There was liberation in problem-solving, but it was life’s unfairness that only the problem solvers would ever taste that sweet release. For the rest of us, our mouths were sewn shut, doomed to an endless cycle of bitterness and longing.

I was stuck.

I couldn’t solve the problems that drove me mad—transformations, time travel, tethered spirits, or true damnation; I couldn’t even do anything about the tasks I threw myself into in the hopes of catching a second wind and finding some momentum to keep my hope from falling behind. Fate was mocking me. Everywhere that I wished I would find success, it said, “No,” unless success would make me hate myself more, in which case, Fate smiled and said, “Yes, of course.”

Plan Wear-A-Hazmat-Suit-To-Hide-My-Changes was running without a hitch. I’d returned to my shift expecting stares and accusations, feeling like sweaty testicles after three bowls of garlic beef and bean stew, but no one seemed to say anything. We were in war-time; the Green Death was at the gates, and everyone was too caught up in trying to survive and fight to notice an innocuous oddity like a doctor walking around in a green hazmat suit for hours on end.

We fought valiantly. We pulled out all the stops. ECMOs, ventilators, every drug you could think of, nebulizers, wound epoxy, even thoughts and prayers. I couldn’t have entered the hospital chapel even if I’d wanted to. It overflowed with people, pleading their hearts to infinity for love, mercy, and aid. But it wasn’t working. Dr. Skorbinka still had hopes on the mycophage treatment, but the drug had yet to arrive. It seemed sheer insanity to me that we had to wait to receive the samples to use them to mass produce the drug. They could have sent the recipe to us and let us concoct it ourselves, but apparently, intellectual property law mattered more than people’s lives.

So it goes.

If that had been all, if the misery had stopped there and gone no further… well, it still would have been intolerable. I could not understand how the Angel could allow such things to come to pass. But that wasn’t all of it. It got worse. The more layers I peeled back, the more rot I saw. Weren’t all people ultimately supposed to be good at heart? Or maybe they just hadn’t gotten the memo?

Almost from the beginning, it had been clear that the Green Death was an extraordinary disease. You did not need to know any of its supernatural secrets to realize it was something beyond the pale. The reason I couldn’t find any records of recoveries was simple: there hadn’t been any. This was a new kind of plague. Wildfire obsolesced in its presence. This wasn’t a disease; it was an exterminator. We were barely a week into it, and already untold millions were dead, and everyone else was a dead man walking—and if they weren’t, they soon would be. The way one study put it, at the current rate, barring a miracle, we were a week away from the total collapse of human civilization. The extinction of the human race could be expected within a month, maybe less.

Was disbelief in these prognostications madness? Possibly. Unfortunately, lately, when it came to madness, people everywhere were saying, “Hold my beer.” And, as usual, us Trentons were never ones to pull our punches.

Protestors had taken to the streets to march for causes that ran the gamut from the noble to the obscene. The military had been recorded summarily executing infected civilians, only for leadership to call out what they referred to as a “renegade faction” and implement purges. It was horrific, and if ever there was a righteous cause for a protest, this was one, and though I couldn’t call it “wise,” compared to other protests, those protestors were downright enlightened. There were also people protesting the feeble public health measures taken by the government at various levels—the municipal, the prefectural, and the national. Apparently, the measures weren’t feeble enough. The stock market had crashed, and the economy was tanking. Everywhere, businesses were shuttering, touched by death and fear of death. As would be expected of people with the audacity to protest public safety measures, none of the protestors followed those measures in the slightest. That wasn’t just insanity, and it was far more than suicide. It was murder. As was our society’s ludicrous demand that people had to choose between their livelihoods and their lives. People were running headlong into the abyss, chasing commerce straight into the grave.

The morning news was blanketed with coverage (recorded via drone) of how many of the city’s premiere public thoroughfares were fast becoming unusable, thanks to the impromptu medical encampments that were being set up to deal with overflow of mass outbreaks of NFP-20, many of which were striking during the protests themselves. It was painful to watch; you could see people toppling over in coughing fits in real time.

If we put aside the question of whether or not the use of deadly force against civilians had been rightfully authorized, the first twenty-four hours were proving the Mayor’s decision to invoke martial law to be a mixed blessing, at best. In certain places, their presence of uniformed men and women with guns and big cars helped maintain a modicum of order, but at the same time, the presence of these “guardians” made it clear just how bad things had gotten. Yes, widespread looting of shops—above all else, grocery stories—was dying down, but, more often than not, it was probably because most if not all the pickings had already been taken. The military had cleared the Expressways and driven back the ceaseless traffic, clearing the way for desperately needed deliveries from the ports and the agricultural heartlands, though few, if any, had so far made it through. From the sound of things, I would have thought there’d be chains of mag-lev barges on the Expressways stretching as far as the eye could see, but, no there were barely any, and those that did make it through were nearly barren, as if they’d been picked clean by the birds.

But the most horrifying twist was that the Green Death was far from the only plague soaring over our skies. Disinformation went viral, fanned by malevolent intent and sped along by plain old human fallibility. The world was dying, and all we had to share with one another was hate. Hate, conspiracies, lies, rank contempt for our fellow man. People were claiming NFP-20 was a secret plot by DAISHU or the Munine government to take over the world. Even if it was, what did it matter? The dead cannot petition for a redress of their grievances. Mass graves make no restitutions.

