I hurried to Operating Theater 12 as quickly as my zombie legs allowed. Several times, I tried to call Dr. Arbond, but he didn’t answer.
It did not bode well.
The trip was a grim one. The halls were filled to the brim with a never-ending rush hour that paralleled the real ones that played out in the streets. Patients seized in their beds—their bodies breaking down—even as nurses and doctors raced to get them to surgery in time. Lobbies and hallways were packed near to bursting. Security personnel—a mix of police and military—corralled the crowds, barking at people to leave as quickly as they could, even if that meant separating loved ones forever more.
The sounds of traffic outside were incessant. I didn’t need to look for windows; I could hear them. The sirens grew louder whenever I was getting close. Lights flashed without end, strobing through alternating colors. And if there were no siren-lights to be seen through a window, it was a safe bet a dark green dump truck was rolling by, shipping the bodies to be dumped into the sea, or—worse—coming back empty, and ready to pick up more.
More than ever before, I realized just how many fronts there were to this war against the Darkness. It wasn’t just a fight against NFP-20; it wasn’t just a fight against ghosts, and the threat of Hell; it was a fight against myself; against fate and my fated changes, and my dying hopes of finding a way to reverse them, or—even more desperate—to put a stop to the fungus once and for all. And yet, no matter how much I wanted to believe that there was still some hope, I couldn’t keep lying to myself. Not after what I’d said to Ileene:
It’s passion that makes our beliefs precious, not truth.
True faith was forever uncertain; it had to be. Faith that washed away under the force of doubt was only presumption. Faith that did not shake or weaken was certitude. Faith could be tested, not proven. But so many people couldn’t stomach that. The Church couldn’t, the Old Believers couldn’t; the Innocents certainly couldn’t. So many of us could not function for even five seconds outside of the comfort of our self-regard. Doubt and difference were difficult for us. It was human nature to want to suss out every trace of opposition and kill them where they slept.
If I kept pretending that my transformation was somehow going to get reversed, or that a miraculous cure to it and the plague would fall into our laps… well, I’d be lying to myself. Once and for all, however revolting it was, I needed to accept the possibility that my future could very well go the way that Greg’s was going.
Or Merritt’s.
Or Kurt’s.
And so many others’.
I needed to be able to stare that possibility in the eye and hold my ground. If not, what hope did I honestly have of making a difference?
I hoped Cassius was still alive.
And then, I stopped in my tracks.
“Huh…”
Someone had been busy.
Operating theaters like Theater 12 occurred in bunches. Their entrances let out into hallways one lined with their fellow theaters. Unsurprisingly, that usually meant a glut of activity. The halls around operating theaters were a lot like lecture rooms at college, filled with busy people of all stripes—surgeons, physicians, medical students.
After the stuffy chaos I’d tramped through on my way over, the sterile, lifeless emptiness of the hallway leading to Theater 12 made me shiver all the way to the tip of my tail. The corridor was empty because it had been outright sealed off from the rest of the hospital. Sepia-hued plastic cut across the corridor in two semitransparent walls, each about twenty feet away from either side of Theater 12’s entrance. Door sills were visible on either wall, etched into the plastic, with consoles mounted alongside them, like mechanical flies caught in flypaper—both of giant size. On my side, I could read a single line of text marching across the console screen on my side in an endless loop:
Danger! Biohazard! Authorized Access Only!
A stream of Munine characters traveled below it, making the message bilingual. And, in case anyone hadn’t gotten the message, black and white biohazard warning tape crisscrossed the plastic barrier, along with orange stickers bearing black skull-and-crossbones.
“Look, Mr. Genneth, I won! I won!” Andalon cutely hopped up and down, having “won” the be-the-first-to-get-to-the-other-side-of-the-barrier contest that, apparently, she’d decided it was now the perfect opportunity to have.
Fortunately, I was a CMT member, and I’d had Greg solder my chip to my coat cufflinks, so I was able to wave my way in. The console pinged, its text momentarily changing to Access Granted as the scanner picked up my chip’s signal and responded accordingly. The barrier’s door popped open with a soft hiss, and then hissed again as it automatically closed behind me, seconds later, after a warning alarm.
“So, Mrs. BokBok is in there?” Andalon asked, pointing at the operating theater.
I nodded. “Yeah.”
“I’mma go see!” Andalon said, and before I could do anything about it, she darted into the operating theater, effortlessly phasing through the wall.
