Heal the Sick, Raise the Dead

by Jacob Prytherch

  It was during the dosing that it occurred...

  The cocktail of drugs had interacted somehow, the rabies acting as the catalyst, the agent to spread the effect throughout the cerebral fluid and reptilian brain, firing new life into it. Her father's eyes had shot open and he had looked around slowly, his mouth hanging wide, slack around the breathing tube. Celia had stood back, trying to make sense of what she was seeing. The expression on his face had reminded her of an enraged animal, pure instinct warping the features into strange contortions she had never seen before, making him look like a different person. He had thrown out an arm, wrapped a hand tightly around Celia's wrist and pulled her inwards as a low and horrific moan had shaken his body.

  The shock had been emotional rather than physical. Her father had never laid a hand on her in the past, even when he was at his strictest, only ever using words to discipline her, yet his grip was now vice-like, squeezing the bones in her wrist until they screamed out in pain. She could see his mouth trying to bite the breathing tube, gnashing against the plastic, squeezing and crunching. He had started to sit up, his other hand coming round to gain a further purchase on her.

  Despite all her mental health issues, Celia had little to no physical health issues. She trained daily, desperately trying to control her mood through the production of endorphins. She was fast and she was strong. She had spotted the danger and managed to wrench herself free, pulling cables and feed tubes with her. Blood had seeped out of her father's arm where she had pulled out his drip. Seeped... when it should have squirted, even a little.

  As cold shock had washed over her she had realised the heart monitor had been signalling no heartbeats for... how long? She had no way of knowing. She had been in this room for so many days, sleeping here most nights, that she had developed alarm fatigue. She had tuned them out, but now she could see... he was dead.

  Yet he moved...

  Maybe it was the isolating effect of her vaccine – sealing away the reptilian brain against the effects of death – or some other combination of drugs that had been pumped into him over the last few weeks. Whatever it was, the effect was terrifying.

  She had managed to strap him down to the bed quickly. He had struggled violently but couldn’t resist her, after all, he had been a weak, frail old man. His muscles had protested but they were no match for her athletic, tenacious strength. He had still been groaning despite the breathing tube, somehow managing to squeeze air out of lungs no longer needing air. His eyes were wide, pale, unblinking. He was clearly trying to bite her, a result no doubt of the rabies element. Celia had found it necessary to gag him, to give her some peace, to allow her to think.

  After an hour of sitting and watching from the other side of the room with her hands over her mouth in shock, it had become clear that this was no temporary state. Her father was moving, scrabbling around on the bed, trying to get to her constantly, never falling back exhausted, never giving up this singular desire that was gripping him. Part of her mind had been fascinated by this, wanting to undertake test after test, cutting the skin to see if there was any pain, studying the brain scans more deeply, testing the limits of the body's new found life. The monitor had still been attached despite his writhing, and she had been able to see that the reptilian brain was firing wildly, erratically, the basic functions working tirelessly. Of the limbic brain and the neocortex, there was nothing. Her father as she had known him was gone.

  After another hour, she had been able to stand it no longer, sense finally prevailing. She had strapped his body down as tightly as she could, restricting as much movement as possible, before throwing a sheet over him. It was a risky manoeuvre but she had to find a way to lay her father to rest.

  She had hastily started to clear her various vials and mixtures away, slipping some into her coat pockets and hiding her notes as best she could, yet the body had still moved, her father still refusing the grave. Her hand had been forced. It had been approaching time for the rounds. A nurse could have come in any second, which would have made the situation all the more complicated.

  When she had gathered herself as much as she could under the circumstances, she had pushed the bed out into the corridor, the sheet still undulating with her father's body's incessant struggling. She had spotted Lucas at the other end of the corridor, leaning casually against the reception desk and chatting to Charlotte the night receptionist. Their flirting had given her the time she needed. She had turned as quickly as she could down a side corridor, past a couple of other private wards before arriving at the lifts. They always seemed to take an age to arrive, even in less stressful circumstances, and she had fidgeted nervously as she had waited, a vertical mirror to the fidgeting of her father’s corpse. Just as the lift had arrived she had spotted Lucas peering down the corridor towards her. She had kept her face as stony as she could, not wanting to show that she had seen him as she wheeled the body into the lift and hastily pressed the button for the basement, the morgue.

  That had been around an hour ago. If Lucas had suspected anything he would have arrived by now, so she could afford to take the time she needed to complete the deed.

  Again she tried, lifting the chisel over his head as his jaws strained furiously at the gag that was restraining him. This time... this time she would do it. The hammer was heavy in her hand but she gripped it tightly, raising it high. This thing, whatever it was, needed to die... truly die. This would not be her legacy. No one needed to know...

  “Celia? Celia, dear, put the hammer down.”

  The voice wrenched her heart in half, as she looked up into the eyes of Jack, his greying hair pressed to his head in such a way that she could tell he had been sleeping. He was wearing the old brown trench coat he had worn every day since Celia had first met him, its faded fabric a stark reminder of just how long that was, almost ten years. Behind him, peering over his shoulder was Lucas, his eyes narrowing as he saw more of the scene.

