Survival/Apocalypse13 min read
The Pale Vial on the Lab Rooftop
ButterPicks12 views
I woke to the alarm I knew too well and slapped the bedside table. "Get up, get up," I told myself out loud.
"Are you sure this is real?" my own voice asked.
"It will be if I don't waste another second," I said.
"Why are you packing three hundred packs of noodles?" my mother asked from the doorway when I shoved one last box into a crate.
"Because there will be a second chance," I said. "Because I remember."
"Remember what?" she asked, and her eyes had the tired softness of someone who had raised a useless daughter. "Sara, stop the dramatics."
"I remember the month before it all fell apart."
"You always were a little dramatic," my mother said, then softer, "But hurry. Eat something before you go."
I kissed the top of her head. "Will do."
"Don't forget your father," she called after me.
"I won't," I said. "I won't forget anything."
I drove out to the South River district like a woman with a deadline. I kept checking the clock. "Three days, then the storm," I told Kailey on the phone. "Three days until the rain that changes everything."
"You're being paranoid," she said, the same Kailey who used to steal my fries. "If you act like this in front of my parents they'll call you crazy."
"Then they'll be the sane ones when the lights go out," I said.
"You're impossible. Tell me when you're done building your fortress," Kailey said. "I'll be there."
"I know you will," I promised.
When the abandoned lab came up on the broker's tablet, I didn't hesitate. "This will work," I told the agent. "I need strong concrete, room to plant, and—"
"You want a moat?" he joked.
"A wall," I corrected. "And a clean underground room."
He laughed and then nodded. "I'll see what I can do."
We signed, paid, and moved faster than I had ever moved for anything. I bought solar panels, seeds, rations, and more rope than seemed reasonable. I hired workers and insisted on concrete ten feet thick, double gates, and a way to anchor a steel cage across the roof.
"Why all this?" one of the crew asked me on day two, as dust made gray smudges on my cheeks.
"Because when the moon comes, things will change," I said. "Because I remember a scientist who loved a problem more than people."
"Is this about that weird feed?" the foreman said. "People are wild now; they'll believe anything."
"They should," I said.
That evening Kailey arrived in a cloud of laughter and cigarettes. "You look like a fortress-sorcerer," she said, scanning the site.
"You look like you missed your nap," I said. "Help me choose curtains."
"You're ridiculous." She grinned. "What about your plan to stockpile everything? You sold the apartment?"
"I sold it," I said. "And everything else that could be sold. I told myself I'd be practical this time."
"Practical," she echoed, then added, "So when the apocalypse comes, you plan to be a farmer?"
"I plan to be alive," I said. "And if I can feed people, I'll keep them alive."
"Ha. Farmer-Sara. Cute." Kailey hugged me. "I'll bring my parents. They'll knit sweaters and complain about fertilizer. It'll be perfect."
I laughed, but in my head a cold fact had settled. "There is a man I need to stop," I told her quietly that night. "He is the reason part of my memory is a lie."
"You don't have to—"
"I do," I cut in. "I did not just wake up knowing how to make pickles."
Days passed in lists and drills. We raised fences, installed water filters, made gardens, and sank animal pens. "You're overdoing this," Kailey said, handing me a bowl of stew.
"If we survive, I'll be eternally lazy," I said, and she rolled her eyes.
On the morning the first rescue team came, I had just finished bolting the last hatch. "Keep your head down," I told Kailey. "If they are military, don't act like a fan."
"We aren't going to faint at a hero," she teased.
They came by four trucks and a plane that made a sound like a distant wasp. "Harrison Blake is the captain," Kailey whispered when she recognized him.
"I remember his face," I said, more to myself. "I remember the way he says 'hold' and people do it."
They greeted us with an awkward formality. "We came to take anyone who needs to go to the base," Harrison said, eyes scanning our compound.
"We can spare rooms," I said. "We can give food. We can offer shelter."
"Then we'll make camp," Harrison said. "We lost some men at the airport trying to get survivors out. We need help regrouping."
"Help yourself," I said, and handed him a key.
That night they cooked for everyone. "We owe you," Harrison told me as we stood away from others, looking at the stars.
"You can owe me with honesty," I said.
"I've never lied to you, have I?" he asked quietly.
"You told me once you'd return," I said. "You did."
"Some missions are... complicated," he said, and for once he looked tired where he had looked resolute. "But I'll be here."
"Promise me," I said.
"Promises get broken," he countered.
"You promised." I smiled at him like a child that knows a secret.
He laughed. "Fine. I promise."
