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Betty replaced her gloves and picked up the phone ringing on the wall, the other hand petting the head of her cat patient. “Hello, Wellbetter Animal Clinic, this is Nurse Lee speaking,” she said in her usual customer service cadence.
There was a stuttering pause on the other end of the line before the person spoke. “Uh, just making sure: is this Betty?”
Ah. Less customer, more friend. Betty cleared her throat, ridding it of the unnaturally positive tone. “Hey, Abernathy. Are you, like, good? Why’re you calling me at work?”
Rodney, the simultaneous customer and friend, coughed on the other end. “Because this might be work. Not an emergency, but still kind of urgent. Can you come over?”
“Can it wait until after my shift is up?”
“Yeah… Yeah, I think so. Just, you know, soon. If you could.”
Holding the phone between her shoulder and ear, Betty changed out her gloves again and began preparing the syringe for her patient. “I still have a couple hours until my shift is up. Are you, like, at home or…?”
“I’ll be home soon, yeah. Thank you for this.”
“Don’t thank me yet. Don’t even know if I’ll be able to fix you.”
“Maybe don’t fix me? I might change my mind about kids one day.”
Betty had to pause. “Huh?”
“Vet joke, sorry. I’ll be at the house.” Rodney hung up, leaving Betty to slowly comprehend the joke and groan to herself.
Hours later, at Cicero Manor, Betty Lee drew the needle out from Rodney’s arm and quickly put a cotton ball and gauze over it. “And you just, like, blacked out?”
Rodney nodded, pulling his arm back from where he’d had it laid out to draw blood. “And I wake up with nausea, a pounding migraine, and the signs of internal bleeding, but no actual pain.”
“Coffee grounds and everything?”
Rodney nodded again, eyes hidden behind a hand to block the light Betty needed in order to work.
Betty flicked the bottom of one of the tubes of dark blood and sighed. “Sucks to be some alien thing, because I can’t tell if anything’s wrong just from color or thickness. I’ll need to run actual tests. And you’re sure there’s not, like, any forewarning? Triggers? Have you asked the fucking… the literal moon those questions I gave you at your last checkup?”
“All anecdotal, found in the file. Nothing about precise blood contents or present organs or anything else necessary. Can we turn the lights back off yet?”
“Not yet. Any chemical imbalances will need to be compared to Earth moths for the time being, I guess. And the potential triggers?”
Rodney propped his head up on his hand, still trying to block out the lights and protect his throbbing head. “Well… while I haven’t noticed it for all of them, some I’ll notice a laser pointer.”
Betty looked up from her tubes of blood. “A… laser pointer.”
“More accurately, and don’t freak out… a laser sight.”
A few moments of pause, then Betty stood abruptly, her chair clattering. “A laser sight like on a fucking sniper rifle!?”
Rodney hissed, wincing behind his blocking hand and wings flaring. “Volume, please… This is bad enough as is…”
Betty drew in a breath through her nose and let it out between gritted teeth, still terse but letting it affect tone over volume. “And you wonder why you have a fucking migraine… You ever think about the idea you’re getting fucking shot? Knocked out and experimented on, maybe? That this is literally you passing out from blood loss? And, like, who the fuck would even shoot at you? I know you piss a lot of people off, but enough to assassinate you? Shit, bud, what’re you doing!?”
Rodney bit his lip, then shrugged and gave an appeasing grin. “It’s confidential?”
“Confidential, my ass.”
“Trash can, please?”
Betty passed over the bagless trash bin and waited for Rodney to finish retching. “You know I’m going to need to test that, too. Even if you are getting shot or, like, knocked out or something, we have to eliminate infections, mutations, unexpected cancer, poison…”
Rodney passed back the can and set his head down on the table. “I’m just tired of it happening all the time. I know I can’t stop whoever is trying to kill me, but can’t we at least get rid of the side effects?”
Betty held up something between a pair of tweezers. “Depends.”
“On what?”
“On who this piece of skull belongs to.”
Rodney paled. Ignoring his throbbing headache, he sat up and turned towards Betty. “What…?”
Betty set down the bucket and stood. “Hold still. I’m going to feel your head.”
Rodney nodded and sat straight, bracing as Betty changed her gloves, tucked her fingers under his hair, and began to feel at his skull. He couldn’t help the violent flinch that came from her touch at a particular point. She moved to look at the area and struggled to keep her patient still through the pain. “General bruising- Weak structure- Blood caking in hair–” She circled around to the other side and lifted the hair there as well. “Exit wound- Smaller- Caking and bruising- Fuck. That’s so totally fucked…”
Rodney laid his head down on the table, hands hovering around the most painful points as if resisting the urge to hold his head and protect against whatever pain invaded his skull. He trembled as Betty returned to her notes, looking over the details with horrified incredulity. He was barely paying attention, more focused on how it felt like his skull was shattered where she’d made contact.
“Jesus fucking Christ…”
Rodney made a noise, words escaping him, but still trying to get her to continue.
“Rodney, you’re not just, like, getting shot in the gut and losing blood… You’re being killed. How many times has this happened?”
He vaguely shook his head. He didn’t know; too many times, probably.
“This is so fucked… You want to know something that’s even more fucked?”
Rodney gave a tired whine, really not wanting to know, but probably needing to know.
“In order to really know what’s going on whenever this happens, we, like, need to recreate it.”
If Rodney cried, neither party present mentioned it when the session was over.
A week later, Rodney was determined ‘fully healed’ and agreed to the frankly morbid experiment Betty worked together with Serenity to create.
