The Wyrms of &alon

Seizure? Recalling my own experience, I feared the worst.

Another Nalfar’s case?

“Crap!” Ani muttered. “We can talk later!”

The four of us went our separate ways, seamlessly disappearing into the chaos. I took all of two steps before I remembered I was totally out of my usual element. Instead, I followed Dr. Lokanok.

“Aren’t you going to go off on your own?” she asked me.

I shook my head. “I’m out of my element. I think I’ll be more helpful working alongside you.”

“How the tables have turned,” she said, with a smile. “Glad to have you on board.”

And off we went.

Ani came from a mixed-race family—half-Munine, half-Costranak—and she’d spent the better part of her life trying to prove her worth to both. Her “how the tables had turned” remark was a throwback to her final year of medical school, when I’d been able to serve her as a mentor for her residency. Mentoring Ani had been a much-welcomed spot of sunshine in what was otherwise a rather dark time in my life—it was around then that Rale died. It had been an honor and a privilege to watch Ani blossom from a sensitive, timorous overachiever to a sensitive, plucky overachiever. Seeing her rise to the occasion even when she thought she couldn’t had given me a sliver of hope that, maybe, I wasn’t quite as hopeless as I felt.

We arrived at the room of the patient with the seizure.

“Well… what do we have here?” I mumbled.

The patient before was the one I’d seen vomiting moments before. A portly, balding fellow, he wore green-hued slacks and a matching plaid shirt, liberally drizzled with the wet, dull amber glops of a meal half-digested. His extremities trembled oddly, and, beneath the bright examination light on the moveable arm attached to the side of his bed, glistening sweat poured down his brow.

Of course, my priorities were elsewhere. I stared intently at the man’s eyes, looking for any trace of black filaments.

Seeing none, I breathed a sigh of relief.

Ani turned to the nurse. “Weren’t you pumping his stomach?”

“I was but, he—”

—The man seized, gasping for air like a fish out of water. His neck flexed as if he was trying to howl, but all that came out were heavy, ragged breaths.

Like a fish?

The mind works in mysterious ways.

Ani and I spoke at the same time.

“Tetrodotoxin!” I said.

“Fricken’ pufferfish!” Ani exclaimed.

It’s like they say: great minds think alike.

“Nurse,” Ani said, “get me a laryngoscope and a ventilator. We need to intubate the patient!”

The nurse stepped out of the room.

“And activate the charcoal!” Ani added.

I stepped out of the way to let the two women do their job.

The poor fellow was almost certainly a gourmand. How else would you end up with pufferfish poisoning before brunch?

Tetrodotoxin (TTX): enemy of sodium ion channels and sushi aficionados the whole world over. Fatal TTX poisoning generally happened quickly, within twenty minutes or so. Higher doses of the toxin corresponded with quicker symptom onset. The fact that the neurological symptoms had only recently begun to spike signaled the man had probably gotten only a minor dose and was likely going to live. Granted, he wasn’t going to be a happy camper for the next few days, but he would live.

If the Godhead really did exist, They had a very morbid sense of humor.

I think it said a lot about our ability to understand our own neurophysiology that many of our fundamental insights into our neurons’ inner workings depended on using deadly neurotoxins to show us how things could go wrong. Also, it wasn’t our own neurons that told us this, but squid neurons. In an emergency, squid forced water out of their siphon to swiftly propel themselves through the water. The neuron responsible for this action was of stupendous size, with an axon—the long, thin, electrically conductive part—sometimes exceeding a millimeter in diameter. With that size, we could stick electrodes in them to measure changes in electrical current, and then experiment to see how toxins like TTX altered the neuron’s functionality. And all of this, just to understand a single neuron. Angel knows what lengths you’d have to go to to understand consciousness.

A voice shouted from further down the hall. “We got another case!” I didn’t need to ask “of what?”

I followed Ani back the way we came, along with several other nurses and physicians. The patients were in the waiting area behind the glass, next to the reception desk. It wasn’t difficult to spot the NFP-20 cases.

Yes, plural.

It was like the color had been siphoned right out of them, leaving a sweaty, glassy-eyed husk in its wake. The patients coughed up a storm, wobbling on their feet, as if their legs wouldn’t quite obey them. Nurses in a mask and gloves approached them warily, handing them face masks, and assisting those of them who either didn’t put their mask on properly or didn’t even care to try. Once they were properly masked, the delicate work of escorting them down the hall and into the room began.

Ani stepped close. Wanting to help, I followed suit, but she held out her hand and turned to face me.

“Stay back, Genneth. A mask isn’t as good as a visor.” Ani looked to her left and right.

“Everyone: unless you’ve got PPE, keep your distance. We don’t want to take any chances.”

“We’re going to need more, then. A lot more,” one of the nurses replied.

“I know,” Ani said. “Let’s just get these patients situated in the hot-zone, and then we’ll all roll out the plastic cavalry.”

The small crowd parted to either side as Dr. Lokanok and the one or two other professionals with their equipment all in order walked the patients out of the reception area and toward Ward E’s rapidly developing hot zone. Almost imperceptibly, two janitors crept into the reception area through the gap in the glass wall and began to wipe down the chairs and walls with antiseptic.

“Here, Doctor,” a nurse said, “this way.”

I followed him, though in the way one usually follows someone they probably shouldn’t be following: slowly, and at a distance. They entered through one of the double doorways near the reception area and I followed suit. I didn’t take long to figure out where we—and the infected patients—were headed:

Physical Therapy.

