Mermaid Effect

vol1

Rand thought he might have had a nightmare.

It was a cold and dark room, the floor and walls were made of gray cement, and the floor was covered with layers of tarpaulins.Above the room, faint music and human voices could be heard.

basement……

For some reason, this idea suddenly floated into Rand's mind, and he was inexplicably sure that this was the basement.

A man crouched in a corner of the basement. His skeleton was huge, his hands and feet were wrapped in silver tape, and his joints were twisted at abnormal angles, proving that his limbs had been artificially broken.He was stuffed in a kennel for dogs, and the cramped space was a comical contrast to his tall stature, his face squeezed through the bars, his nose and eyes swollen to a maroon.

He was clearly tormented... Rand instinctively wanted to run to him, to save him.

However, in this dream, he was like a corpse that had been dead for many days, motionless, not even moving his eyes.

Although the man in front of him was miserable to the limit, Rand knew that he actually had another appearance.

He should be a happy and healthy man, work in a good company, have a pair of lovely children and a beautiful wife.He was handsome, always clean-shaven, and had suits custom-made from Italy every year...

At this time, he was staring askew at Rand with his swollen eyes, his eyes rolling nervously like a laboratory mouse about to be executed, and slurring words from his toothless mouth.

"Rand...Severus...you are...the kid..."

Bloody saliva overflowed from the corner of his mouth.

"I've met you, I'm friends with your father...your family has been looking for you, my God...you should know who you are! You're not...you're definitely not that woman's child! You're Rand Sievers...help me...help me..."

In his miserable cry for help that could almost touch a stone statue, finally, Rand felt his body take a step forward.

However, at this moment, the door to the basement was opened a crack.

A boy poked his head out from behind the door, and he put lipstick on his lips ridiculously, apparently once again stealing makeup from his mother behind her back.The clumsy make-up technique juxtaposed with his apparently male (even though he's only a child) face looks ridiculous.

Like a clown, his lips were bright red.

"Hey, buddy, didn't mom tell you to get rid of him? My God, don't you dare to do it again? How about it, do you need my help? Mom is at the banquet, she won't notice anything is wrong."

"..."

Ignoring Rand's silence, the boy stepped down happily, toying with a box of razor blades.

He deliberately patted Rand on the shoulder as he passed.

"Needless to say thank you, we are brothers."

……

"Hey, Rand? Rand..."

Someone is calling for him.

Rand's consciousness gradually changed from fuzzy to clear like foam rising from the deep sea.

A hand was patting his face lightly.

Rand let out a long breath, opened his eyes, and saw Rogers' face.

His friend was leaning down, putting his face in front of him and observing him, looking worried, some gold powder shone on his eyelashes, covering his pupils.At Rand's side, a nurse was taking an empty infusion bag off the shelf, and then she bent down to remove the needle from Rand's arm.

That didn't make Rand feel pain, in fact he just felt the usual soreness and slight itching.However, the moment his line of sight touched the pulled out needle, Rand tried to jump up from the chair completely, and at the same time let out a gaffe.

"No—keep that thing away from me..."

There was still some confusion in his head, but the fear that had lingered in his body before he passed out was still working.

He almost knocked over the infusion stand, and the nurse took a step back in panic.

"Mr. Carlos?! Please calm down..."

she yells, and Rand doesn't even realize that it's actually referring to him (to avoid trouble, Rogers assumed the identity of an alleged boyfriend during Rand's admission).

Finally, Rogers stopped in front of Rand: "Oh, hey, buddy, are you okay? How did I not know that you are the type who will panic because of the infusion? Calm down! That's your anti-inflammatory medicine, and you've got it..."

While he was speaking, Rand had already sat back on the chair involuntarily due to loss of strength. He stared blankly at Rogers, and suddenly interrupted the other person's words.

"The doctor...the doctor...he put something on my wound, oh my god..."

