I sat there for a bit, shaking my head.
My instincts told me that the right course of action would be to sneak in doses of stimulants to wake my patients in order to talk to them. Now that I knew the dosage they’d be given, I had a pretty good idea of how much I’d need to wake them. On the other hand, common sense told me that defying my employer’s orders while in plain view of a state-of-the-art high-resolution security camera would get me fired “quicker than an assault rifle in a Costranak drug cartel,” as Dr. Marteneiss had so charmingly put it.
Swiveling around atop the stool, I looked up and scrutinized the security camera. The camera was tucked up in the upper corner of the room, too high for me to reach. And, even if I could reach it—say, by a ladder, though that would be a whole other can of wyrms (I can’t escape the pun.)—my innocence would be a tough sell, what with the camera having recorded me covering it up.
Talk about self-incrimination.
Fudge.
I turned around again.
You’d need to be a wizard to pull it off.
For a moment, my life was like a cinema cartoon; in my mind, a gerbil ran on a wheel, the metal creaking as it spun. Had I been facing the camera, I imagined my widening eyes and grinning lips would have looked rather suspicious. But I wasn’t, so it didn’t.
It felt good, knowing I’d just been clever. I rode my—very narrow—sense of self-satisfaction all the way back the elevator, down to Ward E, and over to the dispensary where I requisitioned myself a syringe along with several ampules of noxtifell and quixalin—a very stimulating stimulant. The cleverness carried me back to Room 268 without a hitch. I was so pleased with myself, I almost forgot that Merritt and Cassius were trapped in a hell of my own, sinful making.
Fudge…
I returned to Room 268, guilt cresting over me in waves. It did a good job of dousing my excitement.
Yes, you’d need to be a wizard to neutralize a security camera without being seen. But—lucky me—my recently acquired levels in the Wyrm character class gave me access to arcane spellcasting. I could use my powers to neutralize the security camera and none would be the wiser. The only reason I hadn’t put this plan to work the instant I’d devised it was because I knew our word-class IT department—particularly that Pfefferman fellow—would be on the case the instant the camera feed was cut out, obscured, or otherwise interrupted.
Now, though, I had everything I needed for a quick in-and-out sting operation, and hopefully, none but the Moonlight Queen herself would be the wiser.
Though my ability to create weaves had certainly improved after my acquisition of magic sight, I still wasn’t exactly confident in my ability to reliably give my psychokinetic spells the proper aliquot of oomph. Fortunately, for what I wanted to do, there was plenty of room for error. Still, it was another chance to practice, and I wasn’t about to dismiss that out of hand, especially now that Andalon wasn’t at my side to help me.
Rising to my numb feet, I crept out into Room 268’s vestibule, taking care to position myself where I could see part of the security camera in the room beyond without it seeing me.
“Alright,” I muttered, “focus.”
It helped to use a musical analogy. The task before me was a lot like a solo in an old old concerto grosso. The spell (what else was I going to call it?) had to have enough strength to rise above the background but not so much that it would rupture the rest of the ensemble and offset the music’s balance. Besides, if you screwed up while doing a solo, it was always better to screw up quietly. There was less of a chance of being noticed.
As I breathed in, I pretended I was playing my clarinet, except weaving a psychokinetic web instead of a sonic one. Luminous, pearlescent fibers coalesced in my hands in a swirl of luminous “fibers”. The colors were brilliant: daffodil strands; sapphire gleams; jellyfish tentacles arranged in an ever-shifting argent geometry. I slid my focus over to the camera. My field vision was like a console’s touchscreen and my eyes were like the fingers. I just had to flick them across the screen while willing energy to bloom and sock it to the camera—just not too much.
Now!
The blob of power lashed out like a serpent uncoiling. It phased through the doors’ glass panes and struck the security camera, blasting it off the wall. I flinched at the camera’s rapid crash onto the floor.
Hot diggity dog! I did it!
I clenched my fists, arms shivering with satisfaction.
“Maybe I’m not such a lost cause after all…” I muttered.
But enough patting myself on the back; I had patients to attend to. More to the point, the clock was ticking. I figured I had at most ten minutes before the IT crew arrived.
Pulling the bottle of quixalin out from my PPE pocket, I entered Room 268 and walked up to one of the cabinets, from which I retrieved a syringe—just one—and then loaded it with an appropriate dose. I’d already decided my best course of action would be to wake only one transformee at a time. Fortunately, choosing who to wake up was a no-brainer.
Pulling up his sleeve, I injected the stimulant into Kurt’s forearm and then waited. After about thirty seconds, I started worrying that I’d screwed up when Kurt’s eyes suddenly fluttered open, his body spasming like someone had dropped him into a cold pool. Instantly, he bolted upright, wild with hunger. Saliva leaked out from his lips and dribbled down his chin. It looked like lime juice, cloudy—only here, tinged with green; it hissed as it landed on his bed and blankets, giving off a tiny plume of smoke.