The base grew. People arrived, wounded and scared, and we took them in. Dane Cross led a group of volunteers who learned to tend animals on our small farm. "If you're going to be a city girl, you shouldn't be this good with a shovel," he told me once.
"I learned from Kailey," I said. "She can kill a radish with her bare hands."
One girl arrived from the airport—Laila Petersen. She was nineteen, thin, and clung to the edges of rooms. "Please," she told us, "I'll find work. I can cook. I can—"
"Rest," Kailey said, and put a bowl in front of Laila.
"Who told you to come to the airport?" I asked later, when the soldiers were discussing the rescue.
"A feed," Laila whispered, looking at the floor. "Someone said there would be flights. I thought—"
Harrison raised an eyebrow. "Who told you?"
She named a handle that had vanished from the net. "Someone told me to trust the rescue."
We took her in, though everything in me hummed like a wire. "Be useful," I told Laila. "We don't need spies."
"I can be useful," she said, eyes huge, and Kailey took her under her wing.
Weeks of routine made a fragile peace. Then I found the shredded tapes.
"I shouldn't have kept this," I said to Kailey, holding a cassette with my handwriting. "This proves everything."
"You hid tapes?" Kailey said. "Who are you hiding from?"
"From my past," I said. "From a man—Felix Rossi."
"That's not a name I want to say," Kailey muttered.
Felix was a scholar-king, the kind of genius who made you admire and fear him in one breath. He had been my advisor, the face behind my talent, the man who told me I was special. I had loved being chosen. But the tapes showed experiments, cages, and a room lined with specimens. I watched myself, younger, audibly frightened on the recording.
"Why would he do this?" Kailey whispered.
"Because he wanted proof," I said. "Because to him, my obedience was part of an experiment. To me, half my life was overwritten."
"We go to him," Kailey said.
"No," I said. "Not yet. First I'll finish what I started in that undone laboratory."
I locked myself away to analyze, to remember, and to work. I cooked serums and tested them on the broken and the hopeful. "You can't make miracles out of soup," Dane joked as he brought a tray.
"Not soup, antibodies," I corrected him, but I let him joke. Harrison sat outside the lab-door like a lone sentinel. "You're spending too much time alone," he told me one dusk.
"I need to fix what he broke," I said.
He watched me. "Do that, then," he said. "But don't become the kind of person who breaks for the world. Survive with me, Sara. Survive for Kailey. Survive for us."
"Will you survive?" I asked.
He opened his mouth, then closed it. "I don't know," he admitted. "But I will try."
When we first took the serum to a turned adult—someone we'd fished from the nearest field—her eyes cleared in a way that made me weep in the lab sink. "She remembered her granddaughter's name," Dane said. "You did it."
"I didn't do it alone," I told them. "We did."
We scaled production. The base became a hope point; people came with stories, with scars, with holes in their pasts. Harrison led raids to retrieve supplies and to carry those who could not walk. "No one gets left behind," he said like a mantra.
Then Felix found us.
"We should have expected it," Harrison said the morning his scouts brought him the bulletin. "A man like Rossi will not stay buried."
"They think it's a rumor," Dane said. "A mad scientist making ghosts."
"They're wrong," I said. "He's been alive and he has allies."
"Where?" Harrison asked.
"In a facility not far from here," I said. "He kept secrets. He kept them in the dark and under concrete."
"Then we go," Harrison said, face hard. "We take him in and we end this."
I felt my throat close. "If you go, don't let him die unexposed. I need him to answer—"
"Publicly," Harrison finished for me. "We'll bring the evidence and we'll bring people. We'll make sure the city knows."
"Bring Dane," I said. "And bring cameras. If people can see, they'll not forget."
We moved at dawn. "This doesn't feel like a raid," Kailey said as she loaded the last crate. "It feels like a trial."
"It's exactly a trial," I said. "Except we are the jury and the executioner."
Harrison drove the lead truck. "Keep your hands where I can see them," he told my team with a smile that was all soldier.
When we arrived at the compound, mills of concrete rose like tombstones. Inside the centers of the rooms were beds, and on those beds, evidence of cruelty. "He called them new life," Dane muttered, turning away.
Felix was waiting. He walked toward us wearing a lab coat that had been pressed like a politician's suit. He looked like a man who had won his own argument with God.
"You are . . . Sir Rossi?" Harrison asked.
"I am Dr. Felix Rossi," he said, voice silk over steel. "And you are very noisy intruders."
"What have you done?" I demanded.
"What you call cruelty," he said, palms up, "I call evolution."
