The Wyrms of &alon

Things were not going according to plan.

I wished I could have said that, because it would have implied that I actually had a plan. I had ideas, not plans, and yes, they were different, and the difference was stark. Ideas were sheets in the wind, they blew around, never settling down. They had no anchor. But plans? Plans were banners and flags that you could wave and strut. They were lodestones to follow; they were architecture and purpose.

Ideas told you what you wanted to do. Plans told you when, and where, and how to do it.

It was easy to tell yourself, “I’m gonna be a medical mage; I’m going to use these new powers of mine to fight the plague.”

Most tasks seemed easy when they were still in your head.

But when I actually tried doing it, I had to face the horrid truth that I had no flipping idea what I was doing!

When you wanted to get a handle on something—such as psychokinetic powers—it was generally a good idea to practice it. So, on my walk back to the heart of Ward E, I tried doing just that, practicing with my new wyrmsight to figure out how it worked.

With a little bit focus, I could create the scintillating, metallic-looking filaments of blue and gold light that my wyrmsight identified as my psychokinesis, though I didn’t try doing anything with them—I figured I wasn’t yet at that level, and I was terrified of screwing up.

Unfortunately, fate had other plans in store for me. As Brand might have put it, it was Nematode World all over again.

Nematodes were these minute worm-creatures that were basically everywhere, though they were actually more closely related to weevils than they were to bonafide worms—that is, annelids. Like most horrible things, they came in a variety of sizes, with their lengths ranging from less than a millimeter to up to a truly horrifying twenty-eight feet long—parasites in sperm whale placentas, if you must know. (I happened to learn that particular fact while eating udon noodles with Brand at lunch. Needless to say, I lost my appetite.)

Brand loved talking about them, both because he loved talking about anything biology related, though they were also related to his professional work. As far as studying animal biology—particularly at or below the cellular level—the millimeter-long Johnson’s Nematode was the model organism to end all model organisms. Developmental biology, cellular biology, molecular biology, molecular ethology, molecular genetics, and on and on—they all prostrated themselves beneath the Great Nematode.

So, what is Nematode World? Well, it’s the terrestrial biosphere in general, albeit viewed through a nematodian lens.

Brand had explained it like this. His explanation was forever burned into my memory, even before everything would be forever burned into my memory.

“Suppose there was a button that, when pressed, deleted everything and anything that wasn’t a nematode,” he’d said. “We press it. It deletes the earth, it deletes the sky, it deletes you and me and my momma and everybody’s lawns and the fish and the stock market,” he’d waved his hands through the air,” everything… except the nematodes.”

“Where are you going with this?” I’d asked—it had been during lunch, years before the pandemic—and not the lunch where I’d gotten udon noodles.

“In this Nematode World,” he’d explained, “you’d still be able to make out people, buildings, animals, plants, even the contour of the land itself.”

“But didn’t we just delete them all?” I’d said.

He’d nodded. “Yeah, but not the nematodes. Even with everything else gone, you’d be able to recognize people, places, and things by the ghostly shells of the nematodes that lived in them, or on them.”

And then, he’d run his hand down in front of his face. “Your face, outlined by nematodes.”

I’d nearly thrown up my beef tempura.

The moral? While reality was always worth knowing, sometimes it was better to contemplate matters piecemeal, rather than holistically, lest eyeball-gouging madness ensue.

Now, replace nematodes with NFP-20 fungus aura and you’d have gotten an approximation of what I saw as I stepped into the reception area of Ward E. And it didn’t come to me all at once. No, it crept up on me, and I’d been too stupid not to notice it until it was too late.

The faint glow slowly seething like an aurora in the halls up ahead was the first inkling that something was wrong. But I didn’t heed the warning, so when I finally got my first view of a decent-sized crowd, I nearly soiled my pants.

The surge was already breaking the floodgates. The lobbies, admissions areas, and waiting rooms were noisy and overflowing. Chairs spread out like mold, popping up anywhere they could fit. I saw chairs out there that had to be older than Letty was. The staff must have raided our supply closets down to the last.

The most modern seats were satiny metal eggs welded to a supporting base. An L-shaped bit of upholstery filled a quarter or so of the egg that wasn’t occupied by its shell or the internal material. Older models of chairs were made of two leather slabs set at right angles to one another and held between a pair of angular chrome Ss. A handful of the chairs were solid plastic. Wear and tear had broken them down, scraping up fibers from their edges.

The people sitting in this diverse assemblage of chairs, however, were uniformly miserable. Half of them looked like they were about to fall asleep. The other half looked like they desperately wanted to fall asleep, but couldn’t, and might go so far as to kill somebody if it meant a chance of even a couple hours’ worth of rest. Patches of discoloration or fungal tendrils were tucked away like rotten fruit in this sea of malaise.

