I crudely stuffed my tail back into my pants, stepped into the locker room and into the changing room beyond where I put on a fresh set of PPE. And then off I went. I was in such a hurry, I couldn’t get myself to wait for the elevator, and made the stupid decision of walking up the stairs to the second floor, though it would have been more accurate to say I hauled myself up the stairs. My legs were like dead weights, and—more than once—I thought I heard my leg bones crunch or crack.
(Un)fortunately, being terrified that another one of my patients was eating someone did a pretty good job of keeping my attention fixated on dashing through the hallways to get to Room 268 as quickly as I could. My idle heart, the strange lack of breathlessness, and the constant lag buffering my bodily movements made my run a truly surreal experience.
And then I heard the screams.
No. No no no no no!
Both pairs of the glass-paned double doors in Room 268’s antique vestibule were thrown wide open as I swerved around the corner and burst into the room. Even with Kurt, Letty, and a couple new arrivals still sedated and unconscious, the scene inside was absolute chaos. A handful of transformees were awake—wildly awake—and that was all it took. Already, a body lay dead on the floor, blood pooling around it. My patients clustered around the fresh meat like a pack of raptors, drooling openly.
It was the operating theater all over again.
I didn’t even have time to gag: someone was running out of the room right as I entered it, and we collided into one another, our PPE visors clacking together like a pair of castanets. We both staggered; I recovered from the blow a split second earlier, just in time to see the stranger topple backward.
He was a male nurse in aquamarine scrubs. His ID badge said his name was Kevin.
I lurched forward to grab him, but psychokinesis pushed me back. Threads of power exploded in between us like a miniature atom bomb. Remembering one of the tricks I’d picked up in the morning, I managed to slide sheets of plexus under my feet, like psychic flypaper. I flooded power into them, creating a force that anchored my feet to the floor, keeping me rooted in place as the scintillating mushroom cloud shot out in every direction. Grabbing one door in each hand, I pulled myself up while metal screeched across the floor, beds jostling like leaves in a whirlwind.
Kevin screamed.
I reached out to pull him to safety, but my flypaper kept me anchored in place. But, even if it hadn’t, I was already too late.
Holy Angel. Holy Angel.
Werumed-san stood behind Kevin as he fell; a monster in the nurse’s shadow. The mascot’s bloated, pancake head rose over Kevin like a full Moon. The material of the mascot’s face had changed. It was more than just felt, now; it had the thickness of real flesh.
And then, Werumed-san opened his mouth.
Before, the mascot’s mouth was just that: a mouth on costume. A line of black stitching, forever smiling, with dimples at either end. But now, it was a real mouth, almost like a tear, with lipless edges covered in blackened brown wyrm scales.
Muscles moved. The tear twitched. To my wyrmsight, it was like his body was lit up in violet neon.
Werumed-san opened his jaws. His mouth was a misbegotten nightmare, vast and cavernous, lined by dark, rugose tissue slicked by caustic saliva. The nightmare engulfed Kevin, head-first.
Werumed-san swallowed everything above the man’s clavicle in a single gulp.
I screamed.
Dissolving my psychic anchor with a thought, I stuck out my hands, catching myself on all fours as I fell forward onto the floor. A bestial growl rumbled above me. I raised my head.
A dark blur crashed into the mascot from the side. It, Werumed-san, and the headless nurse tumbled down, crashing into an empty, overturned bed frame, and then onto the floor.
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A patient had leapt at him, one I didn’t recognize.
“No! Stop!” I screamed, finally finding my voice. “You can eat your beds! Your sheets!”
Crawling forward, I reached to grab them, but the gunfire spat overhead. I covered my ears, hollering in panic. Even my flinches lagged. I turned around to face the hallway.
No. No no no no…
Goosebumps rippled down my back.
A handful of police officers had gathered in the hallway, wearing riot-grade body armor. The carbon fiber was dark and unyielding as the weapons in their hands.
Pistols. Rifles. Tasers.
I didn’t know much about guns, other than that they had no place being in a hospital.
My arms went limp. I flopped onto the ground, ducking in terror.
