I feel wrong.

  The doctor tells me that everything is ok and I am ok and that I am not really hurt and it’s all in my head and I had a nightmare but I feel wrong and she’s lying I think. I think I would like it more if she was lying because if she’s not lying then she’s wrong and that’s scary because if she can’t see it and it’s real then

  I’m scared and I feel wrong.

  It doesn’t hurt but I think it should hurt and it doesn’t but it’s not right it’s not right and sometimes I feel it and I never felt it before. Not even when I was running and I got really tired and I didn’t know I could get that tired even then I didn’t feel it and it feels wrong.

  I can’t sleep. The doctor tells me it’s all in my head and I don’t know if that’s scarier but it feels wrong and if I fall asleep maybe the bad thing will come back again and hurt me again and it feels wrong.

  I miss grandpa. I even miss billy.

  I’m so scared.

  The doctor says its all in my head but if its all in my head why does it hurt so much.

  -Writing scribbled onto paper using a simple pen. The handwriting is child-like and shaky, as if suffering from an injury.

  __________________________________________________________________________

  Without the Foreman’s attention, getting out is almost as easy as getting in. We hear it walking from one office to another, and after waiting for it to go a few more doors down, around the corner, we head back out and down. We only see two of the other corpse-things from before down in the cubicle area, as if the others, the unsteadier ones… faded. I catch a glimpse of shapes where they were, something vague like the shape of clothing, but I don’t have the time or the mind to care.

  My head hurts. Even now, still in the building where we almost got attacked and infested earlier, I feel like I might close my eyes and just fall asleep.

  I hear you’re really not supposed to fall asleep with a concussion. Considering the fact that I have likely done at least that much damage to myself with whatever the Bloodling did, I’d say it’s probably decent advice to follow. I don’t feel like I’m dying, but hey, that doesn’t necessarily mean much, does it? Considering that I barely know anything about neurology or the effects that being flooded with blood will do for it (besides “not good”), probably better to push to stay awake however I can, hmm?

  My head hurts.

  We make it out through the front entrance, out past a few steps-

  My head turns as her eyes swivel to the right.

  A door. A door we passed through on the way to enter here. Maybe half an hour ago? Maybe an hour, tops?

  A little voice there, whispering.

  Jay says something, but we’re not listening. I’ve already turned us into the room, walked us forward to the open locker, and reached into it.

  He doesn’t yell- we both know better than that at this point, about what a danger that would be, but I wouldn’t have listened if he did. We came here for resources. We got information, which, you know, yippee, but it’s not resources, not something I know how to work with.

  Dead bodies? Meat? I can work with that.

  I can almost feel the Glove pushing back against the tendrils of Grey that squirm out of the little body in the locker. It feels like my head, woozy as it is, picks up on things I missed the first time. Heh. Turns out all you need for some fresh perspective is a light dosage of brain damage.

  The Glove is well made. Simple, but well made. It is designed to work with foreign material, to cut and pluck and weave and stitch and sew, and the grey finds no purchase in it that I can discern.

  The little body goes into my bag, and then I am back to the hallway, Jay holding onto my arm and pulling me along like a lost little kid.

  I would be more annoyed by that (I don’t love that much contact, that much reminder of my body and what it feels like for someone to touch any part of it), but I think I hear him mention something about my pupils, and that reminds me more of concussions.

  Better to focus on staying awake.

  We make it out, and the light outside Hurts. It hurts my eyes, and it feels like it goes directly past that and into my brain, screaming at me loud and plentiful that I should not be here, that I should close my eyes and goa way until the pain clears up-

  Mmh. The car. We’re at the car.

  Can Jay drive her? She’s a tough bitch who hates everyone, but especially anyone she doesn’t know. The engine light has been on for months and I think the reason why has been cycling through different parts of it. The doors don’t really latch properly, and unlatch with only real fucking elbow grease. She drifts to the right a bit, and-

  Oh. I’m sitting in the car. In the passenger seat. That’s weird.

  Jay is saying something to me, shaking my shoulder a bit. I can tell he’s panicked, but he’s shaking it so lightly! That’s polite of him. Is he trying to keep me awake? That would be kind of silly of him. I’m already on that, you don’t need to nag-

  Oh. His hands are in my pocket. The jangly pocket. The pocket where I keep my keys.

  Hmm. This seems worse than a concussion. I’ve only had the one, so maybe this is just stronger than the last, but it feels a lot louder. Why are my hands trembling?

  Huh. I should probably be able to understand words, right?

  Jay’s saying things, but they don’t make sense. The sound of them swims to me through treacle, like the air is thicker than my breathing says it is, and when they crawl down my ears and slither into my mind they decide to wander instead of connecting to any meaning.

  That’s kind of fucking rude of them.

