Tales from the Dead Zone - Biology Classes

June 2066. Paddy O'Rilley, a biologist with a passion for phages, is filming a documentary about those nightmare creatures for a TV show. However, while putting together the filmed material, her assistant finds out something that will turn Paddy's life upside down in more ways than one.

(Proofread and edited by Kaleb O'Halloran)

“Alright, is the recording on?”

“The REC light is dark, what do you think?”

“That you should tone down the sarcasm, if you want to keep your job.”

Endless dunes of fine sand and brown soil, the sun hanging high up in the sky – an unexpected, but welcome addition. A woman standing in front of an array of cameras, looking quizzically at their operator. She wore a white t-shirt with short, green cargo pants, mountain boots, and a green cap with the letters APW written in bold, yellow characters. Red hair arranged in a long braid, emerald irises, a hint of freckles around her cheeks and nose bridge. She had quite a toned build, that of a decent athlete with a past of moderate weightlifting, but no part of her was excessively muscular. Still, it was a strong contrast with her cameraman – twenty-something years old, scrawny and thin, with jet black hair and azure eyes. He was taller than her, but not as fit, wearing a brown, sleeveless jacket, a dark green polo shirt, and long brown cargo pants. The logo of Correan Channel was triumphantly peeking out from his right pocket, in all its blue and yellow glory.

The cameraman shrugged at her snide remark, closed his eyes.

“Whatever. We still need to wait for the recording of Res from the studio...”

“Oh. Yeah. The recording. The video Res prepared as an introduction. Res’s video. Right.”

She took a deep breath, rolled her eyes, adjusted her cap. The monitor near the cameraman sprung to life, showing a middle-aged man in an elegant outfit standing in front of a large globe. The man opened his arms, applause all around him from the crowd in the studio.

“Welcome to a newest episode of Traveller – Beyond the Boundaries of Science! I’m Res Vertighel and today I’ll guide you once again through the Dead Zone, for a close contact with a race of creatures living between legend and reality, between fear and fascination: the phages!”

With a wave of his right hand, a hologram appeared out of thin air, showing a projection of the quadrupedal creature in question, rotating in three dimensions. On the left side, a picture of a city made its appearance.

“But let’s start from the beginning. St. Patrick, 12th of March, 2013. A city bustling with life, with a growing economy, chosen as a filming location for one of the first big productions of entertainment giant RealLifeAnime. Executive producers Egon Kramers and Benedict Jerome-Marie LeJarme are visiting the set, ready to film the first shot, together with their star technical consultant, Stevan Ezequiel Schneider. Most St. Patricians were feverishly waiting for that day, many considering it an unexpected stroke of luck. Some were skeptical, though, not wanting to be associated with what amounted to a B-movie series, a few even scared by what such sudden notoriety could mean for their peaceful city. However, unbeknownst to each and every one of St. Patrick’s fifty-six thousand inhabitants, soon their dreams of opulence would turn into a nightmare of death and decay...”

Paddy shook her head, patting the monitor.

“Fast-forward it, Marco. Res always talks for ages when it comes to macabre details. We can spare ourselves the blah-blah, I just need to know what info he’ll share with the audience ’fore I take front and center.”

“Alright, alright. One second...”

The cameraman named Marco tapped a button on his wristwatch. The recorded video from the studio started running faster and faster, alternating between pictures of the city before and after the phage outbreak at a breakneck pace, together with a dubiously-crafted crisis map. Paddy puffed her cheeks with disappointment. She had tried to pitch her documentary about the biology of the phages to several networks for years, but every single one of them had declined for various reasons. Their given explanations were always something like “a lack of interest from our target audience” or “too boring for our usual programming”, but the real, unstated reason was clear: Paddy O’Rilley was an activist for APW, the national Agency for the Protection of Wildlife. Normally, this would have been perfectly fine, and even scored additional points for her… If she hadn’t started pushing the idea that phages were now also an endemic wildlife species worthy of protection, that is. That viewpoint hadn’t won her many friends, especially within the most revanchist and militaristic reconquista groups around Ireland. However, at long last, the network called FTV accepted her pitch, agreeing to host a recorded segment about her research... as a part of their show Traveller – a concentrate of conspiracy theories, wild mysteries, unexplained supernatural events, and other weird stuff, made for gullible people who took everything they heard on TV as fact. It was pretty notorious online, with many parodies of its frontman, Res Vertighel, populating nearly every video sharing service, and was widely considered about as serious as a Saturday night comedy skit. Paddy was less than happy about it, but if it meant she could have even just twenty minutes of screen time and a small troupe to talk about phages to an audience, any audience, she would take it.

And she did, albeit reluctantly.

Not that she had any other chances – APW was very strict in terms of what one could and could not do, and uploading self-made videos on her own social networks to talk about her work was strictly under the don’t column. It had to be a formal pitch to a major national network.

“Alright, almost there, Paddy.”

Marco stopped the fast-forward, had a look at the transcript. Paddy peeked at it, adjusted her cap again.

“Res didn’t say anything about phage biology, did he?”

“Nah, he just went on record calling them monsters and abominable creatures. Don’t know what you expected.”

The cameraman snapped his fingers, turned towards the rest of the troupe.

“Kimchi, if you have checked all the mics, it’s time to fire them up!”

A giant crab-like mutant waved her claw as a nod. Her head was hidden inside her oversized shell, her eyes shining as red dots from deep into the chitinous cover. Paddy looked at her for a while, scanning her from cap to boots. Mutants weren’t exactly animals, but they were just as interesting to her, especially those who managed to integrate into society. Marco pushed a button on his wristwatch, causing the camera array to come to life. The microphones started recording, the drones flew all around. Paddy took a deep breath.

Alright, the stage is set.

“My name’s Paddy O’Rilley, and I’m a member of APW, the national Agency for the Protection of Wildlife. I majored in zoology at the Belfast University and I’ve been studying phages for the past six years! Despite all that’s said about these mysterious creatures,” – she said while curling her fingers into air quotes – “their biology and life cycle are understood quite well.” 

Paddy gestured towards the horizon, one of the drones zoomed in following her lead. Four, five red spots became clearer and clearer, standing on their four limbs and lazily looking around without doing much. A small swarm of haemophages, with their characteristic blue stripes and sharp teeth. They were too far to notice Marco’s equipment, but even if they did, the guards hired by FTV were ready to mow them down to bits.

“Haemophages are the most common among them, and also the most recognizable, with their characteristic red scales and blue bands. They are aggressive omnivores that hunt in swarms of four to ten individuals. However, for bigger targets, such as large human settlements for example, swarms can collect as many as hundreds, if not thousands of phages.”

The camera then moved back to Paddy, who shook her finger in front of the lens.

“There are several common misconceptions about phages, beginning with their names. The term haemophage, for example, is completely made up and incorrect. It was the first designation the creatures ever received during the 2013 outbreak, but it didn’t mean what the journalist penning it thought it meant. Nowadays, we call them hematophages – blood eaters. Which, while still being factually incorrect, is at least an improvement.”

Paddy gestured towards Marco, directing him to switch to the close-up cameras. Her green eyes pierced the screen, looking directly at the hypothetical spectator. She felt a sudden movement in the sand near her boot, small waves worming through the terrain. She smiled.

Perfect timing.

“Another misconception is that phages are mammals, due to some similarities between their body structures and that of humans. In reality...”

She squatted down, plunging her hand into the sand, splashing it all around. After a moment, she took it out again, with her fist now closed around something. The camera focused on her palm, on her fingers slowly opening, showing the peculiar trophy she had caught.

“...they are actually ovoviviparous reptiles, much like snakes. And this is what they look like when freshly hatched!”

A small lizard, barely ten centimeters long, its body dark red with some blue and green spots. No visible eyes, only an elongated snout with a tongue peeking out of it at regular intervals. It had a tail too, stocky and ungainly, accounting for almost half of its length.

The small creature licked Paddy’s glove as it moved around, alternating sudden, sharp turns with short periods of absolute stillness, in a sort of broken motion. Marco blinked twice, thrice. He couldn’t believe his own eyes. He whispered towards Kimchi, hoping the microphones wouldn’t pick up his voice.

