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  Dr. Flores pointed it out and said, “What is that?”

  He scratched the bald patch on his head. Rosie knew after working with Dr. Flores for years that he had several ticks when he was in investigation mode. He’d scratch his thin cheeks, crack his long fingers, or stretch his legs on chairs, tables, or any other thing they would reach. She’d never asked, but she was pretty sure he was a runner.

  Another doctor chimed in, “I’ve never seen anything like it.”

  “It seems to be attached to the Basal Ganglia,” Dr. Flores mused.

  “I think it is the Basal Ganglia,” the short Korean doctor said, full of curiosity. He continued, “See here, it has the exact shape and occupies the same space, only its color has changed and it’s pulsating. Have you ever seen it do that before?”

  “Never,” Dr. Flores said. “I say we perform a stereotactic brain biopsy to find out just what that thing is.”

  “Agreed,” Dr. Kim replied. “With your permission, I’d like to perform the procedure myself.”

  Dr. Kim was a brilliant Neurosurgeon with one of the best reputations in the hospital. He tended to get the highest profile cases, so it was no surprise he was chomping at the bit for this particular patient.

  “Of course, Dr. Kim.”

  “We should prep him for the OR immediately,” Dr. Kim said, “There’s no sense in waiting. Let’s place markers for the brain biopsy. Rosie, tell Dr. Hannover to expect some frozen sections in pathology and let’s change him into soft restraints. It’s going to be a long night.”

  4

  0100 hours – Day 2 – St. Mary’s Hospital - Intensive Care Unit

  Neil Meriwether lay in a third floor ICU hospital bed with bandages covering his recently pierced skull and soft restraints binding his wrists and ankles to the hospital bed. Dr. Kim had successfully performed a brain biopsy an hour before and the patient remained sedated. Jenny was a traveling ICU nurse on a six-month assignment to St. Mary’s. Her soft brown hair was tied back in a ponytail and she wore a sporty black headband covering a small part of her forehead. She hummed her favorite show tunes number as she ran through her assessment at his bedside.

  Neil’s eyes began to dart around the room behind closed eyelids. His pulse, which had remained steady at 110 beats per minute, shot up to 180. Jenny hit the side of the heart monitor’s display and the pulse slowly returned to 110. She hated some of the equipment in the ICU. It was older than some of the nurses and was obsolete when compared with some of the hospitals she’d traveled to recently.

  “Stupid thing,” she said in a small voice.

  Rosie knocked on the door and cracked it open partway. She popped her dyed-blonde head through the entryway and gave Jenny a frown.

  “Jenny, come see me when you’re done with your assessment.”

  She hesitated, and then nodded, saying, “Okay, Rosie.”

  Jenny had only been at St. Mary’s for a little over a month and she already hated it. Rosie was a taskmaster of a boss and often cared more about procedures than the patients. If asked, she might say otherwise, but Jenny knew the type. She fixed an out-of-place hair under her headband and gave an audible sigh that encapsulated her whole experience at the hospital.

  Jenny ran down her checklist:

  Heart Rate: 110 bpm

  Blood Pressure: 160/32

  She stopped. The patient’s blood pressure didn’t make any sense. Blood was being pushed away from the heart, but its pressure on the way back was minimal. What was happening to it? Where was it going? She closed her clipboard and turned to go find Rosie. The monitor chirped as the patient’s heart rate jumped once more, this time to more than 200 beats per minute. That should have been near impossible for a middle-aged man. His heart could actually pop.

  •

  Neil Meriwether heard a voice in his head. Its low rumble gave him sets of instructions. The voice could be so persuasive. He’d heard it for several days now, off and on, usually when he was in some sort of distress. He’d taken to calling it “The Other.” Neil would find himself agreeing with the voice and then blacking out. It was frightening at first, but he’d started to like the feeling. He could black out and when he came to his fortune would change. Neil hated conflict and did everything he could to stray away from it. He listened to the voice and let it wash over him. It assured him that everything would be okay. That it was there to help.

  Neil’s brown eyes opened wide, contorting with a swirl of emerald. He thrust his knees toward his throat and caught the breathing tube between them, jerking it out in one fluid motion. He spat blood and spittle over the side of the bed. An alarm sounded hardly a moment after his blood hit the floor. Neil let out a noise of agony and jerked the soft restraints with stunning power.

  It had happened so fast, Jenny was stunned for a moment, standing there in her navy scrubs, trying to hold him down and screaming for help until Neil’s hand latched hold of her throat and crushed her windpipe. He tossed her struggling body head first into the monitors, cracking her skull through the screen and splintering the glass into her face. As she hit the floor, shards of glass lodged in her sporty headband. The robotic beeps stopped. Neil fumbled with the catheter port in his thigh, ripping the tape and yanking the catheter out of his bladder, gasping at the pain, his mouth ajar with no sound leaving his lips.

  It took a moment for him to steel himself, but seconds later he pulled out his IV and found himself out of bed and searching for his clothes. His wool overcoat lay folded neatly on the counter along with a pair of tattered jeans and a stained dress shirt. The alarm continued to sound, quickening Neil’s pulse. He snatched his overcoat and moved to the door, putting his ear up against it. He looked down and saw the drips of blood from the catheter and IV had finally ceased.