All of these things happened in the span of time between Lopé's mouth sealing itself shut and lunch on the following day.

More and more, it was looking like mankind’s final hours would be a race between the selfish and the sociopathic, to see who could make it to the bottom first. A people who could not bring themselves to care for their compatriots’ well-being was a people doomed to fade. Had my father-in-law still been alive and kicking, he’d have agreed with me on that point, except for all the wrong reasons. Every time and place had its “old guard”, and they always lobbied the same point, that society had gone off the rails because people had gone off the rails. Mr. Revenel always liked to say that civilization would fade without the strength of the Church to shore up Truth and Righteousness™ and give society a sense of the Sacred. Like most extremists, there was a kernel of truth behind their distorted vision. A sense of the sacred was necessary. You needed common values to keep the Tragedy of the Commons at bay, as well all the scoundrels that made it happen. But, leave it to extremists to throw a fit whenever people turned away from their preferred institution in order to find their own sense of the sacred. Of course, I could be a pessimist like my father-in-law (or Lopé/Paul), and say that people were so uniformly awful that only a strong authoritarian could get them to stay in and do the right thing, but… that was a cure worse than the disease. Where was the hope in that? That was the road to the faceless order of lives that didn’t know how to dream. That was why trust was so important. Without trust in our people and institutions, and without institutions and people worth trusting, there would be no government by the people, nor for the people, only lonely, atomized actors, seeking to grease their wheels at the lowest available price.

This text was taken from Royal Road. Help the author by reading the original version there.

Throughout the early hours of the morning following Yuta’s awakening, all the way through brunch, as the deaths climbed, the number of souls entering me was skyrocketing. Every now and again I’d see them, or hear them—or see and hear them—lurking in the background, or in the corner of my eye, unsubstantial, flickering and forlorn, though, once or twice per hour, things would get a bit more confrontational. Had Andalon not been operating at full capacity, I wouldn’t have been able to distinguish between the living and the dead. Even more importantly, Andalon helped dismiss the ghosts from my presence—temporarily seal away, rather than permanently imprison like she had with Aicken or Frank—though it wasn’t always easy for her. It seemed Andalon’s ability to dismiss a soul that was manifesting to me depended on the strength of the wayward spirit. Some personalities like Ileene’s were so intense that Andalon had extreme difficulty keeping them under wraps. She told me it would have been easier to just blast them into oblivion.

But neither of us wanted to resort to that.

To both our relief, none of the new ghosts appeared to be corrupted by the darkness or otherwise turned toward the demonic. I just wished I knew the reason why. Was it because I was a little calmer (Andalon’s presence helped with that), or was it because Andalon being active at my side enabled her (and/or her greater self) to intervene and properly save the spirits’ souls from being trapped within the fungus for eternity, damned to Hell?

Throughout the day, in order to sustain Andalon’s efforts, I had to make regular trips to the restrooms to wrestle off my hazmat suit’s helmet and stuff my mouth with a fistful of sponges, freshly solidified from the dispenser fluid. They tasted like laundry detergent, but they kept my body supplied with the energy Andalon needed to keep my ghosts in check. Of course, I didn’t make it through unchanged, though these changes were of the psychokinetic kind, rather than the physical kind.

Even so, I almost wished they had been physical changes. My powers were beginning to cross the threshold separating intuitive action from concerted effort. It was like being potty trained all over again, except with slightly lower stakes—I kid, I kid.

I had to be much more mindful of my reactions, as my powers were more and more often acting up alongside them. Particularly when I flinched or got spooked. I sped up supply carts or knocked them aside, tugging them out of someone’s hand. I spurted out force like psychokinetic hiccups. Older light fixtures—of the kind that hung from the ceiling—swung like pendulums if I didn’t focus on not moving them. I even ‘pushed’ a few people aside. I’d unintentionally knocked a nurse to her feet from across a hallway while being chased by a man with a gun who was intent on shooting me for having handed him a mask and asked him to wear it. Andalon had been overwhelmed at the time, and I’d been on my way for another sponge sandwich, so it was ultimately my fault for not realizing that the man was correct to assert the mask would do no good, because I hadn’t realized (or thought to realize) that he was a ghost. As for the nurse I’d knocked over, I was shaking in my boots, certain that she would have outed me as a transformee. Worse still, Dr. Marteneiss had been within visual range when it had all happened. But the poor woman started convulsing in a seizure of grand mal proportions almost as soon as she hit the floor. She would have fallen to the floor no matter what I’d done. On the spot, Heggy performed the incision test on the nurse and got a positive result, and immediately departed to whisk the woman off to Room 268.

I didn’t even have time to beat myself up about it. My console thrummed against my stomach in the pocket of my hazmat suit. Instead of pulling it out, I just ran into Ward E’s main reception area, listened for the latest scream, and proceeded accordingly. Jonan had had an inspired, though morbid, idea of giving each of Ward E’s EKGs a distinct sound, so that we could respond more quickly, especially when patient alarms seemed to be going off every couple of minutes.