“What in the flying hell? That’s a haemo?! HOW?!”

Kimchi clapped her claws in excitement. It was her first time seeing that as well. She stopped once she realized her clacking claws could compromise the audio quality, resigning herself to silently nod from the depths of her shell.

Paddy smirked. That was the reaction she was hoping for. So few people bothered to research phages without prejudice. Most just wanted to spew hate at them for merely existing, and for having made a significant portion of Ireland uninhabitable. Well, okay, it was a reasonable motivation, Paddy conceded, but that didn’t mean they had to raze everything with napalm instead of trying to coexist with them. True, the mirror study in Australia didn’t really go as planned, and several people lost their lives, including – um – many hundreds of children. So public opinion was a tad on the hostile side towards phages. However, it was nothing that couldn’t be solved with a targeted PR campaign.

Or so she hoped, at least.

The small lizard continued to move up Paddy’s arm, more curious than scared. It kept on mapping its surroundings with its tongue, careful not to fall from its strange new platform. The hovering camera tracked its movements closely, zoomed in to obtain the crispest picture of the tiny reptile.

“Phages have a very short gestation period. Approximately one month after fertilization, the eggs hatch inside a mother phage and the younglings see the light of the day – well, see in quotation marks, as they don’t have eyes. A single pregnancy produces five to fifteen cubs on average, which are then left alone to grow in the wild. Phage cubs are pretty independent and learn to burrow under the sand quite fast. Their diet consists mostly of roots, seeds, plant buds, and a variety of insects. Cubs aren’t territorial, and usually try to not impede each other – rather, they collaborate and share their hunting grounds, which is important since their numbers are so significant. Adult females are always fertile, which means a single phage can gestate up to one hundred eighty cubs per year, averaging out to one cub every other day.”

Marco’s jaw dropped. Almost two hundred tiny new haemos per year, per every single living female. No wonder Ireland had been overrun in such a short time. And no wonder Paddy conveniently found one of them near her boot, just in time to show it off while filming. The implications made Marco shiver and look frantically down at the sand around his feet. He squinted his eyes, suddenly noticing those telltale little waves, small and irregular enough to be imperceptible if not looking for them. He covered his mouth with his hand, trying not to scream.

Oh god, they are EVERYWHERE.

He quickly turned towards Kimchi, hoping to meet a friendly gaze. But his jaw dropped once more, as he saw Kimchi playing with a handful of those things, kept in the safety of her big claws. Paddy chuckled, it was quite a spectacle to watch a crab lady in Hawaiian shirt allowing tiny, soon-to-be deadly maneaters to roam around her carapace, seeing them as cute. Paddy delicately grabbed the lizard from her own forearm and placed it gently on her cap for the camera to look at.

“Phage cubs are harmless to humans, but not so much to the environment. Since their numbers are ever-growing and their main diet involves destroying plant life to the roots, they are one of the agents responsible for the rapid desertification that’s associated with phage outbreaks. It’s much like how sheep and goats can strip the terrain bare of vegetation in a phenomenon known as overgrazing, though it’s yet to be understood how this degradation of the environment benefits the phages at all. After two months, cubs begin to develop into adults. They reach sexual maturity in the span of six months, sizing up to around one hundred seventy centimeters in length. In this interval of time, they develop eyes and lose their tails too, becoming more similar to the widely-known image of the haemophage. As they grow up, they need to eat much more than in their cub days, preferably small mammals and reptiles, which become rarer and rarer in a deserted environment. Experts are still discussing the possible causes of this apparent paradox – cubs destroying the ecosystem that should sustain their adult selves. There are various hypotheses, but no convincing evidence for any of them. The most prominent ones are...”

As Paddy kept on talking and talking about stuff too technical for her to understand, Kimchi let the cubs go, then watched them burrow under the sand at a breakneck pace. Marco looked at them with a mix of repulsion and rage. If Paddy hadn’t been there, he would have squashed those monsters with his feet. Those apparently “harmless” lizards were going to become man-eating monsters in the span of half a year, only to each produce two hundred more of themselves in a year or so. Each cub killed meant at least two hundred less phages – a net positive for the human world. Yet, he couldn’t do it, not as long as Paddy was standing there in front of his cameras. He didn’t feel like offing wildlife right in front of a member of the APW. However, if she by chance went for a walk, or stopped looking for just a moment…

“Marco, Kimchi, you can stop the recording. The live introduction is over, I’ve already prepared a video about the differences between the various subspecies of phages, and one about the sand blood flower infestation.”

“S-sand blood flower infestation?”

Paddy reached for Marco, looked in his eyes, raising her head to watch his reaction closely.

“Yup, you didn’t hear about it? It was all over the news, two years ago. An offshoot of the Northern Algol blood chrysanthemums, or so it seems.”

“Weren’t they called – uh – blood roses?”

Paddy roared, clenched her fists, furrowed her eyebrows.

“Oh, come on! They. Were. CHRYSANTHEMUMS. And don’t tell me but Rosenmaester yadda yadda, because that’s how the confusion started! That murdering psychopath never, ever called himself Rosenmaester, that moniker was the invention of that idiot Alkaid writer, Leo Verrand. I hate that pen pusher, he keeps on getting away with misnaming things! Blood roses, for Koch’s sake! Such a desperately catchy cliché!”

She paused to regain her composure.

“Anyway, the sand blood flowers seem to target specifically hematophages. They were observed for the first time near St. Patrick in 2064, on the carcasses of around one hundred phages. Res will be happy to have something about it, since it’s another mysterious mystery for a mystery-loving audience... but since they are rare in the wild, there was almost no chance to film some live.”

She browsed her pocket, pulled out a small memory stick.

“Here are the videos. I leave it up to you to cut them together with the live section. You’ll show me the final version before sending them back to the studio, alright?”

**

Marco yawned in his trailer. He didn’t like this, he didn’t like this in the slightest. Paddy’s live introduction was flawless, the image quality was as good as it could get, the sound quality even better. Kimchi had outdone herself with the mic placement, equalizing, and filtering. Everything looked masterfully crafted, arguably too masterfully, considering the segment was for a b-list direct-to-streaming show.

Yet, he couldn’t be happy about it.

That video, that sequence they filmed, was an objective explanation of haemophage biology, with many cute close-ups of those freakish haemolizards – that’s what he called the cubs in his mind – and an overall sympathetic tone. The videos on the stick were only reinforcing that view, with the last one, the one about the sand blood roses (no way he would call them chrysanthemums, too long and too difficult to remember) being unnecessarily graphic in describing how those damned flowers brutally killed the even-more-damned haemos.

While Marco felt some sort of twisted joy in seeing those monsters being ripped apart by sprouting, red flowers, he realized how such a grotesque display might make the audience feel bad for the haemos, and ultimately stand with them. It was APW propaganda, plain and simple, and that moronic Res Vertighel would never recognize that fact as long as he had his mysterious monsters and monster-killing-flowers.

He played the reel once more. Paddy’s intro, the haemolizards, all the various types of phages, then the sand blood rose as a conclusion, accompanied by a description of how the haemo population was dwindling. Twenty minutes of haemo apology disguised as scientific facts. He groaned. His family had been displaced by those horrible creatures, with his grandparents being alive when the first haemo outbreak happened in 2013. They managed to escape in time, but it wasn’t without cost. Would they be okay seeing those monsters get glorified as endangered puppies to be protected from evil plants?

No, of course not. The wound was still bleeding. You wouldn’t tell the survivors of Northern Algol how beautiful and biologically valuable the blood roses that destroyed their city were, would you? But somehow, haemo apologists were fine? Just because more time had passed?

Marco sighed. No matter his personal views, the video had to be cut and sent back to FTV as soon as reasonably possible, or his troupe would have to say goodbye to their sizable bonuses. He groaned. He didn’t have a chance to fight back. He hovered his cursor over the render button, ready to seal the deal on the film. He hesitated. What if he had forgotten something? He decided to check the content of Paddy’s memory stick once more. It wouldn’t have been the first time someone mistakenly put a video heshould have known about inside the wrong folder and chastised him for not having looked for it.

