The Wyrms of &alon

Geoffrey was dead. Morgan was dead, curled up on the floor like a broken spider.

Bever was dead. The kind man with the big-hearted laugh and the best chicken dumplings this side of anywhere.

Dead. Or maybe worse than dead; fused into Karl’s body in some unholy abomination.

Karl wanted to scream and cry, but he didn’t know how. His body was a mystery to him. Even his grief had to wait.

He stared in shock at his hands—clawed and three-fingered.

Everything seemed so small.

Dr. Howle stood before him, shaken and diminutive.

Howle the Sorcerer.

Howle the Traitor.

Karl shook his head. “What’s happening to me?”

Even his voice was alien. It was like a pipe organ, or a church choir.

Dr. Howle stammered. “You…” He shook his head and sighed. “You’re a transformee. You’re changing into a wyrm.” The doctor averted his gaze. “A Norm.”

Sounds of battle clanged above the underground chamber. The Norm that had flown through the ceiling bellowed again. The sound made the spines on Karl’s back stiffen, sending a tingle down his tail.

He shuddered.

Karl tried to move, only to stumble and flop onto his stomach. Metal groaned as he crushed the roofs of the vehicles beneath him, and then again as he pushed himself up.

His claws cut through the metal like it was paper.

“What did you do to Bever!?” Karl cried.

Dr. Howle stuck out his hands. “I didn’t mean it. I didn’t! Angel’s truth, I swear it. I…” He gulped and then wept. “I just wanted to deflect him. I…” He stared at Bever’s axe, lying all alone on the floor, halfway between Morgan and Dr. Howle.

“But… my body,” Karl moaned, it—”

“—It consumed him, I know,” Howle said. “It’s not your fault. He and Morgan were doomed, anyway. The wyrm’s spores seeded the fungus in them. It… that’s what let it happen.” He shook his head. His voice broke. “I’m sorry. I’m so, so sorry.”

“The wyrm?”

“The—the Norm,” Howle clarified.

Karl stammered. “D-Did you know this would happen?”

“Bever?” Dr. Howle replied. “No—I mean…” He groaned loudly. “I didn’t know he would be absorbed so quickly. I’m sorry, I should have done better.”

“Did you know about these ch-changes!?” Karl howled.

“Yes, I did,” Dr. Howle replied, after a pause. “I’m—”

“—Are you really one of the Blessèd?” Karl asked.

He wanted to cry, but no tears came.

“I…”

That was a “No”, then.

“Why did you lie!?” Karl yelled. “What are you?!”

He noticed wispy, green plumes puff out with his breath as he screamed. They wafted through the air, lilting toward the ground.

“I…”

Karl flicked his head up as the Norm roared again.

Dr. Howle looked over his shoulder, clearly terrified at the thought of the chaos playing out over their heads.

But, for all his anger, the thought that refused to leave Karl alone was the sight of Geoffrey’s body cracking and twitching as the fungus-monster absorbed his flesh.

“G-Geoffrey…” he stuttered. “He’s… they’re…”

It was too much.

Karl raked his claws down the sides of his head, carving furrows into still-human skin. The wounds tickled for a moment as they stitched themselves up.

“Listen,” Howle said, “I’m sorry for lying. I’m sorry for getting your friends killed. It was stupid, and I deserve your condemnation.” He pointed toward the wall of broken glass. “But right now we’ve got bigger concerns to deal with!” He patted his chest, and then tapped the side of his helmet. “You have powers now. You can move things with your mind. Use that! Help me! Help us! Be angry with me if you want, I don’t care! Just don’t let your friends’ deaths be in vain!”

At that thought, Karl heard Geoffrey’s voice echo in his ears:

If you want to find your courage, accept your fears. Only then will you be able to grow.

“You killed them,” Karl muttered. “You and the Norms.”

“I…”

Karl shook his head. He had no more time for the doctor’s prevarications.

Howle stepped aside as Karl pulled himself forward, scraping his claws across the tile. Behind him, his tail-body floundered. He seemed to be able to move it in every way except the way he wanted. Driven by anger and pain, he slithered forward along the mosaic-covered floor, stopping and starting every few seconds. The impossible sensations of his body’s transformation were running circles in his mind, like one of the future world’s videos—above all else, the feeling of growth. His tail was like his back, if his back had kept going and going. He hardly knew which part of himself was which; there was just so much to feel.

“Karl!” Dr. Howle yelled. “Karl!”

Hadn’t Howle said he’d wanted to talk to him later about what was in store for him as one of the Angel’s Blessèd.

It’s no wonder Howle put it off, he thought.

Karl wanted to ask the doctor how much longer he had before a Norm possessed him, as it had the other … wyrm.

Did that mean Howle was a demon, too? But, if he was, why had he returned the zombies to their senses?

Karl didn’t know what to think of that.

