Events
As they came into consciousness, the agents heard the following resounding in their heads: "The Hypnos Protocol is now complete. Agents, proceed with Operation Incisor. Investigate within the hospital and cut out the infection." Unfortunately, they each faded into the mission in different places, with different burdens thrust upon them.
Agent Nowhere awoke inside cold, confining darkness. She figured out that she was inside a hospital morgue and managed to free herself. However, as she dressed in spare scrubs, she discovered that the corpses housed in the morgue were not resting quietly; they began to bang on the doors to their "cells." When one was released, it bit Agent Nowhere's leg, but she managed to fend it off with a Liston knife and make a run for the elevator.
Agent Frownie found herself holding a coffee mug that read Fiefdom Biomedical Industries in a hospital break room, wearing scrubs. As she tried to leave, she was grabbed by a nurse and told that she was needed in surgery right away. In an operating theater (overlooked by three men in sharp suits who took notes on clipboards), Agent Frownie was asked to remove an ambulatory thing that was squirming beneath the patient's skin. Using a surgical implement of alien design, she was able to cut out a calcified ball of wriggling hair--a living bezoar. When she looked at the patient's face, she saw that it had been replaced with a two-dimensional black rectangle.
Agent Merlot found himself pushing a janitorial cart. A nurse stopped him in the hallway and told him he needed to go clean up a mess in the maternity ward. When he found the offending spill, he saw that is was a mass of blood, meat, bone shards, and adult teeth. As he began to clean, a strange man leaned in the doorway and offered to help "clean up." When Agent Merlot didn't bite, the man offered to trade him a pack of cigarettes for the opportunity. Agent Merlot quickly discovered that the man's "help" consisting of him dropping to the floor to eat the bodily destruction; he crunched on teeth as if they were popcorn. Once done, Agent Merlot proceeded down the hall.
Agent Peach-Glad was in a car, being driven by her granddaughter to the Quantum Hospital for an operation on her hand. Strangely, as she examined her own hand, she didn't see any reason why she would need an operation on it. She felt no pain or discomfort. At the hospital, she was placed in a wheelchair and taken away by an orderly as her granddaughter stayed behind to fill out some paperwork. Agent Peach-Glad attempted to get some information out of the orderly, but when he tried to clamp a chloroform-laced cloth over her mouth she sprang from the wheelchair and knocked the man unconscious.
The agents were able to reconvene; they hid the orderly in Agent Merlot's cleaning cart and took him to an empty room. After rousing the orderly, he admitted to being Agent Hartwick, someone working for a rival agency. Their interrogation was interrupted by the revival of the Redaction Man--a hulking "man" in the uniform of a Soviet commandant, his face a featureless black rectangle. Fighting the Redaction Man proved fruitless--he wounded a couple of the agents--so they ran for it.
As they ran, they noticed that the walls of the hospital were now marred by patches of "infection."
Back in the operating theater, they encountered the three men who had watched Agent Frownie remove the bezoar from the faceless patient. They learned quite a bit from these men--most importantly that the walking dead in the morgue were "dangerous ideas" that they felt needed to be purged from the American subconscious. While they were talking, Agent Frownie slipped the bezoar into the carafe of water; when the three men drank from their glasses, they promptly melted into viscous goo.
The bezoar was retrieved from the carafe and used to facilitate the end of their mission. After breaching a computer terminal in the executive level of the Quantum Hospital, the agents knew that the "subversive idea" zombies were being fed into the hospital's incinerator. They took the bezoar to the incinerator--which seemed to end in a fiery, living gullet--and dropped it inside. They ran from the impending explosion, and then--they awoke from sedation in a CRVCIBLE compound. Their commanding officer, a war-torn looking man in a uniform, welcomed them to the revolution.
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