The iron door hung heavy on its hinges. Poe raised his hand and banged as loud as he could. A small camera buzzed as it panned back and forth across the hallway. He stared into the lens, and it hesitated a moment on him. He raised the cooler in his hands. A loud click sounded, and the door's security disengaged. Poe went inside, and the door slammed behind him.
The room had once been the home of a meth lab, but all that was gone now. Cloverdale's seedier element seemed to be the first to go. Poe wasn't convinced that they had been incorporated into that monstrous horde. Some people and some things just went, as if the town slipped out of sync with the rest of the world and left behind anything Mandi didn't want. Maybe a meth cook woke up one day in the middle of an empty lot, slightly confused and alarmed that his lab had vanished into thin air. Or maybe Poe vanished, locked away in some sliver of time as a personal hell. He seemed to have too much time for existential thought these days. What else was there to do during an apocalypse?
In one corner of the room sat a burly man, Carroll, reading a tattered copy of a Hemingway novel. Several CCTV monitors flickered in front of him, and Carroll occasionally glanced up at them. He exchanged a nod with Poe and gestured behind him.
"Took you long enough," came a raspy voice as Poe approached the rear of the room. Dr. Brown, the other denizen of the makeshift bunker, exuded an air of impatience. "How much this time?"
"See for yourself," Poe said, taking a seat and placing his container on the worktable.
Brown opened the container carefully. A faint steam rose out of the box as he brushed aside the ice. Delicately, he lifted a vial out and held it to the light. The liquid very subtly changed color from a light pink to a dark red. Brown ran his fingertips along the vial, "Still warm," he said to himself.
Poe cleared his throat, "How are the tests going? Have you made any progress?"
"It would be faster if I didn't have my samples coming in second hand. The fresher the better, I've been telling you that." The middle aged man began removing vials from the container and moving them to a small refrigeration unit.
"Too dangerous," Poe said flatly.
"All progress is dangerous," Brown said. "These samples are only one piece of the puzzle. Even if I can explain the cellular changes, that will do nothing to explain the method of infection. I need to test the subject directly. We could learn so much."
"No." Poe replied. He'd been making these deliveries for a while now. Brown had been one of the first rescued. Poe found him in a storm bunker underneath the floorboards of his home. Poe had been the one to install the bunker, so he had an idea of where to look for the errant professor. The resistors found a use for the chemist, setting him up in the abandoned lab. Dr. Brown never showed much appreciation for his lodgings, though. Maybe he thought everyone else got three square meals a day and time at the pool. No, the others looked as emaciated and pallid as the good doctor.
"We are on the brink of the greatest evolutionary breakthrough ever discovered, and you are keeping me locked up in here under an armed guard because it's 'dangerous.' The arrogance of the whole thing. If you want a cure, I need staff and support, not to be locked away." The smallest amount of spittle formed on Dr. Brown's lower lip. He spluttered out his words in a desperate rush.
"You were lucky, Doc. None of them ever came for you. Otherwise, you'd be another monster in the line," Poe replied calmly. They had this exchange weekly. "I need your report."
Dr. Brown sighed. He went over to a pile of papers and picked up a thin, manila envelope. He slid it across the table to Poe. "Do with that what you will. Not that any good will come of it. We need practical solutions, not memos."
"What's it say?" Poe asked, tucking the envelope in his jacket.
"Read it yourself," Dr. Brown sulked.
"Humor me."
Dr. Brown snorted and went over to a set of slides, picked one and brought it over to a microscope. He fixed the slide in place and focused the lens before gesturing Poe over. "Look at this."
Poe came over and looked through the microscope. "Ok, what am I looking at, all I see are blobs."
"Those are the cells I extracted from the last batch of samples. I have spent the greater part of my life staring at things underneath microscopes and nothing, nothing looks like that. This, infection for lack of a better word, isn't anything that we know. It's just that, those blobs. I call them morphic cells. If you introduce them into any kind of culture, they consume and destroy any foreign agents and use them to reproduce copies of themselves. My theory is that they're like un-programmed organic clay. Give them instructions on what to become, and they build structures to accommodate the design. Here." He placed another slide into the device. "This is a tissue sample created after an electric current was applied to those type of cells. They formed into whatever they could, creating a tissue not unlike human skin, complete with normal epidermal cells, the precursors to a vascular system, even a nerve system. This is impossible. This shouldn't exist. It defies all known knowledge and just does what it wants and that's unbelievably amazing."
Another wave of spittle.
"And dangerous," Poe said.
Brown's eye's flared. "Is the sea not dangerous? Or electricity? We have benefited from those, why not from this."
