The Wyrms of &alon

Miss Kathaldri had to be removed from the Quiet Ward. I did not relish this decision—it meant I had to deal with her, now—but it was necessary. With her descent into sociopathy and witchcraft, Heggy, and Yuth, and I were in agreement that keeping Letty in the Quiet Ward was simply too dangerous. We had to transfer Letty somewhere more isolated and secure. Dr. Marteneiss and I also agreed it would be prudent to assume that Merritt’s and Kurt’s recent symptoms would begin to manifest in Letty in the near future, as we feared they would in any Type Two NFP-20 case.

“We could use some breathin’ room,” Heggy said. “And I know just the place.”

Heggy wrangled the hospital bureaucracy like it was a bull at a rodeo. I didn’t want to begin to imagine how I would have floundered if our positions were reversed. With just a couple of tactically placed calls, the arrangements were made for us to get a sizable room to use for official Ward E CMT business.

All that was left was for us to deliver Little Miss Malice to her new accommodations. Ideally, this would have passed without incident.

If only it had.

The medical profession was a linguistic prism; its terminology refracted the meaning of words, and the results often boarded on the absurd. Case in point, after using her nascent psychokinetic powers to pin me up on a wall, half-choke me to death, and whip up a shield that stopped bullets in their tracks, as we transported her out of the Quiet Ward and down the hallways, Letty Kathaldri experienced what would, in psychiatric jargon, be called a non-bipolar hypomanic episode. In layman’s terms: she was completely off her rocker.

Raising an emaciated arm, Letty pointed at a random passerby and swore. “Fuck you!” She cackled with delight.

Looking at one another, Heggy and I put a bit more oomph into our backs as we rolled Letty’s bed down the hallway. Much to the hag’s pleasure, Letty had figured out how to alter the position of the bed’s hydraulic mechanism. She’d set the bed so that the portion of the mattress where she rested her head had risen at a 70° angle. What had once been merely Letty’s bed was now her imperial sedan. She spread her wiry hair wide, dangling it over the mattress’ edges, reclining like Empress Phila, two-hundred years ago.

Letty waved her gnarled arms at passing patients and healthcare workers. Her eyes shined above her sagging cheeks as she greeted her plebeians with munificent disdain.

She smiled at a passing man, hunched over in a coughing fit. She waved at him. “Hello, dear!” she said. “Fuck you!”

The whole thing was appalling.

“Who the hell do you think you are?” a doctor demanded.

Letty pointed at the irate physician. “Fuck you too!”

Sputtering, the doctor tried to charge at Ms. Kathaldri, but then Heggy stepped forward to stop her, and the doctor skidded to a halt. Heggy’s face was like steel. “It’s not worth it,” she said, shaking her head.

“Fuck everybody!” Letty shouted, scissoring her arms through the air.

It was mortifying. Even Dr. Marteneiss couldn’t help but groan.

Obviously, by now, a lot of people were staring. The task of keeping us from getting mobbed now fell to me.

I patted my free hand on the spot where, beneath my PPE, my lucky bow-tie was buried on my neck. I desperately wanted to fidget with it, but could not. Instead, I took a deep breath and tried to put on my most serious voice.

“Pay no attention to her,” I said, eyeing the crowd, “she’s having a… hypomanic episode.”

Ugh. That was awful. I blushed in embarrassment.

I’m pretty sure this is what kids these days call “cringe”.

Meanwhile, Letty was having the time of her life. “We’re all going to die!” She stabbed her finger in the air again and again, like she was goring an animal with a spear.

“Fuck you!” Stab. “You’re going to die! And fuck you, young man,” stab, “you’re going to die. And you! And you! And you!”

Stab. Stab. Stab.

Responding to a tap on my shoulder, I turned to see a nurse. Kevin the Nurse. He tagged alongside us as we pushed forward.

“Uh… do you need any help, Doctor?”

“Yes,” I said, nodding at first, panting a bit from shortness of breath. But then I remembered what—and whom—Heggy and I were dealing with, and I had no choice but to recant. “Actually,” I shook my head resolutely, “no—I’ll pass. Thanks for the offer, but… no. I’m sorry.”

Until we got Letty situated and under control, I didn’t want any uniformed bystanders getting involved—medical professional, or not.

Before Kevin could do anything else, a ping from his console drew his attention away. Paling, he muttered “Shit,” and ran off down the hall.

“Miss Kathaldri,” I said, raising my head, “could you please stop haranguing people?”

Letty leaned over her bedside, gripping its side rail with both hands, thrusting her face at me. She sneered. Her hair dangled around her head like tattered wings.

“Say that again, Howler Monkey,” she whispered, “and I’ll start plucking off folks’ limbs like wings off of flies.”

I didn’t know if it was a bluff, but Heggy and I had no interest in finding out.