Listening, the new sound I heard was an ECG screeching like birds burning alive.

I ran into the room from where the sound was coming. It was only when I was inside that I realized where I was.

Mr. and Mrs. Plotsky’s room.

Mrs. Plotsky was tachycardic.

“I’ve got a tachycardia,” I yelled. “I’m losing her! I need defibrillator gel, stat!”

But I didn’t need to yell; a nurse had already entered, drawn by the screeching ECG.

“Doctor, they’re both flatlining! Which one?”

I whipped my head back, hearing a new sound: a blaring fire-engine.

I threw my hands in the air. “Fudge,” I swore, “do both!”

The nurse pulled down Mr. and Mrs. Plotsky’s gowns, exposing their bare chests. Their flesh had taken on an almost gelatin-like consistency. Hyphae riddled their bodies like roots in a pot two sizes too small. Fungal masses were crowning over rancid ulcers so thick with necrosis that you couldn’t tell blood from rot.

“Go out and get a second defib unit,” I shouted, lurching my head in the direction of the door as I scrambled to hoist the defibrillator unit off the wall.

Babra Plotsky’s body was twitching in a grand mal seizure. Her husband’s body was already beginning to still.

I had no choice.

As the nurse darted out into the hallway, I plopped the defibrillator down atop Jed Plotsky’s bed, pulled out the paddles, and pressed them down on the man’s chest.

I squeezed the trigger.

“Clear!”

Jed’s body flailed limply, barely any movement at all. A dead frog’s nervous system would have been more responsive to electrical stimuli! And when I lifted the pads up…

Oh God…

A whole layer of his torso peeled off with it, revealing filaments growing underneath like a thicket of hair, coalescing in places into eerie, mushroom-like masses. A faint cloud of green spores came loose along with the sloughed skin.

I staggered, dropping the defibrillator paddles in shock. They crashed onto the floor. One of the paddles broke open, revealing the internal wiring.

The nurse came running in with another defibrillator. “Dr. Howle, I—”

“—I’m sorry, there’s…” I shook my head, weeping. “It’s over,” I muttered. “There’s nothing more we can do.”

I looked over the dead parents. Even if there had been something else we could try, what would the point have been? The last time Mr. and Mrs. Plotsky had been conscious—several hours ago—they’d displayed a near-total loss of memory. They didn’t even know their own names, let alone the fact that their daughter had died yesterday morning.

It wasn’t just that we couldn’t save them; there was nothing left to save.

We were drowning in death.

I walked over to the Plotskies’ bedsides and shut off their EKGs. I looked at the nurse. “You got the time of death?”

The nurse nodded dolefully, barely containing her own tears—though doing a better job than I, at least. She inputted the data into the console mounted beside the door.

“Mr. Genneth!”

Hearing Andalon’s voice, I looked around with my eyes, but I couldn’t see her.

What’s going on, Andalon?

Kneeling down—giving no indication I was hearing voices in my head—I picked up the broken defibrillator, pulled open the waste chute on the wall and dumped it in, to be sterilized and broken down into fresh raw materials for the matter printers in the basement.

“There’s a ghost comin’!” Her voice was strained.

Oh no.

“I—“ Andalon stammered, “—it’s really—” Clutching her stomach, Andalon fell to her knees.

A vertical rift tore open through the space in front of the wall, and from it, a figure emerged: Ileene.

I stared in shock, not because of what I saw, but because of what I didn’t see.

Ileene’s demon-touched form was etched indelibly into my eidetic memory. The deathly corpse in the Dove robe; the four bats’ wings; the drake-clawed feet; the ice-clad tail. Had this been like Frank’s ghost, a handful of psychokinetic threads would have spilled out of me and flowed toward Ileene; her madness and sorrow would have taken my powers hostage and wreaked havoc all around us.

But none of that happened. The Dove robe was there, but the corpse wasn’t, nor were the bat wings, nor the drake-clawed feet, nor the ice-clad tail.

Instead, I saw her spirit as I had when she’d first appeared to me. Young, lost, confused, misled, but also stubborn, and a bit too credulous, and with a comely, elegant beauty a bit at odds with the punkish, neon green bolt that zigzagged through her dark, auburn hair. The sleeve of the ghost’s robe swished as she brought her hand to her face, covering her shock-gaped mouth.

She wasn’t looking at me.

“Mom…?” she said. Her voice warbled, shattered and broken. “Dad…?” Her cry was birdsong, frozen in the dead of winter.

In that moment, Ileene saw what was left of her parents; their empty, fungus-ravaged corpses. Perhaps, she even saw their doomed souls—hellbound, unless Andalon could somehow save them.

Ileene staggered and moaned. Her skirt’s hem swept around her. Buckling, she fell forward, curling onto her knees, reaching for her parents’ bodies weeping and pleading, as if there was something she could do to save them.

“No… no…”

The fallen ghost fell again, onto all fours, pounding one at the ground. The neophyte’s robe covered her like a funeral pall, thick and white. And then she vanished, robe and all, and all Andalon could do was shake her head and weep.

“She’s so sad, Mr. Genneth. So, so sad…”