The bitter, icy drizzle, a cruel promise of Jackson's approaching autumn, clung to Ellie's jacket like the fingers of a drowning man. But it wasn't the cold that made her shiver with suppressed violence. It was memory, a wound that refused to heal, throbbing with bitter poison.
Three years.
Almost three years since Joel had plucked her from Saint Mary's Hospital. Three years living under the weight of a lie he whispered like a twisted lullaby: "There were dozens of immunes like you, Ellie, but the Fireflies stopped looking for a cure."
Each word was a tuneless note in the symphony of her survival, a funeral melody that vibrated through every nerve in her body. At seventeen, the fourteen-year-old girl desperate for purpose was dead and buried. In her place was a young woman forged by anger and doubt. The bite scar on her forearm was no longer a sign of hope; it burned like a cattle brand, a constant reminder of a promise unfulfilled, a life spared by a sham.
She knew Joel had seen her as a daughter. But the weight of that love, built on the ruin of a truth that could have saved the world, had suffocated her. So she had fled before dawn, leaving behind only the scent of pine and a hasty note to Dina, an apology that rang false even to herself.
He had to see it for himself. The destination: the old Saint Mary's Hospital, on the outskirts of Salt Lake City. The place where everything changed, the place that would change everything in his life.
The journey was a lonely hell. The first few days were a blur of cracked roads, car wrecks, and the constant vigilance Joel had taught him. The world did not forgive distraction.
She arrived at Saint Mary and got proof that her theory and feelings were not just in her head, Joel lied to her, he...
some time later...
On the outskirts of a devastated ghost town, the unmistakable smell of mold and decay hit her. It was a nest. Coming from a multi-story office building, its broken windows like empty eye sockets, she heard the familiar, guttural click. Clickers. At least a dozen of them, judging by the echo.
"Shit," she whispered, crouching behind an overturned school bus. The safest route would be to go around it. It would take hours. But a reckless fury bubbled in her chest. She was in no mood for detours.
With the agility of a predator, she rummaged through her backpack. A Molotov cocktail, two arrows, her pistol with a makeshift silencer, and her trusty switchblade. She slipped into the building, the sound of her footsteps muffled by the sodden, rotting carpet.
The air was thick with spores, but to her it was just dust. The first Clicker stood in the lobby, banging its misshapen head against a wall in a hypnotic rhythm. An arrow whistled through the air and found him in the temple, dropping him without a sound. Ellie moved through the shadows, up the stairs. On the second floor, three of them prowled an open-plan office. She tossed the empty bottle she was carrying into a far corner. The creatures, blind, turned toward the sound, their fungal plates vibrating. It was the distraction she needed. The Molotov cocktail described a perfect arc, exploding in an inferno of flames that engulfed the three. Their shrill, inhuman screams were music to Ellie's rage.
She cleared the building, floor by floor, in a deadly dance of stealth and violence. Every stab, every gunshot, was a blow against Joel's lie, against her own helplessness. When she emerged on the other side of the building, covered in blood and soot, the sun was beginning to set. The adrenaline had subsided, leaving behind an even greater emptiness.
Some time later, under a gray sky that mirrored the desolation in her soul, she found it. It was not the hospital, but something much more discreet, almost swallowed by nature that claimed its domain. A concrete structure, covered in ivy and moss, surrounded by a fallen wire fence.
There was a stillness there. A wrong stillness .
Throughout her journey, the world had hummed with latent danger. The distant sound of infected, the rustling of animals, the wind whistling through ruins. But here, the silence was absolute. Most alarmingly, she noted the absence of fungal growth. No cordyceps veins crawling up the walls, no trace of spores in the air. It was as if the very plague that consumed the world was afraid to come near this place.
"What the hell is this?" she muttered, her breath forming clouds in the air.
Her instincts, honed by years of survival, screamed. There was something vital here. Following an unnatural rise in the ground, she found it: a heavy metal hatch, hidden beneath bushes. Someone had gone to great lengths to hide it. With a grunt of effort, using a crowbar she found nearby, she forced the hatch open. The metal groaned in protest.
A smell of damp earth and stale air rose from the depths. With her flashlight on, she descended a metal staircase, each step groaning under her weight. The cold intensified, thick with moisture. Her feet touched a concrete floor. The flashlight revealed a narrow hallway lined with locked metal doors. But there was a subtle vibration in the air, a low, steady hum. Energy.