We quickened our pace, disappearing into an elevator as soon as we reached the elevator shafts. In a sing-song voice, Letty shrieked about riding roller coasters as we rose to the second floor.

If you walked around WeElMed enough, you’d cross in and out of the old and the new so often that you began to suspect you might have been traveling through time. The effect was strongest when changing from one floor to another, and Ward E’s second floor was the perfect place to experience it.

Whereas the ground floor had been fully refurbished in the modern styles, the Ward’s second floor still had the old skin that had originally accompanied the building’s old bones. Modern technology had infiltrated the second floor’s antique chambers. Modern medical equipment—imposing scanners, bulky electron microscopes, and other diagnostic equipment—occupied the old labs and patient rooms as if they’d drifted in from another world. In the modern era, of the many components of the Administration Building’s antique interior, the patient rooms tended to get the most use, followed by the labs and a handful of operating theaters.

However—as Heggy tried to tell me over the sound of Letty’s antics—Second Floor E Ward was one of the few areas in the entire hospital complex where some of the old facilities had been preserved in more or less pristine condition. Along with the medieval undercrofts down in the depths of the sub-sub-basements, the preserved parts of Ward E’s second floor frequently found use as settings for historical dramas. To that end, you were more likely to find actors and a film crew in these old rooms than you were to find bonafide medical personnel. They were museum pieces in all but name.

And it was exactly such a museum piece that Dr. Marteneiss had secured for Letty Kathaldri.

Finally, we arrived.

Room 268.

Old rooms didn’t have prefixes; no Ward letters, no “Ba” for “basement”.

Stepping away from Letty’s bed, I pulled open the old, glass-paned wooden double-doors. They let into a small vestibule—much wider than it was long—stocked with some cabinets on the walls, simple benches, a handful of ornate wooden coat stands. A second pair of doors stood opposite the entrance, bearing privacy shutters. Beyond these lay Room 268 proper: an antique hospital ward. Centuries ago, it would have been used to house patients afflicted with contagious diseases.

This room was older than antibiotics.

Weird.

I supposed that made its vestibule the ancestor of the airlock.

268 was charmingly plain, despite its age. The fat corridor of a room held two dozen beds laid out in two rows, one on either side of the room. Lovely varnished wood tiled the floors with alternating square diamonds of green and brown. Metal pipes crisscrossed the space overhead, guarded from corrosion by a thick coat of dark green paint. Funnel-shaped light fixtures grew out from the pipes’ undersides, their metal creased like flower petals. Back in the day, the fixtures would have held gas lamps. The pipes would have fed them their coal gas fuel, though they had long since gotten threaded through by electrical wiring, and, later still, by fiber optic cables. Special removable attachments adorned the side of every bed. These gave each bed an adjustable plastic nightstand. With a touch of a button, the nightstand would swing over the bed and become a perfect little table for the patient to use, with consoles already built into them.

My footsteps echoed in the emptiness as I entered the room.

“Wow…” I muttered.

It even smelled old—woody, starchy. Though there was no escaping the strawberry scent of the antiseptic cleansing agents used on WeElMed’s second floors.

There were simple glass casement windows above the head of every bed, covered by dainty white curtains and matching window shutters. I imagined they must have offered a lovely view, once upon a time. While that was still true for the windows to my right, those to my left offered only the sight of the narrow, passage-riddled Suture where architects had surgically attached the Administration Building to a newer, glassier structure. No doubt the newer structure’s gleaming brass highlights reflected a heck of a lot of light in through the windows at sunrise and sunset.

With a nod, I turned back and helped Heggy roll Letty’s bed into the room. And then, much to my distaste, we lifted the old hag up and carried her to the nearest bed. She cackled as we carried her. Even though I was wearing a fresh pair of gloves, I still felt like I’d somehow dirtied my hands by having touched her.

“Weeeee!”

She looked up at us after we’d set her down.

Letty gleefully played the part of a toddler. “I wanna go again!” she said, giggling, though she settled for pulling the fresh white bed sheets over her skeletal form.

It wouldn’t have been difficult to lift her again. She barely weighed anything at all.

Heggy rolled the bed we’d brought her out on into the hallway and closed both pairs of double doors, as well as the shutters behind them. “FYI,” she said, stepping back into the room, “the supplies are in the cabinet, there, as well as that closet.” Heggy pointed at the cabinet and closet on the wall next to Letty’s new bed.

“Servants!” Letty barked, “I’m hungry. I’m really goddamn hungry. I want food, and soon,” she flashed a mostly toothless grin, “or I’m gonna get real ornery.”

Heggy crossed her arms and sighed. She glanced at me. “So it begins, just as you foretold.” She smirked. “You sure you’re not an Angelic Doctor?”

I chuckled. “Definitely,” I said.

I pursed my lips.

“Do you really think we need this much space?” I asked.