Like some of WeElMed’s labs, pretty much all of our physical therapy modules were made from several rooms’ worth of space melded together to form a single open-floor-plan area, divided only by curtains that could be attached and detached from any one of the many channels that ran through the ceiling. Given all the room taken up by exercising equipment, the large space was a necessity. That I knew any of this was only because of the years of physical therapy Rale had had to endure, even though all of it had ultimately amounted to nothing.

I kept watch from a distance as I approached the room where Ani and the others were busy getting the NFP-20 patients situated, catching glances of what was going on through the windows in the module’s double doors. Creeping several steps closer, I realized that a great deal of the physical therapy equipment must have been moved somewhere else. Walking up to the windows, I saw there were far fewer treadmills and weight-lifting machines than normal. Instead, cots and examination tables filled most of the available space. The longer and more intently I looked, the more conflicted I felt.

There was both good and evil in that room, and it was difficult to tell which was which, and that frustrated me. Was it “good” that most of the patients there seemed to have only minor symptoms?—for the most part, just a nasty cough. Or was it a presentiment of awful death? Was it evil that the repurposed physical therapy module was already nearing capacity, or was it a saving grace that the people within didn’t have to suffer all alone? Heck, when personnel passed in or out through the double doors, I could hear the patients talking amongst one another, and some of it sounded almost chipper. I even heard someone crack a joke about the muzak droning through the speakers embedded in the ceiling.

Like I said, it was hard to tell. I hoped it would stay that way.

I was about to walk in and see the patients for myself when I felt a familiar presence.

I turned around.

“Mr. Genneth!” She hopped in place, excitedly.

Andalon.

“You did it! You did it!”

“What?” I asked, softly. “What did I do?”

“You really are a good mind doctor!” she said.

Though I appreciated the complement, that was beside the point.

“I remembered a thing!”

A chill ran down my spine. Now she had my full, undivided attention.

“Tell me, please,” I asked.

“I know there’s a lot of stuffs you need to do, and I know I don’t remember them, but I did remember one.”

“Yes?” I asked, urgently.

Andalon smiled. “You need to eat. Eat lots of stuff. Lots and lots! Grow big and strong!”

“What…?” I asked. I certainly hadn’t been expecting that.

“Genneth, what are you doing?”

I whipped around to see Ani had stepped out into the hallway. I glanced behind me, but Andalon was gone.

“Actually,” Ani said, shaking her head, “no, it doesn’t matter.” She held her hands up at her sides, as if she was under arrest. “Please, step back. I’m contaminated,” she continued, “and you don’t have the proper protection. Please go back to the reception area. I think we can start distributing the PPE once the whole Ward has been briefed on the protocol you guys have prepared for us.”

I complied and backed away, clenching my fists at my side. I tried my best to push Andalon’s enigmatic answer aside as I forced myself to switch gears.

“Two of the earliest cases happened to be patients of mine,” I said. “Both of them are still in isolation.” Sighing, I let my shoulders fall. “I just wanted to see if there was anything I could do for the folks in there,” I pointed at the doorway, “or, if there was anything I could learn from you and them that I could use to help my own patients.”

Eat lots and lots? What could that have meant?

Ani smiled.

It was nice to see her smile.

Both of us had a tendency to put on smiles to put others at ease, and both of us worried that our smiles would have been something less than genuine. However, unlike mine, Ani’s smiles were the genuine article, and always had been. I told her as much when I’d mentored her.

“You’re on the CMT, Genneth,” she said, with a nod. “You’ll get to do both, and a heck of a lot more. I’d be remiss if I didn’t try to lend a hand myself.”

“What?”

She smirked. “Word is, the CMTeams are looking for junior members.”

“Where’d you hear that?” I asked.

She winked at me. “I know a guy. He’s on the up-and-up.”

Oh really?

“So,” she said, “would you consider me teaming up with you?” she asked. “It’ll be like the good old days.

“Ani…”

“Yes?” She looked at me, full of concern—and not just for me, but for everyone.

“You’re acting like you’re on a one-woman crusade,” I said. “Are you sure you want to dive in that deeply this quickly? You need to pace yourself.” I shook my head. “Or you might burn out.”

I wanted to tell her all the crazy stuff and how it scared the Lassedites out of me. I wanted to tell her how afraid I was for everyone, not to mention myself! But, knowing her, telling Ani Lokanok that this disease could give people zombie skin and magic powers would only redouble her resolve.

“The burn-outs are part of my charm.” She smirked in self-deprecation. “Besides, you know me, if it wasn’t this, it would be something else. And, given the choice, I’d rather it be this. I’ll have you know, a Munine grandma like mine is a machine for turning germs and plagues into the stuff of bedtime stories.” She nodded vigorously. “Horribly, horribly frightening bedtime stories. And it made no difference whether the story is about what happened to the colonists six-hundred years ago, or if it’s about what happened to grandma’s friend’s cousin’s studious salaryman ex-boyfriend a week-and-a-half ago. I’m like you in that regard. It’s tough for me to sleep at night when I know that something is wrong, and that it might have been within my power to do something about it.” She cleared her throat. “With any luck, your CMTeam-mates will give me something specific to do, and I won’t have to keep making like margarine.”

She quickly walked down the hall.

“What?” I asked.

If there was a joke in “making like margarine”, I didn’t get it.

“Spread!” Her words echoed off the linoleum tile.