The stick was stuffed with haemophage-related material, to no surprise. Almost every folder had the name phage in it, as if Paddy had just quickly scraped together all her relevant documents and videos and copied them in a hurry. There was a directory called “phages 4 Traveller”, where the two segments he already cut were located, but there were several more of them laying around; “phages 4 APW”, “phage promos”, “phage personal”... he was too lazy to browse through all of them, so he launched a simple, dumb find all videos search command. The results returned in a couple seconds, showing something like ten additional videos. Not many, but not necessarily few.

He started looking over the titles, seeing if he could find any connection with his current job. Most of them seemed like promotional material or historical documentaries about the creatures, nothing to write home about. One suddenly caught his attention, though – “mating with phages”. He glanced at it for a couple seconds, wondering if he really wanted to see haemophages following their natural urges. Yet, that title sounded somehow wrong. Curiously wrong. Why “mating with phages” and not simply “mating phages”? What if it wasn’t a documentary? What if it was instead a certain other kind of video – the kind that someone should never forget on a memory stick given to a collaborator?

He smirked, opening the file with two rapid clicks. Someone is going to be kink-shamed to hell tomorrow morning, he thought. His smirk lasted for all of a fraction of a second, though. He blinked once, twice, closed his eyes, opened them again.

“What in the name of...”

First of all, he had been absolutely right – that was no documentary. It was nothing less than an explicit, amateur adult video, filmed with a low-quality hovering drone. But the subject...

He stared blankly at the screen, without enough words to describe what he was seeing.

Before his flabbergasted eyes was the nude body of a young woman with long, red hair, arranged in a braid, emerald eyes and freckles, with her breasts and lower abdomen tightly pressed against the reddish skin of a haemophage. The audio in his headphones made the whole situation even more surreal. That voice, the voice of the woman mating with a phage...

“Paddy?!”

Marco stopped the video, out of breath, his face redder than the haemo in the video. He rewound it, played it again, zoomed in on the girl. There was no mistake, no possible mistake. It was her, and she was enjoying her time with a haemo for fifteen minutes straight.

“Bloody Paracelsus...”

Marco started laughing, almost maniacally. Of course she was so adamant in protecting those bastards, of course she was! Now, everything made sense. The laughter wouldn’t stop, couldn’t stop, as his brain churned out all sorts of devious thoughts. What if he accidentally cut that segment into the video he was going to send to FTV? A video that would be broadcasted to the whole nation, exposing Paddy for the person she truly was.

That was rich, he would have paid to see that happen. Yet...

The laughter waned, little by little. He watched the sequence again, Paddy’s body occupying the screen once more, moving rhythmically, in sync with those passionate moans that reached his brain through his headset. What could he realistically do with this? Even if he managed to send it to FTV, nobody sane would have aired it during Traveller – that show had a sizeable following of families and kids. He would have surely lost his job, too – something he couldn’t afford. FTV was the biggest customer of his freelance troupe and screwing with it meant throwing Kimchi, Allan, Lina and all the others into dire straits.

No, mixing the video in with the cut for FTV wasn’t reasonable. He opened his editing program again, without changing anything, and pushed the rendering button. Res Vertighel would receive exactly what he asked for. True, he had a score to settle with that redheaded phagefucker, but his professional integrity came first. For the moment, anyway.

He stopped to think a bit longer. Paddy had put that video on the memory stick by mistake, surely. There was no way she intentionally gave him access to a clip of her mating with a haemo. If she did, she was even more screwed up in the head than he had thought.

Suddenly, a weird, but devious idea formed in his mind. One quick internet search later, and a sneaky backup of the memory stick content to his own PC, and he was good to go. He smiled as he stood up, leaving his computer on to finish the rendering. Now he could go to sleep happy.

**

Paddy sighed profusely. She couldn’t believe what she was going to do and with whom, but she didn’t have that many alternatives. Riding the lightning had been her only way out of that mess, a mess which she was still trying to understand the origin of. Who had uploaded that video on Pornelius, almost a year ago? Who could have had any interest in hacking her personal accounts to look for that? How did the goddamn video end up going viral?

She sighed again. Of course, none of this would have ever happened if she just hadn’t taped it in the first place, but hindsight is twenty-twenty, right?

If only...

She would have still worked for APW if that fifteen-minute-long clip hadn’t been leaked. Pornelius was the third-most-trafficked platform for amateur adult videos online, with several hundreds of thousands of daily unique users. One of those anonymous pervs had uploaded Paddy’s clip on that website a couple months after her first appearance on FTV, ruining her life completely.

To think that everything was going so well before...

That episode of Traveller had been an eye-opener for many people, and Toyco had even started to sell a phage cub plushie, out of popular demand. A phage cub plushie. All thanks to her documentary. Toyco frankly should have given her royalties, but no. Phages are real creatures, and thus exist in the public domain, so no money for her. But, hey, at least she was invited to talk about phages around the world, sometimes even at prestigious conferences. It felt like the beginning of something.

Something that burned down completely in the span of two days.

“Oi, everything fine? You look depressed. Like, seriously depressed.”

Paddy shook her head. She was sitting on a large bed, wearing only white underwear and a green t-shirt with a crudely drawn cartoon phage. The room around her was bathed in soft, bluish lights, underscored by chill jazz music emanating from a speaker. From the wall in front of the bed, an array of cameras and screens was staring back at her. The other person in the room would have stared at Paddy too, if only she could. She was a younger woman with waist-long, brown hair, wearing a blindfold and a rusty peace locket, one that looked like a piece of Woodstock memorabilia. Her outfit – if it could even be called one  – comprised only thigh-long, open socks and fingerless gloves, with a couple metal bracelets clamping both her wrists and ankles. The rest of her body was covered by nothing but bare skin – except for an artsy tattoo of angel wings on her lower abdomen. Paddy followed her voice, shook her head again with an even louder sigh.

“I’m... just a little bit overwhelmed. That’s all, Ms. Constantine.”

“Oi, I told you to drop the “Ms.”! Chai’s okay, ‘kay? ‘Sides, don’t worry – I understand your pain. That video must have destroyed your life, innit?”

“...Yeah. Just as I was finally managing to find the right direction. I wanted to raise awareness of phages. But – uh – not like that.”

The girl named Chai smirked, her blindness preventing her from looking at Paddy’s face directly.

“Girl, you raised much more than awareness with that video. As a heads-up, I’m gonna have to reference it, since my audience’ll expect me to. But if it’s too embarrassing, just stop me, ‘kay? Anyway, I hope you’ll have fun. Say the word and we go live!”

Paddy nodded.

“I’m ready.”

Chai pressed a button on a remote. The cameras went live, kickstarting the stream.

“Oi! Welcome back, creatures of the dark! Your lovely BlindSeraphim is here again to keep you company during the late hours of this long, cold Thursday night!”

Paddy noticed the chat log appear on one of the screens, connected to a solid-state braille tablet where Chai’s hand was moving wildly to keep track of what her viewers were writing.

“For this live episode of Vibe Check, we have a guest joining us for the stream – none other than Paddy O’Rilley, the author of the global best-seller Haemos Did Me Better!”

Paddy blushed, wanted to bury her head under the bed sheets. After her video became popular and she lost her job at APW, she was contacted by a renowned publisher to help her write a memoir about her experience, promising her big, lifetime royalties if she accepted the offer. Not having any other idea of how to get by, she went along for the ride, alternating spiced-up, explicit descriptions of her intercourse with real biology facts about phages (plus seventy pages of appendices, references, and tables). The work in question, aptly titled Haemos Did Me Better, was a resounding success, topping both erotic and scientific book charts at the same time, in the spring of 2066. Her book became low-key known as the bible of phage knowledge and was appreciated by several prominent scientists, even if none of them could openly endorse it in front of their students. Still, she felt uncomfortable about it, as the book had really cemented her public image as the phagefucker. She inhaled deeply, then waved her hand in front of the cameras.

