The Wyrms of &alon

“What in the world is going on here?” I asked.

It was like someone had upended a trash bin over the bed, spilling its contents all over the room: ice cream wrappers, cereal boxes, plastic sandwich containers, colored plastic plates from the cafeteria smeared with sauce and juice and vegetable rinds and threads of meat. The nurse was beside herself trying to clean up the mess. At the moment, the tray atop Kurt’s bed bore a full meal. A bowl of rice-porridge, sugar-sweetened, filled with nuts, and lentils and raisins, beside which was some barbecued chicken breast and a salad with meat—smoked, by the smell of it—tossed up with citrus and more nuts. Beside that, an oily plate of crispy, fried pancakes, with stuffed dumplings on the side. And that was just what Kurt was currently eating, to say nothing of the emptied bowls, plate, plastic containers strewn across the floor.

And Kurt himself?

“I’m hungry, Doc,” he said. “Damn hungry.” He shoved a pork sandwich into his mouth. The food went down quickly and smoothly, even though he barely chewed it. “It’s like I’m a bottomless pit.”

His gut was visibly bloated. It pressed up against his hospital gown like he’d swallowed an exercise ball. It was grotesque. And it was more than just his stomach. His limbs and neck seemed slightly… thicker? Whatever it was, he wasn’t as lean as he had been on the day of the shooting.

“Who’s been giving you all this food?” I asked.

Without answering me, Kurt mashed his grease-stained fingers over the screen of his bedside console. The action spoke volumes. Immediately, I stepped over to the console mounted on the wallpaper by the door and put up an indefinite hold on any current or or future food orders my patient sent to room-service.

Kurt glared at his console’s screen. “Hey!” His eyes narrowed. “What…” He poked it several times over. “What did you do?”

“For the time being, I’ve blocked you from ordering any more food,” I said. I sighed. “Kurt: why have you been eating so much? What’s going on?”

“I just told you,” he grumbled, “I’m damn hungry!”

“Look at yourself, man!” I gestured at his corpulent belly.

Kurt looked down at himself and flinched. There was fear in his expression. But the hunger in him was stronger still. Shaking his head, Mr. Clawless raked his fingers over his sheets.

“C’mon Doc! Why are you doing this to me? I’m already miserable enough!”

“Have you been making yourself vomit?” I asked.

If it was bulimia nervosa, we’d need to give him something to combat acid erosion of his teeth and throat.

“Why would I do that?” Kurt barked. He flicked his arm toward me. “The point’s to get the food in me, not outta me!”

I pulled out my console and accessed Kurt’s file. A quick skim-through didn’t turn up any history of eating disorders, nor body dysmorphia, nor any obsessive-compulsive tendencies.

Conclusion? Like with the certainty of our deaths, there was almost certainly a physiological cause for Kurt’s overeating.

I turned to the nurse. “What’s his blood-sugar count?”

She tossed an empty bag of onion rings into the waste receptacle. “I was just going to suggest that.”

The nurse pulled a glucose monitor out from a nearby wooden cabinet on the wall. Kurt watched, as the nurse dabbed his big toe with an alcohol swab and then tactfully pricked the calloused skin with a needle. She fed the sample to the machine.

Kurt narrowed his eyes and grimaced. “That’s not right,” he said, shaking his head. “I’m dead. My blood should be all clotted up. It’s rotted in my veins.”

“It’s like I said before, Kurt, it’s all in your head.”

“Doctor…” The nurse motioned toward me with the glucose monitor.

I walked over and looked at the readout.

0.2 mg/dL.

“That seems… low,” I said.

The nurse sputtered. She stared at me in shock, as if I’d asked her to do something indecent. “Low?” She gestured fitfully. “Fifty, forty-five—that’s low. Zero point two is the shore after the tide’s gone out! It’s like something sucked the sugar right outta him. With levels like these, he shouldn’t be conscious! Heck, he should be dead!”

“Well, I am dead!” Kurt said, nodding in approval.

I supposed there was no point in trying to convince him otherwise. I know I wouldn’t have believed it.

I turned to my patient.

“Kurt, if you keep gorging yourself like this, you’ll rupture your stomach!” I turned to the nurse. “Why haven’t you gotten his stomach pumped?”

“I suggested it, but he said no. He was very insistent.”

I pointed at Kurt’s shocking potbelly. “Look at him! How can that stomach be healthy?”

The nurse shook her head nervously. “I checked. There’s no sign of internal bleeding. No sign of membrane rupture.”

“That’s—”

“—Impossible?” she asked, with a smirk. The nurse pointed at Kurt’s stomach. “Take a look for yourself. It gets worse.”

I did, and then immediately did a double take.

What the heck?!

Kurt’s stomach was deflating. It was slow—like watching a cloud inch its way across the sky—but there was no mistaking it. His chest puffed out slightly, as if the mass of his meal was being distributed across his body.

“The food’s going through him like water,” the nurse said. Glancing down—averting her eyes—she lowered her voice to a whisper. “Only… there’s nothing coming out of the back end.”

Holy Angel…

My console pinged as a message popped on-screen:

Y. Costran to G. Howle: We could use your help with Letty. She’s causing problems for the physical therapist, and then some.

I pressed my finger down on the message bubble and held it there for the half-second needed to trigger voice-to-text response.

I brought the console close to my face. “Later,” I said, “I’m with another patient.” I pressed the Send icon as soon as the software finished typing up my dictation and then stowed the console back into my PPE.

“Doctor…?” The nurse stared at me, hoping for direction.

