didn’t know if Andalon could hear me or not, and I didn’t care.

“I DON’T WANT TO D—”

—Pressure wrapped around my chest, squeezing the breath out of my throat. I choked. The burning feeling pierced my nerves as psychokinetic force-lines swirled all around me.

Trembling, I turned my head to see Frank’s ghost standing inside the world reflected in the mirror. The specter’s massive arm had reached out through the mirror and into reality, digging its polygonal claws into my chest. My mind burned as the ghost lifted me higher and higher. I tried to scream, but I couldn’t. I kicked and flailed. My tail spasmed, thwacking my left leg.

No. Please, no.

The edges of my vision started to blur.

I DON’T WANT TO DIE!

I cried like a little kid.

More of the specter emerged from the mirror. Its lower body phased through the sink as it stepped out into reality.

ANDALON, I DON’T WANT TO DIE!

Suddenly, time slowed around me. Motions blurred into aurorae. I couldn’t move; I couldn’t feel. I could only think.

Andalon appeared beside Frank’s ghost.

Speak of the Norms…

She floating above the specter, next to a motionless pixel plume. She was crying, profusely. She ran her hands through her hair as she shook her head in dismay.

“You told me to go away, Mr. Genneth!” she said. “You’re just like everybody else! You’re mean to Andalon. You’re angry at Andalon! Everyone is angry, even though Andalon just wants to help!”

Stolen from its original source, this story is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.

I wanted to speak, but I couldn’t.

Andalon. Andalon.

She vanished and time unpaused.

For whatever reason, Andalon’s appearance had broken the specter’s hold on me.

Literally.

I slipped through the phantom hand and fell to the floor. The burning faded along with my hijacked psychokinesis.

“Andalon, I’m sorry for yelling at you!” I screamed, even as I ran toward the door. But then I slipped on a shard of broken mirror and toppled forward into a face-full of glass which scraped against the visor of my PPE.

The burning flared through me. Blue and gold filaments wove a net around me as the specter reached down and wrapped its claws around my torso.

It wrenched me up.

“Andalon, I was wrong!” I yelled, screaming in pain, terror, and anger. I was angry at myself. Angry at fate. “I need your help!” I flailed, but it was useless; all it did was tire me out and give the specter a reason to tighten its grip. “I was wr—”

“—Mr. Genneth…?” Andalon flickered back into view, floating overhead, her back to the ceiling.

Her eyes trembled.

Like before, everything slowed.

I watched the metallic light-threads surrounding me blaze with power as the specter pulled back its arm and threw me into a stall. Andalon screamed. Time continued to slow, even as I flew through the air, into the stall, a tremendous pain exploding at the back of my neck as I hit something. Through the slow time, I felt the lagging pain spread down my spine and shoot out, root-like, into my body, but then, everything went black, and I saw no more.

— — —

Hot breath condensed all over the inside of Jonan’s mask and PPE visor as he rushed into his modified examination room. Shaking his head circulated the air, and helped a little, just not as much as he would have liked.

But he had other things to worry about.

Ileene Plotsky was fighting for her life.

The screeching of the ECG in Dr. Derric’s ears was only slightly louder than the ventilator’s thumps, whirrs, and slurps.

Ileene’s heart rate was through the roof, and her blood pressure might as well have been in the negatives. The necrotic ulcers that ran down Ileene’s arms were linked by hyphae that grew beneath her skin like rivers of spider-webs. Another lesion had recently opened beneath her right knee, rich with black ooze dusted in green.

Dr. Lokanok stood at Ileene’s bedside, with a syringe in hand.

“Ani?” Jonan was a little miffed that his girlfriend had beaten him to the scene, but he could reclaim his superiority later. “What’s going on?” he asked. He’d rushed into the room as soon as he’d heard Ani yell.

“Look,” she said, “her extremities!”

The dark, ugly corpse-bruise pits that had been eating away at Ileene’s hands, fingers, feet, and toes were now stretched and—in places—torn open by inflammation, and by freakish fungal growths; bulbs and shelves emerging from her lesions, reaching for the air.

“Did you take a blood sample?” Jonan asked.

Ani’s expression tightened as she stuck the syringe into Ileene’s arm. “What do you think I’m doing?” She pulled on the plunger. Blood more black than red flowed into the syringe, which she then injected into a nearby blood analysis module’s intake site. The angular, parking-meter-shaped device stood among the group of machines by Ileene’s besides, just as one did beside any patient’s bedside.