“H... hi! Thanks for having me tonight!”

Chai started playing with her locket, while keeping a hand on the braille tablet to follow the developments in chat.

“The chat is going wild! Almost all of them seem to know you, Paddy! I bet many of them have also read your book.”

“Y... you think so?”

“Oi, I even read it myself, from beginning to end, and I’m a weed-smoking blockhead. The braille edition was quite expensive, but very high quality – worked like a charm with my tactile tablet. But let’s skip the foreplay and get right to the meaty part: How did that happen? Like, someone doesn’t become a phage expert in one night! And someone certainly doesn’t end up, ya know, fuckin’ one by chance!”

Paddy nodded, trying to find the right words. The hard part was just getting started, especially in such a weird setting. But, somehow, Chai’s rough voice was actually keeping her at ease.

“I started studying phages in high school. My family originally lived around Dublin, before I was born. They had to relocate to Belfast in 2014, after the UN interrupted the phage outbreak containment protocol due to the Helsinki incident. My grandpa took some pictures of phages while moving out, and I found the albums when I was a kid. I was fascinated by these lifeforms, especially because all information about them was either under military secret or shrouded in myth. Belfast has a lot of centers for phage sciences, but not enough funding or manpower. Sooo, I decided to join one of them at a young age, during my last year of high school, and I kept working there during college, too. I got my Ph.D at the Belfast University at age twenty-four, thanks to some papers that allowed me to skip my master studies. Then finally, I joined APW, and spent the last two years working in the Dead Zone proper. But apparently, nobody seemed to care.”

“At least not until they watched you have sex with a haemo – pardon, a hemato.”

Paddy chuckled at that remark, while also dying a little inside.

“Somebody did her homework, huh?”

“Oi, your Traveller episode was amazing. I wish I could see the phage cubs in person, everyone says they look totally adorbs!”

“They’re very cute, and totally harmless to humans. I wish they didn’t cause extensive desertification, though. This is still an open point, something that doesn’t add up with their growth process. But I guess your audience isn’t interested in boring scientific details, right?”

Chai let out a giggle, stretched a little bit.

“You’d be surprised just how many Ph.Ds are following me, behind the wonderful wall of anonymity that is the Internet. Yes, you know I’m talking to you, DrDisaster! And you too, DolphinSmasher. I’m pretty sure DoggoAteMyPants is a doctor too.”

The chat exploded with laughter, emojis, and innuendos, with those called out either confirming or denying Chai’s accusations. Paddy calmed down a bit, starting to feel more comfortable. She was expecting a much raunchier vibe from an erotic stream, but Chai somehow managed to keep a cozy atmosphere, despite the wholly not-safe-for-work nature of the setting.

“But yeah, I’m sure most would be more interested to learn how the heck you got the idea to do that? Like, I know there is many a monster fucker out there, but it’s usually fictional creatures. Hematos are the opposite of fictional, and they eat people!”

Paddy blushed again, crossed her legs, her arms resting on her ankles, her knees fluttering up and down.

“Well, uh, it’s a long story. So... do you remember what the reproductive rate of a phage is?”

“Something something, one hundred kiddos per year?”

Paddy joined her index fingers, lowered her gaze.

“Correct, provided that the females keep getting pregnant every month – a phenomenon that we actually observed in the Dead Zone. Which, honestly, begged the question... what causes them to follow this behavior? There are almost no differences between male and female phages. But for some odd reason, after a pregnancy, females always try to coerce males to... you know, copulate with them again, even if the males aren’t interested. They literally force them to... uh, perform the reproductive act.”

Chai laughed, patted her head affectionately.

“Oh, wow! They should have called them sluttophages!”

“Y... yeah. I guess they are kind of… sluts, haha! S-so, uh, my doctoral thesis was about finding an explanation for this behavior, and through several sample collections, I did find a possible explanation.”

Paddy’s voice became firmer, as she started fully tapping into her knowledge and memories.

“Male phages have a small stinger on their penises that injects a hormone into the female. This specific hormone causes the female to feel extremely heightened pleasure during the intercourse, a pleasure she can’t attain by stimulating her reproductive apparatus any other way. I’d say the difference with the release of chemicals is tenfold, making an act with a male phage much more sought after. Furthermore, during pregnancy, their pleasure receptors actually become completely numb. And I mean completely. For the thirty days the embryos need to develop, females can’t feel anything from any sort of sexual act. This changes again once the newly hatched cubs leave the mother’s body.”

Paddy clenched her fists, her nails almost digging into her palms.

“So, you have this frustrated female, who felt an indescribable pleasure for some short minutes and then lost all sensitivity for one whole month. When she tries to get off on her own, she realizes that she can only achieve a fraction of that feeling. Thus, her cravings become stronger and stronger, until she realizes that the sensations she felt the first time have something to do with copulating with a male phage. This makes her extremely aggressive, and almost forces her to immediately look for a new partner.”

Chai blinked unseeably under her blindfold, mouth agape.

“Oh, W.O.W.! So they’re, like, sluttophages by design? That would make Darwin blush!”

“Yeah, I literally followed around some marked female hematos for six months to confirm this, and the observations corroborated my thesis. I got a paper on Nature for it. It was quite the achievement. But then...”

“Lemme guess, Paddy... you asked yourself if that hormone worked on humans too?”

Paddy’s face became as red as a traffic light, her gaze fell to the ground, her confidence instantly vanished once again.

“I... uh, might have become curious about it, yes. B-but I had no way to test it in a lab – due to the Australian outbreak, we were only allowed to keep neutered samples in Belfast – and we couldn’t interrupt two hematos mating without risking our lives. So, I... kiiind of hatched a plan? A stupid plan, in hindsight. First, I localized a suitable male hemato who seemed to show very little camaraderie with other males. Then I...”

Paddy took a deep breath, trying to win against her embarrassment.

“...I decided I’d be the test subject. The plan was so far-fetched that I didn’t want to involve anyone else. There were so many things that could have gone wrong. For example, hematos don’t have a good sight. They use their eyes only if their smell and hearing aren’t sufficient. This made things a bit easier, as I just had to synthesize a pheromone that told them I’m a phage, and I could test it on our neutered lab hematos first... but I couldn’t be certain non-neutered hematos reacted in the exact same way, without testing it on the field. Which I did, personally, trying to approach my selected specimen while covered in the synthetic oil that simulated a hemato’s smell. After a couple successful attempts, I ran one last test... in my birthday suit. I needed to be sure everything was ready for the experiment.”

Chai whistled, clapped her hands.

“Oi, you had the balls to face a hemato in the nude! Remind me never to challenge you. And then? Come on, get to the spicy details!”

Paddy’s face was redder than red, but still going forward.

“I brought a drone with me to film the whole ordeal. I undressed completely, applied the oil on my skin, placed a thin, protective foil inside my private parts to avoid catching any potential phage STDs. And then I... I allowed him to sting me... and smash me!”

An applause from the soundboard as holographic fireworks exploded on the screens. The chat was roaring in approval. Chai joined her hands, jumped around a little.

“Well, how was it? C’mon, c’mon, tell aunt Seraphim! Don’t make me wait like this! How was it, Paddy?”

“U... unlike anything I’ve ever tried. I felt like all my senses were heightened, expanded. Every single sensation amplified tenfold. Every. Single. One. It was unreal, my body was shivering with pleasure and craving for more and more and more. It was the stuff dreams are made of. I... I can’t forget that experience, it’s engraved in my body. That was the best sex I’ve ever had... and it was with a friggin’ hematophage.”

Paddy closed her eyes, breathed a couple times in a long sigh.

“I did this three separate times, before I called it quits. I had enough footage and enough samples that I could recreate the same results in the lab without being... uh, exposed as a phagefucker. And the results were so good I managed to get two yellow press papers out of them.”

“Aaaand a whole drug cartel going guns-blazing on injured male hematos to sell their aphrodisiac love juice as a black-market miracle product.”

