The Cure

Part 3: The real big surprise

 

Blinking slowly, Sam pushes herself up from the floor cautiously, hearing an alarm go off above her. She shakes her head and looks down at the hole torn into her suit on her leg, then she looks at the shattered sample disc against the wall. She uses the desk to pull herself into a standing position. She looks at the rest of the room, the red light above her blinking, she stretches and turns it off as the regular lights come back. 

Staring at the cages of rats, she can see that they had become more aggressive. Some have started to bang themselves against the glass sides of the cages, leaving a web of cracks. Sam shakes her head and walks over to them, she looks at the clock and sees that hours have passed since she was knocked out. She looks at the rats more closely and sees patches of their fur missing, a lack of pupil dilation and snot running from their nose.

Gasping, Sam runs out of the room and presses the B2 button on the inside of the elevator, ready to have a talk with Richard. She has yet to notice her cracked mask, the sample is in the air, and that whoever pulled the alarm is no longer alive. As the elevator opens on Richard's floor, on the floor is a couple drops of dark crimson blood. She walks into his lab and looks around, spying feet poking out from behind a shelf, she walks towards it. 

Sam sees that it is the now deceased Richard Pine. His eyes glazed over and dried blood on the underside of his nose and trailing down his mouth, a look of wonder on his face. Sam puts a hand up to her helmet and up clips it, throwing it off as she looks at the one person since her parents died that had treated her like an actual human being. She runs back to his fridge and takes his H4-WP serum and she walks past his unmoving body towards the elevator again, determined to check out the rest of the building.

"They're all dead." She cries as she sits in her chair in the lab. She had gone to every floor and into every room, no one made it out alive. The door had been open a crack but the chain link fence had still been closed, Nancy Carmilin, was out on the sidewalk. She sits up in her chair, "If they are dead, why am I here?" She looks around the room, at her newly dead rats and takes Richard's serum out of her coat pocket. She walks over to microscope and draws some of her own blood, dropping some onto the desk as she does so. She then puts a drop on a slide and puts the cover on it. Looking through the microscope she can see her white blood cells attacking the virus. She rubs her temples and laughs, "Why am I immune?" Looking again to make sure, and sure enough the virus was being attacked as fast as it could form. 

Sam looks down at herself, a few drops on Richard's blood on her sleeve. She reaches over her desk and grabs her office phone, flipping through pages of the handbook on her desk. Typing in the number for the emergency cleanup crew for the company, she looks at all the dismay around her. "You have reached the cleanup detail for Labrith Inc. What seem to be the problem?" a polite woman on the line says. In a shaky voice Sam replies, "They are all dead, the virus got out. Get someone over here. Hurry." With that she hangs up, knowing the were already tracking where the cal, was coming from. 

Pulling off her lab coat, but taking her card, Sam stands up and takes the elevator to the lobby. She walks past Rayleen, the secretary, and head into the employee break room. Laying on one of the cots in there she thinks of what life would have been like if Mr. Bondel hadn't infected her parents. She waits for the sound of boots outside the door, as a person with a hazmat suit opens the door, lighting up the room with a flashlight, she sits up. The person, who appears to be a guy, moves close to her, and asks her in a deep voice, "Ma'am, please come with us." Sam hands him her badge and pushes herself off the cot.