The Wyrms of &alon

DAY 3

Brrreen! Brrreen!

My alarm clock’s screech sliced through the lingering haze of a restless and truly crummy night’s sleep.

The weekend shift was upon me.

I moaned internally.

Talk about the morning after!

It had been the most miserable night I’d ever weathered. I’d insisted on being the one to drive home, and that Pel, Jules, and Rayph sit in the back seats behind the seal. Instead of going to bed with my wife, I spent the majority of the night sleeping in the bathtub, pretending to be dealing with a gastrointestinal issue. The only saving grace was that Pel got up an ungodly early hour, which gave me a whopping two and a half hours of sleep in bed. So, to say that I felt weak and woozy would be the understatement of the century.

And that was just the tip of the iceberg. A marching band of refracted sensations and sounds half-remembered blasted through my head, to the beat of the alarm clock’s screeches. More than anything else—even more than I wanted the glob-forsaken alarm to stop—I wanted last night—no, all of yesterday—to have just been a nightmare.

But it wasn’t. It definitely wasn’t, because I was dead. I was still dead. Even now, lying in my bed at the apogee of cozy comfort, swaddled in my comforter as snug as a bug in a rug, I was still utterly, completely, unanswerably convinced that my body had died and that it and I were no longer parts of one another.

I don’t know if my body has any blood in it anymore, Genneth… and I’ve been too scared to check.

The sound spooked me. Opening my eyes, I raised my head, certain I’d heard Merritt Elbock’s voice…

…Well, I tried to open my eyes and raise my head. The reality was far worse.

For an instant, I was trapped in one of the eeriest places I’d ever known. I was consciously aware that I had willed myself to move. In my mind, I was certain that I had. But my body showed otherwise. It was still in the process of registering and responding to my command. There was some kind of delay. The closest analogy I have for describing the experience would be to compare it to listening to two recordings of the same thing simultaneously, but with one of the recordings playing a tenth of a second ahead of the other.

After an agonizing millisecond, my lagging head and eyelids finally caught up with the rest of my neurophysiology.

I swallowed—

—Lag—

—Hard, only to—

—Lag—

—Gasp and gag as—

—Lag—

—I nearly choked in the process.

I swore.

—Lag—

—“Fudge…”

I was thirsty. Terribly thirsty. My throat and mouth were a desert filled with dung beetles and dead wildebeests. A bitter, acrid taste congealed beneath my tongue.

I sat—

—Lag—

—Up, pressed the—

—Lag—

—off button on the alarm, rose from—

—Lag—

—my bed, and made my way to—

—Lag—

—The fudging master bathroom.

I was a video constantly buffering. And it wouldn’t go away. It was in my body’s every motion, even my breath and my heartbeat. I’d been awake for barely a minute, and I was already half of the way to having a full-blown panic attack.

Mrs. Elbock’s words repeated themselves in my head.

I don’t know if my body has any blood in it anymore, Genneth… and I’ve been too scared to check.

I wasn’t imagining it. Well, I was imagining it, it was just that my imaginings had the force normally reserved for reality, and reality alone. My mind was recreating Merritt’s voice, and using it to play her words in my ears.

This was a bad sign.

Another bad sign? As the remembered words lingered in my thoughts, I realized I now completely agreed with her. As much as every rational thought in my head told me otherwise, I couldn’t shake the feeling that the blood in my veins had curdled and rotted and turned to dust. And, even if I went and cut myself to check, I doubted the sight of blood leaking from my body would have been enough to change my mind.

Water…

Dazed and confused, I looked around the bathroom. The tiles on the walls gave the room a blessèdly cooling feel, especially in the gentle morning light that streamed through the window. Pale green squares covered the wall from the floor up to the midpoint where the ornamental pattern suddenly gave way to a darker green shade that filled the remaining space all the way up to the ceiling. The coldness of the white floor tiles beneath my bare feet worked to rouse me far better than coffee ever could. Groaning, I lumbered over to and leaned against the creamy marble countertop surrounding the sink, propping myself up with my arms. I briefly raised my head to get a passing glance at the mirrored wall in front of me. I thought I caught a glimpse of something dark threaded across my eyeball—like a bloodshot eye, only painted the wrong color.

Blinking my lagging eyes, I grabbed my cup from the shelf and filled it to the brim with cold water straight from the faucet, and downed it in one swig. Every gulp was sorbet and poetry and a thousand and one other beautiful things. I filled my cup a second time, and then a third and fourth before finally setting the cup back on the shelf. In between cups, I paused only to gasp for breath.