In Serenity’s room, cleared of any furniture, Betty went over the step by step process with their subject, who stood impatiently in the center of the room, switching which foot he put pressure on regularly. “I was able to map out, like, where on the skull the entrance and exit wounds were? So we should be able to recreate your latest blackout exactly. Dr. Tycho was able to find out the kind of gun from the details I gave, so that part should be correct. All that’s left is making sure your metabolic processes are the same and getting you hooked up to the monitoring system, hence kidnapping you from your place of work.”
“And Serenity putting sticky pads on me under my shirt,” Rodney deadpanned.
Serenity gave a thumbs up from where she was securing the last wired node. “Everything’s secure.”
Rodney sighed. “Is this all really necessary? I mean, we were able to determine I was being killed and coming back.”
Betty looked up from her clipboard. “Are you rescinding consent?”
“No…”
“Good boy. Dr. Tycho, is the firearm ready?” Betty sounded oddly formal when she went into nursing mode, Rodney noticed.
Serenity nodded, finally arming the rifle with the barrel pointed downward. “All clear. Turn on the monitors and we should be ready to begin.”
Betty turned on the monitors and waited for the nodes to gather a baseline, quickly jotting it down on her clipboard in shorthand. “Gun to position A, subject to position B.”
Serenity pulled out of the room and waited for Rodney to kneel at the far end of the room to raise the rifle, simulating the angle and distance at which Rodney was shot a week ago. “Readied and aimed. Subject is stabilized?”
“Stable,” Betty declared as she watched the monitors. “Three… Two… One… Fire.”
The silencer reduced the sound by a significant amount, but it would’ve still been noticeable to the rest of the manor, had anyone but the ghosts and the mongoose been present. Luckily, there were no nearby neighbors. Betty refused to look at the actual corpse as it fell, using the monitors as an excuse to avoid the sight. She turned back as soon as she heard the thud of the head hitting the floor. The skull was nearly pulverized, blood staining the wall and floor opposite the entry wound. Betty winced and started marking observations: the rate of blood flow, the color of said blood, how Serenity said the wound appeared as she looked over the skull. Please, please, don’t have fucked this up…
“Wait,” Serenity muttered, looking up at Betty.
“What?”
“Why is that still beeping?”
Betty soon realized what Serenity was really looking at, turning to re-examine the monitors. True to the doctor’s word, while some of the vital processes had stopped, others continued unhindered. In fact, some seemed to pick up in intensity. Betty quickly noted the changes, failing to notice when the body started moving.
Serenity, however… She stood abruptly, watching the unnatural, jerking movement. Skin tore as if it were a thin membrane, lightless void seeming to bulge out underneath. Limbs broke free from their fleshy confines, half-formed and coated in slime. Wings flared in a way similar not only to fear, but agitation and anger, a buzz filling the air. “Nurse Lee?”
Betty was too busy writing down the sudden spikes in certain parts of the metabolism and sudden drops in others.
Serenity watched something that could only be described as “incomplete” and “monstrous” emerge from the holes already found at the base of the wings, slime and what she recognized as misted hallucinogenic secretion falling off the body in thick, threatened waves. “Nurse Lee, we may need to leave.”
Betty looked down at her clipboard and back up at the monitors as she watched every sign of life drop off automatically. “That doesn’t make sense…”
The beast’s eyes spun wildly, locking onto the gun in Serenity’s hands still and then onto Serenity herself. A rattle, a buzz, a squeak, a growl, whatever that fucking noise was, Serenity could tell it wasn’t exactly something joyful. Both eyes zeroed in on her with the fury of a cornered, injured animal fully aware of its own claws. It stepped out of the mass of flesh left behind, sharpened jaws slick with the slime of incomplete organ matter and dark, abyssal blood.
Serenity had only seconds. That was all the time she needed. She grabbed Betty’s arm and booked it for the door, ignoring the sharp yelp the younger girl gave. Betty caught only the briefest sight of the monster before she was thrown to the other side of the door and Serenity slammed it shut behind the both of them. She held fast as whatever creature was on the other side slammed into the door not even a second after it had latched, giving a defensive shriek. The repeated slamming into the solid wood sounded painful, especially knowing it was using the full force of weak bones and raw meat against something built to withstand the test of time.
It took a full ten minutes of animalistic clicking, hissing, and shrieking and repeated charges against the door for the noise to finally die down, marked by a pained whimper.
Against her better judgment, Betty was still writing on her clipboard. She checked over her writing, put the board aside, and finally let go of her breath. Her hand hovered over her hammering heart, her eyes catching Serenity’s. “What… the actual fuck… was that?”
Serenity took a cautious step back, eyes switching between watching her impromptu nurse and watching the door for another charge. “I’ll be honest, kid, I’m not too sure, myself. But I think, whatever it was, it’s done.”
They waited another couple minutes, both women just watching the door. Betty only stood when she caught a noise distinctly human coming from the other side. Her eyes caught Serenity’s once again and she nodded. The two entered, hesitant as the door slowly creaked open.
On the other side, the only figure remaining was Rodney’s unconscious body, still as death. Serenity caught sight of the openings at his back sealing around the base of the wings. Muscles almost seemed to squirm under the skin, readjusting to hide the fact the layers of flesh were merely a cocoon for the half-formed moth creature underneath. As soon as the layers of the body readjusted, the Rodney known by the rest of the world took a shuddering breath. And, with that breath, came a fit of coughing and choking, fresh blood joining the drying puddle from the initial wound.
Serenity was the first to roll Rodney on his side, to avoid choking. She made eye contact with Betty and shook her head. Betty gave a thumbs up. Neither were going to say a thing about what they saw. Let the boy believe in a shred more of normalcy than he actually had. As a treat.