“Karl!” Howle yelled. “What are you doing?!”

“What you told me to do!”

“Wait!” Howle said, following after him. “Listen! There’s more I have to—”

Turning his forepart around as best as he could, Karl looked back at the doctor and yelled.

“I don’t want to listen to you! I want to listen to Geoffrey, but I can’t, because he’s dead! I want him to guide me. I want Bever to make his meals and Morgan to speak ill of it. I want to see Duncan draw and hear one of Geren’s stories! Now, I never will!”

The sorcerer tried to speak. “I—”

Karl thumped his chest with a claw. “—Their bodies are in me, now. I will stop the Norm before the madness takes me, and then I will die and I won’t be a burden anymore!”

“What?!” Howle yelled, shocked and confused.

“It’s my fault we came to this blasted place,” Karl cried. “Fink went into the portal, and I chased after him, and Geoffrey chased after me. It’s my fault the Norm attacked us! It’s my fault Bever died! It’s my fault! All mine! Now, leave me alone you—you—” he snarled, “—liar!”

Karl pushed ahead, unable to bear the heartache.

He grabbed support pillars to pull himself forward, and then pushed off them to thrust himself past them. Acid-eaten debris—metal, corpses, glass—got flung this way and that by Karl’s wayward tail. Broken glass tickled Karl’s underbelly as he wormed up the stairs into the underground gallery.

Within, some soldiers darted into view, shooting bullets at him as they crossed the gallery. The bullets stung, but they didn’t stop him. The bullet fire drifted upwards; Karl blocked it with his forearms. His many minute, green scales repelled the bullets, as if they were nothing.

His breaths were so… loud.

Pushing off one of the support pillars, Karl coiled himself—or, at least tried to coil himself—on a portion of the ceiling that had collapsed to the floor. It was a slab stone, and rose up like a ramp. People still clambered up and down it, fleeing like mad. Several leapt off just to get away from him.

Pulling himself onto the slab, his sinuous tail-body drooping over the edges, he pushed himself up the slab until he rose into the sun. Sticking his arms forward, he sunk his claws into the grassy earth at the sinkhole’s edge.

Then he pulled, dragging himself onto the surface.

Hoping to kick off the stone like he would have had he still had feet, Karl flailed his tail flailed behind him, but to little effect—though it did make Dr. Howle yelp and stagger back

Karl pulled the rest of himself out of the hole by thrusting his hips forward, not that he had any hips to thrust. His tail spooled around him, flopping onto the ooze-splattered grass.

And then he noticed the chaos all around him, and for a slack-jawed moment, Karl forgot himself.

People were running every which way; bullets flew left and right. The amber-brown Norm clawed through trees and tents alike, toppling over fences, flicking bodies with its thrashing tail. It whipped its head side to side, dribbling spores. Its silver eyes glinting in the sunset.

Everyone was stampeding to the surrounding buildings, desperate to get into the hospital.

Karl’s gaze darted about as he saw red lines of sound and light sweep through the air. They sliced through flesh and punched mortal holes, the exposed flesh steaming, seared by some fabulous heat.

Everywhere Karl looked, civilians stumbled and snarled, suddenly losing themselves to zombie-will, only to snap back to their senses a moment later, though the soldiers hardly seemed to notice, even when it happened to them. The gunmen on the watchtowers fired like mad, shooting at anything that moved.

“Stop!” a voice yelled. “Stop shooting!”

Turning, Karl lowered himself to see Dr. Howle walking up the slab, feet flat against its slope, as if by magic.

The doctor waved his hands. “Stop shooting!” His voice came out tinny through his green, full-body suit. “They’re back to normal! They’re back to normal!”

But no one listened. Dr. Howle might have as well been yelling into a tempest. Had Karl not been right beside him, he probably wouldn’t have heard him.

But everyone very much noticed Karl. Fresh screams shot out.

“Shit, Sarge! There’s another one!”

“Get to the aerostats, quickly!”

Suddenly, Karl was gifted with a face-full of bullets.

He whipped his head to the side and screamed. Ducking low, Karl pulled himself along the grass, his claws tearing furrows into the soil.

Like with his self-inflicted wounds, there was no blood and little pain, just a brief tickling sensation as the hurt faded.

“Stop shooting at me!” he cried. “I’m serving our country, too!”

His voice was louder than he’d expected it to be. Several of the soldiers took notice, especially on the watchtowers.

They stared.

Geoffrey would have been disgusted with them.

Karl pointed his claws at them. Their sharp tips drew the eyes of the civilians fleeing to the hospital for shelter.

“The army caused this!” he yelled. “They kidnapped the sick; they tortured them! The General turned them into monsters!”

Karl’s voice was a carnival wonder. All the musicians on all the streets of all the cities in the world could have played in unison, and it wouldn’t have sounded half as loud as his voice, and unlike Dr. Howle’s words, people heard Karl’s.

