1.
He carried the trash bag out of the bar, a sour look on his face. In the bag was the remains of something that had once been human; now, it was just a mass of dead tissue that didn't resemble anything so much as a small ape with wings. A knot formed in his stomach, and he tossed it up, aiming into the dumpster. It smacked into the lid and rebounded.
Its limp weight spilled out the bag, revealing the tiny form of Sayid Sanchez, turned into an impish thing by Victor Carver.
Revealed and reviled. Wade knelt by it and gathered up the small body. It wasn't much, but it had been a person. He had hoped to shed this business, be done with it. Now he was faced with the evidence of it.
You can never run away from anything, he heard his dead uncle, Georges, say to him. He had hoped never to run away, after that, and here he was.
Am I running away? He wondered, or toward?
No answer presented itself to him, but he hoped the latter. Gently, he gathered up the broken body, as it jerked to life as if galvanized; its teeth sank into his injured left hand, and he crushed Sayid's head in his right.
2.
Episode 6: CALLOUS, adj. Gifted with great fortitude to bear the evils afflicting another.
When Zeno was told that one of his enemies was no more he was observed to be deeply moved. "What!" said one of his disciples, "you weep at the death of an enemy?" "Ah, 'tis true," replied the great Stoic; "but you should see me smile at the death of a friend."
Mari and Wade stood side-by-side, in the lobby of the hospital again, for the second time in twenty-four hours.
“What bit you?”
“A small child,” Mari said, without missing a beat.
“A monkey,” Wade said, simultaneously.
“Was it a monkey or a small child?” the nurse asked, staring at them over the tops of her glasses.
“A small child,” Mari said, “he was a little hairy, and my friend was still a little drunk, so he couldn't quite tell.”
“Aha,” the nurse said, before turning her attention back to the computer.
Wade and Mari stood there; she simply looked at the attendant, as he glanced around nervously. A functionally identical parade of ailing and injured people were here as last time, though the faces and injuries were unique: A palestino man with his eyes swollen shut sat or dozed on a chair off to one side; a black girl held her arm level, a nail having been driven through her hand; a child with twin streams of liquid mucus coming from his nose sat on the floor at his mother's feet.
Wade saw that black student, Cincinatus, being wheeled through the room in a chair; he clutched the back of his head, and Theia followed along, speaking in a low voice to either the orderly or patient. When they reached the inner door, the attendant stopped her, and turned her back into the waiting room.
She approached Wade and Mari as the latter slapped the counter.
“Hey,” she said, growling at the nurse, “are you going to get him in there or not? For all we know, that kid could have been a werewolf, or have the black plague, or something. He needs antibiotics, or something. Get him into the hospital and run tests.”
The nurse looked at her over the tops of her glasses.
“Insurance card,” the nurse said.
Wade fished into his wallet, and she examined it.
“Someone will be with you in a moment. Go have a seat.”
“What's going on?” Theia asked.
“Got bit,” Wade replied, holding up his hand.
“Wow, what the hell bit you, a midget?”
“A small and very hairy child,” Wade said, mechanically.
The three of them wedged into a spot by the wall, Wade and Theia sitting, Mari standing up, shifting her weight from leg to leg, cocking her hips first in one direction, then in the other. The nervous motion caused her to shift her gaze from one to the other of her companions in a rhythmic fashion.
“Why are you here?” she asked Theia.
“My boyfriend woke up outside the medical building, and was complaining about headaches.”
“Sounds like a wild night,” Mari said.
“You'd think, but Cin doesn't drink.”
“You're dating a Muslim?” Mari asked.
“No. He's an atheist, but he doesn't drink. Says just the taste of it makes him vomit.”
Mari looked at her.
“You two must have a difficult time, then.”
“Are you suggesting I'm a drunk?” Theia asked, looking at Mari through heavy-lidded eyes.
“No. Suggesting is one thing. Reporting is another. I have verifiable data.”
Theia chuckled once.
“I suppose you do.”
The three of them remained silent for a moment, then Theia turned to look at Wade. He looked back at her with a flat look; he was holding his left hand in his right, with the palm up and the fingers slightly curled.
“So you were bit by a child? Were you trying to grab him?”
“Yes. I was bit by a child. That is exactly what we told the nurse so I could get antibiotics and not have gangrene,” Wade replied.
She furrowed her brow, and looked him in the eye.
“What were you bit by?” she asked, in a low voice.
“It's hard to explain.”
“Come on, try me.”
“You wouldn't believe me if I did tell you,” Wade said.
