The truth always comes true.
Angel’s mercy, it hurt.
I wept.
The walls were coming down.
My console made a gentle thunk against the countertop when it slid out of my grip, right after Pel had hung up on me; right when I was trying to reach out to them, to tell them how much they mattered to me, how much regret I felt, and how much I yearned to earn their forgiveness.
I tried calling Pel again, and again, and again, and, each time, the call passed unanswered.
It was like losing Rale all over again.
As much as I wanted to have hope in Andalon’s powers and her plan to save souls from Hell, I still couldn’t get myself to believe in a tomorrow, let alone one worth having. I couldn’t see a light at the end of the tunnel.
Was one even there?
As far as I knew, that videophone call was going to be the last time I ever got to see my family outside of a body bag or the back of a dump truck.
Tomorrow. That’s what I’d always tell myself. That’s how I’d assuage my guilt, my worries at missing out, and not being there for Rayph, Jules, and Pelbrum.
I’ll be there for family dinner tomorrow night. I’ll make up for not being there to help Rayph with his diorama project for Integrated Science like I promised I would. I’ll get a chance to read some manga with my little girl before bedtime, even though it hurt because it reminded us of how Rale used to be there with us, but now, he never would ever again.
But now? Now I’d lived my last tomorrow. The shelf was empty.
No more second chances.
I wanted to hug my wife, and my kids. I wanted to softly knead my knuckle down atop Rayph’s head, and laugh along with him as he said, “no noogies!” and tried to shake me off. I wanted to cuddle up with my daughter late at night, far past her official bedtime, sitting beside each other on the couch as we watched the second broadcast of that evening’s news, or weekend anime showings on Cartoon Nexus’ late-night programming.
I wanted to be able to wake up in bed with my wife at my side, and bend over and ravish her with a peck of light kisses on her cheeks and a surprise hug that almost always made her smile and laugh, even if it did wake her up, and ask her to spill her secret tricks that for making herself so wonderful.
It’d been years since I last dared to try, and, in all likelihood, it was going to be a strange eternity before I got another chance to try, if at all.
I wept, bitterly. I’d never felt more totally alone.
Even Andalon was gone.
That absence hurt far more than I ever thought it would. It felt like a piece of my heart had been ripped out of my chest.
I didn’t know what to do. All I knew was that I couldn’t just stop and give up. I’d fall apart.
I was already falling apart.
Everything was falling apart.
In the end, I just threw myself back into my work. Was it denial? Totally. But there were too many people crying in WeElMed’s halls over what they’d lost, and I didn’t want to give in to that. I didn’t want to lose any more of what made me who I was, not after I’d likely just lost my family.
It wasn’t long after I’d resumed my duties that I received a panicked text message from Dr. Arbond:
Help, it’s Merritt, she—
—But there, it cut off.
Needless to say, I raced over to the operating theater as quickly as I could, not stopping to talk to anyone, running my wyrmsight over everyone in my path and darting around the ghosts—those whose forms didn’t glow with the soft aura of living consciousness. I tried to keep myself as calm as possible, now that I knew that my stress contributed to my ghosts’ behavior.
I arrived at the surgical theater to see an emergency worker had already arrived on the scene, wearing a full-body hazmat suit, and carrying a large, bright orange suitcase in hand. He stood in the plastic containment tunnel, in front of the airlock separating the theater’s door from the rest of the tunnel.
“What’s going on?” I asked.
The hazmat pointed at the stairs leading up to the overhead amphitheater. “Go see for yourself, if you want,” he said. “I’m waiting for my partner to finish suiting up, and then we’ll be heading in. Should be any minute now.”
Nodding, I did exactly that. I’d say my run had turned my legs to jelly, but there was more to it than that. The steps of the narrow, curving staircase that led to the amphitheater were sheets of pressure beneath my feet, which—along with much of my lower extremities—were so numb, they might as well have been wooden peg legs. I leaned against the railing—my hand firmly clasped around it—in order to stay upright, and then pushed myself off the railing to propel myself onto and over the landing, and from there to the railing around the glass cylinder, overlooking the dome glass ceiling of the operating theater below.