Warily, I walked up to the plastic air-lock tunnel that extended from the theater’s glass-paned doors. I scanned my chip to open the door and step in. I stood on shaking legs, trying to see if I could catch a glimpse of Merritt or Cassius through the panes, but I saw nothing, not even the dried puddle of blood that had surrounded Dr. Nesbitt’s corpse when Merritt had…
Ugh…
I still couldn’t bring myself to complete that awful, awful thought.
And then Andalon came scampering out, and I don’t think I’d even been more troubled to see a happy child running toward me as I was as she approached, waving her arms through the air.
“Mr. Genneth! She’s so wyrmy! Both of ‘em are turnin’ wyrmy!” She clapped her hands together excitedly. “There’s gonna be so many wyrmeh, and we’re gonna work together and we’re gonna do all the things!”
This story originates from Royal Road. Ensure the author gets the support they deserve by reading it there.
My tail thrashed in its holding space.
“Andalon… maybe you should go to the not-here-place for a little while,” I said.
Suddenly, she turned sullen. “Is… is this because…? Oh.” She lowered her head, crossing her feet. “I’m sorry for makin’ them wyrmeh without askin’. And… I’m sorry that I made them scared, and… that you feel scared, Mr. Genneth.”
Had I not been butterfly nervous, I would have smiled. She was learning; slowly, but surely.
“It’s okay Andalon. You’re learning, that’s what matters,” I said, adding, under my breath, “one step at a time.”
She smiled softly. “Andalon will go to the not-here-place now.”
And she vanished.
Steeling myself, I reached for the door, only to stop for a moment, and—on a whim—knock, rapping my knuckles against the glass. It was only then that I noticed the green mist that quivered in the air within the room.
“Who’s there…?”
Had it been any other voice, or maybe even any other words, I don’t think I would have thought of it as being a voice at all, let alone recognize it. But it was that voice, saying those words. It was like clockwork with her. Whenever someone entered her house, or knocked on the door? “Who’s there?” Whenever she answered a videophone call? “Who’s there?”
Merritt.
Calling it a voice was giving it more credit than it was due. Save for the words, it really wasn’t a voice at all. It was more like a small chamber orchestra’s worth of wind instruments—brass and wood, maybe with an organ or two thrown in for good measure. It was, in turns, melodious and dissonance; a mix of tones high and low. It was a choir—many ‘voices’, speaking all at once.
I almost wanted to call it “beautiful”.
“It’s me,” I said, as I opened the door.
I immediately regretted it. The glass was so brittle, it fractured as I pulled it open, splitting to several pieces that shattered as they impacted the floor. In between the split seconds, in my panic, time seemed to slow. I watched the swirling green spore-mist flow out into the airlock, wonderstruck, but then responded with the appropriate panic, whipping up a psychokinetic cloak and swept it around myself to knock back the oncoming glass and send it scattering back the way it came.
Time sped back up again as I calmed.
“It’s,” I stumbled over my words, “it’s Dr. Howle.”
Slowly, I stepped into the room. I had to keep my breathing as calm as I could, otherwise I’d fill the inside of my hazmat suit so thick with spores it would melt right off me.
My knees shook as I wept.
“Genneth…” the voice moaned. “Genneth…”
It was Merritt, no matter how much I wished it wasn’t.
She was at least ten feet long, and probably broke sixteen if you counted her tail, lolled and coiled on the floor behind her. Merritt’s arms and forepart were erect, like a viper, poised to strike. I imagined Greg would have looked a lot like that, were he to uncoil himself and extend to his full length. But Merritt was undernourished. Her arms were lanky and skeletal, and her flanks sunken in place. Most of it was dark green wyrm flesh. The minute scales were almost imperceptible from where I stood. She was like an inversion of the infection: patches of human flesh covered her body in much the same way as patches of fungal flesh covered the bodies of the infected; hers receding; theirs, spreading.
There was no sign of the bodies of Drs. Nesbitt or Mistwalker. But I didn’t need to ask to know where they were, nor where the machinery had gone, nor why the operating theater’s discolored, moth-eaten walls bore their broken wiring out in the open.
