***
On the paranormal unit, things were hectic. There were flashing lights, beeping of machines, emergency carts, and people in unis everywhere. Rushing and dodging one another. Ducking through doors before they swished shut. Shouting. The privacy curtains in the glassed-in rooms were pulled. I had no idea where I was going or who was dying. And then I remembered Dougie, and her daughters and their partner and husband. Thefirst death had been the husband, Adam somebody. Fear caught me around my heart and squeezed, bruising and draining.
I followed the noise down the short hallway to the room with the greatest concentration of medical people. On the beds in the room, side by side, were two women, both being administered CPR by uni-wearing hospital personnel. I dressed out in the 3PE and stepped inside, through a purplish blue light that lit me up oddly, and into the room.
Standing at the foot of the beds was Dougie. Tears ran down her face, and she looked beyond exhausted. She was standing with her hands over her mouth, as if to keep in words that wouldn’t help. Or screams. Or curses. On the beds were two women. One looked like Dougie, with strawberry blond hair. On the other bed was a woman who... oddly reminded me of me, as I had been, with long hair and slender build. The red-haired woman’s arm was out. Bloodless and pale. As if she was dying, reaching toward the other woman.
And I knew—Iknew—the women had to be Kirsten Harrell and her partner, Sally Clements. I stepped to Dougie and tapped her on the shoulder. She turned to me, blinked tears from her eyes, and succeeded in focusing on me. “Nell,” she whispered. Over the noise, I didn’t hear her, but I saw her lips move. And she slid into my arms as if the shoulder tap had been an invitation. Surprised, I clasped her closer and noted that she towered over me. How had I missed that she was so tall?
I held her, and shifted our bodies so she could see her girls, but that wasn’t enough. I felt her grief welling high, and she made a strangled sound, and so I maneuvered closer, our booties sliding on the floor, to the end of the bed. I took her fingers and shifted them until she touched the toes of the redheaded woman. She sobbed, her body growing heavy in my arms.
I held Dougie, and I could tell that the doctor was about to give up. She kept looking at the clock, her face giving away nothing, but her stance tightening, drawing in. One patient suddenly heaved a breath on her own. For a moment, everyone, everything stopped. Dougie stiffened in my arms, not breathing. “What...?” she whispered. The woman on the bed took another breath, her chest moving, the air sounding sticky and thick. Dougie gripped her daughter’s feet and squeezed.
The energy of the medical personnel in the room instantly went from controlled methodology to something euphoric. Theattending doctor began again administering drugs and ordering tests at a faster pace.
The heart rates of first one patient, then the other, stabilized. The second woman started breathing on her own, and began to thrash, which seemed to be a good sign, from the medical excitement. Dougie held her daughter’s toes so tight I thought the woman might never walk again. And Dougie grabbed my arm around her own waist, holding me in place when I thought to step away.
Quickly both patients began to improve, their skin developing a pinkish tint that hadn’t been there before. The doctor’s stance grew more comfortable, her face relaxing, and something like relief settled there. Another eighteen minutes passed, Dougie and me standing together.
“Okay,” the doctor said, at last. “Anybody got any idea what just happened? Other than the new antifungal taking effect in unexpected ways?” She looked around. “Yeah. Me neither. Good work, people. Leave your suits at the door, gloves, shoes, hats, faceplates each in the respective bio waste bins. All needles go in the special needle container. All used and discarded respiratory equipment, IV equipment, and paper wrappers are to be double bagged and placed in the outgoing incinerator trash. All equipment gets a thorough cleaning in the new equipment room, with twelve hours in ultraviolet. Let’s keep this contained.”
Contained? What needs to be contained?I thought, studying the room with new eyes. And, Antifungal medication?
I hadn’t recognized it, but the medical people and Dougie were wearing yellow paper from head to toe, not white paranormal unis anymore. The nurses and other people stripped at the door and washed up on the way out, revealing normal hospital scrubs and running shoes. I hadn’t even noticed the difference between the medical unis and my personal protective equipment. The room cleared except for four medical personnel who were cleaning up paper and plastic and sheets and the patients themselves.
Dougie let go of me and her daughter’s toes, stepping lightly, as fragile as life itself, to her daughter’s side, her bootiesshushing between the beds. The medical people recognized her as family and stepped back, allowing Dougie to lean over. Gently, through her face mask, she placed a kiss on her daughter’scheek, turned, and kissed Sally’s cheek. And then she did something unexpected. She made a shooing motion with her hands and the medical people moved farther out of the way. She took Kirsten’s hand, which was still outstretched toward Sally, and she pulled Sally’s hand over, between the beds. Dougie slid an elastic strap, what I thought might be a disposable tourniquet, from where it draped on the bed frame. With it, she joined the women’s hands, tying them loosely. So they could touch. Even asleep, or unconscious, Kirsten gripped Sally’s fingers.