The room was a disaster. Drawers, shelves, and machines which should have been seamlessly hidden in the walls had been pulled open all around the room, their contents spilled out and scattered across the floor. A good deal of the equipment was barely recognizable, having been eaten away to one extent or another, as if by locusts. The once-pristine machinery that had flanked the operating table like wings had been sculpted by ruin, bite marks scalloped into the chrome, and long, ulcerous gashes where corrosive secretions had begun to dissolve them. Splotches of odd, mildew-like growths covered everything—the wall, the floor, the drawers, even the half-eaten machines—and, for the life of me, it looked the early stages of Type One NFP-20 infection I’d seen on countless patients over the past few days.
Learning that even inorganic substances were vulnerable to the fungus’ assault would have been frightening enough on its own, but it was the human element of the scene playing out below that stole my breath away.
There were four souls trapped in the operating theater. Each was trapped in their own, uniquely horrifying way. Drs. Arbond and Nesbitt were both unconscious. Cassius lay supine, while Dr. Nesbitt was on his belly—prone, and bleeding out; a long, wide pool, matted thick around Dr. Nesbitt’s brown hair where a crack in his skull met the holes that Merritt’s spores had burnt into his hazmat suit. He did not move.
No…
At first, I thought the same was true of Cassius, but then I noticed Dr. Arbond’s eyes flutter beneath his eyelids. His limbs twitched spastically, like a dying fly’s.
Holy Angel! How did this happen?
Above, pale aurorae flickered in the air, lustrous and blue.
Dr. Mistwalker lay a distance away from her two colleagues. She sat up against the curving theater wall with her legs spread out in front of her on the floor. She’d ripped her hazmat suit’s headpiece clean off her shoulders. The headpiece’s inner surface was covered in black gunk dusted in speckles of green. Both she and Dr. Nesbitt had Type One cases, but these were unlike any I’d yet seen. Their bodies were distended within the hazmat suits. Jagged ridges of fungal growth pushed up from within the bright green suits. Uneven, tumid domes forced their way out through the holes Merritt’s spores had eaten into the plastic during the surgery disaster. Dark filaments grew out from the holes in Dr. Nesbitt’s suit, spreading across his pooled blood in thirsty roots.
And then Dr. Mistwalker spoke.
I swooned, lightheaded.
The pauses between her breaths were impossibly long. Every other breath, Dr. Mistwalker gasped, croaking out a single, broken record message over and over again and again.
Stolen from its rightful place, this narrative is not meant to be on Amazon; report any sightings.
“Stay away.”
“Stay away.”
Her face was blistered and sunburnt. Her short, straw-blonde hair was all but gone. Ulcerous, eczematous cracks riddled her skin, bleeding filaments and black ooze. The outer layers of her dermis skin rose up in flimsy, translucent peels, almost like feathers, displaced by the fungus emerging beneath.
Dr. Mistwalker’s arms lay at her sides, as if she was about to push herself up. Her eyes aimed her words at the figure sitting at the center of the room.
The last of the four.
Merritt.
Mrs. Elbock sat in the same place I’d seen her hours before, leaning against the operating table’s plastic-plated plinth. Only now, the plinth was gone, as was the operating table. All that remained were a couple scraps of corner and edge pieces that formed an abstracted perimeter around the hole in the floor where the plinth had once stood. Half-eaten cables and stripped wires grew from the hole like mechanized tubers, trickling sparks instead of sap.
Merritt sat naked, on her knees, in front of the hole, her long, thick tail sweeping slowly across the floor behind her, side to side to side. She seemed hypnotized, as if watching a campfire that wasn’t there.
Holy Angel. Holy Light…
I fell to my knees, mouth agape. My gloves squeaked as my hands slid down the smooth glass.
With her back facing me, I had a full view of that half of Merritt’s transfigured anatomy. She was like a doll at childhood’s end, degraded by age and use, broken and crooked, stained in vile ichor. Denuded hair clung to the drying ooze where she’d shed her old skin. The rest littered the floor around her in wispy clumps. New flesh had grown over her shoulders, and then passed them, running down her back, converging around her spine, toward the base, where it flowed out into a tapered tail about as long and thick as a tall man’s corpse. Dark green flesh had built up her sides, neck, and the small of her back, like fresh masonry for her changing biology. Even sitting, she’d tower a foot over me; her neck was as long as my forearm.
A voice filled the room.
“Alright, we’re coming in.”
There must have been an intercom by the door.
The words made Dr. Mistwalker tremble like a broken animatron. back to life. She turned her neck toward the faraway doors, flailing an arm that barely moved anymore.
“Help!” she cried. “Stay away! Help!” She coughed, retching up ooze.
