How Five wished she were just shopping for toys.

She passed by the toy store warily, heading toward the dark building attached to it.

"All right, Five," Dr. Myers sighed. "You listened to Paula's recording with me, so you know what we're doing here. Paula thinks she saw Patient 29—also called Patient 0, the first person to turn zombie—and we need to find that patient's files.

"You're aiming for a long building painted brown. Yeah, it looks like a warehouse attached to a toy store, but it's not. It's a disease research facility. The facility Paula mentioned, where she used to work. Head straight for it. If the door's not open, I've given you the code, which I should never have known."

Five was surprised to find that the facility still was securely locked. She entered the key code and tiptoed through the door. All was dark, save for the sporadic fluorescent lights still flickering in the hallway. Five had goose bumps just looking around the place; the sooner she found the files, the better.

"You deserve to know as much as I do, Runner Five," Dr. Myers continued. "Paula was working with this disease research facility, but she was also… she was working with Pandora Haze Technologies, that tech company. They didn't just make those cute kids' toys. They were doing some research… which sounded far out to me, then. Some stuff about massively increasing cell regeneration. But since everything happened, nothing sounds far out to me anymore.

"You'll have to be fast, Five. Zombies approaching from six o'clock. You're looking for the clinical trial patient records, Room 12-72. That's why they called it VS-72—because they were developing it there."

"All right," Five whispered back, passing through the various hallways. Her footsteps echoed painfully on the tiles as she searched. Rooms 12-36, 12-38, 12-40… They seemed to go on and on. Then:

12-72.

The door was locked. Five pulled violently at the door, but it refused to budge. She bit her lip, looking around for anything she could use—pliers, an axe, anything. She rummaged around in her backpack and found nothing but a spare metal baseball bat she had picked up on the way in. She only had one choice. Five winced, stationed herself on the ground, and swung hard at the glass window of the door.

With an ear-shattering clatter, the glass broke into a million pieces. Five jumped back and allowed the crinkle of the glass to die down before reaching carefully through the small window and unlocking the door from the inside. Her shoes crunched against the broken glass as she finally entered the room and turned on the lights.

The lab was of flawless stainless steel that had been cleaned of chemical spills and imperfections long ago. Old beakers and test tubes lined the shelves alongside a wall of technology Five could never hope to understand. One side of the room held a desk and multiple file cabinets.

Five crept over to one at random and began rifling through the papers, but nothing jumped out at her. The jumbled papers were sorted by category and labeled with complex chemical compounds. She frowned and opened another file cabinet, and then another. Nothing.

Finally, Five turned to the desk. A drawer on the side discreetly blended in with the rest of the metal, and when Five pulled, it was locked. Of course. After another round of smashing with the bat—five metallic clangs echoed through the facility—the lock broke free and Five pulled open the drawer.

There they were. VS-72—Clinical Trial Patient Files. Five nabbed them, hearing a loud clang from the end of the hallway and jumping just as Dr. Myers chimed back in with a warning: the zombies were breaking in.

Five looked down the hallway just to see that Dr. Myers was correct; the walkers were scratching and groaning against the door, and she could hear the cold scraping of the metal as they slowly broke their way inside.

With the files securely zipped inside her backpack, Five went in the opposite direction, hunting for the back door like Dr. Myers suggested. Thankfully, she found it without much trouble and sped out of the building just as the groaning's volume began increasing.

"Oh, thank God, I see you back on camera!" Dr. Myers breathed. "Keep going, you're fine. And if you have something from that facility now, I am more than grateful. They may not know it yet, but the world is more than grateful."

Five slowed to a steady jog, listening to Dr. Myers. The VS-72 files bounced steadily against her back.

"This is the deal, Runner Five. I know a lot that I was never supposed to. Pandora Haze Technologies was working with the government. It was a joint venture. They were looking for…" she shuddered as the gates lifted to grant Five entrance to Abel once more. "It was an investigation into the possibility of eternal life."