The module whirred to life.

One agonizing minute later, the bedside console and Ani and Jonan’s consoles pinged as the results of the blood test marched out onto their screens in a long, multicolored graph—log-scale.

Jonan strode over to the module and tapped its screen, sorting through the different compounds it had assayed. His eyes went wide.

“Damn it: blood lactate is six milmol per liter,” he read. “She’s septic!”

“We need to take blood cultures, now,” Ani said.

“Are you kidding me?” Jonan said, swiftly turning to face her. “That’s time we don’t need to waste! Half of all cases of sepsis are caused by lung infections, and Miss Plotsky’s got one hell of a fungal lung infection!”

Green, purulent gunk curdled at the edges of Ileene’s lips. Black ooze encrusted on the incision where the laryngoscope stuck out of her throat.

“We need to get her on fluids,” Jonan said.

“She’s already on fluids!” Ani said.

Dr. Lokanok grumbled as she pulled her console off the storage dock mounted on the wall. She skimmed through the readout with swipes of her gloved fingertips.

“Her hemoglobin is shot.”

Nodding, Jonan walked up to the wall console and put in an order for packed red blood cells.

“We’ll add the blood cells to the fluids,” he said. “I hope that’ll be enough to stabilize her.”

“Should put her on vasopressors?” Ani asked.

“No,” Jonan shook his head, “not unless there’s no other option. I’m willing to bet she’s already got subclinical pulmonary hemorrhaging, just like all the other the Type One patients with respiratory presentation. Vasopressors will raise her blood pressure, and if her arterial pressure goes too high, it’ll be a blowout, and she’ll drown in her own blood loss.”

“What about the fetus?” Ani said.

“What about the fetus?” Jonan replied, back-sassing angrily, only to blink and realize. “Oh.” He stared blankly. “Fuck.”

Jonan called Nurse Kaylin on his console, to request an emergency ultrasound, but he goofed up and addressed her as “Shorty”, triggering a frantic screaming match that continued even as a nurse arrived with the supply of red blood cells Dr. Derric had requested. Ani got Jonan’s attention with a carefully placed yell, and then made her case to Nurse Kaylin without getting a rise out of her while Jonan hooked Ileene up to the blood packet.

Nurse Kaylin arrived one anxious minute later, wheeling an ultrasound machine across the floor, which she gently shoved toward Jonan before leaving without a word. The metal ball-bearings in the machine’s supporting rack squeaked as the ultrasound rolled across the floor.

Jonan changed his gloves before touching either the rack or the ultrasound machine, pulling a fresh pair from the dispenser on the wall. By the time he’d finished, Ani had already drawn back Ileene’s hospital gown, revealing the septic woman’s tumid belly. Beneath her deathly pale skin, the fungus’ fingertips had encroached on her belly like a wreath.

Opening the tube of lubricating gel, Jonan dabbed some of it on the fingertips of his right hand while grabbing the rack with the other, rolling the ultrasound up to Ileene’s bedside. The weight of the lubricating gel tugged down on Jonan’s gloves as he smeared it across Ileene’s stomach. The subcutaneous fungal filaments passed beneath his hand like slender road-bumps. As he rubbed the lubricant on, he felt a firm mass push up in the upper right-hand corner of her abdomen, as if the woman had swallowed a boulder.

That was most likely Ileene’s spleen.

Thank the Angel she’s unconscious.

Jonan couldn’t begin to imagine the agony Ileene would have felt as he pressed his hand and the ultrasound transducer onto her abdomen and her inflamed organs.

Both Jonan and Ani look at the sonogram’s screen as the ultrasound showed what the transducer in Jonan’s hand heard.

The sonogram was nothing like Jonan had expected. Any trace of the fetus was obscured by swirls of murky, monochromatic clouds. The ultrasound’s pulses bounced off the fungal filaments, causing the hyphae to photobomb the sonogram with forks of white lightning. Occasionally, Jonan and Ani glimpsed more of that same lightning flashing in the depths, interrupting the smooth contours of the fetal image where it could be seen beneath the murk.

Jonan muttered in horror. “It’s bypassed the placenta…”

Ani looked him in the eyes. “We should tell Dr. Howle and the others.”

Fuck, Jonan thought.