The Wyrms of &alon

The fungus was in retreat.

The fungus was in retreat.

A calm washed over the Garden Court as the silver-eyed wyrm soared away. Everyone was silent. Everything was still.

At the time, it was the most surreal experience I’d ever had, and that was saying something. My doppelgangers didn’t even come close to it.

And that cry it let out…

It was like music.

It sent tingles dancing down my spine. Meanwhile, Andalon just knelt down and cried.

I couldn’t blame her.

The fungus-controlled wyrm wasn’t the only thing to retreat. Through my connection to the zombies, I could feel the fungus retract its influence. Our struggle over the zombies’ nervous systems faded away.

I wish I could have said the fungus was gone for good, but it wasn’t. We’d won the battle, not the war. I could feel it there, lurking, down in the depths. For whatever reason, the fungus had decided to shelve its efforts to take control of the infected.

For now.

“It’s gonna come back,” Andalon said, small-mouthed and wide eyed.

The blue-haired spirit-girl was broken with desperation. Her pale face was a dying Moon. She swayed to fro. The light of her flickering power was weak and dimmed. It looked like she would collapse any second.

For a moment, everyone looked around, stunned and confused. The sight of the wyrm thrashing around with its head in its claws as its eyes flickered back and forth between silver and gold had caught everyone off guard. I swear, the looks written on some people’s faces showed genuine sympathy, especially for Karl.

He’d fought for them. They’d shot him and burned him, but he fought for them, all the same.

I wondered if he was aware of the gravity of what had just transpired.

As he’d fought the wyrm, his transformed eye had begun to flicker between gold and silver. The fungus had been trying to take control of him, but, somehow, he’d fought it off, and then he’d followed it up with that massive psychokinetic blast.

I’ll be honest: seeing Karl’s eyes flash silver scared the belassedites out of me. I hadn’t realized the fungus’ influence could take over transformees, too. I’d thought we needed to mostly change, first.

Apparently not.

It was petrifying to watch it happen in real time. Going silver-eyed was for Type Two cases what going zombie was for Type Ones. Even our auras changed in the same way: seen through a wyrm’s eyes, both processes were accompanied by the spread of that magenta aura as the fungus overwrote the victim’s will.

Did that mean I was also at risk, or did having Andalon at my side give me some sort of protection?

I wasn’t keen on finding out.

Great, just when I thought being a transformee meant I didn’t need to worry about being taken over by the fungus. There went my last shred of a sense of security.

Terrified, Andalon floated up beside me. “No, Mr. Genneth,” she said, shaking her head, “I won’t let it take you! I won’t!”

“But can you be sure?” I whispered.

“I…” Her voice trailed off, utterly broken.

“I’m sorry,” I muttered, shaking my head. “I shouldn’t have said that.”

“Mr.—Mr. Genneth,” Andalon said, wearily pointing her finger.

People were finally starting to rebound from the blast, and—wouldn’t you know it—the soldiers were the first ones up, and not just any soldiers, but Vernon’s white-armored elites, with their heat ray rifles.

Karl noticed the soldiers were stirring. Raising his head, he admonished them. He kept repeating the words “Stop fighting” over and over again, adding variations and embellishments to hammer his point home.

“I am not your enemy.” He pointed at some of the rows of zombies under my control. “And neither are they.”

Three inhuman figures emerged from behind an overturned military transport. To my astonishment, I recognized them. Dr. Rathpalla, Nurse Costran, and Larry the janitor.

From the transformee self-help group.

Before anyone got a chance to second guess Karl and restart the violence, I released my hold on the zombies whose souls the fungus had stolen, but not before giving them a final: lower yourself to the ground.

Gasps broke out as all of the zombies sat down or knelt. Some of them were still lowering themselves to the ground when I lifted my influence. Those unlucky ones toppled over, utterly motionless, and possibly braindead.

For the next minute or so, all the sounds I heard were soft or distant: quiet sobs, moans, misery, agonized coughs, the thrums of distant aerostats, the keens of fading sirens, and above it all, the stolen wyrm’s fading threnody.

With the release of my control over the zombies, Andalon’s power stopped flowing into me. She closed her sea-blue eyes as the light left her. Exhausted, she collapsed, toppling to the side. She vanished before she ever hit the ground.

The fan-shaped patterns of Garden Court Drive’s sett-paved streets were encrusted with ooze, bodies, defiled blood, and sweet, sweet spores. The mess splattered across the Hall’s grand doors and the adjacent columns and ornamented. It was like the work of a mad painter.

Then two figures emerged from the Hall of Echoes. Clad in PPE, it staggered out into the fading day.

All heads turned—mine included.

One of the figures fell to their knees.

Several soldiers drew close.

And then, I realized who they were.

“Oh God,” I muttered.

Heggy.

Ani.

I rushed to comfort them, only to hear a clear tone—like a glass harmonic—cut through my mind.

The alarm was going off.

I muttered under my breath. “Nina.”

Being in two places at once? Here we go again!

— — —

Heggy was busy getting Jonan out of trouble with the soldiers. After that, we were going to have a conference.

You know, to “discuss recent events.”

I didn’t know whether to be thrilled or terrified.

And Second-Me was far from the only one.

“Dr. Howle?” Nina asked.

I sighed.

A seal burped out on the water. A tapir seal, to be precise, named for the snooty, stubby trunk-like extensions of the males’ noses and snouts.

I titled my head in deference. “My apologies. I’m in the middle of more than one conversation right now.”

