Chapter 36: Mess of Me
The red bloom on the linen was spreading. It wasn't a trickle anymore; it was a map of ruin. Logan watched it seep through the fibers, feeling the corresponding burn deep in his own lungs, a slow, internal dissolution. The hazmat ghosts moved with agonizing slowness, their scanners beeping like demented crickets. They weren’t here to save anyone. They were here to catalog the disaster.
The masked man sat placidly in his circle of empty floor. He had tilted his head back, almost as if basking in the fear, the desperate symphony of wet coughs and stifled sobs. He was enjoying the show. That was the final straw.
A cold, clear fury cut through the fog of pain in Logan’s head. This wasn’t politics. This wasn’t a negotiation. This was some sadistic fuck in a mask watching people drown in their own blood. And Logan was done waiting.
He pushed himself up, using the wall for support. His vision swam, dotted with black stars. Clarissa grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?”
“Gonna ask for a refund on the champagne,” he muttered, his voice a wreck. He shrugged her off.
Each step was a negotiation. The room tilted. His chest felt like it was packed with shattered glass and hot wire. He focused on the mask—that stupid, bulbous, impersonal mask. He didn’t run. A run would draw attention, would use air he didn’t have. He walked, a slow, deliberate shuffle, past huddled groups, past a man quietly weeping over his wife’s unconscious form.
He was ten feet away when one of the hazmat suits finally noticed his trajectory and raised a placating hand. “Sir! Stay back from the suspect!”
Logan ignored it. Five feet. The masked man’s head turned. The tinted lenses of the respirator fixed on him. Logan saw his own distorted reflection in them—pale, bloody-lipped, determined.
He didn’t say a word. Talk was for rooms where the air didn’t kill you.
With the last of his strength, a surge of adrenaline that felt like his bones were snapping, he lunged. Not at the man’s body, but at his head. His hands, scarred from grills and knives, clawed at the rubber seal where the mask met the man’s neck. The man jerked back, surprised out of his performance. He grabbed Logan’s wrists, fingers digging in.
They grappled, a silent, ugly dance. Logan’s lungs were shrieking. He could feel a cough building, a seismic pressure he knew would break him. He hooked a foot behind the man’s knee and threw his weight, not to knock him down, but to unbalance him. The man stumbled, his grip loosening for a fraction of a second.
That was all Logan needed.
He tore the respirator mask up and off, yanking straps and tubes. The man’s face was revealed—gaunt, pallid, unremarkable, his mouth open in a shocked “O.” He gasped, instinctively inhaling the poisoned air he’d released. His eyes went wide with a different kind of terror.
Logan didn’t stop. He spun, the mask heavy in his hands. His eyes met those of a younger man, maybe a junior aide, who was staring, paralyzed, from a few yards away.
“Here!” Logan rasped, his voice barely audible. He shoved the mask toward him. “Seal’s probably fucked… but it’s better than… nothing.”
Then the cough took him. It was not a cough. It was an eruption. He folded in half, hitting the dirty ballroom floor on his knees. The world reduced to a violent, percussive convulsion that tore through his core. Each hack was a spike driven upward, and each one brought up a warm, metallic gout of fluid that splattered the peeling linoleum between his hands. He couldn’t breathe in, only out, in a horrific, liquid rhythm. The edges of his vision tunneled into a roaring, dark silence.
The young aide fumbled with the mask, his hands shaking, and clamped it over his own face. He took a hesitant breath, then a deeper one. The hazmat team was moving now, shouting, converging on the unmasked assailant, who was beginning to wheeze and claw at his own throat.
A distorted voice boomed from a suit. “Compound is localized! Not contagion-based! Repeat, airborne agent is non-contagious! We are commencing evacuation through decontamination! Follow instructions!”
Logan didn’t hear it. He was drowning on dry land. He felt hands on him, rolling him onto his side, but they felt distant, like touches through thick wool. He focused on the tiny, jagged pattern of the linoleum, the exposed glue, the grimy foundation of the city. It was the last thing he saw before the dark swallowed him whole.
On the clinic’s muted TV, the scene was chaos, but a new, organized chaos. Maya had been hauling boxes of gauze and saline when the news feed changed. The camera, shaky, zoomed in on the ballroom doors. Hazmat teams were emerging, leading out dazed, stumbling people wrapped in silver emergency blankets. They were being funneled toward a series of inflated white tunnels—decontamination tents.