“Well, that means you probably think it was something ridiculous, like a leprechaun, or a gnome, or a New Zealander.”
“I happen to have met several New Zealanders, I can assure you that they do exist,” Mari said, butting in.
Theia rolled her eyes theatrically.
“But seriously, what were you bit by.”
“Well, it was about the size of a large cat and it had bat wings,” Mari reported.
“And it had needle sharp teeth,” Wade added.
“And it was in my bar,” Mari said, going further.
“And it looked a little like a monkey,” Wade clarified.
“And it was in my bar,” Mari hissed.
“So you were bit by a bat?” Theia asked.
“It had too many thumbs to be a bat,” Wade said, “and it was a little too well-spoken. I don't know. I've never had to interrogate a bat before.”
“You interrogated a bat?” Theia asked.
“It wasn't a bat,” Mari said.
“Are you sure?”
“Yes.”
“Wade Larkin!” a voice called out from the interior of the hospital. Wade stood, and headed in. Mari plopped down in his seat, and held her head near Theia's.
“Algernon and Wade asked it questions, dunking it into the sink, and ended up killing it. The damn thing could talk, Theia.”
Theia nodded, and leaned in a bit closer.
“That's nothing,” she said, “my boyfriend started to grow feathers. Feathers, Christ, right there on his head. I plucked a few out before he started bleeding. I didn't know they were growing out of him. Goddamn.”
They retained that position for a moment, before Mari caught, out of the corner of her eye, a boy about the age of twelve watching them with wide eyes. She realized that the two of them were holding their faces close to one another, and shrank back, looking away.
Theia settled down into her seat, crossed her arms under her breasts and fell asleep.
Mari pulled out her phone, and sent a message to Algernon:
“At the hospital. Wade's getting help. Mo will be coming to open up the bar, soon. Stay out of his hair.”
A moment later, the reply:
“Will do.”
3.
Wade fell asleep after they gave him a warm compress to put on his hand, crossing them over his chest, left-in-right. It was the same room as last time, and he briefly wondered if the Colonel Sanders Doctor would be returning. But no one came.
It was still dark out, in the early hours of the morning, when he awoke.
The power had gone out, and he sat in the warm, antiseptic darkness of the hospital. It was silent, save for the sound of his breathing, he swallowed, and the noise was thunderous in the confined space.
Standing, he looked down at his hand, and saw that the blood had dried, save for a small trickle, and in that trickle were luminescent traces, threads of bright fluid that glowed in the dark as if under a black-light.
His eyes dilated.
Two floors down, in one of the wards, something terrible was happening. Cincinatus groaned and writhed, as his skin began to peel away. The pinprick on the back of his neck had split open, widened, becoming a gill, an orifice, an opening. His skin tore back from it, revealing something growing out of him from within.
It opened up, revealing a surface of flesh covered in feathers of every color and description. Cincinatus's face took on a mask of pain and anguish was it crumpled. The thing inside of him raised its head; halfway between that of a man and a bird. Its eyes were giant golden saucers, pitiless, blank, and dead like the moon. Its mouth and nose were fused into a terrible curved beak.
It pulled the top third of its chest out, already outmassing the body it came from. Two arms, longer than a man is tall and ending in a raptor's brutal talons emerged, planted themselves on the floor, and pulled the rest of the creature free. It wasn't quite a fusion of man and bird, resembling more a mixture of bird and ape; its posture was too stooped, its arms too long to be that of a person.
Caim left behind the husk of Cincinatus, and looked about. The others in the ward slept or watched in horrified silence. Opening its beak, Caim cried like an eagle, and set to work.
The cry came through the hospital, resonating with the structure of the building, rebounding through stairwells, and finally reached Wade's ears.
His dilated eyes contracted, becoming mere pinpoints, his hair stood on end, and his limbs began shaking with anger. His blood turned to bile, and every circuit in his brain was flung open, shot through with a St. Elmo's Fire of hatred, a feeling so deep and primal that it rose not from the organs of thought, but screamed out of every cell in his body; the most basic components of his being were waking up and urging him to maim and kill the source of that sound.
He stepped out into the hall and fell over as Theia stumbled into him.
“Jesus, let go of me, fucker!” she said, grabbing his arm and levering him over her back. Wade was looking up at the ground, the ceiling below him; the world rippled, and he twisted in midair.
“Wha...?” Theia began as he landed, feet-first on the ground; the shock traveled up his legs, getting absorbed by his ankles, knees, and hips, before it hit his spine and he stumbled.