Sighing, I shook my head. “Turn off his room service access, I guess.”

“Doc!” Kurt lurched up. “You can’t do that! I’ll starve! I’ll—I’ll go crazy!” He boomed.

An antique light fixture dangled from the center of the ceiling, nearly square over the middle of the bed. Beneath the glow of its fluorescent light bulb, Kurt’s eyes gleamed with a predatory intensity. He scowled. He… he growled.

“You can’t do this to me! You can’t!”

Suddenly, two of the half-eaten meals on the bed-tray shot off the bed and splattered onto the floor, flung there by, well… nothing at all.

Overhead, the light fixture swayed pendulously.

My gaze flew at the nurse as I froze in shock, but it seemed she hadn’t seen what had happened. Her attention was caught only when the food smacked onto the floor, which made her yelp in alarm.

I rushed over to the sink to get some paper towels, as did the nurse.

“Let me help you with that,” I said.

“No, Doctor, it’s alright, I—”

—But then she shrieked: Kurt lunged out of bed. Pouncing onto the floor, he started scooping the spilled food into his hands, piling it into his mouth like an animal.

With a paper towel in hand, I got down to my hands and knees and pressed the recycled brown sheets onto the spilt food. I pulled with both arms, sweeping the food out of Kurt’s reach, though a good deal of it ended up getting smeared over the floor—especially the porridge.

“Give it!” Kurt snarled. He lurched toward me, on all fours, splattering a dumpling under his knee.

It was banana filling.

“Give it to me!” he roared.

Pushing off the ground, I rose to my knees and then leaned forward and grabbed hold of Kurt by the shoulders. I stared him in the eyes.

“Kurt, stop this!” I shook him. “You’re better than this! Don’t let it take your dignity!”

If he’d been made of glass, my words would have shattered him. As it was, he reacted as if I’d slapped him in the face. Whatever feral animus had gripped him turned tail and ran away. In its wake, it left disbelief and shame, and bits of rice, sauce, and meat smeared over Kurt’s lips.

“I… I…” The man stammered. “I don’t know what came over me.” Sitting up, he folded his legs against his chest. His stomach was almost completely back to normal, and noticed it. His gaze fell to his hands and he shivered. “Oh God.” His voice broke. “Holy Angel… what’s happening to me?”

Drawing close, I looked him in the eyes. “Me and my team, we’re going to figure it out.” I said. “Kurt, I promise you. We’ll get to the bottom of this.”

I looked over my shoulder to see the nurse busy cleaning up the rest of the mess.

“Have there been any other cases like this?” I asked her. “This… hunger?”

She blinked. “I… I don’t know. I’d have to check with Nancy in—”

“—Do it,” I said, as I got to my feet.

Kurt and I helped each other stand up. I was starting to move away when he reached out and grabbed me by the arm.

“There are others?”

The question caught me off guard.

“I—I never said that…”

Kurt’s expression turned grave. “If there are others… and they get hungry…” he slowly shook his head. “Beast’s teeth. What’s going to happen if we start running low on food?”

“I…” but my voice trailed off. I couldn’t find the words.

A thrum in my PPE’s pocket signaled an incoming videophone call.

I pulled out my console and just as I was about to answer it, another message bubble popped onto the screen with a ping.

Dir. Hobwell to G. Howle: This is your responsibility. Deal with it.

“That certainly isn’t ominous,” I said, with a sarcastic mutter. I pressed the icon to answer the call.

The next second, I was face-to-face with Nurse Costran. “Hobwell just messaged me,” I said. “Does this have anything to do with—”

—Yuth nodded shakily. “It’s Letty… she…” She glanced down the hall in repeated double-takes. “I… I don’t know how to say this…”

I took a deep breath. “Please. Tell me.”

Nurse Costran’s face loomed large on the screen—high cheekbones and all—as she leaned toward the console on her end of the call. It gave me a close-up of the crows’-feet wrinkles that had been stippled around the corners of her eyes by stress and time. It was where she held in silence all grief, frustration, and resentment that she had to put up with on a daily basis.

She liked to say that working in the Quiet Ward did to your soul what running up sand dunes at the beach did to your core muscles. People who easily gave into despair need not apply.

“Letty threw the physical therapist against the wall,” she whispered.

My features tensed. The hairs on the back of my neck stood on end.

“W-What?”

“She didn’t lift a finger,” Nurse Costran said. “It just… happened, like magic.”

A shout fought to leap out of my throat, but I managed to reduce it to an emphatic stutter.

“Oh God…”

“She did what…?” Kurt said, wide-eyed.

I wasn’t the only one to freak out. Kurt and the nurse had heard it all.

“Angel help us…” the nurse muttered. She began muttering a prayer—one of the Solar Orisons, by the sound of it.

“I contacted my superior,” Nurse Costran said, regaining my attention. “He then directed me to Hobwell, and, well…”

“I’ll be there ASAP.”

I ended the call.

“Doc?” Kurt asked, trembling.

“We came from Your Light,” the nurse prayed, her eyes shut tight. “We turned from Your Light, We Erred, and We yearn to Return.”

“Nurse?” I asked.

But she didn’t hear me. “Forgive me for my trespasses, Holy One,” she prayed. “Grant us Justice. Grant us Mercy.”

“Nurse!” I snapped.

Her eyes fluttered open and her whole body shuddered.

I gulped. “I’m sorry for yelling. Just, please… try to get me a list of the other… hungry patients. Send it to my console as soon as you can. Please.”