Beyond the Veil by Mark Morris

Author:Mark Morris
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: horror; gothic fantasy; supernatural horror; flame tree press; speculative fiction; short stories; anthologies; horror short stories
Publisher: Flame Tree Publishing
Published: 2021-09-23T09:01:28+00:00

Aquarium Ward

Karter Mycroft

Take Jamie, for example. Jamie was dead when you got to her and alive twenty minutes later. It should have been impossible. When her eyes shot open and she gagged on the tube in her throat you thought you were dreaming, or you’d gotten too many huffs of crankbreath and lost your grip. But no, there she was, freaking out in real life to the tune of a hundred heartbeats a minute. Your first miracle.

You rushed to the monitors and did a happy scoff at the numbers. Then you spun round with a hand on her shoulder, a soft word in her ear, a quick drip of Dilaudid because at this point why the hell not? She calmed down some then, wiped her forehead with a bluish hand and made a face at the tube.

Try and relax, you told her. We have to make sure there’s no residual serum in any of your fluids. You had a crooked thought that she maybe shouldn’t trip about some oesophageal discomfort, that she maybe should be thankful to feel anything at all. But she hadn’t seen what you’d seen. She didn’t know the numbers. No one was saying things like one hundred per cent case fatality rate on the news; the Feds who prowled the hospital made sure of that. Probably all Jamie knew was she’d taken a hit, felt something like a hundred thousand orgasms blast through her skinny little body, then woken up choking on a Slinky. You could cut her some slack. Another drop of hydromorphone for Jamie, courtesy of the Good Doctor.

It took six hours for Jamie’s readings to come back clear. In that time you operated on four others, maybe five, trying to replicate the procedure that had worked on her: the quadruple dose of verapamil, cyproheptadine and whateverazepam, the hasty microincision above the renal artery, the modified dialysis to extract serum from the blood. None pulled through. None came close. Either they were dead on arrival and stayed that way, or their hearts gave out from adrenergic storm during operation. This cyclical devastation had been your routine for months and you tanked it with a shot of vodka and a long sigh. Was the drinking making you sloppy? Did anyone notice? It was hard to tell who cared anymore. The bugs certainly didn’t.

When it was time to check on Jamie you collapsed the tube, removed it, told her not to talk and felt excited when she did anyway. She said she needed to piss. By all means. While she shuffled to the toilet you peered at the bag of aquamarine serum you’d filtered out of her while she was dead. Little shimmers in there. Bioluminescent. You squeezed the bag and they brightened even more, dashed at your thumb from inside the plastic like one of those plasma ball toys. Bioluminescent and hungry. A few more minutes and they’d have eaten Jamie’s entire bloodstream.

Sometimes you wondered what it felt like. You’d cut open plenty of corpses who’d found out.

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