Journey to the End

Three Weeks Ago

Grand Isle, Vermont, USA
Croft University
Natural Sciences Department
Laboratory 6-194
04:29 AM

"Shit-"

Lily knocks over the wooden stand of test tubes and watches in horror as her work shatters before her tired eyes. 

"Shit... shit shit shit shit!"

Yanking out from a tissue box she replaced with biohazard waste bags, she hastily tosses the glass shards into a slip, recklessly not prioritising the thought of wearing protective material over her youthful hands but dreading how she'd need to convince her grumpy, inflexible professor for an extension on the assignment - which history has shown before to be impossible with that man, even with valid reason.

God help anyone who lands a class with him.

Holographic digits emerge from her wristwatch accompanied by a loud beeping, the blue screen bright in the shade provided below her desk, a big '4:30 AM' making her swear once more - it was the time she was supposed to wake up. The unpleasant realisation that she pulled an all-nighter brought consciousness to her shrunken eyes. Procrastination has been creeping over Lily's shoulder her whole life and has struck once again. 

Better to have slept now that those hours awake were meaningless.

Three knocks sound from the door and in came a familiar face under several pink hair curlers hanging off his head. 

Gene Rosenstein, Croft University's star pupil and undergraduate, second best being Lily. The two geniuses were more alike than they'd care to admit, both attended Midtown Highschool as prepubescents and graduated in their early teens, just in different years that they've never met. Having perfect grades and shiny records with full marks on their SAT, they gained easy acceptance into all their top choices for universities in the US and UK, including Harvard, Oxford, Cambridge, Stanford, Imperial and MIT.

"Procrastinating again, are we?" He closes the door quietly behind him.

"You're up early," She greets him casually as if she didn't just blow 40 per cent of her grade by knocking over 6 different chemicals for a project.

He blinks at the catastrophe laying in front of the ever-grinning Lily. "Didn't sleep." He made his way across the laboratory and kneels to the mess, picking up more fragments of glass. "Nobody is, we're all awake in the boys' dormitories, heard it's the same in girls'. Everyone's just watching the news." 

Lily takes a cloth and soaks it in the sink. "Have you heard from your family lately?" 

"Yeah, Ruth and my mum," He disposes of the bag. "But not dad, apparently he hasn't been home since yesterday noon. Yours?"

"Haven't contacted them yet." 

"You should," He advised, repositioning from kneeling to sitting down. "The spread is wild, many people get infected within seconds."

She nods, walking back to the mess with a soaked cloth to wipe up the chemicals. "What's been on the news?"

"The Avengers." He sighs defeatedly. "Most are infected and chewing on human flesh in San Francisco as we speak."

Lily hangs her head. She knew the world's mightiest heroes were the only ones who had some advantage over extraterrestrial threats, but she'd never imagined they could fall victim to a disease that originated from the very atoms of Earth. It reminded her of how they managed to defeat Loki and his army of aliens but fell apart to a single man of no special ability.

"But hopefully we stop the virus. Croft's research facility in South Hero has been carrying out experiments non-stop for the past 20 hours, same for every other elite university and research lab in the US."