Nina stared at me. “I’ll… take your word for it.”

While I’d like to think I’d gotten the hang of running two different conversations at once, dealing with two stupidly important conversations at the same time was still a bit taxing for me. Things had started off simply enough: one of my secondary consciousnesses was manning my body out in the real world while the bulk of my awareness was centered within my head, hard at work re-introducing myself to Nina admit the nautical charm of Codman’s wharf, but then Ani came up to me and, well…

Out in the Thick World, Ani hugged me tightly, weeping into my chest. Though her hazmat suit was only a couple of rugged millimeters thick, it might as well have been miles. It bottled up her tears, and forced her words to crawl their way through a speakerphone, as if she was a creature from another world.

How could someone be that close to you, yet feel so far away?

Though both Ani and I were still reeling from everything that had just happened, she was taking it even harder than I was. I could have slowed my perceptions of time to let myself fully debrief Nina before saying even a word to Ani, but I just couldn’t wait.

So, I had to double-task.

Back in mind, another seal burped.

They liked doing that.

That same seal flopped onto its back, blubbery bulk jiggling as it idly waved its limbs.

The seals had been coming to this part of the Bay long before the ancient Peckt had ever built their ports. The tapir seals were a fixture of the brief spats of sunshine that graced Elpeck Bay in between our rainy, fog-clad winters and rainier, fog-claddier summers. They gathered with an intensity you’d normally only find in seagulls, dead-set on idling away the afternoon by lazing about in the Sun. Occasionally, one would flap a fin, or flop over like a patty on the grill, or let out a bellow or a burp. But for the most part, it was peaceful.

Codman’s wharf set up basking zones for the seals, building platforms in the water a couple yards away from land.

An imaginary crowd had gathered up on one of the nearby wharfs, piling against a wooden railing to watch the seals do their thing. The air was brackish, the water, turquoise, and crabs snippy.

Nina and I sat on a log-carved bench up on the wharf, with our backs up against the outer wall of a Lobster King seafood restaurant. If you listened closely, you could hear the saturated fats crackling on the griddle, in between the cries of birds and infants.

I’d been waffling over where to hold my talk with Nina, and Ileene’s spirit had recommended this particular location.

I have to admit, it had its charms. Codman’s Wharf was forever stuck in the past, a piece of the late First Republic at the cusp of the peninsula, encrusted with maritime paraphernalia—kiosks and knick-knack vendors as far as the eye could see. A couple otters drifted by, lazily floating in the current, munching on shellfish scavenged from the deep. A gull flew down, trying to steal the otter’s meal, but the little guy routed his attacker away with a slap of his paw.

The people around us were little more than NPCs—though I’d been getting better at making them.

“So,” Nina said, turning to face me. “I’m… dead?”

I nodded. “I’m sorry.”

She’d asked to see what had become of her body. I’d begged her not to press the issue further, but Ms. Broliguez was quite insistent.

She handled my memory-footage better than I’d expected.

Nina was a tough cookie, for sure.

Stepping away from me, Ani pulled out her console. She tried to show it to me, but lost her conviction mid-gesture. Instead, she let her arms hang slack at her sides. Her sniffles spurted from her suit like stray static.

Ani stared me in the eyes.

“I think I’m a bad person,” she said.

“Don’t say that.”

“I should be focused on the people who are suffering because of the disaster that just exploded in our laps,” she said, “but I’m not. Instead, I just stand around, obsessing over whether or not the mycophage will be a viable therapy. It’s like I can’t even think about anything that isn’t that, and… I don’t know what I’m going to do if it… if…”

Ani’s lips shuddered. She couldn’t bring herself to say the words.

“You shouldn’t blame yourself for how you feel, Ani,” I said, “least of all when those feelings come from a place of genuine kindness.”

Meanwhile, in the other half of my perceptions, Nina stood dressed in what I’d charitably describe as grumpy butch—not that I blamed her. Denim helped hold things together, and in more ways than one, and Nina’s weathered blue denim jacket was no exception. She’d matched the jacket with a pair of denim shorts of a darker, navy-blue hue. I made no comment; as a rule, I let my ghosts dress however they wanted to, though I did include an auto-censor feature on my end in case it turned out their preferred set of duds was no clothes at all.

“What happened to those motherfuckers? The ones that did this to me?” Nina’s features hardened as she crossed her arms. “God, my family!” she said, blurting out the words with a shudder of concern that blocked me from getting so much as a single word in edgewise. “What’s happened to them?” She was rife with worry. “Are they safe? Did they—”

“—I don’t know,” I replied, with a shake of my head. “I’ll have to check.” I lowered my gaze. “From what Dr. Marteneiss told me, the military has taken over administration of the mycophage. They’re administering it en masse. It won’t be long now before we know whether it works or not.” I bowed my head apologetically. “Nina… I’m sorry I couldn’t save you.” I shook my head again. “I should have called you as soon as I learned about Dr. Horosha’s abilities. Perhaps he could have helped you.”

“Why didn’t you?” she asked.

“I got distracted.” Embarrassed, I ran my hands through my hair.

Nina smirked. “Considering how many minds you’ve got scrambled inside your head, Dr. Howle, that’s not really surprising.”

“You’re too kind,” I said. I almost smiled.

Almost.

“Nah…” Shaking her head, Nina then flung her hair around, rattling the strings of turquoise beads. “I’m kind of a bitch. I sort of have to be.” She let out a forced chuckle. “The guys in my life. Dad. Quatémo. Lu…” Her voice trailed off.