The long-deferred second part of Fever (You Set My Soul on Fire). Ironically, while I myself have been ill, I haven’t had any fevers.
Gerald Hansen
Secrecy. Secrecy was safety, or so Gerald’s mother had said. It was why their family had survived so long. (If she was to be believed, it had been a gift much like his own that kept his granddad from getting lynched. The man had lived into his seventies, though he inconveniently died before he could teach Gerald much at all.)
In all honesty, secrecy hadn’t exactly been hard. They lived in a world where damn near everyone would turn their own mind inside out to rationalize away something that ought to be impossible, and his gift wasn’t exactly flashy. There were times it utterly sucked, but it was as invisible as any gift could be. Nobody was likely to wonder why his presence lightened the mood in a room, or why he had a better bedside manner than anybody else in the hospital.
No, it hadn’t been hard, but now each new case of fever added a pebble to the stony weight of dread in his chest. The idea that people could just…could just wake up with a gift went against everything Mama had ever told him, but what the hell were the odds it would be anything else? If she hadn’t died of cancer the year before, he would have interrogated her.
His tiny apartment was stifling as he paced the living-room, heavy with Louisiana air so humid he felt like he could grab a handful and wring it out if he tried hard enough. The AC had choked to death on god only knew what, because apparently his day hadn’t been bad enough. Sweat trickled in rivulets down his face, his back, but that dread was a cold thing — a chunk of ice in his soul, if not his body.
Somebody had come for the blonde girl today. He hadn’t known her name, because she’d been brought in with no ID, but he doubted she was very far north of twenty, skinny as a rake and just as tall. She was burning, just like all the others, her freckled face so red she’d barely looked human, and her fever-glazed eyes didn’t seem to take in him or anything around her.
He’d been so sure she’d die, but the fever broke: by the next day, she’d been lucid, if exhausted. She’d also started a very tiny, very localized rainstorm in the bathroom, and within twenty minute she was just…gone. Men came and took her away, despite the protests of himself and other staff members — men in grey suits, with a complete lack of what anyone might call an expression.
Secrecy.
Secrecy. Hiding in plain sight. Gerald had done it all his life, and he could damn well keep doing it. Empathy didn’t do anything tangible, and he’d been taught to control it for as long as he’d been able to speak. He was safe. He was safe.
So why was he so afraid?
He stood still, and stared out the window. There had been less traffic since the fever took hold, which meant less exhaust to foul the breathless, sodden air. He had no reason to be afraid, and yet afraid he was, because instinct told him those men in grey wouldn’t care that he wasn’t like the others — if they clocked him for what he was, he was screwed, but dammit, they wouldn’t.
Isolation, he thought. He needed to get out of the city — he needed to get out of the country, if he could, and find somewhere in the middle of nowhere. The epidemic had to end sooner or later, so he could go without leaving the hospital in the lurch.
Still sweating, he took his laptop into the bathroom; it was the closest thing to a cool space in the entire apartment. If the wifi decided to cooperate, he could start making a list of potential places.
Secrecy.
Safety.
He had an hour before he needed to leave for work, and he was damn well going to use it.
~
Unsurprisingly, Gerald found the wards still busy as a termite mound. The alcohol scent of disinfectant was overpowered by the general, rotten-onion-odor of sweat and sickness; the medical staff were all used to it, but any patients lucid enough to register it wrinkled their noses.
So far as he was concerned, the smell was worth it just for the wonderful coolness of a functioning air conditioner. He’d showered before he left for work, but such was the humidity that he felt like he’d swum across the parking lot. His sweat would dry soon enough, which was more than could be said for their poor patients. More rooms had been crowded with extra beds and cots with each passing day, and this morning was no different. At this rate, they’d run out, and god only knew how they’d find more of either.
Saline, he thought, as he wove his way through the hallways. The quiet hubbub of voices was strangely soothing, and it made a very odd counterpoint to the sick-stink. What were they going to do, when they ran out of saline? In the height of their delirium, the patients were incapable of drinking on their own; if the saline ran dry, they might start seeing actual fatalities. The fact that they hadn’t yet bordered on miraculous, but that couldn’t be counted on to last.
The crowd parted, and a brief ripple of silence fell — it followed a pair of men in grey, who between them carried a stretcher bearing a semiconscious young man. They looked at no one, and nobody dared question them.
Heart in his throat, Gerald did his best to relax as they passed. Once again, he reminded himself that nothing about him stood out. True, the white staff outnumbered the black, but he was hardly alone, and he was physically…average. Average height, average build, his haircut short and unmemorable.
Still, he held his breath until they passed, and forced himself to project an air of calmness as he began his round. The room that had held the blonde girl was now occupied by three people, red-faced and soaked with sweat, in various states of semiconsciousness.