“...Yeah, that too…”

Not even a month after she had uploaded her paper on the mating practices of phages to an online pre-print repository, the Santuzzelli mafia family started forcefully apprehending weaker male phages to extract that “sense-expanding” hormone and sell it around Europe, under the codename “nirvana”. The demand for the drug skyrocketed over the following weeks, especially among brothel owners, as not having it in stock would result in far less satisfying experiences for customers and lower retention rates. Paddy had unknowingly found the next big thingTM, filling the void left by tobacco and cocaine decades earlier. For what it was worth, a member of the Santuzzelli clan left a suitcase full of cash on her doorstep, with a phage cub plushie stuck on it as a sort of impromptu thank you. While Paddy sort of appreciated the gesture, keeping the cash was not an option; first, because of the barbaric means the mafia used to extract nirvana from phages; second, because it was also illegal. However, if it hadn’t been for the former, she might have looked the other way on the latter – which she did, more or less. Instead of reporting those funds to the police, she redirected them as an anonymous donation to an NGO that was working hard to build a nature reserve for the phages.

Chai smirked, pointed her finger towards Paddy, almost as if she could actually see her.

“Now, it’s time for the million-euro question: Have you slept with a man since your three nights at hemato’s?”

“I have, yes.”

“Did it feel even remotely as good?”

“...No, not even close.”

Paddy was dead serious. After having experienced such an intense level of satisfaction, any intercourse she’d had since felt bland, unfulfilling, and no better than her usual self-service routine. It took her six or seven unsuccessful relationships to conclude she had probably become addicted to nirvana, after only three hits. She had contemplated trying to get her hands on the drug to see if she could reach the same heights, but decided against it. It would have only made her addiction stronger. Chai seemed to notice the defeatism in her voice, began pondering what to do next. Then a devious smirk crossed her face as she licked her lips.

“What about sleeping with a woman instead? Have you tried that?”

Paddy looked at her quizzically.

“N... no? I mean, it shouldn’t make a huge difference – none at all, even. How...”

Paddy couldn’t even finish her sentence before she felt a vigorous push on her chest. She lost her balance, landed flat on her back, bouncing on the bed sheets. She shook her head, eyes shut from the impact. When she opened them again, Chai was leaning over her in a sensual position, her face so near that their noses were almost touching.

“Well, it depends on the woman, right?”

Paddy felt Chai’s lips on her neck, her hands reaching for her underwear. And she lost herself in the other woman’s fragrance, closing her eyes, savoring the moment.

Hoping this time might have been different.

**

Marco yawned, his eyes betraying a deep, everlasting tiredness. He was walking on the main street, sighing what felt like every two steps. Flocks of people roamed around, some disappearing into nearby stores, some idly enjoying ice cream or other snacks. Some, though, were standing completely still in front of the Midas Building, their eyes glued to its giant holoscreen, completely enraptued by it. He raised his gaze, almost resigning himself to the view.

Paddy O’Rilley. As a guest on the Beckett Kingman Show.

He shook his head, sighed once more.

“Jeez, she’s everywhere.”

Marco would have kicked himself in the ass, if possible. He would have kicked his past self too, to the point of unconsciousness. This situation, the whole sequence of events, was exclusively, entirely, absolutely his fault. Paddy’s voice blared out from the speakers, echoed through the streets and buildings.

“...I know it’s hard to believe, but noctiphages, lymatophages, and hematophages all share the exact same genotype.”

Paddy was sitting on a sofa, wearing a green t-shirt with a cartoon phage – now together with proper pants and other items of clothing, unlike that raunchy stream. She seemed pretty relaxed, smiling openly and speaking with a unique, outpouring energy. Beckett Kingman, the beloved show host – an Afro-American man who grew up in Belfast – nodded with a shining spark of interest in his eyes.

“So, they’re the same species? The shiny nocturnal bastards, the sewer crocodiles and those red mofos are all more or less the same animal?”

“Uh-huh! It all comes down to the environmental conditions they develop in, which activates or deactivates certain features in the growing cub. Cubs that end up with defective eyes or that grow in very dark areas turn into noctiphages and develop bioluminescent bands, which allow them to communicate their presence to hematos while also luring their prey. Noctis are physically weaker than hematos, and act as solitary carrion-eaters.”

“And lymatos?”

“Cubs that make their homes inside sewage systems and get nutrients from our organic waste.”

“Let me put this straight Paddy: they eat our shit?”

“They do. And they smell horrible as a result.”

The sound of laughter, undoubtedly a canned effect, erupts from the studio, with the host grinning alongside it.

“Tell me, would you...”

“No, Beckett, I wouldn’t. Even I have standards. Noctis might be okay, aside from their acidic spit, but lymatos stink so much I can’t even joke about it. I know what I’m saying, I’m not even that picky – hell, haven’t I bedded a hemato or two?”

Stock laughter again. Marco sighed (yes, he sighed a lot, lately). His fateful intervention had turned Paddy from a covert phagefucker into a card-carrying phagefucker – and a beloved one, no less. She had completely embraced her weird new pervsona, and exploited every single second of screen time she got from it to raise awareness about those creepy monsters. Marco truly hated his own guts for that. If he hadn’t uploaded that video to Pornelius, the phage cub craze would have died down in a couple months and nobody, not a soul would have given Paddy this much visibility. But, no, he just had to go through with his brilliant idea. It will ruin her reputation, he thought, nobody will listen to her after this, he thought, people will stop caring about dying man-eaters and think more about the survivors of Northern Algol, he thought. Zero out of three. Worst score ever.

He lowered his gaze, trying not to think about phages or Paddy. It’s just a question of time, he said to himself. Trends change very fast, no way hers could last forever. Give it a month or two and it would be over, her stupid half-porn book would fall from the charts and nobody would care about her experiences or her opinions anymore. Or, at least, he hoped so. In reality, he was having a hard time even believing his own predictions.

“Hey, hey! Aren’t you Marco Botanica?”

…That voice.

Marco raised his head, squinted his eyes. In front of him stood a young woman with a long, red braid, emerald irises and freckles. She was sipping Frogga-Cola from a straw, while wearing her signature green t-shirt with a cartoon haemophage on it. Marco’s heart skipped a beat, his skin lost color.

“...Paddy.”

“Oh, so you do remember me!”

“Hard to forget… Your face has been everywhere, lately.”

He lazily raised his finger, pointing at the huge holoscreen, where another Paddy was still talking with Beckett Kingman.

“Say, shouldn’t you be there?”

“It’s not live, we recorded it last week.”

She took another sip of Frogga-Cola, squared the man in front of her from head to toe.

“You look tired. Very tired. Need to talk about it? I was going to get some cake, and I wouldn’t mind some company.”

One of Marco’s veins popped on his forehead. Of course he was tired. He had been facing the consequences of his actions for the last four months without a break, but he couldn’t possibly tell that to Paddy. You know, I was the one who made you famous by uploading your sex tape on the net. Classy way to tell her, maybe even cathartic, but no, not a chance. He was almost tempted to insult her, to tell her he’d had enough of her antics. Then, he noticed it. The small... thing moving on her shoulder.

He blinked once, twice.

A cub phage. A tiny, ten-centimer-long cub phage.

With an equally tiny choker and a little ribbon.

“Bloody Paracelsus, what in the name of...”

The small creature on her shoulder was moved its tongue in and out, licking the folds of Paddy’s t-shirt to orient itself. It didn’t seem to notice Marco at all. Paddy gently rubbed the cub’s head, causing it to emit a sort of purring noise.

“Chocolat. Her name is Chocolat. Before you ask, she will never grow out of her cub phase. A rare genetic defect, apparently. According to our exams, she’s already two years old. I’ve got permission to keep her as a pet. Isn’t she adorable?”

Marco’s jaw dropped. A pet micro-haemophage?!

“...I can’t... I refuse to believe it.”

“Well, I don’t. So, care to follow me for a slice of cake? My treat!”

