White Walls

Chapter 6:

Luke closed the door behind him with his back as he slumped towards it, trying to get his rapidly beating heart under control. He wiped his chin, only now noticing the dozens of oddly placed work stations, that were skewed across the room. To his right was a grey dividing wall, and Luke instantly inched his body to the left. What was this place?

He stood and inched over to the nearest gleaming workstation. On the computer screen that was perched innocently atop it, as though it were doing nothing wrong, was a picture of a human body, sprawled and constantly spinning at the same slow rate. Words appeared next to the body like the keyboard was typing of its own accord.

"The disease will take approximately 2-3 hours to spread through the subject's veins, before reaching its vital organs. No symptoms will be present up until this stage, at which point the subject's throat will close resulting in suffocation. The short time span ranging from infection to death will likely mean little to no time for treatment from the emergency services. It is unclear at this stage how the disease spreads from subject to subject and further investigation is required."

The words were accompanied by the spinning body, and what Luke could only see as a presentation of the disease itself spreading through the body. Luke swallowed, suddenly becoming aware of how tight his throat felt. He crept over to another computer and the same body was splayed across the screen, but the words described a different disease and symptoms and timeframe until death. And another. And another. And with every computer came a different disease. Was he in this facility to be given a disease?

The bang of doors on walls made Luke jump back and he knocked some sort of instrument on the floor, clattering with a loud crash. Luke dived down, using the desks as cover. He slithered to the wall with the door he had used and the large windows providing a portal into the corridor that led to quarantine.

A large, puffy yellow figure rushed the length of the corridor, approaching the window that Luke peered through. All Luke could see was the person's back. As he passed, he could see the man in the yellow uniform and a protective mask was pulling a bed, the other end of which was pushed by another in the same outfit. On the bed, however, was a man with burns covering one half of his face as his skin bubbled, and Luke heard that inhuman scream again, the razor-like scream and it came from the man on the bed who now jilted between the twitches and his attempts to escape the restraints that tied him to the bed. Eventually, as they neared that red blinking light, the man seemed to subdue as his eyes rolled to the back of his head.

Luke had read about a disease that caused burn-like marks on the 'subject's' face, and now he had just seen the real-life version.

Beyond the partition wall, an alarm sounded, jolting Luke out of his reverie. Luke scrambled back and punched his way through a door at the other end of the seemingly never-ending room.

He came to a staircase and headed up the metal steps. On the first flight, a small round window allowed Luke to peer through and see endless beds, all containing still bodies. The restraints on their hands and legs told Luke they were still alive and he saw one of the yellow-suited men again. This time they had syringes in his hand and he administered the needle to the patient's arm. He moved to the next bed and tampered with a machine he was connected to. The next bed along he placed a mask over the patient's nose and mouth. At each bed, he would type something into the computer, and then close curtains around their beds.

Luke realized. They were giving people different diseases. Infections that killed.