If this damn fever continued its mathematical rate of acceleration, the men in grey would find themselves overwhelmed — if they hadn’t already. What would they do, if everyone eventually came down with it? What did they do when one of them did? Gerald was fairly sure he didn’t actually want to know.
Secrecy. Safety. Two words, a mantra, eventually followed by a third: escape. He just had to weather this, and bide his time, and get the hell out of anything resembling a city.
~
Geezer
The man with no name sat at the back of the bar, nursing his third beer.
He was a regular fixture, and he had been for the last year; he’d stay until he felt it was time to move on. He never knew when the itch to travel might strike, but it might be safest if he did soon.
“You gonna finish that thing?”
Faded blue eyes tracked to the barman’s. He was young — maybe mid twenties — but a good kid. He’d given Geezer a place to stay in exchange for odd jobs, and hadn’t even mentioned anything about the twin scarred ruinations Geezer called hands. If the kid made certain he had jobs that didn’t need fine motor skills, nobody needed to say anything.
“Workin’ on it. Helluva thing going on out there.” He jerked his head at the TV, which had been muted all day. Sound wasn’t really needed, given the text that crawled across the bottom of the screen. Every channel had it, and no two seemed to say anything like the same thing.
“I read on the internet it’s some government program that fucked up,” the kid said. “Like, some virus they made to destabilize a population.”
Geezer snorted. “If they did, it worked,” he said. He wasn’t about to tell the kid — or anyone else — that he damn well knew better. Oh, he didn’t know the real cause, but he knew what it wasn’t, and it wasn’t that.
He stared down at the foamy depths of his beer, golden in the sunlight that slanted through the windows. “Kid, if you get the fever, don’t go anywhere, you hear me? And don’t take anybody to a hospital or doctor or anyone like that. Ain’t safe.”
“The hell? Why not?”
There was a very odd note in the kid’s voice that made Geezer look up. “Think about it. Government didn’t do this, but they’re sure as shit gonna overreact to it. It’s not just the fever, it’s what follows.”
The kid snorted, but there was doubt written beneath the impressive sunburn on his face. “What, the curses? You don’t — I mean, you don’t really believe that, do you?”
Yeah, there was real fear in the kid’s brown eyes — fear that made him seem a good ten years younger. For the first time that day, Geezer took a good, hard look at the kid — his red face, the sweat on his forehead. Yeah, it was kind of hot in the bar (air conditioner gone to shit, and the part they needed wouldn’t be there until next week), but…dammit.
“You’re sick, aren’t you?”
The kid looked away, and shrugged his bony shoulders. “I’ve felt better.” Hands that weren’t quite steady polished a glass that was in no need of it. “Probably nothing to worry about.”
Geezer’s eyebrows rose, and he sighed. Fuck everything. “Kid, you shut this place right now. If we get you home and resting, maybe it won’t be so bad.” He didn’t believe that for a moment, and he doubted the kid did, either but it was something to say.
The kid’s apartment was directly over the bar; once he’d locked everything up and flipped the sign to Closed, it didn’t exactly take long to get there and get him settled. The place had been an utter sty when Geezer first took up residence on the couch, but it was organized with military precision now. Sure, the collection of DVDs sat on a shelf made out of a board held up by two cinder blocks, and a square of milk crates covered in plywood passed for the coffee-table, but it was tidy.
“Go on, kid. I’m not much of a nurse, but I’m the best you got. If somebody comes asking after the bar, I’ll just tell ’em you shut it to keep the sickness out.”
The kid actually did as he was told, and Geezer settled himself on the sofa. An ashtray (made from a hubcap) took up one corner of the coffee-table, and he dragged it over before he tapped a cigarette out of the crumpled pack in his pocket. It would be a few days before he’d need to go get more, and by then the kid ought to be past the worst of it.
A flick of Geezer’s battered Zippo lit the cigarette, and the smell of lighter fluid joined the sharpness of the smoke. If the kid was lucky, he’d wake up with something he could hide, and nobody needed to be any the wiser. He had a sister, but Geezer didn’t dare call her for fear she’d give something away, by accident or on purpose. She didn’t ever need to know, either.
He propped his feet on the coffee-table. It might be that he was only delaying the inevitable, but it might not, either. His last prophecy-seizure had showed him a world that seemed to be at least half-ass okay; unfortunately he had no way of knowing when that would be. So often, the shit he saw didn’t make any sense until it had already happened.
Would they get him, the Men in Grey? He had no way of knowing that, either, because the only future he never saw was his own. Logically, the answer was no; they were taking away everyone who’d been sick, and he wasn’t going to catch that fever. He’d been born with the sort of curse it was inflicting on so many — if he didn’t have some kind of immunity, he’d be very surprised. Nobody looked twice at a broken-down old vet.
