The Wyrms of &alon

They rolled Mr. Isafobe out of his room and over to E57.

The urgent-care mass examination room was fast becoming Jonan’s not-so-secret lair. Its transformation was a product of prudence, efficiency, and a bucketful of elbow grease. Like physical therapy modules and other large, open-floor-planned rooms meant to hold many patients at once, Room E57’s ceiling was covered with slitted tracks in a maze-like arrangement. They were designed to attach to the tops of specially made curtains which, mounted in them as they currently were, could be easily slid up or down the tracks, even to the point of disappearing through the tall, narrow slits in the walls. This feature allowed for doctors and nurses to reshape the room simply by rearranging the curtains. Being able to create or merge separate examination rooms on the spot was incredibly useful when a large number of patients were in need of help. This same feature also made the room an excellent place to observe a handful of patients, especially when they were the subjects of exploratory or experimental treatments.

This was one of the rules Jonan lived by. Every action ought to have a reason behind it.

And if it didn’t, at least make your enemies believe it did, Jonan thought. Always keep them on their toes.

Jonan and Isabel rolled Mr. Isafobe’s bed to a stop inside one of the many alcoves created by the current curtain set-up. Jonan then reached up to a cabinet on the wall where Larry had placed a stack of fresh gowns and blankets, as per Jonan’s request. He pulled down one of the gowns.

“Help me get his clothes off and his gown on,” Jonan said.

Isabel complied, though not without her eyebrows shooting up in surprise. The two of them worked to pull off everything by Frank’s undergarments.

“Isn’t something like this ‘beneath your stature’ or whatever?” Isabel asked.

Jonan grinned. “I’m a bad person, not a bad doctor.”

Isabel helped keep Frank steady as he stood while Jonan put his gown on for him. After getting Frank situated in his bed, Isabel pulled a plastic bag from the dispenser on the wall, sealed Mr. Isafobe’s clothes inside, and coded the chip on the bag to the one in the patient’s hand, so that the clothes would be returned to him after they were washed.

“You can take that over to the washroom drop-off,” Jonan said.

Isabel nodded and then walked out with the bag.

Rolled his shoulders and popping a kink out of his neck, Jonan took a step back to survey his current progress. Frank Isafobe wasn’t the first patient to consent to Jonan’s experimental treatments. The controlled environment and close proximity of the handful of patients Jonan had accumulated in E57 made it the ideal location to test out different combinations of immunostimulants. While the treatment regimens he’d assigned to Kevin, Angelina, Isabel, and the rest had included some immunostimulants, Jonan wouldn’t stand for anyone less than himself (or Ani) to watch over the most promising and delicate combinations.

As Jonan looked over his precious experiments, he committed to memory the latest developments in his patients’ conditions. Presently, most of their symptoms were worsening, but only slightly.

Symptom intensification seems positively correlated with time elapsed since treatment initiation, Jonan noted, particularly the intensification of their fevers. But this was to be expected: higher fever and heightened inflammatory responses were natural consequences of immunostimulants.

Jonan smiled.

There were currently no signs of swelling, angioedema, hives, rashes, rapid breathing, or tachycardia—all of which could have indicated anaphylactic shock or sepsis, both of which were the primary risks Jonan’s experiments had to contend with. Frequent monitoring was a must. Sepsis and anaphylaxis could have extremely rapid onset, so time was at even more of a premium than usual. For safe measure, Jonan had put in a request for several ventilators, and had made sure E57 was fully stocked with Epinephrine pens and other anti-inflammatory agents.

“So far, so good,” Jonan muttered.

He walked out of the room to get back to work; he still had a need for more test subjects.

Frank is asleep, Jonan noted. That’s good.

Jonan made sure to close the door quietly as he stepped out into the hallway. In the corner of his eye, Jonan noticed Ani gesticulating in frustration. He turned to look.

Ani stood next to a row of plastic, bowl-seated chairs. Jonan always looked forward to moments like this. They gave him the opportunity to go against type and play the role of the good guy. Well, that and because it reminded him she was just imperfect enough not to be totally out of his league.