  “Don't try and stop me. This has to be done,” she said firmly, trying to raise the hammer again but finding her hand weighed down by the emotional pull the situation was creating. There was no way out of this that would end well for her. Lucas pushed past Jack, almost knocking the older man into a trolley in his haste.

  “Dr. Perrin, put it down and come back upstairs. We just want to talk about it,” he said as firmly as he could manage, though Celia could see from his nervous glances to the bed that he had never dealt with a situation like this before. Well, who would have? He was edging his feet across the floor, trying to get closer without obviously charging into her. Celia raised the hammer in warning but it was Jack who pulled the guard back a little.

  “Lucas, please, I told you I would handle this,” he said imploringly.

  “Can't let you do this alone Dr. Wilkinson,” replied Lucas, trying to gently but firmly prise Jack's hands off his sleeve.

  “At least let me talk to her first, please,” continued Jack.

  “Don't talk about me as if I'm not here, I hate that!” yelled Celia, weeks of anger and frustration bursting out of her as her hands started to shake from adrenalin. “The doctors always used to do that when I was a child as if it would put me at ease, as if being treated as a non-entity could pacify me. Don't you dare treat me like that, you of all people should know better than that, Jack.”

  She could feel a ‘moment’ beginning, as her mother had always referred to her tantrums when she was small, smashing plates or tearing grass out of the lawn in blind frustration. She always knew how to sooth Celia, her strong will and sensible fairness the perfect medicine... but then she was taken by cancer at the age of forty two, leaving her to a father that she loved, hated, respected and feared. She had gone, as they all had, and now Celia was being forced to send her father away. All she had left was Jack, and soon he'd be gone too. It was all gone, dead and buried. Everyone always left.

  “I can see your father is still alive,” said Jack slowly. “If we get him back on the ventilator as quickly as possible he should ho
pefully be all right. I can see he's suffering.”

  “I'm going to put him out of his suffering! Can't you see that...” but what could she say that would make them believe in her father's hideous rebirth? If she didn't convince them and they pulled out the gag... it didn't bear thinking about. She again tried to push herself to bring the hammer down but it was still too much, all too much.

  “Celia, sweetie, please,” said Jack, his voice softening as he pulled out a familiar dark burgundy file from inside his jacket. “I've read your notes, your... stories.”

  “What business are they of yours?” she said, trying to sound aggressive, to warn him away, yet feeling herself crumbling inside.

  “They worry me, I'm worried. You aren't well, I mean, we've known that for a while, but this is something new... I mean, these characters, the images, the violence... and the dead...”

  Lucas charged forwards, acting suddenly in the attempt to surprise her. He grabbed her wrist as she brought the hammer down desperately, his action forcing hers. She only glanced the chisel, causing a small cut in her father's forehead before the blade slid out of her hand. She wrestled with Lucas for a few seconds, starting to get the upper hand due to her physical conditioning, before Jack suddenly joined the guard, both of them forcing her backwards.

  She had no idea what her head had struck but it must have been one of the morgue drawers, half out of its home. The impact was heavy, shocking, almost forcing her to black out there and then. Her vision swam in front of her eyes as she crumpled to the floor with the two men on top of her, the back of her head taking another impact on the tiles. She felt she was lying in a warm pool. It reminded her of when she and her brother had played in a green plastic paddling pool when she was five or six. They had wanted to do it in all weathers, so when it was rainy or cloudy, their father would boil a kettle and mix it with the cold water to create...

  “Celia? Stay with me.”

  … a beautiful pool of warmth for them both. They had put three or four bricks in the pool, and pretended it was an island, isolated...

  “Lucas, move! Here, just... get some help, I can't stop the bleeding for God's sake, I think she's...”

  … from all of mankind, just her, her brother and her father. Just the three of them. Just three. That was all she had ever needed.

  13

  Recovery Or Death

  It was a red sun, burning hot, flames returning and burning themselves, scalding each other as the heat increased, orange, through to yellow, to searing white, falling away into infinity...

  I gasped, taking in what felt like the first breath of air I had ever had. The heat in my chest started to subside as I took another breath, then another, concentrating on the feeling, finding a rhythm. I could feel my heart pounding in my chest and ears – the only sound I could hear. Gradually other sensations forced their way into my cocoon of simplicity. The air was cold, stinging my throat with every welcome breath. My body ached and moaned with a thousand pains... stinging across my stomach and chest, acute throbbing in my shoulder, dull aches in my forehead, legs and feet. I started to moan involuntarily but the sound was such a din in the silence that I pushed myself to stop.