The chyron updated: NON-CONTAGIOUS: HOSTAGES BEING EVACUATED.
“They’re coming out,” Maya said aloud, dropping a box. Dr. Feldman hurried over, wiping his glasses.
The camera panned across the faces, blurred and pale. Then it caught a glimpse through the doors, just before they swung shut. A brief, horrifying snapshot of the ballroom floor. And a figure on his knees, surrounded by others, his body convulsing in a way Maya recognized from footage of gas attacks. Even blurred, she knew the shape of him, the set of his shoulders. The dark hair.
“Logan,” she breathed. The word was a punch to her own stomach.
She turned from the TV. The prepared back room seemed pathetic now, with its two folding cots and her array of potted plants—snake plants, peace lilies, ivy—she’d brought from her apartment. They sat there, green and silent, a feeble attempt to fight a weapon with life. What had she been thinking?
The phone rang again. She snatched it up. “Feldman Practice.”
“Maya, it’s Gina from triage at Gotham General.” The nurse’s voice was crackling with static and exhaustion. “We’re getting the critical cases. The walking wounded, the exposed but stable… we’re directing them to clinics. You’re on the list. Expect twenty. Maybe thirty. They’re running them through decon now. ETA… an hour.”
“What are their symptoms? What do we need?” Maya asked, her professional mode snapping into place, a lifeline out of her own fear.
“Chemical pneumonitis. Pulmonary irritation. Think really bad, bloody bronchitis. Oxygen if you have it. Bronchodilators. Steroids. Monitor for respiratory distress. They’ll have deconned but…” Gina trailed off. “Some of them saw… a lot. Shock is a factor.”
“We’re ready,” Maya said, and hung up. She looked at Feldman. “Twenty or thirty. Chemical lung trauma. And shock.”
Feldman nodded, his old eyes grim. “Then we get ready for lung trauma and shock.”
Outside the Monarch, the narrative was shifting in real-time. Roman saw the first survivors emerge and felt a jolt of savage hope. Then he saw the details—the blankets, the stumbling gait, the haunted stares—and his politician’s mind began editing the footage before it even aired.
A reporter shoved a mic in his face. “Mr. Sionis! Your reaction to the evacuation?”
Roman let the relief show, raw and unvarnished. It wasn’t hard. “Thank God. Thank the first responders. These people… they showed incredible bravery in there.” He paused, looking directly into the camera, his voice dropping to a heartfelt murmur. “When I am mayor, the funding for our emergency services—for our hazmat teams, our firefighters, our police—will be sacrosanct. Because today, they are the only thing standing between Gotham and the abyss.”
It was perfect. He was already weaving the attack into his platform. See? I told you the city was broken. Here’s the proof. And I’m here, with you.
Emil appeared at his elbow, phone pressed to his ear. He listened, then covered the mouthpiece. “They’ve identified the compound. A custom mycotoxin. Nasty, but slow. Antidote exists, they’re administering it now. The man who released it is in custody. He took a dose of his own medicine.” Emil’s eyes were flat. “Logan is the one who unmasked him. Literally. Took the respirator and gave it to a civilian. He went down hard after. They’re bringing him out now. Critical.”
Roman absorbed the information without a flicker. Logan had attacked. Logan had made a hero move. Logan was critical.
He turned slightly away from the press scrum, his face falling into a neutral mask only Emil could see. “The civilian who got the mask. Find out who he is. Get his story. I want him front and center at the rally tomorrow.” He glanced back toward the decon tunnels, his mind racing. “And when they bring Logan out… make sure the cameras see it. Make sure they see me seeing it. My loyal aide, who stood between the monster and the people.”
It was cold. It was calculation. It was also, in a twisted way, the highest compliment he could pay. Logan’s sacrifice wasn’t just a personal tragedy; it was a political asset. Roman would make it count.
The first ambulances for the critical cases began to leave, sirens cutting the night. Then, the walking wounded started to stream out of the white tunnels, disoriented, blinking in the flashbulbs, shepherded toward waiting buses and vans for dispersal to clinics.
Roman moved along the barrier, shaking hands through the tape, clasping shoulders, a general greeting his battered troops. “You’re safe now. You’re with us. We’ll get you taken care of.”
He was watching, always watching. Then he saw him.
Logan was on a gurney, being wheeled not to an ambulance, but toward a separate medical tent—the critical triage. An oxygen mask was on his face, but it was stained with a pinkish froth. His skin was the color of chalk. His eyes were closed. One hand, dangling off the side, twitched involuntarily.
