The Worm That Wasn't

by Mike Maddox

  Leah was so like her father that, at times, it was too much for Saran to even look at her. But, day by day, she had forced herself to see this as a good thing. He was gone, but he lived on. His daughter carried his name, his good looks, and above all else, his love for his work.

  They had been inseparable.

  Until the night of his death.

  Saran moved from room to room, tidying the house, picking up Leah's books, and getting the table ready for supper. It was while she was washing her hands that she noticed the bluish tint to her skin. At first she thought it food dye, and tried rubbing it off with stronger soap, but it would not budge. Moving into the light of the living room, she rolled her sleeve up to see that the rash - if rash it was - had spread up her entire left arm. She furrowed her brow, trying to remember what she had had to eat recently. She was not allergic to anything that she knew of, but it was not unheard of to suddenly develop an unfortunate reaction to something, she supposed.

  No. Nothing out of the ordinary. She decided the best thing to do was to not worry about it and see if it was still there in the morning. The apothecary could always take a look tomorrow. Probably be gone before morning.

  Saran put away the last of the dishes, brushed some crumbs from her sleeve, and fell to floor.

  He pulse raced, her body temperature went through the roof, as she lay on the kitchen floor convulsing. She had struck her head on a corner of the table as she went down, and a small trickle of blood ran from a cut just behind her ear. As she fell into unconsciousness all Saran could see was the face of her dead husband.

  And with that, everything went black.

  Leah was supervising the new recruits, walking them through seed dressing when the comm terminal bleeped, alerting her to an incoming message. It was Rendolph's mother, Glora.

  "Leah, it's your mother. She's been taken ill. I don't know what's the matter with her. I've sent for the doctor but I think you need to come home, love."

  Leah jogged from the seeding beds back to the office, pulling off her overalls as she ran. Over the past three days the Gardens had returned to something like normality, and she had been delighted at the ease with which the militia had adapted to their new role. They still had a long way to go and a lot to learn, but, at this rate, full production would be back before they knew it.

  Leaving the Garden she spotted Captain Krillan and his entourage making its way towards her. "Oh perfect. Great timing." She muttered to herself. Ducking to avoid them behind a water tank, she turned the corner out of sight and broke into a run. She didn't stop until she got to her front door.

  Glora was there to meet her. "She's upstairs. Don't know what's wrong with her, she was like it when we found her."

  Leah nodded and went in, dropping her bag on an armchair, and ducking as she passed the low beams that led to the narrow staircase. She could hear voices from the top rooms. Two stairs at a time she bounded to Saran's room, to see her mother in bed, her skin pale.

  It was the sickness. It was here.

  She looked up, horrified, to see the two men in the room attending to her mother. They both wore facemasks. She recognised one as Kefan, the village doctor. They looked in panic and alarm as she tried to enter the room, before slamming the door in her face.

  "Leah, stay outside! Your mother has the sickness!"

  "Let me in right this instant or I promise you I will kick the door down." She looked at the sturdy oak door; the huge wrought iron hinges and steel bolt, built to last. "Let me in this instant or I will go outside and find a huge muscled man and get him to kick this door down for me!"

  "Leah -"

  "I mean it, open the door!"

  "Leah, it's me, Doctor Barrot. Go down to the kitchen table and you'll find my bag. There's another mask there. Put it on and then open the blue box and take the grey phial inside. It's a standard anti-body and should fight off any residual germs that might be lurking in the air. Your mother has the sickness. We don't know how ill she is yet, but you catching it won't help her one bit! Now go downstairs, do as I ask and then you can come in."

  Leah closed her eyes and bumped the door gently with her head, and then went downstairs and did as she was told.

  The grey phial hurt like hell. She felt it rush through her body like a pack of hunting dogs after their quarry. She felt sick, her head hurt and there was a ringing in her ears. She looked at the phial and read through the list of possible side effects, before dropping the empty container in the bin and making her way back upstairs.

