The leg bone—also known as the femur—is connected to the knee bone, also known as the scapula.

They ran and ran and kept running—Heggy and the others, and the fungal nightmares hot on their tail. The things were crawling out of the fucking ceiling.

Literally.

The group was turning down a hall when Jonan heard something rumbling in the flimsy pipes overhead. He managed to dart out of the way and yell "get back" before a bouquet of tentacles broke the pipes open and spilled onto the floor in waterfalls of snakes and wheat and tumbled across the vinyl, toward Nurse Thurston, who stood in the way.

"Shit!" Heggy yelled. She reloaded and opened fire.

Jonan's nose was too ravaged for him to smell any of the smoke or gunpowder, but the gunshots' percussive noise rang in his ears and made them sting.

Charred and wounded, the dark thing shrieked and scampered off, away from the bullet cases clinking onto the floor.

That should have felt like a win, but it didn't. The roars and moans alive in the basement's hallways left Jonan feeling like he was lost in the jungle, a wandering piece of prey.

"I thought you said there were soldiers at the Matter Printer facility!" Ani said.

"Yeah, well," Heggy replied, "we're not there yet!"

Then they started running again, and Jonan really, really hated it.

Why did dying have to be so fucking miserable?

An amalgam of dead birds and uprooted plants lumbered across at a right angle as the group passed through an intersection. Snapping its legs and twigs, the monster leapt, tackling a physician to the floor.

Ani screamed. "No!"

But the group just kept running.

Jonan grabbed Ani by the shoulder and pulled her along.

Heggy and Dr. B'zool darted back and shot out some covering fire.

Dr. Marteneiss panted and coughed as she reloaded her gun. "Alright. we just need to make a left here, and—"

The group ran to the next intersection, and then screeched to a halt.

A mix of dinosaur and bear was barreling down the hall, with teeth like glass and a long, stiff tail studded in razor-sharp plates.

"—Shit…" Heggy muttered.

The raptor rasped its claws through the walls, tearing furrows, bashing its head and spiny back against the ceiling. Its talons raked sparks off the floor.

Ani screamed. Jonan staggered back, spreading his arms to protect her.

Jonan grabbed a gun and fired.

The raptor opened its freakishly huge mouth and bellowed.

"Fucking run!" someone said.

"But we're headed toward the morgue!" said another.

"There's nowhere else to run!" Ani said.

Jonan had no choice but to follow.

Everything hurt so much. He wanted to stop and sleep and never wake up.

No!

Jonan yelled at himself, fighting back against the dark. He kept his eyes on Ani.

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Focus on her. Focus on her.

He told himself he could let go once he knew she was safe. Her survival was all that mattered to him.

They turned the next corner.

He coughed.

"Whoever said we were getting close to the morgue, you were right on the money," he said.

Holy shit.

Even if it had only been the bodies, the hall up ahead and the morgue beyond it—as per the sign on the wall—still would have been one of the most horrifying things Jonan had ever laid eyes on. The bodies piled from floor to ceiling, and the ceiling was like twelve feet up.

But it wasn't just in the hallway up ahead.

There were bodies everywhere. Bodies, bodies, bodies, stacked by a mason of umbral imagination. The smell alone was enough to kill a guy.

But it wasn't just the smell. It wasn't just bodies. It was so much more.

"This place really is a fucking jungle," he cursed.

The corpses had burst open. Body bags strewn about like ruptured seed pods beneath the dreaming fungus that had overwhelmed the walls and ceiling. The stuff grew everywhere, gnarled, ligneous, and twined. It blocked out the light. Chests and skulls blossomed with primeval blooms that luminesced in soft cyan and cerulean. And everywhere, coats of spores tinkled and glowed. The green mists dawdled in the hallways, tuned and turned by errant currents, eating ragged ulcers into the walls and floor. A whole chunk of the latter had fallen away, revealing the hallways of the basement level one floor down.

Then Jonan heard the sound again: those drums, erratic in the deep. Only this time, he could see it, too.