“Food!” Kurt yelled. He lunged at me, grabbing me with both hands. “Food!”
I blurted out the first alternative that came to mind: “Your bed! Eat your bed!”
Merritt had eaten a blanket and the outer casing of an operating table, while I had eaten plastic and a metal stool, and—not to mention—had considered eating dirt. Dirt. Surely, bedsheets had to be on the menu.
Kurt whipped his head to the side and glared at his bed. He cocked his head at an angle, like an eagle appraising a kill, and then avidly dug in. He began with the sheets, stuffing them into his mouth and then jabbing them with his fingers to keep him there.
It was like a clown pulling rags out of his throat, only in reverse. Kurt slurped the sheets down. His tail wriggled out from between the ties as the back of his hospital gown, wagging with pleasure. Soda pop sounds bubbled in his mouth. Kurt devoured the blanket as soon as the last bits of the sheets had disappeared down his throat. He grabbed the pillow after that, biting into it like it was a giant marshmallow. The edges of his bite marks smoked slightly, blackening as his acid burned them. I heard them crackle and sizzle, though there was no sense of heat, nor any trace of spark or flame.
Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.
Watching him eat started making me hungry again, so I sat down at the foot of his bed and stared out the window for the couple of minutes it took for him to fully chow down on the mattress after he’d finished eating his pillow. I tried not to gape and look, but it was difficult, especially with the sounds of the old bed’s springs groaning beneath him as he advanced. Kurt was like a caterpillar on a rose bush, gnawing away at a leaf, except the leaf was a mattress. When he’d eaten about a third of the mattress, he suddenly stopped. Then, slowly, Kurt looked up from his meal and looked me in the eyes.
“Dr. Howle?” He blinked, uncertain and off kilter, as if coming down from a drug high. “What happened to—”
—But then he stopped and groaned.
We stared in horror and awe as Kurt’s transformation had its way with his body. Unseen hands molded him before my eyes. In those moments, he was more clay than flesh; a figurine, unfired and moist. New layers of muscles and scales rippled down his tail. Kurt’s tail grew, doubling in length, and then it grew more, until it was nearly as long as a grown man was tall, and thicker than both his thighs, at least at where it emerged from the base of his spine. Kurt clasped his head—maybe afraid he’d literally lose his mind—but his lengthening neck soon whisked his head out of his grasp, forcing him to adjust his arms and posture to keep his hold. All of the new flesh was dark blue, like the earliest dawn, and reticulated with minute, lozenge-shaped scales.
Kurt’s hands twitched as black claws erupted from the tips of thumbs and pointer and middle fingers. The third and fourth fingers on both hands blackened and shriveled, as did his nose, which fell off his face like a leaf at summer’s end, leaving twin sinus holes glaring darkly on his face. His right ear joined his nose an instant later. Both our gazes fell to the floor, chasing the fallen body parts, only to watch as a handful of blackened, oblong gobbets spilled onto the floor. By the time I realized they were his toes, Kurt had already bent over and plucked them into his hand like they were a bunch of jacks. He popped them into his mouth and swallowed them whole just as quickly, only to shudder and stare at his hands in revulsion once he realized what he’d done.
The waves of change soon slowed to a crawl, stopping almost as suddenly as they had begun. His claws stopped mid-eruption. Only a handful of his fingernails remained, the rest having sloughed off, either because emerging claws had pushed them out of the way, or because they’d been bound on fingers that had rotted and mummified.
For a while, Kurt didn’t say anything. He gawked at his tail, his elongated neck craning over his shoulders. We both watched his lengthened tail sweep idly from side to side, scales scuffing softly against the floor.
“Doc…” Kurt said, eyes bulging, “what the hell is happening to me?”
Even his voice had changed, though voices would probably be a more accurate description. It sounded like two voices speaking at once, though at completely pitches—maybe halfway between a major third and a perfect fourth. “What happened?”
The pitches warbled with anxiety, squirming in a two-part polyphony
Gently, I clasped onto one of Kurt’s hands. I told him as much as I could share without having a breakdown of my own.
“You’re transforming into a wyrm,” I said, bluntly.
Kurt’s jaw dropped. “I’m turning into an earthworm?”
I shook my head. “Wyrm, with a Y. W-Y-R-M.”
He raised his eyebrows.
“It’s a snake dragon thing,” I said, describing the Wyrms from Catamander Brave. “They have arms, but no legs. And no wings, either. But they still fly.”
I mean, really, what else did I have to go on?
Kurt wept. “How is any of this possible?” he said, barely above a whisper.
