DISEASE

The shaking of the door continued at regular intervals as William tiptoed closer to it. It rattled in place, unable to move thanks to the webbing of obstacles keeping it shut.

The noises were repetitive, but they weren't violent. They didn't even feel intentional, as if whatever was on the other side was accidentally bumping itself against the door, over and over.

William gulped. In the back of his mind, he knew what to expect, but he couldn't manage to make sense of it.

Upon closer inspection, the glass windows on the door were completely blocked by wooden boards. No matter how hard he tried, he found himself unable to see what was on the other side.

'This was done on purpose… They specifically wanted to block the view, didn't they…?'

Despite how dense the barricade was, William noticed some small gaps in between the boards. Most of them were tightly overlapped on top of each other, but certain areas had room underneath. Not enough to look through, but enough to slide something thin through.

He reached for his pocket, and pulled out a cellphone. He was glad he remembered to charge its battery before leaving the apartment building. The phone slid easily under the wooden boards. He made sure the camera flash was enabled, and snapped a picture behind the barricade.

…

'I fucking knew it… What the hell…!?'

As he walked back towards the group, he was met with anxious gazes. One of them unsettled, another one curious, and the last one, nervous.

"W-What is it…?" asked Claire.

"You, pipsqueak." he said, looking at Ethan. "Go back to the elevator. You'll find someone there. Now."

"Y-Yes, sir…!" replied Ethan, running away without protesting.

Once the boy was gone, William raised his phone in their direction, exposing the picture he had taken. Nobody said anything, but their faces were painted with horror.

"I think you have some explaining to do, Marcus. I thought this place was safe, you told us it was safe… but a shambler nest doesn't sound too safe to me."

"…" Marcus' face was brimming with guilt. He refused to look William in the eye, and his mouth contorted in a twisted grimace.

"You're gonna stay silent? Again!? You should be fully aware of all the things that can go wrong here, damn it. Because it fucking happened already."

'This place is massive, and it houses an equally large community. If new people have been flocking to the hospital, by now it probably houses way more survivors than the subway ever did… Shit, if there's an outbreak and this nest gets disturbed, those people will be cornered like rats! There will be no escape! It'll be that incident all over again, but worse…!'

"Marcus… You said you wanted to help people, right…?" said Claire. She stood up from the floor and beat the dirt and dust off her clothes. "I think every bit of information we have will help all of us make better choices. Wouldn't that be the best way to help everyone right now…?"

Marcus kept his silence for a short while, then sighed.

"Alright…" he said. Was he finally agreeing to speak up? William sure hoped so. "We… The Army has been in this hospital before."

"The Army…!?" William put away his phone and listened.

"Yes. It used to be our main command center in the city, until we ended up moving somewhere else. It had a big laboratory, it could hold plenty of resources and personnel, it was easy to defend… And, as strange as it might sound, that shambler nest is the best defense this building has."

"What…? Okay, you're talking nonsense now."

"It's not just on this floor. The first three floors of the hospital have a big nest spread out around their perimeter, sealed and isolated from the rest of the building. You see, shambler hordes avoid nests. Even nocturnal ones. Unless they actually detect human presence in the area, they won't wander into active nests."

William pondered for a moment.

'That's… unexpected. But it kinda makes sense. That's why the subway was safe… The sewers surrounding it were infested! They discouraged the hordes from going underground. Clever…'

"Claire, you saw what's inside that room, didn't you?" asked Marcus.

"You mean… those bugs? Y-Yeah…" she answered.

"You'll end up telling someone about it sooner or later. Might as well do it now."

William looked at the lab door. The glowing insects were still flying around the room, although their frenzied attempts to escape had finally ceased.

"W-Well…"

******

Marcus listened to Claire as she went over her discovery of the bees and their characteristics. He hated this outcome. It shouldn't have happened. He'd rather keep the details in secrecy, if possible. But many of things the girl had learned were subjects of great concern and suspicion. If he were to stay silent about it, he might end up creating further distrust and division among them.

Besides, Claire's words had hit him undeniably hard.

[You said you wanted to help people…]

'So much for following the protocol… I wonder if such a thing even matters at all by this point.'

Speaking of protocols, the fact that Claire was able to access the laboratory was a very bad sign. By protocol, the door should have been electronically locked, and the mechanism's battery should have lasted for a very long time. The entire room, door included, was heavily reinforced; impossible to break into without specialized equipment.

Someone else had been there at some point after the place was abandoned. Someone with the necessary credentials to access it.

'I don't like this…'

He focused again on the ongoing conversation.