My shouts drew the attention of several officers, but most of them ignored me and continued firing into Room 268. Glass shattered. Bullets flew.
Fresh screams spurted up behind me.
Squeezing my fists, I pushed myself onto my knees and raised my hands up high, palms out, waving them like semaphore flags as I yelled at the top of my lungs.
“Stop! STOP!”
They didn’t stop.
Wrath and horror flooded into me. It was a strange combination. I didn’t really know what to do, so I just did what felt most natural at that moment. I willed my power into a clamshell-shaped plexus and let the force flow. Luminous threads streamed out in front of me in a wave of impossible geometry, spilling through the doorway. I leapt at the gunmen, crashing into their legs, plowing my psychokinetic bow-shock into them. The tide knocked them all to the floor, scattering them like billiards. One officer even smacked into the corridor wall. I managed to land on my hands and knees. My slacks skidded across the polished vinyl and I scrambled to my feet, screaming.
“Stop! Run!”
Two of them looked at me like I was crazy.
“Get Back!” one screamed, scrambling for his rifle. “I’ll shoot!”
But they didn’t know. They hadn’t seen what I’d seen. They didn’t understand what was at stake, that their actions might very well trigger a psychokinetic storm that would tear the hospital to shreds. Or worse: a host of vengeful ghosts, corrupted into demons of Hell, ready to ravage the world with the wyrms’ powers.
Shooting my patients was going to put everyone in terrible danger.
“Don’t!” I yelled. “You’ll provoke them!”
Then one of the policemen pointed a gun seemingly right over my head. “You monster! Get the fuck back!”
I froze.
An officer charged at me, pinning me against a door with the weight of his elbow.
Well, this is the end. I’ve been found out.
Time seemed to slow. As I looked over my assailant’s shoulder, I saw the one with the rifle hadn’t been aiming at me. His gun was pointed squarely through the doorway at the patients in Room 268. My patients.
He thought it had been one of them who had knocked the officers over, not me. And his comrades seemed to agree with him.
Not that I could celebrate it much.
My assailant dug his elbow deeper into my chest. Glass cracked near my ears—far too close to comfort. He kicked me in the shin. I didn’t know which was worse: the sickening crunch of my fibula splitting in half where the officer’s boot bashed into my left leg, or the fact that what should have been pure, undiluted agony had all the discomfort of a light slap to a cheek—pressure, without pain.
My attacker roared. “Who the fuck do you think you are?!” Behind his protective plastic visor, he bore his teeth at me. Data, orders, and a heads-up display glowed on the visor’s inner surface, updating in real time.
I wrapped swirling light around my hands, barely needing to think about it. I just imagined my attacker getting flung back. I wanted that. I let the power fly as I pushed him, and in an instant, our positions were reversed. Now I had him pinned against the other door.
Split-second thoughts linked together, forming a plan. It helped that my now-photographic memory told me exactly what I needed to do. It also helped that it was like everything had been dipped in slow-motion goo. It wasn’t a lot, and I wasn’t quite sure how it worked, but it made a difference.
Shoving myself off the police officer, I lunged toward a console mounted on the vestibule’s inner wall. I fell to one knee when I put my weight on my left foot. My left leg hand bent behind me where the officer’s kick had split it two. For a second, the fractured end of the upper portion of my fibula scraped across the floor, but I realigned the two bones by folding my leg at the knee.
Again, this should have hurt. I should have been unconscious from the pain. But I only felt pressure and vibration—an uncanny sensation which I ignored as I gritted my teeth and used my perfect memory to know exactly where and when to press on the console’s touchscreen. I tapped my fingers on the console screen thrice in quick succession. I didn’t need to look to know what I was doing.
An ear-piercing siren keened, making everyone stagger. Lights flashed red. Sheets of reinforced steel rose up from gaps that opened in the doorways. By the time the police officers understood what was happening, it was already too late. A couple of them stuck their guns forward, only for the steel quarantine walls to crush them and split them into pieces, closing on them like jaws as the walls slid into place.
I collapsed onto the quarantine wall just as it slid shut, my face pressing against the bullet-proof plastic viewing port built into the steel.
Thank the Angel for DAISHU.