Chapter 600: No Time for Tears

YOU BELONG TO US rang out across the system, psychic power pushing it into every living brain, driving millions to their knees as they screamed, holding their heads, staring at the uncaring sky with suddenly bloodshot eyes.

Across the planet, over ten billion souls here slashed by that simple statement of fact from the oncoming Atrekna.

Buildings with psychic shielded, most of them unmaintained and largely forgotten, weathered the psychic assault much more easily. Those inside whimpered, flinching, looking around and wondering what was going to happen now.

Hospitals had the most recent and the best psychic shielding outside of some government and a few military buildings (most had pocketed the money or sold the equipment and never installed it or never finished installing it) and the nurses inside felt little more than a twinge and a cold whisper.

The nurses on the 19th floor of the largest hospital on the proto-continent had barely even heard a whisper. The psychic shielding on that floor even extended to separate rooms. An open door would reveal a wavering iridescent curtain, like a soap bubble, across the doorway.

They all wore white, with little folded hats, and wore shoes that whispered on the tile floor of the ward out of respect for their patients culture.

The Phrewicken nurses shivered as the roar of YOU BELONG TO US whispered through the ward, but they went on with their work.

Half of the floor was taken up by vast wards where the patients were side by side in beds, a hundred to a row, in four rows per ward. Their eyes were taped shut and covered with soft pads. Feeding tubes went up their noses and into their mouths. IV's were sunk into thick veins beneath skin that required razor sharp implements to pierce. Electrostimulus patches were on their muscles to use muscle spasms to keep their skin tone. Their bodies ran hot, their endothermic systems powered by sugars and carbohydrates in a complex system the more simple ectothermic Phrewicken found fascinating.

The nurses, still shivering as that terrible cry roared out again, moved between their patients, checking their monitors.

Body Temp: 96.8 to 99.8, hot enough to feel baking to the Phrewicken. (adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || []).push({});

Blood Pressure: 90/60 to slightly less than120/80, an insanely high pressure that meant the Phrewicken could see their veins pulse with life.

Pulse: 45 to 100 beats per minute, wildly varying. The Phrewicken often showed new nurses how strong their patients single four-chambered heart was by having them touch the middle of the patient's chest to feel the organ thumping away.

The Phrewicken were moving between the vast rows of patients, examining EKG and EEG readouts, the computer terminals showing vitals, when the scream came again.

YOU BELONG TO US

Every nurse frowned as they saw the monitors jump. The EEG's, which showed the brain of the comatose patients was dreaming, suddenly whispered at the massive activity.

The lead nurse summoned one of the doctors even as she turned up the psychic shielding.

One nurse noticed the pads had fallen from her patient's eyes and the tape had come loose.

Instead of a cool amber fire deep in the startling blue eyes, the eyes now glowed a steady red.

She got the tape, put ointment on the eyes, then taped the eyes shut before putting ointment on fresh pads and replacing them.

One nurse noticed the patient she was checked suddenly balled their fists, the muscles on their forearms standing out, their biceps muscles clenching, their knuckles protruding. The joints of their knuckles crackled as the fists clenched.

She alerted the head nurse. The electro-stimulation was showing no output, the muscles should have been relaxed.

The doctor arrived, surprised that there was any activity in the ward that had been largely silent for over a year. Nurses were bustling from patient to patient, replacing eye coverings, trying to get muscles to relax.

He thought, for a moment, about seeing if stimulants would wake them all, but changed his mind. He was not here to do experiments on them, he was there to care for them. He ordered muscle relaxers and began to examine EEG and EKG and other esoteric device readings.

YOU BELONG TO US!

He flinched slightly but felt relief in the way the heavy psychic shielding, preventing patients of floors above or below from suffering intense nightmares and night terrors, was keeping out that terrible roar.

He saw every patient's instrumentation jump, almost as if their endless dreaming was interrupted by a sudden sharp sensation that pulled them toward wakefulness. Curious, he called in multiple colleagues, including those who specialized in neurological disorders.