"Alright, alright… Let me think for a moment…" said William. "I don't get it, how are these hybrid things related to anything…? Are you telling me that Sting virus they carry is… this!?" he swung his arms open, referring to everything around him. "You surely don't believe such a thing! Marcus!?"

"That… is actually true. The Sting is what ended up causing this disaster."

"B-But how…!?" asked Claire.

"A long incubation period. As in several years long. No symptoms at first, until they suddenly kick in. After several iterations of infection, the virus mutates to adapt to its new hosts, incubation becomes gradually faster, and contagion rates grow exponentially. The result is… this."

"A-Ah… Oh g-god… But why does it create… those things…!? Why do some weird bugs have a zombie virus!?"

"You're mistaken. The prevalence of such things in popular fiction makes you think that way. But they aren't zombies. As a matter of fact, they aren't even dead. They're perfectly alive."

William's eyes opened wide.

"They are… alive…? Then, she's…" he murmured.

"The Sting seems to be able to mix the DNA of the carrier with the DNA of the new host. When a human is infected, it becomes some kind of human-insect hybrid in itself. The body mutates and tries to adapt to its new features, but the required changes can't be properly enforced on an already formed organism, and therefore the end result is… botched, so to speak. That's what a shambler is, in essence: a flawed hybrid organism."

"Then, all the similarities in their behavior, in relation to the insects' behavior, those are…?" Claire kept asking questions, both horrified and full of curiosity.

"Those are to be expected, yes. They have inherited many of those behavioral characteristics from the previous carriers of the pathogen. They behave like a colony of social insects. But they're not. Not exactly."

"I see…" Claire lowered her eyes towards the floor, looking somewhat disheartened. After some seconds of thought, she gasped, as if she had realized something important. "Wait…! Then, does that mean…!?"

"I bet I know what you're thinking about. Listen, I think both of you might have reached this conclusion by now. If you haven't, you soon will. But I'll still mention it, just to be sure… In the same manner they developed new behaviors, the shamblers have also developed a new social hierarchy. Their colony has a queen. And just like you might suspect… Lilian is the queen."

"Shit… Okay… I thought about this, but… To hear it like that, it's…" Claire took a couple of steps back and her arms drooped a bit. "I-I wonder if we should even tell Nora about this… William, what do you—?"

"You knew." he said, speaking to Marcus. "You guys knew this would happen, didn't you? Those documents were more than a year old… There were no symptoms back then…? Bullshit. There's no fucking way you didn't see this coming."

"And your point is…?" asked Marcus.

"You're asking what my fucking point is!? Seriously!? You were the only ones who knew, that's what my point is, motherfucker! You could have done something! You could have given us a warning! You could have handled things much better than you did…! You could have saved people, damn it…!!" William's hand was moving dangerously close to his pistol holster.

"When we found out about this disease, those bees were already being spotted across nearly the entire globe. What do you think was going to happen if we suddenly told the world that there was an insect carrying a potentially deadly disease, literally everywhere? A clueless society is much easier to manage. We placed our bets on being able to decipher this thing before it was too late. And we lost that bet. But the other alternative might have just ended with a similar disaster."

'You think we didn't want things to end differently…? I get it, William. I get how you feel, I understand that frustration. But it's never that easy.'

"Shit…!!" William walked away from the group, back towards the main hallway. "Let's go... There're more important things to do than arguing right now. But mark my words, Marcus: I'll make sure to beat the crap out of you when this is over."

For some wicked reason, Marcus looked forward to that. If they both survived long enough to let that threat escalate into reality, it was a win in his book. A beating was a fair price to pay.

******

Ever since entering the hospital, her subconscious was filled with mumbling. A voice that wasn't hers, but it wasn't Lilian's either. A shadow of her sister's voice, whispering endlessly without coherence or meaning. It had every intention of conveying a message, but it failed to do so. Instead, it conveyed emotions.

I'm lonely.

I'm sad.

I'm lost.

Sometimes, Nora wondered if Lilian was also able to "feel" her. Could she hear her thoughts? Could she tell if she was nearby? With no clear answers to be had, Nora clung to her own fabricated hypothesis. If her thoughts were somehow reaching Lilian, she had to make sure her mindset was as positive as possible.

'Hang in there, sweetie… Big sis is coming to get you. It's gonna be okay… It's gonna be okay…'

…

When she reached the location where the others had been piling up their supplies, she spotted a man sorting the items and doing inventory. She didn't even know his name, most of Stella's group were still strangers.

"Should I leave the bag here…?" she asked.

