Day 6.
The Return to Sector 1.
Sauget, Illinois.
12:45 Hours.
The ride back was a blur of wet pavement, screaming tires, and the smell of copper.
It wasn't the clean, metallic scent of a penny. It was the heavy, cloying stench of arterial spray in a confined space. The cab of the truck smelled like an abattoir.
Ronnie sat in the passenger seat, curled into himself like a dried leaf. He clutched a shop rag to the left side of his face. The rag had been white when we left the hardware store; now it was a sodden, heavy crimson thing that dripped steadily onto the rubber floor mats.
"It's dark, Jack," Ronnie whimpered. His voice was thin, reedy, vibrating with the onset of shock. "Why is half the world dark?"
"Pressure," I said, my voice sounding like it was coming from someone else. I kept my eyes on the road, dodging the potholes that scarred the streets of Sauget like bomb craters. "Keep pressure on it, Ron. Don't let up."
"I can feel the air," he babbled. "I can feel the air touching my brain."
"That's just the nerves," I lied. "You're fine. We're almost home."
I wasn't looking at him. I couldn't. If I looked at the hole in his face, at the way the skin sagged around the empty socket, I would lose the thread. And right now, the thread was the only thing keeping this truck on the road.
In the rearview mirror, I saw Yana. She was in the bed of the truck, exposed to the acid drizzle, fighting a war of her own.
Travis was thrashing.
The big man was buried under a tarp, wedged between the bags of industrial lime and the Pelican case containing the serum. He wasn't having a seizure—not exactly. It was more like his body was trying to tear itself apart from the inside out. His back arched, lifting his three-hundred-pound frame off the metal bed, slamming back down with a force that shook the entire chassis.
Yana was sitting on his chest, pinning his shoulders down. She was shouting something, but the wind snatched her words away.
I rolled down the rear slider window. "Status!"
"He's burning up!" Yana screamed, her face streaked with rain and grime. "Jack, he's cooking! But he's freezing! Look at his neck!"
I glanced in the mirror again.
Travis's skin had gone the color of wet ash, a dead, sickly grey. But beneath the surface, something was alive. His veins—the jugular, the carotids, the vascular networks mapping his deltoids—were pulsing with a violent, bioluminescent orange rhythm.
It didn't look like blood flow. It looked like magma forcing its way through rock. It looked like parasitic worms wriggling under his dermis, seeking an exit.
System Sickness.
The Administrator called it "Metabolic Recalibration." The Root called it "The Chrysalis."
I called it the tax you paid for playing god.
He had lifted two tons of steel and concrete. He had broken the laws of physics because the System allowed it, but the human body wasn't designed for those kinds of numbers. His muscles had torn, his tendons had snapped, and now the System was knitting him back together with a needle made of fire.
"Hold him down!" I roared. "Don't let him bite his tongue!"
We skidded around the final corner, the tires searching for traction on the slurry-slicked asphalt. The gates of the Coldwell complex loomed ahead, a jagged silhouette against the bruised sky.
Miller was there, standing guard with his good arm, a shotgun propped against his hip. He saw the truck coming in hot and scrambled to drag the chain-link gate open.
I didn't wait for it to clear completely. I gunned the engine, scraping the paint off the passenger side as I squeezed through the gap. I slammed the brakes in the center of the muddy courtyard, killing the engine.
"Helen!" I roared, kicking the door open before the truck stopped rocking. "Triage! Now!"
Helen Voss was already running from the Mudroom. She didn't look like a doctor; she looked like a mechanic for meat. She wore a heavy rubber apron over her clothes, stained with bleach and old blood. Her vet bag swung from her shoulder, clinking with the sound of steel instruments.
She reached the truck just as I hauled Ronnie out of the cab.
She took one look at him—the blood soaked through his shirt, the grey pallor of his face, the way his remaining eye rolled back in his head—and didn't even blink.
"Shock," she barked, her voice raspy from forty years of Marlboros. "BP is crashing. Get him horizontal. Miller! Sal! Get the stretcher from the supply tent!"
"The Mudroom?" Miller asked, hesitating. "Protocol says—"
"Fuck protocol!" Helen snapped. "If we put him through the chemical decon now, the shock will kill him. His heart can't take the cold cycle. We bypass."
"Where?" I asked. "The barracks are filthy."
"The Lung," Helen said. She shined a penlight into Ronnie's good eye. "I need the oxygen concentration. Level 2. The air is cleaner there than an operating theater. Move!"