He murmured that the high fever or the aftereffects of the anesthetic still confused his mind.

He tried to tear off the bandage on his right hand.

"Wait, man, really, wait... God, what the hell are you doing?!"

"The doctor put something really disgusting in my wound and then he sewed it up and I'm going to get that thing out!"

"Sew on? What the hell are you talking about?"

"Mr. Carlos! Please don't do this..."

……

Rand insisted on tearing off the bandages despite the resistance of the nurse and Rogers, but to his surprise, there was only a long and narrow wound on his arm.The wound was covered with a translucent, flesh-colored film—no trace of any stitches.

Rand blinked his eyes in an attempt to make himself more awake, and he checked again and found that he was right.

"...they didn't give you stitches, Rand, the doctor who gave you the emergency department fainted before stitches from fatigue, and you had an adverse reaction to the anesthetic, your wound was smooth, and finally they decided to give you Bioglue was used for bonding."

Rogers glanced at the nurse, then frowned and explained to Rand.

"Adverse reactions?"

Rand held his forehead, trying to figure out what was going on.

After calming down, he got a more detailed explanation from the nurse who suppressed his dissatisfaction.Just as Rogers said, someone heard the crash outside the emergency room, and when they rushed into the emergency room, they saw the doctor who had passed out on the ground without any response, and Rand, who had fallen into a coma because of the anesthetic— —In theory, the anesthetic injected before suturing would only make Rand partially lose his sense of the arm.This is the "adverse reaction" pointed out by the hospital. Rand is very sensitive to anesthetics. What's even more troublesome is that the anesthetics also cause him dizziness, nausea and hallucinations to varying degrees.

"You've been screaming and yelling 'no' 'stop' and stuff and I think you must be having a really bad hallucination that's why you think the bioglue is something alive."

Rogers shrugged his shoulders and said to Rand.

The nurse came over and tried to help Rand repack the wound, but Rand couldn't help avoiding her.

"No, I don't think I need to."

Rand said with trembling lips.

That might indeed be an illusion, although Rand was still full of panic and doubts, he still accepted this statement.

However, he still resisted covering up the wound. The piece of flesh put into his arm in the previous "illusion" made him full of anxiety about the wound. He couldn't help but observe the wound on his arm repeatedly to make sure it was normal.

Then he and Rogers left the hospital as quickly as possible, and there was still a breath that made him very uncomfortable.

The real, excruciatingly painful stitches, the red eyes under the doctor's bangs, the curled flesh under the tweezers...

Is it really a hallucination?

Rand looked at his arm again.

The car started, and Rand could vaguely hear some noise amid the sound of the engine.

When the car drove out of the hospital, he unconsciously glanced back and found that there seemed to be some commotion there.

What accident happened?

This thought flashed across his mind quickly, and then crossed out at an even faster speed.Anyway, what happened in the hospital has nothing to do with him, Rand thought.

Vol2

Bart Buckley is a whining electrician.

Especially when he was called in from leave by the arrogant hospital administration staff to fix their damn broken elevator, and his whining became even more brazen. "Damn it, we only checked that thing last week!"

He grumbled dissatisfiedly over the phone.

"I know, but it still has problems, people complain about a disgusting smell in the elevator, the lighting has been intermittent, I think maybe a mouse crawled into the mezzanine..."

"Okay ok, I'm almost there, I'll get it over with."

Bart hung up the phone, then spat, staggered past a transvestite and a pale-faced nerd, and headed inside the hospital.

At first he just thought it would be a small problem.

Just like he has done countless repairs, he routinely placed a "under maintenance" sign on the outside of the faulty elevator, boarded the elevator routinely, and prepared to open the maintenance door.But the damn maintenance port was only a small crack open and it stuck, like something was pressing on it.

"Oh shit."

Bart cursed that he could even smell the strong stench.

"bump--"

He punched the iron plate, trying to break it away.

It does.

