by James Axler
“That must have been when the Overbrain died,” Mildred said.
“The what?” J.B. asked.
“I’ll explain later,” Mildred replied. “Then what?”
“We came down and ran to Ryan when he started convulsing, and the thing in him poked out, just like the woman back at the school building,” Krysty said. “It subsided, but whatever it’s doing in there, I don’t think it’s anything good.”
“You got that right. With the Overbrain dead, I would have thought all the symbiotes would have died, as well. This one might be trying to go rogue on us.” They were at the elevators now, and she slapped the door button. “I just came from the infirmary. We can operate there.”
“But how do you know—” Krysty began.
“Honestly, I don’t, Krysty. Right now I don’t even know what it’s doing. I’m not even sure it knows what it’s doing. It may be trying to override his nervous system. It may be about to force its way out of him. What I do know for sure is that if it stays in him much longer, he’s probably going to die.”
The red-haired woman nodded. “Do whatever you have to,” she said as they entered the elevator and hit the floor for the medical level.
“That’s the plan. When we get there, get him onto the nearest bed. Ricky, Jak, strip the other beds of sheets and tie him down. J.B., Krysty, you’ll be watching him, making sure he doesn’t go anywhere.”
The elevator opened, and Mildred ran to the double doors. “There was anesthetic here, but it should have dissipated by now. Let’s get him inside.”
They dragged Ryan into the infirmary and placed him on the nearest bed. Mildred ran to the supply room and quickly assembled the tools she’d need on a wheeled tray. There was no suction machine, which worried her the most, but it couldn’t be helped.
“Hurry, Mildred!” Krysty shouted.
She wheeled out the cart to see all four of them holding down a thrashing Ryan while Ricky maneuvered a rolled-up sheet across his torso. “Wait! You have to turn him over! It’s going to be near his spine!” Mildred said while pulling on a pair of blue surgical gloves.
“Shit!” J.B. swore. “Okay, on three! One...two...three!” He released Ryan’s arm and the big man immediately swung at him, which threw him over on his side. J.B. immediately grabbed his arm and forced it the rest of the way over. “Okay, flip him!”
Krysty, Jak and J.B. immediately piled onto him while Ricky lashed him down across the neck. Jak got his furiously drumming legs, double wrapping them before he tied them to the bed. “There. Not goin’ anywhere!”
“Great. Now get...his arms!” J.B. said as he still wrestled with one like a man fighting a thrashing python.
“Tie them underneath, so he’s pinned on his stomach,” Mildred ordered. “Make sure they’re tight. If he gets loose while I’m inside, the wrong cut could paralyze or kill him!”
The braying alarm was like a sonic spike, driving straight into her already exhausted brain. “Ricky, J.B., once he’s secure, if you could find some way to shut that damn thing off and restore the regular lights, I’d really appreciate it.”
Jak poked up from where he had finished knotting Ryan’s hands together. “What ’bout me?”
“You stay here and help hold him in place,” Mildred said as she cut away the back of Ryan’s jumpsuit. “You may wind up sitting on him.”
Just then the skin on his back expanded outward as what looked like the face of the symbiote pressed against his back muscles.
“There it is!” Krysty said.
“I see it, I see it!” Mildred doused her scalpel blade in alcohol. “All right, hold him. Do not let him move even an inch!”
“No...no... You will not take me.... I’m not coming out.” The muffled, eerie, inhuman voice came from Ryan’s mouth, but he wasn’t talking.
“Bullshit,” Mildred said as she bent over the one-eyed man’s scarred back, placed the blade against his skin and made her first vertical incision.
“Krysty, you’re on blood detail. Grab another sheet and wipe when I tell you to.”
“Right.”
“I’m warning you now. This is not going to be pretty,” Mildred said.
“I don’t care—just do it!” Krysty said.
“Jak, hold the forceps for me.” Mildred made a second cut horizontally across the middle of the first one and peeled the skin and muscle back. Spying a flash of gray-black flesh inside, she set the scalpel down and grabbed the forceps from him. “No, you don’t!”
She darted into his body with the forceps. “Swab!” Mildred shouted. Krysty darted forward, soaking up the blood. “I got it!”
She tugged on the creature, but it refused to budge. “Shit—it wasn’t kidding, it doesn’t want to come out.” She had a firm grip on its end and could see the dozens of tiny white tendrils that connected it to Ryan’s nervous system.
“Now what?” Krysty asked.
“Now, Jak, you’re going to take the forceps and keep a tight hold on the end of this slimy little bastard,” Mildred said. He stood next to her and grabbed the handles of the tool, squeezing tightly.
“Krysty, go to the front and hold him down. I don’t care how.” She picked up the scalpel. “I have to go in and cut away the white bits to pull it out.”
“Won’t that hurt Ryan?” Krysty asked as she positioned herself at the head of the bed.
“I don’t know, maybe. But it’s the only way to get it out of him,” Mildred said.
At that moment, the alarm stopped, and the regular lights came back on. “Thank goodness for small favors,” Mildred said. “Okay, here we go.”