For a second, the public face on Roman slipped. A real, unfiltered spasm of something—fear, rage, possession—twisted his features. He took an involuntary step forward before Emil’s subtle hand on his arm stopped him.
The cameras saw it. The microphones heard his strangled, “Logan…”
It was better than any rehearsed speech. The image was instantaneous: Roman Sionis, the strongman, brought to the brink by the sight of his fallen man. It played perfectly to the tough-but-loyal brand. Roman let them see it for three full seconds before squaring his shoulders, the leader recomposing himself. He gave the gurney a long, last look as it disappeared into the tent, a look of fierce, private promise.
Then he turned back to the lights, his jaw set. “The people who did this,” he announced, his voice booming with a new, hardened edge, “they think fear will break us. They think poison will stop us. They are wrong. Tomorrow, we vote. And we will show them exactly what Gotham is made of.”
The crowd erupted. The chyron changed again: SIONIS AIDE A HERO IN ATTACK; CANDIDATE VOWS RESOLVE.
The first bus arrived at Feldman’s clinic. Maya was at the door, directing traffic. They filed in—men and women in donated sweats, their fancy clothes bagged somewhere, their hair still damp from decontamination showers. They coughed. They stared into the middle distance. They smelled of bleach and something else, something sour and chemical.
Maya processed them, her hands gentle, her voice calm. She listened to lungs with Feldman, handed out inhalers, wrapped blood pressure cuffs. She saw the red rims around their eyes, not just from coughing, but from crying. One woman, Clarissa, kept repeating, “He just gave it away. He was dying and he just gave it away.”
Maya didn’t ask who. She knew.
She worked. She placed her plants near the intake vents, a silent, probably useless vigil. She fetched blankets. She called relatives. The chaos was a river, and she was a stone in it, letting it flow around her.
Hours bled together. The flood from the bus slowed to a trickle. Feldman sent her home just before dawn. “You’re dead on your feet. Go. Sleep. It’s not over.”
Her apartment was silent, the TV dark. The ghost of the popped popcorn still on the floor. She stood in the middle of her living room, the adrenaline leaching away, leaving a hollow, trembling fatigue. She looked at her plants, thriving in their quiet corner. She thought of a toxin derived from mold, a weapon made from decay.
Her idealism felt like a child’s blanket—thin, useless. Her anger, however, was a different thing. It was hot and specific. It had a face now, or the ghost of one, pale and blood-flecked behind an oxygen mask.
She didn’t cry. She changed out of her clothes that stank of clinic antiseptic and other people’s fear. She pulled on a clean shirt, one of Logan’s, left behind weeks ago after a coffee spill. It smelled faintly of diner grease and his cheap detergent.
As the first gray light of Election Day smeared itself across the Gotham skyline, Maya sat on her floor, her back against the couch. She wasn’t thinking about healing the city with vines. She was thinking about the specific, fragile mechanics of a human lung. She was thinking about antidotes. She was thinking about what kind of soil bred such poisonous things.
And for the first time, her anger and her hope fused into a single, steely resolve. It wasn’t a comforting feeling. It was a quiet, dangerous one. The city was voting today. But Maya, sitting in the silent dawn, was already drafting a different plan.
But Maya, sitting in the silent dawn, was already drafting a different plan. It was a plan that involved phone numbers she’d sworn she’d never dial. The pale light creeping across her floorboards felt accusatory. She stared at her phone, the device cold and heavy in her palm. Calling Roman Sionis felt like drinking something she knew was poisoned, but the thirst for information was a sharper pain.
She found the number, not in her contacts, but buried in an old text thread from Logan—a forwarded joke with a signature ‘RS’ below it. Her thumb hovered. The city outside her window was waking up to Election Day, a day now stained with chemical fear. She pressed call.
It rang four times. A male voice, clipped and toneless, answered. “Yes.”
“This is Maya. I’m a… friend of Logan’s. I need to know his status.” Her voice sounded strange to her own ears, too formal, stripped of its usual receptionist’s warmth.
There was a pause, the faint sound of a hand covering the receiver, muffled words. Then the voice returned. “He’s in transit. Critical but stable. Gotham General, the new pulmonary wing.” The line went dead.
The clinical detachment of it was its own kind of violence. In transit. Like cargo. She was moving before she’d even pulled the phone from her ear, grabbing her jacket—a long, black thing with too many buckles—and shoving her feet into boots. Her plants watched her go, a silent jury of green.
