Paul Farmer Memorial

September 19th

You know, writing things down in my little yellow scribbler isn't a bad idea at all. And I feel like I need to write this—I got an interview! OMG I got an interview!! I am so stoked!!

Well, everything went so fast! Yeah, my application to the Daly Centre for Earth and Atmospheric Sciences (DCEAS) was from August but I'm already starting next Monday! It's been a little crazy, spent last month packing and moving... I'm back on the Wet Coast, although I'll be working under Dave Highwater and likely starting on salinisation work, so I'll probably be travelling all over, which sounds exciting.

But being back in BC also means I can say hi to Bob more often since he lives over in Vanc. I almost can't believe how well things are going.

I'm almost waiting for the other shoe to drop. Or I'm just a born pessimist.

February 3rd

I'd stuffed this scribbler into a drawer and forgotten about it! Happy New Year, huh?

Everyone at Daly was buzzing when I came into work today. Turns out Dave Highwater had gone to school in Washington with one of the guys on the Columbia, and I guess he was hit pretty hard by the news. Fucking hell. Sometimes we forget people can die doing science and exploration and get these nasty reminders. Like 50 Mile.

Dave surprised me in a few ways when I started working here. When I first bumbled into his office, I quickly realised my Common Sign was rusty as fuck. Dave had been hit with the nerve virus as a kid, and like hundreds of thousands of others before the vaccine, he'd lost nearly all his hearing. So he speaks, but it's not easy to understand him that way and he used Common as he introduced himself and started showing me the way the department worked.

I remember long ago when I'd considered learning full NASL, but I guess it was my inner laziness that just kept me getting by with Common, which isn't even a language because it doesn't have a grammar. It just pastes Plains and NASL signs with spoken English and French. So many generations of kids had gone deaf or partially deaf from nerve virus that pretty much everyone learns Common informally through tv and society and stuff. When I got it officially in school I did pretty well and thought maybe I'd do some NASL classes for pre-uni second-language credits or something, but I got distracted with other things.

He also surprised me by turning out to be an actual scientist, rather than just an administrative-manager type like I'd initially taken him for. With his bald pasty head, short white beard and mild belly pushing out of his polo shirt, I thought I was going through some kind of formal intro BS until we ended up in the lab. When I stared interestedly at the TIMS (OMG yes they have a TIMS!) he launched into all the cool stuff they're using it for, in detail, and the look on my face must've been why he mentioned he was a physicist.

I'm such a goddamn hypocrite, aren't I?

For a small research institution, Daly is pretty diverse. It mostly gets paid work doing hazard assessment, which is where all the exciting geophysics stuff is going on, but the extraction industry asks for help mapping potential energy sources (under piles of NDAs and lots of lawyers involved I guess), manufacturers want assessment reports for permit applications, and agriculture gets soil and groundwater analyses... like I said, pretty diverse. There's hydro guys, pedologists, hard-rock geologists, and lots of computer nerds.

And so far, I like it here. Dave runs the group, and our team is preparing for a salinisation project in the greatest river delta system in North America. I'm stoked. I've never been to the south of the continent and I'm looking forward to seeing the Gulf with its young geology. Rushana Vaid is leading the team; she's a hydrogeologist. My math in school wasn't quite good enough to go into "math disguised as geology"—aka geophysics—but I did well enough to follow hydrology. Darcy, Ohm, Newton, I can keep up with those guys. Think if I pay attention, I can do well with this project.

My inner cynic, the Snark Queen Bitch Supreme is stretching and muttering inside me. Is this is one of those taxpayer-wasting exercises in futility? We'll go down there, take measurements, plot graphs, run models, and tell the folks who hired Daly what they already know: the combination of human commercial activity in a delicate, dynamic hydro-geological area is causing the land to sink, salinise, and succumb to abandonment. And commerce is never halted by concerns like these.

C'mon, Sanne. Try to be upbeat on this job. If I can't force down my cranky, bitchy inner curmudgeon, then I gotta do everything I can to hide it. People hate whiners. Gotta tell myself that we're gathering intel so governments can do something to help suffering people and I'll keep repeating it.

Maybe if I do that enough, I'll convince myself.

February 18th

OMG I'm being stalked by a goddamn monster bug thing. Ug.

Yeah, guess who came to my little workspace this morning? Mr Staccato himself. He came with a story, of course, and I am so, so tempted to tell him to fuck off when he comes back. But.

But. The thin, worn manila folder with answers is sitting in front of me.

This morning I was sitting on my end of the desk, using the computer to go through some background in prep for the delta salinisation job and sucking down my fourth pot of coffee. I'd just finished two cigarettes, so I was feeling pretty okay. There are people walking past me most days—there's sort of a corridor between our desk and the outer wall, but it's not really so busy that it's distracting. My first few weeks at Daly, it gave me a chance to meet some of my new colleagues.

So when someone tall appeared and leaned over the desk, I initially thought it was one of them. But I looked up to see wide, nearly-black eyes staring at me through wire-rim glasses, framed with bushy grey eyebrows and a long, straight nose. His grey hair, slightly receding at the sides, stuck up here and there, and the total lack of expression on his pale scruffy face gave me a start before it was suddenly filled with lots of teeth. Dr Marcus Stetz, sometimes called Staccato by other monsters, was giving me one of his scary fake grins, barely an arm's length from my own face; it frightens me in a way that amuses him.

"Hallo!" he said in a cartoonish voice. He kept the stare and the grin a moment. "Sanne de Winter."

Luckily I'd gotten a bit immune to both the creepy smiles and the weird way he talks during the two or so weeks of fieldwork I did with him last summer. I don't think he can help it. After my initial shock at seeing him, I only glowered.

"What are you doing here?" I demanded sourly. Had he been following me? Was this scorpisectipede-like creature, shifted into a human disguise, stalking me? Sure, I made the mistake once of bringing him food, but since then I was certain I'd made it clear that I did not want anything to do with him or his particular demented obsession with Desolate Areas.

He straightened his lanky frame with a bit too much speed, and glanced down at himself before looking back up at me. He was dressed in what I consider sort of his human uniform, because it's the only type of clothing I've ever seen him in: an open collar shirt over a crumb-covered t-shirt (this one with the stupid text Geology rocks!) and dirty jeans with the weird zippers sewn onto the pockets. Today he also had a worn leather messenger bag strapped across one shoulder and hanging against his opposite hip. And as usual, everything was rumpled and discoloured, as if he'd been sleeping in a dumpster. For the past week.

"Sometimes," pause, "I work here." I was reminded of his trouble with spontaneous speech.

"You work here?" I asked, skeptical. He does itinerant geochemistry, sure, but did he work here, right were I happened to be?

"Sometimes," he repeated. He glanced around, as if making sure we were alone. My desk is almost public in the cramped room of the Agri building, but at that moment there was nobody else about.

"Are you following me?"

He raised his hairy eyebrows innocently and shook his head. I gave him an accusing stare, and he showed me more teeth than I thought should be anatomically possible.

"I am great. Thanks for asking!" he began, drumming his long spidery fingers against the outer flap of the messenger bag. "Brought in samples... for Dave Highwater last month." His constant wriggling of fingers and air-piano is another thing I don't think he can help. Itching uncomfortably in human skin maybe. "Saw you," he continued. Then he paused, as if reconsidering. Smelled you, he signed quickly in Common. He leaned forward again, making his eyes wide. "Did not know you were here."

"So you came to say hi?" I asked, toning down the snark. No reason to be a complete bitch to something I have to admit I still waffle between feeling sorry for and anger. And sometimes a bit of fear.

"Nope!" he answered with overdone cheerfulness, then continued in a quieter, subdued tone. "Can I tell you a story?"

"Shit," I muttered.

He opened his ratty messenger bag and pulled out a slightly-battered manila folder in one smooth motion. He held it in front of himself with both hands and looked at it, almost as if considering it a shield against my attitude.

"Instead of asking a favour. I would like to," pause, "offer you something."

I gestured at his folder. "What, your amazing pile of traffic tickets?"

"Payment?" he asked hopefully, with a tilt of his head that reminded me of a lizard, or a predatory bird. Then he sighed, and looked old. "I need help."

I shook my head. "Yeah you do, but I'm not a bug shrink. I can't help you."

He switched again to looking wired with excitement, practically bouncing on his feet. The pauses between his little sentences shortened. "Need your help," he repeated. "To get a sample of puteshestite. In living tissue!"

I blinked, tripped up by the unfamiliar word. "Puta what?"

"Oh!" he said excitedly. "They've named it. Puteshestite." He drummed his fingers against the manila folder still clutched in his hands. "Means... 'travelling mineral' in Russian. I think."

Ah, the freaky mineral he's been collecting in several Areas.

"Uh, okay. Look, I can't go looking for rocks with you." I waved my hands around, indicating the room. "I have a job now. A real job."

"Yep!" he agreed cheerily. "Congrats." He turned his head slightly and eyed me. "And they're sending you," pause, "to the Gulf. Next month, yes?"

"Yeah..." I admitted carefully.

"My sample is there," he said, suddenly still and with no expression on his face.

I sighed. "I'm going there to do work for Daly, Marcus. Not look for your rock."

He bent slightly and carefully set the manila folder next to my computer, as if placing a sacred offering on an altar, then straightened. "This is yours," he announced, before briefly making another creepy grin and holding a hand out towards the folder. "Take it for granite!"

I rolled my eyes. I don't know why, but this monster really likes stupid puns.

"Hear me out. Or not. But still yours." He dropped his hand and stood there expectantly.

I looked down at the grubby folder in front of me. Ignore it, Smarter Inner Me whispered. "What's this?" came out of my mouth instead. Goddammit.

"About your... condition," he said in a low voice.

Jesus! I glanced around furiously, making sure there still wasn't anyone nearby. "You mean my disease?" I snarled at him as quietly as I could manage.

He shook his head. "Condition. Read these," he commanded, pointing to the folder. "I learned much. You are mistaken."

I squinted at him a moment, then roughly whipped the folder open and pulled the first papers towards me. It looked like some kind of medical paper—or a photocopy of one. I don't read medicalese, but it was clearly about Weston's syndrome.

I pawed through the other papers. Some were old and thin, originals. Many were photocopies. Some of the papers were slightly yellowed and curled at their edges, attached in the upper-left corner with a big industrial staple.

"It's not the condition which... shortens life span," he murmured as I paged through it all. "It's the treatment."

I stilled, and looked up at him. He had his scary, toothy grin again. "What? What is this? Are these legit? How did you get them?"

He shrugged in his overly comical way. "Others owed me. This," he pointed at the pile of papers, "is not public." He made a frown for me. "Should be. In my opinion."

I looked back down at the papers with a bit of awe. Must've been owed some pretty big favours to get this stuff. That, or maybe he just threatened to eat them.

"You let me in." He's said this to me two or three times before. Yeah, I literally once opened a door for him, but he says it in a weird way so I just ignore it. I stared at the folder contents instead.

"The treatment is the problem?" I mused. I didn't have time to actually read all of it right then—I needed to finish my work prep.

"Yep." Spidery fingers drummed on the messenger bag. "The drugs they give... temper symptoms, but over time... cause organ damage."

"You're shitting me."

He shook his head. "Hear my story?" Another predator-bird head tilt.

My mouth tightened.

"Please?"

He had come to me with a story just as I was finishing school, and it had convinced me to take a look at his work. I ended up doing fieldwork in the 50 Mile Desolation with him, and barely escaped with my life. At the end of that adventure, he'd told me another story, one where he finally revealed that he wanted to use me as a tool to find... something. He wasn't sure exactly what, but thought it was the cause of Desolate Areas. The reason some places on the planet are twisted and sick. And spreading.

Why me? Because I can find things—though not something like that—and I wasn't already sucked into Civil Service like most people with Weston's syndrome are. I keep my illness under wraps, so here I am working a regular job and paying taxes and choosing where I live and what I do in my evenings and weekends. Nobody's disgusted by me because nobody fucking knows, so long as I keep jumping through these hoops. So long as I don't screw up... at least until the symptoms get bad enough for everyone to notice.

Please, please, let that be another year or two away.

I had resented his reason for coming to me, but I understand desperation. I'm also wary of it. He seems sunk far into his obsession. Aaaaaand he's a large, scary-ass predatory arthropod. A jaekelotherium, though his kind are more popularly called "Surgeons" due to the partially-amputated people found being eaten alive by one of these creatures more than two decades ago. Two and a half meter long many-legged creepy-crawlies that look like they inspired Giger or something.

Unhinged monsters that can somehow look like people scare the hell out of me, and I don't hate myself for that particular fear, because it's fucking sensible.

The smart thing was to make this creature leave. Make it clear, again, that I was not interested in any more stories. No more requests, no more favours.

"Fine," I told him. What the fuck is wrong with you? Smarter Inner Me asked Stupid Me. Stupid Me had no answer.

The moment the word was out of my mouth, Marcus' body relaxed slightly, letting out the breath he'd been holding.

"Thank you." He leaned a little forward. "This will be short!"

"Better be," I grumbled. "I have work to do." I closed the manila folder and pushed it to the edge of my desk.

Like the other times, this was another smoothly-prepared little speech, and once again I found myself interested against my better instincts. See, that's what's wrong with me. I'm afraid of everything in the whole damn world, and yet any salesman—or scary creature nobody else knows is a Surgeon—can sucker me into acting stupid with an unsolved scientific mystery.

"You've noticed where Areas are absent, yes?" he asked.

I nodded. So far, the only thing that really seems to connect the Areas is that they are found on old continents. As if they're coming out of the ancient cratons. Places with newer crust seem to have no Areas, nor have any been found in the oceans.

Something a geologist would notice. The majority of people studying Areas aren't, though. It's all ecologists, physicists, and sometimes those weirdos who believe in stuff like ESP and ghosts.

"Yet there is a small place with Area characteristics. Near the Gulf."

I frowned at that, because I've seen maps of the world showing the known Areas and there weren't any near the Gulf. But apparently now there is. I immediately suspected Daly's salinisation project.

He began talking about a rural hospital, in the dark swampy wilds of the delta region, which specialised in treating infectious diseases. Tropical areas have tropical diseases, and this place was busy with patients despite its relative remoteness from larger metro areas. Usually hospitals are not built outside because that just leaves them open to nature and creatures and things most people don't want to deal with. I guess this place preferred keeping whatever nasty shit came along far from the cities.

A few years ago, an emergency call was made from that hospital, but when help arrived, they were told nothing was wrong. A week later there was a sudden evacuation. Administrators interviewed on the news were never clear on exactly why—something about moulds on the walls. Patients were moved to a sister hospital in the nearest actual city, and instead of fixing whatever the problem was, the place was closed up.

According to Marcus though, it wasn't properly closed and emptied. It had been frantically abandoned within a day or two, and all the stuff had been left behind. He'd visited it a few weeks ago. I mean he actually broke into the building and wandered around.

"What the hell, Marcus. Why the fuck would you do that?"

His hairy eyebrows went up and he continued his story. The difference in how smoothly he can talk like a person when he's had some time to prepare always gives me a shiver. "Someone entered that hospital with psychosis, unusual physical symptoms, and died. A 'foreign object' was found embedded in the spine, wedged between the spinal cord and a vertebra." Long bony fingers played air-piano. "I believe it's puteshestite." He pushed his glasses up and looked at me. "I need that sample."

"And you think... you think it's still there?" I asked incredulously. "They don't just leave patient shit behind in a hospital! Isn't that against privacy laws or healthcare rules or something?"

"Everything," he insisted, shaking his head. "They've left nearly everything."

I sighed, and thought about what he'd just said. "So you—you want me to go to this—this abandoned hospital in some creepy bayou outside, filled with redneck cannibal banjo players and monsters, to find this rock?" What a terrible fucking idea, and once the words were out of my mouth, it sounded like the kind of B movie I'd watch with Bob.

He nodded once, eyes wide. "Yes please." Absolutely serious.

I shook my head. "Fuck no. I don't wanna die."

"I will be there," he replied. Was that supposed to be reassuring? "I visited," pause, "twice. No signs of... new inhabitants." He meant those creatures that live outside inhabited regions. Like his kind.

"I'm going down there to do work," I said again. "I don't have time for this." And it sounded scary as fuck. Dangerous. Stupid.

"One day!" he insisted, holding up a pale thin finger. "Saturday afternoon picnic."

Didn't he realise "picnic" and meaning with something like him is the least appealing word he could have used? Coupled with showing a bunch of teeth? Probably not. The grin vanished again as he leaned forward and stared at me intensely with his black eyes. "Please."

"You don't need a geologist for this," I told him. That was one of his arguments for me helping him with Areas research, originally.

"Nope. Don't need a geologist. I need you." He needed a sickie, he meant.

We went back and forth a bit. He left repeating that the folder was mine to keep either way, that he needed to return on Friday, and wouldn't I please think on it? He'd also mentioned that Bern Michaels' lab was planning on inspecting the sample, and that puteshestite had been found in living things before but never properly investigated—and here was some that had gotten into a human being.

The fact that this wasn't just Marcus' lone obsession and the freaky idea that this Areas-related mineral was able to somehow end up inside people's bodies remained sitting in my head all day. Really, how the hell did a rock show up inside someone's back? It's not like they swallowed it.

It would have to grow there, wouldn't it? Like calcium? But all Marcus' samples he'd collected so far were a good three billion years old. And not made up of common earth elements. No, seriously, how can someone have this stuff in their spine? That'd be like, I dunno, finding a ball of iridium there. Makes no damn sense.

And my thoughts kept turning to the folder.

I'd stashed it in my backpack as soon as he was gone and took it out the moment I got home. I'm sitting here at the kitchen table with my bazillionth cup of coffee of the day, the emptied plate of my third supper, this Rite in the Rain notebook, and the folder. A pile of information on a disease I've often avoided even thinking about, because it's so much easier to ignore.