Accompanied by a stream of foul-smelling viscous liquid spraying down.

Bart fell off the ladder, the liquid smeared his face, and then a long strand of meat slipped through the maintenance opening and fell on top of him.

When Bart wiped the blood from his face in a panic and opened his eyes, the most terrifying scene he had seen so far appeared in his vision.

It was the broken body of a woman.

The skin of her limbs and torso, the rich fat under the skin, and the soft muscles were all eaten clean by something, and there were even clearly visible teeth marks on the pink bones, but those foreign bodies in the abdominal cavity, For example, the digestive system and lungs of digesta and excreta were abandoned on the top of the elevator car like garbage.

The woman's face had been eaten clean, and two eyeballs rolled out of the black eye sockets, and stopped on the blood-stained dark red cloth—the cloth might be the uniform she wore when she was alive.

A breastplate is still obediently pinned on the top of the pocket as before.

A smear of blood stuck to the back of it, and the only words that could be read were - Lola.

As people screamed and gathered at the elevator entrance, in a lounge at the other end of the hospital, a man opened his eyes.

He was the doctor who was thought to be "burned out".

Colleagues didn't find much wrong with him after a cursory inspection at the time, he looked like he was asleep...they moved him to the break room hoping to make him feel better.

But if his group of colleagues could see him now, they might be shocked by their previous wrong diagnosis of this man.

His eyeballs became cloudy and covered with a large amount of red blood, and the rupture of capillaries made his skin covered with bright red patches.The whole lounge reeked of human excrement, and the hapless doctor had been incontinent before, yet at the moment he woke up, he didn't even notice it.

He stumbled up, swayed like a zombie, and walked towards the door.

His friend, another young doctor just pushed the door open at this moment.

"Mason? How are you feeling now—oh my God! Mason?!"

The moment his friend saw him, he screamed. He involuntarily took a step back in an attempt to avoid the doctor, but the doctor had already bumped towards him like a fallen stone statue.

The doctor's hands firmly grasped the frightened friend's clothes, and his eyes, which were almost protruding from the eye sockets, fixedly stared at the other party.

"(*...%￥￥..."

He tried to speak, but his swollen tongue turned all his words into ominous hisses.

"Mason?! God..."

Mason was panting in agony from a high fever, and he felt pain, excruciating pain.

In the next second, blood and vomit mixed with necrotic internal organs spewed out like a fountain.

He slammed to the ground in front of his screaming colleagues.

……

Four hours later, terrified doctors determined Mason's cause of death.

A severe infection with a mutated flesh-eating bacteria.

The germs had eaten away almost all of his internal organs, turning them into something almost slimy.It is unimaginable that less than three hours before Mason's onset, he was almost normal when his colleagues saw him.

This level of severe infection can almost be said to have never been encountered in human history. The hospital was immediately blocked, and the US Centers for Disease Control urgently dispatched a medical team from Atlanta to Kansas.

After a second examination of Mason's remains, the medical team requested the CIA to assist in the investigation.

At the same time the entire case was flagged as a red urgent case and sent to the Department of Defense.

"We have reason to suspect that this case may be the prelude to a premeditated biochemical attack."

On the document, the CDC official wrote.

His judgment was not without reason, because during the autopsy on Mason, they found an artificial wound in his abdomen.And that kind of unprecedented flesh-eating bacteria was probably poured into Mason's body from this wound.

At the same time, the body of the female corpse found in the elevator car, the nurse Laura, also detected the existence of flesh-eating bacteria. Ra's organ corrosion was low, which may be why the final assailant used a different method of disposing of her body.

Officials declined to say what happened to the tooth marks on the hapless woman's skeleton.

Before the citizens noticed, the entire Kansas was declared a state of emergency, and agents began to roam the city, looking for possible biological and chemical attackers.

On the other hand, the CIA began to secretly search for a man named "Carlos", who was the last key person Lola and Mason contacted before the accident.

