"X, you've got to do something!" The worm that had remained to keep an eye on the agents called as X came hurrying out to see what disaster had struck this time. "Something's wrong with Kay!"
"Something's really wrong. Do you know if these suits can be drip dried? Want to look my best for the fu..." Frank started to say before the worms pounced on him again. They weren't sure if the line with Aileen might be open still or not, but they weren't going to take any chances.
X bit off a curse in his own language as he saw what had the worms so freaked, and Frank thinking about appropriate funeral suits. Kay was shaking uncontrollably, the pillows and blankets around him the only thing that was preventing him from giving himself a major head injury, as he jerked, and his head slammed back against the fluffy, feather-filled material. "One of you, go and get more pillows. Get anything soft you can find." X swore again, loudly, as he dropped down by Kay, grabbing the scanner and pointing it at him. Zara had said anything over a hundred was bad, but he had a feeling a hundred and fifty heartrate was a special category of bad. He reached for his communicator and started to try to get his cousin. It was tricky at times, getting a connection during inter-stellar travel but maybe he would be lucky, and Zara would be somewhere where she could get a signal.
By the time the worm had returned with more pillows and another blanket, Kay was lying still, so still that at first it looked like he was dead. "X?" the worm asked anxiously as he came hurrying over. What were they going to do if something happened to Kay? Aileen would be brokenhearted if she arrived and it was too late.
"Get the pillows around him. If that starts up again, he's probably going to give himself a broken bone." X muttered as he looked at the scanner, and debated hitting it when the reading that it showed wasn't what he wanted. As soon as the shaking had stopped, he had given Kay the injection like Zara had told him to do, but his heartrate was still way too high, hovering around the one hundred rate that Zara had told him was getting into a danger zone. What in the world was he going to do, though? And what if some of the others ended up like this as well? His head shot up as he looked in the direction of his partner. No, Elle was still right where he had left her, though, tucked under the blankets, and thank heavens still, instead of shaking like Kay. And when he looked around the room, he couldn't see any other agents seizing either. That still left the dilemma of what to do about Kay, though. Zara still hadn't answered. Obviously she was in a region of space without call service. Just his luck. His training with the peacekeepers back home had covered seizures, and he remembered that book that the MIB had issued him mentioning something about them as well, when he had been bored and thumbed through it one day, but still, all it had said was to keep the person from hurting themselves, not how to manage when you were in a situation like this, with all of the medical staff poisoned, and help still who knows how far away. "I'm going to have to get a doctor." Where in the world was the closest hospital, though? He couldn't afford to be gone too long, no matter how well it seemed like the worms were managing. Sooner or later, a batch of vanilla almond would distract them.
"A doctor?" one of the worms asked. "But there aren't any... Do you mean a human doctor? Zed isn't going to like that."
"Zed would like something happening to his best agent even less." And he was holding Zara to taking the blame this time, no matter how cute and innocent she looked. "Do you know where the closest hospital is?" He demanded, as he glared at the dog.
"What about this one?" another worm asked, and he pulled up a picture of a hospital on the twins' monitor. "Kay chases people through there all the time. Bet there are a lot of doctors there."
"Yeah, that's a nice one." the fourth worm said as he trotted over to join his friend. "Kay almost saw his brother there once."
"He has a brother?" Did X really want to learn details about Kay's family tree, though? From the little he knew, it might rival his for confusion. The hospital did look big, though, and was probably full of doctors. How hard would it be to grab one? "Watch them." He ordered the worms as he dug in his pocket for the keys to the SUV. Hopefully he could be there and back before things could get even worse. "And if my cousin calls, tell her we have a disaster on her hands!"
"Wait, you're leaving us alone?" Frank demanded. "Are you crazy? What if someone else gets sick? Or what if Kay..."
"The worms are in charge. Obey the worms."
"Obey the... You're leaving them in charge?"
"They managed before. I'll hurry. Just keep an eye on them." X said as he passed the instructions that Zara had given him earlier, about the drugs to use to one of the worms. "Just try to do what the list says, if he gets worse. I'll be back as fast as I can." And surely, if he could get his hands on a doctor, this was still fixable. True, a human doctor wouldn't know what to do with an alien poison, but wouldn't they have to have a clue as to how to keep Kay alive until someone with experience with that sort of thing got there?
X was ready to hit the dashboard, and give the garage agent a heart attack when he recovered from the poison. The hospital was packed. Every human in the area had apparently picked today to become horribly accident prone. The entire parking lot was packed. How in the world was he ever going to get his hands on a doctor, if he couldn't even find a parking space?
Just as he was about to do serious damage to the vehicle, or to the next human, who cut him off for a parking space, he spotted an older couple, coming out of a side door of the hospital, the man wearing a nametag with a little smiley face, that X swore said something about a doctor. He jerked the wheel to the side, and pulled it to a stop, half on the sidewalk, right in front of the two humans. Yes, the tag did say doctor, Doctor George Weaver, Convention Attendee. Perfect. Finally something was going his way.
"Young man, what in the world do you think you're doing?" The woman demanded as X hopped out and came over to them. "This is the sidewalk, not a parking lot!"
"I'm stopped, not parked. There's a difference." X repeated something he had heard Zara say once. "Wait, you are a medical doctor, right, and not a doctor of English or that horrible musical theater or something, right?"
"My husband's a neurologist." The woman, Rose said. "Why?"
"That works." It would have been nice to get a poison control specialist, but didn't neurologists deal with the brain? He probably knew something about seizures.. X snagged him by the arm, and tossed him into the back seat of the SUV before he could even let out a scream.
"Young man, what do you think you're doing?" Rose was in the front passenger seat before X could even get behind the wheel, glaring at him in a way that reminded him uncomfortably of his mother.
"I'm sorry, but we kind of need a doctor and my cousin said to grab the first one I saw." Did he have time to get rid of her? No, who knows what he might run into on the way back to headquarters. He would just have to take her with them. And how bad could it be? Maybe a new friend would distract his mother from attempts to play matchmaker for him? Somehow, he didn't think all of those poisoned humans would proved to be enough of a distraction.
"What? Young man, are you in the mob?" Rose demanded, as X clicked the locks on the door to make sure the humans couldn't escape, and then pulled out, cutting off an ambulance, and earning him shouts that would have done his cousin proud as he sped onto the street, heading back the way he had came.
"The mob? If you'll remind me of it later, I might be. That's better than the last cover story Agent Jay came up with." X said. Now if things would just be the way he left them back at headquarters, then maybe they had a chance of somehow getting through this mess in one piece.