  Militia men arrived, waddling through the streets in bacteriological warfare suits none of them had worn since basic training, and which no longer fitted as well as they once might have. Soon the whole street was cordoned off as Chemical Warriors went from house to house, taking blood samples and saliva swabs. Thankfully no one else seemed to have the sickness. A military vehicle arrived, and Saran was taken away in a translucent oxygen tent to the hospital, a wing of which had been given over solely to the sickness and its victims.

  Word spread very quickly in the village, and soon people were calling their children inside and leaving pets out in the yard. It was as if there was something heavy sitting on the very spirit of the village itself. Like something wrapped around it, squeezing the life from it.

  Leah sat in her mother's chair at the table. She held a blue phial in her hand, rolling it from finger to finger. She thought of her father. And she thought also of his sense of duty, of his passion for getting the job done. Of what it meant to face down disaster. She took a deep breath and slid the phial into her wrist.

  Saran was not the first patient admitted that day, nor was she the last. One by one the sick started to arrive. No one expected any of them to make it through the night and, indeed, one or two of the more elderly patients didn't live to see sunrise. But the vast majority, although in a serious condition, were still holding onto life come morning. And against all the odds, the majority were still there by midday. Whatever was wrong with them, it wasn't the same sickness that had killed the workers in the Garden. Or at least it wasn't as severe for some reason. The doctors weren't sure if this was a good thing or a bad thing. In one sense it would be better if the disease remained a constant, something they could measure with some accuracy; then they would have a better chance of finding a cure if such a thing existed. But as things stood at the moment the sickness was completely unpredictable in how it effected a patient and what symptoms it displayed.

  The Barrots ran the small local hospital. Kefan and Kadia were husband and wife. They had moved to the village some years previously, and had quickly endeared themselves to the locals. They were as well known for their skills as physicians as they were for their legendary fertility, having some twelve children between them. Leah had known them since she was a little girl, and had always felt at ease with them. They had been there when her father died, and had seen her through all of the ups and downs of everyday life.

  They had helped Saran deal with the constant aching sadness that at times threatened to destroy her, not through medicine alone, although that had its part, but by simply listening, and by helping her to mend herself by engaging with normality.

  Leah sat in the wood beamed hall that served as the waiting room. It had previously been the canteen, but there were so many recent admissions that every spare room had been taken up. Non-critical patients had been sent home, freeing up bed space.

  "Leah?" It was Kadia, scrubbing her hands with a wipe. "How are you doing?" Kadia was the complete opposite of Kefan. Where he was short and rotund, she was tall and willowy, with long grey hair. Leah had always thought her quite beautiful, and could never equate the elegance she constantly showed with the nature of her work, dealing with sickness and disease in all its gory detail.

  "I don't know. I don't know how I am. I think a lot of that depends on how my mother is. How bad has she got it? She looked awful."

  "You've seen her then?"

  "Only through plastic sheeting. They wouldn't let
me touch her. Is she going

  to get better?"

  Kadia sat down on the pine bench next to her, her hands folded, silent. Outside, a transport was pulling into the drive in front of the hospital. More sick people waiting to be helped, no doubt.

  "Your mother has a particularly bad chest infection. We are treating it as best we can, but are short of supplies." She looked at Leah squarely and openly, her face calm and serious. "People have died, Leah, you need to accept that. The elderly and sick seem particularly vulnerable, but your mother is fit and strong. There is every hope for her."

  "The Gardeners, they weren't old. Most of them were my age."

  Kadia reached out a hand and felt Leah's wrist, checking her pulse, but also casting a critical eye at her wrist-port. "How much Blue have you been taking?"

