I tapped the screen to accept the call as I walked out of the room and into the hallway. Andalon followed me, phasing through the door as I closed it behind me.

Nina’s face blossomed into view. “Dr. Howle!” she cried.

Any pleasure I had at seeing her again was dashed to pieces by her wan complexion, bloodshot eyes, desperate cough, and the fungal hyphae slowly encroaching on her neck from below her white blouse, which was covered by a gnarly looking blue denim vest.

She looked like she’d been through a war—or maybe was still in the middle of one. There were unpleasant colors smeared around her mouth: vomit hues, seasoned with specks of black and green.

Marks of the Green Death.

No!, I thought.

“What’s going on?” I asked. It looked like she was on a bus.

“I need your help,” she said. “We’re on a bus coming to the hospital. We should be there in a couple of minutes, I—”

—But then the call immediately cut to black.

“Fudge!” I hissed.

With my console in hand, I sent a text message to Heggy, telling her a bus filled with victims was inbound for WeElMed, and was only minutes away.

“I’ve already talked it over with Vernon,” she texted back. “The military is helping us out with triage. They’re setting up camp out in the central courtyard.”

Then that’s where I would have to go.

I moved as quickly as I could, drawing on my powers to steady and hasten my gait. Andalon’s blue hair fluttered behind her with underwater slowness as she flew alongside me.

“What’s going on Mr. Genneth?”

“It happened a couple days ago,” I muttered, “when you were in the not-here-place because you were angry with me. I met Nina and her younger brother and promised to help them both, but I’ve failed on both counts.”

“Wha?” Andalon asked. “Why?”

I shook my head as I rounded a corner. “I haven’t even thought of calling her over the past few days. A better person wouldn’t have made that mistake. And then there’s the fiasco with her brother, who’s a transformee, but I’ll have plenty of time to beat myself up over that, later.”

Floating ahead of me, Andalon turned around to face me.

“Fee asko?” she asked.

“It means, big messy situation.” I sighed. “And there’s more than one.”

Nina, I thought.

We passed several panicking physicians. Patients slumped over on the floor stared at me, listlessly, with eyes shot through by the fungus’ black lightning.

So far, I thought-said, continuing my explanation for Andalon, Nina is the only person I know of other than Suisei Horosha—and also probably the Lass Herself—who has been showing supernatural powers despite not being transformees. Her little brother, Lopé, had been taken over by Irredemptists, and I’d promised her I’d help de-program him, and I’d given Nina my console number so that she could call me if anything happened.

“Wait, I remember!” she said. “You were thinksing about her when you were asking Andalon about wyrmeh looks-likes. Miss Nina is gonna go for the rain-bow, right?”

I had to take a moment to appreciate the cuteness of Andalon’s garbled attempt at parsing Lassedile eschatology.

“Yes,” I said, as we continued down the hall. “As far as I knew, with the Last Days upon us, Nina and Suisei are two of the chosen few who that scripture says will come to aid the faithful. And they do it in two ways: protecting them from the horrors of Hell, and safely guiding them into Paradise—up the rainbow, like you said. Heck,” I added, with a tug at my bow-tie, “she might even be a reincarnation of the Lass herself!”

“Wha?” Andalon asked.

I sighed. “Reincarnation is when someone dies, only to come back to life later as a different person, but with the same soul.”

“I don’t get it,” Andalon said.

“No one does,” I explained, “but that’s beside the point. Belief in reincarnation is an almost ubiquitous feature of the religions of the Far West, and, technically speaking, the Church does not have an official doctrinal stance on reincarnation one way or the other, but,” I glanced at Andalon, “as with what you told me about the Angels,” I spoke that last word barely above a whisper, “that no longer matters as much as I once thought it did.”

We arrived in Ward E’s main lobby, though it would be more accurate to refer to it as the mess formerly known as Ward E’s main lobby. It was amazing how much it had changed over the past few hours. The place was basically a refugee camp now: total desperation.

The only semblance of order came from the clusters of rows of those modern egg-shaped chairs, and even then, that was only because the things were mounted in place and wouldn’t budge. People were spread over them like tarps. There were entire families huddled together, half-buried beneath their belongings, and we didn’t have either the time or the people to be able to check which ones were still alive. Personal effects cluttered the floor, up against the walls, like flotsam on the shore.

I wondered if any would ever find their owners ever again.

Nearly every face in sight showed signs of the Green Death: ashen complexion, bloodshot eyes, the fungus’ black, filamentous hyphae growing underneath their skin. Exposed limbs bore the canyons and valleys that ulcers and necrosis were opening into their flesh. Everyone seemed to want to disappear beneath the brims of their hats or the collars of the jackets, as if salvation would only come if the world never learned the truth.

