For the Dead Travel Fast
—-xxx—-
When she woke, the room was icy and her body too heavy to move.
Everything was pain. A rolling sickness that manifested in trembling, a cold sweat on her brow, her top lip. She smelled blood and panic, and her heart struggled to beat.
Her head had rolled to the side and when she managed to grate her eyes open, there was a long expanse of tile floor and a clear glass wall. Lights were low, a subtle blue-green glow coming from some kind of medical equipment. Or the hallway beyond. Something. She wasn't... too clear on where she was.
She felt her lids falling and couldn't stop it, the terrible slow slide back into darkness.
—-xxx—-
Castle was lying on the floor when Harris came back inside. The cycle of the airlock, the double door feature on the room, alerted him to her return, and this time the hazmat suit wasn't as terrifying as it had been.
His spores, he remembered. Though what spores, what was he now that he had spores—he was very much suppressing that reality and focusing instead on the flickers of life he could see from Kate on the hospital bed the next room over.
Flickers. Not much more.
"Okay," Harris said briskly. "Your antigen sets are a near-perfect match, which is almost unbelievable in a newbie and his Origin VL. But you don't understand a word I'm saying, do you?" She shook her head in the hood and her braids stayed eerily still. "I can inject you with the proper glutathione-hydroxylamine sulfate combo now—ah, that's an alliinase inhibitor for the uninitiated… never mind. I'm giving you another injection to counter the deep freeze I put you in. Got it?"
He made another inhuman gargling noise and she took that for consent, which, hell, he supposed it was. What did he know about any of this?
She came forward, dragging her cart on wheels behind her, and produced two zip cords from the lower compartment. "And since you won't be in deep freeze, but accelerating through phase, well..." She let that dangle like a threat.
Which meant this couldn't be good.
She zip-tied his ankles, having to wrestle his bent crooked legs together to perform such a feat, and then she apologized in a weird soft low voice and zip-tied his hands. "Newbies don't know their own strength," she said, patting his pec with a double-gloved hand. "Nothing personal."
Fuck that. It was all damn personal. That was his wife languishing in the next room and this so-called doctor was—
He gasped when the needle went in. Same damn spot, just below the sleeve of his t-shirt, into the thick muscle of his bicep.
She grabbed his chin and then two latex-free fingers pried open his eyelids to let her check his pupils. She'd turned the lights down at some point after the surgery (the greenish blue glow had been an immediate weird relief, like being lowered into a lukewarm bath when feverish), and now she briefly shined a penlight towards his pupils and nodded.
He hissed, but the light wasn't white—it was something else. Something almost invisible. It left a phosphene of pretty pink-blue across his vision, and that was when he realized he was alone.
The cycle of the airlock whirred, he heard the hiss of the room's negative pressure pulling air away from the doors and cycling it back out somewhere, and he laid on the floor, bathed in pink-purple light and his heart rate slowly climbing.
The heat started in his muscles first—his bicep where the shot had gone in—then it spread to his chest and guts, his heart thumping so hard it rocked his whole body.
Heat, and his heart was beginning to race, and the smell of the air itself was somehow insultingly sterile. She'd pulled all the good stuff from the air, and now he was left with the equivalent of rubbing alcohol, constantly inhaled like fumes, singeing his nostrils and searing his lungs.
He blinked and blinked again, the return of gritty sand under his eyelids, harsher and more painful than the last time. His palms were damp with sweat, his chest and groin prickling, his breathing now expanding the full range of his lungs and bellowing out again, nearly hyperventilating.
It was like that bad trip his senior year of school, after the prank, when they'd bought mushrooms off some guy who met them behind an Italian restaurant next to a dumpster, and they'd had to mix the magic mushroms with Tang because they were so bitter, and as soon as the hallucinations had hit, it was all dark spells and voodoo witchery in his head. Rick had spent three hours smashing into things in the dark, his friends laughing and chasing hi, and then another hour vomiting.
This was worse.
He sat up, dizzy, overheated, turned inside out.
Dr Harris was on the other side of the glass, watching him carefully. Her face was hard as she took off the hazmat hood and shook out the braids. The beads glimmered in the dim light.
He blinked and grunted, reached up to rub his fists into his eyes. Grinding away at the grittiness until it seemed to dissolve some, and now when he opened his eyes, the pink-blue was gone. Just that green algae glow to the room.
He swung his head around and found Kate in the next room, and he was on his feet and heading for her before he could think. He stopped just short of the glass, unsure if it was something he should touch, if Harris hadn't perhaps booby-trapped it, and he rocked on his toes as he took in his wife, studying her, eyes scouring the scene for clues.
Her face was turned to him, lashes on her cheeks. Too pale. The bandage was an artist's rendering of the many gradations of blood: the deep maroon-black where it had dried, the watercolor pink where it was faint, the slash of crimson where the wound bled still. All that blood. He sniffed but he smelled nothing, his nose burned by the sterile air.
Kate twitched, her breathing seemed shallow. He swallowed roughly, fighting the instinct to do something, because he couldn't, he probably shouldn't either, and she was at least in a doctor's care.
A weird-ass doctor, but the bullet was out, wasn't it?
He turned his head to the woman watching him from the other glass wall. "You don't have to let me out there, but can't I go in to her?"
She touched a panel set into the pillar at her side, the PA crackled and cleared. "No."
He frowned, looked back at Kate. "But she'll heal? Without… no, you said she needed an infusion." He tried to remember high school biology, the things he'd gleaned from working with the NYPD, blood types and DNA. "You asked me what family? I don't know. She's O negative and—"
"That's not all."
He blinked. "I… look, she's my wife. We had to fill out these forms for—she's been shot before—she's a police detective—we know each other's medical histories. She—"
"You don't know a damn thing." Her voice twisted, turned mocking. "Oh, good job, you know her ABO status. But you could still kill her not knowing anything about her VL antigen and family. Who are you people and why are you so dangerously dumb about being vampires?"
"Wh-what?" he croaked. His eyes returned to Kate, so still on the hospital bed, so… drained. What blood could possibly be left? It darted panic straight into his guts. "You mean we're the same family now. Because of this transition stuff. That's what you were asking, wasn't it. What family is she? She's mine. My family. How much blood do you need? Hook me up to her, Doc, I'll do it. I'll give whatever she needs. Just let me in there."
The speaker gave a weird staticky hiss and then cleared again. "I know you think you're clear-headed right now, but that's the phase talking. It wants to sweet talk us into letting you out, into giving you free rein. But I can't do that."
"But she needs me," he growled. A flash of heat burned through his voice. "She needs me."
"She will. But not now. You're staying in there while this phase has its way with you."
"No!" He felt the whiplash of emotion, the violent wellspring of rage. "You fucking cunt—"
"That's it. Finally broke. You see your man in there?" She began stripping the rest of the hazmat suit with brisk, satisfied movements, but he jerked his head around and saw Kate was awake, staring at him. Harris cackled. "That's the phase beneath all his charming bullshit. That's his true face now." The PA cut off.
It was with hungry eyes that he watched her enter Kate's room to check on her.
He wasn't even aware of the way he bared his teeth at the glass.
—-xxx—-