Except I can't. It's fucking with me every day, and I know the time will come when I can't hide it anymore. That thought makes my gut tighten—I'm going to lose all this. I'm on borrowed time.

Which is why I need to tell Marcus "no" on Friday. Even if that's telling the Michaels lab "no" or all the researchers desperately trying to figure out what's going on with Desolate Areas "no." I'm not an Areas researcher. I'm just a junior geologist with limited time working at a small institute.

Borrowed time. I need to get as much out of this life as I can. That means this job and my freedom at least, if not having any close relationships with people. Not with this shit future hanging over my head. Bob was the last person I've been close to.

The manila folder is sitting here. I should burn it in the trash container outside.

Goddammit.

February 19th

"Are you alright?"

My fugue was interrupted this morning by Rushana, the lead hydrogeologist whose wide desk I've been sharing since being assigned the salinisation project. She was giving me a look of suspicious concern, and I realised I must've really looked like a space fruit.

Breathe. "Yeah. I just got some heavy stuff on my mind, but I'll deal."

Rushana pinched the corners of her mouth but said nothing. When I first came here, nearly everyone remarked how much I looked like her. That I could be her younger sister. Like me, she's small, with light brown skin and wavy black hair, though hers flows halfway down her back while mine goes just past my shoulders and I keep it in a kind of ponytail-knot. I hate hair getting into stuff while I'm working.

We may seem vaguely similar—we seriously don't look related at all, Christ—but we're nothing alike otherwise. She's from the aristocracy of the learned, growing up in a demanding household under a renowned psychologist and some big-name pediatric surgeon at an East-coast teaching hospital, with siblings who all got advanced degrees in one thing or another. I heard one works at CERN. Her family supper conversations growing up must've been about politics, literature, economics, science and philosophy. You can tell from the eloquent way she speaks, her large vocabulary, her ease in slipping into conversations about wildly different topics.

I don't speak, I talk, and when I open my mouth, a mobile home comes out. Or swear words. When my family did eat together, it was in front of the tv. (And my coworkers keep ribbing me about saying 'supper' instead of 'dinner.') Okay, I don't swear at work, or I try not to, but it's obvious to everyone here that I'm an aberration that somehow made it into and through university. While I know my geology, I don't know much else, and clearly Rushana thinks very little of me.

Which was why I needed to stay on-track this morning. I need to show that I belong here—not a diversity hire, not someone who fucked their way to a degree, not someone the real professionals need to tolerate with pity. Uni was a foreign world for me, and I worked harder to figure the system out while also trying to actually learn anything. But every shit comment and "what are you even doing here?" just made me chew my teeth even harder, and now I have a fucking master's and I'm gonna be a real researcher, dammit.

I took another deep breath and forced myself to focus on the old USGS maps in front of me. We were making plans for our research into the problem of salt—too much of it. A band of local governments consisting of several parishes (so those are like counties but French?) had contracted Daly to figure out the source, or more likely sources. Of course the nearby Gulf is salt water, but there's a lot going on with the geology in that area, and people are making plenty of large-scale changes to the environment.

Rushana has me sharing her desk because she's leading the work there and I'm both a new hire and relatively junior. I'm not a hydro person either, though I think my sed background will work well with tracking salt. So I need to get it together.

Some of the data we got is... off. Rushana keeps repeating that the real problem is just ordinary salinisation, and that some of the reports sent our way were clearly exaggerated. Salt growing out of the ground within a week. Drinking water going from potable to unusable in days. Farm animals dying from dehydration, kicking and writhing as their brains salt up. I mean, salinisation of a region takes a hell of a lot longer than a week, barring some large event like a storm. Rushana expects we'll find a cresting diapir, a mound of salt rising up through the denser ground like a slow oil bubble in a lava lamp. The ones more inland mostly stopped rising in the Miocene, but as you approach the ocean you'll still find slow upwards drift.

"They're probably just sending us every data point they have, including letters from random panicked rice farmers," Rushana told the team yesterday. "When we get there, our job is to detail and report what's actually going on. Real measurements, real numbers, not wild rumours."

She's surely right. Hydro is her specialty. Still, I can't help but think about what Marcus had said about Areas. A sudden explosion of salt coming up out of the ground with such speed sounds exactly like the kinds of things that happen there. It's as if Areas are hostile to time itself.

And yet this morning my head was somewhere else and even now I keep catching myself shaking and clenching my teeth. Last night I made the mistake of reading that damn folder. Should've waited until the weekend, to give myself a few days to recover.

I'm sick. God, I fucking hate being sick. I hate having to eat all damn day to feed this racing metabolism. I'm tired of the akathisia, that need to move just a little bit all the time—unless I stuff my system with as many stimulants as my kidneys can stand. Only way I can act normal in public is to drink literal pots of coffee all day and smoke all the time. Hell, it's worse—it's a craving so intense... this must be how crack is for druggies. And while I don't have the night terrors or dangerous sleepwalking-into-traffic yet, that's definitely a shit-gift in my future.

I'm supposed to be registered with Civil Service, but for some reason my symptoms started very late, after I'd started my undergrad... so I never did. Usually this stuff shows up around age four or five. I passed all the tests they do in elementary and high school. But I wouldn't now, and only got this job at Daly thanks to bribes at the blood lab Marcus had recommended, and his tip about sunscreen for the De Real people in HR. Westies can't tolerate alcohol but I can still drink a piss beer or two, and my eyes have only gone from dark brown to a lighter brown—they're not yet the giveaway bright copper-gold. But yeah, at some point everyone will see I'm sick, I'll get reported, and shitweasels in suits will appear at my door and drag me off to some pit in the earth to do drudge work until I die in my forties.

After reading the stuff in the folder, I now know it's much, much worse.

I was initially hesitant to go through the contents, but of course I couldn't stop myself. There were some medical reports and some internal research papers, but what caught my eye first was a table in one of the studies showing the ages of the participants: eighteen to sixty-eight.

Sixty-eight. That was just... unheard of. There were two other participants in their fifties, also unbelievable. People with Weston's were usually dead around fifty.

I scanned the rest of the paper for any mention of their state of health, but there was nothing. As if having Weston's and being nearly seventy was no big deal. The study date was 1964. Everything I'd ever read or heard mentioned early death. Seems Marcus was right.

Another paper, a xeroxed memo dated 1978 with new rules for Civil Service: workers with Weston's were to get daily doses of Anepro. I recognised that name, but my vaguely-positive view of it vanished as I kept reading. Anepro slightly reduced the akathisia, sleep problems and desire for stimulants, which was what I always thought it was for, but here it stated the main reason was "increased performance" in the distance and accuracy of a feeling sensation, a sort of strange sense the brain has—the reason Civil Service wants us. With Anepro, people with Weston's could sense spaces and surfaces as far away as twenty meters, a lot farther than I've ever been able to do.

Scarier was the dismissive tone in the warning at the end: Anepro causes metals to build up in the organs and neurological damage. Regular chelation to reduce the buildup was recommended... "if desired."

I know what chelation is in chemistry, but I wasn't sure what it meant as a medical treatment, so this morning I looked it up on the Internet at work. Goddammit. Osteoporosis and heart problems from low calcium, kidney failure, and other issues that come from pissing out important trace minerals.

I've always been terrified of Civil Service, but as I kept paging through the thin pile of papers in the folder, I saw more and more of this darker side. I'd wanted to keep my freedom and choose what I did for a living. But I hadn't thought the Service meant getting slowly poisoned, or having a De Real person controlling me like an animal handler. Or being locked up in bed cages (the sleepwalking thing, I guess). Didn't they care that people died so young? The remaining papers in the manila folder suggested more dangerous work, restricted lives, and lots of misery for people in the Service than I'd thought.

The fuck am I going to do? Borrowed time, and then something that sounds more like hell than I'd ever thought.

There's only one person I can think of who I can talk to about this.

March 9th

On and off, I've wondered about shifters. What exactly they are, how they change their forms to look like other things, and why only some of the monsters living outside can do it at all.

Most of the time it was just idle curiosity, and something my mind would worry about whenever I was in an unfamiliar city, or pretty much any place if it was after dark. I mean, every so often there'll be a report in the news of an attack, or at least about one being found. Always someplace far away from wherever I was living, and almost always in remote dingleberry towns stupidly close to the edges of habitable areas, but sometimes a larger city would get one. Those got more coverage, of course.

After my first encounter with Marcus—not the time I let him into my school building (Jesus why the hell did I do that), but the very first, a summer stint replacing field camp as a student at UBC, I started really wondering about shifters. Enough that I spent even more library Internet computer credits researching that topic than I spent on Weston's. I think I was mostly trying to find out if they would follow people long distances to hunt them down. Luckily, nothing suggested anything like that.

This afternoon I drove over to Bob's in Vanc to chat, hang out, and get some questions answered. Now I'm thinking about shifters again, because we didn't end up discussing the stuff in the folder, which had been my plan.

I was standing in front of the main door to his apartment building, my finger hovering over the worn buzzer button with the label "R. de Souza" pasted next to it. I like visiting Bob for a lot of reasons—he knows about my Weston's, so I don't have to hide it. He's super smart, loves bad films, reads everything he gets his hands on, and doesn't ever seem bothered by my lower-class clothes or sweary mouth. Hell, he asked me out back when I was doing the barista thing for school money, while he was already making buckets working for some kind of insurance company for banks and stuff. Something-something fraud-hunting with computers.

And of course, he's super hot. Sigh.

If he hadn't accidentally triggered the start of my symptoms, if I hadn't unknowingly been sick, I think we'd be a couple. Right now, we're very carefully being friends—not careful for ourselves, but because Bob's family is literally a bunch of De Reals. Bob never wanted to do any reali stuff, and I guess that already made a strain between him and his parents, but now he really can't have them finding out he's got an unregistered Westie for a friend. And no way could he have an unregistered Westie girlfriend, shit.

So... I was standing outside his door, about to hit the bell, planning to ask him about the folder... and had a thought. If he'd known anything in that folder, he would have told me already, right? Bob doesn't like parts of the family business, refuses to tack "de Real" onto the end of his name as his family does—he's just Bob de Souza, not Roberto de Souza de Real—so maybe bringing up papers showing the whole system is even scuzzier than either of us knew might be, I dunno, like a kick in the balls or something. I'd be shoving it into his face, and probably make him feel even more guilty than he already does.

It wasn't his fault. Not really. I mean not deliberately.

It's the past, Sanne. Fucking unhealthy. Some of the best advice I'd ever gotten from someone was you're not a sheep, so quit ruminating. So anyway, I'd decided not to say anything at all about the folder. Instead we started off watching something.

Almost every visit to Bob's includes a B-grade horror flick, a plotless blow-em-up action blockbuster, or some poorly-dubbed kick-ass kung-fu film. They're all amazingly bad. I love it. This time it was from the category Shitty Monster Movie, an old one straight from the reject bins: Slicer.

A group of campers, stupidly outside without fallbacks for the inevitable problems of broken equipment, trust issues and of course a love triangle find themselves being picked off one by one by the monster, a Surgeon. The young dude who's the hero dies blowing the thing up by holding an emergency flare as it eats him (nothing anyone does until that point, not bullets or anything, make any kind of scratch on the leggy bug, in classic undefeatable-monster style) and in the end the sole survivor is a young woman whose clothing of course manages to mostly come off during the fight for her life, staggering into the safety of an outpost.

I've seen that film twice before, but today it made me think of Marcus. I'd spent like two weeks working outside with one of these things, though whenever I think back, it feels unreal. Imaginary. It—he—literally scuttled around in front of me daily, and the depiction in the film was suddenly laughable. The monster in the film was bigger, moved slowly and clumsily (except when snatching people from behind), and the rubber beast seemed extra fake. I mean, normally that's what I like about low-budget monster films, but today I saw it in a different light.

It made me turn to Bob and say something I've been wondering for a long time but never thought to ask him.

"Hey, what do you know about shifters?"

Bob took a swig from his beer and glanced at me. The stoner dude on Bob's huge screen was sitting alone in the camp, so focused on his doobie that he didn't realise everyone else went off to do steamy couple stuff in the woods. He was about to hear some rustling behind him and call out to his friends to grab some brews.

The one I know wouldn't make a single sound, the thought came unbidden. Making noise while sneaking up on prey isn't a mistake apex predators make.

"What about them?"

"Well, I was just wondering... how do they do it? How do they look so human?"

Bob laughed. "They don't. People think they do because that's what they show on tv, but it's not true."

"It's not?"

He shook his head, grinning. "It makes for good movie monsters, but they're not that human-looking. Deeg's been going after one down in Yakima Nation, says everyone recognises it almost right away, it's just really fast. Only reason they haven't caught it yet."

Deeg, his older brother, is following in their father's profession—hunting nuisance creatures from outside.

I frowned. "So they don't really sneak in?" That's what I'd always thought they did—look human and enter habitable areas, able to freely hunt without anyone suspecting anything until pets, or people, start disappearing in short order.

"Oh, sure, they sneak in, but if you see one in the middle of the day, you'd know it's not a person. They just look vaguely human, you know? At night, in a crowd, you'd maybe miss them." He took another drink from his beer. "If everyone just paid a little more attention, they'd get caught immediately. That, and most of them just get into the garbage. If there's a lot of homeless or disaster refs in a city, nobody's necessarily going to notice a shifter sifting through the trash."

"Oh." This didn't make sense with what I knew. It didn't make sense with Marcus. He's a shifter, right? He acts a little strange, and regularly makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up, but he definitely looks completely human. Then I thought of all the terrible, awful word puns Marcus makes. "So, do they talk?"

Bob looked thoughtful. "No, I don't think so. Not really. Big R said there was one that could imitate people pretty well, but it was like a parrot. Just saying phrases."

He meant his sister Rosario, the only family member he's on pretty decent terms with. They call each other Big R and Little R.

He ticked his fingers against his bottle, staring at the screen but I don't think he was seeing the film. I couldn't help noticing again how sexy his black hair was, slicked back out of his brown eyes and his Superman glasses. "That would freak me out. Hearing something like that and knowing it was some creature." He looked back at me. "Why are you thinking about shifters anyway?"

"Um." I decided to explain the upcoming delta job. That region isn't so much known for problems with shifters, but I'd be outside for a lot of the work. He knew I was fairly comfortable with that, and about my stint at 50 Mile—everything except what Marcus was—so I knew he'd see that I was just being cautious. Not shit-scared. No, not Sanne, she's not some cringing cuntwillow.

"Mm, I don't know about that area so much, but I could ask Big R about it."

I stared at him. "Uh, how are you going to explain that to her?" I couldn't imagine him mentioning me to her. I even have to be Somewhere Else if she's dropping by, because she's so good at sniffing out sick people that she'd probably get suspicious of me without even touching my skin for confirmation.

"I can truthfully tell her that someone I know is going to have to be doing a job outside in that region, so what tips could I give her, stuff like that." Then he smiled at me, though it looked a little sad. "Someone I care about a lot."

I'm thinking about shifters, but I'm also still thinking about that sentence. Usually, spending time with Bob makes me feel pretty good. Almost like I'm normal.

I feel like shit now.

April 7th

> 6:00!! OMG I hate Daylight Savings. Spring ahead, fall back, fuck off.
First day of the salinisation work down here. Supposed to rain today, but it's warm and the food's good and cheap. Hotel's not bad—it's actually quiet this morning as I jot this down.

We'll rendezvous (woohoo, I can French!) at the Lafayette USGS, then start with the well map. Rushana's gonna send Ernest and me out to measure a bunch. We're not sure how many wells there really are (maps are always out of date) but Rushana figures it'll take a week at least, and then we'll see if we bore any new ones. Besides listening to the earth, wells are one of the easiest ways to start seeing what's going on in the ground.

Ug, bailing wells.

Bailing wells outside. Like chanting the name of the boogeyman in a mirror, you pull water out three times (or more), waiting for the head to come back up each time, before taking the sample. Several of the wells we know of are on private property, but a lot are on abandoned land.

This makes sense with the information I got from Bob. After hurricanes Carmen and Elena, when people evacuated habitable areas, the local wildlife moved in. People found their homes had become too dangerous, or too much work to clear them up again, although I think the States sent some federal help. Lots of small towns vanished right off the maps, and the cities swelled.

The O&G majors and the Wildlands Bureau are pretty much the only organisations placing people in small settlements outside. Anyone else living out there is the sort I'd rather not run into—nutbags, holdouts, outlaws. Especially the holdouts, people who don't leave when a habitable area becomes dangerous.

The ones who've been out there a long time are often... different.

> 22:00
Tired. Fun almost, except for one thing. One really crappy thing.

So, it turns out there's a soil team and a water team. I'm of course Team Water. I can't tell if I got the shit end of the stick or not, but probably not.

The dirt people go around with these metal T-shaped little murder weapons and shove them in the ground, twist once or twice, pull up, scrape off the excess, and empty the dirt into little plastic baggies. Simple, but like, fifty times around some farmer's field. Then they go back to a tiny portacabin, add distilled water, and make cow patties to test for salt at the top horizon. I dunno what they're gonna do for deeper levels, but I'm imagining them going out with shovels and backhoes and stuff. No, the dirt folks don't have it any nicer.

I honestly had no idea the Gulf area was full of rice, but we might be crawling through a flooded rice field or two. I thought rice needed to grow in water or something, but no. It's to kill the bugs, and the competition.

So for Ernest and me, it looks like there'll be some time later spent in waders sucking brackish muck and duck turds into plastic buckets while being mosquito meals and hopefully not gator meals, but for now it's Weller Time.

Ernest's a big guy. Huge, with size fifteen shoes he gets special-ordered, or so he tells me. He looks like some cross between a farmer's son and an Iron Man competitor and freaking towers over me. When we're bent over buckets I'm thankful for my short stature because it looks difficult for him. The others call him names like Weed and Dandelion, I guess because of the fluffy pile of yellow hair on his head, but it's done in a friendly way and doesn't seem to bother him. Think I'll just stick with Ernest for now though.