  Leah took a deep breath, paused and let it out. "Loads. I was going to lie just then. I was going to say 'a little bit now and then', but these last few days, since, you know, since everyone died...? Well, frankly I've been shovelling the stuff in. One of the Chemical Warriors gave a load to me. Probably to make sure that the Gardens remained operational. The side effects are driving me mad, though. I keep making constant inappropriate comments. Cracking jokes about everything all the time. I don't think it's particularly funny. I don't think I'm funny... which might be one reason why no one seems to be laughing. I do think that gallows humour is a coping mechanism of sorts, albeit a fairly unpleasant one, it's just that I wish I could find a different way to cope. I'm considering an alternative therapy and might try losing myself in deep erotic abandonment with a squad of muscular, tanned firemen." Kadia raised a quizzical eyebrow "No really, I am. Properly rude sexual experimentation. Tag-team intercourse, no holds barred physical gratification with no thought to the consequences." She paused, suddenly red faced. " Or perhaps a nice picnic?"

  Kadia finished looking at her wrist and smiled. "I'd go for the picnic if I were you. A lot of the local lads are quite uncouth and probably keep their shoes on while doing the naughty stuff. Firemen's boots are flame retardant and go all the way up to their knees. Just think of the chafing."

  "Thanks. You're not going to ask me to stop are you?"

  "Stop what? Destroying your social life with mind altering chemicals, or stop you cheering up vast armies of civic servants?"

  "Either really."

  "You need to ease off the Blue, if you can. It stops you feeling emotional pain. Your mother is ill. You should be feeling things, frankly, no matter how inconvenient it might be for your work. As for the other business, they're your rude bits and it's not for me to say. But again, just think of the chafing."

  "Thanks."

  "It's going to be all right, you know? I know it seems impossible right now, but things have a way of working out. It just seems impossible when you're as young as you are, but I do understand, truly I do. I was young once." She laughed, warmly. "Kefan wasn't, of course. He was born his current age. Which might explain why he never really bonded with his own mother."

  "Current age or current size?

  "Both, really."

  "Ouch. Chafing again?"

  "Hmm. Just a bit."

  Leah stood up, straightening her work dress as she did so. "When can I see her?"

  "Not today. We've got her in isolation. If we can contain the disease, then that will be a small victory in itself." Kadia put a gentle hand on Leah's shoulder. "Go home and get some rest. Science explains the world, discovers it. But science won't be enough. It's going to take magic to solve our problems, and for that we need the Sages to do their work. And for that we need people like you alive and well."

  "Right. So it all hangs on me then? No pressure."

  "Eat sensibly, avoid strong drink, talk about your feelings and get lots of sleep."

  "I'll see you in the morning."

  "I'll let you know if there are any developments." Kadia held out her hand. Leah shook it, feeling the weathered dry skin against the softness of her own palm.

  "And Leah?"

  "Yes?"

  "Don't go talking to any strange firemen on the way home."

  The sun was setting over the woods as Leah made her way from the hospital down to the part of the village where she lived. The inns were open, light spilling out invitingly from within, but they sounded subdued, half-empty. It made sense. People were at home, scared to go out in case the sickness somehow was passed on to them. In case they brought it home to their loved ones. Leah paused to look at the Castle, towering high in the distance. The light caught its walls and towers and shone and sparkled with a bright orange glow in the early evening. She hoped to whatever Gods there were that her mother would be alive in the morning.

  Anything was treatable. Anything.

  She looked towards the Gardens. The giant mushrooms were glowing softly in the fading light. She hoped the night shift were watering the seedlings properly. Too much water and... she sighed.

  "Let it go, girl. Go to bed."

  Grefno rubbed his eyes and viewed the image once again. He had been sitting here for four hours now and still it made no sense. Patterns, projections, probabilities, all swam in front of him like tadpoles composed of data. It made no sense. Every charm, every strategy, had failed him. He was entirely unsure whether the sickness could be conquered before it claimed the lives of everyone in Allesh.

  The last rays of the sunset through the vast lead light windows caught the dust particles hanging in the air; making golden patterns like bubbles in a glass of cold beer. Every now and then a tiny robot the size of a grain of sand joined the pattern, adding flecks of silver and green to the swirling gold. The air in the Castle was thick with them. Grefno leaned back into the polished wood of his chair. The size of a throne in a less civilised land, the chair held his shape perfectly. Fine monofilament wires like gossamer, like spiders' webs in the first mists of morning, wove their way out from the dark grained wood, feeding him with ideas and magic.