She no longer knew the words to voice the terror in her eyes.
Merritt’s tail slid to the side as she moved toward the surgeon, crawling on all fours.
No, no no no no!
“Merritt!” I slammed my fist on the glass, screaming out her name. “Merritt!”
“STOP!” A fierce yell split the air. “DO NOT GO IN THERE!”
The shout came out of nowhere. I scrambled to my feet, bashing my head against the bottom of the handrail in the process.
I was about two-thirds of the way down the stairs when I caught sight of Dr. Horosha bent over in the hall, with his hands on his thighs, his bright mote-veil rapidly swirling around him, seemingly pulsing in sync with his panting breaths.
“What is it?”
The voice came from one of the workers in the hazmat suits, echoing loudly from within the operating theater. He must not have taken his hand off the intercom.
Although I couldn’t quite see it from where I stood, I heard one of them step out of our side of the airlock. “We’re fully protected. You could dump a bucket of crystallized darkpox virus on us, and it wouldn’t be a problem.”
“That,” Dr. Horosha panted, “is categorically incorrect.” He held his arm up. “Please wait. Let me catch my breath.”
And he did, breathing in deeply before standing tall in semi-regained composure.
“While you might very well be protected against biological contamination, I doubt you can say the same for radioactive contamination.”
Reaching into the pocket on his PPE apron, Dr. Horosha pulled out a small, somewhat antiquated-looking device bearing an analog needle indicator beneath a thick, plastic screen. A black tube dangled from the side of the device by way of a bulky, tightly coiled insulated cable. Dr. Horosha activated the device with a flick of his thumb on a switch, grabbing hold of the tube. Immediately, a ceaseless cicada-storm of clicks and clacks filled the hallway. The frequency and intensity of the clicks rose as Dr. Horosha stepped toward me, and then rose even more as he approached the airlock.
I shot down the last few steps too quickly, and stumbled, but Dr. Horosha caught me at the last minute and then yanked me away from the staircase before I’d even righted myself.
“I had to run to Radiology and back to get this detector,” he said.
Moon’s breeze! That’s on the other side of the complex!
It seemed Dr. Horosha had an athletic streak to him.
Or, perhaps, his mote-veil was enhancing his physical abilities?
Another mystery I can’t ask him about.
The other hazmat-suited doctor stepped out of the airlock and into the hallway, closing the door to the plastic tunnel behind him.
“Even if that biohazard safety gear could protect you from the spores for a limited time,” Dr. Horosha continued, “it would do little to stop the ionizing radiation in that room from killing you. It is also safe to assume that everything within the operating theater is highly irradiated. Were you to enter, you would die within forty-eight hours, as well as emit enough radiation yourselves to pose a threat to everyone else. Without the proper equipment for the containment and disposal of the suits and your tools, the radiation would run amok, damaging our computer networks and much, if not all of our higher end electromagnetic diagnostic equipment.”
“But we need to get in there!” one of the doctors said. “Dr. Arbond reported that Dr. Nesbitt was critically injured. We—”
“—Given the amount of blood I saw… pooled around Dr. Nesbitt’s head,” I lowered my eyes, “to say nothing of the fungus growing in him, I don’t think there’s anything to salvage, let alone save.”
The man shook his head and shrugged. “What are we supposed to do, then?”
“I…” but my voice trailed off. I shook my head in dismay and turned to Dr. Horosha, mouth ajar. “How is this even happening?” I asked, bearing my palms.
“I was assisting Dr. Nowston with sample analysis,” Dr. Horosha explained, “when he mentioned that you had informed him Dr. Arbond had seen an unusual pale blue glow in the air in the operating theater. Fearing the worst, I asked Dr. Nowston to show me the footage Dr. Arbond had sent him, and then I was convinced: the blue glow was the Nakayama effect.”
“The what?” I asked.
“A sonic boom, except with light instead of sound, caused by ionizing radiation traveling at sufficient speed.” He shook his head. “None of us should be—”
“—HELP!!”
Dr. Mistwalker’s static-shredded cry blasted through the intercom beside the airlock.
One of the doctors rushed to respond. “What’s going on?”
Dr. Mistwalker railed against the glass door, smearing green-speckled fluids over it in black and red.
“Stay away!” she shrieked. “Help! Help! Stay away!”
I dashed up the stairs to the amphitheater as quickly as I could. Dr. Horosha called out to me, his voice echoing up the stairway.