And he's quiet, but seems nice enough. He didn't make any kind of face when he heard he was working with me, the newbie, and the day went pretty well as far as us working together, so that's a positive.

Before releasing us into the field, they had us do a quick meetup at the red-bricked USGS building about safety. Not so much occupational safety other than the usual "wear your PPE" stuff, but more like a ginormous list of all the nasty animals and creatures we need to watch out for around here.

Like, five different types of killer snakes, including the water moccasins which're probably partying with the giant gators in that brackish water we'll be wading into, plus it's spring so there's these hairy caterpillars with stinging spines like little spiky glass tubes that break off in your skin (bring duct tape, the local USGS folks said), and spiders and scorpions and then the shit that lives outside like bag hags and water witches (or were those the same thing? I forgot already. Long day) and something called "giant lubbers" which are apparently some kind of mutant grasshopper bigger than your hand that bites like a parrot and squirts stink oil at you when it flips its shit. Jesus fuck. I spent all day feeling like something was crawling on my back, though we haven't seen any of these animals yet.

We're also supposed to stay away from water that's any colour besides black or brown. "Yellow or red could make you dead" was the helpful mnemonic one of the Fisheries guys called out with a laugh (Fisheries is in the same building and some of them came to sit in on our meeting for some reason. The salt's probably bothering them too). This is Chemical Central, and all that Better Living stuff leaks or gets dumped (totally legally) everywhere, and we wouldn't want to end up like those guys who burned their hands collecting sediment samples decades ago, would we? Goddamn. I'm half thinking this was a "scare the Canadians" meeting.

Oh, and apparently "coonasses" is the correct, respectful term for the locals down here. Yeeeeeah. Uh huh.

So, yeah. We're not fucking around with our PPE. Gloves at all times, don't let anything splash in your face, chloroquine pills, broad-brimmed hat to keep the stinging caterpillars from falling down your shirt. Yay fieldwork!

And we only got to one well. I've worked some phase II ESAs back before I got my master's, so Ernest didn't have to warn me that a well can easily take six hours or more to do. But he did, because he doesn't know me. I stayed quiet, wrestling myself on whether I should tell him I know what the hell I'm doing. We both agreed we wanted to start with one that was furthest away from Lafayette and as the week went on we'd be driving less as we hit the closer ones. For similar reasons we're going to do the ones marked "abandoned" first since they're outside, and get them over with.

Luck was with us today—it didn't take us too long to find this well, not far from a pile of green leaves and vines the size and shape of a house, on a property that might not have seen any people since the early nineties. A slightly raised bit of ground you can only feel with your feet as you walk towards it (after pressing down and cutting up a crapload of brush)... and also with the feeling sensation if you're sick with Weston's.

This was the crappy thing that happened today. I wasn't scared, I really wasn't. Uneasy and on alert, sure, but that's a normal state when you're outside. But even before Ernest and I got out of the truck, the visible world around me started getting a strange familiar-yet-not sensation of what I guess I'll call textures. In the past, when my brain reached out to the world with the feeling sense, it felt like a click. A sudden switch, and it only happened when I was trying to do it, or when I was so scared I thought I might shit myself.

Not this time. It came on its own, gradually, and I almost staggered as we walked because the unexpected combination of what my eyes were seeing and my feet were feeling with, well, feeling made me a little dizzy.

And it stayed the whole time we worked. I acted as normal as possible. I let Ernest discover the little hill where the well casing was half-buried. We cleaned the area around it, brought our twenty-litre bucket, tape roll, sample bottles, fishing wire and bailers, went through our protocol almost as if we'd been working together for weeks... but I was sweating and tense. Hopefully Ernest thought I was just nervous doing my first field job for Daly or something. He's a quiet guy so he never said anything either way, except to mention as we were cleaning up that he hoped all the wells on our list went as easy as this one.

Now that I think about it, that was probably also a compliment. Whaddaya know, the trash-class newbie isn't a total dumbass! But earlier today I was simply relieved—relieved that I somehow managed to function despite the world having more depth than it has any right to. Relieved that by suppertime the sensation went away, though it faded rather than left in an instant.

And relieved that the child-sized, human-shaped creature I sensed shuffling around the other side of the kudzu-enveloped house stayed there.

April 13th

Oh boy. This was a tough week. I'm mentally exhausted from juggling hot azides backwards in heels on eggshells or something. Thank fuck it's Sunday. I need to breathe.

The feeling sense is back every day. Sometimes for just an hour or so, sometimes until I crash into bed. It's gone in the mornings, but returns as I get tired. And now my sleep is getting messed up. I woke up this morning standing in my hotel washroom, facing the closed door, and feeling like I'd just run in there and closed the door on something. As if I'd had a nightmare about something chasing me. But I don't remember anything. Why else would I be in the washroom with the door closed?

Night terrors. Westies have night terrors. They're not nightmares—or maybe they are, but who knows. You don't remember them.

But other people hear you screaming in the night. I'm in a cheap hotel room. They've got thin walls. I can hear the guy next to me's tv going when I hit bed in the evenings. I can't have someone calling the management at two in the morning because my room sounds like a gruesome murder going on.

And I'm really doing a balancing act with food and stimulants. I get something the night before to eat first thing in the morning, in my hotel room. Then I leave early and hit a cheap coffee place for more food and caffeine. Then I buy more food and bring it to work, where my colleagues can see me eat "breakfast." I try to do similar for lunches, eating the first one where Ernest doesn't see me and the second together with him when we're out. I power through the late afternoons, making it past three hours without eating by sheer willpower. And while we do bring coffee with us, I try to ration it and rely on my cigarettes to keep the jitters at bay. I'm sure I reek, but as usual Ernest doesn't say shit. Not a complainer, that guy.

The evenings are multiple suppers, but that's easier to do. I brought a bunch of States money with me to be able to pay for all the extra meals without it going to Daly's account. Yeah, Daly's paying for our three meals a day. That's pretty cool. Too bad my shitty metabolism is fucking diseased as hell.

The other thing that bothers me, although a lot less than my shitty state of health, is the little weird things going on. Yes, I know we're working outside. And yes, I've been keeping that "Areas characteristics" comment in the back of my head. Still.

Not just the fact that, maybe due to my emerging feeling senses, I've been noticing things moving around Ernest and me as we're working the wells (but so far nothing's come close enough to be seen, and I don't think Ernest has noticed anything at all), but Friday night most of us went to a bar after everyone was back in from the field, and people started telling stories.

On Wednesday one team came back to their truck and found the stuff inside all strewn about, but whatever or whoever did it was long gone.

A pedologist, Mar, said she watched a farmer whose fields she was testing pour several barrels of water into troughs for sheep and chickens, his wells contaminated. He'd shut down his chicken waterer, said all the pipes had "salted up." There weren't very many animals left, because most had died. He was pushing a wheelbarrow through pasture to collect the bodies and load them into the vet's van for testing. Their necks had twisted back as they died, eyes bulging out of their heads.

Another well team, Harold and Justin, told us how earlier in the week they were driving slowly down a dirt road just outside, looking for a place on one of the maps, and there was some old geezer standing at the side of the road. As they rode past him, he just stood there and only moved his head to track them, face blank. Justin thought the guy must've been stoned. Harold said it gave him the willies. Maybe the guy was a holdout.

Most people aren't saying it out loud like that, but you could feel it in the slightly subdued atmosphere of the bar. A lot of us have the willies.

Willies, go the fuck home.

April 16th

I got this. I can do it. I got this.

And OMG! I found a cheap taco place and have been eating an irresponsible number of tacos the past two days.

I fucking got this.

April 18th

I'm stupid. I'm stupid! I'm so damn stupid.

Why do I keep doing stupid?? WHY DID I SAY YES?

I can't fucking believe I said yes. Jesus. What is wrong with me? Why can't Smarter Inner Me just stop Stupid Me from agreeing to do stupid shit?

Old Staccato showed up. Down here. Here at the USGS office! A coworker told me later that he's been hanging around a few weeks now.

This morning we did a stand-up meeting, Rushana giving us a summary of the week and quick plans for the next. Lots of salt so far, still no salt-sediment boundary. Not knowing the size of the deposit under us, it's hard to figure out the source of the uplift. She sounded stressed. I was standing near the back of our group, unable to actually see the map taped to the wall because I'm short.

It's just rehash, whatever. I didn't have to look to know the map has little red stickers for all the high-saline wells we've tested so far, blue for the normal ones, and black Xs for the ones we either couldn't find or haven't gotten to yet. We've all been staring at it every day when it gets updated. None of it makes sense; Darcy's law's getting more violated than a kid in Uncle Touchy's Candy Basement.

But while Rushana was talking, there was suddenly something tall and silent next to me. I'm proud of how quiet I stayed when I jumped. Fucking Marcus, who hadn't been there a moment ago, was just standing like he'd materialised or something. Goddamn apex predator shit.

Rushana doesn't bloviate or waste our time, and we were dismissed in a minute or two. I immediately glared up at the tall pale creature grinning down at me. "The hell are you doing here?" I whispered, admirably stopping myself from yelling and attracting attention.

He did his cartoon shrug, where his shoulders are brought ridiculously high. He was in uniform again—stained t-shirt (with Reunite Pangea and an upraised fist, for fuck's sake) and collar shirt, dirt-smeared pants, and scuffed, formerly bright red Converse tennis shoes. His grey hair stuck up in places and he needed a shave, completing the Motel Dump look. "Said I'd return Friday."

My mouth dropped open. Yeah, when he visited me at Daly back in February, he had said something about coming back that Friday, but he never showed and I was glad at the time because I hadn't felt like arguing with him again. Today was a Friday, but it's fucking April. Good Friday even, but you know, not good at all, because I did the stupid ungood thing.

His fake grin vanished and he leaned towards me just a little. "Tomorrow. Paul Farmer." His head did one of those predator-bird tilts. "Please?"

I was still gaping at him. "Wut?"

"Paul Farmer Memorial," he answered. "The hospital."

I glared at him, shaking my head. "I said no fucking way, didn't I? What part of 'no fucking way' was confusing to you?"

He gave me a frown, furrowing his grey caterpillar eyebrows. "What does the F stand for?" He wriggled his fingers on hands still at his sides. "In the word 'way'?"

I shook my head at him again. "What? There is no F in way."

He nodded suddenly. "Better. Much better." Then he showed me his teeth again.

I rolled my eyes. "Oh fuck you." Smartass monster. I started to turn, to walk off and away from that invitation to the weird.

"What's happening here," he started. I paused, Smarter Inner Me knowing I should keep going and Stupid Me wanting to hear the rest of his broken sentence. "It's not normal," he finished. Neither are you, I thought as I faced him again.

"No shit, Sherlock," I growled. "You know what I saw yesterday? I thought it was snow! Little blades of grass peeking up through a pile of dirty snow sticking to the ground, and it's salt, it's all salt!" I waved my hand around, gesturing to mean the whole huge area we've been measuring in. "This is ridiculous. Salt, and it's just there, it's just all over in the ground. Of course it's not fucking normal!"

The wells were way, way over fifty parts per thousand. Some places were in the seventies. There were high amounts of the usual suspects, sodium and chloride, but there's magnesium, sulphur, bromine and potassium everywhere... it's not Louann salt, or ocean salt. The composition varied in the soils, but the amounts didn't. Like, if there were a source like a diapir, it should taper off at wherever the edges were, right? But it's not. It's just... coming out of the ground, all over, in amounts that would make any first-year geology student—or farm kid—snicker in disbelief if you told them this.

This is the Gulf, not fucking Bonneville, or the goddamn Atacama.

The creature disguised as an old man tipped his head to the side, looking at me. "I am almost certain," his fingers played air-piano, "the presence of my sample." Pause. "It's the cause." He looked around the nearly-empty USGS room we had just done our meeting in, then back at me.

I stared at him. He'd mentioned during last summer's field work his theory that, somehow, the weird mineral with unusual composition and strange properties was responsible for Desolate Areas. He seemed to think this sample of his, having been brought here, was... causing the salt to come up out of the ground?

I don't know. Marcus is scary smart, but he doesn't always think like people do. It sounded plausible and ridiculous at the same time. Plausible because everything's nuts. Ridiculous because rocks don't magically suck salt out of the ground.

"I need to find it." Air-piano. "We need to find it. Get it out of here." His eyes moved again, this time to something behind me. "Get it to the Michaels lab."

I snorted. "And let it do damage there?"

He darted past me—making me jump and hate myself for being a damn pusswillow—to peer down into one of the trash cans in the room. People had brought in their morning food, snacks and coffee for the meeting, the remains of which must've been what he plucked out and shoved into his mouth. I hadn't forgotten how gross he is, yet I had.

This is where it went south, I think. I was standing there, watching something shaped like a man picking through an office garbage can, and I got this wave of wrong sweeping through me and making my hair stand up. I don't know what came first, his ability to look human or his obsession with the Areas, but the only reason he shifts is to use our tech, to read our papers, to discuss ideas with other beings who are also trying to figure out why our planet has these sores on it. Areas are a danger to all living things, but I guess most Surgeons aren't exactly looking for solutions. Or anyway, it's not like they're building computers or mass specs.

He thinks that if he can find the answer, he can stop doing this. Stop doing the "smelly bipedal" thing, wearing clothes, eating all the time to fuel the apparently huge energy costs of shifting. I saw, just for a moment, a wild animal digging through the trash. A wild animal that doesn't belong here. It needs to be outdoors. Or outside, really.

And in that moment I felt incredibly sorry for him. Surprised they couldn't smell the waves of pity going through me all the way down the hall. I opened my mouth to say something—I dunno what really—but he straightened, holding a paper cup of someone's thrown-away coffee or tea, wiped his mouth with his sleeve (because he's fucking disgusting) and spoke first.

"It doesn't always happen," he said. He drained the rest of whatever was in the cup. "We don't know why." He sighed. "Sometimes," spidery air-piano, "puteshestite is reactive." He did another cartoon shrug. "There's more at the Michaels lab. So far... it seems inert there."

He was still looking at me but his gaze changed in intensity, as if he was trying to decide if I was edible. When I realised I had gone still, I glowered at him and folded my arms. I'm not fucking prey.

In one of those irritating sudden starts of movement, he sprung over to the map, but was still looking at me. He moved a finger around in a circle, around the red-dotted well tests, without moving his gaze.

"See these?" he asked. He kept moving his finger slowly around the red dots, and kept looking at me, waiting for a response.

"Uh, yeah. I know what's on our own goddamn map," I told him.

He stilled in mid-circle, then glanced at the wall briefly to stab his finger near the middle before staring back at me. "What's right here?"

I frowned. "I dunno, nothing." The map is not a geological map like most of them in the office are, but a state road map. Where his finger touched was just white with some little grey lines. None of our tested wells were close, or any towns. Habitable areas on this map are light pink, so this was also outside.

Almost the moment the words were out of my mouth, I realised that empty area was near the middle of our field of red dots. His hospital, obviously. I sighed grumpily. "Oh."

He didn't give me the creepy grin I expected, but continued to have the blank expression he usually wears. Other than his eyebrows, he seems to use his body for non-verbal cues more than his face, and when he does make a facial expression it seems too deliberate. Like a see, human, I am communicating with you! kind of thing.

"Yep! Slightly north of center, of course."

Of course?

He let his hand drop, and pushed his glasses up with the other. "The effects... are moving downriver, yes?" Towards all those cities and industry on the coast. Shit.

I stared at the map. The pity I was still feeling for the scary predator got mixed with a feeling of... responsibility, I think. What if this piece of mineral, this puteshestite, really was causing all of this misery? What if I could find it, and we took it away? What if doing that could show whether puteshestite caused Area characteristics, rather than Areas somehow creating puteshestite?

What if I'm the only person who could find this sample?

So that's how I managed to make the stupid decision today. The combination of pity and curiosity and the idea that I might fix something broken seemed to poison my brain into saying yes. Smarter Inner Me must've been asleep or something.

Normally we work on Saturdays too but this week it wasn't fieldwork, it was desk stuff, and Marcus said he'd show up at the room we'd taken over at the local USGS to pick me up in the morning.

"Back before closing time!" he claimed. Back before five in the afternoon, he meant. It's the Easter holiday weekend here, which doesn't change the days Daly works, but the office closes at five. I didn't care, really. My mental daily schedule is more focused around sneaking meals and caffeine in. I'd be back in time to have my three suppers.

I'm so stupid. But I said yes, and I just feel like I can't say no now.

April 19th

> 6:00
Jesus I'm gonna tell him no today.

> 19:30
Fuck me. I can't believe I didn't say no. Gonna pass out before I can write it all down.

I'm in so much shit.

April 20th

Goddamn. I'm in trouble. Fuck, so much trouble. Yesterday... all that happened, and I'm terrified of going to work tomorrow.

So in the morning I got a few hours in actually doing work, inputting our well stuff into MODFLOW and getting it ready to send to the nerds back at Daly. How the fuck are we still using FORTRAN in the twenty-first century?

Marcus didn't sneak in like I'd imagined. Sometime around nine in the morning he boldly waltzed right into our room—with cookies.

Want to get a bunch of geologists temporarily distracted and you don't have any fermented beverages? Bring in cookies shaped like trilobites and announce them, loudly, as "trilo bites!"

I remained at my desk, and closed my mouth when I realised it was hanging open. Marcus—who appeared to have spent the night under some bridge—marched over, bent slightly, and signed in Common while staring at me with raised eyebrows. Are you coming?

Maybe more like AreYouComingRightNowC'monLet'sGo!! since he was practically vibrating with energy. His t-shirt had something about geologists being "gneiss, tuff and a bit wacke" on it. Definitely wacke, I thought.