Everything was topsy-turvy, now. The disease. Lassedile prophecies and mythology coming true. Everything. Terror was everywhere—at the tip of every tongue—and the slightest trigger could set it all ablaze.

Angel, imagine if word got out that Nina (or Dr. Horosha!) had magical powers! Everyone was already acting on the assumption that the pandemic was a fulfillment of scripture’s doomsday prophecies. What would they do if they found out? Would they worship her? Lynch her?

What would they do if they stood face-to-face with a wyrm?

I didn’t know, and I didn’t want to find out.

“But if Ms. Nina is magic,” Andalon said, “why is she getting sick? Dr. Sushi isn’t gettin’ sick.”

The tale has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.

You’re right, I thought-said, he isn’t.

But Nina was.

Suisei had miraculously avoided infection by the Green Death, so I’d like to have thought that Nina—as someone with similar powers to his—would have been able to avoid it as well, but I guess I’d been mistaken. If they really were the foretold Blessèd, it did not bode well that they could succumb to the infection just like everyone else. It did not bode well at all.

If they got sick, would they be able to recover? And if they didn’t—if they all died… what would happen to us?

I’d have to puzzle it out later—and by later, ideally, I meant never.

I couldn’t do anything until Nina was here.

We crossed the lobby as quickly as we could. I slowed down a bit, tamping down my powers—not wanting to startle anyone—but then sped back up as I ran out through the front entrance, into the broad corridor and, from there, I made my way to the Hall of Echoes. As I stepped out the grand doors and onto the curb, squinting my eyes as the rising morning’s light, I did a double take.

Garden Court had changed, big time. Though most of the tents and stretchers that we’d set up beforehand were still there, they were now caught in the middle of a maze of walls that looked like they were made of layers of chain-linked fencing. I recognized the black, lace-like construction from one of the models in Heggy’s office.

These were collapsible prefabricated structures.

When Jules was in elementary school, I helped her do a report for science class about this stuff and its use in prefabricated constructions. The black, lace-like metal was a quasi-synthetic material that could “remember” its shape. Apply heat, it became malleable, and you could take a make-shift fortress and fold it up into a single truck’s worth of boxes. Apply heat again, and the stuff would unfold and resume its original form.

Even now, I could spot dark stacks of the stuff unfolding and growing, like caterpillars crawling out of their cocoons. The fence-walls had been and still were being set up across the courtyard, dividing it into quadrants, while also surrounding the garden in a defensive perimeter that extended across the street over to the entrance to the Central Wing, where I now stood.

The fortifications were more than just walls, though. Compact guard towers rose from the walls, and at the corners. Several stood on their own, in the middle of the garden. Traffic on Garden Court Drive had come to a standstill, though that wasn’t new. For the past day or two, the only traffic on that street came from transports and dump trucks that picked up corpses and took them away to be buried, burned, or dumped into the sea. Now, though, Garden Court Drive was serving as an extension of the parking garage. Vehicles filled the street, mostly buses and the military’s stocky, angular troop transports. The most noticeable sights were the aerostats lying in wait here and there, as well as the two armored tanks at the base of the guard tower in the middle of the garden.

The white tents the hospital had set up across the city-block-sized garden continued to serve as triage centers and as an outdoor extension for the hospital—as well as sleeping quarters for much of the staff—though, now, they were also housing the troops and military officers like the General. To my relief, the mix of hospital and military personnel manning the scene seemed to be getting along well, and, thankfully, were masked up the wazoo. The lanes and corridors formed by the prefab walls were allowing us to be much more orderly and systematic in our approach to processing the convoys’ refugees.

As I walked through the lace-metal corridor, crossed the street, and entered the garden, I kept being stopped by soldiers on guard duty. Thankfully, a single scan of my chip on the cufflink I was wearing underneath my hazmat suit brought up my WeElMed profile page on the PortaCons built into their armors’ forearms, and that shut them up real quick.

I tried to ignore my observation that all of the soldiers who had spoken to me were actively, audibly coughing, as if something was stuck in their throat and wouldn’t come free.

Obviously, my wyrmsight was thinned all across my vision, except for the one thick spot in the corner of my eyes that I kept for emergency use. That one spot never stopped glowing with the fungus’ aura.

Strictly speaking, now that I could speed up my thoughts at will, I no longer needed to have even that bit up. In an emergency, I could always slow down my perception of time by speeding up my thoughts and then using what was effectively a real-world pause button to adjust my senses and defenses accordingly.

