She prepared the six Jell-O molds.
That was the first voice in Helane’s head. It sounded like her. The second voice sounded like Bryan.
It’s not Jell-O. It’s a gelatin solution used to create a supportive structure that imitates the natural scaffolding cells use in the body.
God. Even in her mind, he was an arrogant asshole. Still, it was comforting in a way. She’d spent countless hours in the lab with him. She was all too familiar with his literal nature, just as he should have been familiar with her casual approach to conversation about her very formal research.
She blew a tuft of hair out of her face. She really needed to trim her bangs. Every goddamn morning, it ended up in her face. Always while she was pouring the “gelatin solution used to create a supportive structure.”
It was annoying. It was all so annoying.
She finished prepping the solution and turned her attention to the vials. Six more variations. Six more shots in the dark. Six more options they could eliminate from the infinite number of possible vaccines.
Mercifully, the lab was quiet. That was one good thing about this daily ritual. The rest of the bunker always felt chaotic. Life on the fucking edge, right? But the lab was a clean environment, and only a few were allowed entry. Just her, Bryan, Jacobs, and Fran.
We’re all still approved for access, she thought. Funny.
But it wasn’t funny. It wasn’t funny at all.
The morning of the accident was the last morning of her isolation. It was probably just a cold. But there were 200 people in the bunker. If one person caught something, it could spread with alarming speed, and she routinely handled live cultures. She had to quarantine for days to be sure she wasn’t a risk to everyone else. That’s the only reason she hadn’t been here.
But she saw the footage. She understood how easily a simple mistake could fuck her over. One slip. One careless moment. One misplaced jab. One prick, and you’re fucked.
So she moved slowly as she injected each vaccine into its gelatin solution. Caution mattered more than speed, at least in those moments. In general? They were running out of time. Speed fucking mattered. It had since the beginning.
When the outbreak started, everything moved too slowly. Initial reports lagged. Officials were hesitant. There should have been a swift, global response. They should have used bombs—fucking bombs—to wipe out whole cities. But the very idea of such extreme action sounded insane.
So they tried to seal off the affected cities. They used chain-link fence, for Christ’s sake. Thin strands of woven metal against those things. Yeah, it didn’t work. None of it worked. And by the time the government realized their attempt at humane containment had failed, it was too late to go all fire and fury.
They were loose.
Within a day, it spread hundreds of miles. Within a week, it was in every country—every state, every province, every major metropolitan area, and most small towns. Folks in rural areas fared best, but no one had it easy.
The comms officers at the bunker had radio contact with a few small outposts. When one fell, they just drew a big ‘x’ over it on the map in red marker and moved on. There were no memorials or moments of silence.
You see enough death, you stop honoring it. It becomes routine. Like the gelatin. Like the vials. Like this pointless, stupid, time-wasting daily chore.
Sure, she might find a cure. And all those things shambling around out there might just keel over and die. Or these could be the end of days. She could die right here in the bunker—starved when they eventually run out of food, or with a gun to her head, like Jacobs, or eaten alive, like Bryan.
Or worse. She could go out like Fran.
That thought motivated her. Long-shot or not, she preferred hope. She preferred action. She continued the trial.
If there was one good thing about the virus, it was the short incubation period. Hours. She could inject each gelatin solution with a vaccine, wait 30 minutes, and then introduce the virus. She’d know within 12 hours. While she waited, she would spin up six more vaccine variations. Slight tweaks in the formula based on the day before’s results.
It was a bit like chasing her own tail. But it was the best approach they’d settled on. And now that it was just her, it was frankly as much as she could handle in a single day.
No more autopsies. No more exploratory research. No more fucking library days spent hunched over a computer screen, poring through years of medical journals, hoping to find some kind of clue about the origins in a random report on a similar outbreak with far less horrific results.
Her life had become the lab. This test. This daily fucking ritual.
Maybe that’s why she did it. Maybe it was just boredom.
Camera 4 had been out for a month. Faulty wiring, most likely, but there wasn’t a pragmatic way to address it, so they designated the blind spot as no-man’s land—no equipment, no tests, no activity of any kind. They marked it off with duct tape and ignored it. A dead spot in the lab.
Helane let out a morbid laugh. Yeah, she thought. The dead spot.
That spot was a rare thing in the bunker. A true secret. No one but those with lab clearance would ever lay eyes on that spot. Anything in that roughly 10×10 square of space was entirely unknown to everyone else.
And really, she hadn’t lied. Bryan, Jacobs, and Fran were there. She just hadn’t shared all the details of their current condition.
Jacobs would have looked like he was napping, were it not for the hole in the back of his head. Bryan, on the other hand, looked like rancid hamburger meat. He was a liquified, rotting mess. And Fran? She was messy and smelling, too, but quite a bit more … animated.
Helane hated what came next. But if she didn’t feed her, Fran became a chaotic distraction. Choking back bile, she walked over to Bryan’s body. She picked up a lower leg. There were bits of meat hanging from the bone. She tossed it toward Fran.
Fran moved with frightening speed. The restraints held, but it was still startling. Enough so that Helane missed a detail.
One slip. One careless moment.
She didn’t see the blood under her left foot. She jumped when Fran rushed toward the bone. She slipped, falling onto her back and sliding forward as she fell.
The first bite felt cold, like ice held against her skin. The second bite burned. Then, for a bit, she didn’t feel anything. It gave her the mental space to recognize what was happening. That this is how she would die.
Like Bryan. Meat for the beast.
And then pain exploded in her veins as the virus surged and Fran fed. Now who would prep the Jell-O molds?