Gotham General’s new wing was a monument to glass and brushed steel, but the air still smelled of antiseptic and dread. Maya navigated the buzzing hive of it, past harried nurses and rolling equipment, following signs for the isolation ward. She felt absurdly visible, her whimsical goth clothes a stark blot of night in the sterile fluorescence.
She saw Roman before he saw her. He was standing in a hushed conference with a doctor and two of his men near a bank of monitors displaying wavy, anonymous lines. He looked like he’d been carved from the same polished stone as the walls, but his suit jacket was off, his sleeves rolled up, and the perfect facade had a single, profound crack: exhaustion around his eyes, a tension in his jaw that suggested it might actually snap.
One of his men, a block of a person in a too-tight suit, shifted to block her path. “Ma’am, this is a restricted—”
“Let her through, Leo.” Roman’s voice cut across the hallway, flat and final. He dismissed the doctor with a nod and turned. His eyes, dark and assessing, swept over her. There was no greeting, no false warmth. Just a raw, shared acknowledgment of the reason they were both standing in this terrible, bright place. “He’s in room seven. They’ve got him on a high-flow nasal cannula. He’s conscious, sort of. Fighting the intubation tube so hard they had to sedate him a little. Stubborn bastard.”
Maya just nodded, her throat tight. All her rehearsed accusations, her moral disputes about his methods and his world, withered to ash. There was only the door to room seven.
The light was softer here, diffused. Machines beeped and hissed with a rhythmic, mechanical life. Logan lay propped up, looking both younger and terribly old. A clear plastic tube was taped under his nose, hissing oxygen. Another tube ran from a vein in his hand. His skin had a yellowish-grey cast, like old paper, and his eyes were closed. But they flickered beneath the lids, chasing some nightmare.
She pulled a chair close, the legs scraping softly on the floor. She didn’t touch him, just watched the painful rise and fall of his chest. Each breath seemed like a conscious, difficult effort.
His eyes opened. They were bloodshot, the green-hazel dulled, but they focused on her after a moment. A weak, lopsided approximation of his smirk touched his lips. “Hey,” he rasped, the word a dry leaf scraping concrete. He tried to clear his throat and it triggered a cough—a horrible, shallow, restrained thing he tried to swallow back, his body tensing. His hand clenched on the sheet. A speck of blood appeared at the corner of his mouth.
“Don’t talk,” she said, her own voice barely a whisper. She reached for a cup of water with a straw on the bedside table, her hand trembling slightly.
He shook his head minutely, refusing the water. He took a few controlled, hissing breaths through the oxygen, mastering the spasm. “You… look like hell,” he managed, each word spaced by a careful inhalation.
“You’re one to talk,” she said, and the familiar, light-hearted barb felt like a lifeline thrown across a chasm. She dabbed the blood away with a corner of the sheet, her touch feather-light. “You decided to become a human air filter. Not a great career move.”
He tried to laugh, but it dissolved into a single, wet crackle. He winced, squeezing his eyes shut. When he opened them, the humor was gone, replaced by a sharp, urgent clarity. “The others?” he breathed. “Clarissa? The kid… the kid with the mask?”
Maya nodded, swallowing hard. “They’re saying most are stable. The antidote is working. The… the kid is okay. He told the news you saved his life.”
Logan’s eyes closed again, a long blink of relief. His body seemed to settle a fraction deeper into the mattress. Then his gaze found hers again, sharper. “The election?”
She almost smiled. Of course. Even half-drowned in his own lungs, the game was still the map he read. “It’s today. Right now. They’re voting. The news is calling you a hero. Him a steadfast leader. It’s… it’s all anyone is talking about.”
He gave a tiny, almost imperceptible nod. His eyelids grew heavy. The brief lucidity was burning through the sedatives and his own battered system. “Good,” he whispered, the word trailing into the hiss of oxygen. “That’s… good.” His hand twitched on the sheet, fingers curling slightly. Not quite reaching, but not quite not.
Maya hesitated for a heartbeat, then covered his hand with hers. His skin was cool. He didn’t open his eyes, but his fingers relaxed under hers.
She didn’t know how long she sat there, listening to the symphony of machines keeping him alive. Eventually, she stood, her legs stiff. She needed air that didn’t smell like sterile death. She slipped out of the room.
Roman was still in the hallway, now on his phone, his voice a low, relentless murmur about polling data and district turnout. He saw her and ended the call. For a moment, they just looked at each other, two people from opposite poles of Logan’s world, tethered by this hospital room.
