Having finished the truffles, Andalon slid the glass bowl over to me, with a needy, puppy-dog look on her face. I sighed, and then materialized it full with more chocolate truffles.

She devoured them with a vengeance.

Then, there was the matter of the side-effects—because, of course, doppelgennething had to come with side-effects.

Every sky had to have a cloud.

There were different degrees of doppelgennething. If I went all-in, I’d be in the driver’s seat of every copy of my consciousness, piloting both my body and the spirit-copies in my imaginary office spaces. That was still difficult for me, especially when I took charge of my physical body alongside its mental copies, though it became easier if I closed my eyes and meditated or slept. There was less processing power needed that way.

That was what had happened on my first doppelgenneth excursion, back with Kreston.

But I could also do it another way: I could do it with a light touch, handing the responsibility of managing my copies (physical or not) to my subconscious mind so as to free up one copy (physical or not) to which I could devote all of my attention. That was what I’d done in my memory-delving with the Plotskies. Of course, this, too, had some side-effects. While yes, I didn’t feel nearly as disoriented as when I went all-in, on the other hand, once I unified myself, after a brief latency period—maybe an hour or so—all the experiences my subconscious had weathered bubbled up into my conscious thoughts; all of them, all at once.

It almost made me miss having panic attacks, particularly when the experiences getting shoved up my throat were as nightmarish as what my body-doppelgenneth had endured while running my body for me during the Plotsky incident. It left me feeling guilty for having taken refuge in my mind-worlds, and it made me worry I might be inflicting significant psychological harm upon myself by forcing my subconscious to handle the real world rather than “manning up”, as Dad might have put it, and face reality myself—well, with my main safe.

Those lost hours hit me like a bullet train.

Triage. Sequestering transformees. Rolling body bags to the morgue. Strangers dropping to the floor, seizing, or choking, or comatose, or dead—and you had to rush to their aid no matter which it was, because you couldn’t just know at a glance. Jonan had proposed a few ideas for combatting NFP-20 and Ani had set her hopes on them, and—as Ani was wont to do—shared those hopes far and wide, offering them to families who desperately wished for their loved ones to recover. But, inevitably, the patients succumbed, the fungus murdering them as graphically as it would any other Type One case, even the ones that hadn’t gotten the benefit of Dr. Derric’s latest scheme.

For me, the worst part was dealing with the bodies—not just because corpses now made me water at the mouth. In some ways, it was even worse than telling people their loved ones had died. One of the plague’s twisted mercies was its tendency to strike entire families at once. By the time the end neared, the Green Death had devoured so much of their victims’ memories that they no longer had the context needed to grieve death. But there was no sunshine in those spotless minds: only unnamable terror as the void swallowed them whole.

Part of the reason the bodies were the worst part was because the last few hours of last night’s night shift before the midnight break had seen NFP-20 begin to claim the lives of our fellow healthcare workers. Dr. Marteneiss had tried to console us—Ani and I, most of all—that deaths on our side were an inevitability, but that hadn’t made much, if any, of a dent in our despair. It was never going to be easy to stomach the deaths of your colleagues, nor should it be.

I wouldn’t want to live in a world where death had no meaning.

The rest of the reasons the bodies were the worst part were because of the zombies.

Yes, zombies.

It started with a video here and there, but reports were quickly growing, and their consensus was truly sobering, to say the least: the infected—Type One cases, that is—were, in places, starting to act like zombies from a horror movie. It was still unclear as to whether it happened to the infected while they were still alive, or only after they were dead, or both, but we didn’t need the details to be scared out of our minds by it.

As if things couldn’t get any worse.

Now, we had to be extra cautious with body disposal, for fear of a zombie apocalypse on top of the fungal pandemic apocalypse. We’d been lucky that, so far, the zombies hadn’t reached or appeared in WeElMed, but, I suspected it was only a matter of time.

Alas, Andalon had no explanation for any of this. The zombies scared the belassedites out of her, too!

I didn’t know what scared me more: the thought of my family, out there somewhere, being hunted by zombies, or the thought that they, themselves, were counted among the living dead.

The tale has been illicitly lifted; should you spot it on Amazon, report the violation.

I wished I could be as level-headed as Dr. Marteneiss was. For her, the zombies were just another part of the pandemic, something to be dealt with, just like the rest of it.

Really, Heggy was proving herself to be our rock and keel. Like Ani, she was a woman of faith, but of a secular kind: faith in the system, faith in her colleagues; faith in professionalism and expertise. Dr. Marteneiss never let anyone forget that we weren’t alone. Yesterday, starting at around sundown, she’d insisted on giving our fallen colleagues the honor they deserved. There wasn’t much dignity or decorum in rolling body bags into the incinerator, or heaping them into dump trucks for the military to drive them to ever-deepening mass graves, but Heggy Marteneiss was determined to find it.

“And if I can’t,” she’d said, “then, by the Angel’s toes, I swear, I’ll make it myself.”

Even in this darkest hour, she, like so many others, shone a noble light.