Of course, they already knew it was a pseudonym, a false identity.This makes them more sure that this is likely to be a prelude to a terrorist attack.

Confusingly, however, the false identity is so invulnerable (including "Carlos"'s companion, a pretender with unusually distinctive features), that they are completely untraceable, and they are so sophisticated that they evade all surveillance The camera, and part of the monitoring lines were determined to have been destroyed afterwards.

So in the end, all cia can get is the information of witnesses.

Of these, the testimony of a nurse was considered the most important.

"...yes, he had an injury on his hand, apparently from something very sharp, and we gave him some bioglue...he was out of his mind, I think, and he kept insisting that Dr. Mason was in his Living thing in hand... name? Oh yes, I think he has another name, his mates called him that but... oh god, I gotta think, I was getting an IV bag and didn't Caring too much about their conversation... I have to think, I'm sure I heard it, that name is familiar to me..."

The nurse sat behind the table with a pale face and said, looking at the tense agents.

She swore she was going to remember the name almost immediately, but just barely.

That's right, just a little bit...

Vol3

"Rand?"

Rand recovered from his trance.

He was sitting on the edge of the tub, next to his knees was the toilet lid, where bandages and tape and potions were placed.

Before Munster poked his head and called him, he should be preparing to change the dressing on the wound on his arm.

"Munster...what's the matter?"

He gave it a forced smile.

Munster crawled in with some hesitation. Ever since he injured Rand that time, he always flinched a little unconsciously when facing Rand... like a beggar holding himself in his arms for eternity. Like high-end jewelry that he couldn't afford, it always seemed to be worried about where it would hurt Rand again.

Just like now, although it tried its best to maintain its superficial calm, the almost erect hair and the gradually bright silver-blue scales on its body revealed its nervousness.

"Do you... need help?"

It asked Rand cautiously. The latter had been in the bathroom for a long time, but the scattered bandages showed that he had not completed the process of applying the medicine. Munster always felt that it was because he only had one Because only one hand can move.

Rand's face became a little subtle, and he shook his head at Munster.

"No, I don't think I need to."

"I, I will be very careful, I will control my strength, and I will not hurt you."

Munster spoke urgently.

Rand frowned and turned his gaze back to his arm, and he tore off the remaining bandage on his arm.

"I'm not worried about your strength, Munster, I'm just... I'm afraid I don't need medicine much anymore."

he said dryly.

There was only a very light pink mark on the arm exposed from under the bandage, and the huge wound that was so hideous two days ago disappeared like an illusion.

The glue used to seal the wound should theoretically fall off after five or six days, when the film was still intact on Rand's arm.Rand frowned and picked the glue off, touching the healed wound.

A strong uneasiness sprouted in his heart.

The wound seemed to heal a little too quickly, he thought, but wasn't sure if it was because of the new skin-gluing method.

After observing that the wound had healed, Munster seemed much more relaxed.It got closer, and then gently pulled Rand's arm to the position in front of his eyes, astonished like a child.

"Rand, hello!"

The scales on its tail turned back to peacock blue.

Perhaps because it was too happy, according to its habit, it couldn't help sticking out the tip of its tongue and licking Rand's arm gently.

"Munster!?"

Rand jumped up in shock at the feeling of being licked, "...I've said it many times, you shouldn't do this!"

He looked at Munster who retracted his tongue with some headaches, still unwilling to give up trying to make him more normal.

But Munster, who was expected to apologize honestly, seemed a little strange this time.

Its ear spines opened, its hair bulged behind its back, its cheeks were covered with a drunken blush, the tense muscles caused the terrifyingly shaped mouthparts to pop out of the folds inside its mouth, trembling like sea anemones The tips rubbed against each other, secreting streams of mucus with a strong smell that dripped to the ground.

"Land... De..." Its eyes became confused and hot, it stared at Rand, and there was some lisp when speaking, "You lick...so sweet..."