She hadn't let go of his arm, and he twisted, pulling her off his feet. In a flash she was on the ground, and he had his splayed left hand planted on her midriff, holding her down.
“Who...?” she asked.
“You ran into me,” he pointed out.
“Wade? What the hell was that? How did you do that?”
“I...uh...had a good breakfast?”
“You're bleeding on me,” she informed him.
“Oh...sorry about that,” he said, standing up and offering her his good hand.
“Mari's still waiting in the front room. Trying to get the police or the power company. I snuck in here, but got lost,” Mari informed him.
“Looking for Cincinatus?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“Well, I don't think the doctor's coming, so...”
“Want to help me look?” she asked.
He paused for a moment, some mechanism in his mind clicking over.
“Sure.”
4.
Far beneath them, Caim stalked from bed to bed, ripping open those patients who didn't run or crawl from it. The slightest pressure with a talon could open a body, and what was inside fascinated it to no end.
A smell came to it through the air, a scent like static electricity, like fresh gunpowder, like the air a half-second before an avalanche. Caim raised its head and turned.
“Fuck, what is that?” Theia asked, shrinking back from the doorway. Wade stood, his feet splayed wide, in the door. Caim could see both of his shadows: one was cast back from the light coming through the ward's windows, into the hallway. The other was elongated, stretched as far as it could go in front of Wade, extending forward, clawing at the ground before it, as if struggling to escape. Struggling to attack.
Caim cried out, and loomed, posturing before the two humans that had approached it.
The shadow shot back into Wade, pooling around his feet and crawling up into him; a halo of gray smoke came out of his head, emerging from his mouth, nose, and ears.
Wade popped like a balloon, sending shreds of dead skin everywhere.
Where he had been standing, there was a dead white figure, like something made of burnished bone and polished metal. Instead of hands or feet, it had three-foot blades terminating each limb. Its head was like the visor of a knight's helm, venting incandescent smoke in an arafel about its head.
Wade's mind, still inside of the figure, registered a name, a moniker for the figure: Paimon.
He moved forward, tumbling forward, digging each blade-point into the linoleum floor in turn, first hands, then feet, then eventually shifting into a cartwheel.
Caim swiped a talon toward the tumbling figure, but Paimon sprang over the outstretched claw. The white figure was gone, Caim glanced around, and Theia hid on the other side of the wall, covering her mouth, trying her hardest not to breathe.
The arafel-smoke drifted through the room, entering into the bodies of the dead or dying patients, a nightmarish moaning rose from them, the bodies shuddered and twitched, their eyes opened, rolling back to reveal the whites.
One of the still-living patients set up to a litany:
“Ayh Jee Ayh Yu See See Jee Yu Ayh Ayh Ayh Jee Yu Ayh See Jee Jee Ayh See See See See...”
Paimon crawled along the ceiling, digging each point into the panels before shifting to move to the next one. It skittered without thought for gravity above its enemy's head.
Caim thrust one arm through the wall, its talons outstretched, trying to reach Theia on the other side. Paimon dropped down, digging its lower blades into Caim's upper back, and its hand-blades into the floor, with a springing move, Paimon pulled the larger figure backwards, and over.
Standing on its hand-blades, Paimon pirouetted, drops of blood flying off of its feet, before it shifted back into a more-or-less standing position.
“...Jee Ayh Jee See Yu Ayh Ayh See Jee Jee See Ayh Yu Yu Yu See Jee Ayh Yu Ayh See See See Ayh...”
Blood formed a band around the walls at eye level, and the arafel-smoke mingled with it, tracing forms—faces, silhouettes, letters that belonged to no alphabet, no language—in it. Caim pulled itself up, and Paimon rested with all of its blades on the ground, its vented head facing the bird-beast.
Paimon clicked one bone-like razor against the ground.
Click. Click. Click.
It reared up, and ran its hand-blades along each other, rubbing a noise from them like a great pair of scissors closing.
Caim hissed, tried to stand, and fell. Paimon sprang forward, aiming both arm-blades toward the bird-thing's throat. It was too early for the coup-de-grace, though: Caim dodged to the side, and swiped the smaller figure aside with one great talon.
Two of the eviscerated bodies—one male, one female—crawled toward one another, and began to mingle their parts. The arafel-smoke filled the body, knitting together disparate flesh, congealing into liquid blood, reforming bone.