I had decided that morning to tell him no. That I changed my mind. That it was not my day to die and boy did I have a lot of measurements to type up. Dumping them all on Ernest is a dick move and I'm not one of those kinds of people. Ernest seems to even like me, or at least not mind working with me. Good, this was good. I'm hoping this job can make my reputation at Daly a good one.

I opened my mouth to tell him this. Something else came out instead.

"You actually baked those?"

He raised his eyebrows at me. "Not all the ovens here... are elemental combustion analysers."

What? "Wait, you—you made them here?"

He blinked a few times. "Where else would I find an oven?" Yeah, when he's not sleeping outdoors, he lives in his car. He beckoned me with his hand. Let's go.

"You... you bake cookies?"

He became very still and stared at me a moment. I didn't shiver, I didn't. Then he tilted his head, predatory-bird style. "As a chemist. Of course I bake." A pause, his eyes looking off to the side and then back to me. "I bake rocks. I bake cookies." He made a large, toothy grin. "You should see my subduction layer cake!"

This time I shivered. I dunno why. The idea of a monstrous creature baking pastries, wearing a little apron saying Feed the Cook or something.

His grin left and he stared at me again. That feeling of pity, the tickle of curiosity and the heavy weight of responsibility sank back onto me, and I knew I was going to get up from my chair.

Which I did. While most people were still over by the trilo-bites table, I followed Marcus outside to the parking lot. I had my backpack with me, with food for third breakfast, cigarettes and little else. It had been warm all week so I was just wearing my long shorts, flip-flops and t-shirt but also wore my zip-up hoodie.

I wish I knew why my feet can't stand the sensation of shoes, and whether it has anything to do with Weston's. The hoodie absolutely does—I'm pretty sure my sped-up metabolism is why I feel cold when everyone else is complaining about the heat, and Weston's sets your body temperature to pre-fever levels—thirty-nine degrees, usually. Which makes the shoeless-feet thing weird. Even winter outdoors in sandals takes a good half hour before it bothers me.

"Can we take one of these?" he asked, pointing to the field trucks. We get to use some of them for driving to our work sites. Unfortunately we're not getting a big thump truck for the seismic imaging. No, that's gonna be a giant circus-strongman sledgehammer party.

I scanned the parking lot. "You didn't come in your car-strosity?"

"Oh, I did." He looked down at me. "I'd rather leave it here."

I thought that was strange, but I shrugged, went back inside to grab keys—I'm happy not to be in that ancient, messed-up Oldsmo-steinian deathtrap of his—and we walked over to the closest personal truck, a Silverado. Marcus headed for the driver side.

"Uh, what are you doing?" I waved the keys at him. "No way. No. You are not driving." I shook my head at him. "I'm driving. You drive like a goddamn cat on cocaine."

He stopped, showed me his teeth, and got into the passenger side. He may not like shifting, but he sure loves driving. He does it terribly, though. I still don't know if he actually even has a license, or how he'd ever get one without immense bribery.

I lit a cigarette once I was in the truck. I could feel the nerve tension, the twitchy need to move parts of my body just a little bit, starting already. It was still early in the day, so this bothered me.

"Ah, the sweet smell of polonium in the morning!" Marcus exclaimed cheerfully.

"Polonium?"

"Yep! Tobacco... concentrates polonium on its leaves. And lead daughters! From radium in fertilisers." I gave him a look, and he only raised his eyebrows in amusement and wriggled his fingers at me.

Well, fuck me then. I sighed and mentally added polonium to the nine thousand other carcinogens I'm inhaling every damn day. I'd started smoking when I was twelve or thirteen, can't remember. It was surprisingly easy to quit at fifteen, when I realised I didn't want a deadbeat life and would need money if I ever made it to university.

Once Bob triggered my symptoms in grad school though... I was resigned to using anything I could to suppress that repetitive, uncomfortable urge to move all the time. I learned the term akathisia. Akathisia fucking sucks, I hate it. How can I bitch about the wanksock-washing Service poisoning people with a drug that relieves it when I'm basically doing the same damn thing with cigarettes?

Anyway, since this vehicle has a normal sound level, I could actually listen to something while driving. That's not the case with Marcus' car. I don't know what he did to that thing, but it sounds like a goddamn jet engine capable of rotating Jupiter.

Terror requires a soundtrack, and I just needed some tunes. Didn't care what. Rock and roll... "truck quit-dawg died-woman left me" country... local French gumbo accordion stuff... whatever. But when I turned the radio on, Marcus got squirmy. He's normally very precise in his movements, but I kept seeing him shift around in his seat out of the corner of my eye.

Turns out he can't stand music. Who knew? After not even ten minutes he politely asked if I could turn the "rhythm noise" off. I kept driving, considering whether to leave it on anyway, but relented after a moment. I didn't want to be in some stupid rotting abandoned hospital with a cranky predator. Of course I didn't want to be in a stupid rotting abandoned hospital at all.

"Okay, so who's Paul Farmer and why'd they name a hospital after the guy?" I asked instead.

I didn't necessarily expect him to know, but if I can't use music to take my mind off the incredibly scary-stupid act I was about to commit, then conversation would have to do. Not that Marcus is much of a conversation partner. He can sometimes be as quiet as Ernest.

"Infectious disease specialist," he answered, surprising me. He played air-piano. "Highly respected. Especially amongst those who... cannot easily pay." Farmer'd been working in communities hardest hit by these diseases, he told me, pulling money in for research and facilities, and trying to find cures and treatments that were feasible in places with damn near no infrastructure, funding, or political stability. "Died in 1998. Quake in Haiti."

"The huge Leogane quake?" That was a particularly nasty one. Two hundred and fifty years of built-up stress between two plates (and maybe a third whose existence is heavily contested) finally slip-dip-whipped in such a devastating crustal jerk, turning almost everything above and nearby built by humans into dust and rocks. Farmer and the people working with him were buried under the concrete rubble of the very hospital they'd worked so hard to build.

Someone who died like that, and so young, must be considered a fucking saint. My view of the guy, whoever he was, went way up. So we were heading to a hospital named after an infectious disease Mother Teresa. I wasn't sure if that was comforting in any way or not.

Marcus had brought his ratty messenger bag with a flashlight, extra batteries, a mostly-empty box of nitrile gloves, alcohol hand wipes, some white sample bottles and plastic baggies, and the requisite giant Sharpie. What he didn't have was food—except for a few trilo-bites—and we stopped at a sub place along the highway to stock up.

I stayed in the truck and munched my third breakfast while Marcus went inside to pick up about fifteen subs, some coffees and bottles of water, watching the normal happy people entering and leaving the breakfast place next door. People who weren't sick, people who weren't about to wander off into jungle hell with an insistent creature from outside, people busy worrying about maybe the bills and kids and stuff. People who didn't need to eat three breakfasts, two lunches and several suppers to make it through a day.

My mood had dropped by the time Marcus got back in, and at his direction I drove the rest of the way mostly feeling sorry for myself and with not much to say.

After turning off the highway, the roads quickly became small and after several turns they had that old, broken-up asphalt of once a decade maintenance. We were in the middle of outside in an unpopulated basin of the Long River flowing to the Gulf, just north and east of Lafayette. If humans hadn't been fighting the river further north, this area would be all raging—the new exit to the Gulf. Instead, people try to carefully regulate it like it's not the explosive bucking-bronco dirt-hose that it is. People are dumb, but... yeah. Those nasty chemical plants. Those money-generating shipping ports.

Those cities full of people. I get it.

Ominously, a large sign which looked kinda new stood on the side of the road.

NO HUNTING
NO FISHING
NO NOTHING
GO HOME

A little further, I noticed a familiar-looking pile of vines, a small mountain of green, off to one side of the road. Marcus turned his head to track it as we passed. It reminded me of the house by our first well.

Shortly afterwards we turned onto a short concrete-paved driveway headed by a plywood-covered sign (I assumed this was the main entrance sign) which widened directly into an overgrown parking lot, surrounded by vine-covered trees. The lot seemed to wrap around the building to one side.

I was rather underwhelmed. The place might be named after Infectious Disease Mother Teresa, but the building before me was small, single-story, and the large front windows were boarded up with plywood. The plywood had turned dark from moisture, but there was no graffiti. It looked as though it were built maybe in the fifties or sixties at the latest. I must've said something out loud.

"Doing asbestos they could," Marcus said cheerfully. I gave him a dark look, but held back the swear words that wanted to escape.

He pointed towards the leafy tree-shapes. "Could we... park there?"

I looked at him, suspicious. "Why?"

He continued looking out the windows, as if scanning for something. "No need to announce ourselves too loudly," he said finally.

"To who?" I asked.

"To whom." Irritating fucker. He finally looked at me and did the cartoony shrug. "Anyone? Everyone?"

"Like cops?" I trusted Marcus when he'd said nothing had moved in, so while the thought of wandering around inside a creepy empty building scared the crap out of me, I was maybe more scared of being seen. Here I was, driving a Department of Interior vehicle, at a place I didn't really have permission to visit, about to commit breaking and entering. The truck's doors have "USGS" in giant letters and the license plate has a big "I" on it. If anyone from any part of the States' government saw any of this, my job would very likely be toast.

I hadn't realised until that moment how much that had bothered me, because I'd been so focused on the hospital. So I carefully waded the truck backwards into the greenery, as deep as I dared, and turned the engine off. I ate a sub and downed two coffees, while Marcus ate three. I'm always amazed at how fast he can make food disappear—he was finishing the third sub as I neared the last bites of my single sandwich. All while still being able to complain about how stupid it is to eat with the breathing hole, or breathe with the eating hole, or whatever the hell his problem is. Doesn't seem to slow him down in the slightest.

He took a little plastic bag of turquoise-coloured crystally powder from his bag and shook some into his coffee and swirled it. He'd done this back at 50 Mile too, so I didn't say anything but did stare.

"Flavouring," he said as if I'd asked, without looking up. He guzzled the cup empty in one go.

"Melanterite, you called it?" He'd used a couple of names for it, though.

"Yep." He set the cup into the sack we were using for trash and gave me a look of anticipation. The one for when he thinks I'll be afraid of something, which amuses him. I waited.

"Hunting's not good around here," he said finally. "Too many chemicals in everything."

I had never explicitly asked, and keep forgetting to look it up, but I think that stuff must make things taste like blood.

We stuffed the rest of the food and his things into my backpack. I took a big breath, looking out across the sun-filled, weed-choked parking lot at the building I was supposedly going to find some rock in.

It's daytime, I told myself. Marcus said nothing's living here. We'll get in and get out. Back just after lunchtime. I had doubts on many of those things.

And then Marcus started untying his dirty red high tops. I stilled as I watched him, and after he had stuffed his socks into them, he sat back up and looked at me with raised eyebrows. Problem?

So he was going to shift back. Un-shift. Whatever it's called. After a moment I decided maybe that was better—wouldn't I rather have a Surgeon with me in that place than a human? I shook my head at him, but he kept staring.

"Uh, it's fine. I just—I've been preparing myself for this, and I expected... I dunno. That I'd be going in there with someone I could talk with instead of... something I talk at. That's all."

During our field work last summer, I'd asked him how well he understood human speech when he was himself. Not everything, he'd admitted, explaining that while simple, direct statements seemed fine, a complex conversation between multiple people was "rather beyond my abilities."

"Human brains... have structures dedicated to human languages," he'd told me then, pointing to his own head. "We don't." He also took that moment to inform me that I talked too much anyway and he was pretty sure he ignored eighty percent of everything I told him and so far that was working out just fine, wasn't it? Har har.

He looked back down at the shoes and pushed them to one side, and then pulled off a ring I'd never noticed from his hand and dropped it into one of them.

"What's that for?" I asked before I could stop myself. Not my business, but too late.

"Same reason as... the rest of this," he replied, gesturing to his clothes and the shoes. He pushed his glasses up his nose, paused, and briefly lifted them. "Except these. Seems I have bad eyes." He ticked his fingers against the inside of the truck door restlessly. "Maybe I always have bad eyes." He showed me teeth. "No idea!"

"That looks like a wedding ring," I said.

"I say I only date rocks." He held his hands out. "Doesn't always work."

A wave of disgust went through me as my sub tried to come back up.

"Ew. Ew! People actually want to date you?" I didn't gag, but I did have to swallow a few times. Even not knowing what he was, I couldn't see why anyone would want to go out with someone who looks like they wandered out of a senior dementia facility.

"Horrifying, no?" he replied. I nodded, but now as I write this I'm wondering if it was also sarcasm. Hard to tell.

I thought back to my time at Mines, where he was working under the guise of a temporary researcher and was required to teach classes to get lab access. I didn't see him much while there, but heard about him. He was considered weird, but while it's sooo obvious to me that he's faking human, people seemed to just accept he's really a man, one with "charming eccentricities." Like picking food from the floors, looking like he sleeps outdoors, and smiling like he was about to eat you. People are so dumb.

He opened the door with a bit of difficulty due to the plants now pushing against it, and hopped out barefoot. I got out too, grabbing some smaller branches I could break off and placing them over the hood of the thankfully dark-coloured truck. I hoped any eyes from the sunlit parking lot wouldn't immediately notice it.

We crossed the lot towards the boarded-up building, my every step making me clench my teeth. I followed Marcus not to what I thought was the front entrance, but a small grey door off to the side. It looked like an exit-only door. I didn't see any doorknobs or anything. Stuff was growing enthusiastically around the edges, as if ecstatic nobody was mowing and weeding anymore. Marcus paused in front of it.

He stood there, standing in his disguise except with bare feet, and my hands grabbed my cigarettes and lighter automatically as he raised his hairy eyebrows and wriggled his fingers at me. I tried to let the first blast of nicotine do its thing. Was he trying to freak me out right before we walked into an abandoned building in the middle of fucking nowhere?

"I have a way in," he told me, pointing in a way that suggested he'd climb over the roof to somewhere in the back or something. Then he gestured to the small grey door. "I'll open this from within."

"Fine," I said as casually as I could. "I'll wait here."

After a short nod at me and without another word, he unbuttoned his pants with the weird zippers on the pockets, took off and carefully folded his glasses, and suddenly there was an explosive growth of grey pushing out of his back. It turned into segments, which grew grey jointed legs. The growing middle pushed the clothing off both ends, an insect-like head peeking out of the shirts and two long spiky bits at the end pushing off the pants.

In what always seems like much too short a time, there was a long pale centipedey thing in front of me with massive, slender front claws and two long antennae unfolding out from above large black eyes. The antennae opened a thousand little branches, becoming pastel Christmas trees which swept the air around us. Getting his bearings, or checking for danger maybe.

I had somehow forgotten about the feather dusters in the face thing he does, and made spitting noises while I stabbed my cigarette into the empty air where they had been a second earlier. "Gross," I muttered. He'd done it nearly every time he'd shifted during the summer field work until it almost seemed a kind of weird greeting, like hello I am me now except I'm also sure he likes grossing me out. Maybe he keeps mental track of how often he can make me gag, I dunno.

So I waited by the door as the many-legged insectoid lobstrosity scuttled around the corner of the building, sucking hard on that cigarette and finishing in record time. Damn near burned my lips. I carefully placed the filter back into my cigarette box, a habit from leave-no-trace camping, and debated taking out another one. Deciding against it, I put the box back into my backpack—and suddenly wobbled and took a step to the side to steady myself, because I realised I'd been feeling everything around me since maybe before we'd even gotten out of the truck, and hadn't noticed.

The hell...? I made a slow circle where I stood, now that I was paying attention to everything. The walls of the outside of the hospital, the wiring in them, and some of the space inside. Stuff which felt maybe like furniture in there. The ground at my feet, the little roots underneath, the surprisingly-thick vadose zone... huh. This area is all swamp, yet I couldn't find the water table. How the hell did someone think this was a place to build anything? Yet under the building walls was... more wall. Felt like concrete. It went down deep, and around the outside was something I thought was compacted clay. Maybe they filled the area? Still dumb.

But this was when I realised something else, which I could see once I bothered to look. The whole building was sinking. The grey door Marcus was going to open for me was still above the ground, but the boarded-up front was a good step lower and the plywood had started warping to accommodate. Looking and feeling at this, I shivered and seriously considered just going back to the truck and driving back. This was just stupid, why am I here?

I made an effort to ignore all the parts moving inside my body, my guts chowing down on that sub and the coffee moving through. Hmm... I hadn't needed to work at that until I became aware of the sensation. That's good, I guess? Sigh. Maybe this'll become like hearing, I dunno. I hope so.

I tried to go back to ignoring it, with limited success, until I felt a massive wormy shape approaching the other side of the door. With surprisingly little sound, I heard—felt—the door handle inside turning and a slit of darkness appeared.

I stepped up to the open door and stopped, looking in. I could faintly see an insect-like head somewhat larger than a beach ball, large black eyes with those hand-sized silver rings that I assume are pupils pointed at me. Two mandibles with tiny black serrations opened and closed a few times. The creature had backed up, but was still holding its head and thorax up in the air, to my height. The massive front claws were folded almost politely in front of it, mantis-style. I could just see, but mostly feel, the pair of legs holding the balled-up bundle that was clothing against the body, and the hard folded pair of glasses in the middle. It stood there, looking at me.

I was briefly back at the chemistry lab at Mines, in the dark, pushing open an emergency exit door to let in a frightening, dangerous creature. It bothers me that I still don't know why I did that. I shook my head to get back to the present, and pulled the door wider and stepped in.

"Yeah, yeah, you let me in this time, whatever," I muttered as I carefully let the door close. The strip of outdoor light vanished. More through my awareness than the bit of dim light still making its way in, I knew ~~its~~ his antennae were slowly rising up in amusement. I rummaged in my bag for the flashlight. It felt strange knowing exactly where it was by feel, my hand slowed down only by the food and other items having migrated to the top. Granular convection strikes again.

