Muscular arms wrapped around his elbows. "Hey..."

Two men in black, like bodybuilders, grabbed him tightly. He heard Ronald Fetch's voice.

"Nice play. You're one of those weasels at TruBind, aren't you? What the hell are you doing here?"

Dennis began to stutter, half in shock. "I — I..."

"Yes. I, I, I." Fetch muttered.

"Should we throw this sucker out?" One of the brutes said.

"Actually, we're going to take him where he wants to go."

Dennis was suddenly very nervous. It had been too easy. After all, he was a nerd, not a silver-tongued thief.

Fetch entered a code and inserted a key into the locking device on the door. The lights turned red. The brutes carried Dennis — who was helpless — behind Fetch, wherever he was going.

He found himself in a large room with many machines. They looked like microscopes and other scientific devices, as well as various photographic apparatus.

The laboratory.

Fetch turned around and looked at Dennis. "Mr…Ender, is it? What exactly made you so curious about medical textbooks? And why?"

Dennis struggled in vain. "Just…an interest…hobby…like to write things. No harm..."

"No harm?" Fetch asked.

Another man walked up beside Fetch. It was the man he had run into in the basement of TruBind. The man who had refused him a textbook.

Fetch motioned. The guards loosened up on Dennis. He stood up straight and panted. "Look, I'm sorry. I was just curious. What did I do that was so bad?" You impersonated an employee and made yourself to the top floor of a restricted building, Dennis's own answer came back at him.

Fetch laughed. "You thought you were pretty good at this, eh? Just drop your briefcase? Don't you think that's a little cliché?"

"Well…" Dennis was lost at this point.

"Anyway, I just made up this Dr. Oxfeld character. Well, that's not completely true. He was a physician here. Long time ago. You picked it right up, though. You wanted in. We do good work here, Ender, and we don't need lowlifes like you running around with some neurotic obsession messing with us! Jesus.

"Well, all in all, you've succeeded. We'll show you what the story is here. You must have noticed that we change photos so often. We're really, silently, the best in the business. And we serve two purposes — you could say, firstly, to produce quality work — but we're also healers.

"Healers?" Dennis asked.

"Of course. We perform miraculous things here. Understandably, though, the process sometimes goes awry. It's the thought that counts, right? As they say, it's good for what ails you."

"Yeah, sure..."

Dennis took a chance and broke free from the dynamic duo. It struck him, mid-flight, that he had no idea where to go. He scrambled past all kinds of scientific machines. Some glasswork fell and crashed.

Dennis took his first opportunity. There was a dark glass door, with some writing on it, which was ajar. He jumped in and shut it behind him.

It was dark. A thought occurred to Dennis: They didn't even give chase. He had an ominously bad feeling, reaching for a light switch. He found one, and the lights went on.

He was in a huge room. Most of it was well-lit but down the end it was all dark. It seemed like another warehouse.

There was a problem.

Something scaly brushed past his leg. Like a worm or something.

"What the hell are you doing here, Ender?" It was Harry Pitchman's voice behind him. Dennis slowly looked over.

Pitchman was strapped to some kind of metal device. He was naked spare his undergarments. An iron cylinder was placed on half of his head. There was some kind of red light coming from some kind of lamp, which was attached to the machine and faced Pitchman's chest. It looked somewhat like an electric chair.

"Uhh…Mr. Pitchman? What-What are you doing in that contraption?"

Pitchman sounded afraid. "They said they'd cure me. I don't think that's going to happen. Well, maybe not like I thought, y'know?"

To hear Pitchman speak without yelling was far too ominous. Dennis finally took a good look around, craning his neck to see the floor.

Dennis turned white as a ghost as he registered the appalling state of affairs. It was the most horrible thing he had ever seen.

There were... things all over the room. Terrible looking creatures. One, presumably the critter that has slinked past him, was like an overgrown snake with black tissue all over it. It had a sucking mouth that opened and closed and was covered with fine needles.

That wasn't all. Something rolling around that looked like a collection of cysts, with stalks that had little mouths that made popping sounds as they opened and closed. Lumps of tissue, like giant, multicolored amoebas, hopped around. Something that looked like — well — a leg that dragged itself around with tiny little hairs on its underside. It was purple and yellow. Scabs independent of tissue made sucking sounds.

It's a motherchristing zoo, Dennis thought, horrified, a zoo of — horrible sicknesses made into independent creatures.

Pitchman started shuddering. "Jesus damned christ…Ender! Get me the hell out of here!"

Dennis tried the door. Surprise! Locked.

Then there were thudding sounds. Like huge padded feet. Dennis looked up in horror. It was…

Like a person, at least shaped like one. But it was like a huge 7-foot lump of palpitating tissue and growths, with appendages that looked like arms and legs.

Cancer is alive. It's not confined to a body here. It's in the back room, the curing room at Quinn Medical Accessories. It wasn't just a tumor in someone's organ. Here was the disease in all its glory.

Dennis backed up. Suddenly he felt the worm wrap around his leg. Its spines were digging into his leg. He yowled in pain. The cyst ball bounced closer and clung to his pants. The little mouths brushed against him, each squirming around, presumably looking for food. The cancer behemoth continued walking towards him.

Pitchman was crying, snorting, gibbering. The red light pointing at his chest turned green.

"Get a grip!" he yelled at Pitchman, then realized he hadn't much of a grip in the first place. He smashed the worm against the metal chair. Eventually black blood squirted out (in some abundance) and it dropped. He tried to brush the cyst critter off.

He looked back at the cancer-man. It was getting closer. Dennis swung around to look at Pitchman.

Pitchman's eyes started to go blank. Suddenly, at the green light's target, a huge …something burst out of Pitchman's chest. It looked like a lung surrounded by black tendrils. It attached to his face. As it turned out, the lung cancer rumor had been true. Dennis briefly remembered the new text with the missing cancer picture.

Dennis fumbled with the tumorous lung (which had immediately come to life when it was liberated from Pitchman, who now appeared to be dead). He could see nothing. He tripped on something furry and fell to the ground. The foot-thumps were right around him now. Dennis could only gurgle. The tendrils filled his nose and mouth. He couldn't breathe. Everything went out of focus.

---

Rudy Pollack added some whitener to his coal-black coffee.

"Yeah. Well, Ender probably cracked and got fired. I told ya how he tried to threaten me, the wimp?" he said.

"Hmm," Jim Davison thought out loud, "What about Pitchman?"

"Who knows, maybe they sent him to the zoo. Anyway, Boerigard seems OK. Lot less yelling. I hear.. that they kicked him out of head office because he was gay!" Rudy lowered his voice for that delivery.

Paul Boerigard paced around the cubicles. What a dungeon, he thought.

He knocked, then entered Croder Watchfield's office.

The man, as usual, was gray as a ghost and had cracked glasses. Fat as a horse.

"Don't worry, I'll keep an eye out. I think Ender was just an anomaly — everyone else seems to be just a bunch of gossiping losers. At least, that's what Dr. Fetch told me." No response from the old man. He did, however, slink away from the desk. Boerigard smiled at him: a fat torso supported by four furry, pulsating stalks that acted as legs.

"Anyway, I'll keep a lookout for anyone that seems to want to throw a wrench in the works." He walked to the door - the turned around for a moment.

"Have to run a tight ship, I know. Thank you, Dr. Oxfeld." He said to the preserved man.

The bulbous, furry-legged mass slinked back behind the desk.