Death's Nemesis: The Apocalypse Doctor Who Refused to Die

Terms and Conditions

The pain stopped first.

That should have scared him. Ethan had spent enough nights on trauma wards to know what it meant when a screaming patient went quiet. But this wasn't the soft gray quiet of shutdown. It was clean, like someone had reached into his body and turned a dial.

[Contract accepted. Binding to host.]

[Welcome, Doctor Ethan Vance. You are the first of your line to answer in four hundred years.]

"My line," he croaked. His mouth tasted of pennies. "My family was a pharmacist and a bus driver."

The voice did not seem to care.

[Basic function: Death's Nemesis does not heal. Death's Nemesis takes back. When a life you have stabilized is pulled from the edge of death, the System collects a tithe. Lifespan. Strength. Skill. Whatever the patient carries that Death had already claimed.]

[The greater the debt owed to the grave, the greater the harvest.]

Ethan lay in the gravel and listened to this the way he'd once listened to drug reps, with one ear and a lot of suspicion. "And what does it cost me?"

A pause. If a voice made of text could have a pause, this one did.

[Honest answer: the System does not yet know. Previous hosts did not leave records.]

"That's not reassuring."

[It was not meant to be.]

He almost liked it for that.

Around him, the horde had made a wide, uneasy ring. They shuffled. Some of them swayed in place. One, a woman in a torn nurse's tunic, had her face turned up to the sky like she was trying to remember rain. None of them came closer than six meters. The bite on his shoulder had stopped bleeding. He could feel the torn muscle there, hot and tight, and under it something unfamiliar, a sort of cold thread running through the wound, knitting.

[Emergency stabilization applied. Host vitality: 19%.]

[Warning: Stabilization is temporary. Infection vectors detected in left shoulder. Estimated onset of transformation: 14 hours.]

He went very still.

Fourteen hours. He had watched it happen to forty-one people. The fever, the cracking of the voice, the way the eyes went flat and patient. He had held the hand of the first one, a boy named Dario who'd made jokes right up to the end, and he had been the one with the pistol when the jokes stopped.

"So I'm still going to turn."

[Not necessarily. You are a physician. The System provides tools. Use them.]

The air in front of his chest rippled, and something fell out of nothing and landed in his hand.

It was a scalpel.

He turned it over. It was longer than any he'd used, the blade a pale blue-white that seemed to hold its own light, thin enough that he could see the shape of his thumb through it. The handle was warm. It fit his grip like it had been made from a cast of his hand.

[Item acquired: Spectral Scalpel (Grade E).]

[Cuts what the wielder understands. The deeper your knowledge of a body, the deeper the edge.]

"Cuts what I understand," Ethan repeated. He thought about thirteen years of anatomy, of cadaver labs and night shifts, of every body he'd opened and every one he hadn't been able to save. "Well. That I can work with."

[Skill acquired: Basic Diagnostic Eye.]

The world shifted.

Not in color, exactly. In layers. The woman in the torn tunic was suddenly a map. He could see the dull rust-colored bloom spreading through her bloodstream, the swollen pale knot where her spleen should have been, a thin black filament running up her spine into the base of her skull, where it pulsed like a second heart.

That's the parasite, he thought, and his stomach dropped. That's what's driving them.

He had spent three years watching the infected and thinking it was a virus, a brainless thing that rotted bodies. It wasn't. It had a structure. It had a seat. Which meant it had a weak point.

He looked at his own arm. The Eye showed him a thread of the same black, a hair-thin tendril, creeping from the bite toward his collarbone. Slow. Patient.

[Basic Diagnostic Eye provides observation only. Treatment requires your own hands.]

"Of course it does," Ethan muttered.

He sat up. It took three tries. His ribs ground like loose gravel, and his left arm hung wrong, but the spectral light of the scalpel threw faint shadows across the ground, and in that light he began, slowly and clumsily, to work.

There was no anesthetic. There was no sterile field. There was a man in a cold parking lot, surrounded by the dead, cutting a shallow line along his own shoulder with a blade that seemed to know where the nerves were before he did.

He bit down on his own sleeve and kept going.

The black filament came out in a single, glistening thread. It writhed against the gravel for a moment and went still.

[Parasite extracted. Infection vector neutralized.]

[First treatment recorded. Experience granted.]

Ethan lay back, shaking, and stared at the bruised sky while the horde stood silent around him, watching, and something in his chest that had been closed for three years opened a crack.

He was going to live. He didn't know for how long.

But he was going to live.