She peeled back the flap of skin and muscles again and eased the blade inside Ryan’s body, slipping it around the tubular body of the slug to begin severing the white connections. The slug quivered, and Mildred withdrew as Ryan’s whole body shook.
“Hold him, dammit!”
Krysty threw a knee up on the bed and lay across his upper body. “Shh...easy Ryan, we’re getting this thing out of you, I promise. You’re going to come back to me....” she whispered into his ear. Her words seemed to calm him a bit, and Mildred went back inside.
“Why not just cut slug up?” Jak asked.
“Because I don’t know what will come out of it, or what that would do to Ryan,” Mildred replied. “No more questions, please.” She reached underneath it and used her free hand to pry the soft, fleshy mass up while cutting away the white filaments with her blade. She got about a quarter of the way through when the symbiote began thrashing around, as if trying to burrow deeper into Ryan’s body.
“Hold it, Jak!”
“Tryin’!” he replied. “Slippery bastard!”
By now Mildred had her whole hand under the creature and was starting to lift it out. “Pull back when I do,” she instructed Jak. Then she moved the scalpel along the last few inches, operating more on feel than anything, and knowing that the slightest wrong move could leave Ryan paralyzed if she was lucky, and dead if she wasn’t.
She felt the whole body of the symbiote shift backward an inch, even as it writhed and flopped in her hand. “Okay, pull it out with me!”
Jak tugged on it, and Mildred felt several filaments tear free as she extracted the slug from his body cavity. “That’s it!” The symbiote squirmed angrily in her hand, trying to slip free. “Jak, would you kill this ugly thing?”
“Sure—let go!”
Mildred did, and Jak used the forceps to toss the creature through the air. As it flew, his arms blurred, and the slug fell to the ground with a clatter, skewered by three of his throwing blades. It arched off the ground as if vainly trying to move somewhere, anywhere, then fell back to the floor and stopped moving.
“All right, we’re not out of the woods yet, people,” Mildred said. “I’ve got to clean that out and sew hi
m up. Jak, could you get something and wipe my brow? I’m sweating a river here.”
Once he’d mopped her brow clean, she bent over her patient again. “Okay, let’s get to work.”
* * *
TWELVE HOURS LATER, Mildred was finally able to get a bit of much-needed rest, which meant she could sit down for a few minutes. After making sure Ryan would be all right, she’d spent the rest of the day examining the infested staff, figuring out who would need to be operated on, and who didn’t.
The majority of the redoubt whitecoats would be fine. The psychic shock broadcast by the Overbrain in its last moments had overwhelmed the majority of the symbiotes, killing many outright. For those people, Mildred figured if the slugs didn’t come out by themselves, as many had, they would have to be removed from each survivor’s body, and had made plans to ensure that would happen. Fortunately, the doctors and nursing staff had been the first ones to come back around, and had been assisting her for the past few hours with evaluating everyone’s condition.
A small percentage of people hadn’t survived the mental shock and had died from the sympathetic nervous system failure. Several others had suffered from their symbiotes going insane, for lack of a better term, as Ryan’s had, and she’d had to operate on five more people. She had saved three of them and lost two.
Ryan had come through his operation with flying colors. He was resting in the infirmary, which was filled with other patients in varying states of recovery. He claimed to have no memory of what had happened after the symbiote had entered his body. “It’s all a black blur,” he said. Jak remained quiet about what had gone on afterward, including their fight.
The scavvies had had a tearful reunion with their lost members, including Saea finding her son, Joseph, safe and sound among the staff. They planned burial services for those who hadn’t made it through alive, as well. The truly amazing thing was how the whitecoats and the scavvies had so quickly come together. Once it had been explained that the staff hadn’t really been in their right minds while trying to kidnap the farmers, but were now restored, they had set aside their differences and worked together to recover the ruined trucks, move the scavvies’ wagons and equipment over to the complex and treat their various minor physical ailments.
As the only person who knew just about everything that had happened, Mildred oversaw every patient who came in or out of the infirmary. At that moment, she sat in the chair at the nurses’ desk, reviewing patient reports, when a shadow fell across her desk.
“You wished to see me, Mildred?” Doc asked as he rocked back and forth on his heels. Of everybody, he looked the best now, having gotten an inordinate amount of rest during the past few days, and being absent from much of the combat. Ostensibly, he had been watching over the children while the rest of the Silvertide adults had been on the front lines, but Mildred had suspected another reason for his lack of activity, and now she was about to confirm it.
“Hi, Doc, yes, I did,” she replied with a smile. “I just figured we’d do a checkup on all of us while we had access to all of the equipment. You’re my last patient. Would you come with me, please?”
She led him to a side room where they would be by themselves. On the way, she caught Dr. Markus’s eye and nodded at Doc. He nodded back and began to beckon personnel. She also patted her breast pocket, making sure the loaded syringe was still where she had placed it.
“Okay, Doc, why don’t you hop up on the examining table for me.”
As he did so, she closed the door and locked it, hiding that action with her body. She then turned back to him and put a stethoscope in her ears. “Pull up your shirt, please.”
