Ani could only be amazed at her mother’s timing. Sharing a videophone call with her in Hoshi’s room didn’t feel the least bit real. The zombies on General Marteneiss’ footage made more sense than it had.
Ani ended the videophone call with her mother as swiftly as she could, promising over and over again that she would be right there.
“Were you talking to the gods?” Hoshi asked, hiding behind the bed
“My family needs me,” Ani said.
“Where is my Daddy?” Hoshi asked.
It was times like these that made Ani wish she could be in more than one place at one time.
Speaking from experience, while it is certainly a useful ability to have, it isn’t all that is chalked up to be—or, at least, the wyrm version of it isn’t.
The raven-haired girl watched in nervous curiosity as Ani dashed out a text message on her PortaCon:
Genneth, the daughter of our darkpox patients is awake and alert. The antibodies worked like a charm. Her new liver is firing on all cylinders (!). She wants to see her Dad.
It might seem odd that a true-blue Lassedile like Ani Lokanok would strike up a friendship with yours truly, but had no qualms about it. She was better than that, and—not only that—she could relate to me, too. Like me, Ani was an apostate, she was just apostatizing from a different orthodoxy.
For the sake of this analogy, I’m disregarding the unorthodox aspects of Ani’s beliefs.
My demons came from Lassedicy, and while Ani had had her fair share of those in the past, her true tormentors came from filial piety. As the old joke went, the east made religion into government, while the west made government into religion.
I texted her back a moment later:
Say no more. I’ll handle it.
She sent me the room number, and then I was on my way.
As best as she could, Ani told Hoshi that a friend of hers would be coming to help. She described me as “wearing the same clothes as me, with a cute red and yellow on his neck.”
In response, Hoshi gave Ani a quizzical look, but then Ani said, “He will take you to your daddy,” and Hoshi smiled, freeing Dr. Lokanok able to step out of the room and fulfill her ingrained daughterly duties without also feeling like she’d failed to honor her responsibilities as a medical professional.
“Please stay here,” Ani said. “Do not touch anything.” And then she ran off as quickly as she could. By the time she reached her destination, she was coughing and panting so intensely, she had to bat away her coworkers’ worried looks.
“Running in a hazmat suit is the stupidest thing I’ve ever done,” she said, while hunched over, knees bent and ass in the air while her circulatory system ran on overdrive.
Inside the hazmat suit, it was hotter than a desert and wetter than a jungle. There was an odd, unnatural smell to the compressed air circulating through the suit, and it did almost nothing to help with the sweat weighing on the edge of her brow.
She gasped for breath as she staggered into the massive, all-Wards reception area in the hallway down from the Hall of Echoes. Ani looked around the room for several frantic seconds before she found them and, like an idiot, ran straight toward them.
Duty and the hope of Love had a way of getting people to make unhealthy life choices.
Her mother and father stood by the entrance, lost and confused. Just like Ani’s mother had told her, they’d only just finished getting through triage. Since the day before yesterday, the hospital had already moved part of triage out into the Garden Court, and now, with the military on the premises, there were finally enough hands on deck to go the full nine yards and have all triage take place out in the courtyard, to leave as much as room possible inside the hospital for treating patients.
Two nurses and a soldier were trying to tell Mr. and Mrs. Lokanok where to go, but Ani’s parents were having none of it. Her father didn’t like being told what to do, and her mother was much the same, unless the command had come from her husband, her own parents, her older brother, her old friends, or one of the senior managers at the Lacy’s boutique where she had worked since the beginning of forever, in which case, filial piety demanded she acquiesce. Taken as a whole, the two of them were the very definition of passive aggressive, Hanako being the passive one, and Alon being the aggressive one.
“Okasan! Itay!” Ani shouted, still panting for breath. She flailed her arms—fingers splayed wide—to scatter the crowd and clear a path through the marl of dying humanity. “Out of the way!” she yelled. “Out of the way!”
Ani looked the soldiers and the nurses in the eyes as she pulled out her PortaCon, opened the WeElMed app and scanned her chip along the sensor. The app immediately displayed Ani’s personal profile, showing her official status as a junior member of Ward E’s CMT for all to see.
“These two are with me,” Ani said. The nurses nodded and turned to the other people further back down the line out the door.
Ani resolved to go Divulge this abuse of power after at a future date. While she would have loved to do it now, at the moment, she was busy getting her parents as far away as possible from the crowds that, at any moment, might devolve into a horde of zombies.
The narrative has been taken without authorization; if you see it on Amazon, report the incident.
Without another word, Ani took her parents hand in hand and led them out of the reception area and into Ward E, where, after traveling down a series of halls, she finally found a room for them a decent way away from any crowds.
“What happened?” she asked. “How did you get here?”
Around itself, time did coil; static kissed the memory-fragment’s edge.
Ani had always thought of her father as a man of many colors, and in many ways as well. His face was darker than hers, the result of genes and many years spent laboring beneath the Sun. His hair was dark atop his head, fading to ashen gray stubble on his chin, along with a matching mustache. She had vivid memories of the kisses he’d given her when she’d been little. Her father’s kisses were brushes with steel wool dripping with beer and sardine juice. She could always picture him in the white wife-beater, sitting in the ratty old reclining chair in the living room, in front of the TV console, at the tail end of a long day at work.
Ani couldn’t believe that “wife-beater” was a phrase people used to describe a shirt. It was just awful.
Ani’s memories of her mother lived with morning smells: coffee, hard boiled eggs, miso soup. For a while, there was also the smell of cheap whiskey, but then that got replaced with scented incense—a piece of Munine tradition repurposed for Lassedile ritual. And while Ani’s father could drink himself to death without so much as getting tipsy, her mother had a far more delicate constitution, physically and emotionally.