Out of force of habit, Jonan flicked his head back. Tousling his hair like that was one of Jonan’s favorite ways of asserting his alpha male status. This time, it didn’t amount to much; he’d forgotten the mushroom-shaped hairnet on top of his head. Still, Jonan stepped forward with a spring in his step, only for that spring to creak and rust in place once he saw the cause of Ani’s frustration.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Plotsky,” Ani said, “but you can’t bring your daughter with you.” Tears daubed Dr. Lokanok’s bright eyes. “You’re sick. You need to be examined.”

“I’m telling you, I’m not leaving their side,” Mr. Plotsky replied, glancing at his wife and daughter.

But as sad of a sight as it was, it wasn’t what had put a stopper in Jonan’s normally boundless confidence.

No.

That was the mother’s doing.

Mrs. Plotsky sat several seats away from her husband, her face half-hidden behind the bright blue surgical mask she wore. Jonan noted the surgical mask didn’t have a sufficiently high filtration efficacy to be up to code, but, at the moment, that hardly mattered.

Mrs. Plotsky’s eyes weren’t focused on her husband at all. Their time was split in two. Half of it was spent staring at the naked foot Mrs. Plotsky held in her lap. The other half had her peering through her daughter’s half-closed eyelids, as if there was some chance she could reach the young woman locked behind that pitiful, motionless face. The daughter’s shoes sat in the empty chair at Mrs. Plotsky’s side with her socks stuffed inside, neatly folded, with the young woman’s elevated leg forming a bridge over the gap between her wheelchair and her mother’s chair.

Mrs. Plotsky tenderly massaged the soles of her daughter’s foot, muttering softly as she engaged her daughter in a conversation the young woman would never understand.

“When I was pregnant with you,” she said, “your father used to give me foot rubs, and—let me tell you—they did the trick!”

Though Mrs. Plotsky’s face mask might have hidden her smile, there was no way it could hide the tears that trickled down her cheeks, nor the puffiness creep in between the wrinkles at the edges of her eyes.

It made Jonan think of his own mother, and his grandmother, and his great-grandfather. And—

—Jonan banished the thought with a shake of his head.

“Ani,” he asked, “what’s the fuss?”

Dr. Lokanok gestured at the husband.

“Mr. Plotsky,” she glanced at the man, “Jed here is refusing to let me take him to a separate room.”

“I already let Ileene slip out of my fingers once,” Jed said, staring at his daughter. “I’m not going to let it happen again, and I’m not going to let it happen to my wife, either, and I’m not—”

—Mr. Plotsky’s eyes gazed longingly at his daughter’s rotund, life-packed stomach, and his words trailed off.

Jonan turned to his girlfriend. “This is the sort of thing orderlies are for, you know. Or, you could just sedate him.”

Dr. Lokanok responded with a concerned glare. “If you do, and Dr. Howle finds out about it, he might take you off the team—or, at least, feel miserable about it.”

That intrigued Jonan.

“Oh?”

“It has to do with his sister,” Ani said. “He’s very much against sedating people against their will.”

“So then have the orderlies do it,” Jonan said. “Really, you’re overcomplicating this.”

Ani pointed down the hall to a gathering of patients near the main reception desk. “I’m trying to build these people’s trust, Jonan. I’d like to avoid giving them the impression that I’m an Inquisitor who’s come to take their family away.”

Jonan wagged a finger at her. “Ani,” he said, in a gentle, but serious voice, “you know how you want me to work on being less…” he gyrated his hand, “horrible?”

She nodded.

“Well… it’s kind of hard to make progress in that direction if you keep letting all the morally problematic responsibilities fall into my lap.” Jonan shrugged. “I mean, I’m perfectly happy to do the dirty work—you have the most perfect moral compass, and I would hate to see it tarnished—but… I thought you wanted me to be better.” He grinned playfully.

Ani gave her boyfriend a look that might as well have said, “I’m this close to slapping you, Jonan Derric!”

