T-13 hours 24 minutes
Location: Top Secret lab facilities, Tennessee
Dark circles, trembling hands, and a glossed over stare; all clearly indicating that Sherrie had worked past her scheduled double. She prodded at and lifted the sagging skin beneath her eyes, squinting in the bathroom's mirror; the spark of electric lights hanging overhead on thin wires not doing anything to help her already sallow reflection. The subtle apples she'd brushed onto her cheeks the morning before (or was it the morning before that?) now made her look fevered and flushed; and the tight bun she'd pulled her hair into fell in tired, salt-and-peppered tendrils around her face and neck.
Sherrie's final assessment was that she needed a long soak in a hot bath, and at least a week's worth of sleep. She'd never fulfill her own prescription, she was far too busy for that, but it was a pleasant dream none the less.
"Doctor?" The timid head that followed the voice through the cracked bathroom door belonged to one of Sherrie's young lab assistants. She was pretty and fresh, with a friendly freckled face; and Sherrie couldn't fathom why the girl would ever want to work where the hours were murder and the suicide rates among its chemists was at an all time high.
Tried, glossy eyes met the vivid blue one's of the girl in the mirror as Sherrie cocked a sleepy eyebrow; a cue that the shy girl understood.
"I'm going to head home for the night," She really was too sweet for this place.
"Night?" Sherrie's tongue was thick as she looked at the watch on her wrist, the hands under scuffed glass indicated the ungodly hour as she scrubbed her knuckles briefly over her itchy eyes, "Yeah, yeah go ahead. I'll straighten up and lock the lab for the night."
The girl cast a grateful smile at Sherrie's reflection before she disappeared; leaving the over-worked doctor, who was clumsily fishing for her keys, alone.
T-5 hours 09 minutes
Location: Upper East Tennessee, Holston Valley Medical Center, ER
More flickering electric lights. Sherrie watched drowsily as they raced past her vision, bright and blinding and erratic enough to give an epileptic a seizure. They made Sherrie squint against their glare, and she tried to shield her face against the harsh illumination with a hand lifted above her face.
The sight, shocking and horrifying, curdled a scream in Sherrie's throat; escaping only as a strange, gurgled groan. The flashing lights and pure shock sent her vision out of focus before returning with a painful sharpness that made her eyes sting with a watery, grey mucus that clung to her lashes and clotted thickly on her cheeks and around her nostrils where the grey matter flowed freely down her face.
Sherrie tried to choke down the foul mucus as she stared at her trembling hand. In the center of her palm was a deep, festering gash where the flesh hung away loosely; blackened and riddled with rot that numbed the nerve endings it infected. Her fingers were curled into a harsh claw; the skin cold, waxy and tight. Her once manicured nails were yellowed and brittle, caked in the stink of decomposition and the black infection that oozed from her opened flesh.
A grey tone had come over Sherrie's forearm and spread over her elbow, the deadened flesh pocked with black pustules where infection boiled below the surface and spread further through her nervous system.
"Sir, more secretions from her ears and other orifices," The unfamiliar voice pulled Sherrie's attention away from her horribly disfigured hand, and she squinted against the light only to catch the silhouette of the muffled speaker. She felt a none-too-gentle wipe at her ears and face, the clotted grey mucus that had congealed to her flesh came away painfully; raw and stinging patches left in its wake. Sherrie tried to struggle against the wipe, turning her face this was and that, and failed in her mission.