Even as a kid, Ani remembered hearing people say she was better-looking than her mother was. “Bigger eyes,” they said. “Longer hair,” they said. Those words upset her. She loved her mother, and didn’t like it when they insulted her, but she also didn’t like that her mom would get upset when she heard those words, and would hold that pain inside herself, until it started oozing out of even the littlest interactions, leaving Ani afraid of talking to her, because it would only make everyone sad, and that was awful.
A child shouldn’t have to be wary of their mother, especially when she was already afraid of talking to her father.
Around itself, time did coil; static and noise kissed the memory-fragment’s edge.
The science fair.
Even in kindergarten, Ani loved going to the science fair, and she nurtured that love through high school and beyond, never failing to attend, but what she really wanted was to compete in it, which she did, but only once, in middle school. 7th grade.
With her biology teacher’s help, she’d set up a wonderful experiment. Really, it was much a work of conceptual art as it was a demonstration of a scientific concept. The idea was to express passages from the Words of the Witnesses Testaments in chemical form, using the four chemical bases of DNA to render the words in a base-4 numeral system, which she then implanted them into bacteria in a skillful bit of microbial genetic transformation that her biology teacher was happy to help her with.
As the bacteria divided and reproduced, tiny changes would occur in the DNA in a demonstration of the great thermodynamic truth that no physical process was free of disorder or mistakes. Several months later, they extracted the encoded passages from the location in the microbes’ plasmids where they’d originally been placed, and, after a bit of processing, the nucleic acids would be translated back into text, now altered by evolution’s own handiwork.
She got 3rd place, and would have been higher, were it not for one of the judges, who determined that Ani’s experiment was too “controversial” for the 1st place prize. After that, some of her mother’s church friends stopped coming over to their house for scripture study.
Ani wasn’t sure how much of that was her own fault, and how much of it was her father’s. Alon had gotten into a screaming fight with one of the judges. It would have broken out into a fist fight had Ani’s mom not swooped in and calmed things down.
“My girl gets nothing less than first place, you hear me?” her father had yelled. “First place!”
She should have remembered that teacher’s name. Mr.…?
But, no, she couldn’t.
Around itself, time did coil; static and noise kissed the memory-fragment’s edge.
“Okasan, Itay… watch your step,” Ani said, glancing back at her parents. “Don’t get in the way of people ferrying bodies out.”
The room she’d found for her parents was about to be emptied of its previous occupant. Ani waited until the body bag was wheeled out of the room before she darted in.
Hanako stood in the hallway, overcome by the currents of life and death churning all around her.
People in. Bodies out.
“Ani… by the Angel.”
“Everything’s gonna be fine Mom,” Ani said.
With her PortaCon in hand, she scanned her parents’ chips and then transmitted the data to the room’s console, registering the two of them as its current occupants.
Her parents slowly stepped into the room, with Ani’s mother leading her father by the arm. The room was in a really bad state; Hanako gasped in fear and apprehension. There was black ooze splattered on the floor and the electronics. Spores were becoming visible where the ooze had begun to dry.
“The sheets are filthy,” Alon said. “This place is a fucking pig-sty,” Alon said, with a laborious cough.
“I’ll take care of it,” Ani said. “I’ll take care of it.” She pulled out a stool for her mother as her father plopped into the seat of the visitor’s chair.
Ripping the sheets and pillowcases off the bed, Ani bundled them up and then opened the cover on the incinerator chute in the wall and chucked them in. Hoping to find fresh linens, she walked over to the cabinets by the sink, only to discover the cabinets were empty.
She turned to face her parents, saying, “I’ll be right back,” and then darting out into the hall and into the room the next door over.
The room next door wasn’t empty. Even with all the death and horror Ani had seen so far, she still couldn’t help but stare at the fungus-ravaged patient lying in bed. His body was seizing, like he was being electrocuted. His hair had fallen out, and the ulcers on his arms had eaten all the way down to the bones, exposing the periosteum to the air. Fruiting bodies were beginning to creep from up the ulcers’ ravines.
Ani happened to have some sedative on hand, in the pocket of her hazmat suit.
At this point, a lot of people—myself included—were carrying doses of drugs on their person, because that was the only way to be sure that no one else would come in and use them before you did.
It was a dog-eat-dog world, that’s for sure.
She tried administering it to him, to stabilize him, but the flesh around his IV port was like rotten fruit, so soft and wet that it fell apart at the slightest touch, skin, fast, and muscle sloughing off with a wet slip.
Ani made the Bond-sign. “I’m sorry,” she muttered, “I’m sorry.”
She stepped away from the dying man. It hurt to turn her back to him, but there was nothing she could do. His pulse was erratic. His SpO2 was abysmal.
He died while Ani was pulling linens out of the cabinet—the last remaining pair. She entered a notice of death into the console on the wall by the door before she left.
Back in her parents’ room, Ani placed the clean bedding on the countertop and then went back out into the hallway and, thirty seconds later, came back, pushing a second empty bed into the room. It, too, was filthy. Ani hoped the reason it had been left empty in the hallway was because some good intentioned soul had hoped someone would come along and clean it.
Well, they were right about that, she thought, as she did the cleaning herself, squeezing out some instant sponge from the dispenser by the sink. She soaked the sponge in antiseptic before wiping down the floor and both beds. She made sure to tear off the second bed’s death-stained linens before grabbing the clean, pine-scented linens from the countertop and unfurling them over the bed.
She tried her best not to cry as she helped her parents to their beds. Unfortunately, not even the Green Death was enough to stop her father from doing what he did best: making things worse.