"Death is not the end. For some, it is merely the loosening of threads—until they weave again, in stranger patterns."
The hum of fluorescent lights was a ceaseless drone in the Apex Biohazard Institute's Sub-Level Four laboratory. It was the sound of electricity on the edge of failure, the buzz of dying circuits straining to hold against the entropy creeping into every corner of the facility.
Outside these walls, the world was already burning.
Within, a man fought a war he had already lost.
Xiang Zainan, thirty-four, sat hunched at his desk, surrounded by a graveyard of notes, shattered coffee cups, and discarded medical gloves. The screens surrounding him flashed with data streams and biometrics—half of them blinking red in warning. It had been three days since he last left the lab. Maybe four. He no longer counted by hours but by how many times he coughed blood into his hand.
A hacking rasp seized his chest again. He lurched forward, crimson spraying across the white sleeve of his coat. He stared at it for a long second, breath shallow, before sighing through clenched teeth and wiping it on the inside hem. One more stain among many.
"Dammit…" he muttered, his voice dry and fraying.
He turned back to the microscope, eyes red and ringed with exhaustion, and adjusted the fine focus knob with practiced precision. The microscopic world greeted him again—tiny structures moving with frenetic purpose. Bacteria, viruses, cell clusters—and at the center, something… new. Something wrong.
A synthetic chimera of RNA and madness. Something designed.
And it was winning.
Red Wake. That was what the news had called it in the early days. A catchy name for the apocalypse.
Zainan hadn't named it. He didn't name things that killed people.
He leaned back in his chair and pulled up a holo-window, reviewing the latest cellular interaction simulations. The counteragent sequence—the one he'd been refining for months now—was still unstable. The last batch had catalyzed an autoimmune response so severe it liquefied neural tissue in seconds.
A failure.
Like all the others.
He closed his eyes for a long moment, fingers pinching the bridge of his nose. A headache pulsed behind his eyes like a second heartbeat. It didn't matter. Nothing mattered, except the next step, the next test, the next chance to fix the mess he hadn't made—but had become responsible for all the same.
You were supposed to stop it.
The thought wormed into him like a parasite. He had heard it so many times—on screens, on the news, in his own mind—that it had become a litany.
He was supposed to stop it. He had the education, the talent, the resources. A world-class lab. A research team once seventy-strong. He had everything—until it all unraveled.
Now the cities were hushed. Roads overgrown. Governments fractured. Entire countries cut off from contact.
His team was dead or scattered. He never bothered to find out.
He coughed again. This time, it didn't stop.
The fit doubled him over, and when it passed, his vision swam. Blood dripped from his nose now too. He wiped it away with the sleeve already ruined from earlier, the gesture automatic.
The intercom crackled. A woman's voice—tired, familiar.
"Doctor Xiang, your vitals are critical. Please. Let us in."
Zainan chuckled dryly. "I told you," he said hoarsely, staring blankly at the screen. "Nobody comes in. Not now. Not when I'm this close."
"You've been in isolation for eighty-seven hours. You're hemorrhaging. Your temperature's spiked. You're—"
"Dying. I know," he said. "I'm dying. Just like the rest of the world."
There was a pause. Then a softer voice.
"You don't have to go down with it."
He smiled bitterly. "I'm not going down. I'm going through."
The line clicked dead. She knew better than to argue with him when he spoke like that.
He looked around the lab. The cluttered chaos of it. Empty IV bags, shattered vials, nutrient bars long since hardened to bricks. And everywhere—charts, papers, notes scrawled in half-legible script about microbial mutation patterns, immune response degradation, tissue decay.
He was still wearing the ring his mother gave him when he first entered university. It hung loose on his thinner fingers now. He twisted it slowly. Once, she had told him:
"Don't lose yourself chasing the invisible."
He had laughed. "I don't chase it. I catch it."
But maybe she was right. Maybe somewhere along the way, the invisible had caught him instead.
He stood—slowly—and walked to the last containment chamber. Inside was a small, pressurized cryo-case. A single vial sat inside, resting like a jewel.
He placed his hand against the glass. It read his fingerprint. Still authorized.
With a soft hiss, the chamber opened, and he withdrew the vial.
The fluid inside shimmered faintly. A soft, silver-blue glow, like moonlight caught in liquid. His final attempt. A fusion of viral suppression, immune modulation, and something new—nanoscopic bacterial binders, designed to symbiotically overwrite the infected tissue.
The culmination of everything he had left.
But his hands trembled.
"Too late," he whispered. "Even if it works… who'll use it?"
He staggered back to his chair and slumped into it, the vial cradled in his palm like a dying flame. He opened the log recorder.
Lab Log – Final Entry. Xiang Zainan.
"I don't know if anyone will hear this. If there's even anyone left to. But if someone does… I tried. God help me, I tried.
"This virus—Red Wake—it wasn't natural. I'm convinced of that. Designed. Spliced together like a monster under a child's bed. And once it got out, it didn't crawl. It ran.
"I think I might have something here. A synthesis. Not a cure. Not exactly. But something that could help. Change the game. But I won't live to finish it."
He coughed again. Blood flecked the recorder.
"If you find this… don't waste it. Don't waste what I couldn't finish."
He stared at the vial in his hand. It seemed so small. So absurdly fragile.
His grip loosened.
The glass slipped through his fingers and shattered on the steel floor.
He didn't move to pick it up.
Instead, Xiang Zainan leaned back in his chair. The lights above flickered once. Twice.
Then he closed his eyes.
No sound. No pain.
Just stillness.
And then, finally…silence.