Dr. Marteneiss nodded. “I like puttin’ some distance between me and my troubles,” she said. “I wasn’t just a combat medic, you know.” She winked. “I was also a sharpshooter, and a pretty damn good one.”

“Ahem!” Letty forcefully cleared her throat—though, to me, it sounded more like a growl. “You better get me something to eat,” she said, “or I might start chewing on the bed.” She licked her lips. There was ravenous desire in her eyes. “Or maybe I’ll try a couple of fried physicians’ fingers, fresh from the glove.”

Nausea oozed in my stomach. “We’ll get you some food right this second.”

However, that wasn’t going to be enough. I’d need something to hold her over. I didn’t need to mull it over; the answer struck me like a bolt from the blue.

Inside, I groaned.

I walked over to the nightstand beside Letty’s bed and pressed the button on the nightstand’s armature. The tabletop swung around, stopping as soon as the built-in sensor got sufficiently close to Letty’s chest. I tapped the screen, then tapped the television app, and then tuned it to VOL News—though, in practice, it was more like “vole spews”.

They say misery loves company, and Letty Kathaldri was nothing if not miserable. She was miserable, mad, selfish, and mean-spirited, and her value had only depreciated with age. In other words: she was VOL’s core viewership demographic.

VOL was a pale excuse—literally—for excellence in televised journalism. Their business model was an insidious application of invidious lies. Shovel boatloads of fear, paranoia, and frothing rage at whatever targets its board of directors deemed appropriate and whip viewers into a frenzy about it.

Minimum wage increases infant mortality rates!

Make national election days national holidays? The economy will collapse!

University researchers want to sterilize your children!

And so on and so forth, all the way to sensationalist infinity. VOL’s founder, Grimbel Hadlock, had been the final Chief Information Minister of the Trentonian Prelatory, and was one of the few Nater party heads who hadn’t been present when the bomb went off in Prelate Zinker’s penthouse lair. Aside from establishing it as the propaganda organ of the neo-nater movement, Hadlock had used his corporate lapdog to embezzle billions of dollars of Prelatory assets, much of which the regime had stolen from the many political opponents and religious minorities it had spirited away to one of our many labor camps. Yes, in politics, the line between good and evil was often far blurrier than we would have liked it to be, but VOL News was the exception that proved the rule. I only ever watched it when I had to make an appearance at Pel’s parents’ place, and even then, I only watched it because Margaret flat-out refused to watch anything else.

As I watched my stratagem play out in Letty’s eyes, I soon sighed with relief and disappointment.

She’d taken to VOL like a dog to a bone. Letty stared at the screen, transfixed, muttering under her breath and nodding in agreement with the network’s professional provocateurs.

I glanced at the screen.

Sword pierce me!

They were showing reruns of John Henrichy Tonight.

I locked eyes with Heggy and motioned toward the double doors. We walked out into the vestibule, closing the shuttered doors behind us.

“So…” Dr. Marteneiss crossed her arms. “In your neuropsychiatric expertise,” she asked, “just how bad is this hunger of hers gonna get?”

“Like I said before,” I answered, “my biggest worry is that it could lead to violence. And if Letty’s got psychokinesis…” I snorted and shuddered.

Heggy’s expression darkened. She nodded grimly. “Point taken.”

“Still,” I said, wrapping my hand around my mask, “this isn’t entirely a neurological problem.”

Heggy nodded again. “Yeah, you told me about Kurt’s blood glucose levels.”

“Do you have any ideas about what might be going on?” I asked.

Stepping aside, Heggy pressed her arm against the wall and leaned into it. “Since it isn’t psychosomatic, this hunger’s got to have a metabolic basis. In a perfect world, it would just be a simple endocrine malfunction, but,” she chuckled nervously, “somethin’ tells me we’re stuck in a whole different potluck. It’s like my great-uncle said: expect the worst, so you can be at your best.”

I sighed. “Hopefully, I’ll be able to squeeze in some time to meet with Brand and hear what he has to say about all this.”

Heggy smiled. “Let’s hope you get a home run.” She nodded. “But, until then, what are we gonna do about Letty?—and about whatever happens after.”

“You’re asking me?” I cocked my head back, blinking in confusion. “I’m still getting used to my new duties; the leadership ones, as much as the medical ones.”

Dr. Marteneiss made an L with her thumb and forefinger and pointed it right at me. “And that’s exactly why you gotta start really flexin’ those medical muscles of yours.” She nodded again. “So, c’mon Gen: what’s our battle plan?”

My brow furrowed, first in concentration, then a little bit more in reaction to the idea that had popped into my head.

“Oh fudge…” I muttered.

“What is it?”

I sighed. “As much as I dislike it, I think the smartest thing we can do is to give her a filling meal lace with a heck of a dose of barbiturates.”