The patients were highly complex mammals, but the Phrewicken still had vast databases on medical care for them.

The doctors all examined the chart. Like the coma itself, or the sudden frenzied and explosive violence of the other survivors, none of it could be explained.

YOU BELONG TO US!

The vitals all jumped.

One nurse shrieked as a patient sat up, the pressor beam projector the kept the patient stable on the gurney/bed exploding in a shower of sparks as it overloaded. Their arms went straight forward, their muscles clenched as they made fists. Their jaw muscles clenched. The pads slipped from their suddenly open eyes, which burned with a bright red light.

Another jumped back as the patients around her, in unison, mumbled something too low for her to hear, in their own language, all at once, all together, all the same word.

The doctors hurried in.

The one sitting up slumped back down and relaxed.

The whispering stopped.

The doctors paged more colleagues, who hurried in to examine patients that had been completely comatose, not even responsive to pain, for over a year.

One doctor, a doctor of psychiatry, told the others that the patients in the high security psychiatric ward had stopped screaming or throwing themselves against the integrity screens of their cells and were now all staring at the ceiling. When the roar would come, they would roar something back, as one.

The doctors were intrigued.

The hospital administrator broke into the examinations.

Civil Defense was ordering everyone into what shelters had been completed. The shelter beneath the hospital was now open and the doctors were ordered to enter. The nurses were ordered to enter the shelter to help care for patients that would be moved to the shelter.

The Head Nurse asked if her charges, which she had watched over for more than a year, would be moved to the shelters.

The Chief Administrator regretfully informed the Head Nurse that he regretted to inform her that regrettably the patients would not be moved to the shelter.

Regrettably.

The Head Nurse asked about the other patients in the high security psychiatric ward that had been built just for them.

The Chief Admiistrator said that in no uncertain terms he would not move psychiatric patients that had required military grade weaponry to capture to be put in an underground shelter full of possible victims.

Regretfully.

The Head Nurse regretfully informed the Chief Administrator that she would be staying up with the patients and suggested, regretfully, that perhaps the Hospital Chief Administrator should jump up his own ass in a clown costume. She then cut the call.

Regretfully.

She was inordinately proud of her staff when nearly a third declared their intention to stay behind and care for their patients.

The Chief Hospital Administrator ordered the hospital security forces to move the patients from the psychiatric unit that had been specially built for them to the 19th floor.

The security forces found the psychiatric patients, all of them with burning red eyes and rock hard musculature, to be strangely docile. Allowing themselves to be bound with specially designed jackets with straps the could be used to haul a fully loaded cargo ship and made with psuedo-cloth that could repel medium grade fixed weaponry fire.

The Head Nurse clenched her jaws and had patients moved from rooms into the large bays and put the psychiatric patients in the room.

YOU BELONG TO US!

The comatose patients murmured and whispered. The insane ones roared at the sky.

She saw three of them snap the straps that held their arms to the front of their torso and raise their arms to the sky as they roared.

To the Phrewicken on the 19th floor, the roars seemed to batter at them, a rolling pressure from each of the insane (and previously very violent) patients.

The nurse turned the psychic shielding up to max and told the other nurses to chew gum to keep the taste of strange berries out of their mouths.

Two of the doctors returned. Both stated that they had cared for the patients for over a year and they would not abandon them now in their time of need.

The nurses and the two doctors and a handful of janitorial staff kept working, kept ensuring their patients were as comfortable as possible even as doom closed in.

YOU BELONG TO US!

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Two days passed. The roar outside was audible as a whisper inside the ward.

The comatose patients had begun to writhe and twist in their beds, whispering constantly. The Phrewicken could feel an almost physical pressure emanating from them and the insane ones in waves. Patients constantly needed their eye covers replaced.

One doctor had noticed that their nutritional needs, based on cellular consumption levels, had doubled, then tripled, then tripled again. Trace nutrients that the patients needed, that would be poisonous to any other species, were rapidly absorbed by the patients.