Not yet.
This wouldn’t stop with the fever. Geezer knew that much, at least; somehow, at some point, the fucking MiG would find a way to clock the cursed even if it didn’t show. This wasn’t the sort of place they’d pay attention to, though, and the kid was like him in one way: he was beneath the notice of anybody who supposedly mattered. There was an upside to being the kind of person society didn’t care about — when shit hit the fan, nobody thought about you, so long as you weren’t an idiot who drew attention to yourself. Flying under the radar wasn’t too hard when people tried not to look at you, either out of fear you’ll attack them or beg for change.
Get something invisible, kid. Hell, get invisibility, if that’s even a thing. Geezer didn’t know just how many different curses there might be, but they were probably going to find out soon enough.
Fucking wonderful.
~
Raoul von Rached
For the first time in decades, Von Rached found something well and truly interesting.
He had always known that others like himself existed, rare though they were. As he understood it, magic ran in families, or had once done; so far as he had been able to discover, both sides of his family were now long dead. Even the aristocracy in the normal world had an unfortunate habit of inbreeding itself to extinction, and among his kind there were even fewer of those to go around. If they had been at all like his mother, it was no real loss.
This fever, however…
Von Rached was not about to bother with the news, or even the CDC feeds he should not technically have access to. No, he sought the man who was supposedly some combination of superior and handler, as if anyone could actually control him. Letting them believe that made his life less annoying, so he allowed it.
Andrew Crupps lived alone, in an expensive flat in an upscale neighborhood of America’s capital city. It was exactly what one would expect of a civil servant devoid of any real imagination or creativity: pure white carpet, flat white walls adorned here and there with bland watercolors for which he had no doubt paid a fortune. Even the sofa was off-white. The occasional splash of color — a replica Ming vase with an artificial fern, a Persian rug in red and gold — only offset the sterility.
The man himself had no idea his home had been invaded until there was quite suddenly a Von Rached in his kitchen, where there had been no Von Rached a moment before. He jumped, swore, and dropped a jar of marinara sauce that shattered upon impact with the (white, of course) tile floor. The resultant mess looked remarkably like blood.
“I— I didn’t hear you knock.” Crupps swallowed, but rallied himself. He was a tall man, and reasonably fit for his forty-odd years — not normally someone who was easily unsettled, but just now he was pale as his anemic flat.
Von Rached arched an eyebrow. “I didn’t bother,” he said. “It hardly matters — you won’t remember this anyway. Hold still, Andrew, and this will be over much sooner.”
He stepped over the mess and broken glass, while the wide-eyed Crupps fought an urge to flee and just barely won. “This really isn’t — you should make an appointment…” The words trailed off, and he went both still and calm, his mind wrapped in an artificial haze of serenity. It made it extremely easy for Von Rached to enter it, and look about as he pleased.
Every mind he had ever inspected was different, but there was one thing they seemed to have in common: some manner of inner landscape. The person themself was often entirely unaware of it, but it was blatant enough to Von Rached.
Crupps’, naturally, was very like the sort of office in which he worked, and very nearly as impersonal as his home. His mind was tidy enough that Von Rached didn’t need to rummage for long before he found what he sought.
The human memory, he had found, could be an incredibly peculiar thing. Crupps’ conscious powers of recall were nothing remarkable, but the things he stored below the surface of his mind were far more complete. A mental file labeled ‘fever’ revealed a great many things the man himself likely would not have known he could retain, though the language was somewhat…less than professional.
Morbidity rate 30%?
Fatality rate, 0. How?
Alteration rate from fever: 100%
Known alterations thus far (terminology subject to change):
- Pyrokinesis (fire)
- Transmutation (conversion of objects to other objects?)
- Flight (note: calling it ‘Superman Syndrome’ was overruled)
- Chloropathy (plant manipulation of some sort)
- Aura manipulation (how very New Age)
- Clairsentience (reading the history of…everything. Note: subjects prone to suicide)
- Aquakinesis (water. Note: calling it ‘Aquaman Syndrome’ overruled)
Von Rached was somewhat disappointed that there were no telepaths among that number, but it was early days yet. While he had suspected the fever inevitably lead to the acquisition of an ability, it was useful to have confirmation that it was so thus far.
Transmission vector unknown.
Subject commonality…apparently nonexistent.
Recommended course of action: pray.
Well, that was hardly useful. Von Rached could study this, once given funds and facilities. If anyone could divine the true source of the fever and its effects, it was him.
Crupps was the key, and thus it was Crupps he would use. The man would forget Von Rached had invaded both his flat and his mind, but on the morrow he would convince everyone who would listen that it was imperative to study this phenomenon — and that only one person was qualified to do so.
Yes, things were about to get far more interesting.
