Page 152 of My Undead Love Life

“Dr. Sofia Vale, technically.” She started walking, not bothering to wait for us. “But titles became less useful after the institutions attached to them collapsed. Sofia is fine.”

Keith’s head snapped toward her. “You’re a doctor?”

“Several things. Doctor is one of them.”

Luck leaned toward Oxi and whispered, “That sounds like something a villain says.”

Sofia called back, “I heard that.”

Oxi whispered, “That also sounds like something a villain says.”

“I heard that, too.”

We hurried to catch up with her.

The hallway beyond the decontamination chamber curved gently, the metal walls giving way to a wider corridor lined with sealed doors. Some had keypads, and others had thick viewing windows. One room held shelves of supplies arranged in labeled bins. Another had what looked like water filtration equipment behind glass. The pipes and tanks hummed softly.

The bunker opened up into something massive. The corridor ended in a broad central space, and I stopped dead in my tracks. It was a lab.

Rows of metal workstations stretched across polished floors. Screens glowed with data. Samples sat locked behind glass-fronted refrigerators. Tubes ran through machines I couldn’t name. Microscopes. Locked cabinets. Whiteboards covered in equations, diagrams, and frantic handwriting.

Notes were everywhere. There were sticky notes all over the walls, and clipboards hanging from hooks in multiple spots. Colored string connected printed maps to photographs and handwritten labels.

Some of the screens showed maps of the city and surrounding areas. Red dots clustered in certain places. Blue lines marked routes. Yellow circles pulsed slowly around areas I didn’t recognize. Another screen showed images of infected tissue magnified. It was terrifying.

“Holy shit,” Keith murmured beside me. “This is…this is incredible.” Sofia lit up instantly.

“Oh, you’re interested.” She zeroed in on him. “Good. Finally, a survivor with a brain. Usually when I help others, they couldn’t care less about science.”

Mad’s expression tightened. “Most people are in survival mode. They can’t think of anything except how to stay alive. You’re incredibly lucky to have this.”

Sofia’s smile softened a fraction. “That’s true,” she said. “And I know that. I do. But it’s nice to chat with people who care. Or at least people who can understand more than ‘food, guns, sleep, and don’t die.’”

Luck lifted a hand. “In our defense, those are very compelling categories.”

“They’re important categories,” Sofia agreed. “Just not the only ones.”

Keith stepped closer to one of the screens, careful not to touch anything. “Is that a mutation map?”

Sofia’s face brightened further. “Yes.”

“What do these maps show?”

“Primary outbreak strain, secondary environmental adaptation clusters, anomalous behavioral variants, and suspected evolution sites.”

Luck blinked. “I understood approximately four of those words.”

Oxi leaned toward him. “The world is fucked, basically.”

“Thank you.”

I stared at the maps and at the images on the screen. “Do you know what caused everything to get worse?”

Sofia turned to me, and for the first time, the cheerfulness thinned enough for me to see the exhaustion underneath it.

“I’m working on it,” she said. Her hand moved in a broad gesture that encompassed everything.

“The virus. The mutations. The behavioral deviations. Why some infected rot fast and others retain muscle integrity. Why certain hordes become more coordinated over time. Why animal hosts are deviating more dramatically than human hosts.” Her eyes sharpened. “You’ve seen that, I’m sure.”