How do people work here?
As her breathing slowed, she turned back to the room. Near the stairwell were a series of washing stations: sinks armed with seemingly endless antibacterial soap, a steel chute in the wall for dirtied lab coats, and bins still half-stuffed with plastic gloves. Past that was a decontamination room. The glass rectangle looked airtight and held a myriad of hoses.
The lab contained multiple sealed work areas. Each space had either windows or half-glass walls. Some areas were as simple as tables holding petri dishes. Others looked like miniature workshops. Some held machines Clare didn’t even have names for. Endless charts and whiteboards littered the area. The labs had been well-used before the stillness.
Tiny bronze plaques had been fastened into the work-area doors. They bore names and had been designed for easy removal to compensate for Aspect’s high turnover.
She read the names as she passed them. Near the front of the room, she found Michael Billings, the donor of her own ID card. His workspace held something that looked like an X-ray machine and not much else. A little farther beyond that was Peter’s station. Eye diagrams were stuck above the desk, and the whiteboard was covered with complex calculations scrawled in messy handwriting. There was very little dust, but the desk still held a sense of abandonment.
Clare’s heart beat faster as she moved deeper into the space. She knew eventually she would come across the name she dreaded, and needed, to see.
She found it at the back of the room. Dr. Ezra Katzenberg had one of the largest sections in the lab. The glass wall ran across nearly the entire rear of the room, and Clare could see more glass enclosures inside. She stared at his plaque for a second. The bronze name badge glittered in the harsh light. She lifted her ID and swiped it, just in case, but the lock didn’t respond. Then she noticed the usual red light was missing. Clare pushed on the handle and found, to her surprise, it had been left unlocked. The airtight door hissed as it unsealed and slid back to grant access.
Clare clamped a hand over her mouth and doubled over. The air was overwhelmingly foul. She leaned her forehead against the cool glass, taking tiny, sharp gasps between her fingers. Any time she moved, her stomach threatened to revolt. All she could do was hold still and endure.
I shouldn’t be here. This was a mistake.
She peeked stinging eyes open and tried to take stock of her surroundings. Ezra’s work area was divided into three sections. Her part, the observation area, was narrow but long. A desk had been set into one end, its dashboard looking like something out of a flight deck. A cheap swivel chair was tucked neatly into it. At the room’s other end lay a heap of discarded lab coats waiting to be taken out for cleaning.
The observation area ran the length of the two glass enclosures in the back wall. Eight feet square, they had frosting across the lower half of the glass, but Clare thought she could see a dark shape huddled in the corner of the area to her left. Ezra.
She swallowed the thick, metallic slime that had developed over her tongue and straightened. She’d come to see the orchestrator of humanity’s fall. She was too close to back out.
Clare approached the containment room, her hands shaking as they clutched her ID tag. The door had no access bar to swipe. She guessed it was operated by the machine on the desk to her left. The glass was blurred by greasy hand smudges, but she could still see inside well enough. She breathed through her mouth as she approached.
Ezra’s body lay in the back corner, huddled over. A thick, torn grey jacket obscured his form. He was smaller than she’d expected. A crushed fabric shape had been discarded nearby. Clare tilted her head, trying to make out Ezra’s form.
It trembled.
Clare’s mouth opened, but any noise she tried to make became trapped in her throat. Her mind went numb. Full of horror, she reached out and tapped her fingertips on the glass. The shape twisted, one blind eye staring at her, then lurched forward. Clare bit down on a shriek as it hit the barrier.
This isn’t Ezra. Open palms slapped the glass, and a wide jaw gnashed, spilling saliva across the divider. Wiry grey hair grew from its face, poking through holes in the cheeks and throat and matting in slimy clumps. One eye had been lost. The other was scratched into blindness.
Clare curled her arms around herself and took a step back. Her attention flicked towards the discarded shape in the containment room’s corner, and she realised it was a damaged hat with a pink fabric flower. Peter’s words came back to her. “His neighbour… wearing her best coat and hat, waiting patiently.”
“Oh,” Clare whispered. The woman in the containment room was patient zero. Clare hadn’t even considered that she might still be alive.
The woman slapped her fist on the glass, adding to the layers of grease she’d built up and exhaled a rattling hiss through her choked throat.
Clare turned away. The observation room smelt foul, but it wasn’t the kind of stench she’d learned to associate with the hollows. This odour was sour and yet sickly sweet, a unique tang that seemed perfectly designed to make her gag. Rotting flesh. But not the hollow. That means…
Her eyes landed on the pile of lab coats in the room’s other side. They were shaped oddly. She took a step closer then stopped. The toes of a sneaker poked out from under the cloth.
Clare tilted her head back, her heart thundering, her stomach in knots. Her legs didn’t want to move, but she forced them forward, towards the shape. The smell grew impossibly worse as she neared it. She reached towards the coat Peter
