The Wyrms of &alon

Whatever Andalon had done, it had done the trick. It was like there was now a second layer to my vision seated atop the first. After a couple seconds of disorientation and confusion, I discovered I could alter the layer’s thickness at will.

It was like a dimmer switch, or the opacity setting for a layer on an image-processor. The second layer was my wyrmsight. I most clearly saw the auras and energies where the layer was thickest, On the other hand, the wyrmsight was completely inactive on those swaths of my field of vision where the layer was thin.

The bodies passing darkpox beds glowed like light-beams at a rave even at a modestly thick setting. Colors seethed all over them. It was still intense, though no longer quite so intense as to make me want to gouge my eyes out to make it stop.

Gasps filled my ears, along with moans and a few screams and swoons.

I jerked my head up, expecting the worst, only to realize, no: for once, things actually made sense. Reality was behaving like it was supposed to behave.

The hubbub was over the darkpox beds.

That was unsurprising.

Folks always stirred when darkpox beds rolled by. A steady stream of people trickled along the walls as they swiftly beelined to the nearest exit they could find.

I couldn’t blame them.

Even in this day and age, it wasn’t uncommon to find people who still saw darkpox through the lens of old superstitions. People who thought darkpox had been inflicted upon mankind by the Godhead as punishment for having abused the Sword’s powers in the Second Crusade—for having used it for prideful, worldly ends. Glory. Conquest. Empire.

We owed the traditional, scriptural view to Harold II, 177th Lassedite, the first Lassedite to succeed after Athelmarch’s demise. As Harold II wrote:

The Godhead made darkpox so as to grant sin a form that we might see and know. How wise a punishment this was! No longer could mankind remain blind to his corruption and iniquity. Just as mankind’s sin broke the world, so too would that sin now break mankind. Through darkpox’s ministrations, we feel the yoke of our misdeeds as the earth feels them: gnawed, torn, and broken.

As a rule, in a crisis, you did not want to remind people of darkpox. It would turn the discussion from what could be done to help to why the victims deserved to suffer from the slings and arrows of their misfortune.

So, this is it, then? We’re riding to Hell in a darkpox bed?

My arms slapped against my sides as I let them go slack.

Blinking, I focused on what Andalon had said about the fungus’ aura, trying to shake off my feelings of hunger and lightheadedness.

The bright ones… the Darkness wantsta take them, because they’re so shiny.

That told me what to do.

I walked up to the reception desk.

“Alright, I’m here,” I said.

“Oh!” One of the receptionists looked up at me. “Dr. Howle!” She nodded.

“Where do you need me?” I said, nodding back at her.

She threw her hands up. “Wherever you can be. Check your console, or… I don’t know, just follow your ears. Everything’s going crazy.” Turning, she pointed at one of the nearby seating areas. “The people over there have already been sorted by SPN. You can take ‘em in any order you choose. We’ll try to get back into a normal case order once this surge ends. Until then, we’ll be shaking up the routine.”

She pointed at the large console mounted on the counter in front of her. “Scan your hand.”

I did.

“Alright.” She glanced at the monitor. “You’re in E4.”

“What?”

“Instead of assigning patients to doctors, we’re assigning doctors to rooms. Keep using the examination room for as long as you can. Just make sure to come back here and check out before you go off to eat, breathe, or cry.”

I bowed solemnly. “Thank you.”

At least I now had some freedom of choice

Following Andalon’s advice, I walked over to the group indicated by the receptionist and, briefly thickening my wyrmsight, I picked out the brightest fungus aura among them and walked the patient over to Room E4.

Thankfully, it wasn’t very far.

I set the red, hydraulic examination table to Seat mode with a swipe of my hand over its built-in console and then set the man down. He was a burly fellow, balding and bearded, the hair wiry and curled. He was still in full business casual, though it looked like he’d been through a wind tunnel. His shirt and tie were in disarray; his crimped collar was undone and mottled with sweat.

I thickened my wyrmsight after closing the door, and happened to make an interesting discovery in the process. Whatever physics were involved in my wyrmsight, it seemed that solid barriers like walls and doors were, at worst, only a minor hindrance. I guess that meant the auras behaved like radio waves, in that both could pass through solid matter without too much trouble.

Turning my attention back to my patient, it was like I had X-ray vision. In any other situation, my inner child would have been thrilled that I had X-ray vision, but the deadly seriousness of my patient’s condition tempered any sense of excitement I might have had.

As I looked over the man’s body, I noticed his abdomen was matted over by a multicolored light-weave. I glowed quite strongly, and was oddly crumpled, seemingly zig-zagged.

The implication was obvious: gastrointestinal involvement. Pressing my stethoscope against his back only supported that conclusion. While his breathing was certainly labored, it didn’t have the raspy or crinkling noises indicative of fluidic pulmonary obstructions.