Marco gave up. She had a pet haemo. A PET HAEMO – a creature which was already marketed and sold as a sickeningly cute plushie. She had created an entire haemo-based brand. Heck, he wouldn’t have been surprised if she had a haemo-branded line of vibrators, too! Internally, he was screaming. He felt like he needed to think with a clear mind, to ponder his next move, but his mind was anything but clear.

That was the only reason he accepted. Not for any logical purpose, but just because his brain was so jammed with guilt and rage that he couldn’t properly coordinate a response.

And, not even two minutes later, they were sitting at a cafe, with that horrible lizard running around on the table. Of course, they were being watched. Of course. Paddy was too well known not to be noticed. Her pet monster wasn’t a good way to keep a low profile either. The only thing Marco could do to hide himself was bury his head inside the menu.

“I’d recommend a serving of the Hazelnut Royale with caramel. It’s my personal favorite.”

Marco briefly peeked out from behind the menu, only to quickly tuck his head back down like a turtle. He could only think about that terrifying little creep that was licking the surface of the table at irregular intervals. It was horrible, unnatural. He wanted to divert his eyes from it, but that small, eyeless salamander wouldn’t leave him alone.

“I’ll take that, sure.”

“Good! I’ll order two!”

Marco glared at Paddy. She was still sipping her Frogga-Cola with a lighthearted carelessness he couldn’t understand. She hadn’t changed a lot since their last meeting, only her clothing style was different. He noticed several bracelets fastened to her wrist, one of which proudly contained the signature angel-wings logo of a certain not-safe-for-work entertainer. An enamel pin on her pants was actually portraying a super-deformed chibi version of the same adult streamer. Were those two so buddy-buddy that they even wore each other’s merchandise, now?

“Hello? We’d like to order!”

A waitress pranced to their table, wrapped in fashionable gothic lolita attire. And of course she recognized Paddy, and immediately started asking questions about haemos, about Chocolat and about her live horizontal tango with BlindSeraphim. Marco was surprised by how natural Paddy sounded while replying. Not a pinch of annoyance, embarrassment or sarcasm. How that was possible, was something he couldn’t even comprehend. Once the waitress left their table, Paddy directed her attention back to him. Marco gathered what little was left of his courage, decided to ask the question on his mind.

“How do you do that?”

“What?”

“They ask you about... that stuff in public, and you answer no problem, like it’s the easiest and most normal question ever! Aren’t you, I dunno, angry? Embarrassed? Tired of being reminded of that goddamn video?”

Paddy quietly placed her half-empty cola can on the table, started caressing Chocolat with her index finger.

“...To some extent, yes. All I wanted from my life was a honest career in APW to help with the preservation of phages after the sand blood flower epidemic. I just... wanted to become an anonymous researcher, always on the back lines, finding ways to save the environment without exposing myself too much. That sounds so impossible to believe, now, right?”

“Uh, yeah, sort of.”

“After I got fired, my family also stopped talking to me. I’m dead to them now. You know, fairly catholic people. Can’t have a daughter who’s into sinning. So, yeah, I guess I’m pretty lonesome, all things considered. Li’l Chocolat here is my best friend. Plus a couple other ones, but she’s the only one that’s around me 24/7.”

Marco clenched his fists, his eyes wide open. That was it, that was the deal. He did that to her, out of pettiness. It was all his fault.

All.

His.

Fault.

The burden was too much to handle. It had never dawned on him before, but her life had been turned upside down completely – just because he decided to follow through with his petty revenge plot.

“Hey, Marco, it’s not THAT bad, okay? At least now, I can seriously do something for the phages, and my work has reached so many more readers than I ever imagined. I wish it could have gone differently, but the past can’t be changed.”

Marco felt something wet graze his finger. The lizard. That goddamn lizard was licking him. He instinctively retracted his hand, let out a shriek. That thing. That thing didn’t have any right to live. He examined his index frantically, looking for any scratch or wound, after quickly wiping away the saliva. What if it was carrying some unknown illness? What if it could infect him? Maybe that was what happened to Paddy – a protozoan parasite transmitted by haemos that turned her into a phagelover, by feeding on her brain. What if he’d become one of them too? Marco’s forehead was sweating profusely. That was it, it was another one of their weird evolutionary tactics – look cute and harmless, then spread a microorganism, which forces humans to praise their phage overlords and offer themselves as food.

“Marco...?”

He stared intently at Chocolat, at that eyeless freak roaming freely on the table. What would happen if he squashed it? What if he just dropped a plate on the thing, by accident? What if he accidentally pierced it with a fork? A grin spread through his spirited face, as his mind started racing through all those options and more. He could do it, he could easily kill that little monster – what laws were there against it? None, none at all. It would be so simple, so very simple...

“Marco, you’re freaking me out. Are you okay?”

Paddy’s eyes filled his field of vision completely, raw emeralds gazing at him, looking into his soul. Marco winced, put some distance between himself, her, and her “pet”. He breathed once, twice, tried to calm down.

“I am.”

It was only half a lie. He had managed to get his urges under control, for the moment. That tiny alien on the table wasn’t making things easier for him, however.

“Paddy… How come you like haemos so much?”

“Huh?”

“These things butchered thousands of people, forced millions to leave their homes. Have you watched the videos from that time? Hundreds lost their lives to build Correa DOME and St. Patrick SHIELD, to build the Dead Zone wall. So much death and devastation... and you still want to help them?”

Paddy crossed her arms, sat silent for a long second before responding.

“They deserve to live as much as we do. We aren’t special among animals. We need to learn to coexist with our world.”

“We aren’t special? Bloody Paracelsus, has any other species born on Earth traveled to space and built orbital cities? It’s clear as day that we are the top dogs on this planet, Paddy!”

“Oh, so you have no issues accepting alien lifeforms like devsk and shoigas, but you draw the line at phages?”

“Stop with the strawman! Devsk and shoigas can talk, read, have history and legends, and traveled light years before they reached us! What did haemos do? They just showed up one day, started spawning like mad, and razed my country!”

Paddy stared at him without saying a word, without blinking. Chocolat climbed on her arm, reached her shoulder. Paddy caressed the small animal, while pondering her answer.

“...Sorry, I was indelicate. I know what phages did. I’m not justifying their behavior and the destruction they caused... but I also want to understand how they evolved, what caused them to appear all of a sudden. There are rumors that they were actually created by RealLifeAnime for a cancelled show, but unfortunately, that’s all we have – rumors. Anyone who would be able to confirm or deny these claims is dead, and no documentation from that period survived, thanks to the Helsinki incident and the ruckus it caused just one year later. However, if they weren’t man-made, if they did emerge spontaneously... that means it could happen again, maybe when we least expect it. And what would we do, then? Just hope they can be contained like in Ireland? What if it happens in continental Europe, this time? And don’t get me started on accidental leaks – phages didn’t reach Australia on their own, y’know.”

Marco froze. A dim ray of light was shining inside his brain, carving a path through his prejudices with immense effort. He was starting to see her point, understand her end goal.

“If we learn how to coexist with them, learn how they tick, we will be able to face similar crises in the future. There’s also another practical aspect: illnesses and parasites. Whether we like it or not, phages are now a part of our ecosystem and, as such, something that affects them might start to affect us, by jumping species. Phages could be the reservoir for the next global pandemic. The more we know about them, the less chances we are taking.”

“And why is killing them all not an option?”

“Economically infeasible. They tried to do it in the early 2020s, but the recovery plan from the Helsinki disaster meant they didn’t have enough resources for it. Now, nobody would even attempt to stage such a large scale reconquista. Too high of a cost for the little benefit of conquering back what amounts to a deserted, charred wasteland. However, the sand blood flower infestation almost caused the phages to go extinct, two years ago.”

The sand blood rose. While editing that fateful documentary, Marco had a chance to watch the video Paddy provided. A parasitic plant whose reproduction cycle revolved around phages. While hunting for food under the sand, cubs ate its seeds, which then started to develop in their stomachs, at the same time spreading spores into the bloodstream. And, once the cubs reached sexual maturity...