  Nothing made sense about this. The sickness, on the face of it, was straightforward enough. And yet when probed, it defied explanation at every turn. Every protein chain, every strand of living matter seemed to twist and turn out of his understanding, out of his grasp.

  At first he had discounted the idea that the sickness might somehow be magical in nature, but now he was not so sure. There were things about it that certainly seemed to be magical in origin, but then so much was, that it could just be background noise.

  There was certainly nothing mechanical about it. No robots the size of blood cells replicating. Likewise there were none of the other obvious dangers one might expect. No golems made from living matter at the molecular level rampaging through immune systems.

  And yet what else could it be?

  Gently extricating himself from the lattice that held him in the chair, he made his way to the window that looked out to the West. You could see a long way from here, but today his eyes didn't strain to the horizon, and instead went to the nearby village, sheltering in the snug of the valley below the Castle wall. There were towns and cities across the land, but the village had a special place in the life of the Castle. The people living there were the cleaners, the cooks, the guards, but also a permanently visible symbol of what the Castle stood for.

  There was a view, not one that Grefno adhered to, that the Mage kept the villagers close to anchor him to normality. To remind him of what he was here to protect, and of what he had once been in the days before he had become a Mage.

  Beyond the village, Grefno let his eyes gaze on the Gardens. The massive plants rose above the walls, not as high as the walls of the Castle, but almost as imposing in their own quiet way. The magnificent trees swayed, silhouetted by the setting sun, whilst pulsating lights shimmered across the vast mushrooms.

  As a Sage, Grefno could see things hidden from ordinary eyes. He looked at the Garden with more than mere vision, with magical insight, with a philosophical understanding. He could see the strands that bound the two together. The emotion
al bonds between the people and their Mage, and the framework of enchantments that hung in the air above them. Magical defences that no spell or smart bomb could ever hope to penetrate. In theory, the Garden should have been the safest place in the land, apart from the Castle itself.

  So why were most of the Gardeners now lying cold in the autopsy rooms in the bowels of the Castle? It made no sense. The plants themselves, although not exactly safe, were at least in the hands of trained people. Men and women who knew their craft well enough not to be poisoned through negligence.

  Niaal, his equal in every way, had postulated that there may have been some breakdown in the processing of the chemicals. A manufacturing error that had resulted in a deadly toxin being released into the air, but again this made no sense. Why were there no traces of it in the leaves and grass inside the Garden? Why were there no traces in the clothes of the victims? Likewise, something as straightforward as food poisoning seemed out of the question, given that none of them ate there as a point of order, given the complicated chemical make up of many of the plants.

  Grefno heard the door slide open on its wooden runners, and turned to see Niaal standing behind him.

  "The results of the latest autopsies are in, Grefno. I thought you should be the first to know."

  "Well? Do they tell us anything?"

  "Only that one or two liked a drink, one was addicted to Green, and one had a sexually transmitted disease that he wasn't telling anyone about. Nothing out of the ordinary. Fairly standard for a sample this size."

  "Does it tell us why they died?"

  Niaal drew a shape in the air and a pictogram blinked into existence, sparkles of glitter falling through the air as it rejoiced itself into being. "All the same and yet all different. For some reason, which we can't establish, their bodies were all responding as if they had lost a major organ: heart, lungs, liver, things you can't do without. One body was trying to compensate for a failing kidney that was actually fine. Another brain was being told that the liver was no longer working. It seems that the sickness blocks information being sent to the brain so that it thinks that whole areas of the body have shut down. The brain tries to compensate for the perceived loss and that is what actually kills the person. We've tried interfering with the signal, heading it off before it gets to any part of the brain that makes decisions about basic body functions, but with no luck. In real terms, they are otherwise healthy people. There is nothing wrong with any of them."