Angel, wouldn’t that be fun, Jonan thought—and not just because it would have been kinky. Just like Ani wanted Jonan to be less horrible, Jonan wanted Ani to be more in tune with her inner tiger mom—just not as much as her mother was.

A hand pressed onto Jonan’s shoulder, and everyone present—save for Ileene—turned to look.

It was Larry the Janitor. And he wasn’t alone. He’d brought a woman with him. “Doc,” Larry said, glancing warily at the lady, “she just walked up to me and started talking, and I didn’t know what to do with her, so I thought I might as well bring her to you.”

The woman’s face contorted in disgust as she stared at Larry’s teeth.

“Honey…” she said, oozing with contempt, “you should get a job where you make enough money to get decent dental insurance, ‘cause, right now, with teeth like that, the ladies will think you’re a homo.”

The comment drew even more stares than Larry’s teeth.

With her fulvous, frizzy hair and matching freckled cheeks, the middle-aged harridan Larry had brought with him was medium, through and through. Medium age, medium build, medium class, medium sane, medium rare, and medium nice—and medium nice was hardly nice at all. She struck Jonan as the sort of person who owed their fashion sense to the blandished advice from an augur she only ever spoke to via text-message. Apparently, the Godhead’s will—as read into the flight of birds—desired her to wear shoes with absurdly high heels and skin-tight leggings meant for a woman half her age and weight.

She turned her attention to Jonan.

“Finally! Somebody who actually looks like a doctor,” she said, “even if he’s in a weird dress.” She pressed the tips of her gaudy pink fingernail extensions at the back of her head and then at her lumbar region. “There’s a bump on my head, and my back hurts, and my husband was being mean to me. He won’t let me buy more purses,” she said. “I’ve had this cough for months that keeps me up at night, and it hasn’t gone away, so I just know I have the virus. My sister agreed with me, and said I should go to urgent care, so I did. My son told me I was overreacting, and that I should have stayed home so that I wouldn’t get sick, but he hates me, and I’m not going to let him boss me around, and—”

—Jonan’s eyes glazed over. He fled to a serene refuge deep within himself as he let the woman’s self-absorbed ramblings wash over him. Fools were always a danger, but rarely were they more dangerous than during a public health crisis. In a pandemic like this, fools were the biggest menace, followed by the conspiracy theorists, and the liars, and the hypochondriacs, and the price-gougers.

If we’d been more organized somebody like this would have been weeded out and sent back home before they even parked their car.

“I used to give the best blow jobs,” the woman said, “but all my husband does is complain about money. Don’t do this, don’t do that. Don’t buy more wigs. You don’t listen to anyone.” She shook her head and grimaced.

For some reason, the woman’s presence pulled Mrs. Plotsky out of her trance-like denial. Mrs. Plotsky stood up and stepped out from behind Dr. Derric.

“Mabel…?” she asked.

The woman’s eyes pounced on Mrs. Plotsky like a panther. “Babs?”

Ani stepped beside Jonan. “Did the nurses tell you about—”

“—Yes,” he replied, in a whisper. “This has to be the Mabel…”

Mabel chided the two doctors. “What are you standing around for? I need help! My sister looks fine!”

Jonan took a very deep breath. “Ma’am, I think you should leave.”

“I paid good money for my health insurance,” Mabel replied, “and I drove all the way here on my own. I’m not going anywhere!”

Jonan narrowed his eyes. “I will call security if I have to.”

“Security?” Mabel’s eyebrows buckled. “If anyone’s gonna call security, it should be me.” She pointed at wheelchair-bound Ileene. “That girl is a terrorist. She had sex with terrorists! Terrorists got her pregnant! It’s a shame they didn’t put her out of her misery, instead of lobotomizing her and upsetting Babs.”

Mrs. Plotsky’s eyes widened, like saucers about to shatter. His posture went limp. Without so much as a word, Babs lunged at her sister and smacked her in the face, scratching red furrows into the skin.

Jonan thrust himself in between the feuding sisters, grabbing hold of Mrs. Plotsky even as she battered the side of Jonan’s PPE gown with her indignant flailing. Larry intervened as well, wrapping his arms around Mabel and pulling her back, though that didn’t stop her from screaming like a burning seagull.

