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“Tell me anything.” She sounded more adamant now.
Taking a deep breath, he leaned back on the couch, the food forgotten, and his appetite vanished. “The immunization, at its earliest stages, was a medical breakthrough. We saw properties of cell rejuvenation, documented cases in which the immunization, which originally was just for a new strain of the flu, was healing destroyed and mutated cells. That last part had been a fluke.
The subject in which this all came about had cancer, and we hadn’t known about it at the time. They were one of the subjects that volunteered to do a clinical study with us, and that’s when we noticed what was happening.”
She stayed silent, but her focus was solely on him.
“We studied what was happening, watching the miracle, the medical breakthrough, whatever you want to call it, and studied it, learned about it.”
“I don’t understand what happened. Didn’t you see the infection effects early on?”
He shook his head. “We were told by the higher ups to release the immunization after one or two years of study. We tried explaining it wasn’t ready, wasn’t fit for injection, but they wouldn’t listen. It wasn’t until it was out and with the public that we started to see things changing. The immunization properties were changing, mutating, and we couldn’t understand why.
It had been doing so well in the labs, was stable, and our tests subjects were fine. But, after the fact, the other scientist and myself came to the theory that possibly external elements had been a factor. We will never know, because too much time has passed and the world is destroyed.”
He thought about those clinical trials in which they’d been required to stay in a lockdown lab, the test subjects signing waivers, consent forms, and documentation that mandated them to stay in the facility as long as they were getting treatments.
“I’m so confused. How can you have people that had gotten the immunization years ago show no signs of infection, but once it’s released into the community, it changes?” She sounded so confused, and he fucking hated that.
“I don’t honestly have an answer. We couldn’t understand what was happening either. We were ordered to stay in an underground bunker and keep working on it, trying to find out what happened, and try to develop a cure.”
“And you didn’t find anything,” she said with a flat voice.
He shook his head. “I’m sorry. I’ve been wracking my head around all this. It’s just something that happened, and unfortunately it totally brought down a plague.”
She looked at him in the eyes but didn’t say anything for long moments. When she finally shifted on the seat, he expected condemnation from her, maybe disgust. He expected whatever she wanted to give, because he had already given it to himself.
“And you left the bunker? Why? I assume it was safe down there.”
That wasn’t what he’d been expecting. “I left because I would have died down there. It was nothing but a big coffin, with two of the scientists dead because they’d gotten the infection.” He left out that he’d been the one to kill them. “I knew I had to get out.” He rubbed his hands on his pants, his body tight. “I left a fellow scientist down there, but only because he didn’t want to face what was above ground.”
“He was smart.”
He chuckled humorlessly but nodded.
“I didn’t mean you weren’t—”
“I know what you meant, and there were times when I was on the road I thought about going back. But I couldn’t stay down there. We were running low on supplies, and dying so far underground, not being able to smell fresh air, feel the sun on my face, wasn’t something I wanted to do. If I was going to die, I was going to die trying to help fix the mess I helped create.”
“This isn’t your fault,” she said softly.
“It is, Maya.”
She smiled and shook her head. “This just escalated. It isn’t like you knew it would mutate like it did, that it would change people. You sent it out thinking it would help people, help cure cancer. How can you think you are to blame?”
He wasn’t going to argue this with her, because she was trying to make him feel better, trying to make him understand this wasn’t his fault. But it was, to a point, and he wouldn’t be swayed to think differently.
“What about your family? Did they survive all this?” she asked with tightness in her voice.
He looked at his hands in his lap. “When it all went down, I sent help for them, wanted them to come to the facility. It was the only safe place for them to be.” He let the silence hang between them for a few seconds. “But my parents were older, frail even. I got word days later that they found their bodies in their bedroom. They’d been attacked.” He scrubbed a hand over his eyes.
