Jonan, Ani, and I walked down the hallway together, as closely as social distancing protocol allowed—which, really, wasn’t that much to begin with—ready to go our separate ways and return to work. But then my console rang, indicating an incoming videophone call.

Ani stepped forward and offered her arms. “I’ll hold the case,” she said.

I graciously accepted her aid and then pulled out my console, lickety-split.

Dr. Skorbinka’s face appeared, dominating the screen. His prickly sideburns were almost completely obscured by the headpiece and rebreather unit of his orange hazmat suit.

“Howle Genneth!” he said, gruffly. He nodded vigorously. “Approval has been received. Please arrive at matter printer control center in 3Ba1 immediately.”

He cut off the call before I could get a word in edgewise.

I stowed my console, and then Ani handed my charge back to me. “That… was quick. I didn’t expect Hobwell would get back to him so quickly.”

Jonan shook his head. “That’s because the machines have taken over.”

“What?” I asked.

Meanwhile, Andalon tugged at my arm: “What’s that mean, Mr. Genneth?”

Ani rolled her eyes at her boyfriend, but then lowered her gaze. “I went to sleep a little earlier yesterday evening,” she said, “so that I could wake up in the middle of the night. I was on duty when Director Hobwell was sent into surgery to deal with the internal hemorrhaging caused by his Type One NFP-20 infection. He…” she paused, and then made the Bond-sign. “He didn’t make it.” She looked up at me. “ALICE has taken over in his capacity as the hospital’s director.”

“ALICE can run the hospital?” I asked.

Jonan nodded. “That, and pretty much everything else. Like I said,” he said, “the machines have taken over.” The suave, blond physician’s deadpan expression left me unable to tell whether he was joking or not. He looked me in the eyes. “Now, let’s get that box of yours down to 3Ba1, pronto.”

Ani nodded. “I’m coming, too.”

Neither of them got so much as a peep of protest out of me. I appreciated the company, as did Andalon.

We took the elevator down. As large as the hospital elevators were, we each kept to one corner.

Safety first.

“I keep going over that footage General Marteneiss showed us,” Jonan said. “I can’t help but compare it to tochukaso.”

“Insect grass?” Ani asked, quizzically.

I recognized the word, having recalled a lunch conversation years ago where Brand had mentioned it to me. At my side, Andalon attempted to pronounce it, and failed miserably.

“It’s a fungus native to the Old World,” Jonan explained. “It’s known as the zombie ant fungus. Dr. Nowston once told me about it over lunch.”

“Yes,” I said. “Dr. Skorbinka mentioned the zombie ant fungus during our autopsy of Ileene Plotsky’s fetus.”

Ani stared at me, horrified. “You autopsied her fetus?”

“Believe me,” I said, “it was not a pleasant experience.”

“Pleasant or not,” Jonan said, “tochukaso is a spectacular example of parasitic evolution. The fungus infects insects.”

“Yes,” I said, “as I said, Dr. Skorbinka explained it to me already.”

“Great!” Jonan said, with a smirk. “Now I’m going to explain it to you. It hijacks its victims’ nervous systems, forcing them to climb to a high place. Then the fungus blooms, and, with the insect up high, the spores get blown all over the place, which maximizes the distance the spores can travel, and the number of insects that can be infected. I don’t know if you’ve played it, but there’s an award-winning video game about tochukaso spreading to humans and causing a zombie apocalypse: The First of Them.”

I’d heard of it, but I’d never played it.

Ani’s eyes blinked behind her large, circular glasses. “Wait… don’t tell me…”

Jonan nodded. “Can you think of a better explanation for what happened in Tonevay—and, apparently, everywhere else? We’ve already had plenty of patients wandering around in the later stages of the disease.”

Ani shook her head. “I had my hands filled with some of them last night. We’ve been coding the door locks of patients’ rooms to hospital personnels’ chips just to keep the patients in their rooms.”