I nodded. It was the right call. The Lung—our hydroponics bay—was sealed, filtered, and pumped full of O2 to accelerate the plant growth. It was the only place in East St. Louis where the air didn't taste like sulfur.
Miller and Sal, a welder with a thick neck and terrified eyes, ran to the back of the truck. They dropped the tailgate with a clang.
Yana scrambled off Travis. "He's heavy," she gasped. "Jack, he feels like... like stone."
I grabbed Travis's ankles. Miller and Sal grabbed his shoulders.
"On three," I grunted. "One. Two. Lift."
We heaved.
Travis was dead weight, but dense. He felt heavier than he had this morning. The serum was increasing his bone density, compacting his muscle fibers. He was becoming a Tank Class in real-time.
As my hands touched his skin, I hissed.
He was freezing. His skin temperature had dropped to at least seventy-eight degrees. It was like touching a corpse that had been left in a meat locker. But beneath the ice, I could feel the vibration of the energy surging through him—a low-frequency hum that rattled my teeth.
"Jesus," Miller hissed, almost dropping him. "He's vibrating. He's freezing and burning at the same time."
"Corpse Cold," I said, adjusting my grip. "Don't drop him. If he hits the ground, he shatters. Move."
We shuffled across the mud, a grim procession of the broken and the breaking.
The Lung (Level 2).
13:10 Hours.
We descended the industrial freight elevator into the belly of the Silo. The doors groaned open, revealing Level 2.
The smell hit us instantly. It didn't smell like death. It smelled of wet earth, crushed nitrates, and high-yield fertilizer. It smelled like life, aggressively engineered.
The room was bathed in the purple-pink glow of the LED grow lights I'd purchased from the System Store. Rows of PVC piping and hydroponic trays lined the walls, seeded with the fast-growing nutrient paste we'd scavenged. The heavy scrubbers in the corner were humming a deep, rhythmic bass note, pumping ninety-percent pure oxygen into the room.
"Table," Helen ordered, pointing to a stainless steel prep table we used for mixing nutrients.
We hoisted Ronnie onto it. Travis we laid on the concrete floor, propping his head up with a bag of potting soil.
Helen moved like a machine. She ripped Ronnie's shirt open, checking his vitals, slapping a blood pressure cuff onto his thin arm.
"Systolic is sixty," she muttered. "He's bottoming out. I need a line. Sal, hold his head. Don't let him move."
She turned to the vet bag. She didn't have IV bags of O-negative. She had saline solution meant for horses and dogs.
"Is it compatible?" I asked, watching her spike the bag.
"It's salt water, Jack," she said, hanging the bag from a ceiling pipe. "It puts volume in the veins so the heart has something to pump. It's not blood, but it'll keep the engine running."
She found a vein in Ronnie's arm with practiced ease, sliding the needle in. Then she turned to his face.
"Okay," she said, her voice softening slightly. "Let's see the damage."
She reached out and peeled back the blood-soaked shop rag.
The sound it made—a wet, sticky peeling noise—was louder than the scrubbers.
I looked away. I had to. I had seen men die in the first timeline. I had seen bodies torn in half by Pus-Bombers. But there was something intimate, something deeply violating, about a scooped-out eye socket.
It was a raw, red cavern. The eyelid was torn, hanging in tatters.
"Orbital floor is intact," Helen muttered, shining her light into the mess. She leaned in close, the smoke from her cigarette—which she had somehow managed to keep lit—curling around her face. "Optic nerve severed cleanly. That spoon... it did the job."
She stood up. "Infection is the priority. The bacteria in a human mouth—or on a dirty spoon—will travel straight to the brain meninges. I have to flush it."
She grabbed a bottle of iodine and a syringe of irrigation fluid.
"Sal, hold him down. Put your weight on him."
"Is he... is he gonna feel this?" Sal asked, his face pale.
"Yes," Helen said. "Jack, hold his legs."
I stepped forward and leaned my weight onto Ronnie's shins.
Helen began to flush the wound.
Ronnie screamed.
It wasn't a scream of fear. It was a primal reaction to the raw nerve endings being bathed in chemical fire. His body bucked under my hands, arching off the table with a strength he shouldn't have possessed.
"Hold him!" Helen shouted, working fast, scrubbing the bone, flushing the cavity.
I looked down at my own hands as I held him. They were shaking.