At the end of the hallway, the door stood like an insurmountable blockade, made of a dense, dark metal that contrasted with the rust of the others. There was no visible handle, just the smooth, cold surface interrupted by a digital number panel, inert and silent. Sealed. That modern metal screamed "secret," "protection," raising the stakes of what might be on the other side.
Ellie's heart hammered against her ribs. Codes. They were the language of forgotten places, the key to unlocking buried mysteries. But for the first time since she'd found the hatch, she was faced with a seemingly impenetrable obstacle. There were no notes scrawled with numerical sequences, no maps with cryptic notations, no obvious clues. The impersonal coldness of the digital panel mocked her intuition, her experience in sifting through the remains of the old world.
Desperation, viscous and suffocating, began to creep in. It was as if the place itself knew what she was looking for and was determined to keep it hidden. She ran her fingers over the cold metal, searching for any crack, any sign of tampering, anything that might give her an advantage. Nothing.
He leaned his ear against the door, his breath held. The low hum, barely audible before, seemed louder from this vantage point. A steady, subtle pulse, vibrating through the metal like the heartbeat of a sleeping machine. A freezer? he thought again, the image of frozen meat and darkness lingering in his mind. But the tightness of the door's security seemed too much for mere supplies.
Her eyes scanned the digital display once more, trying to make sense of the dark array of numbers. And then, like a bolt of lightning on a moonless night, a memory struck her. Fragmented at first, like a forgotten dream, but gaining clarity with every passing second. An old pre-outbreak history book she'd found gathering dust on an abandoned shelf in Jackson. A section on the events leading up to the pandemic. The global panic. Day Zero. The day the world as they knew it had come to an abrupt, violent end.
A data.
A date that echoed not only in the books, but in the collective memory of the survivors, a dark milestone that divided the before and after. Could it be? Was it a cruel irony, a grim reminder encoded in the very entrance to whatever was sealed inside?
His fingers trembled slightly as they rose over the keyboard. He hesitated for a moment, feeling the weight of the possibility. If this was the password, what did that mean about the nature of the secret it held? He took a deep breath, trying to calm the whirlwind of thoughts. With cold resolve and a nagging sense of foreboding, he typed in the eight digits that had haunted human history: 2 6 0 9 2 0 1 3 .
The silence seemed to thicken for a moment, Ellie's own breath hanging in the air. Then a sharp beep cut through the tension, followed almost immediately by a loud, unmistakable metallic click that reverberated through the dank hallway. Small, dim green lights flickered on around the panel, like eyes opening in the darkness.
"It opened…" she whispered, her voice hoarse and incredulous. A mixture of shock and a sudden rush of adrenaline hit her. That date. The date of the outbreak. Why would this sinister combination work? What was so deeply tied to the end of the world that its very beginning date was the key to unlocking it? A chill ran down her spine.
Her heart beating like a war drum, driven by an urgent need for answers, she pushed open the heavy door. It creaked softly, revealing a small chamber lit by cold, clinical lights. The smell of sterilized metal and something chemical hung in the air, distinct from the earthy dampness of the hallway. Her eyes adjusted to the brightness. And then she saw it. In the center of the room, a towering glass chamber…and inside it, a boy.
His hair was a dark red, almost crimson, like blood spilled on water, floating gently. His skin was a deep tan that stood out against the sterile surroundings. And his body… Ellie caught her breath. He was muscular, but lean and defined, like a panther at rest. Not the bulk of a man like Joel, but an intrinsic strength, visible in every sculpted contour.
Ellie's mind whirled with unanswerable questions. Who was he? A prisoner? A volunteer? And why was he here, preserved as a pristine relic of a future that never came, while the world outside rotted? He looked about her age, but his stillness and the technology surrounding him placed him a universe away. He was a flesh-and-blood enigma, floating in a blue silence.
It was the low hum and pulsing light of an ancient computer terminal on a metal desk that broke the spell. The machine, a beige block of plastic and metal, was the only thing in the room, other than the camera, that seemed to have power. It was the only source of answers.
Ignoring the chill that emanated from the chamber and the dampness that clung to her clothes, Ellie approached the table. The monitor, with its dark, curved screen, displayed a phosphorescent green cursor that blinked rhythmically, like a lonely heart. It was an invitation. Hesitantly, she touched a key.
The screen flickered, and lines of text began to materialize, like a digital ghost from a lost world. It was not a user-friendly interface; it was a raw, straightforward file, laden with the impersonal coldness of military bureaucracy.