Everyone screamed.

"Break the Tablets!" Heggy shouted.

It was like a hill on legs. It was a faceless thing, vile and tumescent—a bolus, a fecal mass, filled with fetor and death, girdled in jointless legs that grasped and squirmed. The thing was like a cell made giant. It reached out with its cilia as it shuffled through the halls, plunging them into the walls to pull itself up.

The corridors shook, and then a whole section of the floor gave way. People screamed and stepped back, but not everyone made it. One of the doctors slipped and plummeted. Ani tried to grab him, but she was too late.

One of the mass' tendrils lunged toward her.

"Ani!"

Jonan knocked Ani to the floor, pressing his gun into her back as he pushed her out of the giant cell's reach. Rising to his knees, Jonan fired his gun, and Heggy followed suit. Everyone who had a firearm used theirs.

But most of the bullets just bounced off the thing.

"Jonan, run!" Ani yelled.

More screams and gunfire echoed down the corridors behind him.

He didn't have time to check if it was backup.

Heggy grabbed him by the arm and pulled him up, and Jonan grabbed Ani and did the same, and then everyone ran. With three out of the four available routes cut off, they ran toward the only place they could go: the morgue.

Then there was a tremendous crash, followed by some feisty, cornetted wyrmsong.

Jonan and Ani toppled onto the ground, back-first, staring in awe as a deep black wyrm slithered up beside the horrid mass. People whose guns still had ammo fired them, only for Heggy to raise her hand.

"Hold your fire!" she yelled.

Jonan wasn't the only one to stare at the wyrm as it wrestled the giant cell.

Even with his brain melting into goop inside his skull, there was no way in hell that Jonan could forget the Werumed-san mascot transformee.

Angel, if there was an afterlife, that fucking thing would be giving him nightmares for the rest of eternity. The creature was a sick joke: a badass, monster-dragon-snake thing, but with a poofy, foppish, chibi doctor mascot at the top five or so feet of its body. Spines and horns jutted out from the cover yellow felt on the mascot's head. Golden eyes gleamed from the ruined fabric, which had been torn open in the middle by a burgeoning snout.

"What the hell is that?" Dr. B'zool yelled.

"It's Werumed-san," Jonan yelled. "For the love of God, don't shoot him! He's on our side."

Also—though Jonan ran out of the breath needed to say it—the quicker the mascot assimilated the giant cell's biomass into himself, the quicker he'd look like a normal wyrm, which—at this point—would be a definite improvement.

Pinning the horrid mass on the wall with its body, the black wyrm pressed its claws against the walls, impaling two bunches of the creature's many tendrils.

"Wait," someone said, "so, he's friendly?"

Werumed-san snorted out spores.

"Yeah," Heggy said.

"Uh, guys?" Ani pointed and screamed. "Guys?!"

More than one person said "shit" as they turned and looked to see two more of the raptor-beasts come charging down the hallway.

Werumed-san stuck out his clawed hand and spread his palm.

Maybe it was just the fungus eating away at his brain, but Jonan was pretty sure he saw something quivering in the air directly in front of the two raptors. The next moment, the creatures smacked into an invisible wall that spanned the corridor, their bodies bursting open like crushed bananas.

Jonan dared to laugh. "Now that's what I'm talking about!"

Werumed-san tooted in approval, though that sound was distorted as writhing tendrils emerged from his and pierced the giant cell mass. The mass squelched, folding and bending around the wyrm's flanks, pulled close.

They were beginning to fuse. The last traces of the mascot's face disappeared beneath the expanding layers of scaly black wyrmflesh.

Then Jonan heard a wrathful trumpet. The wyrm-call came from the overgrown hallway around the corner. Everything shook.

Something was coming.

Even the mascot-wyrm took notice.

Jonan's every instinct told him to run.

He grabbed Ani's hand and ran right as a massive purple wyrm slithered around the corner, its six eyes gleaming and golden.

Heggy gasped.

"Letty?"

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