Not from the exertion. From the User Chill.
I had used the Regression Echo during the raid. I had borrowed stats from my dead self, pushed my speed to Tier 3 for thirty seconds. Now, the bill was coming due.
I looked at the skin of my wrist. It looked thin, translucent, like parchment paper. Underneath, the veins were dark.
And they were moving.
I blinked. I swore I could see black worms—maggots—wriggling through the veins in my wrist, swimming upstream toward my heart. I could feel them. A tactile itch, deep under the meat, like something chewing its way out.
Maggots.
I let go of Ronnie's legs with one hand and clawed at my wrist, scratching until I drew blood.
`[SYSTEM WARNING: SANITY DRAIN DETECTED.]`
`[ROOT: THEY AREN'T HALLUCINATIONS, ARCHITECT. THEY ARE PREVIEWS. THIS IS WHAT YOU BECOME.]`
"Shut up," I whispered, squeezing my eyes shut. "Shut up, shut up."
When I opened them again, the worms were gone. Just red scratches on pale skin.
I took a deep breath of the oxygen-rich air.
"Done," Helen announced. She was taping a sterile pad over Ronnie's face. "He's out. Passed out from the pain. It's a mercy."
She stripped off her bloody gloves and threw them into a waste bin. "He'll live. But he's one-eyed now. His depth perception is gone. He can't weld like this."
"He can sort scrap," I said, my voice cold. "He can mix concrete. As long as he can walk, he works."
Helen looked at me. Her eyes were hard. "He just lost an eye, Jack. Maybe give him a day."
"We don't have a day," I said. "Look at Travis."
I walked over to the big man on the floor.
He was worse than Ronnie. Ronnie was just maimed. Travis was mutating.
His body temperature had dropped further. Frost—actual ice crystals—was forming on his eyebrows and the hair on his arms. But beneath the frost, he was sweating profusely.
The orange glow in his veins was pulsing faster now, a strobe light effect that illuminated the dark corners of the room. I could see the layout of his circulatory system through his skin.
`[STATUS: METABOLIC COLLAPSE.]`
`[CALORIC DEFICIT: CRITICAL.]`
`[MUSCLE RECONSTRUCTION: STALLED.]`
"His heart rate is 180," Helen said, kneeling beside him and slapping a stethoscope to his chest. "He's fibrillating. What the hell did he do?"
"He lifted two tons," I said. "He pushed the strength stat past the safety limiter. He tore forty percent of his muscle fibers."
"He's drowning in lactic acid and rhabdomyolysis," Helen snapped, checking his pupils. They were blown wide, encompassing the iris. "His kidneys are going to shut down in an hour. He needs dialysis."
"He needs calories," I corrected. "The System consumes biomass to repair. He's starving to death at superspeed. Feed him."
"He's unconscious, Jack! He can't eat! If we put food in his mouth, he'll aspirate it and die of pneumonia."
"Then we force it down his throat."
I walked to the supply shelf and grabbed a jug of protein slurry—the concentrated nutrient paste we mixed for the hydroponics. It was a vile brown sludge, made of rendered fat, powdered vitamins, and nitrates. It was fertilizer base.
"Hold his nose," I ordered.
Helen looked at me like I was insane. "That's plant food. It's toxic in that concentration."
"It's nitrates and protein," I said. "His body will burn it before the toxins can settle. Do it."
I knelt by Travis's head. I pried his jaw open. His muscles were locked in rigor, hard as stone. I had to use a pry bar from my belt to lever his teeth apart.
"Miller, hold his head! Yana, pinch his nose!"
They obeyed. I tipped the jug.
The sludge poured into Travis's throat. He gagged, sputtered, his body bucking violently.
"Swallow!" I shouted, massaging his throat. "Swallow it, you dumb bastard!"
He swallowed.
As the slurry hit his stomach, the reaction was visible.
The orange glow in his veins flared bright white, blinding us for a second. The frost on his skin evaporated in a cloud of steam.
And then we heard it.
CRUNCH. SQUELCH. POP.
It sounded like a bag of wet gravel being crushed. It was the sound of his muscles knitting together at accelerated speed. Fibers reattaching. Bones thickening.
`[BIOMASS ABSORBED.]`
`[REPAIR INITIATED.]`
Travis arched his back, screaming a silent, airless scream, his face contorted in agony. His chest expanded, the pectorals visibly growing, densifying under the skin.