In one case an insane patient reached up, tore out the light fixture, ripped apart the casing, and ate the tungsten/magnesium filament on the light.

Another ripped open a section of wall, tore out the emergency light's emergency power pack, and ate the capacitance gel like it was pudding. Two others attacked and the doctors and staff were unsure what to do to calm them, but all three stopped fighting when the gel fell to the floor. They knelt down, growling, and ate it straight off the floor, glaring at each other.

Eight security beings had joined the staff to protect them. Twelve Phrewicken had arrived to help protect their siblings, their mother, and their son. They learned to move slowly and carefully.

"You must never run, never hurry, it attracts their attention," was ingrained into them.

A hurrying nurse would cause comatose patients in her wake to sit up, turn their heads to follow her progress, the pads falling from their eyes and the tape breaking lose to reveal burning red light. Once the movement was gone or ended they would lay back down, closing their eyes.

The two doctors were at a loss to explain it, but were excited by it all.

It helped them ignore the millions dead throughout the system and the massive ships orbiting the planet.

They had no idea why the cry of YOU BELONG TO US! agitated their patients, but it did.

They knew each roar meant thousands of more deaths.

But it still rang out.

YOU BELONG TO US!

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Two more days passed.

The insane ones would gather together, standing up, leaning against each other, mumbling and whispering. Sometimes groups would shuffle along behind the nurses, whispering to each other and to the comatose patients as the nurses made their rounds. Sometimes they stood, swaying back and forth, near one of the comatose ones, whispering constantly.

The doctors knew the insane ones never laid down, never fully slept. The closest they came was when they closed their eyes and stood, slightly swaying, a faint amber light leaking through where their eyelids touched.

It was behavior usually never seen before.

Usually they attacked one another and anything else they encountered. One doctor had seen one of the insane ones fight a truck.

And win.

Now they were gathering together.

Several computers had gone missing. The security beings searched and found the casings and the metal framework.

The complex circuitry was gone. The liquid crystal from the LCD's was gone. There were broken and shattered pieces of macroplas around, with teeth marks on them from bone crushing molars.

The nurses and security beings whispered to one another that the insane ones had stolen the computers and eaten them.

They began moving in groups of three or more for safety.

On the morning of the fourth day, one of the security beings was walking by an insane one when the patient suddenly moved, snatching the security being's pistol from the holster. Before the security officer could do much more than turn, the patient took apart the pistol and reassembled it.

It looked smooth, practiced, like the being had done it a million times before.

The being held out the pistol, staring off into space, its eyes glowing a faint amber.

The security being noted that her eyes, beneath the amber glow, were a beautiful pale grass green.

Late that night, the insane ones vanished. The security beings swept the floor nervously, but could not find them.

The elevator doors showed damage from someone using tools to spread them open.

The staff wondered if the insane ones had fled.

Three hours later they were back, carrying plas bins with the personal effects of the patients.

The insane ones moved in and began removing the equipment from the comatose ones, dressing them carefully, putting their possessions in their pockets, then moving to the next ones.

The insane ones were dressed in their clothing.

It was a strange looking clothing, the first time the staff on the ward had seen it. It seemed to be made of different sized little blocks scattered across the cloth like static, that constantly changed colors depending on what the being was standing near.

The nurses moved back in carefully, replacing the oxygen lines, the feeding tubes.

The insane ones just stood there, swaying, murmuring and whispering to themselves.

YOU BELONG TO US!

This time the insane ones didn't roar, just whispered.

The comatose ones eyes all opened at once, then slowly closed, hiding the crimson burning light.

Then came another roar. A different one that reverberated off of every flat surface. Off of metal, glass, plas, even ceramasteel.

The roar made the comatose ones open their eyes and sit up. Made the insane ones stop swaying and stand up straight. Made the whispering stop, the murmurs stop, as the patients, as one, looked to the sky.

And smiled, showing all the teeth.

STEAMBOAT WILLY IS HERE!