It was one of those insanely bright LED beams, burning my eyes. I swept the beam around, which showed a surprisingly fully-furnished front reception area. There were still signs on the walls pointing to various departments, where to check in, a fire escape map of the building marking exits and extinguishers... rows of chairs, and shuttered windows at a counter. Large plants in pots sat between the groups of chairs, their plastic leaves covered with a thin sheen of dust and spider webs. If the fluorescent lights had been on and the windows open, you'd think this place was ready for patients and visitors. Unbelievable.

I waved the small light in Marcus' direction. "You first. Show me where you've been. We'll go from there." The sound of my voice in the silence was spooky. The large arthropod immediately dropped to the floor and skittered down a hallway. The way it moved was almost like liquid, and it was fast. I half-ran to keep up, my mind flashing back to jogging along to match his speed walking as a man back at 50 Mile.

Not far along it suddenly dodged to the right, through a doorway, and I followed into a little closet of a room with lots of folders shelved into the walls. The patient file room. A very small room, nearly filled with curved leggy people-eating arthropod. I only took a step inside.

It waved a slender claw at the far wall, indicating the files, and then came next to me to grab something from a drawer in a small metal desk. I froze instead of jumping back, managing to keep my cool as a claw fished out a huge ring of keys. Like something a janitor would have.

"What is that? Are those the keys to... everything?" I asked in a whisper. Nobody here, empty building, but I couldn't make myself speak louder than that.

It ticked once in the affirmative, using the cobbled-together communication system we'd worked out during the summer fieldwork. The claw held out the key ring, which I gingerly took from it. Him.

I stood there, still holding the keys out, thinking about the room. I didn't have any ideas, or feelings about anything. Nothing at all.

"Marcus... look. I know you think I can just find stuff, but... I don't know if that's going to work here. I don't—I don't know how it works. How to do it." The silver rings in the black eyes looked at me.

I tried again. "I mean... I don't do this on purpose. Consciously. It almost always feels like an accident. Or it seems logical, like stuff is just where it should be. I dunno." I gestured to the wall of folders with the hand holding the keys. "I don't, like... there's nothing particular about any of those. But I don't know if that means your patient's not in there or if it's just not working right now." I shrugged. "Real Westies can do this stuff in their fucked-up sleep." Supposedly. Unlike the feeling sensation, the finding-things stuff is almost more like a rumour, an urban legend.

If this disappointed Marcus, he didn't show it. Instead, he darted towards me in a way that this time did make me stagger backwards out of the room and into the hallway, and he sorta flowed out after me. He's so certain I can do this, I thought. I shook my head and followed the silvery-grey river down the dark hall. Deranged certainty that I can help him.

I found myself feeling bad that I might fail him, but what could I do? This wasn't my idea anyway. I could try. That's all I could offer him. Try and see what works. God I wished I wasn't in a creepy empty hospital though.

I followed him to a set of closed double doors, which somehow he'd easily opened and slipped through. By the time I reached them they were already closing again. Fire doors, I thought. With the power out, all the double doors separating each department must have automatically fallen shut. This ended up being a good thing later on.

At the end of the hall was a stairwell, next to a set of elevator doors with big Patient Elevator signs on them. Walking towards them, I stumbled a little in disorientation. I stopped to shake my head and figure out what was wrong, staring at my feet and black flip-flops. My nail polish job from two weeks ago was looking pretty bad. Under my feet were the strips of rubber of the sandals. Under the rubber was a layer of flooring. Under the flooring was a layer of something hard. Concrete? Under the concrete was, a little off to my right, a large pipe with thick walls. Under the pipe was... nothing.

My senses reached out to either side, weird fingers of attention touching the walls and following them down. And down and down, past the nothing under the floor until I felt another hard flatness. Another floor. Ug. Another hallway.

I started walking again, this time letting my brain reach forwards towards the elevators, and the stairwell. I never like the way elevator shafts feel, but this one told me that, yeah, it only went down. The stairs were in another shaft, with a landing and a snaky arthropod which was waiting for me by the door at the bottom.

I shook my head again, which didn't help at all with the slight dizziness. There's a fucking basement here? I thought again about buildings with basements in places with stupidly high water tables. Why not just build up? Why was there only a single ground story?

I tried to focus on my eyes again and shined the light around. Everything looked pretty normal, or however normal I would expect a small hospital to look like, although a bit further down the hall to my right was a small pile of somethings on the floor. Everything else had been so clean, so it looked strange, but I couldn't tell what it was. Like someone had dumped a pile of wine-bottle corks.

I followed Marcus into the stairwell, passing the landing and reaching the bottom before my brain reminded me I was supposed to be terrified. The rest of me dutifully responded. I stepped out into a basement hallway with my hair standing on end, moving as quietly as possible and trying to flash my light in all directions at once. The weird brain sensation kept stretching out as far as it could, brushing against floors, walls, ceilings. Behind me too, so I didn't have to keep checking nothing was quietly following us. Above me, so nothing could fall down on my head like those stupid stingy caterpillars. No, my imagination was sooo not helping.

This basement wasn't entirely a storage-basement thing though; after passing rooms still filled with stretchers and wheelchairs, I saw it was being used as regular hospital space. Had been, anyway. After the storage areas was the blood lab, radiology, laundry rooms and some physician's offices. What kind of doctor would accept an office without a window? Maybe the doctors working here weren't so picky or something.

Chills came and went as I walked as quietly as I could, holding the janitorial key ring in a tight fist to prevent them from jangling, wincing at each step in my flip-flops. Not the smartest footwear choice, because only my toes hold them to my feet so they make noise no matter what.

Flip. Flop. Flip. Flop.

God, if anything were living here, it'd hear me a mile away. I forced the thought away.

Marcus, only making a quiet ticking, kept moving straight along the hallway, but through some combination of terror and curiosity I stopped often, peeking into rooms. This was radiology. Christ, he was right. Everything was still sitting in there: I saw papers and a pen atop a little wheeled cart. A little cubby with a control panel, and an exam table dominating the room with I guess the X-ray machine hanging above it from the ceiling. Aprons hung on a hook. It was so ordinary except the room was completely dark, if it weren't for my flashlight.

Another room had a vertical black tube with a sign on the wall: Dark Room. I shivered. These were all dark rooms, and they looked as if people had just been here a few moments ago. As if everyone had just gotten up and walked away. Pens and bottles on tables, Post-Its stuck to computer monitors (computers! left behind!) with passwords or instructions. Only the electricity off, the darkness, and the stale smell of the air told me people hadn't been here in a long time.

Back in the hallway, I passed a large machine parked against the wall. I think it was also an X-ray machine. Just sitting there. Don't those things cost a buttload of money? Why wouldn't someone at least take it out and bring it to another hospital?

After going through a half-open set of double doors, the sign above saying Pathology, I tried to think about this patient we were looking for, or at least the sample they supposedly removed from his body. I still had no ideas or feelings or anything. The only thing I felt was that my mental model of the building plan was off somehow.

According to the evacuation maps posted all over, the entire hospital seemed to just be two levels, first floor and basement, arranged in a large square. Or, the basement level was a square. Upstairs only had three sides. But something was a little off. I chalked it up to my unfamiliarity with the building and kept focusing on the three pathology rooms.

The first room was just an office, with books, papers, a desktop computer... a coffee cup with the stains of evaporated coffee still in it. A bunch of papers and books were on the ground, as if they'd been pushed off the desk. There were the large manila patient folders in here, but nothing seemed right or interesting to me. Still, I lifted a few up to read the names. What if that guy's file is right here and I didn't see it because I didn't look? I sighed and decided to move on to another room.

Stepping back out, I finally saw the first signs that everyone here hadn't simply stood up and walked out. The wall had a large dark stain I hadn't seen at first, behind the pathology office door. It looked brown in the light, and like a splatter. Yeah, I had a pretty good idea what that was. I stepped gingerly into the next room.

It had lab stuff in it, little countertops with plastic bottles, glass tube holders, microscopes (microscopes! just sitting there!), still more computers (!!), drapes, bright red trash cans with biohazard stickers, even a section with whatever the medical version of a fume hood is. On one wall was one of those things they hang X-rays on. Everything was pretty cluttered with junk, and I was amazed at how Marcus wound his way around all the little wheeled chairs without moving any of them. That scary precision again.

He had managed to turn around in the small room so he was facing me. I glanced around, at a loss at what I should do here.

"Did you, uh, ever shift down here and pick through all this stuff?" I whispered. There were little bottles all over, and what looked like a mini-fridge but covered with warning stickers. I thought I'd rather not open that if he already had, because it probably would stink to high heaven.

Yes, he clicked.

I looked around the room again and shrugged. "So it's not here." If he'd already looked at everything, he knew it wasn't here, right? Did he expect me to wade through all this crap?

No, he agreed. I took a last wave of my flashlight around the room, and turned to leave.

"Uh, so what happened here?" I asked as I passed the wall stain again. I both felt and heard him following me back into the hallway. I didn't really expect an answer, since he'd never said he knew what exactly had happened here and, well, he couldn't talk anyway.

But he ticked out our code for bad. A bad thing happened here.

"Well no shit," I grumbled quietly. Not knowing what else to do, I just kinda wandered further along the hallway, still peeking into rooms now and then, but paying more attention to how the walls and floor looked. I didn't see any more creepy stains, but I did see another pile of wine cork things.

I shined the light onto them and took a closer look. Light brown, the pile reminded me a bit like a woodchip pile but tall, the top reaching at least halfway up to my knees. The cork-chunks felt really... compact? Hard. I shivered, this time because of the idea that my brain was somehow touching something that looked like shit. Animal feces. It didn't smell, and looked very dry, but standing over it, I was pretty sure that's what it was. And I got angry enough to actually use my voice instead of a whisper.

"What the fuck is this?" I glared at the creature that had stopped behind me. I waggled my flashlight beam at the pile. "You said nothing is living here. So what the fuck is this? Cause it looks like shit." I whipped the beam around the rest of the hallway before shining it on a spot on the floor between me and Marcus. "Do I want to know what kind of thing makes this kind of mess?"

I stepped past the pile and waited as Marcus extended his antennae and waved the open feathery branches at it. I suppose if he were a man at that moment he'd have some shitgoblin excuse like "No no, this is just a chewed-wood collection made by small peaceful woodland critters" or something. But he went very still and after a moment the branches folded back up against the main antennal stalks, which he whipped back against his thorax shell.

"Something's moved in since you were last here, huh?"

Perhaps. In our click-pidgin, one click was some kind of yes, two were no, and three were "maybe" or "I don't know." One of the first rules we set up, though it sucked because it relied on me being good at Twenty Questions. During the weeks of fieldwork with him, I started interpreting his replies mentally with how he speaks, and all the little body movements I'd started noticing over time. The more complex rules we came up with later rely a lot on both his non-verbal communication and context. Lots of context. Most of the possible "answers" were fairly work-related too, so... works okay with geology, but we weren't outdoors digging samples out of the sides of a coulee here. Still, he made a wave with his front claws that we used for time. Older, it means.

Either he thought these scat piles were older than his last visit, which I didn't believe he would have missed—unless he had lied to me to get me to set foot in this place—or they were oldest in the time since his last visit.

Yeah, I'm not so great in guessing stuff, so his answer didn't really help me too much.

"Christ. Okay, I don't want to meet whatever made these, 'cause I saw one upstairs too so it moves around." I irritably shined the intense light beam right into the large pale bug face, which satisfyingly turned to avoid it. "I am not dying in this place today, you hear me? So we're going to walk a circle around this floor and then we're gonna go back upstairs, and if I don't find anything, notice anything, feel anything or whatever the fuck, then we're leaving. Got it?" I moved the light away from him, and realised I was shivering.

Fucking pussy, I scolded myself, but you know, fear in the presence of creepy animals in a creepy empty building in the middle of outside is completely reasonable. I am a pussy, but I knew this was not one of those times when I shouldn't be scared.

We continued the circuit downstairs, coming across a kitchen and small eating area. A cafeteria, which reminded me that I was hungry. Of course. I sighed with a scowl nobody could see and set my backpack onto a clean-enough-looking table and pulled out the bags of subs. I heard—felt—Marcus stop rummaging around the kitchen area and make his way over to me.

"How many?" I asked him. My voice sounded more cranky than scared. Liar.

Four, he ticked out.

I made a big deal of walking over several little tables away to place the unwrapped subs on. I still don't know how he drinks and only got out a coffee and some water for myself.

We ate as quickly as we do, I guess, my brain grumbling to me the whole time about how shitty all this eating is and what the fucking hell is my body even doing with this energy I'm consuming anyway? and just the usual self-hate that runs through my head when I'm doing things like eating or showering or walking where I have little to occupy my thoughts. Better than paying attention to the noises the giant bug was making as it scarfed food on the other side of the dark room, I suppose.

They weren't working of course, but I let a bunch of the morning's coffee out into one of the toilets. I'd kinda expected the bowls to be filled with, I dunno, seep or something. I assume toilets below ground level have some kind of pumps running all the time to keep the turds flowing up, and it's been a few years since this place has had any electricity. And there's the fact that the building is literally sinking into the earth. But they were bone-dry. Huh. I should ask Harold about that. He knows lots of engineering stuff.

Time to finish the circuit downstairs, and except for not having found anything yet, I was starting to feel pretty okay about this. No rock? Not my problem, so long as I get the hell out of here intact.

As we came back along pathology, my brain was still kinda brushing edges all around me in almost a passive way. It still felt weird in how it also reached behind me, under me, in me. Ug. Could I get used to this? I suppose I have to, don't I? It's only going to get worse.

And I guess I have to give it credit, because as we passed a door for maybe the third time labelled Custodian, I stopped and went back. It was bigger than it should be.

Or, there was a normal-sized closet, but the back wall, which I realised had a door, butted up against more nothing. I'd learned quickly that a nothing-feeling meant air, and underground that meant a room. Another room behind the closet.

"Huh," I muttered.

The wriggly monster ahead of me had stopped and curved its front half to face me. I shined the light on the door, then glanced down at the key ring in my other hand. The doorknob of the closet didn't turn, so I hoped the key I needed was on this thing.

I've never fumbled for keys that I can remember, just as I've never lost socks in the laundry or wandered around a parking lot looking for my car. This key ring had a buttload of keys, all different sizes and ages. Let's try this, I thought, and closed my eyes while thumbing through the keys. To the one I needed.

I took a breath and tried it. For some reason I felt surprise when it slid right in and turned. I've never had a key not do that, but it was like I expected it wouldn't work.

Because I've never thought about it. I frowned at that, about how I've lived my life and being abnormal in such an unremarkable way that nobody, not even me, ever noticed. It's the one (possible) symptom of Weston's that didn't develop after Bob's touch. It's just always been there.

Anyway, I opened a janitor closet door and saw, well, janitor stuff. Buckets, mops, a yellow folding sign with Caution Attention Wet Floor Plancher Mouillé. Against the back wall were coveralls hanging to the left, and white suits to the right. Bunny suits. And sorta between those, another door, also with stencilled letters: Materials Management.

I had taken a step in to shine my light around, but stepped back out into the hallway. There was absolutely no other sound and more than ever I felt like I was in some kind of tomb. I looked back at Marcus, tilted my head towards the door and stepped back to let him sniff around. His antennae fluffed open, swept around, and closed again. He kept them raised in interest and swivelled that insect-like head back at me. Would I open that door? I blew my breath out slowly, let Marcus back out of the closet and stepped back in, doing my key trick again to find another key... and coming up blank.

I looked down at the keys in my hand and frowned, flipping through the keys. None of them were right. I looked back at Marcus, who was half-raised in the doorway to my height. I hadn't noticed and that spooked me.

"The key's not here," I whispered. Back to whispering.

The arthropod tilted its head in a jerk like a raptor, then made me shrink back as it reached a long claw past me to the doorknob. And turned it.

"Oh duh," I muttered, feeling extra stupid. The door opened away, outwards from the closet and into... a vile stench.

I covered my nose with my hand. "Oh God," I muttered, and looked at the creature next to me. I waved my hand at him. "I'm not going in there first, bucko. It smells like death in there." Man, I thought drilling invert was gross, but this was bad.

His antennae did the slow rise of amusement and without hesitation he unfurled his antenna-branches and poked his head through the door. After a moment of stillness, he flowed through it. Only then did I dare shine the light inside and take a step in.

It was another lab room. This one looked visited by a barroom fight, a pack of wild toddlers, or maybe a small tornado, with stuff on the two long tables all knocked over. There was even a computer monitor on the floor, seemingly still whole but lying on its side. The walls were white cinder block like everything else in the basement level, with cabinets attached above on the left and right. The far wall had a gap in the middle, suggesting closets or something on either side. Under the tables were wheeled chairs and I guess little fridges or storage boxes, like in the pathology room.

The tables had my attention because of all the stuff strewn all over them, and I looked for what could be the source of the smell. Like in the other lab, there were test tube racks of different colours, centrifuges, microscropes with two sets of viewing heads, and lots of boxy devices that resembled desktop printers sitting around with curved see-through blue covers. Still, I glanced up, shining the light. One of those low suspended office ceilings, with panels yellowed from time and fluorescent lights.

On the wall to my right was a little metal box with a number pad and a thick tube sticking out the bottom. It made me think of the pneumatic tubes at my bank. A printed sign on the wall said Do NOT switch this unit OFF or ABOVE—then half-covered with a sticker with something scribbled on it that looked like "17t"—If you do reagents WILL be and the rest was torn off. Underneath that was another brown splatter, but smaller than the one we found earlier and with little black bits sticking to the wall. Ew.

I wondered if that was the source of the horrid smell, which made me think of both burning rubber but also fake sweetness, but there was a chemical element to it. What if a bottle had fallen and broken open, leaving something in the air that was slowly turning the insides of my lungs to burnt mush? I hoped if that were the case, Marcus would've noticed and warned me already.