Dougie stepped back, and that was when I saw the black spots on Kirsten’s upper arm. Black as tar. Dripping something black onto the floor. It was on the sheets beneath her. Drips spattered the floor. Everywhere. I stepped up and gripped the sheet, lifting it and looking down. “Hey!” a nurse said. “Stop that!” Kirsten’s arm and her torso were covered with black spots. Like mold on bread. I checked Sally, who displayed the same spots, only smaller, some appearing to be under the skin, not on top. The mold might be all through them, inside. A systemic mold.Antifungal medications...
“Nell?” Dougie said, her voice trembling.
I dropped the sheet and saw a box of thick blue plastic ziplock bags to the side. I withdrew one, opened it, and quickly shoved the handheld P 1.0 inside. Working clumsily through the gloves and the heavy plastic, I zeroed the device before taking a reading. Both of the women redlined. So did the sheets. The walls. The entire room.
And that was when it hit me. The black slime might have begun as part of a paranormal event, an accident even, but it was acting like an infection, spreading faster than any mold on Earth as if using the new magical energies in the ground to speed its own growth. So was the mold an unintended side effect of the working? That would make sense, and if so, could give us a way to track the underground working.
I pulled out my cell and stuck it in a baggie too and searched for the word that was hiding in my brain. My fingers tapped out an Internet search through the baggie as my brain kept on working.
So... the mold—whatever it was—was a mutated life-form? An unknown or brand-new mold? I pulled the words out of the Internet ether like a sailor pulling up an anchor. Mycobionts! They were calledmycobionts, and some varieties madedifferent types of fruiting bodies, or spore-producing structures. It took nutrients and blood, stole its sustenance, from another life-form. And then killed it. I remembered the bumps on the black mold on the shrubs in the neighborhood. The black oily sheen beneath the pond. Was the mold growing inside the earth?
I needed to touch some of the black stuff. With my finger.
I had no idea if I could actually do what I was thinking about doing, but... ignoring the nurses, I shoved the P 1.0 onto a shelf at the head of the bed. The psy-meter would need to be cleaned like the doctor had said. This uni was more unyielding and rigid than others, and the gloves were problematic. I spotted a pair of scissors to the side, big clunky things that looked capable of cutting through hard plastic. Using them, I cut the tip off the right finger of my glove and placed the bare skin on Kirsten’s face, next to the plastic face mask, on healthy pink skin. And I dropped into her. Like reading the earth.
Heat and sound hit me like a fist wrapped in a wet, steaming-hot wool rug. I was instantly disoriented and dizzy, and I put out a hand. Someone caught me. Held on. I steadied and tried to figure out what I was seeing. This was vastly different from land, from earth, despite the analogy I had always used as to the breath of the earth and the water that ran beneath it and over as blood in veins. So different.
I dropped deeper. Into heat and power and action and life so abundant I had nothing to compare it to, nothing to base an assessment or corollary on. Blood pumped, bright with life, intense and rich. Kirsten’s lungs breathed and her heart beat, mighty and powerful. But something shadowed was spreading through the system, a blight, stealing the life from it. The system that was Kirsten. I studied the blight and realized that the darkness was pulsing, ever so slightly, with a dull red light. And after a moment, a dull blue light. Slowly the blight went through the rainbow of colors, just the way the dancer infinity loop had done right at first. But this was darkly and terribly shadowed. I heard a sound with each pulse of light, soft and scratchy. It sounded like, “Aaaaap. Aaaaap.” Over and over. Again, I had no idea what it meant. I eased away from the system and back into the hospital room. I remembered to breathe.
“Nell,” Dougie whispered. “They’ve called security. You need to leave now.”
I had a feeling about the blight, but it was nebulous, unformed,hovering just out of reach. Something that seemed important. But this was a hospital. They had labs and oncology departments and pathologists. They had already found what the blight was. Theyknew.
I backed away. Silently, I trashed my uni at the door, removing the baggies and dropping them into the garbage, pocketing the handheld psy-meter and my cell. I washed my hands under hot water, with strong soap. As safe as I could make myself, I started to slip from the room, the P 1.0 under an arm, until a nurse stepped in front of me and said, “Hold your ID and electronic equipment to the lights.” She pointed up to the bluish lights at the door. “They were outside your 3PEs.” I did as instructed, holding them in place until she nodded and said, “You’re good to go.”
I waved to Dougie, but she had turned her attention to her girls and didn’t see. I didn’t see security, so I walked the halls and took handheld P 1.0 readings from all the patients. Redlining, or close to it, everywhere.
Down the hall, I spotted the woman I thought was the hospitalist, and a man who might be an intern, and I followed them through the empty nurses’ station into a back room. The door swished shut behind me.
“What is the black stuff?” I demanded.