"You experimented on people," Dane spat. "You made monsters."
"I tested survival," Felix said. "I elevated life. You don't understand greatness."
"You're a murderer," Kailey said, and there was a sound like a small animal under her voice.
He laughed a small, hard laugh. "You call me that because you are small."
"People have seen your work," Harrison said. "We have proof. We will broadcast you."
"Broadcast what? The truth? The science? Or is your mob thirsting for blood?"
"Both," Harrison said. "You will stand in public and people will decide."
He didn't flinch when they cuffed him. "You cannot force science into a court," he said. "Not the kind I practice."
"Science that kills is a crime," I said.
They put him on a truck and drove him into the city for the first public tribunal since the fall.
When the makeshift platform was set and the crowd pressed in, I stood beside Harrison with the cassette and the recovered footage stacked on a portable drive. "This is what he did," I told the crowd. "This is what he called progress."
Felix's face was pale under the lights. People who had lost children, siblings, partners, whispered and then shouted.
"Why did you do it?" a woman asked, stepping forward and pointing a trembling finger.
"Because the old world decayed," Felix answered, voice calm. "Because the new needed seeds."
"You planted people like crops," she said. "You took their pain and made it your lesson."
"This ends with you," Harrison said. "No hiding."
"Don't you want to hear him?" someone called. "Let him speak."
Felix smiled as if hearing a compliment. "You will thank me," he said softly.
We played the footage. The crowd watched. The room leaned in. There were drags of silence between each clip—sterile rooms, flashes of needles, soundless cries.
Then the murmurs began.
"How could he—"
"That was my sister."
"That's my husband."
"I remember that hospital."
Felix's face tightened. He had anticipated fame, not fury. "You are misinterpreting," he said. "You are emotional."
"You're bleeding the air out of our hope," someone shouted.
Felix tried to speak but the first public reaction had already turned on him. "You used 'science' as a shield," Harrison said, "and your shield is thin."
He called for mercy and for understanding, and he was given only questions. Someone pushed a phone into the middle of the platform and streamed live. "Do you see him?" a man shouted. "The man who made the dead un-dead to prove a point?"
"Felix," I said quietly, "did you ever think about asking those people if they wanted this?"
He looked at me like someone peering through a microscope. "Consent is a technicality," he said.
"That is monstrous," Kailey cried. "You ripped lives like paper."
The crowd's mood changed from shock to righteous rage. "We are not built for this," whispered an elder near me. "Not anymore."
Felix stood and for a moment he had the arrogance of a man before a royal court. "History will vindicate me," he announced.
"History also contains tyrants," Harrison answered. "History remembers justice."
A chant began—half prayer, half accusation. "Justice! Justice! Justice!" People who had been silent found voices. Someone who had lost a son pointed at Felix and produced a vial. "This is from the place where you hide things," she said. "What is in it?"
Felix's jaw moved. "It is my work. You are too small to appreciate—"
"Take it," a man from the crowd said, and his hand found the vial.
Felix lunged. "You cannot touch that!"
"Put your hands up!" Harrison barked.
Felix's hand brushed the vial and the crowd gasped as if something physical had broken. "You will regret this," he said, and his eyes filled with something like hunger.
"Maybe," Harrison said softly. "But you'll be remembered for what you did, not what you meant."
They removed the vial and placed it in a secure box. The crowd's anger had not yet found its end, but the public testimony had stripped Felix of his dignities. People shouted for him to be turned over to the tribunals, to be stripped of titles, to have his research destroyed. He tried to bargain with our fear, to tell us about a cure buried inside his cruelty.
"Is it true?" someone asked. "Did you actually find a higher form?"
Felix smiled the smile of a man who believed himself already immortal. "Possibly," he said. "But this is not for you to decide."
"They will decide," Harrison said, and the chant rose again.
For the first time since the broadcast started, Felix Rossi looked small.
He went from calm to flinching. He tried denial—"You are misremembering"—then he lashed into rationalization—"This was worth it"—and finally he was pleading, "Please, listen—"
The pleas fell like dry leaves. People recorded him. Voices from the crowd told stories of lost sisters, lost children, neighbors who had been taken as a means of testing.
"Let the heroes speak," the crowd demanded, and they turned on Felix like a storm.
He was taken not to a prison, but to a secure site where a tribunal of survivors, scientists, and leaders convened. The hearing was public. He was allowed to speak, allowed counsel, allowed to present his data.
"I did this for knowledge," Felix said, voice shaking now, "so that life could adapt."