"Huh…? Oh, sure! Leave it there on the pile, I'll take care of it." he said.

Nora nodded and placed her backpack on the floor. She walked away from the pile, and out into the hallway.

They were somewhere in the hospital's basement. She'd have a bad time just remembering how to backtrack to the exit, that place was an intertwined web of twisting corridors. It was extremely dark, forcing them to rely on handheld light sources, like flashlights, lanterns or candles; but she was getting used to that kind of thing already.

She stood there, pondering what to do next, when she saw someone coming out of the shadows at the end of the corridor and approaching her.

"You don't look good. Still suffering from those headaches?" asked Stella, who carried a big duffel bag overflowing with tools and various materials.

"Ah, well… Yeah, a little bit. I'm getting better, though."

She kept saying that she was getting better, but it was a lie. The headaches weren't waning at all, they had simply been there for so long that she noticed them less and less as time went on.

Stella stared at her for a while without saying anything. Nora looked away from her, not sure how to react.

"Hey, this person you guys are trying to rescue… She's your little sister, right?"

"Eh…? Y-Yes…"

Stella took her eyes away from Nora, and instead looked around, at the people handling the supplies and wandering around the area.

"Look, I never had brothers or sisters, but I care about these folks with all my heart. I've survived with them for a long time, I've shared my life with them, I've put my safety in their hands so many times… To me, they are my family. And in the same way, to you, she's your family, right? I think I can understand you. I want to get the rest of my friends away from this place, but I won't be leaving anyone behind." she placed her hand on Nora's shoulder, and gave her a smile. "We'll get her back."

Nora felt conflicted. She was pretty sure Stella was helping them save Lilian because she could be the key to save everyone. The greater good, as always. But that wasn't the message Stella was delivering at the moment.

"Why do you… bother with me? We barely know each other…"

"…we've lost everything already, haven't we? Everything but our humanity. Empathy is one of the many things that make us human. If we lose all that, we've got nothing left. You can be damn sure I'll proudly live the rest of my days treasuring those values. I'd rather die a human than live like an animal. And that means we're on the same boat, strangers or not. Got it?"

"…thank you…" Nora's eyes got slightly wet, and her voice came out as a tiny whisper.

"Aw, come on! Lighten up! Right, the folks are waiting for me, we'll be setting something up to facilitate access to the upper floors. May I ask for an extra pair of hands?"

"S-Sure…!"

******

"Who are you…!? How dare you…!" shouted Julien.

He was fuming. The last thing he expected when retreating back to the tranquility of his personal room was to find someone else inside. He had closed the door and walked to his desk, without realizing a man was waiting patiently in a corner of the room.

The stranger stood between Julien and the exit. He wore a white tracksuit with red stripes, very worn and with holes on the knees and elbows. He looked like any other random survivor. But there was something unusual about his face. Strong features, various small scars and burn marks on his cheeks and jaw, and deep eyes filled with guile.

"Call me Donovan. You've done well so far." he said.

Julien got a chill down his spine.

"Don't tell me… You're…?"

"Yeah. We thought we'd get a bit more personal with you. It'll make communication easier."

'So, they've decided to show themselves… Has this man been in the building the whole time…? Maybe he did, I don't think I've paid attention to everyone. What could be the meaning of this…? Are they getting confident? Is this a sign of trust…? No, that's probably what they want me to believe…'

"W-What do you want?"

"They will be making their move soon. Sooner than you think."

'Who…!? The military…!?'

"You'll need all these people to truly be on your side when the time comes, but you don't have the means to do so… yet."

"S-So…? What's the plan…?"

Donovan looked at him for a while. He said nothing. His emotionless expression didn't change. Nothing happened for a bit, and it was driving Julien nuts. Then, he pulled something out of his pocket. A cellphone. He played a video on it, and showed it to Julien.

…

"W-What is this…!? How…!?"

"You'll find this video on a USB drive hidden in the supply room tomorrow, along with the necessary equipment to make use of it. We believe it'll serve you well."

"…"

"Be ready."

Without saying anything else, Donovan turned around and left the room. The sudden silence left Julien bewildered, shaking with nerves, and covered in cold sweat.

******

When he made sure he was in a secluded enough area of the hospital, away from curious eyes, he pulled out a small portable radio.

"[Donovan] speaking. The target took the bait."

…

"Yes, as gullible as predicted."

…

"Understood. I'll monitor his movements accordingly. He'll be more wary now that he knows we're on the building with him, but our presence might actually make him easier to push around."

…

"Yes. If the plain fails, we'll follow protocol as instructed. Over."