Heggy had gotten her great-grandfather’s naval whistle out from its storage case in her office and had recorded its cry on her console. That way, she could safely play its sound to honor our fallen as we carted their bodies off to their final destination. She’d played the recording for each and every one of them, saluting the body bags as they were hauled off. Andalon started copying Dr. Marteneiss, saluting the dead alongside her.

I’d cried at that.

Now, imagine all of that pouring into your mind in the span of thirty seconds.

It was not pleasant.

So, yeah, things were bad, and were getting worse by the hour.

But…—and I’m aware this was a big “but”—compared to the past few days, at least now, I was in a position to do something about it, and that that position came with the confidence that my actions were actually making a difference. Yes, that difference was a far cry from what I would have liked, but… gosh darn it, it was better than nothing!

Dawn approached as I slept; the dawn of the seventh day; seven days since Merritt walked into C158 and asked me to kill her; seven days since Hell had crept onto our shores.

Unsurprisingly, I found myself feeling guilty again. This time, it was toward my surroundings: the coziness of my mind-made office; the charm of Andalon’s rambunctious company. I was worried I was abandoning my colleagues, leaving them to fend for themselves.

Shouldn’t I be suffering along with them?

I fidgeted with my spotted, lucky yellow bow-tie, and then ran my fingers through my hair.

Hope wasn’t always as strong as we hoped it would be.

Thankfully, whether or not I was guilty, it would be easy to make amends. I just needed to swallow the bullet and spend time out in the real world. I no longer needed to worry about a lack of victories. Now, it was my responsibility to be there for my friends, so that defeat wouldn’t find them haggard and all alone.

And that’s when it hit me. I’m pretty sure it was the words “to be there for my friends” and “haggard and all alone” that did it. The shock of my realization was so powerful, it hit my sleep’s Eject Button and sent me jolting awake, plunging my awareness back into my physical body.

I sat up on the couch in Staff Lounge 3. A quick glance at my console on the table showed it was a little after 3 in the morning. The only lights were the emergency lights that glowed softly along the molding at the base of the wall and the dimmed hallway lights shining outside the door.

“Andalon!” I said. I dragged her out into physical reality by briefly popping in and out of my mind-office. She was still munching away at the candies in my mind-office.

I’d slept in my hazmat suit. The heat and smell as I awoke were almost intolerable, but I had to grin and bear it. Hunger hit me like a tidal wave, but I fought it tooth and nail.

Andalon popped into existence on the table, holding the—already empty—bowl of chocolate truffles in her hands. For the second time, I wished it to be filled again, and, lo and behold, it was.

“What’s wrong, Mr. Genneth?” she asked.

I pressed my hands on either side of my hazmat suit’s headpiece. “I’m an idiot! I totally forgot about the Self-Help Group!”

“Self Helf Gruwup?” Andalon said, with a mouth filled with truffles.

I wouldn’t have advanced as far in my control of my abilities as I had without the example set and guidance given by Greg Pfefferman, IT guy extraordinaire and current chief know-it-all of the Self-Help Group (SHG) that Dr. Horosha had secretly set up for members of the hospital staff who were turning into wyrms. I hadn’t even realized I’d possessed the ability to create worlds within my mind until Greg had shown me the RPG project he was working on. The voxel-graphics experience we’d shared had also been where I’d gotten the idea of diving into my ghosts’ memories.

“I used what I learned from Greg to help Ileene and her parents. I saved them; I stopped them from turning into demons.”

Andalon nodded. “Yeah, yeah, you did a really good job.”

“But they don’t know that!” I said. “Fudge,” I groaned, “I got so distracted with the sheer joy of being able to meaningfully help people again that I plumb forgot that I’m not the only one in this boat! The SHG transformees have ghosts of their own, just like all the other transformees and wyrms. If the souls under my care are at risk of getting corrupted by Hell and turned into demons, then—”

“—So are theirs!” Andalon said, right along with me. She set her bowl of truffles down and hopped onto her feet, her eyes widening in fear. “Mr. Genneth, you’ve got to tell them!”

“Yes, I do.” I sighed. “I just hope I’m not too late.”

Hunger rumbled in my belly as I rose up from the sofa. While my main self (selves?) had been busy with the ghosts in my mind-offices, the doppelgenneth I’d put in charge of my body had managed to snag four protein bars—the last ones he could find—and stored them in the hazmat suit’s pocket, for me to use as an emergency meal.

He’d also explained to Heggy and the others that the reason I was now forever wearing the hazmat suit was because I was scared out of my mind, and that I was sleeping alone in Staff Lounge 3 for exactly the same reason.

I’d deposited them on the table next to the sofa in Staff Lounge 3 before I’d gone to sleep. Now that I was up, I immediately popped off the hazmat suit’s headpiece—it came free with a hiss—and shoved two of the four bars into my mouth, not even bothering to remove the wrapper. As far as my body was concerned, that was just another part of the meal.

I put the helmet back on as quickly as I could, and then turned to Andalon.

“Let’s go,” I said.

She nodded.