I guess my guesses were just making it worse.
Shrugging, I averted my gaze and shook my head sympathetically. “Remember what I said, the more you eat, the more you change.”
But my words flustered him. “That’s not what I meant!” he said, angrily waving his claws.
I sulked deeper, fidgeting with my bowtie, and then pressing down on my hairnet. “I’m sorry, Kurt,” I said, “I knew what you meant, and I wish I could give you the answer you deserve.”
Kurt looked over his fellow patients, and I watched him as he stared. If Andalon had been there, I would have been able to use her transformee-mind-reading-power to know what was going through his head. Instead, I could only speculate—though it wasn’t that difficult.
“When last we met,” I said, “the higher ups had the room with laughing gas. Dr. Marteneiss pulled me out while a bunch of nurses sedated all of you.”
Kurt shook his head. “Why would they—” but then he cut himself off and pursed his lips. “Because what’s happening to us is terrifying,” he said, a moment later—answering his own question. He turned to face Werumed-san. “And, let’s face it,” Kurt looked down at his own two hands, “…we’re dangerous.”
I sighed as I turned to face him. “Kurt, the only dangers are from the unknown, a loss of control, and…” I let my eyes wander over to Letty’s unconscious form, “and the bad apples—those of you who won’t let anyone control them.“
Kurt shivered, “How can you say that?” Disbelief was ripe in his eyes. “You saw what that freaking mascot did! If I hadn’t tackled him—” but then Kurt lashed out with his tail and clonked it against one of the feet of his bed, causing the metal foot to snap off and skitter across the floor.
We both yelped as the bed lurched to the side, leaning at an angle, its other feet scraping the floor. I slid off the edge of the bed and onto the floor.
Kurt winced. “Sorry…”
I chuckled—and genuinely. Nothing about it was forced.
I looked up at him, meeting him in the eyes. “We’re slowly learning more and more about this. I think we’ll be able to help you learn to manage these powers—you, especially, Kurt. I’ll need your help keeping the others under control.” I scratched the back of my neck. “I can’t stay in Room 268 twenty-four/seven, and you’ll be in a far better position to do something when things go south, as they almost certainly will.”
Kurt pointed at his chest with one of his new claws. “Me? Why me?”
I smiled gently. “Because you’re a good person, Kurt Clawless,” I said, “one who’s shown he can put others’ well-being ahead of his own. Heck,” I managed to smirk, “you’re a bonafide hero”—he winced at the word—“even though I know you don’t like being called one.”
Kurt sighed.
I looked up at the clock on the wall. I didn’t have much time; the IT guys would be here any minute.
“What’s the matter?” Kurt asked.
I glanced around evasively. “Keep this between us,” I explained, “but… I had to take out the security camera so that I could rouse you from your drug-induced stupor. Otherwise, I’d be at risk losing my job.”
“The fuck?” Kurt’s brow flattened.
Now it was my turn to sigh. “Right now, I’m still trying to figure out what, if anything, I can do to persuade my superiors to change their ‘all transformees must be drugged into vegetables’ policy.”
“Transformees?” Kurt raised an eyebrow.
“It’s better than Type Two NFP-20 Patients.” I forced a soft chuckle out of my mouth. “No one wants to be Type Two.” I smiled sadly.
Well, no one except Andalon.
Kurt rolled his eyes at me.
Suddenly, my console pinged.
I pulled it out and checked my messages.
Gen - we’ve figured out the logistics for the Type Two test. Please head over to the diagnostic station near E4, ASAP.
—Heggy
My grip tightened, my thumb pressing hard onto my console’s liquid crystal touchscreen.
“Ugh, scribbledybit,” I swore, shaking my head. “I have to go.”
Grabbing the foot of Kurt’s half-eaten bed, I pulled myself to my feet and waddled over to the cabinet to fetch a new syringe—a bulky 50 milliliter unit. I loaded it with a dose of noxtifell. 24 milliliters.
Kurt eyed me warily. “Doc?”
“I’m… I’m sorry about this,” I said. “I’m going to have to sedate you again. There’s more we have to talk about and even more that has to be done, but—dammit—it’ll just have to wait. I have to go, and I wouldn’t want to be here anyway, seeing as the IT guys will be here to fix the camera any minute now.”
Kurt nodded in understanding. He scooted over to the uneaten side of his mattress. His tail trailed off the chewed edge, dangling over the antique bed frame’s dull metal. I injected him with the sedative. Kurt’s eyes and tail fluttered for a moment before he passed into unconsciousness.
I rubbed the edge of my bowtie in between my fingertips as I slipped out of the room, just in time to pick up some chit-chat from the IT guys as they arrived on the scene, right as I rounded the corner and disappeared down the hallway.