There was an impossible moment when many of the fleeing civilians stopped running, their faces churning with disbelief, even as the zombies came charging at them.

But it was only for a moment. An instant later, everything erupted in frenzied indignation.

Fear was spliced with anger.

Waves of force rippled out from one corner of the crowd, at Karl’s right. People fell like fumbled swords. Screams turned toward the source: a hunchbacked figure clad in heavy garments.

He was rage incarnate.

“Murderers!” he screamed, bellowing his fury. “Murderers!”

The man threw off his hooded jacket, revealing that one of his eyes was a golden orb eye. The distended length of his neck and torso stretched free, no longer hidden beneath his clothes.

Was he another sorcerer? Or another demon?

Was there even a difference?

The man flicked an arm. One of the military transports was sent careening across the street. Soldiers tried to run out of the way, but they were not fast enough. The vehicle slammed into them, scattering their viscera to the wind.

“The dead told me,” the sorcerer said. “I didn’t believe them at first! I didn’t.”

No! Karl thought.

All order was gone. Before, the people had been running to the hospital. Now, chaos reigned. People ran every which way. Terror spread like wildfire through the seething tide of humanity.

Suddenly, a cluster of people—civilian, soldier—spasmed as Hell claimed their bodies as its own. Then another cluster, and another. The crowds split, running away from themselves.

“Fudge!” Dr. Howle cried. “What’s happening!?”

Karl looked down at the man in his shadow.

“What do you mean, it’s fighting back!?” Dr. Howle said.

He must have been talking to Andalon.

Zombies crashed into the black-lattice fences. Others climbed up the watchtowers.

Howle gasped. “Oh no. No no no no no!”

Trees snapped and fell. Cars crunched.

Karl swerved to look at the center of the disturbance.

Angel’s breath, he thought.

“Sorcerers!” he yelled, pointing with a claw.

More of the demon-sorcerers were joining the fray. They were directing their powers at their oppressors and betrayers.

“You aren’t helping!” one yelled, “They’re dead! My son and wife are dead!It’s all your fault!”

A car tumbled down the sett-paved street.

It was a free-for-all, now. People attacked each other without reason, maddened by fear, rage, and pain.

The Norm slithered up toward the edge of the garden. With a flick of its tail, it swept up several soldiers, flinging them against a building’s façade. The sweep of its body tore through the lattice-metal fence crisscrossing the street in front of the older-looking building. Dozens of people got knocked to the pavement as the fence slid across the ground, lacerating the bodies of the fallen.

More of the fences toppled or ripped apart as the Norm slithered back onto the garden. Plants and bodies blackened and sizzled in its wake, corroded by its fatal breaths.

The soldiers were split. Some trained their fire on the Norm, while others moved down the oncoming zombies, clearing the way for men with the ray-guns to move into position.

Karl slithered after the Norm.

Maybe I can stop it, he thought.

They were nearly the same size, after all.

Karl’s spines stiffened as he stretched up tall.

“Monster!” he yelled, swiping an arm through the air. “Face me!”

He had to get its attention somehow.

“Face—“

“—What the fuck!?” someone shouted, having heard Karl’s words. But their outburst drowned in screams of terror as nearby soldiers stumbled and turned. The soldiers’ bodies twitched out of control. They struck at everyone around them, even their comrades.

Then, from a high tower and the rooftops, a rain of bullets descended. Bones and black ooze scattered across the setts as headshots burst open the lost men’s skulls.

“Karl!” Howle yelled.

But Karl ignored him, stumbling forward. Deformed cypresses and shriveled willows uprooted as Karl pulled their trunks for leverage. Shoving a white tent out of his way, he exposed the spread of corpses laid out underneath it.

Zombies charged through the open space. Physicians ran screaming, fleeing the nearby tents, only to stumble and snarl as the evil claimed them.

Coiling—rearing up high and raising its head—the Norm breathed a tall plume of spores with an unearthly bellow. Slithering off the garden once more, it approached one of the buildings and then reared up its forepart, as if to climb.

Karl made the Bond-Sign. By the Godhead…

The Norm rose up off the ground.

Floating.

Flying.

“Karl!?” Howle yelled again.

Snapping to attention, Karl turned to face him.

“What are you doing?!” Howle asked. “Why won’t you talk to me? I can—”

“—Leave me alone!” Karl yelled.

Tears welled in Dr. Howle’s eyes.

“I’m sorry!” Dr. Howle yelled. “It’s—”

“—If you are, then act!” Karl yelled. “You do something!”

For an instant, Dr. Howle’s gaze turned distant, like it had several times before. A moment later, he shook his head in frustration. “Of all things,” he muttered, “why does it have to be necromancy?”

And then he raised his hands.