“He’s sleeping,” Maya said.
Roman nodded. He looked past her, through the small window in the door, at the still form in the bed. Something unreadable passed over his face—not softness, but a kind of stark calculation, like he was assessing the structural integrity of a building he owned. “He’ll be pissed he missed the party,” Roman said finally, his voice devoid of its usual theatricality. It was just a flat statement of fact.
“I think he did his part,” Maya replied, the edge returning to her voice.
Roman’s mouth quirked, not in a smile, but in acknowledgment. He glanced at his watch. “The polls close in eight hours.”
“And you’re here.”
“I’m here,” he confirmed, his gaze sweeping the hallway, the nurses’ station, the potential cameras he knew were lurking. “Where else would I be? My best friend is fighting for his life. The city needs to see that some things are more important than a victory speech.” He said it without irony, a cold recitation of strategy. He was already crafting the narrative from right here, in this chair, with its vinyl cushions and faint smell of bleach.
Maya understood then. His need to catalog the care behind practicality, to hide why he truly hasn’t left.
She turned to leave, needing to be away from him. He didn’t stop her.
The doors slid open. She stepped inside, the fluorescent light of the elevator a harsh contrast to the ward’s gloom. As the doors began to close, she saw a local news crew, led by a producer with a tablet, rounding the corner. They spotted Roman just as he was turning back to the window of Logan’s room, his profile a picture of somber, solitary concern. The camera lights flicked on, bathing him in a saintly glow.
Maya’s elevator descended. She leaned her head against the cool metal wall. The city was choosing its future today. Upstairs, one man was fighting to breathe, and another was using every gasp of that fight to cement his power. And she was somewhere in the middle, her quiet plan taking root in the dark soil of her anger.
The day bled away in a blur of news updates and waiting. Roman, as promised, became a fixture in the pulmonary wing. He was photographed speaking softly with doctors. He was filmed accepting a cup of coffee from a nurse with a grave nod of thanks. He gave one brief, hushed statement in the atrium, praising the hospital staff and urging citizens to honor the victims by voting. The image was potent: the would-be councilman, setting politics aside in a time of crisis.
Maya watched it all on the small TV in the clinic’s break room between patients. Each segment made her feel hollow. Feldman noticed her staring, the grim set of her mouth. “You can’t fix people who don’t think they’re broken,” he said gently, placing a chart in the rack. “You can only tend your own garden. However you define it.”
She thought of her plants at home, of the toxicology textbooks she’d already pulled up on her phone. Her garden was getting darker, its purposes shifting.
Night fell. The polls closed. The city held its breath, waiting for results, but the story of the day remained the attack, the heroics, the vigil at Gotham General.
Back in room seven, the artificial light mimicked a perpetual, shadowless dusk. The noise from the hall dimmed. Logan surfaced from the deep, chemical-assisted sleep just after midnight. This time, the fog was gone. The pain was a bright, sharp thing in his chest, and the oxygen still hissed in his nose, but his mind was clear.
He saw Roman first, a dark shape in the chair by the window, illuminated by the glow of his phone screen. “You look like shit,” Logan croaked. His voice was sandpaper, but it was his.
Roman didn’t startle. He lowered the phone. “You’re one to talk.” The old callback hung in the air, a thread of normalcy. He leaned forward. “They’re counting. It’s close. Your little stunt bought us six points in the exit polls.”
Logan absorbed this, his eyes drifting to the ceiling. He took a few careful, measured breaths, mastering the urge to cough. “The others?” he asked, his first question, just as it had been hours before. “The ones who were… coughing.”
“Three still critical. Twelve in serious. The rest will recover. The antidote worked.” Roman’s report was crisp, devoid of sentiment. “The man in the mask is in a coma. Self-inflicted. His apartment was a lab. An amateur, like you said. A disillusioned biochemist with a grudge against ‘corporate political machines.’ He left a manifesto.”
Logan’s mouth twisted. “So he was aiming for you.”
“He hit you instead.” Roman said it like a simple recalculation of an equation. “A miscalculation.”
Another silence stretched, filled by the beep of the heart monitor. Logan turned his head, a slow, stiff movement, and looked directly at Roman. The politician’s mask was off here in the dark. What was underneath was tired, ambitious, and utterly focused.
“Did we win?” Logan asked, his second question.
Roman held his gaze. The glow from the phone lit the planes of his face. “Not yet.”