The elevator doors opened, letting us out onto basement level three.

“3Ba1 isn’t far,” Ani said. “C’mon, let’s get moving.”

I let Ani and Jonan take the lead. Walking wasn’t as easy for me as it used to be. I’d decided to refrain from undue exertion as much as possible, out of fear that doing so would make my legs deteriorate even more rapidly.

Like the other basement levels, it was high-ceilinged, windowless, and industrial. Pipes of varying sizes ran overhead, carrying who-knows-what to who-knows-where.

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

Jonan continued his lecture. “As I was saying,” he said, glancing back at me to make sure I was still following, “considering how quickly NFP-20 is spreading, there’s a non-negligible chance the zombies are the result of a whole new strain. The more people a pathogen infects, the greater the likelihood a new, even more dangerous variant will emerge.”

“We’re already floundering against the vanilla version,” Ani said. “Now there’s a variant that turns people into zombies?” She shook her head. “No, that doesn’t pass the smell test.”

“What’s a smell test?” Andalon asked.

It means she thinks there’s a problem with Jonan’s idea, I thought-said.

“Since we’ve continued getting new patients all this time,” Ani said, “if we’re dealing with a new variant, it should be affecting WeElMed as well, but it isn’t.”

I looked down at the plastic case in my hands. “All the more reason we need this mycophage to work,” I said.

“I’d like to know what’s so special about WeElMed,” Ani said.

“Any ideas?” Jonan asked.

Ani shook her head in despair. “No freakin’ clue. At this point, if you told me it was the ghosts of Templars from the Crusades fighting off the fungus, I might just believe you.”

It almost goes without saying that my (un)dead breath was caught in my throat. Though I dared not tell my colleagues—I had no interest in testing Ani’s claim of what she was willing to believe—there was, in fact, something special about WeElMed.

It’s where Andalon was.

I glanced down at her beside me. She was floating a couple inches off the floor, her nightgown slowly billowing. I had to fight the urge to speak the words aloud as I telepathically posed my questions to the blue-eyed, blue-haired spirit-god-angel-girl-thing.

Do you know anything about this, Andalon? You saw the footage General Marteneiss showed us. Is Jonan right? Is there a new variant of the fungus?

“What’s a very-ant?” she asked.

Ani thinks that the fungus is changing. Before, it wasn’t turning people into zombies. Now it is.

Just to be safe, I asked Andalon if she knew what zombies were. The way she stuck out her arms and let out some very zombie-like moans and snarls made it clear that she did.

Great! So… why is this happening?

She looked me in the eyes. “The darkness can do that to peoples, yeah.” She nodded. “But the darkness doesn’t change, Mr. Genneth. It makes other stuff change.”

So, no variants? But… then why aren’t—

—Suddenly, I stopped in the middle of the hallway.

I felt like a grade-A moron. It would have been bad enough if the answer to the mystery was under my nose, but it was worse than that. It wasn’t just under my nose. It was my nose—and my face and my body and my doppelgenneths and everything else.

I whispered. “By the Angel…”

Jonan stopped and turned toward me. “Did you say something, Dr. Howle?”

Clearing my throat, I shook my head. “No, just… muttering to myself.”

I was the answer.

“No,” Andalon said, “it’s us! We did it! Together!” She raised her arms in triumph.

I smiled. You’re darn right we did, I thought.

She really was. Thanks to her help, I was now able to bring solace to the souls of the dead, which kept Hell from turning those souls into demons and using them to aid the fungus in world conquest. The two of us were keeping the armies of Hell at bay—and, now, all the transformees in the Self-Help Group were doing it, too.

The cure for the zombie apocalypse was therapy. Who’d’ve thunk it?

I needed to tell the Self-Help Group about this ASAP.

For once, I had a reason to push myself. I pressed forward, eager to be done with this errand and my upcoming work shift so that I could let the others know about this momentous discovery.