I carefully stepped in, putting the keys in my shorts pocket and checking the floor for anything goopy or squishy I didn't want to step on or trip over, then ran the light up along the walls and cabinets. There were aging A4 printed signs taped all over that made the little hairs on my neck stand up, because they seemed so... I dunno. Banal. Instructions for the daily work done here. Normal, except it was, you know, a hidden lab room. One where apparently somebody or something went nuts and trashed the place.

I could see the desktop printer devices better as I tiptoed past them. Something called an ISE module, a photometric module, a pre-analytical unit, a "FACS," an immuno assay module... I didn't know what any of these things were or did but someone had thoughtfully label-printed names and instructions on a lot of them. I can guess what a "colony counter" is, and it made me suddenly worry about some open petri dish with a nasty-ass killer bug in it.

Check your samples
Are they spun or unspun?

I started imagining a mom-like figure running the lab, constantly telling everyone to clean up after themselves, don't leave things on or turn them off, stuff like that. I mentally named her Agnes. Bun and a lab coat.

WASH HANDS
after every run

That sign reminded me that I really didn't want to touch anything in here. What the hell was this four walls of underground disaster anyway? Why was it hidden behind a janitor closet? Something illegal, you moron. I slid my backpack from my back and rummaged inside for the box of nitrile gloves.

Marcus was wriggling around the other side of the tables, clicking and picking through things. He seemed to have no problems with the possibility that stuff in here might be covered with mummified entrail goop or something. Probably was thinking of eating it.

I rounded a table and staggered to a stop as I realised I was only now finally looking at the computer monitor on the floor. It was black, while I had imagined it was that vanilla-white—because I had only felt it when I'd walked in.

Shit, my brain's turning the stuff I'm feeling into visuals? It reminds me of how sometimes, after watching a black and white film, I manage to misremember it being in colour. And I immediately thought of this getting me in trouble, like at work. Suppose I thought I saw something and someone noticed I couldn't have? I squeezed my eyes shut and actually tried concentrating on the horrible smell filling the room.

And instead found myself making my way to the other corner of the table, where underneath was a narrow set of drawers. Second drawer down. I needed something in there.

"Marcus," I whispered, hand on the handle. Silence, then a slight rustling and a faint sensation of air moving behind me as I pulled the drawer open and pointed the flashlight in. There it was. Little sample jars, looking like something for hair wax, or very large pill bottles. I picked one up, the one we needed, and turned it in the light. The once-white label was stained as if it had gotten wet, and the ink was smeared and partially faded to purple, but I could read the name.

"Gerome Marie Stillwater."

I stared at it, blinking. I did it! I found the sample. I found Marcus' rock. There were even actually two bottles with the guy's name on it.

Marcus had been looming over my shoulder, but when I read the name out loud he dropped to the floor and started circling. I looked up from the bottle in my hand and watched the snaky creature run tight circles in the cramped space, stopping to look at me before circling again, like a dog waiting for a ball. Then I realised I had a stupid grin plastered on my face because my cheeks started to ache. I can't remember the last time I had any smile on my face, to be honest.

"Fucking hell." I shook my head at myself, and put both the bottles into one of the plastic baggies we'd brought. Sitting on top of the table, right above the drawers, were several large manila envelopes, all stained and looking like slimey mould had started growing on them. Two of them had Stillwater's name on them. Wow. The guy's file had gotten so full, they'd gotten a second envelope to hold all the test results and reports and things. Supposedly he'd only been at this hospital a little over a week.

"I suppose Bern'll want the guy's files too," I murmured as I pulled our empty sub sandwich bag around the file folders. I didn't want anything from this disgusting room touching the insides of my backpack.

Yep. Marcus was done circling and had moved over to the wall behind the second long table.

This was great. Still alive, found the rock, and it didn't even take too much time, really. "Okay, awesome sauce. Let's go!"

No! came the response, and excited ticking. The hell, what now?

I was still buzzing with the surprise of our success as I carefully made my way over to him. He was double-ticking bottles he'd found. From our field time, I knew what that meant. Read this to me. He wanted to know what was in these bottles, and it seems Surgeons can't read.

Seriously? I suppressed a sigh. I wanted to be out of here. Anxiety started gnawing at my guts again and my nose was still burning. Maybe this would be quick.

I gingerly picked each one up and duly read out the names. "N-Hexane. Toluene 99.9%. Absolute Ethanol..." Okay, this was the burny-burny section. Marcus motioned for some of them to go into my backpack.

"You want these?" I asked him, surprised. "Isn't most of this stuff out of date or something?" He only ticked an affirmative to my first question so I shrugged and kept reading as we moved along the counter.

"Tributylamine. Butyric acid for synthesis. Acrylamide suitable for... electrophoresis..." This place had a burny-burny section, a 'splodey-boom section, an caustic eat-through-your-skin section... at least they had grouped things by nastiness.

I can't remember everything I named, it was just weird lab stuff, but Marcus seemed to know exactly what he wanted to steal from a presumably secret lab room of an abandoned hospital in the middle of outside. Man, now we definitely can't get caught here by cops, I thought as I stuffed another bottle into my bag. Breaking, entering... stealing. Even if it was most likely all expired garbage.

He seemed to patiently want to check out each and every damn bottle. I wanted to get the hell out of there.

"Marcus, can we fucking go?"

Oh-no-no! He ticked out multiple sets of twos. I imagined this in his I'm too excitedly-entranced by this tiny stupid thing I found voice. Sometimes he'll get all excited about a bug he's seen, or a strange screw on an access panel to some ignored infrastructure box on a building, or a cloud.

We reached the back wall, and that chewing anxiety grew. Something was bothering me, which I figured was my pressing need to run out of this foul sinking building where people had been doing fuck-knows-what, jump into the truck and destroy the suspension by taking those potholes at top speed. Hell, just being in the hallway would be so much better. My nose and throat still burned a little from the stench, though by then I couldn't smell it as well.

My shoulder touched that back wall and that's when I freaked. My sickie brain-sense had outlined those two closet-rooms, the gap between them making up the little hallway. One closet had what I was pretty sure was a toilet, so that was just a bathroom. But the other room... it had a strange thick door, and no plumbing-anything that I could tell. It was just a room, with nothing in it—except now I felt someone laying on the floor. A human-shaped body. Nothing moving inside it, no breathing or heart beating. A fucking dead body. But that wasn't the worst part. Not at all.

"Marcus!" I hissed. "Someone's in there."

Marcus made a noise, a kind of chirrrp-sound that comes from him moving one of those legs against his thorax. His question-noise.

"Someone's dead in there. And... and... something... it's like. Gawd. It's like their guts are stretching out of their body up to the, the—a pipe. Up there near the ceiling." I pointed up. There was a bit of round ventilation piping sticking partway into the lab room, with a grate at one end—the only connection besides the thick door between the little room and the larger lab. As I shined the flashlight to it, I could see it—some kind of long things hanging out a bit. Tendrils. Tendril-entrails. Goddamn intestines.

"Can you..." I stopped, because I wasn't sure what I had planned on asking him. My brain was fuzzing.

I was shaking, and grabbed one of the long tables for support as my knees wobbled. Marcus flowed past me, antenna-branches out and twitching all around the closet's door and then reaching up towards the ventilation pipe above. The ceiling wasn't very high in this room, so he didn't have to raise himself up much to sniff it. After a moment, the branches closed and the antennae folded back over his thorax, and he turned his head to me.

Are you okay? This was good and bad signs followed by a chirp, one of those nightmare claws pointed at me.

"I'm fine, I'm..." I wasn't fine. I sank to a crouch, gloved hand still clutching the edge of the table. The mess in the room suddenly told a more graphic story. Someone was brought in here, and they freaked out and trashed the place until the lab workers could force them into the little room.

Or maybe the person was brought to the room, and then their ropey guts had shot out of their stomach and started grabbing people like some freakish Harryhausen cephalopodic beast. It Came From Beneath The Hospital. I held back a groan and only partly succeeded. It should be biologically illegal for brains to make imaginary cinematic horror films and play them over and over against your will like cheesy product jingles. You hear me, universe?

Marcus lowered himself back down to the ground and came near, staring with his little silver rings. I still had the flashlight in my other hand, backpack strap around my arm. I focused on breathing and trying to force that sense of feeling onto the little details of those printerlike devices on the tables. I didn't want to focus on the horrid smell anymore.

"Their intestines. Their intestines are coming out of their dead body and are... are kinda sticking out of that pipe. Marcus." I stared into his bug eyes. "Marcus. What the hell were these shitgibbons doing here?"

No idea! he ticked out. Pause. You okay?

"Can we leave now, please?" Not a whisper but a croak.

Yep.

Thank fucking god. Though I think as soon as I could stand up again I would have just left him there to enjoy the stench and intestinal monstrosity all by himself.

After I got up and shouldered a backpack that was now too heavy and, worse, made occasional clinking noises if I shifted it too much, I noticed we both scuttled out of there in no time. I pulled the heavy lab door shut behind us a bit too quickly, and I was already fishing the keys out of my pocket before stepping out of the janitor closet. This place should be locked up forever and the whole shitbrick building can sink until there's no trace of it on the surface, as far as I was concerned. There was a sort of satisfaction in turning that lock.

But I stopped, clutching the keys in my fist like I did earlier, feeling something crawl across my brain in a quick spider skitter. Above my brain. Above me. Upstairs.

I looked up, which is stupid because that doesn't do anything, but Marcus noticed and tilted his own insectoid horror head up as well. I wondered if he could hear anything; I couldn't.

"Something's walking up there, on two legs," I whispered. I didn't think it was some creature, but since we hadn't been expecting any people either, I was terrified.

The person, whoever it was, was already outside my range. It had almost been a blip, there and gone, because it seems I can only just reach a whole floor right above me. But I started walking in the direction they had gone, wincing again as my flip-flops flip-flopped and the heavy backpack clinked. I clenched my teeth. Marcus stayed still, his antennae out but without the fluff.

I rounded the corner and got another "glimpse" of the person upstairs, and realised they seemed to be headed to the elevators and stairs at the end of the hall, the same ones we had taken to get down here. I kept walking, as quietly as I could manage, but turned the flashlight off—something I would've thought just moments earlier that I'd never ever do in a gazillion years.

We had gone through two sets of those closed pairs of fire doors, and when I reached the first set I stopped to listen. Maybe I could hear the person walking down the steps? I could hear something. Because the person, a man, was calling out. I couldn't quite hear it what he was saying, but I got a shiver of fear from the tone. It sounded like a cop.

I stood there, in someone's closed-up building I didn't belong at, with a bag of stolen stuff hanging on my shoulder and a set of pilfered keys. Oh shit, shit, shit.

My mind started trying to come up with scenarios.

Hide until they leave—wait, if they're calling out they must know we're here. Did they find the truck? Did they see us enter? Did they see Marcus? Should we try to sneak out another exit and drive away before they can follow us? How many cops are here? Can we even get to the truck?

Maybe I should try to get Marcus to take the stuff and get away, and I just reveal myself with my hands up. Get it over with, say I just wanted to take a look at a scary building I'd heard about. Just trespassing! Urban explorer! I look young. This'll be minor. Oh wait shit but I took out one of the trucks for this. Uh, I don't have my own car, officer. It was stupid, I'm super sorry, I shouldn't have done it, I was just curious, officer.

The more I thought on it, all while hearing someone making their way down the stairs and calling out, the more I was convinced that running away or trying to hide would make the consequences ten times worse. No, I needed to just own up. Sorry officer, I didn't realise this was super illegal, there's nobody here anyway, right?

I turned my flashlight back on and walked back to the corner, where Marcus had followed me and stopped. I let my heavy bag slide off my shoulder, keys still held tightly in my hand.

"Okay, look. Take this stuff, and sneak out. You're good at sneaking around people, right? You can get this to the Michael's lab, and I'll distract the cops by showing myself. They won't look further if I come out. They'll just see some dumb girl went to see a scary building, right? I'm here alone, I didn't take anything or touch anything, and you get away—"

My whispering caught in my throat as the huge arthropod, in a move so quick I almost didn't even see or feel it, jumped at me and clamped huge mandibles tightly around my forearm, making me almost drop the flashlight. My other hand was clutching the keys and holding the strap of my backpack, which I had let carefully sink to the hallway floor.

It was biting me. Biting me!

I froze in panic and tried not to shit myself. Absolute terror filled me. What was it doing? It was biting me! This predator was going to paralyse me with its bite and hunt down the police too, now that everything's gone to shit. Falling back to instinct. I imagined it attacking everyone here and spending days carefully cutting off bits of our bodies to eat them while we remained alive to experience it.

That's what Surgeons do! That's why people call them Surgeons. They keep their prey alive while eating an arm here, a leg there, somehow staunching blood loss and preventing infection so the prey keeps breathing. Sucking out eyeballs as a snack. They do this in a lair where other predators won't disturb them, which this sinking abandoned building would be perfect for. One by one, all the humans who had carelessly entered this building in the middle of outside would vanish and the inhabited world would never know, because all anyone would find are some abandoned vehicles at an old hospital, maybe months or years later.

I might be reported missing, but I was reminded that nobody knew I was out here.

"Marcus!" I squeaked in a panicked whisper. "Marcus? What are you doing?" The creature remained still. I tried pulling my arm back, but nothing moved, as if it were stuck between two boulders. The mandibles weren't biting through my skin, just holding my arm so tightly I could feel my hand buzzing. "Marcus, please let go. Please. Let go. Please let go let go let go..."

My vision was filled with the huge insect-like face and two huge black bug eyes with their hand-sized silver rings pointed at me. I think part of me hoped saying a human name to the pale predator would remind it that it knew me. It knew me!

My voice never emerged as I kept begging with whispers. "Please let go, Marcus please? Please. Let me go, let go, let go, Marcus please..."

Down at the other end of the hallway, behind the two sets of closed fire doors, I thought I heard someone opening the stairwell door. My pleading ramble stopped as the feeling sense swept back behind me, reaching as far as it could past the doors. I couldn't feel anything further than the set of doors closest to us, but the voice calling out was definitely louder.

Only then did I hear the ticking that Marcus had been doing all along: tick-tick! Tick-tick! Tick-tick!

No! No! No!

I blinked, staring at the horrible expressionless bug face. The silver rings flickered between staring straight at me and looking up to the hallway behind me. I heard slow footsteps from heavy boots, echoing slightly in the bare hospital corridor, and could finally make out words.

"Y'all could just come out right now. C'mon now. I ain't going nowhere."

It was a raspy voice, an older man. It still made me think of cops, or provincial agents. It had a sound of authority, someone not afraid of creatures living in abandoned hospitals outside and casually expecting obedience. Like someone who hunts grizzlies out of boredom.

The tips of Marcus' antennae were curled slightly at the tips, like prehensile monkey tails. I've seen that two other times. Once when he was hurt badly, that night at the chemistry lab at Mines, and again one evening right after he shifted at our field camp in the 50 Mile Desolation. That was the day the man with the caved-in head had visited our camp, though I hadn't told Marcus about it. He'd told me later that he'd smelled blood that day.

He was afraid.

No! No!

"Oh." I turned my head away from the creature's head to look back at the fire doors. They didn't have those little windows you sometimes see in hospital hallway doors. There was a slight thump and a squeak as the first set of doors was pushed open.

Marcus isn't afraid of anything. Surgeons are apex predators. But now he was afraid, and he'd been trying to warn me. He stopped his frantic ticking.

I looked back at him. "That's not a cop, is it?"

No!

"Shit." If it wasn't a cop, who was it? What was it? I let go of my backpack's strap and reached over to the flashlight, still held in the hand of my trapped arm, and switched it off. It was a bit difficult because I still had the janitor keys held tightly between my other fingers, trying to keep them from making noise.

But the mandibles released my arm unexpectedly, making me drop the little flashlight. I sucked in air as it clattered onto the hard flooring. The person down the hall went still. So much for keeping silent.

I quietly bent down and grabbed the small cylindrical shape I could feel and picked up my backpack again, slower than I wanted so Marcus' filched bottles wouldn't clink. We needed to get out of there.

"You playing games, Stetz? You know, I have all day." There was a country drawl to it, but not like the people I've met down here in the States. No, this voice was harsh, cold, and gravelly. Unyielding Albertan rock.

I felt my eyes widen in the dark. Stetz? He knew who Marcus was? I pointed the flashlight against my hoodie and turned it on again, thankful it still worked, making only a faint light so Marcus could see me. Once the silver rings were pointing at me again, I waved my hands in a shooing motion, back where we had just come. Go back, go back. Then I clicked the light off, put it in my shorts pocket, and decided to take my flip-flops off and carry them.

The snaky arthropod remained still as I padded past and it flowed behind me as I hurried around the corner and back to the janitor's closet. My hands shook as I worked to unlock the door in the dark without those damn keys making jingley noises, and we heard the second set of fire doors open.

I yanked the door open, stepped in and pushed the Evil Hidden Lab door open, almost retching as the sweet burning stink rolled out and into my nose again, and stepped back to the side of the narrow closet to let Marcus sweep past, and to quickly slide my feet back onto my sandals. After pulling the janitor door shut, I felt with both my brain and my fingers for a lock on the inside, but there wasn't one. Dammit. I couldn't lock the door behind us.

I tried to keep my breathing even as I pulled the janitor coveralls and bunny suits around to cover the Materials Management sign, then stepped into the lab and closed that door too. I hoped that if the man opened the closet door, he'd just see a regular maintenance closet and keep going. With two doors between us and the hall, I couldn't hear the bootsteps anymore.

I was still getting used to the feeling of being in complete darkness and feeling everything around me and wanted to turn the light back on so, so badly. But I kept thinking that maybe, somehow, the man coming for us would be able to see light leaking from around the doors or something. Rationally, that shouldn't be possible, if the lab door could keep the horrid smell in and if the people who had made this room wanted it hidden. But I'm not logical when I'm freaked out.