  I could see nothing, as absolute emptiness surrounded me. There were physical presences around me though: the surface under me was freezing, a hard material cut into pieces and aligned in rows. There was a stickiness to them, or maybe it wasn’t the pieces, maybe it was something else that lay on the surface. Yes, that was it, there was a tackiness pulling my clothes towards the surface as I rolled fitfully in my microcosm of pain. The smell was also forcing its way into my consciousness, decay, pestilence, wet rot...

  Celia Perrin.

  That was my name, that was...

  It flashed before me, taking a second and an age, the entirety of time and none. Another gasp, though this one was forced out of me by emotional forces rather than physical.

  I had caused the plague.

  I stopped thinking, going blank for a few moments, the weight of the realisation and the associated chain of thoughts that would certainly follow were too much for me to handle. I tried to concentrate on the physical again, spreading my hands out experimentally. Dried, sticky liquid, soft matter, stench... a cold metal cylinder.

  My hand closed around it, and as I brought my other hand...

  All of those deaths, every death that has come, every death that would come... how far would it go? Would it cover the country, the continent, the world?

  … to also grip it, I found the button on the side of the torch. As I flicked it, the light blinded me for a few seconds as it filled my vision. I had no idea how long I had lain in the dark, crumpled in the decaying blood that I could now see surrounded me.

  I had caused the plague.

  There was no denying the thought now, as I shone the torch around myself. The blood in the morgue was the stark reminder of how it had begun, the festering lumps of flesh that had been bitten out of my father’s first victims lay scattered around me, leading to the gore drenched corridor. Jack and Lucas, the first to die, the first to come back...

  I had left this place somehow before returning, too selfish to die, too scared to dive into the abyss of doom that followed me, even though there was no one that deserved its dark depths more.

  Details returned, bleeding into my mind from a subconscious periphery: the moan as the restraints and gag had been taken off my father, the scream of mortal terror from Lucas as his wrist had been torn in half by the old man’s decaying teeth, Jack turning as I was momentarily forgotten, struggling with the thing that I had created out of my wish for some cure, some antidote to my childhood grief, hate and guilt, casting aside my Hippocratic oath as if it were a coat to be discarded at a whim... and what had I done when these two men had made the first vital stand against the new, encroaching enemy?

  I had hidden.

  With blood dripping from my head and into my eyes I had crawled into the closet and slipped myself between boxes of cleaning materials, sheets and surgical supplies, folding myself away as I tried to deny the horror of my actions. How long had I stayed there? I had no idea, yet it had been long enough to hear both Jack and Lucas return to their new, unnatural existence, groaning in defiance of the laws of mortality and staggering to attack the hospital workers who had arrived for the day shift. Still I had hidden, my blood clotting and matting in my hair as I tried to block out the screams.

  When I had finally emerged from that hideaway, I was no longer one but three, three lost souls torn into being from my fugue state, three who needed names, finding them in a book... they had moved, weak and formless, drifting and changing, babbling and screaming, running and hiding, escaping to a memory, a dream of simpler times. My soul had been reborn on that island and it had longed for a completeness I had never experienced, driving the fractured parts of my identity back here.

  At least, that was how it had felt...

  I now knew that it had been a severe and understandable mental breakdown, the parts of my psyche splitting away until I had sufficiently healed. Somehow I had made it to the island that we had often visited as children, maybe I had walked and swam all the way, my fitness keeping me alive. Everything that I had seen had helped me to learn the value of patience, trust, and life. I was finally healthy, ready to be a part of the society that I had never fully understood whilst growing up. Except... what society was left?

  The cold clinical reality of my new situation was too much to bear. I was paralysed by the enormity of it, the sheer cost of my actions, pinned to the tiled floor, lying in the spoils of a war I had waged on my own mental condition, a pool of festering bodily fluids. Why had I felt no remorse when I had filled my father’s body with cocktails of drugs and viruses? It was like I had been another person, a person I despised, a person that I could not escape from. There was no one here to judge me, as I lay in the darkness of the morgue with the light of the torch flickering and waning, the only two people who knew were dead and gone, forming the
ranks of an army I had brought to life. I had to judge myself.

  It was clear that I did not deserve to live. There was no way forward, no way backwards. I was the destroyer of worlds, the plague priest, the doom that walked... there was no reprieve, no way I could make amends. I should have died a death for every one that I had caused but I only had one life to give.

  I started to sob as I tried to work out the most fitting way to end my own life, a horrific calculation that I had never thought of working through before. I shone the torch to my left and right, finding only the chisel and hammer, the extendible baton from the police uniform I was wearing, nothing useful for a quick and easy death. I gritted my teeth, my judgement upon my own crimes seeing fault in my reasoning. I did not deserve a quick and easy death. How many had the chance to die easily in this new world I had created? No, I deserved to be consumed, torn apart by the teeth and fingers of my rotting children.

  I screamed, loud and long, using no words but simply a deep roar of anger, frustration and hatred at my own deeds. It reverberated around the morgue, the sound surely travelling into the bloody stairwell. Soon enough, I heard a distant moan in answer. I had called them to me. It was just a matter of time.