Welcome to Zarth

Exclusive #4 - "The Original Origin Draft 2"

This is the subsitute origin story of the virus in the second draft of Tooth and Nail, in which the friends have broken into a science lab in the HPB, finding the door Maryssa assumed would be open to actually be unlocked.

Connor sat down Zack in a barstool next to the largest sink, one with an emergency eye wash and water fountain, incase the inevitable rotten cherry flavor was too much for Zach on an empty stomach, then began a slow walk around the lab along the countertop, looking at rows and rows and rows of labeled tubes sitting on further labeled stacks of manilla folders with poor handwriting and signatures on the edges. Finally, about halfway around the room, he found a short test tube stand with a line of five glass tubes in it. Two still had a green-clear liquid in them. The folder below was labeled Rat Hack Remedy.
Connor chuckled and looked around the room for a cage with the rat in question whose Cold and Flu Syrup he had found. And there, across the room, was a wall of clear plastic lockers, five of them, each with a little black face looking through the door, and five little pink noses touched the barrier between their box and falling four and a half feet to the ground below their cages.
On the wall was a clipboard. Connor saw this, snagged one of the two full tubes, and walked across the lab, weaving around black top tables to the wall where the information he needed was hanging, waiting. He took the board from the wall and lifted the black cover sheet.
Page one was a diagram showing the names of the rats in each cage and their medical information. Size. Weight. Allergies. Rats have allergies? Also listed was "fatalities", and this was by far the most interesting thing on the page.
Connor turned the biography sheet over to look at page two. It was pictures. Stacks of frail little bones in the corner of a wire pet cage, surrounded by fur balls and small round rat feces.
He turned the page again. An essay.
Here you see five rats. This is not inhumane captivity and they are not pets. These rats were taken from the scene in the second floor Allergic Reaction Examination lab, directly below our own Experimental Pharmaceuticals lab. One morning, upon entering the HPB here at Texas State, I discovered the hallways quite crowded by men in Hazmat suits carrying cages with rats in them. Three or four to a cage, a cage in each hand, and many men with two hands each. I asked what was going on to one of the students standing by, watching terrified as what seemed to me an entire city's population of rats was removed from the building. She told me that one of the drugs being tested on them had gone horribly wrong, and it was causing them to want to eat eachother. I looked around, suddenly sensing opportunity. I found Professor McMahan and asked her simply if it would be alright to have a couple of the rats and attempt to cure them with the materials we have upstairs. She shrugged and told me it was probably useless. I told her I had nothing else to work on. She shrugged again, and reached out a hand to stop one of the men carrying two more cages out. She told him to follow me upstairs to my lab and let me keep the rats. I thanked her, and led the gentlemen up the stairs and into my lab. I began work immediately. I called down to the lab where they had come from. Jacqueline Grey, a sophomore working in that lab, told me she could bring me a sample of the medication they had taken and attempt to counteract it. It took three weeks before I had formulated the liquid I thought could cure them. On two of the five rats, it completely did what I thought. On the other three, symptoms of cannibalism increased drastically. I will continue to look for a cure for subjects three through five and contribute treatment on One and Two until bloodthirsty tendencies such as gnawing the plastic door frames and nibbling their own tails disappear completely.
He inhaled sharply. There were zombie rats in these lockers?! And he was holdng the cure?! This was no hack, as in cough. This was genetic and mental hacking. Connor laughed and nodded, then whispered loud enough to be heard across the tile room, "I got it!"
Maryssa and Nicole gave him a thumbs up, then Nicole reached for something she had set down. A bottle of blue Gatorade. No, a Gatorade bottle with something else blue in it. Connor walked to them and she said it was melted Icee from lunch. Connor unscrewed the orange lid from the hard plastic bottle and set it down on the cold black lab table beside him. Maryssa pulled a scarf off her neck and said she would go blindfold Zack. Connor held up the test tube and told Nicole that they were going to make Zack drink the zombie cure. She laughed and asked what he meant. He explained while attempting to pull the cork stopper from the mouth of the bottle. Unsuccessful, he handed the bottle to Nicole, who easily pried the cork out, and gave the tube back to Connor. He snorted at her, making her giggle proudly, and he carefully poured the vile's contents into her Icee remnants.

The three who retained their vision tiptoed the few feet it was to Zack, who sat squirming impatiently in his seat, turning left and right on the smooth surface. "Guys?"
Nicole snickered. "Ready, Z?"
He tilted his head side to side, deciding whether or not he was okay with drinking something from a science lab. "As I'll ever be." Connor handed Zack the bottle, and he swiftly took a head-tilted-back deep swig, then spat out atleast three-fourths of what he'd dumped into his mouth. "Jeez, Connor! That's disgusting!" They all laughed and Zack took off the scarf, tossing it at Maryssa. "What the hell, guys?!"
Connor wiped a tear from his eye and tried to calm his laughter. "It's zombie cure juice."
Zack raised an eyebrow and continued to choke on his jeers and struggled to breathe calmly through the fun of it. "Zombie cure?" He scoffed. "You're kidding, right?"
"Nope!" Connor's raised an arm and pointed to the cages on the adjacent wall. "Those over there are recovering zombie rats. They've been drinking this stuff to cure them of some cannibalism disease."
Everyone snorted and chuckled more for a few moments before they all came down to just tired breathing. "Okay." Nicole said. "Let's get outta here and get some sleep, yeah?"
"Yeah." Her three friends nodded back and they began their walk out of the lab to the door. Connor stopped and his tennis shoe rubber on the floor made the squeak sound universally recognized as "Crap, hold on a sec."
He jogged quietly back across the room and put the testtube back into the rack on the Rat Hack Remedy file stack, then rejoined his friends in the door frame. Maryssa pulled the door shut behind them and listened for the locking click that would tell them that they had entered and exited unnoticed.
Four hours later, Professor John Spooner would enter the lab, crossing to his work station at the countertop beside one of his student's areas, look over into said student's workspace, and see that the fatal medication sample from the lab below was no longer in it's testtube in the wooden rack on top of the cure case files.
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