“Howle!”
“I have to do this,” I replied, not bothering to look back.
As I came up the top of the stairs, I saw Merritt nearing Dr. Nesbitt’s body, smearing blood beneath her tail as she crossed over the puddle and the fungal roots.
I threw myself onto the handrail and pressed the intercom button. I tried to put There was barely any time to put on a good smile, but a poor smile—an unsteady one, an uncertain one—even that was better than no smile at all.
I swallowed hard. “Merritt… it’s Dr. Howle.”
I knew she had heard me, because she stopped dead in her tracks.
Her bloody, blood tracks.
“Genneth…” Mrs. Elbock did not turn to face me, nor did she raise her head.
Her voice had changed, like Kurt’s had, but even more so. It had thickened, and multiplied. My name came out of her mouth at multiple pitches simultaneously. A chord.
“I’m so hungry, Genneth,” she said. “The metal tickled going down. It was so… spicy. It was too much. I can’t eat it anymore. It burns. And—and the plastic… it’s so dry.”
Gently, she reached out to Dr. Nesbitt’s body. Two of the fingers on her hand, along with her thumb, had thickened with a coat of dark green flesh. The other two fingers were ashen and shriveled, as if burnt.
Her head hung down over the body and the blood. The last strands of her hair dangled from her skull like branches of dead willows. “Please,” she begged, weeping in her polyphonic voice, “I’m so hungry…”
“Help!” Off to the side, Dr. Mistwalker moaned. “Stay away! St-aaaay… away…” Her body sputtered. She fell to her knees.
I had to force my eyes shut.
My breathing quickened. I bit my lip.
“Merritt,” I said, opening my eyes. “There’s a great deal of radioactivity inside the surgical theater. Maybe,” I croaked, “maybe that’s what’s making you…”
“Radi… radiation?” Merritt asked. Her voice was like a dragon in a cave. “That must be why I see so many colors. It’s raining rainbows in my eyes, Genneth.”
“I,” I stammered and wept, “I’m sure Dr. Horosha and I will be able to figure out a safe way to get you some food.”
Merritt hung her head down in dejection. What remained of her once-blonde hair drooped over her scalp’s edges all white and wiry.
“I don’t know how it happened, Genneth.” She shook her head. Her tail flicked waves across the curdling blood. “They were getting sick so fast, and then it got worse. They bled. They… they said things.” She turned to face Dr. Nesbitt. “He called me a monster. A monster. And then… he fell. The doctor.”
The memory of that water bottle getting flung far by my powers flashed before my eyes.
“Merritt… did you?”
Then her voice broke. Her tail swept wide as she shook her head.
“No no no,” she wept. “I—I didn’t. I swear. I don’t know how it happened. He started bleeding and bleeding and then… he fell and… oh Angel… help me.”
She inched closer to him.
“Merritt!”
“Stay away!” Dr. Mistwalker screeched. “Stay away!” She reared up on her legs, staggering about.
They were her last legs.
“He’s just laying there,” Merritt whimpered, pleading and desperate. “It’s not my fault. Please… None of this is my fault. But I’m so hungry, and I know I don’t need to be, but… but…”
“Stay away!” Dr. Mistwalker bellowed. Her body twitched.
“Merritt,” I said, tears running down my cheeks, “you can fight this! You’ve conquered migraines worse than this. You saw Arton and Miselle off to college.” I laughed in desperation. “Fudge, you put up with me and my crazy family for all these years. You were strong then. You can be strong now, too, I just know—”
—Merritt scrambled toward Dr. Nesbitt’s body, only to stop in frozen terror as Dr. Mistwalker came charging at her, a howling virago.
A death charge.
Force rippled out from Merritt in a shimmering shockwave. Vertical bow-shock whipped up blood, cleaving through Dr. Mistwalker with crimson talons. The surgeon’s body fell apart. The fungus and the radiation had weakened her tissues and macerated her tendons. They were at their breaking point, and they offered no resistance. The psychokinetic strike tore her apart in wet chunks and bony cracks.
And then, Merritt… she…
…
I fled the room, down the stairs and out the hall until I found a restroom, threw open the door, locked myself in, ripped off my visor and mask and poured my guts out into the toilet, hugging the cold porcelain and plastic, only to look down into the bowl and see nothing but dregs of black and green.
Dusty, dusty green.