THINK ABOUT LIVING | Daryl Dixon

007 | An Autopsy On The Living

━━━━━━ CHAPTER SEVEN ━━━━━━
An Autopsy On The Living
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          SOME HUMANS SURVIVED AND ENDURED one year into the end of times, but humanity... humanity ended mere weeks after this virus started spreading.

Mallory witnessed that deplorable end to a glorious existence that had lasted thousands of years, that democratic farce that tied the noose and pushed humanity off its pedestal, and though her best attempts were focused on staying present in the moment, in that long infirmary room where the dead roamed aimlessly like headless chicken trapped in a film placed on slow motion, the blood loss was starting to take away from her precious consciousness, string her closer to yet another death she'd have to add to her long-abandoned count.

How many times? Daryl had asked her and she almost wished she had corrected his question into a better one. How many times have they killed me?

With such matters on her mind, of course she was bound to recall the day she knew it was truly the end of everything: the makeshift trial day.

It would have been a month since she escaped the county hospital, a month since the outbreak tore into the world like the teeth of a rabid dog into unfortunate flesh and it hasn't exactly been a quiet month, though she was supposed to feel thankful to have a bed in a fortified outpost like TRIUM, a military project that if she ever heard about, she probably dismissed completely. 'Temporary Refuge Institution for Urban Maintaining', a bunker-type construction available in the first days, the days that truly mattered, only to those rich enough to have known the right names and phone numbers.

Dr. Densmore, the woman who led Mallory's aortic surgery after her car accident, helped her get there. She even walked her through the dubious results of her surgery too, not long after they arrived and settled in. She explaining why helping had less to do with her and more to do with the fate of the world. Back then, Mallory had consented to giving her and the rest of the prominent doctors and scientists who have been granted access to TRIUM samples every once in a while.

Who would have done differently when told something inside of them might save people from a carnage she too had witnessed and was fresh on the attempt to forget?

But blood samples, scans, they didn't do the trick. The once kind Dr. Densmore was visibly discouraged by the amount of failures piling up against her lead on a cure for Wildfire, the virus that only kept on spreading while they hid.

Around that time, she stopped updating Mallory on it. On any of it.

Then, out of the blue, she made a call. Coming out with a plan that put on hold every single ethical rule to her occupation, Densmore announced in the cafeteria, for all the people the TRIUM outpost had taken in over the past month that there was a scientific discovery living amongst them — it was the first time Mallory was seen as less than human and to this day, the scar left on her mind by that hollowed sensation haunted her decisions, shadowing them behind a veil of worthlessness —, someone immune to the virus whose probing might return humanity to its glory days.

"However," Densmore voice came through the speakers over the cafeteria. Mallory recalled the pain in her right palm as she tightened her fist on her spoon hearing the message, looking into her deformed and stained reflection on the surface of the cutlery. She was aware everyone around her was looking in the crowd, searching for who might be the immune. "The testing that is required to understand how immunity can be replicated for everyone may turn out to be fatal to..."

Her hearing ability took a break. Ringing took free reign over her ears and before Mallory could stop herself she regurgitated her last good meal, the last one she'd be graced with for a while. Dazed, she woke up on the ground, fallen off the bench, people staring at her.