Paimon picked itself up, again, and began another cartwheel, picking up speed until it became a white-and-red blur, a free-floating buzzsaw chewing through floor and air. Caim dodged to one side, but Paimon ricocheted off the wall, its blades biting into Caim's leg, its side, its shoulder. When Paimon reached its head, it miscalculated the angle, and scored a long gash on Caim's head, not piercing the skull.
The larger creature shook it off, and batted it through the air, sending it across the room.
The androgynous figure gasped to life, the Arafel-smoke entering the body and going into the brain knitted together from pieces lying about, bringing it to terrible awareness:
“Virus!” it screamed.
“...Yu Ayh Ayh Jee Ayh Yu See See See Ayh Yu Ayh Yu See Jee Ayh Jee Yu See Ayh Ayh See Jee Yu See Jee Jee Jee Ayh...”
Paimon's lower blades were embedded in the wall, holding it straight out like a diving board, it curled, pitched forward, and rolled into a standing position.
“Humanity is a Virus!” the androgyne screamed.
The white demon scrambled across the floor in a quadrupedal fashion, a crab-walk that caused its rigid body to roll and quake as it moved forward.
Caim lunged forward, just as Paimon rolled forward, tucking its head down and throwing its arm-blades out. Its lower blades were made into a point, and driven upward with all the force that the smaller creature could muster.
“Winter then Summer then Winter!”
“...Ayh Jee Yu See Yu See Jee Ayh Yu...”
The blades pierced the underside of Caim's head, lancing up into its brain, and out the top.
“...Patient and potent...will reign again...”
“...See Yu Ayh See Yu Jee Ayh See Yu...”
Paimon scissored its legs apart, cleaving Caim's head in two. It somersaulted through the air, and dissolved into dust, the arafel-smoke pulling back into it, revealing Wade.
He pitched through the air, windmilled his arms, and landed face-first on the linoleum floor.
A half-second after the “Smack!” of his fall stopped echoing, Caim exploded in a shower of feathers, leaving behind only Cincinatus.
“Virus...” the androgyne croaked, before falling asleep.
5.
“Mixed one too strong, the other two weak,” Victor muttered, standing up from his seat in front of the bank of CCTV monitors.
“Charles told me how to do it,” a feminine voice said, from the other side of the open door. Victor refused to look at her, “I know how it is done.”
“I know you do,” he muttered, “but I'm not owing you anything.”
“You've already wasted your chance with three of the seventy-two. Nine, Twenty-nine, and fifty-three.”
“Nine is still accessible, and you're responsible for twenty-nine,” Victor protested.
“You really think that he'll listen to you? You didn't place restrictions on Paimon, and you let him into the world. You're lucky that you diluted it as much as you did, otherwise, you'd have a discorporate cambion knocking down your door and boiling your blood.”
He turned to face her.
“Astarte, come forth,” Victor said.
The dark-skinned woman entered, leaning on the door frame. She radiated an unmistakable power, and smelled faintly of sweat and ozone.
“Bring me that hermaphrodite, the Rebis-figure. Some of the arafel-smoke might linger in it.”
Astarted looked at him through heavy-lidded eyes.
“And what will you give me in return?”
Victor thought for a moment, licking his teeth.
“I'll give you Daphne. You remember how to be male, don't you?”
Astarte rolled her eyes.
“Astarte...Ashtaroth...it makes no real difference, Victor.”
Victor sat again in his chair, and steepled his fingers before him.
“Good, so you'll do it?”
“If you tell me why,” Astarte said, sitting on the lab-bench and crossing her legs.
“The Arafel-smoke.”
“What about it?”
“Paimon isn't the white thing. That's just a container for it. Paimon is the smoke. That raw, uncased power; a burning malice that has no material component, just a probability wave that manifests itself in different mediums. If I have that...well...I can move on to the next stage.”
He felt Astarte touch his mind.
“Putting away Faust, Solomon and Crowley for Maxwell, Laplace and Descartes?” she asked, before laughing.
He smiled thinly, and reached over, pressing a small red switch.
Deep beneath their feet, a thrum of turning generators could be heard, a growling of puissant engines.
“The Magician's tools are still good, and my great-grandfather's notes tell me that the Seventy-Two are just a convenient cognitive framework. I'm making a new one. A new way of seeing the issue. I'm not going to tolerate the skepticism of a phonecian goddess.”
“Why?” Astarte asked, “shouldn't I know?”
“I won't tolerate it, because I'm an atheist, bitch. I don't care if you're the goddess of lust and warfare or flies. You're just a wave-form. Now. Leave me. I have work to do.”