But then Jonan’s heart skipped a beat.

He heard Ani scream.

“Ileene!” Mr. Plotsky yelled.

Everyone turned to look.

Ileene convulsed wildly. Jonan saw the fetus stir within its mother’s womb, nascent limbs pressing up against her belly. Ileene gagged, hacked, and gasped. Her body writhed, trying to steal breath that simply wouldn’t come.

Mrs. Plotsky rushed to her daughter’s side, flying off her sister and out of Jonan’s hands with a parting slap to Mabel’s sweaty neck. Babs firmly pressed her hand on Ileene’s back, pushing the trembling body until it leaned forward.

The lobotomized young woman’s limbs spasmed, beating like dying wings, and then she curled forward and wretched, spewing slime from her mouth. Black and green dregs splattered in a wide fan over the hallway’s vinyl floor. She coughed again, heaving up more ichor, violently lurching to the side, enough to tip the wheelchair over and send it and herself crashing onto the floor. Bone cracked. A gash tore open on Ileene’s forehead. The young woman landed on her side, twitching on the floor like fresh roadkill as ruby red blood trickled onto the slimy vinyl.

“Holy Angel!” Babs shrieked.

Larry was on his knees beside Ileene before anyone else. Deftly, the janitor dragged Ileene away from the black and green ooze on the floor and rolled Ileene onto her back. Gobs of the stuff still clung to the young woman’s lips.

Larry stood up in a rush and ran off to fetch some cleaning supplies. He didn’t even bother to scrape the dark gunk off his clothes or arms.

Jonan knelt beside Ileene and put his stethoscope onto her throat.

“Fuck! It’s like a gutter chute!” He said, turning to Ani. “There’s some kind of blockage. We need to intubate. Hell, we need a tracheostomy!”

“I’m on it!” Ani yelled.

“This is—it’s all your fault!” Mr. Plotsky screamed, raging at his wife. “It’s your fault she got lobotomized! It’s your fault we’re even here in the first place. I don’t care who goddamn father is, it’s our grandchild!” He wept. “Illene never would have fallen in with those maniacs if you hadn’t—if you and your father—if—”

—But Mr. Plotsky’s fury ended, crashing into a coughing fit. Dark spots bled through the fabric of his face-mask. Jed wheezed and staggered about, ready to collapse, but Larry rose from his spot on the floor and grabbed hold of him.

Now, Mr. Plotsky’s refusal to be taken away to an examination room was the least of his worries.

Jonan didn’t waste a moment. “Take him to a room, now, before he gets a second wind.”

The janitor nodded and complied. Muscles bulging, Larry lifted Jed Plotsky up with both arms and carried him off to a nearby room like he was a piece of luggage.

Rapid footsteps clacked on the vinyl floor. Jonan looked over his shoulder to see Ani rushing toward him with intubation equipment in her arms and a scalpel and syringes clasped tightly in her hands. Jonan was pleasantly surprised to see Isabel trailing behind her, rolling an empty bed down the hallway.

“Your belligerent patient problem has been resolved,” Jonan said.

“Like hell it has!” Ani said.

Dr. Lokanok dropped to her knees and immediately injected Ileene with a combination of a sedative and a vasopressor; the former to keep her still, the latter to stabilize her blood pressure.

Jonan helped Isabel lift Ileene onto the bed and then bent down and stuck his hand out to Ani. He didn’t even need to ask for the scalpel; Dr. Lokanok handed it to him without skipping a beat. Jonan made an incision in Ileene’s throat, adeptly feeling out the location of her vocal cords beforehand so that he wouldn’t cut them. He backed away from Ileene as he pulled the scalpel out, expecting the opening to spurt out sputum, fluid, and breath, but none did.

Jonan handed the scalpel to Isabel who took it and ran off while Ani frantically readied the endotracheal tube for insertion.

“Ready!” Ani said.

Grabbing Ileene’s head, Jonan kept the young woman’s neck steady as Ani inserted the tube into the tracheostomy.

