On Distant Worlds: The Prologues & Colibri. Brian Gonzalez
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acted like it was quite ordinary, vacuuming up the floating stinky globules and applying a cool cloth to his flushed skin.
The Medical Center in the Authority Lobe looked exactly like the hospital in his own civilian Lobe, of course. That was as disappointing as the trip. Davvit didn’t know why he had expected anything different; the key structures in each Lobe were of course identical to each other.
He was there for three cycles of which he remembered very little. They sedated him for the actual treatment; he had a few vague memories of waking up and finding himself in bed and hooked up to various pieces of intimidating equipment. That was the first two cycles; the third cycle was recuperation. Davvit spent all day either lying in bed, marveling at the fact that he could actually move without pain and watching old movies on vid, or standing in front of the toilet pissing out dead nanites. That part did hurt a little but Davvit didn’t mind. It was minor compared to that of the previous week. The next cycle Dr. Saito returned them to their home Lobe; the same long boring trip in an ancient, beat-up sled, but at least Davvit didn’t have to vomit this time.
He’d made that journey dozens of times since. The journey was always the same dull, nauseating trek and the treatment was always the same vaguely recalled deep misery; only the Authority doctors who were assigned to him or the actual room he was treated in ever varied in any way.
He was sick of it. But it was time to do it again.
Davvit had no way of knowing this time would be different.
The strange thing didn’t happen until the recovery cycle of his treatment. Davvit must have awoken from sedation earlier than usual – he was in his mid-teens now, and perhaps the doctors had not adjusted his sedation doses well enough – to find himself alone in a dark recovery room. Every other time there’d been a nurse there, patiently awaiting his return to consciousness, usually reading or doing pad-work in a well-lit room. He glanced at the clock display on the biometric readings pad attached to the back of his left hand; it was the middle of the night. He still felt a bit woozy from the sedation. Light-headed but heavy-bladdered; he desperately needed to piss out some nanites.
“Lights,” he said and the room dutifully flickered on a few of its ceiling panels. The room was new to him but familiar: a small, spare room, with banks of mostly inactive medical gear on the wall behind the headboard of his bed. Opposite the gurney he occupied there were two identical doors in adjoining walls; one would lead to the hallway outside; the other was hiding the fixture Davvit’s bladder was seeking. Davvit disconnected the single lead from his biometric pad and gingerly swung his legs over the side of his gurney, but there was little pain. He stood up and swayed a little, adjusting his balance to the remaining effects of the sedatives. With no nurse to guide him to the bathroom as usual, he optimistically chose the nearer door, the left one, sliding it open and stepping through as his bladder cheered him on.
It wasn’t the bathroom; it was the hallway. The recovery rooms formed a horseshoe configuration surrounding a central nurse’s station; Davvit was standing slightly left of center of the base of the horseshoe and looking at the nurse’s station which was, for the first time in the years he had been coming here, unoccupied. He could hear urgent-sounding voices from somewhere up the hall leading off to his right. Some other patient’s recovery must not be going well. A fresh twinge from Davvit’s bladder, and he darted back toward the bathroom door.
Passing nanites was never fun but this time it was alarmingly different. His urine felt even more syrupy than it usually did after treatment and it was bright pink and foamy instead of the usual blackish-gray. And it smelled, sharp and unpleasant as bile. As his bladder relaxed with physical relief, Davvit’s mind shrieked with fear. What had gone wrong? Had they messed up his treatment? Was he in danger? Was he dying? He needed to find help. He finished and started to flush, then decided against it in case a doctor might need to see the scary mess. He hastily refastened his smock and closed the bathroom door as he left; no need for that odor to permeate his recovery room.
There was still nobody at the nurse’s station, so Davvit returned to his room to use the call button on the side of his gurney. Several fearful minutes passed without any response before he realized with chagrin that the call button was probably signaling the empty nurse’s station. He needed to go find a doctor or nurse himself. Once again he walked out to the nurse’s station, and this time headed for the raised voices up the hallway past the central station. The nightmare happened as he turned the corner into the hallway, a moment after he thought he heard a shout and a moment after he heard approaching footsteps and dared hope it was the nurse.
The figure he almost collided with was about Davvit’s height; in other words, as small as an undersized and chronically ill teenager. It was wearing a smock like Davvit’s, only this smock was stiff and crusted with biological stains; some reddish-brown which were probably dried blood, others were greenish or yellowish caked encrustations which Davvit did not care much to guess about. And that was where the tolerability of the situation ended, for the person wearing the smock was like no presumably living thing Davvit had ever seen.
The figure was hunched over, too far so for the face to be visible, but it was male if the pattern baldness meant anything. A man, then; a tiny, withered man. His skin hung loosely wrinkled on his bones and was horribly discolored, liver-spotted with large purple-black patches on the arms and face. Some of the patches appeared to be oozing fluid. Otherwise the skin was greenish or ash-gray; Davvit had no idea what color the man’s skin might have been originally. In places the skin was missing completely and Davvit could see raw, rotten-looking flesh underneath. Near the back of the head it looked as though actual skull might be showing through.
And the smell! Davvit gagged as the figure’s miasmic aura reached him; it was the smell of decay, of rot, of mold, of death, and bizarrely, of Thursday night teriyaki in the Module Citizens’ Café. Davvit was never to eat there again. His gorge rising and terror clutching at his gut, Davvit fell back even as the figure laboriously lifted its head on a thin neck mostly wattle and cancer to look at him, and the face, the face… the face was what made Davvit lose his mind. The eyes in that face, so cataracted they looked like sinew. The bare amount of rotted flesh on that face, leaving the shape of the skull intimately visible. The missing part of the face, exposing yellowed cheekbone and black veins and tooth roots and bone bubbled with tumors. The way a small part of the remaining flesh on the left side of the jaw, apparently disturbed by the creature’s effort to turn its head upward, slid slowly and haltingly off that face and fell with a greenish double splat to the deck below.
It was a shamblie. What else could it be? It was a shamblie. There was shouting from behind the thing. The shamblie. Down the hall there were people pursuing it and they were not doctors or nurse but Authority Peacekeepers in combat gear and carrying rifles. They were yelling at Davvit to get away but it was too late. The shamblie opened its ghastly mouth and issued an inarticulate cry of rage, and then lunged at Davvit with its skeletal hands. Davvit, his defensive skills honed by years of necessarily exercising anti-bullying tactics at school, parried the thrust with his forearms, and shrieked and ran. He ran as fast as he could, back around the nurse’s station and up the other hallway. But the hallway dead-ended at a locked door marked “Authorized Personnel Only”. His back to the wall, Davvit listened to approaching footfalls and raised voices while he planned his last stand. He could not see a way to quickly become Authorized and escape through the door. He would have to drop and roll, taking out the shamblie’s legs, and then run like hell toward the Peacekeepers.
The shamblie turned the corner. Spotting Davvit, it croaked out a dry scream and lurched toward him. A Peacekeeper was right behind it. Davvit watched with nascent hope as the man brought his rifle up to his shoulder, steadied himself, and aimed.
And then the Peacekeeper shot Davvit in the chest.
Everything went black.
Davvit woke up in his recovery room.
What the hell? Davvit sat up and looked around. The lights were on. A bored-looking nurse was sitting beside his gurney, jotting notes on a clipboard. Her nametag read “Marjorie June”. She sensed Davvit’s motion, looked up at him, and jerked her thumb toward the bathroom door. “You know the drill,” she said.
“But…”