It was also a chilly morning, and even though the hospital was doing a good job of keeping the temperature comfortable, I saw coats out everywhere I looked, from posh fur overcoats to flimsy plastic ones whose inner linings seemed little more than package stuffing.

And there was never a moment of quiet. Everywhere I turned, coughs, moans, and groans would lash out at me. The noises mixed with agitated footsteps, nervous voices, pinging console apps, not to mention the never-ending barrage of ads and news playing on seemingly every screen within view.

There wasn’t enough hand sanitizer in the world to make this tolerable.

But those sights weren’t what had nearly made me soil myself. Everyone could see this stuff just as well as I could. But those sights were really only half of the story.

My wyrmsight showed me the rest.

It showed me layers that no one else saw, or would ever even want to see.

The air itself was alive with form and color. It was a riot in multicolor. And it was everywhere. I saw the shapes of lungs and throats outlined in soft, twinkling light. I saw the filamentous hyphae as the fungus worked its way through people’s chests and limbs. The intensity of the brightness varied widely. Some shone like the Sun. Others were lambent—almost gentle.

And that was just Type One—which wasn’t to say that Type Two infection wasn’t accounted for. It was. Two people hidden among the crowd glowed with the same violet and ultramarine lacework that I saw on my body and on Lopé. In all likelihood, they were bound for wyrmhood, just like me.

But it didn’t end there.

The air was thick with amorphous, phantom mists. They drifted down the hallway like floating sheets, slowly undulating in a non-existent breeze. The forms passed through other people and myself as if we weren’t even there.

Are these… souls?

Stepping aside, I pushed my back against the wall of the corridor, biting my lip and clenching my fists. I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, trying to bind my emotions in place. If I hadn’t, I was pretty sure I’d have just screamed and screamed until my throat gave out.

Andalon emerged from the wall behind me, only to stop and lean back onto it, right beside me.

“They’re peoples,” she said, with a nod.

I turned and looked down. Our eyes met.

I spoke to her through my thoughts.

Andalon, what do I do?

Curiously, I noticed she didn’t have a consciousness-aura.

As to what that meant? I could only speculate.

She was hesitant to speak. She chose her words carefully, as if she had to reach out and grab hold of each and every one. “The… bright ones. The Darkness wantsta take them… because… they’re… uh… shiny?”

She looked up at me nervously.

Translation: the brighter the fungus’ aura, the closer the patient was to death.

Does that sound about right? I asked.

She nodded, but not in a way that left me feeling reassured.

“Uh… I think so?”

Fricassee me!

I huffed in frustration.

I started walking toward the brightest aura when I heard wheels squeaking as they rolled around the corner.

You gotta be kidding me.

My jaw gaped.

A bunch of fulminant Type One NFP-20 patients were being rolled down the hall by a group of nurses. And they weren’t in just any beds, no; they were in the special beds. The darkpox beds.

Fudge.

It seemed Director Hobwell had decided to go for the darkpox protocols after all. This was bad. This was really bad.

Darkpox beds were just one of the many precautions taken by our pseudo-benevolent overlords over at the DAISHU to ensure that every major healthcare provider under its control had the very latest in quarantine and outbreak-control technology in case darkpox ever came a-knocking, but they could just as well be used for any other terrifyingly virulent airborne contagion. In practice, they were almost exclusively reserved for darkpox patients, simply because the sight of them rolling down the hall would inevitably strike the public like a thunderbolt as it told them they should probably head for the hills.

As for the beds themselves, the things were like coffins, but with transparent, barreled lids, designed to isolate people infected with darkpox and make it far, far easier to keep strict barrier nursing techniques in force. The lids were made from a special insanely flexible plastic that flowed like thickened putty, capable of perfectly molding itself around any hands or instruments that sought to reach the patient within. The plastic worked in concert with specialized syringes and intravenous ports so that any punctures made in the plastic could instantly self-seal once the syringes were removed. Gas tanks stowed on the sides of the beds provided their occupants with an air supply that was completely separated from the ambient air.

Not that I could see that much of it, though. The multicolored lights were so bright. The bodies of the patients within the darkpox beds blazed like strobe lights. The sight made my head throb. Hissing in pain, I squeezed my eyes shut and held them together.

Andalon, please, this is too much! How do I dampen it? Please!

“I…”

For a second, everything seemed to spin. Inside my head, underneath the stinging pain, I felt something twitch in the space behind my eyes, and whatever remained of the respite from the hunger my protein bar snack had given me vanished altogether.

“Does… does that help?”

I immediately opened my eyes, and not just because I wanted to see what she’d done to me. It was her voice. Andalon sounded… exhausted.

Looking down, I saw the blue-haired girl sitting on the floor with her head slumped downward. “Andalon is…” She mumbled. “I…”

Her body flickered.

“No!” I hissed. “Please, not now!”

She vanished.

Fudge.

But then I blinked and gasped.

It worked!