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

What the Dark Remembers

By dawn, the horde had drifted.

He'd watched them go the way you watch weather leave: slowly, with a sort of suspicion that it might change its mind. Without whatever the System had done, without that bell tolling in the dirt, they would have torn him apart. Now they wandered off in loose clusters toward the highway, drawn by some other call, and left him sitting against the wall of the depot with a fever, a stolen scalpel, and a head full of questions.

He checked the interface.

It wasn't a screen so much as a thing he could think open, a pale ledger hanging at the edge of his vision.

Name: Ethan Vance Occupation: Physician Level: 1 Vitality: 31% Lifespan: 38 years (base) Skills: Basic Diagnostic Eye Tools: Spectral Scalpel (E)

Thirty-eight years. He was thirty-four. He tried not to think too hard about what that arithmetic meant.

Water first. Then somewhere to hide. Then, if he was very lucky, a plan.

The depot's office had been looted but not burned. A vending machine still stood upright in the corner, its glass smashed, its coils empty. Behind it, wedged in a gap, he found a single dented can of peaches and a shop-floor first aid kit with the seal still on. He opened both with hands that would not quite stop trembling. He ate the peaches standing up, drank the syrup, and set the splint on his own arm with strips cut from a hi-vis vest.

He was wrapping the last of it when the Eye flickered.

It did it without being asked. A flash of heat at the edge of his vision, and the whole room reorganized itself into layers, and in the far corner, behind a toppled filing cabinet, a shape resolved itself that had not been there a second before.

He held very still.

It wasn't human. It wasn't quite anything. It crouched on all fours, and its limbs were the wrong length, too long in the forearm, too thin at the wrist, and the skin hung off its ribs in loose gray sheets like wet paper. Its head had no real face. Only a split, running vertical, wet at the edges. Something inside the split moved.

[Mutant detected: Tier 1 Stalker. Threat: moderate. Weakness analysis available.]

Ethan did not move. The Stalker did not move either. It was listening. He could see the ridge of its throat working, tasting the air.

"Okay," he said, softly, to the System. "Weakness analysis. Now."

The Eye sharpened. Thin white lines drew themselves across the creature's body like a surgeon's marking pen: a bright node at the base of the neck, a second along the inner elbow, a dull red crescent under the third rib where the heart had migrated.

[Primary vulnerability: carotid junction, left. Secondary: brachial plexus. Warning: Subject has no functioning eyes. Subject hunts by vibration and breath.]

Breath, he thought. Hold your breath.

He did. He counted. Thirty seconds. Forty. The Stalker's split opened a little wider, then drifted left, toward the tick-tick-tick of the cooling vending machine. Its weight shifted forward.

Ethan eased his feet under him.

When it lunged, it didn't go for him. It went for the noise, the cooling machine, and in that stretched half-second, with its long arms outstretched and its throat exposed, he stepped in from the side and drove the scalpel into the white node at the base of its neck.

The blade went in like it was cutting warm butter. There was no resistance. It slid through the tough gray hide as though the hide had been waiting for it. A thin, high sound came out of the creature, and it spasmed, once, twice, and then it was just a long pile of ugly limbs on the floor, and the room was very quiet.

His hands were shaking again. He wiped the blade on his trousers and the blue-white light of it flickered and settled.

[Kill confirmed. Anatomical insight recorded.]

[Experience granted. Level 1 → 2.]

He sat down hard on the filing cabinet and laughed, quietly, a little crazy, for about a minute.

Then he stopped.

Because from somewhere beyond the depot, over the dead highway, came a sound he hadn't heard in months. It wasn't the horde. It was thinner, sharper, and it belonged to nothing that had ever been a monster. A woman's voice, hoarse, calling out in the dark.

"Is anyone there? Please. I think he's dying."

Ethan looked at the scalpel in his hand. It was warm. It had, he thought, been waiting for exactly this.

He stood, wincing, and went to find out who needed a doctor.