The wind outside howled like a living thing, rattling the steel shutters over the lab windows. It was the kind of sound that made your gut twist, not because of fear—but because it reminded you of what used to be out there. People. Life. Normal noise. Now it was just wind, the occasional groan of something not-quite-human dragging itself across the asphalt, and the distant crackle of military-grade gunfire.

I adjusted the strap of my respirator and stared down at the test sample beneath the microscope. The blood shimmered faintly under the light—iridescent, alive in a way that wasn’t supposed to be. I’d seen it a hundred times, but it still sent a chill crawling down my spine. Whatever this infection was, it didn’t just take the body—it rewrote it.

“Doctor Vance,” came the voice over the intercom, steady and low. “You’ve been in there for seven hours. You should rest.”

I didn’t look up. “If rest was going to solve this, we’d all be in hammocks by now.” My voice came out rough, deeper than I meant it to—years of dust, caffeine, and grit grinding through my throat.

The silence that followed told me they weren’t going to argue. No one really argued with me anymore. Being six-foot-eight and built like a linebacker had that effect, even on soldiers armed to the teeth. They looked at me and saw someone who could crush a skull with one hand. They didn’t realize how often these hands trembled under latex gloves.

I leaned closer to the microscope, adjusting the focus. The infected cells danced like wildfire across the slide—rapid, mutating, intelligent in a way that made my chest tighten. It wasn’t mindless, not entirely. There was pattern, intention. It was like watching evolution on fast-forward.

That was the part that fascinated me, the part that made my wife beg me not to take this assignment.

“Eli,” she’d said, voice cracking as she packed the boys’ things into a duffel. “You don’t need to prove anything. You don’t owe the world your life.”

But she was wrong. I didn’t owe the world. I belonged to it. Knowledge had always been my lifeline—the only way I knew how to fight fear. And now, fear was the only thing that seemed to keep everyone alive.

I closed my eyes for a moment and thought of her—hair messy from sleep, standing in the kitchen of the safehouse with one of my shirts hanging off her shoulder. The smell of instant coffee. The sound of little feet running across linoleum. My six-year-old, Noah, always asking if he could “help Daddy fix the world,” and little Micah clutching a toy dinosaur, barely understanding any of it.

The ache that settled in my chest was almost worse than the exhaustion.

I turned to the containment tank behind me. Inside, a test subject—Subject 47—shifted restlessly, its movements oddly rhythmic. A woman once, maybe in her thirties, skin ashen and veins dark as ink. Her eyes flicked to me when I approached, tracking my motion. Not mindless. Never mindless.

“Still in there, aren’t you?” I murmured. “Somewhere behind all that.”

She tilted her head. I swore her lips twitched.

The monitor beeped—a sharp, insistent sound that made my pulse jump. I turned and scanned the readout. Mutation levels spiked—new protein chains forming, breaking, reforming. Faster than before. Too fast.

Then the lights flickered. Once. Twice.

And the sound that followed wasn’t the wind.

Gunfire. Screams.

My stomach dropped as the alarms blared, red light flooding the lab. “Containment breach detected in Sublevel Two.”

“Goddamn it.” I grabbed my rifle from the counter—a precaution, they’d called it, though no amount of bullets ever really made you feel safe when facing something that didn’t stay dead.

I keyed the intercom. “This is Dr. Vance in Lab C. What’s the situation?”

Static. Then—“They’re inside. Security’s down. Get out, Eli. Get to your family.”

My breath caught in my throat.

For a moment, everything inside me warred—the scientist, the husband, the father. I looked back at the microscope, at the slide that might’ve held the key to everything. Then I looked at the containment tank.