Chapter 22

After our conversation with the boy, Terry and I went to meet Ember on the sixth floor of the hospital. As she said, there were well preserved corpses everywhere. In fact, there was one in almost every room on the sixth floor. I looked at the placards on the wall and saw that we were in the Intensive Care Unit, meaning this is where the patients who were too sick or too injured to run away were kept.

“This feels wrong” Terry said “These people had hard enough lives as it was. Can’t they at least have some peace in death?”

“If they have a problem with being eaten I’m sure they will say something, but I somehow doubt the dead care all that much. If you need some time to rationalize it to yourself, I can leave you to do this at your own pace.”

Terry heaved a sigh and said “No, I already know what I have to do.” Then he entered the first room on the left.

Inside the room there were a pair of beds separated by a wooden nightstand. The beds were the austere, cheap, easily replaceable beds that were favored by most modern hospitals.

And in each bed was a dead little girl. Judging by the fact that neither one of them had hair, and all of the tubes and wires attached to their emaciated bodies, it wasn’t hard to see what they had died of. I looked between them and saw that each of the children had a single arm hanging over their bed. It looked like, at the end, they had been reaching for one another.

“To feel the warmth of another, one last time.” I thought.

“They couldn’t have been older than ten…” Terry said, looking down at the two.

“…Would you like to find another?”I asked

“No…if I’m going to do something monstrous, I don’t want to half ass it. Just…just wait out there until I’m done, please.”

I nodded and left the room, closing the door behind me.

Terry’s transformation went off without a hitch, and an hour after I left him alone he came out of that room looking completely different. His body had shrunk quite a bit, going from ten feet tall with an extra five feet of height for his horns, down to seven feet tall with the horns now only adding two feet to his overall height. His color had changed and now he was a distinct shade of gold that glinted in the exact same way that my own black carapace did, despite there not being any light.

His body also became more human in appearance but unlike Peter and I, Terry’s exoskeleton shaped itself into a look that was more like a suit of armor. Now, with his armored appearance, massive size and shiny new coloring, Terry looked for all the world like some kind of insect knight.

“It suits you.” I remarked, looking Terry’s new form up and down. It would undoubtedly stand out in the grayness of the fog, but something about the power I felt radiating off of him told me that wouldn’t be a problem.

Terry didn’t acknowledge my compliment, nor did he say anything else. Instead he just walked silently to the stairwell and exited the sixth floor.

“Will he be ok?” Ember asked, concerned.

“I think he will, eventually. Terry has just done something that goes against everything he holds sacred. He’ll need time to come to terms with it.”

Motioning for Ember to follow me, I left the sixth floor and went back down to the room Peter and his mother were in.

I walked in, expecting to find Terry, but he wasn’t there. Instead, Peter jumped up and said “Oh, hey Mr Forminus! Terry said that he was heading out for a while and that you shouldn’t worry about him. He’ll be back by night.”

“Did he say why he was leaving?”

“Nope. But man, he looked so different I almost didn’t recognize him. Did you see? He’s all golden now! And he looks like he’s covered in armor, it’s so cool…” the boy said, droning on about Terry’s new form.

Resigning myself to wait for my friend to return, I picked the corner of the room opposite to where Peter’s mother was laying and sat myself down. Ember entered the room soon after and scuttled into my lap, causing Peter to once again stare at her from where he sat at the foot of his mother's bed.

“Well” I said “seeing as how I’ve got nothing to do, why don’t you tell me about yourself?”

“Oh, uh ok!” The boy said, suddenly flustered “What do you want to know about?”

“Your transformation, this place, and everything that happened in it.” I said simply.

The boys eight eyes widened and he looked very uncomfortable as he said “I don’t know…”

“Hmm, then how about this? If you tell me your story I’ll tell you mine.”

Though he still looked hesitant, the boy's curious eyes met mine, and then Embers, and he said“Well…ok. But I’m warning you, it’ll get pretty scary in places!”

I snorted and said “Is that so? Well I’ve been known to tell a scary story myself every once in a while. Impress me, you itsy bitsy spider.”