Then he collapsed back onto the concrete, the glow fading to a dull, simmering ember. His breathing slowed. Deep. Rhythmic.
"He's stable," Helen whispered, checking his pulse again. She looked terrified. "How... how is that possible? That shouldn't be biologically possible."
"He's not human anymore," I said, wiping the sludge from my hands onto my pants. "He's a Tank Class. He runs on pain and protein now."
I stood up, my knees cracking. I felt old.
I turned toward the ladder leading up to the factory floor.
"Where are you going?"
It was Paige. She was standing by the elevator doors, still wearing her blood-spattered fatigues from the decontamination crew. Her face was hard, her eyes wide with a mixture of fear and revulsion.
"Command Deck," I said. "I need to secure the serum."
"We just almost died for that stuff," Paige said, stepping in my way. She pointed at Ronnie, unconscious on the table, and then at the monster that used to be Travis. "Ronnie lost an eye. Travis is... whatever that is. And you're just walking away?"
"I'm securing the asset," I said. "That serum is the only reason we survive the next week."
"Is it?" Paige's voice trembled. "Or is it just making us into monsters before the zombies do? Look at him, Jack! Look at what you did to him!"
I looked at her. My Decay Sight flickered over her face.
`[PAIGE: LOYALTY 54%. FEAR: HIGH.]`
`[STATUS: BREAKING POINT IMMINENT.]`
"We were monsters the minute the sky turned blue, Paige," I said softly. "The serum just makes us monsters that can kill back."
I stepped toward her. She flinched, as if she expected me to hit her.
"Get out of my way," I said.
She moved.
The Command Deck.
Level 2 Office.
14:00 Hours.
I placed the Pelican case on the map table. The office was quiet, dusty, untouched by the blood and screams below.
Five vials of Quintuple Serum.
This was the stash. In the first timeline, the Red Faction found this cache on Day 12. It fueled their "Berserker" elites, allowing them to overrun the western suburbs. Now, it was mine.
I took one vial out.
The liquid swirled inside the glass, heavy and viscous. It shifted colors, from deep violet to angry crimson.
My hand trembled.
The maggots were back. I could feel them wiggling under the skin of my palm, itching, burrowing, eating the nerves. I could feel the cold spreading up my arm, the User Chill trying to freeze my heart.
`[SYSTEM SICKNESS: HALLUCINATION TIER 1.]`
`[ROOT: DO IT. TAKE A DOSE. BECOME THE APEX. THE PAIN MEANS IT'S WORKING.]`
"Not yet," I muttered to the empty room. "Not yet."
I put the vial back. I locked the case in the heavy steel floor safe beneath the map table and spun the dial.
I pulled up the holographic map.
The Blue wireframe of the Silo hovered in the air.
Mudroom: Green.
Gutter: Green.
Lung: Yellow (Occupied/Medical).
I scrolled out to the region map.
The Red Faction convoy was still stationary on Highway 40, twelve miles out. They were waiting. Probably scouting the perimeter with binoculars, watching the smoke from our foundry, wondering if we were worth the ammo.
But there was something new on the map.
A single Yellow ping. Just inside our sector, near the South Gate.
`[THREAT DETECTED: SYMPTOMATIC SURVIVOR.]`
`[LOCATION: SOUTH GATE PERIMETER.]`
A runner? A refugee?
Or a vector.
I grabbed the radio off the desk.
"Yana," I said. "Do you copy?"
Static hissed, then her voice came through, tired but clear. "Copy."
"Perimeter check. South Gate. We have a visitor. Approach with caution. If they're twitching, if they're foaming... put them down."
"On it," she said.
I leaned back in the chair, closing my eyes. The silence of the room pressed in on me.
I could still hear Ronnie screaming. I could still hear the wet pop of his eye coming loose.
Thirty days.
We were only on Day 6.
`[DAYS REMAINING: 24.]`
`[MORTALITY INDEX: 88%.]`
"Get some sleep, Jack," I told the empty room. "Tomorrow, we start the purge."
FOUNDRY PROTOCOL - DAY 6
SECTOR 1 (JACK MONROE) ███░░░░░░░ 3/10 Nodes
STATUS: POST-RAID RECOVERY
Injuries: Ronnie (Critical/One-Eyed), Travis (Unstable/Evolving)
Assets: 5 Serum Vials (Tier 3 Potential)
Next Event: System Purge / The Factory Floor