Contagion: Genesis Vector

Contagion: Genesis Vector



Jasmine Taylor walked out of the quarantined room, blood dripping down the arm of her lab coat and staining the pristine white into a light maroon. Her assistant wasn’t far behind her but before he could reach the doors to the room, they shut and the young man was trapped inside.

         Jasmine looked in at him, young only on the third day of work and he had forgotten the primary rule which everyone was told before they were allowed to begin work with the infected, You are to NEVER allow their blood to enter any part of your body, through cuts, scratches, open mouth, nasal…anything. Apparently though the young man hadn’t thought that the procedure needed to inject an infected person wouldn’t require keeping his mask on for part of the operation. Only two drops of blood had somehow gotten into his mouth, probably a result of when the infected’s intestinal tract had ruptured, but two was enough to change him. The look on his face almost broke her down, his terror and confusion; he looked like an animal that had been caged without its knowledge.

         She had never learned his name, didn’t felt the need to, in his few days of work he hadn’t seemed like someone who would be truly cut out for what they had to do, so few people were, but those who came in tried and if they were lucky they would live to leave the job in the first week before they found out just what it was they were up against.

         The tears streaming down his face showed he knew what was coming now. She had seen it multiple times over and still couldn’t harden herself to stop from thinking “If we had just been a few days quicker, smarter, if they had found a cure before he had joined.” the first gunshot interrupted her thoughts, when she opened her eyes she saw the next bullet put a stop to his. Jasmine slowly and carefully took off her jacket and placed it the hallway incinerator.

         She walked through to her office and opened the door, light shone onto the cold stone floor and she looked out of the high barred window, past the barbed fence, at the city. When she had first come to work, stationed by the government at a prison turned hospital, she had imagined that the life would be rewarding.

         If in no other way than by the knowledge that she was saving the lives of people, and to an extent saving the world, from one of the most deadly viruses in mankind’s history. Nowadays she had come to the understanding that all she had really signed up for was constant exhaustion, and a morbid gag reel of fatalities.

          The city itself seemed an entirely different domain, on days when the weather was fair it throbbed with life people happy and cavorting throughout the storefronts and streets. Even with the knowledge that there was a virus of epic proportions rampaging across the globe, this was a haven, a place where the virus had yet wrought its horror upon the people, and fear of it striking anyone down was almost non-existent to the people here.

         Jasmine sighed, she supposed that she should be happy to even view the scenes that the city people caused, but the knowledge that she had about what transpired inside the makeshift hospital was enough to tear away anyone’s good mood. A slight sound of knuckles rapping at her doorway made her turn and cut away from her thoughts. Edwin Hearst stood with a small clipboard in his hand, “these are the test results from today’s experimental procedure, I just need you to sign the forms and I can be on my way.”

         The slightly elderly man handed her the clipboard and watched as she quickly scribbled down her signature onto the forms. As she gave him back the documents he took the clipboard, and began to turn away, before he was too far down the hallway he yelled out “better luck with your new partner tomorrow.”

         She turned, suppressing a small laugh, some people would probably think she was a horrible person, but in these times laughing was the best antidote when something was said. She took a shower and then went to lie in the small bed that her room could house, picking up a novel she had been trying to finish recently.

         Halfway through her fourth page of the night, she felt tears burning at the edges of her eyes and thought that she might finally brake down. The memory of the young man earlier and the leagues of others like him across the globe trying to stop the virus, and failing at the cost of their lives was overwhelming, but the tears never fell.

         She knew there was no reason to cry over the dead, especially when there were so many of them, and though they weren’t fighting against other people, essentially this was a war and letting your emotions get in the way during war only acted as fuel for more casualties.