  Oh! He got the car working. That’s good. She’s kind of a bitch, so it’s hard to get her to cooperate unless you know all her tells and tricks. I think maybe I should tell Jay about some of them… but when I try to speak, it kind of comes out as a weird little mumble, and then I figure he’s got it and maybe I should just focus on staying awake.

  Brain stuff. Brain stuff. Bad brain stuff. Blood brain stuff?

  Brain bleeding is bad, because it… it does something. Right? It doesn’t smush the brain, like an impact. There’s a medical term for it somewhere, maybe we can ask a doctor. That would be nice. Should I trust doctors? Should I trust anyone? We’re heading back into town, so-

  Right! If the veins in your brain get clogged up, you have the… the spasm-biting-frothy thing. In a non sexual way, like, a bad way. Not rabies though. What is the word-

  Jay is shaking me, and I open my eyes. Well. I open one of my eyes. The other one is closed, and doesn’t seem to be listening, which really isn't great news. I have a doctor’s appointment soon, though, so-

  Oh hey. We’re here. Guess it’s tomorrow.

  That… that makes no fucking sense. It’s getting worse.

  Oh.

  Oh fuck, I’m-

  Am I having a seizure?

  The thought hits me right as we pull into a lot and the engine cuts out. Like she was waiting for a cue, I feel my mind shut down and the cold of the window as my head falls against it.

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  _______________________________________________________________________

  …

  …

  Oh.

  I can hear you now.

  Hello in there.

  …

  Well that’s very sweet of you, but you might have overdone it a bit.

  …

  I’m glad it was fun, but you know better. You have to be careful around puzzles, right?

  …

  It did help! Don’t be sad! It’s just… most humans are pretty delicate. Lots of little pieces that need to fit just right. Knock one out of order and a lot of stuff can go wrong. Maybe just be more careful next time.

  …

  Haha, fair point. You’ve a very sweet lil fella. I love you too buddy.

  …!

  …

  …

  I’ll be ok, probably.

  …!

  Yeah, or maybe I won’t. No chance you can help with that?

  …

  Understandable. No one knows how to do everything at once. Just do your best, and be careful about it, ok?

  …

  …

  …

  Yeah, ok, feeling something. I’m… hmm.

  Oh, wait, I think you got it-

  ___________________________________________________________________

  I wake up like I’m coming up from air. It almost feels wrong not to be spitting up water, the way oblivion retreats and knocks me awake, sending me up to my elbows as I sit up and-

  Oh. Huh.

  I guess… I guess we did make it to the clinic.

  I’m laying in a white hospital-style bed, the one with the railings on either side that’s tilted a bit up, so you don’t get bedsores and can breathe easily. There’s no machines beeping around me, so I have to assume I’ve only been here (and unconscious) for a little while, but there are curtains drawn around me, so clearly enough time has passed that someone came in, put me in the bed, and walked out again.

  Ok. That’s a good thing. There’s nothing you can really do to stop someone mid-seizure, and the fact that I blacked out means this was a really bad one, but if there’s no machinery around me and Jay isn’t still with me, that means… probably good things? If it were worse, they’d have injected me with something, and then I’d definitely have some machines and fluids set up, right?

  I don’t fucking know, I just watch medical dramas and do weird google searches sometimes.

  It’s fine. If that one guy from the Hannibal show can black out like a million times from brain swelling, I can do it once. As a treat.

  I let out a sigh, and it comes out shaky.

  Yeah. Joke doesn’t quite land when you are just waking up from having said seizures.

  But I’m fine now, so-

  Wait. Stop.

  Why do I think I’m fine?

  I lay back onto the bed and raise my arms, one hand normal, one hand almost-normal, the Glove’s implements retracted and leaving it larger and messier but mostly human-shaped. Slowly, I touch each finger to my thumb, or thumb-equivalent on the Glove’s side, one by one, and then accelerate, until I’m doing it as fast as I can.

  Ok. No fuck ups, no numbness. I check my pulse, and it seems steady. I take a few deep breaths, and it goes pretty easily.

  Then, I walk myself through everything I remember, step by step, since we went into the lumber mill.

  Locker room with the weird fungal rat, check. Went into the main space, check. Looked around, found other… lures(?) and ended up fighting one, a human one, sluglike and vast. We were winning, and then the Foreman arrived.

  Negotiations failed, we got chased, I gaslit, gatekept, and literally girlbossed my way through some dream-logic bullshit to trick it into letting us go, and then we got out, the whole placed calmed down.

  And then I had a seizure. Or maybe a stroke. I don’t really know the difference and either way, everything got fuzzy, like stuff stopped connecting or making sense and I kept losing track of what and who and where.

  And then…

  Silence, for a while. A blank spot in my memory.

  And then I woke up, and feel certain that I’m… more-or-less ok.

  The blood in my arm throbs, once, as if in agreement.

  …

  Did it do something while I was asleep? Can it fix the damage of leaking blood in the brain the way it could the torn-open remnants of my arm? Is that where this confidence is coming from? If it’s communicating with me, maybe this is the only way it can, through vague impressions.