He shivered. Those pictures were tremendously graphic, he couldn’t push them away from his mind even if he desperately wanted to. Haemophage corpses turned into bushes of scarlet flowers, blood dripping from their petals, sprouting by the dozens from their skin, their muscles, their mouths, their eyes. The first time he saw them, he thought he was going to throw up – only his work ethic could force him put up with that terrifying sight. There was even one clip of a haemo germinating and dying in a horrible scream of pain. He had to cut it out of the documentary, otherwise FTV would have cut him instead. That goddamn flower got its nutrients from the corpse for two-to-three additional days, before finally withering. In that short lifespan, it would cross-pollinate with any other specimen that infested the same haemo cub, and then produce dozens of seeds. Seeds that fall into the sand, seeds whose specific smell would go on to attract other cubs, to repeat the cycle once more. It was sickening, harrowing, the thought alone made his skin crawl.

“Your cakes! Enjoy your meal!”

The chipper words of the waitress brought Marco back to reality, away from the image of the revolting, blood-soaked creature he had a sliver of pity for.

Paddy joined her hands, smiled warmly to the girl.

“They look delicious! Thanks a bunch!”

Marco nodded too, without too much conviction.

“Y... yeah, thank you.”

He stared in a daze at the caramel melting above the cream. His mind raced back to the crimson rivers flowing out of the flowers. He brought his hand to his mouth, tried to keep his diaphragm under control as his breath accelerated, his abdominal muscles contracted against his will.

“Marco?”

“I’m... fine. I was just... say, the sand blood rose... it can’t grow inside humans, can it?”

Paddy crossed her hands under her chin, looked him directly in the eyes. She resisted the urge to correct him again (was it so hard to understand that it was a chrysanthemum?) but she refrained from doing so. He seemed on the verge of throwing his soul out.

“...I’d like to say no, but… we had at least one suspect case of cross-species infection earlier this year.”

Marco’s skin lost all its color, his eyes wide open, his arms falling limp on his legs.

“Y... you’re joking, right?”

Paddy sighed. She probably should have kept silent, but the cat was out of the bag now. Even if she had denied it, she wasn’t sure Marco would have believed her anyway.

“I wish. Those flowers are scary, Marco. Those things... are a much deeper mystery than phages. There’s no way such an organism could have developed autonomously in barely five years. It must have been artificially engineered. And that scares me way more than a bunch of reptiles running in the desert, or their lizard-like progeny.”

She let Chocolat jump on her hair, walk slowly on her head before settling down and curling up, wrapping her tiny, frail body with her own tail.

“You were asking for an objective reason why we should keep phages alive? Well, one of them is that some hematos have developed antibodies against the sand blood flowers, while some others have actually reached a symbiotic relationship with them. These are the two ways in which part of the phage population have adapted and survived the acute phase of the infection. Studying them could give us the tools to... avoid having to develop similar biological countermeasures on our own. And to prepare us for a large-scale species jump.”

“...If that happens.”

“Not if, Marco. When.”

Marco clenched his fists. He wasn’t looking at the big picture. He was so laser-focused on his petty revenge, he hadn’t even considered any alternative reasons for Paddy’s actions. He didn’t even think it possible that preserving haemos had any saving grace. Yet...

He swallowed a lump of saliva. He was sweating profusely, his burden heavier than ever. He couldn’t stop it, he couldn’t keep it in anymore.

“...Paddy...”

His voice broken, his mind shattered by the titanic effort of finally telling the truth.

“...I... I was the one who... who uploaded that video to Pornelius.”

Frozen. Everything was frozen in time. Not one movement, not one sound.

“I hated you for wanting to save the haemos. I found that video on the stick you gave me to edit the documentary and... and I thought I’d use it to make you lose credibility. I... I was mad at you. I’m still mad at you. Haemos should have never existed, they should have been completely annihilated fifty years ago. Yet... it... it was a dick move. I didn’t... I couldn’t...”

All of a sudden, he felt something cold on his nose, his eyes, his mouth too. Something soft, creamy. Caramel. It tasted like caramel and hazelnut. Marco blinked, white cream falling to the ground. Cake. He was covered in cake. Paddy had slammed her slice against his face, and was now standing in front of him, her cheeks as red as a traffic light. Silence fell around them. Nobody talking, no movement, even the birds stopped singing. Then, Paddy turned around without saying anything, keeping Chocolat in her hands, haphazardly tossing a bill on the table. Marco raised his hand.

“Paddy...”

She didn’t reply. She just walked away, her furious steps getting quieter and quieter, her blood boiling, her teeth gritting. Marco watched her go, slumped back in his chair.

A deep sigh.

At least the cake was as delicious as she told him.

**

Paddy looked around the room. It was quite late at night, so she wasn’t expecting a flower shop to still be open. Not in New Langdon’s harbor, at least – probably the dumbest place to open such a store. She shrugged it off as an oddity and started analyzing her surroundings. Flowers everywhere, of course. Most of them were chrysanthemums, and the vast majority were violet in colour. Browsing around, she observed a small selection of other botanic species, in all existing (and some very rare) colors. Surprisingly, roses were not among them, not anywhere to be seen. She raised her gaze. There was a clock on the wall, ticking every second, almost completely wrapped in ivy. The vines seemed to be ready to stop it forever, by making the minute and the hour hands their unwilling prisoners. Yet, the clock kept ticking forward, defiant of its fate to the end.

“Thanks for coming. I wasn’t sure who I could call...”

She lowered her eyes again to meet the golden gaze of a peculiar girl, with short blonde hair, weird faint tattoos all over her body, and dressed in a very questionable way. Despite all the strange things she had seen in her short career as an erotic writer, a girl using yellow police tape as a makeshift bra was a new one.

“Don’t mention it. Luckily, I wasn’t that far from here.”

She heard a grumbling noise from the corner. She turned her gaze to find a dark mass lurking there, its white bands shining in the dim moonlight. Paddy’s heart was filled with joy at the sight of that familiar shape.

“Ohmygod, is that...?”

“A domestic noctiphage, yep! It’s the shop’s mascot, we call him Mr. Kramers – ‘Li’l Kramers’, if he likes you!”

Paddy knelt down, crawling on all fours to examine the creature. Chocolat was still resting atop of her shoulder, almost asleep. She wasn’t interested, of course, but Paddy couldn’t leave that little disaster of a pet alone. Her hand moved towards the black skin of the nocti, touched it delicately. A reaction, the creature jolted, turned towards her. Paddy retracted her hand instinctively, eliciting a cheeky smile from the absent-minded girl.

“He’s a softie, don’t worry! We had him neutered and de-glanded, get it? He can’t spit acid anymore. He’s just a cute little critter. Our cute little critter!”

The strange girl started caressing his head, causing him to react accordingly. Paddy was in awe. The noctiphage was purring like a house cat, and was apparently enjoying the company of humans. She looked at him curiously, taking mental notes of his features.

“From the shape of his bioluminescent patches, I’d say he’s quite young, no more than four years old.”

“Yay, he’s a big, dumb kiddo!”

The girl crouched near Paddy, while still caressing the creature.

“Lately, though, his behavior has been a little bit odd. He eats very little, and keeps on throwing up whatever he does eat. I’ve tried changing his food, even killed a rabbit myself minutes before dinner, just to be sure it was fresh enough, but it didn’t make a difference.”

Paddy shuddered at the image of that girl slaughtering a bunny in front of a hungry, yapping noctiphage without any regret. That wasn’t really what she would call the peak of sanity. But then again, she was the one who had sex with a hemato, so she had lost any right to judge others.

“So, you want me to give him a look?”

“That’d be great. No vet in New Langdon wants to visit him. They either act like scared puppies or think I’m joking, when I tell them my pet nocti is ill. But then I remembered seeing you on Chai’s stream, and how you knew a lot about noctis. So, I phoned her and asked how I could reach you. I’m just happy you were available on such a short notice.”

“Oh, you’re friends with Chai?”

“Yup. Me, her, and my girlfriend even had a spicy threesome together, once.”

You had WHAT together? Paddy desperately wanted to ask, but her brain was quick to remind her of her own misgivings. Nevermind.