He did so, and she checked his breathing, then moved to his back and placed the chilly end of the scope on his skin. A quiver ran through the old man’s body, and while she was back there, Mildred took the syringe out of her pocket.
“I know you’re in there,” she said quietly into his ear.
“Huh?” Doc twisted his head to look at her. “My dear Mildred, what are you referring to? I am the same Doc Tanner I have always been.”
Mildred shook her head. “No, Doc, I’m afraid you’re wrong about that. You see, there’s a symbiote inside you. It’s been there ever since we met those two at the school building.”
“I—I have absolutely no idea what you are talking about,” he said, but Mildred heard the quaver in his voice.
“I’ve seen enough of these symbiotes to be able to tell the difference between the kinds. Most people get a normal one, like the one that was placed in Ryan. But the queen symbiotes are different. They even look different. What Jak stepped on back there wasn’t the queen—at least, not all of it.”
“My dear lady, I do not know where you are going with this—”
“I’d always wondered how those two people had managed to escape the Overbrain, especially after I met the freaky thing,” Mildred interrupted. “It was only after I heard about the big brain’s plans to spread itself farther that I realized they hadn’t escaped—they had been released on purpose.” Mildred uncapped the syringe and moved it up to the back of Doc’s neck.
“You see, the Overbrain wanted the queen to go out into the world to create another colony. But something went wrong, and the woman fell ill. The queen symbiote needed another host. The man back at the school wasn’t suitable for some reason, but there was another candidate lying there—you.”
“This is ridiculous—” He started to rise from the table, but was stopped by Mildred’s hand on his shoulder.
“Uh-uh. You aren’t going anywhere.” Before he could react further, she slipped the needle in and pushed the plunger down.
“No...” The inhuman words fell from Doc’s mouth. “If we die, then the colony is truly lost. We are all that is left of the Mind now. We must live. We must continue....”
Mildred shook her head. “I’m afraid I can’t let that happen.” She walked to the door, unlocked it and opened it to reveal Dr. Markus and a surgical team waiting outside. “He’s ready for you.”
“No. Nooo!” the symbiote cried impotently as they transferred Doc’s limp body onto a gurney.
“Get him ready for surgery,” Mildred said. “I’ll scrub up and be there in a minute.”
“Are you sure?” he asked. “You’ve already done so much today.”
“I know, but this one’s special,” she replied as she walked to the sink. “It’s for my friend.”
Epilogue
Two weeks later, Ryan and Doc had both recovered from their surgeries and had spent a lot of time helping around the base. Like Ryan, Doc also professed to have absolutely no knowledge of what had transpired since the queen symbiote had entered his body. “I am afraid that it is all a blank to me. I do not even know how we got here.”
The fast bonds formed by the scavvies and whitecoats had grown over the past several days, to the point where the Silvertide collective had taken a vote to join the group and begin their new lives there. The motion passed unanimously. The whitecoats were overjoyed at the additions to their ranks, since it meant potential new trainees and genetic material for them, as well as a wealth of information about the outside world.
Ryan and his group had also spent several days filling them in, giving them potential contacts if they decided to go out into the Deathlands proper.
Both the whitecoats and the scavvies made passionate pleas for Ryan and his people to stay with them. When that failed, they even tried individual appeals, particularly to Mildred. She also—gently, politely—turned them down.
As for Ryan and his companions, eventually the day came when it was time for them to move on. They were well supplied with food, equipment and a repaired truck, and planned to head to a redoubt with a working mat-trans unit. Jak had shared a tearful goodbye with Tully after spending nearly every minute of every day joined with her, and he cast a wistful glance ba
ck at her as they all looked out at the group that had gathered to see them off.
Elder Chreis placed his hand on Ryan’s shoulder. “Thank you for everything. All of this—none of it would have been possible without your help.”
“You’re welcome, Elder,” Ryan replied. “You’ve got the setup here to make quite a settlement. Hopefully we’ll be back one day to see how it’s coming along.”
“You and yours will always be welcome here,” Chreis said.
Dr. Markus approached Mildred. “And my thanks to you. You gave us our own lives back. We owe you—all of you, of course—a debt we can never repay.”
“You’re also welcome,” Mildred replied. “And you can pay it back by creating something great out of all this desolation.”
“That we will, Mildred,” Markus replied, exchanging a smile with Elder Chreis. “That we will.”
The others said their goodbyes, and soon the truck was heading across the desert. Jak kept looking back.
Doc noticed the albino’s continued glances back the way they had come. “Do not worry, my young friend,” he said. “I am sure that your path and hers will cross again.”
“Yeah, mebbe. Just wish been more time, that’s all.”
“Don’t we all, Jak,” Ryan said as they continued heading west. “Don’t we all.”
* * * * *
We hope you enjoyed this Harlequin ebook. Connect with us on Harlequin.com for info on our new releases, access to exclusive offers, free online reads and much more!
Other ways to keep in touch:
Harlequin.com/newsletters
Facebook.com/HarlequinBooks
Twitter.com/HarlequinBooks
HarlequinBlog.com
ISBN-13: 9781460344842
Hive Invasion
