Bringing the strangers her home wasn’t the smartest idea she had come up with in the past five years, and knowing this, she took precautions. Sydney Peters had them set all of their weapons down in a bucket by the front door which she promptly put a lid on and lifted to take with her. She had them sit in her living room, on the old gray plaid couch she had recently called her bed. Paul, her ten year old beagle, ran through the house and jumped onto the couch next to the woman who had pulled the gun on her. The lady scoffed and pushed the dog to the side. She already didn’t seem happy, taking her weapon hadn’t helped. “Are any of you hungry?”
“Oh god yes,” The young man said.
She curtly nodded and left for the kitchen.
How much had they heard her say? Did they know she barely had any food left? Did they know of all the times she had planned to just walk out in the street and just forsake all the work she had been doing for the past five years? Probably not the latter. She herself still hadn’t counted all the times.
Opening up the cupboard she pulled out the bowl of apples she had been hiding there for a week. They had bruises and were only a couple of days away of going rotten, but they, besides the can of Chef Boyardee in the locked fridge, were the only food within the home. She took the bowl back to the living room and set it down on the coffee table. The boy dove in, taking an apple for himself and tossing one to each of his cohorts. They ate them greedily. Her eyes did not leave the group while they munched down on the fruit, and her mind did not let her forget the last time she had let someone in her home.
Five hundred and seventeen days before their arrival. A woman and her young son, barely out of diapers by the look of it, had taken shelter in one of the upstairs bedrooms. The mother had tried to kill her for food and the boy had tried to kill Paul. Their bodies were still out back in the burn pile, just waiting for her to come sweep up the ashes.
If this group of four decided to revolt against her, even without their weapons, she’d have no chance. Sydney Peters decided that she was okay with that. Maybe it was just her time – as cheesy as that sounded. “Hello?”
Blinking, she lifted her head, suddenly aware that she had been staring at her feet for the past couple of minutes. “Yes? Sorry, I was just thinking.”
“That’s okay.” It was the older man. “I figured we’d just introduce ourselves. We’re kind of at an advantage here, knowing your name and all.” She ‘oh’ed. “I’m Val.” And one by one, they said their names. Val seemed satisfied at that. “Is this your home?” He asked, looking around.
“Not exactly… Where did you all come from?”
“We were in a Safe Zone down in Orleans. But…happenings caused us all to leave.”
Sydney leaned back in her chair and patted her lap. Paul understood and jumped off the couch, then bounded to her, his front paws resting on her legs. She scratched behind his ears and his tongue fell out onto her leg. How blissful it must be to be a dog in a world like theirs. “I found this place a while ago. Abandoned. But it served its purpose.”
Beck leaned forward to rest her elbows on her knees. Her hands folded together with ease. Sydney figured that this Beck woman and she wouldn’t get along very well. “And what exactly was its purpose?” The words were like poison as they dribbled from her lips. Sydney found herself involuntarily scrunching up her nose in disgust. It had been quite some time since she’d spoken with another sane human and she had forgotten just how bitchy some of them could be. Stooping to Beck’s level however, wouldn’t get them anywhere. So she started from the top.
“I got my doctorate in biology a couple of years before everything went down and I was using it to study the progression of viral resistance to antibiotics at MIT.” Beck tried to cut her off, but Sydney held up her hand to shush her. “I found that penicillin was obsolete, as well as ampicillin and most of the other antibiotics we have been relying on for more than a hundred years. Viruses were just too…smart. They adapt too quickly for us and find new way to avoid old problems. A month before this all happened,” She gestured around her. “A new sample from Cambridge was delivered to us. It was from a cadaver they had been examining; it was showing strange signs of reanimation. The hair continued to grow, nails as well, even the eyes showed signs that the brain was still active. The dead man’s name was Martin, a mortuary assistant in London. He had been attacked and two of his fingers had been bitten off. His final cause of death was suffocation. But the thing that ate his fingers? That was patient zero – a housewife named Deloris Maycom. And if you remember anything from the news before the televisions were shut off, that’s what they were calling the outbreak. Virus Deloris.
“We peeled off his skin and began doing some experiments, including the basics – letting the flesh rest on the agar gel – it’s like a sturdy gelatin substance that allows for bacteria to grow – and after a week we began testing different antibiotics’ effect on the flesh. None of them did anything. In fact,” She stood and headed for the bookcase behind her, her fingers skimming across the spines of the notebooks within the shelving. Removing a red spiral, she sat back down. “If I remember correctly, they actually helped the virus grow.” She flipped open to a page and turned the notebook around so they could look at it. A drawing of what looked like some bacteria in a circle was at the top of the page and below it, under the words ‘five hours later’ was another drawing, but this time the bacteria looked like it was about to burst out of the circle. “It was remarkable. We thought that maybe it was just a stomach bug though, and filed it as so.
“We were wrong. The virus within the petri dish actually grew out of the petri dish over the weekend…one of the lab assistants contracted it and…well you can imagine what happens next. A little negligence and the next plague is started.” She closed the notebook and set it down next to her. “Now, the reason why I commandeering this house in particular was because it belonged to a cook. And where there is a chef there is science. I uh…I used this as my base. I still have a few samples, and there’s always a plethora of subjects willing to be tested just outside my door, and I just…I can’t stop. There has to be a cure. I know there is. Cancer was never cured, but it was treatable and you could live with it for most cases…so there’s hope for this. I think.” She scratched her eyelid. “I know that I’m responsible for this in my own right, and I know that in all actuality my life should’ve been taken a long time ago, but it wasn’t. And I’m still alive now. So I won’t waste this time given to me on doing nothing. I’m going to find this cure so help me God.”
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