  Only twenty seconds had passed since he’d killed the nurse and a second nurse burst through the door. She was older, hardly worth the kill. Still, he took her arm and snapped her wrist, forcing her to the ground where he twisted her neck violently. She toppled to the floor lifelessly.

  Neil gracefully stepped to the door and looked out. Way down the hall, a couple of security guards were jogging his direction. Neil opened the door and ran in the opposite direction, making a left and, creeping along the wall to a supply closet. It was unlocked.

  •

  Dr. Hannover, a pathologist at St. Mary’s Hospital, examined Patient Zero’s brain biopsy under a microscope in his lab. He always gave the name ‘Patient Zero’ to any unusual specimen he examined. It gave him some sick comfort to know he was the first line of defense against some unknown disease. He couldn’t help but get excited when something strange came across his desk. But, when he was excited he liked to eat, and his stomach was proof of just how much excitement he’d had recently. He eyed the Swiss cake rolls on the edge of his desk and salivated. They would have to wait until he was done with the examination. His thick belly protested.

  His lab was furnished with several chemical-resistant black top desks and countless pieces of high-tech microscopes and other equipment. St. Mary’s kept his lab well-stocked and well-funded since his findings often meant life or death for a patient. Finding cancerous cells early or a bacterial infection before it spread could easily save a life. Dr. Hannover wrote notes in his journal occasionally while he waited for test results. He kept a detailed record of everything he did, but would sometimes jot down story premises for the fantasy novel he’d been working on for three years and was no closer to publishing.

  Dr. Hannover’s job revolved mostly around looking for cancerous cells in tissue samples, but now he was looking at something he had truly never seen before. The black mass on the slide congealed like molasses before his eyes, betraying an emerald tint from certain angles.

  How strange, he thought.

  It was as if the tiny fraction of cells were sentient. It gurgled as lava in the recesses of a volcano, making it difficult to get a fix on it under the microscope. Dr. Hannover put on a special set of eyewear with a magnify
ing lens and held the slide under his desk light. He inched his face closer, bringing the mystery substance into focus.

  It was a microorganism; that much was for sure. However, it wasn’t like any he had ever seen before. As he tilted the slide the microscopic mysteries shied away, retreating to the farthest edge. Dr. Hannover grew frustrated. He reveled in knowing everything about the world, and while he liked a good mystery, something this far out of the realm of ‘normal’ was disconcerting. It meant that there was so much he was missing.

  “What are you?” Dr. Hannover mused.

  A loud ringing caught him by surprise, making him drop the slide to the floor. He cursed. He always got a call at the most inopportune time. He blew a strand of hair out of his husky face and then answered the phone irritably.

  “What is it?”

  It was that arrogant surgeon, wondering what he pulled out of Patient Zero’s skull.

  “I’m still running some tests,” Dr. Hannover said. “It will probably take a couple more hours.”

  Nothing was ever fast enough for these people. The brain might not seem as complex to the guy slicing and dicing, but to the person really studying its complex structure it was a labyrinth of possibilities. One prod of a needle here and the person could smell lilacs, one prod there and they can’t remember the fourth grade. Dr. Hannover smiled. His morbid mind thought of ways to torture his high school class. A few crude tools and he could perform a frontal lobotomy on Zane Martin, that licentious prick from the football team that stuffed him in his locker every day. He shook his head, suddenly remembering he was having a conversation.

  “My preliminary analysis is that it’s bacterial,” he answered, and then continued optimistically, “But I wouldn’t rule out parasite just yet.”

  Dr. Hannover said goodbye and hung up the phone. Now where did that slide go? He slid back his roller chair and moved to the ground on his hands and knees. He felt sharp pains in his knees. He was never going to lose the weight with his bum knees. After carrying around some extra weight for most of his life his knees were shot. He fumbled for a few moments until he grasped one edge of the slide. It had cracked in two after it hit the floor.

  “Shit,” Dr. Hannover cursed.

  He held up the broken pieces to the light and the black molasses substance was dissipating into the air, like watching water evaporate in a time-lapse. It spiraled up and up until Dr. Hannover went cross-eyed trying to follow it. The mist turned green just before it entered his nostrils.

  •

  Inside the supply closet, Neil Meriwether slipped into his gray wool overcoat and examined the treasure trove of scalpels in sterile white packages. An emergency message sounded over the intercom system. Someone would be finding the bodies soon, which meant he had to move quickly. He moved to grab a handful of scalpels when a pulsating pain shot through his stomach. He grew cold, as though ice water were flowing down his throat and into his belly. His stomach growled with hunger, forcing him to drop to one knee, snarling like a wild animal.

  He took a deep breath, blew it out, and returned to his feet. Neil was in a period of lucidity. He’d come to after entering the supply closet but there was no telling whether his control over his own mind would last seconds or hours before returning to that dark place once again. He would never get used to the trail of dead in his wake.