The boy grinned and said “Fine. Here we go…”

Peter

I was standing outside of mom’s room waiting for the doctor to let me back in. He’d said he had something important to tell mom and that I would have to leave the room while they talked about it. At least I knew he would be quick, since it was so hard to catch her awake nowadays

I knew what he was going to say to her though. That she would die soon. I already knew because that’s what mom told me.

At first I’d wished she hadn’t told me. At first I cried and cried and cried some more every time it got brought up. Dad died before I was born and I never even knew my grandparents. Mom was the only family I’d ever had and soon she would be gone too.

Soon I would be all alone, and so I cried, until I didn’t have any more tears left. After a while the crying stopped and all I felt was a big black emptiness where it used to hurt. To be honest, I can’t tell which is worse.

As I thought about all of this, the door finally opened and the doctor let me back in, and for a moment his eyes met mine and I could tell he was pitying me. It was the same look everyone had when they saw me nowadays.

“What was that all about?” I said

“Same as always, more treatments, more steroids, more chemo, maybe I have a few months, maybe a year, maybe a couple of weeks. I swear these fuckers love stringing me along for every penny they can get from the insurance company. I’m half way tempted to just pull all of this shit off and go die in my bed at home. At least there I’ll be able to get a good night's sleep without this thing beeping at me all night.” she said, pointing to the IV drip next to her bed.

I didn’t say anything. She always complained after talking to the doctors here. I didn’t really blame her though, she’d been trapped in that bed for a long time and besides watching TV, complaining was all she really had to do.

She stopped her tirade to catch her breath, panting heavily. After she caught her breath, mom asked “What about you? How was school today?”

I perked up a little, and said “It was alright. We had a math test and I think I passed it, and we played dodgeball in gym class-and our team won! Mr. Eddard was kind of a pain in science though, we were learning about chromosomes and-” I stopped, suddenly aware that my mother was no longer listening. Her head was lolling to the side and her eyes were drooping, she was clearly about to fall asleep.

I hopped up from my chair and went to help mom pull her blanket up, adjust her pillow, and push the button that lowered the back of the bed into a laying down position.

“Sorry sweetie…i’m so sorry…so sleepy…” She said, eyes closing completely.

“It’s ok mom, you get your sleep. I’ll come see you tomorrow. I love you…”I said, hugging my mom and kissing her cheek.

But she was already asleep. Shaking my head, I quietly walked out of her room and closed the door behind me. I left the fifth floor through the elevator. On the ride down I wondered to myself, what would I do after she was gone? I didn’t want to get shuffled around in the foster care system, but I also didn’t have any relatives that would take me in.

“I could just run away…”

I shook my head, trying to clear all of these bad thoughts out of it. The elevator door dinged, signaling me that I had arrived on the ground floor. I stepped off and walked across the lobby where a bunch of people were gathered. For some reason a lot of them were frantically talking on their phones. There was also a large group gathered around the lobby’s TV, but I couldn’t hear what was being said through all of the peoples voices.

I turned back toward the double doors that marked the hospital's exit, wondering what all of the commotion was about, and exited the building. To my surprise, it was already dark out. I checked my watch, wondering if I had been here for longer than I thought. But it was only 5:30. I looked up at the sky, wondering what was going on and instantly got my answer.

A massive bank of fog that towered above the city's buildings, rolling in from the south incredibly quickly. I suddenly got a bad feeling, as I remembered hearing all of the news stories a few months ago talking about a freakish fog that covered up a lot of the counties south of here.

Most of the time nobody who went into that fog came back out, but every now and then some folks managed to escape. And when they did they came with crazy stories about giant spiders, massive wasps and some weird Ant thing that helped them escape…

The government said that these people were suffering from some kind of mental illness, but looking at the massive grey wall In front of me, I wasn’t so sure I believed that anymore...

My eyes shifted from the fog to the bus stop to the hospital behind me, unsure of what to do. .until I heard a scream in the distance. I didn’t know if that scream came from the direction of the fog, or the city but whichever it was, it was enough to convince me to go back inside of the hospital.

After all, if there was nothing wrong with the fog, I could just go home tomorrow, right?