“Lacing a patient’s meals with pills without their consent?” Heggy raised an eyebrow. “Now you’re thinking like a real doctor.” She grinned.

It scared me that I couldn’t tell whether or not she was being facetious.

“Still,” I said, “VOL News is a double edged sword.” I pointed at the doors. “For every minute being hooked on VOL keeps Letty out of our hair, that’s a minute being spent buttressing her belligerence with a bunch of cockamamie grievances.”

Briefly, I shut my eyes. Doubt boiled inside me. “Darn it! I can’t let her get exposed to that toxic crud. It’s tantamount to medical malpractice.”

“VOL isn’t good, yeah,” Heggy said, “but I wouldn’t call it that bad…”

But I wasn’t listening. Instead, I moved to open the doors, intent on marching into 268 and turning VOL off.

But then Heggy’s hand pressed down on my shoulders.

“Don’t,” she said.

I turned to face her.

“You’ll just make it worse.”

“Then what should I do?” I asked.

“Exactly what you suggested. We should feed her some of them sweet, sweet narcotics. She can’t watch VOL if she can’t so much as give us the time of day.”

I breathed in deep, clenching my fists. “That… that’s true.” I tried to warm myself up to my idea as much as possible. “And,” I continued, “I suppose if there’s something wrong with her metabolism, trying to slow things down by putting her to sleep would help stall for time while Brand and others like him turn to the science for clues.”

Heggy nodded. “It’s a good strategy, Genneth,” she said, honest and serious.

For some reason, that was when it clicked in my head that there was something I’d promised to do but had completely lost sight of.

“Oh fudge…” I pressed my hands on top of my mushroom-shaped hairnet.

“Heggy,” I said, “if you don’t mind, could you implement this scheme? Or find someone who isn’t me who will?”

Heggy pursed her lips. “What, you’re gettin’ cold feet already?”

I made for the door.

“No, I have to ask Cassius about Merritt.”

“What for?”

“Exploratory surgery.” I sighed. “I just hope it doesn’t blow up in my face.”

“I’ll keep my fingers crossed,” Dr. Marteneiss replied.

— — —

It took a couple of tries to get a hold of Dr. Arbond. I got no response on my first attempt to videophone Cassius. Attempts numbers two and three met with the same fate. But on the fourth attempt, I finally got an answer.

Not even a full suit of PPE coupled with a rebreather in place of a F-99 mask was able to cover up the indignation that shot through Dr. Arbond’s face.

“Dr. Howle, with all due respect…” His rebreather sucked in air rather loudly. “Who the hell do you think you are,” he yelled, “tellin’ patients that I’ll descend from the sky like the Angel Himself to fix their shit?!”

Looking around, I saw he was in an operating theater, though the position of the wall-mounted console through which I spoke Dr. Arbond kept me from seeing any details of the ongoing surgery beyond the tail end of the operating table and the surgeons and machinery cocooned around it.

“I already have a goddamn schedule,” Cassius barked, “it’s blown up in my face twice over! Don’t call me when I’m in the middle of a fucking surgery!”

No matter how gifted of a surgeon Dr. Arbond might have been, a curmudgeon was still a curmudgeon, especially when he insisted on full-spectrum communication blackouts whenever he was performing a surgical procedure. But Cassius’ personality was as volatile as his vocabulary, and his mood changed its tune right before my eyes.

The veteran surgeon shook his head.

“My apologies, Genneth,” he sighed and rolled his shoulders, back, “it’s been stressful. I’ve been up to my knees with problems everything and anything that isn’t NFP-20-related. It’s like runnin’ a surgical ironman. The real miracle is gonna be my back not giving out on me before this crap is through. I didn’t mean to bite.” Closing his eyes, Dr. Arbond took a deep breath. “I know you’re on the E Ward CMT with Heggy Marteneiss. I shoulda shown you deference ‘cause of that, but I didn’t. Now, enough unpleasantness; tell me: what’s the situation?”

I told him.

Cassius’ eyes bugged out. He threw his hands up.

“Well why in freezes didn’t you tell me sooner?!” he roared. In the background, one of the surgeons yelped in shock. “Listen, Genneth, I don’t know much about how you neuropsychiatrists do things, but, us blood’n’pus folk know that time is of the essence!” He gesticulated excitedly, revealing surgeon’s gloves covered in fresh human fluids.

“So, you’ll do it?” I asked.

“You betcha!”

At the risk of tempting fate, I let myself enjoy a brief, happy chuckle.

Dr. Arbond turned around and bellowed. “Paula, get me the other residents! The good ones! We got ourselves the opportunity of a lifetime!”

One of the surgeons looked up from the operating table. “Dr. Arbond, your schedule is full!”

“Well then, add more room, dammit!”

Cassius turned back to face the camera. “I’ll text you the details as soon as I have them,” he said. “Hopefully, we won’t all be dead by then.”