But then Ani suddenly stopped in her tracks.

Both Jonan and I stopped, too, and turned around.

“What is it?” he asked.

“Have you heard what people have been saying about the Green Death?” Ani asked. “They’re saying it’s the end of the world.” She spoke the words as if they held a forbidden power.

Jonan pursed his lips. “I didn’t realize that was a controversial take.” He raised an eyebrow. “You just saw General Marteneiss’ presentation, Ani. Was that somehow not enough to put a dent in your optimism? Did you not see the Doomsday Special that Kirk Dempshire and Ilzee Rambone have been running on CBN?” he asked.

“Well, yes,” she said, “but—”

“—No. There’s no but about it,” Jonan said. “The fact of the matter is, civilization is collapsing. Too many people have died. Even if you could snap your fingers and wipe NFP-20 from existence, the world would still end, in the sense that it would no longer be the world as we know it. Things are not going to return to normal. It’s like what the General said: what we’re now doing is not for us, but for the future. It’s the difference between humanity building the world back up again and us going extinct. Maybe something else might rise to take our place—I dunno, maybe bird people, or something?—or maybe not.”

“No, Jonan,” Ani said, “that’s not what I mean. “Her face contorted in pain. “They’re saying the Last Days have come.”

“Oh, right.” He blinked. “That.”

I stared at both of them. “You’re saying it like you’re unconvinced.”

“I’m not unconvinced, Doc,” Jonan said. “Something freaky is happening, no doubt about that.” He shook his head. “I just don’t think our measly ape-brains are cut out to understand it. I mean, the same evolutionary processes that gave us our intellect and our capacity for reason also gave us genetics that basically give up after the age of fifty, and wired our eyeballs so that the nerves get in the way of our retinas, and leave us with two blind spots that our brains have adapted to gaslight us into thinking that they aren’t actually there. I mean, there are people out there who can’t do long division. We live in a society, and we’re barely competent enough to keep it running. I do not trust my fellow human beings to come up with the correct explanation for the snake transformation plague, present company notwithstanding. My take: we’re screwed, and we’re not going to get to learn why. We’re just going to die. Scripture says the world is flat, but the world is not flat, so… what’re the odds it got the details of the apocalypse right? Not high, that’s for sure.”

“Ani?” I said, turning to face her.

Staring at me, she shook her head. “I don’t agree with everything he said, but… I do agree with one thing: I don’t think these are the Last Days.”

That was astonishing to hear. “What else could they be?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Ani said, “but… I know in my heart…” She clutched a hand to her chest. “The Angel wouldn’t do this.”

“The Angel allowed Darkpox to happen,” I said.

“Yes, but He also brought forth the people and discoveries that led to the vaccine. It all serves a greater purpose. But this,” she shook her head, “this doesn’t. It’s annihilation.” Tears glinted in her eyes. “This is not how the world ends. It can’t be. That’s why there has to be a cure, a vaccine, or something. The Angel wouldn’t do this to us.”

I tried not to cry, but it was hard.

“Then, why doesn’t He stop it?” I said, unable to hold my tongue. “Why doesn’t the Moonlight Queen strike this evil destiny from the Tablets? Why doesn’t the Hallowed Beast descend and smite the zombies and purify the land?”

“Everybody makes that mistake,” Ani said, smiling sadly. “You think the Godhead can just do… whatever.” She shook her head. “They can’t. They’re not all-powerful.”

“Ani,” Jonan said, “I’m pretty sure that’s heretical—not that I care.”

Ani chuckled. “It doesn’t matter.” She raised her gaze to the ceiling. “In my heart, I know it’s true. That’s why our choices are so important; we have a responsibility to try to make things right. The Angel needs us as much as we need Him. Faith is like love and marriage: it’s a two-way street. Things only get better when we choose to make them better.”

As I said, I envied Ani’s faith.

I reaching for the plastic case. “Speaking of making things better,” I said.