I’d barely taken two steps toward him, however, when, with a horrid groan, he fell off the examination table-chair and vomited out his breakfast. The ick splashed all over my PPE gown as well as the floor. Oozing darkness mixed in with blood and liquified food, trickling off the hem of the gown and dripping right in front of my loafers. I made sure to step around the puddle as I helped him up. Even from within my gloves, my fingers traced out a growing network of tiny ridges beneath his skin, hidden among the overgrown back hair poking out from the back of his loose-fitting shirt. Closer inspection revealed the ridges to be the dark filaments of an NFP-20 infection—Type One, of course. They glowed beneath my wyrmsight. I tried grabbing them—and I mean literally grabbing them, but that didn’t work in the slightest.

This was when I realized I hadn’t the foggiest idea of what I was doing!

He kept on heaving and groaning, even after having voided all the food in his digestive tract. He gasped in pain as his breaths turned shallow and rapid.

I screamed for help. But it was too little too late; somewhere, a hemorrhage burst. Blood trickled out of his mouth, and then sprayed as he coughed, desperate for air. As the nurse opened the door, she saw the blood and immediately put in a call for emergency surgery, and within thirty seconds, she and another nurse came with a hospital bed and together, we put my patient on the bed, and then off they went. That would be the last I ever saw of him, unless you counted the bits of blood and black ooze that I wiped off the floor afterward. Some of the crud had also gotten onto the bed’s wheels, but there was nothing I could do about that.

For safety purposes, I squeezed out some instant sponge from the dispenser over the sink and doused it in cleaning solution before getting down on my hands and knees to wipe the biohazardous material off the floor. I dumped the sponge into the incinerator with a rapid flick of my hands. For good measure, I spritzed the spots on the floor where the gunk had been with one of my bottles of sanitizer spray.

As I readied for my next patient, seemingly out of nowhere, a short, portly man at the far side of middle age walked up to me, wearing nothing but a hospital gown. He was as bald as a mountaintop, with hair girding the sides of his head like clouds around a rocky peak.

I must not have seen him coming.

“Hey there, you a Doctor?”

I nodded. “Yes?”

Turning to face him, I was troubled to see that he didn’t appear to have any signs of a Type One NFP-20 infection.

My eyes widened.

“Sir, it’s incredibly dangerous for you to be out here!” I said. Please, go back to your room, now!”

I mean, there was always the possibility that he was a Type Two case like myself, but I wasn’t interested in taking that chance.

Apparently, though, this fellow had other priorities.

The man smacked his lips together. “Where can a guy go to get a cold beer or two around here?”

“Sir,” I said, “we’re in the middle of a deadly pandemic!”

“Yeah, yeah,” he said, waving his hand dismissively, “my daughter told me all about it. Just tell me where I can get some booze in me; I can feel myself getting sober already.”

My jaw hung slack behind my F-99 mask.

Well, at least I know why he’s in the hospital now.

The man was completely delusional.

Then, behind me, another woman spoke. “You there, with the bow-tie, I demand treatment.” Her voice was haughty; it oozed privilege and entitlement.

I turned around.

The speaker’s face was an attempt at using ointment to smooth over the pasty, topographic wrinkles late middle age’s had folded into her manicured skin. She had the look—and garb—you’d associated with someone from a combination of money, blood, and privilege.

“Excuse me?” I said. “You can’t just—”

Her brow flattened. “I am Moira Earnshaw—Countess Earnshaw—and, yes, I very well can, as my health insurance provider will readily tell you.”

Oh, fudge.

Yes, we had aristocrats and nobles and fiefs; all that feudal trouble. But, supposedly, we’d done away with it. Barely a month after Hilleman’s march on Elpeck, the Republic—in one of its first acts—passed the Concordat of 1804—abolishing the aristocracy and titles of nobility, freeing any remaining industrial serfs, and stripping the former nobles of nearly all of their wealth and property, save for their manorial land (basically, just the mansion itself). But, as is so often the case, the inertia of power managed to buck the trend. A good many of the ex-aristocrats had cuddled up with various captains of industry, so as to ensure they and their descendants would remain preëminent for generations to come, as well as to give medical students plentiful case studies for genetic disorders that resulted from their profligate inbreeding. With very few exceptions, people like Mrs. Earnshaw lived their lives ensconced in wealth and privilege, and they never hesitated to use it.

“Ma’am,” I said, pointing over my shoulder, “if you can’t tell, I’m already with a patient, and—”

Countess Earnshaw’s brow puckered. “—Do you take me for a fool? You were talking to yourself!” She coughed. “I will not be subjected to such improprieties as a doctor attempting to—”

—I turned around to look for the man I’d been talking to, but he was gone.

Across the hall, a young woman shrieked, and then burst into hysterical tears.

“No, Daddy! No!”

Everyone turned to look.

And there, in the bed in that room… there was the man I’d just been speaking with, his body ravaged by the fungus almost to beyond the point of recognition, but still, with that same cloud of wispy hair girding the top of his bald, pallid scalp.