Flicking the switch on the wall turned on the ceiling lights directly over the countertop. A half-minute spent staring at myself in the mirror didn’t reveal any signs of anything amiss.

And yet…

The lag was still there, undiminished. I didn’t need to be a neurologist to know that lag was not a normal feature of a healthy human body. Fortunately for me, I was one. I raised my hand in front of myself and waved it back and forth, gandering at the afterimages that trailed behind it as my eyes worked to track the motions. The lag I was experiencing was a lot like those afterimages. If I focused, I could feel the lag as my hand passed through those afterimages, catching up with the will it lagged behind. I was equal parts amazed and horrified—and for once, it wasn’t because of the most recent “fun fact” Brand Nowston had decided to drop on me.

Unlike the famous myth of the barashai who challenged Thought to a footrace to see who could first reach enlightenment, it actually was possible to travel faster than the speed of thought, and thought itself very much had a speed limit. Despite what lived experience seemed to tell us, the electrical signals of thought and will moved at the speed of chemistry, in the form of chemical gradients of sodium and potassium flooding—in and out, respectively—down the axons of our neurons. And was just the situation within the neuron. Things got more complicated when you had to take into account additional factors such as the myelin sheath, and the various neurotransmitters involved in bridging either side of the synaptic cleft—the gap between neurons. And not only that, but not all signals traveled at the same rate.

Sensations of pain were among the slowest nerve signals, crawling along at barely over a mile per hour. When it came to nerves, size was very much a factor. The larger the neuron, the more ion channels the cell could have, and the larger the volume of ions the axon could hold, both of which caused a corresponding increase in signal speed. While the nerves involved in nociception—that is, pain—were relatively small, the efferent neurons responsible for our conscious control of the skeletal muscle that made our arms and legs move were significantly larger. Thanks to that, the signals received by the muscles in our limbs could roar through our nervous systems at anywhere between one-hundred fifty to two-hundred seventy miles per hour—provided the neurons involved were fully myelinated, of course. And, believe it or not, the reason we knew any of this at all was because of squid, but that’s a whole other story.

The point was: human thought might have been able to create mag-lev bullet trains, but it certainly couldn’t outrun them.

Maybe that was it.

Was this “lag” possibly a conscious awareness of the time it took for signals to travel through my own nervous system? And if so… how was that even possible?

First Andalon, and now this?

I let out a ragged whimper.

“What’s happening to me?” I muttered.

I had an explanation for why I believed I was dead—Nalfar’s Syndrome. I did not have an explanation for everything else that had happened.

Had my wife not been in earshot—she was in the kitchen, making breakfast—I would have screamed myself hoarse and cried tears of blood. Instead, I chucked. “I’m going insane, aren’t I?” I asked myself, between panting breaths. I stared at my reflection. “Maybe it’s the stress?”

I giggled and shivered.

My breaths had grown heavier.

There was definitely a panic attack heading my way in the near future. I just hoped to the Angel it wouldn’t pay me a visit while I was driving.

In the distance, I heard my daughter calling for me.

“Dad, you’re really pushing it. You’re gonna be late.”

Flibbertigibbet…

Almost on a reflex, I shut the door and turned the lock.

Then the gravity of the situation finally hit me. It was one thing to realize that I now had whatever Merritt had. It was quite another thing to look that fact in the eye and drink in all the horrid consequences.

I was infected, and it was probably contagious and my family was within walking distance of me. Within breathing distance.

“Fudge fudge fudge fudge fudge!” I muttered.

“Daaaaad?” Jules said.

“Just—just hold on a minute!”

It could be argued that the best thing to do here would be to lock myself in the room for however long this was going to last. Had this been an ordinary disease, I think that would have been my best course of action.

But this was not an ordinary disease.

Figures from my dreams were appearing to me in my waking hours. Merritt was displaying psychokinetic powers, in addition to that freaky skin rot. And, add to that the Nalfar’s and the lagging…

I had no business staying at home, not even if I spent that time behind locked doors. I would not be able to live with myself if I ended up infecting my family with this… whatever it is.

My best bet was to go to work and hunker down there. If there was anything that could be done about my condition, it wasn’t going to happen if I was locked in my house’s master bedroom. Besides, at least at work, I would be able to make myself useful, even if I was infected. Or, at least, I hoped I would.

I just couldn’t stomach the thought of being stuck behind locked doors, unable to do anything to help, and just being a burden on others around me.

I gulped.

With any luck, if we could figure out how to fix this, I could be back home in no time at all.

“Well, it’s been a minute!” Jules said.

“I’m coming!” I said, “I’m coming.”

Fudge!

And then it hit me: I needed to change the bedsheets!