Chapter 41: TS-19 - Part 1
Tuesday Morning
Hot water was a revelation. I stood in the shower for twenty minutes, watching weeks of dirt and blood spiral down the drain. The CDC's facilities were fully operational—power, plumbing, climate control. Jenner had maintained everything despite being the only person left.
Or maybe because he's the only person left. Nothing else to do but keep the systems running.
[ TIMER: 28:15:33 ]
Just over a day. The pressure was building—headaches constant now, vision occasionally tinged red. I'd need to reset soon, which meant finding a target. But everyone here was either innocent or necessary.
Maybe at Fort Benning. Military bases attract deserters, criminals. Someone guilty will turn up.
I dressed in clean clothes from the CDC's supply lockers—generic scrubs that fit reasonably well. Emerged to find the common area transformed.
Glenn was cooking eggs. Actual eggs, from the CDC's frozen stores. Carol was setting tables. The children were playing a board game—Monopoly, the board warped but functional. Normal morning routine, apocalypse edition.
"Sleep well?" Madison asked, appearing with coffee. Real coffee, hot and bitter.
"Better than I have in weeks."
"Jenner's a terrible host, but the facilities are good." She sipped her own coffee. "He showed me the labs this morning. Explained the generator situation. We have maybe five days before power fails completely."
"And then?"
"Then we leave. Find somewhere else. The cycle continues."
"Forever?"
"Until it doesn't."
Nick emerged from the showers, looking almost human again. The withdrawal symptoms had mostly passed—he'd been sober for weeks now, forced clean by circumstance. He moved differently without heroin, more present, more aware.
"Breakfast?" Glenn called. "Got eggs, got bacon, got toast. Living like kings."
"Or condemned men," Daryl added. "Eating a last meal."
"You're a ray of sunshine."
"I'm a realist."
I found Jenner in his lab, exactly where I'd left him. Still watching brain scans, still counting down to nothing.
"You ever sleep?" I asked.
"Sometimes. When the exhaustion gets too bad." He gestured to a cot in the corner. "Three hours here and there. Enough to function."
"That's not sustainable."
"Neither is this." He waved at the screens. "But we do what we can until we can't."
I studied the brain scans. "Is that the moment of death?"
"Death and resurrection. Watch." He replayed the sequence. A brain, fully active, then shutting down—lights going out in sections. Then, minutes later, reigniting. But different. Only the brainstem, only the most primitive functions.
"The virus preserves the motor cortex and basic hunting instincts," Jenner explained. "Everything else dies. Memories, personality, higher reasoning. Gone. What's left is a biological machine programmed for one thing: spread the infection."
"Through biting."
"Through any fluid exchange. Bites are just the most effective method."
"And everyone's infected?"
"Everyone. We tested samples from across the world before communications collapsed. Everyone carries the virus. Death activates it."
"So the bites don't matter. The infection doesn't matter. Death is the only trigger."
"Correct. Which means every person who dies—natural causes, accident, murder—becomes a walker. The population is converting itself."
"How long before humanity's extinct?"
"At current conversion rates? Months. Maybe a year. Unless someone finds a way to break the cycle."
"Is there one?"
"No." He said it flatly, without emotion. "I've tested everything. Antibiotics, antivirals, radiation, genetic therapy. Nothing works. The virus is too well adapted, too resilient. It's a perfect predator."
"Then what do we do?"
"We die. Slowly or quickly, but we die. That's the only option left."
"That's defeatist."
"That's realistic. I'm a scientist. I deal in facts, not hope."
I thought about Martinez, infected and dying in a military compound in Panama. About the prisoners in the Georgia woods. About everyone I'd infected to reset my timer.
"What if I told you I'm the source? Patient Zero. That I carry a variant of the virus that spreads faster, converts quicker?"
Jenner looked at me. "I'd say your blood work suggests as much. You're not just adapted—you're weaponized. The question is whether you're spreading it deliberately or accidentally."
"Does it matter?"
"Ethically? Probably. Practically? No. The virus is already pandemic. Your variant might accelerate things by weeks or months, but the end result is the same."
"So I'm not making it worse."
"You're not making it better. But worse?" He shrugged. "Hard to measure degrees of apocalypse."
We sat in silence, watching the brain die and reanimate on repeat.
"Why are you still here?" I asked finally. "Why not leave, find other survivors, try to rebuild?"
"Because there's nothing to rebuild. The infrastructure's gone, the knowledge is lost, the population is converting. We're returning to caves and stone tools, assuming anyone survives long enough to get there."
"You don't believe anyone will."
"I believe humans are resilient. I also believe the virus is more resilient. This isn't extinction through catastrophe. It's extinction through biology. We lost the evolutionary arms race."
"Then why keep the generators running? Why maintain the facility?"
"Habit. Routine. The illusion that my work still matters." He removed his glasses, cleaned them for the hundredth time. "And because when the generators fail, the facility decontaminates. High-impulse thermobaric fuel-air explosives. Everything burns. It'll be instant, painless. Better than the alternative."
My stomach dropped. "You're planning to die here."
"I'm planning to end here. There's a difference."
"And everyone else? The people sleeping upstairs?"
"That's their choice. Stay or leave. I won't force anyone."
"You won't warn them either."
"I just did. You'll tell them, or you won't. That's on you."
I stood. "You're a coward."
"I'm a pragmatist. Same as you."
I left before I could say something I'd regret. Found Alicia in the recreation room, reading a water-damaged paperback she'd found somewhere.
"Can't sleep?" she asked.
"Too much thinking."
"Want to talk about it?"
I sat across from her. The room was quiet—most people were in bed, exhausted from travel and stress. Just us and the soft hum of the generators.
"Tell me something true," she said. "Something you haven't told anyone."
I'm Patient Zero. I transmigrated here from another world. I'm spreading the virus to survive. I'm dying and the only cure is infecting the innocent.
"I'm dying. Slowly. And the only way to stop it is something I can't explain or justify."
She closed the book, set it aside. "Is that why the walkers don't attack you? Why you can walk through them?"
"Part of it."
"And the rest?"
"The rest is complicated. Biological. Unexplainable."
"Try me."
"I can't. Not because I don't trust you, but because explaining would make it real. Would make me confront what I am."
"And what are you?"
"Something between human and walker. Something new."
She reached across the table, took my hand. Her skin was warm, alive, grounding.
"I don't care what you are. You've kept us alive. Kept me alive. That's enough."
"Is it?"
"Yeah. It is."
We sat like that for a long time, hands clasped across a table in a doomed facility, pretending tomorrow would come.
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