I felt Marcus moving around a bit on the other side of one of the two tables, but I was focused on the hallway, waiting for the man to enter my range. He wasn't calling out anymore. I kept standing off to the side of the lab door in frozen silence. Maybe hiding in this room with no other exit was a stupid thing to do.

Eventually the man's form coalesced into a vague shape, then sorta stepped into clarity, and sound, as he approached the janitor's door. Marcus didn't make any sounds or movements, nor did I. I think I stopped breathing as I heard, and felt, the man place his hand on the door handle and pause, before swinging the door open. There was something in his other hand—not a gun, exactly. I wasn't sure what it was, kinda boxy and with some kind of container of liquid on the back of it, but the guy sure was holding it like a weapon.

I felt like collapsing to the floor in relief when, after a glacial moment, the figure closed the closet door and continued thumping in those heavy-sounding boots just a few steps before the sound vanished, further down the hall. My uneasiness with being in a dark stinking lab with a tentacle-gut body in the adjacent room finally overcame my fear of the man and I pulled the flashlight out and turned it on again. I could hear Marcus moving around, and then a loud intake of breath. I realised he didn't feel long and snaky anymore, and shined my light over the crap-covered tables.

A pale hand reached up onto the table top, and a shaggy grey head appeared with a groan as Marcus pulled himself into somewhat of a sitting position. I could only see his head and one thin arm, but I could feel he was still on his knees, his other hand rummaging in a soft pile that I knew was his clothing. Eventually his hand found his glasses, pulled them out and put them on tiredly. He shifts scarily fast, but I got the feeling that he had really pushed it this time.

"He's gone?" Even his voice sounded weak. Old.

"He who? Who the fuck is that wankstain? What's he doing here? How the hell does he know your name?"

"Just... a moment." He held up a hand as if I needed to calm down. I ignored it.

"No, you listen. You fucking knew this guy would be here, didn't you? That's why you wanted to take one of the trucks. You didn't want to go in your steaming pile of Frankenbolts 'cause everyone can hear it from a gazillion fucking miles away! Why you wanted me to park the truck in the goddamn weeds! You—you literal spineless fucking invertebrate piece of shit!"

I could feel him pulling clothes on, and knew from that field job last summer that he usually needed some time to boot up, mentally, as a man. I didn't wait, because I had le-git complaints. Maybe I was so pissed because of all the fear-adrenaline, or maybe I was pissed because this filthy trash-panda had used me. Lied to me.

"You told me nothing was living here, so why do I find multiple piles of something's shit all over? You didn't say anything about scary-ass motherfuckers following us into this sinking basement, calling out your name like he fucking knows you. Does he know you? Is he looking for you? Is this cockwomble one of those monster hunters?" I squinted at the lanky figure now carefully standing up on the other side of the tables. "It sure as fuck sounded like he knew you weren't alone."

"Sanne de Winter..." If I gave him enough time, he'd surely come up with some ratbag excuse, I just knew.

"Fuck you, Marcus. Fuck. You. Is this guy alone? Do monster hunters travel in packs? I'm getting the fuck out of here and I don't want to be caught up in your goddamn personal problems." I glared at the thing which now resembled a frail-looking barefoot old man standing in front of me, a hand still on the table for stability.

"Remember when I told you I wasn't a bug shrink and can't fix your obsessive mental issues? Remember when I told you I didn't want to do any of this, when I said I was down here to do work and not to help you hunt down creepy rocks? And then you told me this whole bullshit story about maybe stopping all the weird shit happening down here and helping Bern and the others figure these Areas out and you needed me to do this for you because I'm a fucking sickie?"

Almost on cue, my stomach growled. As if my broken metabolism ever needed to remind me how sick I was. Fucking unnecessary, universe. I don't need this shit.

"Goddammit," I growled at it. My brain helpfully reminded me that there was still a few subs and a coffee in the backpack, which immediately made me feel sick because that also reminded me of all the mouldering hospital folders and little bottles of something taken from some dude's body in there too. Separated by plastic, but still. If I got out of this alive and uncaptured, I would seriously consider throwing the backpack away. Some taint can't be cooked away in a ninety-degree wash.

Hunger and tiredness came over me in a wave, and while I was still pissed, I noticed my energy levels sapping to the point that I knew I was done yelling. I sank into a crouch and set the flashlight on the floor on its butt. The beam shined up into the yellowing ceiling panels.

"I am sorry." He'd said that to me last time, when I'd almost died at 50 Mile. Sorry my ass.

"Fuck you." My eyes stared unfocused at the backpack in front of me, and my fingers were aimlessly sorting through the keys of the giant key ring. "God it fucking stinks to high heaven in here—like invert on fire and rotten fruit." And we had to sit here breathing it in until we figured out how to leave.

"Phenol," he said quietly.

"Whatever. Don't need a chemistry lesson right now, asshole."

"He was not supposed to be... in the Gulf area."

My eyes moved up to him. "Who? Who is that guy?"

"His name is Lembree."

"Uh, yeah, and?" I know Marcus struggles with talking. Talking's what humans do, not crawly giant bugs from outside, but when I'm pissed off I don't give him the time.

A pause. "Can I tell you a story?"

"Christ, fuck your stories!"

"You need to know." He removed his hand from the table and stood straighter, then took a step towards me. "He cannot learn what you are."

Okay, that told me something right there. "The hell. He's a fucking reali, isn't he?" He nodded.

Great. Just great. Monster hunters who were De Real people. Finding me will probably get this asswipe Lembree a holiday bonus or something.

"So you lead me here not only to use me to find your goddamn rock but also straight into the waiting arms of the fucking law? Thanks, you mucous membrane." My stomach made noises again, and I felt light-headed. So frustrating. I hate being sick. Hate hiding. Hate worrying all the damn time that someone's gonna notice something, someone's gonna report me. Or some actual reali will grab my wrist and drag me into the cesspool known as Civil Service. Hate knowing that this is exactly what's going to happen.

"I am sorry."

So tired. So fucking tired. Literally tired and wrung out, but just... the whole thing. Life. It all sucks.

One thing at a time. "I need to pee." I slowly pushed myself back up, then pulled the clinking backpack over one shoulder, and grabbed the flashlight. "I'm done, Marcus. I'm just... done."

This Lembree guy will hear me and catch us and bring me in. That was inevitable. I figured I'd rather not have someone manhandling me into a windowless van or whatever with a full bladder. Or wet smelly shorts. So I opened the heavy lab door, stepped through the janitor's closet and noticed I still opened that door quietly. I didn't wait to hear or feel if Marcus was going to follow me, because fuck him, but he did. I headed down the hall in the same direction the man went, because that's where the cafeteria area and the toilets were, but I actually didn't expect to run into him. The guy was probably on the other side of the building by now.

As expected, the cafeteria was empty. I dumped the backpack onto one of the little tables and used the toilet. Coming back, I found Marcus drinking a bottle of water in the dark. I had brought the flashlight with me. Now I sat it on the table next to mine.

"We should leave," he said.

"How? That guy'll hear us. And I need to eat." I prepared myself mentally to put my hands into that nasty backpack, and then started pulling out the last of the subs. Yup, there was still one coffee in there. I needed food, but I desperately needed caffiene. I'd decided smoking inside this hospital basement was not a good idea, but that meant the jitters were starting already. Fuck you, akathisia.

"We really need to leave," he insisted. I continued getting the food ready. "Sanne de Winter."

"I really need to eat." I looked up at him. "So do you. How are we supposed to get past this Lembree anyway?" I had taken the nitriles off and thrown them into a bin in the toilet room, and was now using one alcohol wipe after another on my hands, trying to get any nasty little thing from the secret room with the dead intestinal monster off them, as if the wipes could get the smell out of my memory as well.

"I have a plan!" he said excitedly. Like, that ridiculous-sounding excitement he has when he's found some dumb rock or something. Okay, that's not fair, I get excited over dumb rocks too. But it was his usual bizarre extreme switching of tone that always reminds me that he kinda sucks at human-ing.

"What plan? I'm gonna walk back upstairs after this and I'll get taken to Wanksock Service central and spend the rest of my life playing drug dog or some shit."

"Nope. Have a plan." But he did step over to the table and take a sub from the last four that I had laid on the table.

I just savagely started eating, ignoring him, but... maybe it was getting food into me, or caffeine (cold shop coffee tastes like ass, but I've gotten used to it over the years), but Stupid Inner Me—who for some reason seems to trust Marcus on some level—was starting to feel hope.

"Why did you shift back?" I asked him after he'd finished his second sub. I was almost done with my first. "Un-shift or whatever it is."

"Lembree doesn't know what I am."

"What? He's a monster-hunter, isn't he?"

He slurped more water. "He knows I shift. Nothing more." A pause, and he wriggled the fingers of his other hand, playing air-piano. "Want to keep it that way." I thought back to my convo with Bob, about shifters and how they don't really look human. This Lembree guy must know he's chasing one that absolutely does.

Maybe there are other shifters like Marcus, and Bob doesn't know about them because he refuses to do De Real work.

My coffee and sub were done and I also had about half a bottle of water in me, so I stood up. "Okay, so what's this plan of yours?"

"Well. Where is he now?"

I snorted. "Fuck if I know. I told you, Marcus, most of the time I just think of where stuff should be, logically." Sometimes I wonder if I'm just very smart at concluding where things or people should be, and very lucky, and this has nothing to do with being sick. But people with Weston's are known for finding stuff... I dunno.

"Great!" he said with enthusiasm, also standing up, but of course doing it in that smooth and inhumanly quick way that unnerves me. "So where would he... logically be?"

I shrugged. "He knows we're downstairs. And he couldn't find us, because he doesn't know about that fucking hell-room, but we gotta come back up at some point. So... he's probably waiting for us upstairs." I frowned a moment. "I dunno how many exits there are in this building, though I'll bet a few can't be opened anymore because of the subsidence. If there were only one exit, he'd wait there..." I trailed off, thinking.

"Yep! There are multiple exits." He adjusted his glasses. "I've gone through Emergency."

Oh yeah, I forgot. Hospitals have an Emergency entrance. I had noticed when we arrived how the parking lot seemed to wrap around the building, but it had looked so much like some backwater post-war hick hospital that a modern driveway for an ambulance in the back hadn't even occurred to me. Duh.

"Soooo... we try to leave there? But that's upstairs, and this Lembree guy is upstairs. So I still dunno how we'll avoid him."

The tall creature didn't move his feet but leaned forward and stared at me with black eyes. "You'll know where he is... before we hear him."

"Maybe? Maybe, Marcus, a big fat maybe! And so again, how do we avoid him?"

He pointed to the big janitor ring of keys still sitting on the table. "We don't. He'll follow us. Into rooms. We'll double back. Lock the door."

I blinked. Marcus is smart, I think, but this was a stupid "plan" and I told him so. He made one of those scary toothy grins, like a predator anticipating a meal. Then he picked up my backpack without making a single clinking noise and started off, towards a different corner of the basement level with a set of stairs and elevators. Not knowing what else to do, I grabbed the keys and flashlight and followed him.

Why didn't he just eat the guy? Wouldn't that solve the problem? But he was playing human now, so that wasn't going to happen. And did I really want him to? I remember the scary mandibles clamped around my arm and shivered.

We took the stairs back up, my sandals flip-flopping and Marcus somehow making no noise at all, barefoot but carrying my backpack full of glass bottles. We were at the other side of where we'd gone in, the other side of reception at the front of the building, but the ER department was in the back. I saw a wine-cork pile near the outer wall, which made me notice a finger-wide fissure in the wall itself. As the building sank, the foundation and walls were breaking apart. The need to get the hell out of here was stronger than ever. There was also a metal stand holding a pair of big green oxygen tanks. I didn't really notice them as we passed—I was straining with everything this weird sense of mine has, searching for anything resembling Lembree.

Now that we were back upstairs, the hall wasn't a hospital department, but opened to little rooms with beds, windows, and darkened heart monitors with empty IV poles. I stopped a bit too long by one that hadn't been cleaned when everyone left. The bed was unmade, and there was still a wrinkled bag of something clear hanging on the pole. Leftover remains of supper or lunch was sitting on a small tray table, and the plastic wrappings from medical stuff was all over the floor.

Did whoever was in there, sick with some disease, get out okay? Went to that other hospital everyone was supposedly transferred to, and recovered? I wondered if they had any nightmares.

It wasn't so dark up here, because the patient windows hadn't been boarded up, and eastern daylight diffused through the shades of windows in the mostly-opened patient rooms and into the hallway. A set of fire doors up here were, somehow, standing open. The flashlight was in my shorts pocket, so I only had to carry the keys and my flip-flops, which I had taken back off.

Walking a few steps further, I felt a man-shape further down the corridor, in one of the rooms. I might not have figured out it was a person it if had been still, but it was moving, swinging an arm around as if moving a light. Or that weapon, if that's what it was. It couldn't be Lembree, because this figure was round in all the wrong directions. There were two of them?

I held my arm out to signal Marcus, who was walking silently behind me... something I probably wouldn't have allowed if I didn't have the weird feeling sense to always tell me where exactly he was. Did I trust him or not? If he was going to eat you, he would have long ago, I told myself.

I looked back at him. Four rooms further, a large person, I signed. I saw Marcus' nose flare as he sat the backpack at my feet without a clink, then darted past me. The figure of the person I was sensing was still taking steps here and there, waving the arm, then going still, but Marcus walked almost right up to the doorway of that room. Jesus, the way Marcus moves, like a coyote checking out a rabbit. After a peek, or sniff maybe, he came back... and continued past me, in that unnervingly quick way he does, like a speeded-up video. I frowned as I watched him reach the stairwell door and grabbed one of the oxygen tanks. Lifted it right up by the little neck with the gauge, without a sound, as if it weighed nothing.

Now I could hear someone walking and I shrunk into one of the rooms. I heard the footsteps faintly, and felt the vague large man-shape coming towards us, and then turning into another room. Marcus, who had ducked into a little nurse's office on the other side of the corridor, slipped past me and back up the hall. I felt a large movement of limbs, heard a gasp and a metallic thwack, and the heavy body thumped to the floor.

I shot out of the room and ran to see Marcus standing above a large unconscious man while still holding the oxygen tank with one hand. The man on the ground was a candidate to be his own postal code. A baby beluga in uniform, though it wasn't a state police uniform. This one was all browns and dark greens. Civil Service.

I don't know this one, Marcus signed to me. I blinked, and looked at the small sauropod on the floor, still breathing but not moving otherwise. How many of them were here?

And as if the gods have something against us, right on fucking time, we both heard a voice from the other side of reception. Lembree. Coming this way.

I stared at Marcus in panic, but he had his I have a wonderful idea! look on him. He glanced around, then picked up the uniformed continent by the arms and easily dragged him out into the hall and back to the nurse's station, which was little more than a slightly wider section of hallway with an island desk piece separating the hall from some workstations.

I think this is the first time I've ever seen Marcus touch a human. Maybe it was okay because he was unconscious?

"Louise. Answer me!" Yeah, definitely Lembree's voice. Closer now.

Marcus carefully pulled the unconscious man only partially behind the desk island, leaving the legs out, large boots pointed upwards. They looked as big as Ernest's, which are ginormous. Marcus took a step backwards, hands on his waist, as if critically admiring some artwork, then looked my way and signed for me to get back down the hall, away from Lembree. Which I did, but he only followed me a little ways. I turned and looked back at Marcus, the backpack hanging from one shoulder, who gave me his creepy grin with raised hairy eyebrows and wriggling fingers.

"Make some noise," he said cheerfully, in a normal tone of voice, pulled each of the fire doors away from the walls, and darted into a patient room. I froze, and didn't make any noise at all, and flinched as the doors thumped shut. These doors were different. They each had a handle, just something you could grab to pull them open. And then Marcus was back, wedging one of the IV poles through the handles with enough casual strength that he bent one of the curly ends as he forced the top of the pole through each narrow handle.

The way he bent metal and tossed a heavy tank of gas was scary, and strange to see being done by something that looked like a frail grey old man.

"Louise." Lembree spoke again, this time in a tone of... disappointment. He had found the legs, and apparently thought his companion's supine state his own damn fault or something. I heard, and felt, the figure coming towards us, past the unmoving mountainous figure of Louise, right up to the doors. In fact he bashed right into them, forcing them to bulge towards us, but the IV pole held and they remained shut. I jumped. Marcus seemed ecstatic.

"Stetz!" Lembree roared from the other side. He was just a man, but the power in that voice turned my insides to frazzled mush. I almost expected the doors to fly open, IV pole cut in two like a ribbon.

"Yes?" Marcus called back, as if answering a phone. I gaped at him. Shouldn't we be going? Who knew how long that skinny little pole would hold.

"What're ya up to in here, Stetz?" The voice rolled like a gravellous debris flow.

Marcus raised an index finger, facing the doors even though Lembree couldn't see through them. "Actually. The fine folks here were up to something." He played some air-piano. "You should... check out the back. Hm. Of that... basement custodial closet." Loud breathing came from the other side, and I could feel that Lembree was trying to get something out of a pocket.

"Worth your while, Mr Lembree. Even a corpse in there. For your trophy record!" Trophy record? Did this guy collect monster bodies?

Suddenly Marcus was no longer by the door but in my face, waving at me to GO GO GO! I turned and started running.

"Keys," Marcus called out, in a loud and much too conversational voice. I promptly dropped them on the floor without stopping, and we ran past the stairwell and elevator doors to an emergency exit door, which I of course slammed into as it didn't move. Marcus was right behind me and I rolled out of the way just in time to avoid a kick from him as he pushed the door slightly open. Bright light streamed in a stark beam.