Ellie leaned in, her eyes scanning the green letters that stood out in the darkness.
CLASSIFICATION: TOP SECRET // EYES ONLY // OMEGA LEVEL PROTOCOL** **DEPARTMENT OF DEFENSE (DoD) // FEDRA - SPECIAL THREAT DIVISION**
*FILE: PROJECT PHOENIX // BIOLOGICAL ASSET REGISTRATION** > **ASSET IDENTIFICATION:** PHX-ALPHA-01 > **ASSIGNED CODE-NAME:** "Sam" > > **CURRENT STATUS:** Contained // ARK Protocol in progress. > > **MISSION PURPOSE:** Final Contingency Asset for the Preservation and Reset of the Human Species...
_________________________________
Ellie took a step back, her hand instinctively covering her mouth. The language was cold, but the meaning was an avalanche that overwhelmed her. "Biological Asset." "ARK Protocol." "Human Species Reset." These were words of terrible power, painting a picture of a plan as grand as it was monstrous.
His gaze fixed on the title of the file, on the two words that seemed to contain the weight of all that secret. The words escaped his lips in a whisper filled with dread and amazement:
"Project... Phoenix?"
She scrolled through the files, opening an audio log. A scientist's voice, clinical and monotone, filled the room.
"Audio Log 040. Subject Alpha 002013. Age: 2 years. Expanded immunity testing. Alpha 002013's blood completely neutralizes pathogens such as... Staphylococcus... Mycobacterium... the Ebola virus... It's as if his every cell is an impenetrable fortress."
Ellie continued reading and listening. Sam—the name they gave him to simulate a normal life within the compound—had been grown in a lab. Off-the-charts IQ, eidetic memory, able to remember everything from birth. A trapped genius.
Hours after hearing the testimonies of the "researchers" she reached the last entry. "Final Chapter: Project Phoenix - Resolution". The date: September 25, 2013. One day before the outbreak. The scientist's voice was now filled with palpable hopelessness.
"...Final record. Outbreak is imminent. Our efforts...have been in vain. Sam...he is the cure. But not in the way we thought. There is no way to create a vaccine from his blood. Cordyceps is too complex. The only way...the only way to defend yourself against the fungus...is to be born with immunity to it. It can only be passed on genetically."
A punch in Ellie's stomach. An even greater betrayal of fate.
The voice continued, revealing the truth behind the silence outside.
"We ran a test. Desperately. We exposed a captured infected to Sam's presence. The result was... Supernatural. The creature... recoiled. It shrieked in pure terror, and fled from him as if he were death itself. The Cordyceps somehow detect his perfect immunity as an anomaly, an existential threat. They avoid him. Instinctively."
The pieces clicked into place in Ellie's mind with a painful click. The nest of infected miles away. The dead zone. The silence. All because of him. He was a living repellent.
The scientist's voice cracked, her professional facade cracking.
"...We'll preserve him. Sedate him. It was the hardest thing I've ever done. He knew, Ellie. Somehow, he knew what we were doing. His eyes... But we did it. He's in this cryopreservative liquid now... we decided he should awaken in the distant future. Maybe in 2100. We gave him the chance to seed that immunity into a world that might deserve to be saved. It's an unthinkable sacrifice... to steal a century from a boy... but it's humanity's only chance."
A muffled sob echoed through the audio, and then, a sentence that pierced Ellie.
"Sam... my son... I'm so sorry. May you find a world worthy of your salvation, thank you for allowing me to be your mother for a while.
The audio ended. Silence.
A crushing silence. Ellie stared at the boy in the chamber, the seedbed of a new humanity, trapped by a lie even crueler than Joel's. Government, Fireflies, Joel. All with their own convenient truths.
They locked him in here. He, with his perfect memory, remembered everything. The sedation, the betrayal, the forced goodbye to his "mother." The injustice of the whole thing was poison.
A cold rage, pure as tempered steel, took hold of Ellie. A rage not against one man, but against the entire world that continued to sacrifice its young on altars of false hope. Her and him. Two sides of the same sacrificed coin.
The truth was there, suspended in a blue liquid. And with it, an unshakable determination.
Sam wouldn't wake up in 2100. He would wake up now.
She found him. And she wouldn't leave him there.
His fingers, trembling with anger and purpose, moved from the keyboard to a side panel in the glass chamber. On it, a single red button, pulsing with a dim light beneath an acrylic cover.
[START RESUSCITATION SEQUENCE]