  …

  Cool. I have absolutely no goddamn way to confirm a goddamn thing, but I’m not dead. So.

  Moving slowly, making sure to track how my head feels, I lift myself off the bed, swinging my legs over to one side and getting up. I’m still in the clothes I was wearing, further implying that it’s only been a little bit since I was brought here.

  So where’s Jay?

  I walk over to the wall of curtains surrounding my bed, pull one aside, and take a look at the clinic proper for the first time since I’ve moved to town.

  It’s… clean. Sterile, but not in an overwhelming way. The lights above are bright and crisp, reflecting off of a tiled floor that leads to cream-white walls. The room I’m in holds several different beds, only one of which has the curtains around it, letting me see the clean hospital sheets and well-made setups, with cabinets in easy reach and machinery close by.

  I don’t really know what I was expecting, considering that I know Sarah works here and she’s probably the cleanest one among my roommates, but… It’s clean. Nice. Almost modern, at least as far as I know to compare it to.

  On one side of the room, opposite the centermost bed, there’s a door, closed but visibly unlocked. I can go out and start looking for Jay, and…

  Stop.

  Focus.

  I pull at the feeling of Glimpse Beyond, pulling it to the front of my mind, looking for what it might tell me.

  There’s something here, but it’s not the grey. I open my eyes and look, but I don’t see the cracks that decorate my walls, or the microbial veins of the mill.

  It’s like there’s a glow. Soft, but ever-present, a thing of clean white, shaped so that any color on its surface stands out as alien, as infection, as identifiable. Like clean bone, washed and preserved and set into shape, indicative of life but not alive in and of itself. I look around, and I see it, calm and quiet and barely visible, even as I push the strange sense I’m still learning to understand.

  Even at its strongest, the feeling of cleaned flesh never gets close to what I felt at the Mill.

  It’s safe. It’s ok. I’m ok. It’s fine. Jay is fine.

  So stop, and evaluate.

  I take a breath, sitting back down. My bag is here, beside my bed, and it’s closed, so I can only hope that it wasn’t messed with. Considering I’m not handcuffed to the bed and the Glove’s partially exposed tissues aren’t bandaged up, it’s probably safe to assume that no one here can see the details of what’s going on, like Jay, back at the mill. I need to think.

  The grenades were a good idea, but with so few, and with them being single-use and only somewhat effective, they aren’t enough. I discard the idea for now, until I can come back to it with something fresh. Maybe specialized grenades?

  The totem-thingie was useless. The original design function was as a scout and control unit, but considering how strong the stillness of the lumber mill was, I don’t think it would have made it without getting infected, and seeing as I can’t see through the damn thing, I wouldn’t know what to send it in to look for. I either need to reinforce it or swap it to something else- maybe a bomb delivery system? If only it wasn’t expensive as fuck to make, requiring a whole ass skull.

  Still, I could have used it. I waited, because I wasn’t sure and because there’s only so far I’m willing to push Jay’s comfort level (what a fucking joke, that). It would have been worth it to lose the scout if we had more understanding of what we were looking for, but without it…

  Fuck.

  All this genuine supernatural shit, and I’m still barely scraping by.

  I put Jay in danger. He could have died.

  …

  Deep breaths, girl. Deep breaths.

  Something moves in the room.

  I look up, immediately on alert, and my eyes find the only hiding place in the room- the other bed, the only one other than mine with the curtains drawn across it. Something rustled behind it. Another patient?

  “Hello?”

  The pitch of the voice surprises me. Young. Hard to tell if it’s a boy or girl, considering the age and the way that it shakes, uncertain.

  I pull on that strange other sense again, trying to see if there’s anything-

  Rotten meat and sockets and decay that grows like fuzz on rot.

  I gag, reeling back, the smell without a smell hitting me like a truck. It’s much, much more intense- how did I miss it? Was I not looking? The whole Glimpse Beyond is still full of unknowns, the skill genuinely alien to me- maybe it’s a glimpse beyond what I’m specifically looking at?

  It doesn’t matter, I need to-

  “Who’s there?”

  Fuck.

  They sound scared. They sound so young.

  Before I have a chance to make up my mind, a hand reaches out from the curtains and pulls them back, revealing what lays beyond it.

  The hand is dead. The flesh on it is grey and pink and there are places where the muscles fall away to reveal bone.

  The curtain pulls back, and I am brought face to face with a child of no more than eight. Their eyes are wide, wary but curious, and when they look at me, they don’t look at my face- they turn to look immediately at my right hand, and what the Glove has turned it into.

  I can relate. I stare right back.

  Half of the kid’s body seems like a regular kid, bandaged up as if from a fucking mauling.

  The rest of it is dead, and rotting, and squirming in ways that muscle should not move, and parts of it are looking back at me.

  Well. Alright then. Guess this is what we’re doing now.

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