Sorry it took so long to update, it's been a busy week! Thanks for all the follows and favorites! And thank you for the reviews from casper6six6, onigri, KoNeKoLuvsU, and whoever the lovely guest reviewer was! Seeing so many people interested in the story really has been motivating me to find time to update!
It felt amazing finally waking up in a bed and for a few minutes, I just laid there. Maybe we could make things work living here, if Jenner let us. I didn't see how we were going to make it if we had to go back out there again. At least here we had some semblance of how things used to be.
"I've got eggs and pancakes cooking, come out and have breakfast!" I heard T-Dog's voice call out in the hallway.
My stomach let out a growl and I sat up, rubbing my eyes and stretching. Breakfast would definitely make this day even better. I kicked my legs over the side of the bed and dressed in a clean shirt. I only had two pairs of jeans and I had changed into the only clean pair I had after my shower last night.
I made my way down the hallway and spotted Carl dragging Lori by the hand. I smiled at his excitement but noticed that Rick was nowhere nearby.
The moment we hit the dining hall I could smell the eggs and pancakes cooking. My mouth watered and I followed Carl and Lori to a counter with clean plates.
"That food seriously smells amazing," I told T-Dog as he took his pan off the stove and began pouring eggs onto Carl's plate.
"Jenner even found some bacon," T-Dog told me with a big smile.
"Really?!" Carl exclaimed, his excitement no longer containable.
T-Dog smiled and gestured to a plate farther down the counter piled high with bacon. A large smile crossed the boy's face before he was racing towards the bacon and already tearing into a piece.
"You must have been up early if you've managed to make all of this already," I commented as T-Dog began scooping eggs onto my plate.
His smile faltered for a moment. "Couldn't really sleep."
I nodded my head but was surprised that he'd had trouble sleeping. It was the first time I had felt safe since I'd woken up to this whole mess, how was it that he didn't feel safe?
I grabbed a spot at the table, thanking Dale as he passed me some orange juice. I didn't waste much time before eating everything on my plate, and it wasn't much long after I'd finished my last piece of bacon before I spotted Daryl quietly making his way into the room. My eyes followed his movements around the room, but I wasn't entirely sure why. It wasn't until he'd filled his plate and taken a seat on an unused counter behind the table that his eyes met mine. The exchange only lasted a second before his attention was locked on his plate of food, eyeing his feet in between bites.
"Don't ever let me drink again," Glenn's exhausted voice called from the dining hall entrance. "I feel like death."
The table let out a laugh, which only caused Glenn to groan even more as he made his way to a chair beside me. He slumped into it and buried his head in his hands.
"I'm never drinking alcohol again," his voice said, muffled from under his hands.
I spotted a bottle of Ibuprofen on the table and passed it to him before pouring him a glass of orange juice. I directed him to take the pills and he did so, his face contorted in pain the entire time.
The table began filling up as everyone managed to wake up. Rick finally entered, not long after followed by Shane. Carl was teasing his dad about being hungover, and Lori remained oddly silent as Shane took a seat beside Glenn.
"The hell happened to you?" T-Dog asked Shane as he brought the pan of eggs over to the table. "Your neck, it's covered in scratches."
Everyone's heads shot up and turned towards Shane. There were three short scratches on his neck, and they looked red as if they were recent.
"Must have done it in my sleep," Shane answered, seeming completely uninterested.
The way Lori remained intent on her glass of orange juice hadn't been lost on me. Something must have happened between the two last night, but I knew it wasn't my place to say anything. I wondered if Rick had noticed, but when I looked at him, he was eyeing Shane's scratches just as curiously as everyone else.
"Never seen you do that before," Rick observed.
"Me neither," Shane said simply before digging into his food.
Jenner's entrance ended all discussion on Shane's scratches.
"Mornin'," he greeted everyone as he grabbed some food and took a spot at a table by himself.
I eyed him curiously as he did so, remembering he'd done that last night at dinner also. Figuring he just wasn't comfortable joining our group, I let it go. He seemed to be someone we could trust so far.
"Doctor, I don't mean to slam you first thing with questions," Dale spoke up suddenly.
"But you will anyway," Jenner answered, his voice sounding almost uninterested.
"We didn't come here for the eggs," Andrea added in.
Jenner eyed his cup of coffee before abruptly standing up. "Let me show you something," he said before leading us down a hallway.
The room he took us to I remembered from last night. Everyone filed in curiously behind the man as he brought the lights up in the room and began issuing orders to VI.
"Give me a playback of TS-19," Jenner told VI.
The big screen on the opposite wall suddenly came to life and began loading whatever TS-19 was. Suddenly the screen was covered in a few images of a brain.
"Few people ever got a chance to see this," Jenner told us. "Very few."
"Is that a brain?" Carl asked, taking a few steps closer and looking at the image on the screen.
"An extraordinary one," Jenner answered Carl with a smile. "Not that it matters in the end."
Jenner directed VI to enhance the internal view. A movement beside me caught my attention and I looked over to see Daryl standing a few feet away. His attention was focused solely on the screen though, and quickly I returned my gaze there as well.
The screen showed an up-close view of the inside of the brain we had just been looking at. I could see the lights flickering and assumed they were electrical impulses in the brain being monitored. It was Shane who had called out and asked what they were. Daryl beside me seemed interested as he viewed Jenner, waiting for an answer.
"It's a person's life," Jenner replied. "Experiences, memories—it's everything. Somewhere in all that organic wiring, in all those ripples of light is you. The thing that makes you…unique. And human."
Daryl crossed his arms. "You don't make sense, ever?"