Isabel returned with a naked bag-valve which she hooked up to the endotracheal tube and then backed away to let Ani lean in and carefully begin to squeeze the bag and flood Ileene’s lungs with air.

Immediately, Ileene’s spasms calmed. Color began trickling back into her cheeks.

“Let’s get her to the examination room. Follow my lead.” Jonan thrusted his head in the direction of E57. “I already got a hold of a couple of ventilators,” he added.

“Then let’s get her over there, stat,” Ani said.

Jonan nodded, and Jonani joined forces to push Ileene’s bed to the repurposed examination room.

Stat…

The word sent a shiver down Jonan’s spine. He loved the way she said it. He loved seeing Ani seize the day like that, and his dearest wish was that she’d learn to do it more often.

The world needs to know that Ani fucking Lokanok isn’t going down without a fight—and it’s a fight the world would lose!

More than anything else, Jonan wanted to see the woman he loved learn to know her true worth, and to fight back when it was threatened. If she stood loud and proud, if insisted that she mattered—and, O, how she mattered!—he knew she would persevere. She would succeed.

No, she’ll soar, he thought.

He needed to know she could do it on her own even if—and, especially, when—he would no longer be around to give her a face full of egging-on when she needed it most.

“It looks like I was right in thinking we’d need them.”

Bed’s wheels roared as it rolled down the hall.

Dr. Howle is a nice guy, yeah, Jonan thought, as he and Ani pushed the bed through the doorway, his heart racing in his chest. But he doesn’t have enough fight in him. Ani doesn’t need a psychiatrist. She needs a sensei.

Ani kept on squeezing the bag-valve until Jonan was set to hook the ventilator tube up to the endotracheal tube embedded in Ileene’s throat.

Biting his lip, Jonan popped the mask attachment off the end of the ventilator tube, hooked the plastic tube in his hand to the plastic tube jutting out from Ileene’s throat, and then flicked the on switch.

“There we go!” Jonan clenched his fist in triumph. The ventilator was in place and doing its thing, pumping air in and out of Ileene’s body in a noisy rhythm.

“You know,” Ani said, panting slightly as she turned to face Jonan, “you and Genneth are more alike than you think.”

“You take that back, Dr. Lokanok,” Jonan said, feigning high dudgeon. “Them’s fightin’ words.”

“You both strive for excellence,” Ani said.

And the smile beneath Jonan’s transparent face mask gave away his true feelings.

Beeeeeeee—

—An ECG screeched. Jonan whipped his head around to see Frank Isafobe seizing in his bed. The vital signs on the display monitor hopped and then dropped.

“No!”

Jonan rushed to Frank’s bedside.

“What’s going on?” Ani demanded. “Jonan, what did you do?”

Clenching his teeth and fists, Jonan rushed over to Frank’s bedside, grabbed the tube of the ventilator he’d placed beside it, fastened the mask on the end of the tube to Frank’s mouth and nose.

“Jonan?”

Frank’s vitals began to return to normal: Heart-rate slowing, SpO2 rising past 90% and steadily climbing.

Jonan shuddered and exhaled, relieved, but still on edge. “I gave them immunostimulants, exactly like we discussed.”

For exactly three seconds, Jonan’s world collapsed until nothing remained but the sight of Ani’s eyes and the sounds of breath: Jonan’s breaths, touched by dread; Ani’s breaths, rife with worry; Ileene’s heavy breaths, pumped in and out of her body by the ever-whirring ventilator; Mr. Isafobe’s breaths, seemingly stable, though shallow and troublingly weak.

Jonan sighed. His shoulders went slack. “I guess I’ll have to modify—”

—Beeeeeeee—

—Another ECG shrieked.

Kathlyn Chinnmog. She’d gotten bluzepinab and G-CSF.

And another.

Vladimar Korusenko. He’d gotten gimotlin, GM-CSF, and interferon-γ.

And another. And another.

There was no escaping the process of elimination, just as there was no escaping the common denominator of immunostimulating compounds that trickled into the bloodstreams of Jonan’s test subjects as their vitals crashed one after another.