"You weaponized others," Harrison said. "You dyed morality with your ambition."
Felix's mask fell and the man screamed not in pain but in the collapse of arrogance. "You don't understand the strain of genius," he cried. "I poured myself into this, and you destroy my work because you are petty."
"Look at them," Kailey whispered, scanning the crowd. "You did this to people who trusted you."
Felix began to crumble. He begged forgiveness like a man seeing his house burn. He promised to donate his findings "ethically." He offered to work under supervision. He offered the location of caches.
The crowd's reaction flickered from anger to hunger for retribution. "Give us where the experiments are hidden," a woman shouted. "Bring the families. Make him help them."
Felix's face collapsed into a small, sharp noise that was almost sobbing. "I'll show you," he said. "I will show everything."
They bound him with a visible line of shackles, carried him back to a truck, and the people followed. "You should die for this," someone said, and later I would think about that as I sat with Harrison on the roof of the lab while snow caught the light.
"The crowd needed to see him," Harrison said quietly. "Not to feed on hate, but to anchor the memory. If we forget what was done, history becomes soft."
"You think public shame is enough?" I asked.
"No," he said. "But it's the start."
Felix's public breakdown lasted hours. He went from composed scientist to pleading man. He begged historians, begged mothers, begged children, and the crowd watched as his body betrayed the intellect he'd once wielded like a blade. Recording devices captured every tone shift: composure, irritation, denial, anger, pleading, collapse. Around us voices rose and fell, witnesses took pictures, young soldiers whispered, elders muttered, and some walked away silently.
Some cried. Some clapped.
Afterwards they took him to a secure facility where his research would be destroyed under supervision and his freedom removed. He would never lecture again. He would never be trusted.
"You did well," Harrison told me as we watched the truck drive away.
"It will not bring them back," I said.
"No," he said. "But it makes a promise to the living."
I nodded. "Then we must keep that promise."
The serum we had produced continued to mend broken minds. People reclaimed fragments of their lives. The world started climbing back like a bruised animal up out of the mud.
Harrison did not come back from the final push.
"I have to go," he said the night before, gathering a small bag. "There is a hold in the north with survivors. If the serum reaches them, it could save hundreds."
"Don't go," I said, not trusting the words to be rational.
"I have to," he said, and kissed my forehead like a benediction. "Promise me you'll keep the lab running."
"I promise," I said, and I meant it.
He left before dawn. His truck rolled out and the wind took his silhouette. The day after he left, the line of radio calls got shorter, and then one call failed to come back. The camera on his last run recorded his assault on the compound, the fight, the lab's alarms, a struggle, and then—silence. The footage showed him screaming as Felix lunged, a vial glinted, and an explosion swallowed sound.
We watched in the lab while Kailey sobbed into her hands. "He saved us," she said. "He saved so many."
"That's what heroes do," I said, and I did not cry until the night we buried a small mound of earth behind the lab. Harrison’s helmet rested on top like a small crown.
Time does a strange thing. People rebuild.
One winter, when frost patterned the windows, the tribunal's final judgment came: Felix Rossi would be held in secure custody for life; his research would be publicly archived and then destroyed by the survivors' council; his name would be recorded in history with his crimes. Families were given reparation where possible.
The public punishment had already broken him—everyone had watched his fall from grace. That fall lived on in stories and in the recording we kept in the lab, the pale vial photographed, the cassettes played in courts and schools.
"We're not monsters," Kailey told a group of new recruits as they trained in the fields. "We remember what happened because forgetting makes monsters of us."
"Make sure you teach what Harrison taught," I said. "Not how to kill better, but how to care better."
"Lives first," Kailey repeated.
I went back to the bench and looked at the pale vial I had once pulled from a hidden freezer in Felix's compound. "It almost became a Bible," I whispered. "Now it's a lesson."
In spring the fields were green. The animals made soft noises in their pens. Children learned to plant. We built a small sign at the road: "If you are hungry, ask. If you are scared, come." People came.
"Do you miss him?" Kailey asked one evening as we trimmed the greenhouse's lights.
"All the time," I said. "But every time I look at a healed person, or a child who can name their grandmother, I see Harrison too."
She nudged my arm. "And Felix?"
"I won't forget him either," I said. "Not the man I admired, not the monster he chose to be. But remembering him reminds us to be better."
We kept the lab's rooftop solar panels and the pale vial under lock. On quiet nights I'd climb up and lay my hand on the cold metal. "I will not let memory be stolen again," I told the sky, and the stars seemed to listen.
The End
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