"Those are synapses. Electric impulses in the brain that carry all the messages," Jenner explained. "They determine everything a person says, does, or thinks from the moment of birth…to the moment of death."
Jenner suddenly became quiet, watching the electrical impulses on the screen almost in awe as was the rest of the group. It was a moment before Rick spoke up.
"Death? Is that what this is? A vigil?"
"Yes," came Jenner's voice, quieter than it had been a minute ago. "Or rather the playback of the vigil."
"So, this person died?" I found myself asking Jenner. "Who?"
"Test Subject Nineteen," Jenner said, his voice taking on a strange tone. "Someone who was bitten and infected. They volunteered to have us record the process." His eyes met mine for a moment and I saw he was holding some emotion back. "VI scan forward to the first event." His gaze shifted back to the large screen.
The screen fast-forwarded to an image of the brain, with a mass of black at the base of it. No ripples of light were racing back and forth like before.
"What is that?" Glenn's voice called out.
"It invades the brain like meningitis," Jenner answered him. "The adrenal glands hemorrhage, the brain goes into shut down, then so do the major organs."
Slowly, the black seemed to spread throughout the brain until it had covered everywhere. The person stopped moving. Finally dead, I assumed.
"Then death," Jenner continued, confirming my thoughts. "Everything you ever were or would be—gone."
For a moment my mind flashed back to the conversation I'd had with Daryl last night at Jenner's words. I had already lost everything I was, but I hadn't lost who I would be, not yet anyway. I shifted my gaze to Daryl who was still staring at the screen, an unreadable expression on his face.
Andrea began crying and Jenner glanced over at her, a confused expression on his face.
"She just lost her sister," Lori told Jenner.
Jenner eyed Andrea a moment before speaking up. "I lost somebody too, I know how devastating it is," he told her. His attention turned back to the computer as he directed VI to scan ahead to the second event.
The screen fast-forwarded again and then stopped.
"The resurrection times vary wildly. We've had reports of it happening in as little as three minutes. The longest we'd heard of was eight hours," Jenner told us all. His voice became softer when he said, "In the case of this patient, it was two hours, one minute, seven seconds."
The screen showed a few red lights starting at the base of the blackened brain. The red light steadily growing a bit and shooting impulses on occasion towards different parts of the brain.
"It restarts the brain?" I asked dumbfounded.
"No, just the stem," Jenner answered. "Basically it gets them up and moving."
"But…they're not alive?" I asked him.
Jenner shot me a curious glance. "You tell me," he said, gesturing to the screen.
I watched as the impulses shot through the brain, but it happened less frequently. There weren't ripples of light constantly moving throughout the entire brain like it had been doing before.
"It's not like before," I said after a moment. "Most of that brain is dark."
"Dark, lifeless," Jenner agreed. "Dead. The frontal lobe, the neo cortex—the human part—that doesn't come back. The you part, that's gone. It's just a shell driven by mindless instinct."
Moments later on the screen I saw a gun appear. A bullet was quickly fired into the brain and the test subject immediately stopped moving. The little red lights at the base of the brain had disappeared.
"What was that?" Carol asked.
"He shot his patient in the head," Andrea answered her. "Didn't you?"
Jenner didn't answer and instead directed VI to power down the main computer and the work stations.
"You have no idea what it is, do you?" Andrea spoke up again.
"It could be microbial, viral, parasitic, fungal," Jenner answered.
"Or the wrath of God," Jacqui suddenly said.
"There is that," Jenner conceded.
"Somebody must know something," Andrea pressed. "Somebody, somewhere."
"There are other facilities, right?" Carol asked him.
"There may be some people like me," Jenner replied.
"How can you not know?" Rick spoke up, his voice stern.
Jenner sighed. "When everything happened, communications all went down. I've been in the dark for almost a month."
"So it's not just here," Andrea said, realization hitting her. "There's nothing left anywhere. Nothing. That's what you're really saying, right?"
Silence met Andrea's question and Jenner wouldn't look her in the eye. Whatever hope everyone had been holding on to, they appeared to be letting it go right now as realization began hitting them too.
The moment I had seen Atlanta, truth be told, I knew there was nothing left out there. How could there be? If a city like Atlanta had fallen, and here the CDC was, operated by one man for the last month, how could there be anything else anywhere else?
"Man I just want to get shitfaced drunk. Again," Daryl said beside me, the palms of his hands pressing into his eyes.
My eyes shifted to the clock in the corner of the room. The bright red numbers were now counting down from what looked to be an hour. I remembered seeing it the last time we'd been in the room last night and the number had been a lot higher. A sinking feeling hit me in my gut.
"Doctor Jenner," I spoke up, catching his attention.
The moment his eyes caught what I was looking at I swear I could see the man go pale. He wouldn't look me in the eyes as I continued, either.
"I noticed that clock last night. It's been counting down ever since then, hasn't it?" I asked the man.
Everyone glanced up and turned to look at the clock in question. Jenner remained silent.
"The number was a lot higher last night. It looks like it's counting down from an hour now," I continued. "What happens when it hits zero?"
All eyes in the room landed on the man who was now refusing to make any sort of eye contact.
"The basement generators run out of fuel," Jenner responded quickly.
My eyes narrowed at the man.
"And then?" Rick asked.
Jenner remained silent.
"VI what happens when the power runs out?" I found myself asking when Jenner didn't answer.
The automated female voice quickly responded. "When the power runs out, facility-wide decontamination will occur."
The way Jenner remained silent and kept refusing eye contact with everyone suddenly had my stomach in knots. Decontamination, whatever that was, could not be good. Not with the way Jenner was acting.