  Neil retrieved a scalpel from the bin and tore off the packaging. As soon as he touched it, the darkness returned and he moved on auto-pilot. He slipped out of the supply room and down the hall toward an emergency exit. The alarm continued, though the halls were empty. Lockdown, a voice in his head told him. Near the emergency stairs was a nurse’s station, where three nurses cowered under the desk. He leaped over the counter and dragged one of the nurses out, kicking and screaming. She tried to block the blade with her arms but he was far too powerful. He snuck the small blade in and cut her jugular artery. His grizzled face contorted with a weird sort of pleasure that was not his own but emanated from a deep recess inside of him.

  The remaining two nurses plead for him to stop, but he was a passenger in his own body, unable to be reasoned with. When they realized he wouldn’t stop, the blonde one grabbed a coffee mug and smashed it over his head while the other made a run for it. Before she could move three feet he gripped the back of her neck and squeezed with immense force. He heard a satisfying snap and turned back to face the blonde nurse, now cowering in the corner. She started to cry and Neil felt a twinge in his belly that might have been remorse. The feeling faded quickly and he took his time while he cut her throat along her jawline, soaking his polka dot patient gown and wool overcoat in the spray. Satisfied, he took off toward the emergency stairs as fast as his legs would take him. When he entered the stairwell, he noticed a red light flashing overhead. He calculated that it had taken him just four or five minutes to get there. The police should arrive any moment.

  Neil leaned against the wall of the stairwell for a moment under the flickering fluorescent lights. He started breathing heavily. He glanced at the scalpel in his hand, bloody down the handle and quivering in his sweating palm. The scent of iron filled his nose and he gagged. It was the moments of clarity that scared the hell out of him. This was one of those moments.

  That dark place in the center of his head cried out in a chorus of screams. Neil tightened his wool overcoat around himself and his body moved once again without his consent, down the stairs to the first floor and out into the brisk night.

  He stopped for a moment in the parking lot, as though seeing the world for the first time. It was a feeling unlike anything he could recall. He recognized the things he saw, but instead of thinking of their names, a guttural series of clicks and cracks echoed in his ears. Lampposts, cars, trees, all were suddenly new to him. His stomach roiled, making him whimper. An unexplainable anger bubbled up inside him until it burst out and he screamed into the night.

  5

  0600 Hours – Day 2 – The Willamette Valley - Oregon

  Ted Newberg barreled down the narrow dirt road leading to his rolling vineyard in his restored ’64 Ford F100. He liked to get started on his chores early before the tourists began to show up. The Willamette Valley’s reputation for Pinot Noir had been growing for years, in part because of winemaker’s like Ted, who toiled away every day at their passion. There wasn’t anything better in the world than drinking a good bottle of wine with every meal and eating the goat cheese he received in trade from his neighbors.

  He adjusted his overalls and fiddled with the radio station. He narrowed his eyes at the dial. Sometimes his favorite country station cut out and he would change to the alternative station. He may have been a country man at heart, but that didn’t mean he was behind the times. He kept his graying beard neatly trimmed and wore the kind of glasses the hipsters would die to find in a thrift store. When he went up to Portland he felt like a lot of the younger kids were copying his way of dressing. His wife Rita had told him they were being ironic. That didn’t jive with Ted. He knew he was still cool, and like a fine wine he was only getting better with age.

  Ted’s father was a child during The Great Depression and believed he had to make as much money as possible and sock it away, never using it except to stock up on supplies. For a lot of his youth, that’s just the way it was. He didn’t question it. Ted was an old-school thinker. He believed in the American Dream; that if he worked hard and made the effort, he could change his fortune and grow rich.

  He had already held Wall Street jobs in his life which paid a fortune and built up his nest egg the way he was supposed to. Now, Ted was following his own dream, not his father’s. Making fabulous wine and enjoying it with his wife Rita. It wasn’t about the money anymore, though over time, that was coming anyway. He wasn’t getting any younger, but what time he had left he made sure to enjoy thoroughly.

  A plume of dust smoked up behind Ted’s Ford. He must have hit a soft patch of road. Ted loved driving in the morning, especially before the sun rose. He felt like he was
the only person on Earth and could be alone with his thoughts. Certainly, he loved Rita, but he also cherished his time driving around his property and walking through the vineyard as the sun rose into the sky. It reminded him of his favorite novel, Walden, by Henry David Thoreau. It too spoke of getting back to nature and being skeptical of the state. Regardless of what he might think about some of the folks up in Portland, Ted Newberg was well at home in Oregon.

  Dawn had begun to creep into morning when the color of the sky swirled like the brush of a confused oil painter. Ted’s eyes drifted up and his jaw loosened. A thin line of green appeared in the sky and then vanished. Ted pressed the brakes in time to see something fall from the sky not twenty yards in front of his truck. It crashed, sending up a plume of dirt and dust thirty feet in the air, finally fizzling with emerald light. Ted’s truck was covered in a shower of soil. He got out of the F100 and jogged up to the edge of the crater, ignoring the objections of his titanium knee. A jagged meteorite pulsed, half covered in dirt six feet beneath his feet. The green light that emanated from the tiny holes of the space rock dimmed until they faded completely, leaving only a faint purple residue on its face.