“Can you keep Chocolat safe for a while?”

Paddy picked up the cub from her shoulder and gently placed it in the weird girl’s hands. The girl nodded, taking two steps back. Paddy crouched near the noctiphage again, started examining its skin, her hands moving along his body carefully.

“I see no external wounds, rashes, or vesicles. He looks clean from the outside, so maybe he has contracted a virus or bacterium. Do you have a sample of his feces?”

“His fe... oh, yeah, let me pick up his litter for you.”

“Thanks, that’ll do. Also, bring me some gardener gloves, please.”

After a brief moment, the girl returned with the requested gloves and a sizable heap of noctiphage waste. Donning the gloves and a face mask, Paddy started working her way through the grains of the litter and the byproducts of Mr. Kramers’ digestive system.

“The consistency is okay, but the color is a bit outside the normal parameters… Huh? Wait, wait, wait…”

Her attention was drawn by a small, solid fragment lodged inside one of the droppings. She picked it up with her fingers, looked at it from a reasonable distance.

“...What is this?”

She glanced at the litter again. It wasn’t the only one. There was a second, a third, a fourth. In a couple minutes, she counted seven objects in total. They all looked like… seeds. They were coarse and deformed, seemingly having withered before getting a chance to bloom, but they were undoubtedly, unquestionably seeds. The girl with golden eyes started to move around nervously, with Chocolat firmly in her hands.

“Gosh, did he eat a plant or two while I wasn’t watching? Mr. Kissilmer will kill me!”

“...Quiet. Please.”

Paddy cleaned the seed, revealing more of its colour and shape. She had seen a seed like this before. More than once. A gulp, then a shriek, as she fell on her back in shock.

“This is... this is a sand blood flower seed?!”

She looked at the noctiphage, then at the seed, then again at the noctiphage.

“But how...”

“S... sand blood what? I... is it bad? Is li’l Kramers in danger?”

Paddy calmed herself down, returned to the phage, started touching its belly. He purred at her, without a hint of pain.

“No reaction. Good lord...”

“And? And? Please, say something more!”

“He’ll be better in two or three days. Your pet was lucky to be a nocti. If he was a hemato, he would have been dead by now. Just be sure he isn’t eating anything – and I mean anything – outside of his meals. And I mean sealed meals, please. Not... freshly slaughtered rabbits, okay? At least until he gets better.”

She sat down, closed her eyes, drew a deep breath. Noctis and lymatos had a slighter lower pH in their gastric acid compared to hematos, which made the sand blood flowers incapable of blooming. However, the seeds were still toxic to them – no wonder he was feeling bad. But where could have he found the seeds? That didn’t make sense. Unless...

“Do you happen to have flowers – any flowers – from the Dead Zone, here?”

“Well, uuuuh...”

“Why, of course, Ms. O’Rilley!”

An unfamiliar voice surprised her, coming from the door. She turned towards the newcomer, trying to focus on him in the dim light of the shop. He was a man, a bit on the older side. His skin was of a ill gray tint, and only one of his eyes was visible. It had a strange violet iris which seemed to focus on everything except her, partially obscured by dry, thread-like brown hair. He also wore a huge plaster on one of his cheeks, making his mouth and nose seem more grotesque than they already were. Whoever that man was, he looked more dead than alive.

The strange girl waved her hand at the stranger.

“Oh, uh, hi Mr. Kissilmer! I thought you were already lying in your caske– er, bed, I meant bed!”

“How so? Late hours are the most productive for me.”

Paddy squared him up and down. That guy was even freakier than the golden-eyes girl. One thing was for certain, though – he knew who she was. He had recognized her immediately. Paddy gazed at the man, directing her fingers at the blonde-haired girl.

“You’re the owner of this shop? Your employee here asked me to check on her pet. And, guess what? He had ingested sand blood flower seeds. Here, in New Langdon.”

The man called Kissilmer shrugged.

“Oh, is that so? Maybe someone goofed up when they sent me the last batch of sand roses. Well, mistakes happen. I’ll ask my business partners to be more careful, next time.”

“You don’t seem to understand. These seeds are dangerous. Incredibly dangerous. They should have never left the Dead Zone.”

Kissilmer stared at her, his lone violet iris meeting her emerald ones, piercing like a dagger.

“You should have never left the Dead Zone either, Ms. O’Rilley. Your story would have been much more interesting that way. Not that I complain about a departure from the script, mind you, but I wasn’t expecting things to develop like this. It was decently entertaining, though. For all the countless variables and paths I’ve considered, your rise to fame was something I hadn’t accounted for. Bravo, you actually managed to surprise me.”

“E-excuse me?”

“No, I don’t excuse you. I have work to do and recorded episodes of Eliphya to marathon. Now, please, if your little first aid intervention was successful, I’d like to be left alone now. As for your payment, ask my employee, but know this nocti is castrated and you obviously can’t have intercourse with him – even if I wouldn’t have disdained watching.”

Paddy gritted her teeth, squinted her eyes. This Kissilmer man was already getting on her nerves. A cray lecherous pervert, without a shred of an accomplishment and looking like a rotting corpse – maybe even smelling like one?

“The fact remains that, somehow, sand blood flower seeds were in your possession. I hope you’ll be able to explain it to the cops, tomorrow.”

Kissilmer waved his hand, as if he was bored by her words.

“As if I haven’t dealt with worse. I mean, have you seen that nocti? How easy do you think it was to bring him here legally? Nah, It’s not a couple seeds that worry me. But you should be worried about them – on this, you are completely, utterly correct.”

He turned around, returning to the back of his store, with a very precarious motion.

“Now, go, please. I have to prepare some new hybrids for tomorrow. New plant species don’t appear out of thin air by themselves.”

“Fine, Mr. Kissilmer. Know it wasn’t a pleasure.”

“Likewise. But a little displeasure makes life more amusing for the spectators, n’est-ce pas?”

With that cryptic remark, he delved into the depths of his store, once again leaving Paddy alone with the strange girl – who suddenly didn’t look so out of place in this bizarre venue. The girl proffered her hands, let the little phage cub return to her human companion.

“I’m sorry, Mr. Kissilmer is... a little bit crazy. He’s missing a cog or two inside his brain, but he pays on time every month. And yes, he does sleep in a casket, but don’t tell him I told you that.”

Paddy rolled her eyes, caressed Chocolat. The little phage purred a little, licked her fingers in turn.

“He’s as abrasive as sand-paper, yeah. But I’m happy for your nocti pet. Not everyone has the sensitivity to see something beyond the monsters. He’ll get better soon.”

The golden-eyed girl nodded, then, as if suddenly she remembered something, started tapping on her lips.

“Oh, uh, before you go, I have another teeny-tiny question. It’s about the rabbits I buy to feed Mr. Kramers.”

“What about them?”

“Well, uuuh, I didn’t tell Mr. Kissilmer because it sounds creepy but... can rabbits, you know, bloom?”

Paddy shivered at that word. She had a horrible feeling about this.

“Show them to me, please.”

“This way.”

The two of them exited the shop, heading to a small shed near its entrance. The golden-eyed girl opened the door, a creaking sound accompanying her motions.

“Here. They were fine until two days ago. A little bit sleepy, maybe, but then they just... uh...”

Paddy’s eyes went wide open, without saying a word. She hugged Chocolat protectively, keeping her near her heart, a heart that was beating faster and faster, like a machine going into overdrive. Her voice came out broken, shattered by the sight before her.

“...Not if. When.”

“H... huh?”

She closed her eyes, took a deep breath once more in an attempt to calm herself down.

“I think I’ll need to write a new book soon. Mind if I make a call?”

“No, not at all! How can I help...?”

“Just stay as far as possible from those corpses. Don’t get near them, close this shed and never, ever go back inside again, for any reason at all, alright?”

Paddy pushed the girl outside the small room, her heart still racing.

What once was a cage full of living bunnies, now was a bright, colorful, dreadful bush of chrysanthemums.

As red as the blood they sucked out of them.