Sunday, November 2, 2008

Droubble: Control

Control

The next room doesn’t look much better. The remains of its occupants are barely recognizable as formerly human; gore plasters every wall of the room, little clean shadows behind each piece of furniture.

I dispatch orders to quarantine the building – there’s no way of knowing how virulent the strain was, but even if it hadn’t been modified for greater airborne spore survivability, the blood at least was a high infection risk.

And these guys had obviously been messing around with one of the nastier strains. By and large, the plague’s been contined, controlled with a simple program of injections at first signs. But that doesn’t stop criminal gangs or fringe agitators from seeing benefit in the creation and control of a new strain, some way of accellerating the disease’s progression. Not terribly smart, and these guys were espescially foolish. Their set-up was lously: Less like a lab and more like someone’s kitchen, and not a clean one at that.

A fly alights on my mask. As I reach up to brush it away the cloth of my environment suit catches on the corner of the table.

I freeze.

I already feel my skin prickling. This is a nasty strain.

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