The door to the brightly lit room slid open with a soft pneumatic hiss, the sibilant noise pulling Judy out of her idle thoughts. She watched the slab of shifting metal rise into the air. Out of the yawning mouth strode a thin, wiry man, a clipboard and pen tucked under his cold white sleeves.

When Judy moved to stand up, the man gestured for her to remain still. “Please, stay where you are. There is no need for you to get up.”

She averted her gaze. “Oh. Okay.”

“So, how are you feeling today?” the man asked through his white surgical mask. His lab coat was a perfect match to the room: cold, clinical, and painfully white. “Do you… feel any different?”

“I’m fine,” she whispered, looking everywhere but at the man. The room was imposing in its simplicity – a simple rectangle, the tiled surfaces only interrupted by the thick door of polished steel and the mirror beside it. Catching sight of her reflection, Judy quickly did her best to fix her hair, her fingers having little effect on the loose strands of hair. Her efforts only made things worse. “I’m s-sorry… I must look terrible.”

“Don’t worry Judy. We wouldn’t expect anybody to look their best in your situation,” he said, giving her what she assumed was a gentle smile from beneath his mask.

“Really? I can’t… I mean, I don’t remember much,” she admitted.

“What’s the last thing you remember, Judy?”

“Um, I was… I was feeding all my pets like always and… Oh!” Her head jerked up, her eyes wide with alarm. “My animals! Has someone been feeding them while I’ve been away?” she said as she struggled to lift herself up off the floor.

The doctor backpedaled. “We need you to remain calm, Judy. All your pets have been taken care of. You don’t need to worry about them. So please, just stay where you are.”

She blinked at him a few times before smiling. “Oh. That’s good. Thank you. I was… I was really worried for a moment,” she said as she settled back down on the bare tiles.”

He coughed and took took a few measured steps closer to her. “Now, you were about to tell me what the last thing you remembered was.”

She managed to nod. “Okay. I remember having to take care of a few injuries in the evening. It was… Thursday, I think. I don’t really know how many days it has been. What day is it today?” The doctor continued to stare at Judy silently. “Oh, s-sorry. It doesn’t matter. Some of my pets get injured now and again, but I remember that these were pretty nasty. They showed up with bites and scratches from one of the wolves in my canyon that had been acting aggressive. I heard something loud outside my house. The dogs were barking really loudly, so I rushed outside and saw the… the wolf.”

“Now, there was something wrong with the wolf, right?”

“Yes,” she squeaked slightly. “T-There was… he d-didn’t look normal. He was… sick. The fur was gnarled and lumpy, and had these growths all over him that made him… made him much bigger than any wolf I’d ever seen. It looked like he had parts of dead trees growing out of him, sharp branches and limbs going off in different directions that just pushed straight out through his back.”

Judy inhaled sharply. “And he… had b-blood on his muzzle. I didn’t… please, I’d rather not talk about it.”

The doctor marked something down on his notes, ignoring her request. “What did you do?”
“I… I tried to get him to leave, but… but it didn’t work, and he charged me and he bit and scratched me before I could run from him and then…”

His pen resumed its furious scribbling. “Did you seek help?”

“Oh yes!” she said with a quick nod. “I called Mia to come over and help me. She's a good friend and a great person, and she really helped me when I needed it most."

“Ah, okay,” he said, correcting something on the paperwork. “Mia was the 26 year old woman, the first person you came into contact with after the attack.”

Judy frowned. “She’s… she’s not in any trouble, is she?”

The doctor let the pages fall flat as he looked over them to stare at Judy, his jaw working silently as if chewing on a stalk of wheat. “Do you remember what happened to Mia?”

“She helped me.”

“What happened to her after she helped you?”

“I… I don’t understand. She helped me.”

“And after she helped you, what happened to her? Where did she go?”

“But… she helped me. That’s what she did. I n-needed her help, and she helped me. Did she do something wrong? Did… something happen to her? Oh no… Oh please, no!” The wrinkles on Judy’s face deepened as she began to hyperventilate. Unable to stand, she pulled herself forward with a jagged scraping noise instead. “Please! If my f-friends are hurt, you have to let me know! We could… we could do something!”

“Judy, I said remain still!” the doctor shouted. He pressed himself up against wall as she drew closer, his eyes darting from Judy to door and back again.

“But I need help! Please!” she groaned. She cried out even louder when the doctor ducked beneath the bottom of the door, disappearing into the darkness beyond. The door closed behind the doctor with a pneumatic sigh that was lost beneath the cacophony made by her fist banging away on the polished steel. “Please help me! I need help!”

There was no response. Judy sighed in defeat, collapsing back to the floor. A low moan escaped her stained lips as she stared up at the ceiling. The echoes of her protests quickly faded away. After the doctor’s questions, the soft hum from the air vents did nothing to mask the deafening silence.

Judy cried. Along her sides, the mouths of a dozen small animals cried as well, their faces subsumed into her bloated thighs. A third arm thrashed erratically atop the mass of meat and detritus of her tumorous lower half. The strips of her flesh intertwined with the root system that made up her left leg, resembling the stump of a long dead tree that had been pulled violently from the earth. What skin that could be seen between the chunks of gnarled bark and twisted plantlife writhed with the activity of the thin green vines that swam through her flesh like fish through water, popping up at random to sway in the air.

Judy’s remaining eye wandered around the room, the other lost when a sharp branch had pushed out of her skull, obliterating the eye socket. She caught sight of her reflection again and winced. “I hope Mia doesn’t see me like this,” she said to nobody as she tried to fix her hair with her good hand, doing her best to straighten out her frazzled hair.

Once she was satisfied with her work, Judy gave herself a small smile, wiping some of the sap that dribbled from her lips. Never one to be vain, Judy was confident that she was at least presentable.

Resting her head against the sealed door, Judy let out a long, wet sigh, her lungs already filling with more of the congealed liquid that sometimes leaked from her unhealed injuries. Despite how well she felt, she knew that she still needed a little help. The tendrils that drilled through the back of her skull pulsated slightly as if in agreement, thin vines digging further into her brain. Her memories were fuzzy and indistinct, but still, she wasn’t worried. She just needed a little help, is all. Just a little help. Mia had already helped her, and what was left of her body twitched in time with the vines.

It was nothing to be worried about.

She just needed a little bit of help, and everything would be fine.