Marcus backed up and ran forward a second time for another kick, pushing the door even wider, and it was just enough. Squinting, I could see the bottom of the door had scraped against the ground outside. We were lucky this side hadn't sunken any further. Marcus gestured at me, and I squeezed out through the narrow opening and into painful brightness, and then he slid out with more ease than should be possible.

And once we were outdoors, once clean, warm, fresh air was coming into our lungs, I squinted and my brain flailed around, getting my bearings and searching for the truck. Marcus seemed to know exactly where we were though and calmly began walking across the uneven, weed-choked parking lot.

"Why aren't we hurrying anymore?" I asked after jogging to catch up with him, because he's always so fast. He walked on his bare feet as if the small sharp pebbles and bulging root braids weren't bothering him in the slightest.

I felt more than saw him turn his head and look down at me, because my eyes were still tearing and being forced into a tight squint by the sunny day. It felt like late afternoon, and from the edges of the parking lot came what I assume were bug noises.

"Oh. Louise will nap. Lembree will... need to go around. All the doors." He wriggled his fingers. "Unable to resist... investigating that room."

By now I could see better. We had left the hospital building from basically the other side of the front, and were walking straight to the trees where the truck was parked. I realised I had been holding my breath until I saw its dark shape, because part of me had feared it would be gone or something and we'd be trapped out here, outside.

We reached the truck, me uneasily expecting someone to burst out of the building behind us and start shooting or dudes in gear stepping out from the treeline, Marcus seeming so upbeat that he almost bounced on his heels as he walked. I glanced around and felt as far as I could, around the parking lot. It was just as creepily barren as when we'd shown up.

"Uh, so where's whatever they drove here with?" I asked out loud... though as soon as the words were out of my mouth, I looked at the drive that wrapped around the hospital, to the ER entrance in the back. Obviously, if they had driven here and I didn't see any vehicles, they must be parked in the back, out of sight. Duh. It's not like they parachuted in or anything.

Is that any kind of sickness-induced finding-power? No. It's just common sense. Then we were at the truck and I stopped and looked down at the ground, right at the corner of the front grill.

Looking at the ground is kinda automatic, the nature of a geologist I guess. But I stopped because of what was freshly lying there. A cigarette butt. Someone's cigarette butt. Not mine.

I immediately needed one of my own. Someone had stood here and smoked. Someone had stood right in front of the truck. I remained looking down, and Marcus eventually came back from the passenger door where he had been waiting for me to unlock it. He stopped near me and looked down as well.

After a moment, we looked up at each other. "Fuck," I muttered. "Think he wrote down the plate number?" I looked at the truck a moment, which had been fully in shadow when I'd parked it, but now the nose was in the sun. Suddenly I wanted to do something stupid.

I started walking back towards the building. I wanted to see the car the Service guys had come in. Why? I dunno, we should have been getting the fuck out of there as fast as possible. Even Marcus came up beside me and leaned forward as we walked, giving me a what are you doing? face.

"My cigarettes are in there," I told him, waving at my backpack he was still carrying. "Front pocket." We kept walking, the ER side coming into view. A piece of the roof stretched outwards, shading the large, boarded-up double doors. He pulled out a crumpled pack and handed it to me. "Lighter," I reminded him. After a moment he had that too. I lit up and sucked on that cancer stick like it was a straw and I was underwater.

There were two vehicles, parked at angles, backed up against a rotting rust-coloured diamond mesh fence which had been pushed down here and there by various swampy flora. One was a new-looking Camry with a little barcode sticker on the lower corner of the windshield. I checked the back. State plates, but the plate holder said "AVIS Baton Rouge." A rental. The other was a small aging truck, one of those so-called compact SUVs.

Both plates had "Sportsman's Paradise" on them. I shivered, because I wasn't thinking of dudes fishing.

I walked until I could see the driver side of the rental. On the ground by the door was a small pile of cigarette butts. Fresh like the one by our truck. I turned around to face back out across the parking lot, and swore.

"They sat here the whole fucking time," I sighed. "Probably watched us come in." I turned to Marcus. "So, he's seen what I look like, and he probably has the plate number." I stubbed my finished cigarette onto the hood of the rental, pressing and rolling it a few times before putting back in the pack and grabbing a fresh one. Unfortunately, the paint seemed undamaged. "My name's on the truck signout form. In Lafayette. I am super fucked, Marcus," I said, shrugging my shoulders and shaking my head. "Super, super fucked."

"I can fix this!" he said earnestly. "Sanne de Winter."

"No, you can't. You can't fix this." I started shuffling back to the truck. I was hungry and still needed to get food for my suppers and first breakfasts on Sunday. It's Easter, and I didn't know if stuff would be open or everything closed. They're religious down here, but in a weird celebratory kinda way. Either everyone will be out having Easter breakfast with grandma, or everyone'd be at Mass and businesses closed. I had no idea.

We got back to the truck, Marcus still making a few more attempts to make me feel better with his lies, and then we were ready to drive away from the rotting subsidence and two Service guys who still hadn't come out but were surely going to be knocking at the USGS' door on Monday morning. I hope they don't claim I assaulted the fat one.

I braked and almost stopped the truck right outside the entrance, though. That house-shaped pile of vines? It was sitting there, mostly on the side of the road but plants covered at least half of the broken asphalt. "The fucking fuck?" I muttered.

"Something attracts them," Marcus said, and I decided not to ask him what all "them" was. I let the truck roll slowly towards, and then carefully around the structure. Thing. Whatever it was. A kudzu creature with a few roof peaks with broken shingles sticking out the top. I winced as we rode over some of the vines that were crossing the road, even though I drove as much on the shoulder as I dared. Driving off the road wasn't a great idea here, because the sides were mushy. Nothing moved, no vine-tentacles stretched out after us. As soon as we were past the thing, I hit the gas.

I don't know if that was the same house we had seen on the way to the hospital, but we didn't see anything like it the whole way back. The one we'd seen earlier was gone.

Marcus transferred the folders, pathology sample bottles and the expired chemicals from my backpack to his messanger bag, and inhaled the last sub. I drove with both hands clenched on the wheel, chewing my teeth. So fucked. So, so fucked. The end of my job. My house. My freedom. I'll be living in some kind of shitty barracks with crazy sick people. And worse, I'm going into work on Monday like nothing happened. I'm gonna play along and wait for Rushana or someone to walk up to me and say "there's some people here to see you." I mean, what else am I going to do?

The Daly folks'll look at each other as I'm taken away. "I knew there was something weird about her." Rushana will be justified. I'm a freak, not a real person. Not a scientist. Just wasted a spot at a public resource getting a useless education, took a job a real geologist could've had, loose and unpredictable like some escaped convict.

Again I considered just running off. Vanishing into the wilderness. I think about it a lot... for about a second. But I have no place to go, and I'm not some survivalist. I know how to camp, but, y'know, I have this stupid metabolic disease. I could never hunt and gather or steal enough to keep going, let alone the absence of coffee trees and cigarette bushes.

But anyway, getting away from a sinking abandoned shit-hospital of death wasn't the end of the weirdness yesterday, no. Oh no. I had to engage Marcus in conversation, which I absolutely shouldn't have. I should have just parked at the USGS, kicked him out and gone back to my hotel without another word.

But I'm stupid. I keep wanting to know stuff. Stupid Inner Me is... me.

"So how long's this guy Lembree been chasing you?" We were getting on slightly better road surface but still outside. The thought also occurred to me that Marcus, who normally calls everyone by their full name because he's a weirdo, only ever said "Lembree."

"Oh... three... almost four years." He wriggled his fingers. "Hm. Anniversary coming up." He showed me too many teeth, which he knew I saw in between squinting at the road through the windshield. "I should bake a cake!"

For the second time that day the mental image of Marcus wearing oven mitts and a Feed the Cook apron popped into my head, this time holding a meat pie made of people.

"So, c'mon. Why don't you just, you know, eat him?" There. I asked the big scary monster why it didn't simply eat its enemies. He was silent long enough that I thought he wouldn't answer. Which was fine. Really.

"Ah. Hm." He took his glasses off, looked at them critically, then tried to clean them with the hem of his collar shirt. Tried, but his shirt is gross, and while he seemed satisfied after a moment, I'm certain all he could've done was smeared more dirt onto the glass. He wipes everything with his shirt. "Two reasons."

We were entering inhabited areas. The truck became quieter as the road condition improved noticeably. I was pretty sure he was preparing words in his head, constructing a story into coherence.

"First. He has colleagues. They know of his... hm. Focus on me. I suppose I'm a personal project of his!" His voice had a sound of satisfaction, or pride. "Should he vanish. So much as... have a cardiac emergency alone. Nobody hears from him. I'll go from having one hunter after me... to five or six." He blew a breath out between his lips. "I do not want that kind of stress." He did the scary grin thing. "Only force per unit acting on rock. Yep."

I was driving, so I tried not to roll my eyes.

"Second. Your people are..." He wriggled fingers for a moment. "How do I say this." More agitated air-piano, and I decided to keep my eyes firmly on the road. Tasty, he's going to say tasty.

"Absolutely delicious!" I knew it. "Perhaps it's the processed foods you eat," he mused. "But I cannot become like... the one in Florida." Another pause. "That one... got a taste for your people. Lost control. They were found." Air-piano. "Lost their name. We have forgotten them."

He'd said something like this before, about the Surgeon in Florida. The one everyone knows about, because its victims were found still alive. The one that lead everyone to start calling these monsters "Surgeons." I don't know what he means by losing its name, but it sounds important, I guess.

But so if he was trying not to eat people... "So you've never been caught? Nobody's ever seen you?"

"I've been caught. Several times. Two years ago, even!"

"But... you didn't eat them?"

He drummed his fingers on the side of the truck door. "I have. Before. Not recently."

"Soooo..." I was getting irritated. This was like pulling teeth. "What did you do? What did you do two years ago?" How did he stay free?

"Ah. Em. Well." Drumming. "Fed them to the car."

I wasn't sure what I'd just heard. "You fed them—you what?"

"To the car."

"You what? To your car? What the hell."

"Ah, it is... multi-fuel."

The fuck. I knew it. I knew there was something about that frankenheap that creeped me out. I can't believe I fucking sat in that thing as we mapped the Tea River Formation. The dashboard alone looks like something out of a really bad eighties sci-fi film.

I rode in a car that runs on people? Jesus, I can't even—

It just so happened that there was a little parking strip and some businesses on the side of the road, and empty. I didn't signal as I yanked the wheel and braked hard, bringing the truck to a near-sudden stop as soon as we were completely off the road. I jerked the shifter to park a little too hard, and turned to stare at him.

"You what."

He shrugged, in the overdone cartoony way, and stared straight out the windshield. "There are no gas stations... in Areas," he said finally. "I can convert to other fuel sources."

"What, you switch some pipes around and bam, it burns people? Seriously?"

"Er, acid digestion..." His fingers kept wriggling like bug feet, and he still wasn't looking at me.

"Marcus. You are a goddamn nightmare. You know that?"

He finally turned to me. "I am..." And I fucking swear, his hair actually raised up in all directions, like an angry parrot or something. "Doing what I can!" He leaned very slightly towards me, not quite enough to make me jump out of the truck and start running. "Alone."

At this point I was thinking that I have way too many creepy conversations with a mentally-unstable shifting monstrous bug thing while sitting enclosed in a small vehicle cab. Smarter Inner Me reminded me that he probably didn't have room to shift back into his people-eating form, but that didn't make me feel any safer.

But he leaned back fully into his seat and stared straight out again. "Don't know what else to do. Doing what I can."

"Then just stop," I said, but he'd already explained why he couldn't, when we were leaving 50 Mile. He thinks it's something in the universe, or God or whatever, pushing him to keep going back to the Areas. I think it's a psych problem. Sometimes he does, too.

"I wish to go home. Yes." Air-piano. "I do this alone. There are researchers. I work with them. But..." He looked at me again. "I cannot do this alone."

I shrugged. "I'm gonna be in sicko-prison real soon. Can't help you there."

"So." He drummed agitatedly on the dashboard. "We delay that. Indefinitely."

"They're gonna be looking me up on Monday. They'll probably walk in, ask Rushana where I'm stationed for that day, then drive out and pick me up, right there in front of my colleagues." I made the smoke sign. "Poof."

He shook his head. "Give me a chance." His face didn't change but the rest of his body seemed to tense slightly as he stared at me. Damn creepy black eyes. "Would you help me? If I am successful?"

"You won't be," I replied immediately. He can't. What the hell could he possibly do?

"If I was." His head did the predator-bird tilt. It's quick, unblinking, and doesn't belong on a human body. "Would you?"

If he could hide my illness. That's impossible, so it was hard to entertain the idea at all. But I tried. Let's say there was such a thing as magic and unicorns and miracles. If I could just, in a flurry of sparkles, not look sick and this Lembree guy somehow forgot ever having seen me. If I could do this for a long time. Not months, but years. A decade?

Would I voluntarily wander into Desolate Areas with a half-cracked creature so it could go digging around for whatever causes the corrupted weirdness there? I'd almost died at 50 Mile. We thought we were out of that Area, but it tricked us. There were dead bodies and missing time and I had nightmares for months. I found myself shivering as that nasty awful roadside diner flashed back into my head.

Would I?

"I..." I started to say no. "I don't know." The words surprised me. They left a lot open.

"You were... invaluable today," he said. He raised his messenger bag slightly.

"That was—but that's just—I mean..." I shook my head. "We were lucky. I was lucky!" Though I immediately reminded myself that we were very unlucky and I was now completely doomed.

"I came to a door I couldn't open," he replied. "You were there." I blinked, trying to figure out where this non sequitur was coming from. "You." He gestured at me with open hands, like ta-da! "You!"

Mines. He meant that night at Mines U. I rolled my eyes. "That just happened to be—"

"How did you find my... summer work? With U of C students?" he interrupted.

It took me another moment to regroup mentally. Which job? Oh yeah, the one where I first met him, thinking he was human, way back in undergrad. The one where he was recruiting a small group of students to help with a prospect survey.

"Uh. My lab prof." I had to work a bit to think back that far. "She heard me complain about not being able to afford field camp." Camp wasn't required—some schools do require it to get your degree, though UBC didn't, at least not back then. But everyone knew you didn't want to graduate with a degree that was entirely done indoors. It looks good on your CV when you've actually done some mapping, even just a class.

It cost way too much for me, though. I wasn't able to save up fast enough with my barista job. Not with the amount I was spending on food and, especially, cigarettes at the time. So when the professor running the minerology lab heard me, she told me about this little job she heard about, a visiting researcher at U of C looking for some summer help. She gave me an email address. One other student at UBC was going, too. I hitched a ride, and never regretted being out there. Everyone should do field time if they can.

It was all just... accidental.

"You. She sent you. You find things. You saw me. As myself. Told no one." He shook his head. "Were there again when I could not get in."

I hadn't told anyone when I thought I'd found a shifting monster in our group, because we were out in the middle of nowhere—just a few students and maybe a monster—and later, when I got back safely... I don't know why I didn't report it. I really don't know. And it bothers me that I don't know why I let a dangerous people-eating creature into the chem lab of my university years later. I'd thought maybe it was him, but wasn't at all sure, and even if I had been certain, it's still letting a monster indoors. I didn't know he wasn't getting in to hunt us or something. As if I'd had a death wish against the people there, which I didn't.

See, for him, the pieces just all fit together. This was fate, or something. Which is bullshit. I don't believe in fate, or God really, or mystical vibes. There's stuff that we can't explain yet, and lots of stuff we might never explain (sorry, Hilbert), but coincidence is a thing. It happens. It can look all freaky and whatever, but there's no actual connection. Things aren't, like, meant to be. They just happen. Especially shitty things, those happen a lot.

Okay, I guess I do tend to shake a mental fist at the universe and blame it for stuff, but I don't think I actually believe it's malevolently steering my life or anything.

I didn't bother trying to convince him, and instead just held my hands up while shaking my head. "Whatever. You're nuts, you're an abberation of nature, and you'll do anything to figure these Areas out. I get it." I sighed. "I don't know if I can do that—go back to those places. They scare me. You scare me."

"Really?" Now his fuzzy grey eyebrows were slowly rising. Laughing at me! Fucking bug. "I thought I was merely revolting." He glanced out at the main road. "You are not afraid of me."

"Uh, seriously, I am. You're scary as fuck."

"Fear is smart! But yours is not enough." Air-piano. "You came. You helped." Pause. "Thank you."

"You've doomed me, Marcus. So let me just go home so I can meet my shitty future on a full stomach, okay?"

He nodded, surprising me. I thought he would argue more. We've done this a few times before. It's getting pretty tiresome, to be honest. "Just... think about it."

No need to waste time or energy on that, I know. How the hell can an animal from outside, however smart, help me hide a disease like this? It can't. The question doesn't need to be answered.

So after refilling the tank and stocking up on cigarettes and calories we drove back to the USGS in blissfull fucking silence, and yes I did kick him out of the truck and just walked back to the office without looking back. When I went to sign the keys back in, I stared at my name, in my scribble, on the check-out column. There were other names in the following rows—not USGS folks, the sign-out form is for outsiders like us Daly people—so I couldn't just remove the paper from the clipboard. I'd be breaking a bunch of other records, meaning people would look for it. The Daly folks surely know I was gone most of the day.

Oh shit, yeah. I still have a bunch of measurements to input into the computer system. I'll have to figure out how to make that up while still getting all the field work in. I'm not gonna make Ernest bend over doing his work plus mine.

Of course... he can see me as a shitty coworker. What's it matter, if I'm not going to be there long?

'Cuz, you know, I'm super, super fucked. This is the end.

Huh. I wonder if I should burn this notebook, to keep Marcus' secret...?

Nah, fuck him.

April 21th

Well, today was interesting, because it was boring and I was so nervous I thought I would just manufacture my own damn heart attack. A personal hell limbo thing.

The 50 Mile Desolation Road Crew