Like the people in E Ward’s lobby, most of the civilians I saw had bundled themselves up in their clothes, probably from a mix of fever chills and the nippy weather of an early autumn morning in Elpeck—not that it felt very “nippy” to me; the inside of my hazmat suit was perpetually sweltering.

Suddenly, lights crested over the buildings on the slopes of Crusader Hill, and a couple seconds later, two aerostats came roaring over the rooftops as a beat-up red Elpeck Metro bus trundled out of the tunnel. The arrival stirred up the soldiers on guard duty like a kick to a hornets’ nest.

The bus pulled up to a gate in the lace-metal wall around the garden.

I passed many tents and even more people as I crossed the grass and made my way toward that gate, weaving around sickly trees and shrubs.

The bus’ doors opened with rickety squeaks. Desperation pushed the small crowd of people out of the bus, only for the current to slow once they saw the guns being pointed at them by the soldiers on the ground.

“Slow down, people,” one of the soldiers said. “Don’t fight. The hospital staff will receive you one at a time.”

The group of hospital workers waiting in the wings behind the gate rushed out onto the street, splitting up to attend to one of the bus’ three sets of doors. Up on the watchtowers, the soldiers kept a watchful, holding their rifles at the ready.

I imagined they’d shoot at the first sign of zombies.

It took all of five seconds for things to turn sour.

Guns clicked, ready to fire, as shouting broke out among the new arrivals.

Fearing the worst, I froze stiff.

“No, no!” Andalon cried. “They can’t hurt them. They can’t!”

Some kind of fight was underway.

Then a hoarse, male voice bellowed. “I said out of my way!”

Crowds converged and receded at the same time. The refugees who’d made it off the bus ran through the gate, into the garden as medical and military personnel closed in.

“No!” someone shouted. “Don’t shoot! Don’t shoot!”

A pair of arms shot up in the middle of the crowd. People stepped back.

I recognized that voice.

Nina.

“He’s not a zombie!” she yelled. “He’s not!”

She stood off to the side, staring fearfully at the soldiers up on the watchtowers.

By this point, the crowd had thinned enough that I could tell what was going on.

The male voice from before snapped. “I said out of my way! If you won’t take me to my son, I’ll find him myself!”

The speaker shoved his way to the front of the line and out onto the pavement. When Nina turned toward him, the look in her eyes told me everything I needed to know about what was happening.

Also, there was the matter of the obvious family resemblance.

A trio of nurses in white, wearing bulky, old-fashioned rebreather devices converged on the man, a burly figure holding what looked like a wrench in his hands.

I figured this was Nina’s father, and Nina confirmed my hunch by crying out, “Papa, no!” as he accosted the nurses standing in his way, shoving one of them out of his way.

Even Andalon looked concerned.

“Flibbertigibbet,” I muttered.

Nina’s father was a little darker skinned than his daughter. He was a tall, wide man, with short, black hair worn in a buzz-cut. The narrow strands of his thin mustache sat above his lips like windshield wipers on a cloudless day, and his personality shone through just as clearly. He was a down-to-earth man with down-to-earth clothes: a worn-out, hand-me-down business casual garb. Any reason he might have had to wear a necktie was almost certainly dead by now, but that hadn’t stopped him from wearing one, regardless.

Who was he trying to impress? It certainly wasn’t the nurses.

Or the soldiers.

“Dad, please!”

This time, the cry came from a young man; Nina’s older brother, apparently. The young man rushed up to his father, but Mr. Broliguez knocked him back with a thrust of his arm.

“Stay out of this, miha!” he bellowed.

The nurses were tired and scared. Someone was about to get hurt—assuming they hadn’t been already.

One of the aerostats drew close. I could feel its engine’s growls through my hazmat suit. As the aircraft came to hover overhead, one of the nurses managed to grab Mr. Broliguez’s arm and wrench the wrench from his hand. The wrench hit the pavement with an ugly thud, where it glinted in the aerostat’s searchlight. The grass at the garden’s edge flailed in the current coming off the aerostat’s thrusters.

And then, while wrestling the nurses and with a half-dozen rifles trained on him, Nina’s father made the brilliant decision to throw a punch at one of the nurses. Fortunately, his body refused to coöperate, and for the worst possible reason: his ruddy skin was shot through with fungal hyphae.

It was a miracle he was even standing. He must have had the constitution of an ox; “had” being the operative word.

Finally, the pressure couldn’t bear it anymore, and a lone gunshot rang out.

With a hideous groan, Mr. Broliguez bent forward, gripping his chest, as if he was having a heart attack. And then he fell, toppled onto the nurses and the pavement and the edge of the grass like a lumberjacked pine.

Nina yelled as she rushed to his side and stuck out her arms and legs, prepared to take the next bullets for him.

I gulped.

Fudge.