As I gawked at Merritt, I couldn’t help but think of a serpent-demon from Munine lore: the nure-onna—the “wet woman”, a devourer of children who stealthed out from the waves in the deep of the Night. But this wasn’t a drawing on scroll; it was dead and alive and totally surreal. Her face was still recognizable; her snout had only just begun to sprout. The last traces of her blonde hair matted the sides of her head like shredded curtains, ready to fall. Glistening golden orbs blinked where her eyes had once been. They were slowly moving apart to accommodate her developing snout.
At first, I thought Merritt was blind, but then she blinked and craned her neck over to me.
“You came…” she said.
Holy Angel…
I staggered into the room, stepping over the sharded glass. “I’m sorry,” I said, “I’m so, so sorry…” And it wasn’t just for Merritt’s sake. Cassius deserved my apology nearly as much as she did.
Dr. Arbond hadn’t turned to face me as I’d entered the room, but I completely understood why, just like I also understood why he hadn’t been answering my calls, or anyone else’s. It was just as Andalon had said: he was on the road to wyrmhood. But the devil was in the details.
So far, Cassius’ transformation had been grotesquely fixated on his head, which it had remade into a nearly solid mass of deep blue wyrmflesh, nearly two yards long and several feet tall and thick. The bouquet of instruments on hydraulic limbs up on the ceiling that had so excited Brand had been deflowered and devoured. Even now, Cassius sucked at it like a hog at its mother’s teats, with the lower jaw of a sperm whale, lengthy and slender.
Cassius had already been facing the doors, so when I’d stepped into the room, he’d immediately focused his eyes on me.
All three of them.
He had two eyes on his right side; they’d been pushed there by his head’s changing structure. One was recognizably his; recognizably human. The other was caught mid-change; it had just begun to swell and shine. There was no trace of nose or lips anywhere near them. His third eye was on the left side of his head, and was a phosphorescent golden orb just like Merritt’s. A tumor grew not far behind it—a lump, building beneath his flesh—almost certainly a fourth eye, soon to bud.
Every once in a while, the mechanical bouquet groaned from its attachment point on the ceiling. Cassius was probably biting down on the thing to help support his head’s massive bulk, because his legs definitely weren’t up to the task, folded beneath him as he knelt on the floor. The regard of his one-and-a-half human eyes stung for the handful of seconds for which he gave it, and then he turned away in a mix of emotions too potent for me to name.
I tried to stay. I wanted to. I tried to hold my ground. I really did.
But, I couldn’t.
Angel, have mercy on me.
I couldn’t.
I ran out of the room. I stumbled over the broken door on my way out and fell onto claws and knees, landing in the middle of the airlock tunnel. I crawled a few steps forward before pushing myself back up onto my dead legs with a psychokinetic thrust off the floor at the same time as I heaved and wretched, vomiting up a misty green aerosol that filled my hazmat suit’s helmet with the stink of moldered caramel. Splotches of dry powder stuck to the visor’s inner surface. And my world was awash in tiny sizzles.
Clumsily, I ran out of the airlock and to the sepia barrier, smacking my wrist against the console’s scanner, and then storming out through the door the instant it hissed open. I covered my suit’s visor with my hands, trying to hide the green splotches as best I could. It cast me into darkness.
I should have been lost and confused, and yet I wasn’t. I didn’t need to see to know where I was going. There was an island in my mind, a room in a citadel in the skies of thought, filled with placid skies and reflecting waters. I stood within it, even as I ran through the hospital’s hallways. With just a whim, I brought up my collective sensory memories of the experience of walking down the hallway. In that quiet place in my mind, they stitched together, recreating it for me. I saw without seeing. My inner self repeated my body’s every step within my mental recreation. I didn’t need to think about it; it just happened.
Terrified at what I was becoming, I wretched again, hawking up more spores. I headed for the nearest restroom, flinging the door open with a psychokinetic slap. On dead feet, I ran, darting into a toilet stall, slamming the door behind me, locking it shut, and then zipped open the suit so hard that, for a second, I nearly thought I’d torn it in two.
I dunked the helmet into the toilet bowl, not bothering to check if the water was clean. I washed out the helmet with water from the bowl, swiping away at the spores with my claw-stuffed gloves, flushing the toilet clean several times over whenever it turned green with spores, whether I’d washed them out from my helmet or vomited them directly into the water. I dried it with sheet after sheet of toilet paper, and rinsed it again, and dried it again, and then flushed it all the waste down the drain, even when my instincts told me it would make an excellent meal.
Then came the screams, and all the sobs.