Breach
Marcus Yu
Two years ago, I was admitted into Celestial Query Laboratory as an amateur molecular biologist. I, along with a team of wiry men and ardent women, spent many days attempting to quantum entangle frozen tardigrades in light of the ever-expanding unknown of quantum mechanics. I was constantly in and out of laboratory corridors, all the while the never-ending facility revealed new sectors about which I could only imagine were I not a molecular biologist. Celestial Query was a large, modular research base that inhabited various sectors dedicated to extraterrestrial phenomena.
My partners were of no amateur status, some having led projects for over fifteen years. It was everyday banter to assume just what lay beyond those secure doors—it was supposedly the remnants of the Roswell incident and Zamora’s sighting that were kept secret from us. It would have been more interesting if they had secured a cryogenic preservation of Elon Musk and his artificial brain, in which case confidentiality was reasonable. Yet this fictitious rationale only partially hindered my constant curiosity.
There would be routines throughout the year. Fire drills like elementary school, earthquake drills in which facilities had to be sealed shut and contained to preserve samples, sanitary inspections, maintenance, what-have-you.
But I never understood why they had exercises for containment breach.
“What kind of stuff would breach containment?” I had once asked a partner before we armed a superconductor for experimentation on frozen tardigrades. She was tall, pale, and had wide-rimmed glasses that emphasized her witty and overworked personality. Her jagged shoulders did not bother turning to face me.
“I mean, if they don’t have Roswell aliens, Celestial has a few viral samples they study at the southwest wing. I can imagine if that kind of stuff gets out, we’d all be scrambling.”
It made sense.
#
And one day, the alarm started blaring. The halls turned red.
All containment breach protocols are now in effect. All subordinate levels evacuate the premise immediately. This is not a drill. All containment—
People dispersed in fever, abruptly emerging out of distraught voices and undefinable chaos. I was in one of the arteries of the southwest wing, running an errand for a physicist, leaving the sector to the northwest wing. I dumbfoundedly watched the people run past like birds evading a cyclone, the final call of a storm toward which I had but a foolish oblivion. I needed to get to my lab, secure samples, and lock the doors.
A stocky, tan, and bald man in a white coat sprinted out of one of the rooms, his petrified gaze washed away by the panic and speed of his movements as he sprinted toward the southwest commons. His name was Adrian Thor, a scientist whom I did not often see.
“Hey, hey!” I moved alongside him into a gradual jog, heading in the same direction. “What happened?”
“Containment breach. You need to leave!”
“What? Where?”
We were yelling.
“Sector 5, southwest!”
Shit.
“I need to get to my lab first.”
He came to an alarming halt and grabbed my shoulders, admonishing me with a glare that transposed from his brow into my chest. His hyperventilation withstood every atomic moment I had taken from sparing his life as though I were the one to have conjured this havoc. “Don’t. Get the hell out of here, and don’t turn back.” His fingers sank into my shoulders as if to separate my ligaments, my shoulders from my body, and I procured a momentary wince that vanished into the chaos. He released my body, yet his grip lingered upon it as my flesh formed back into shape. I paused, unable to describe what I was experiencing.
Adrian Thor vanished in an instant, abruptly released from my presence.
The sirens drowned into a white noise that rang no audible alarm in my ears. I was merely seized by my fight or flight as nothing processed in my head, none of the urgent warning nor the delirium. I stood at the end of the southwest artery and faced the commons thoughtlessly. Tables and chairs were displaced as if a storm had passed moments prior. More personnel ran past me from seemingly nowhere, emerging and vanishing in frenzies that reached nowhere below the sirens. All was but a waning dream inundated by specters of my peripheral.
And there I saw it, unmistakably.
I turned my head one last time down the southwest artery. It was devoid of people and became quieter than the noiselessness I had already procured in my head. I needed to flee the premise, but it was in the hallway, half-clothed and shuffling toward me.
I scrambled for the communicator in my pocket, slowly emerging into my senses that urged me to run for the northwest wing. The southwest artery needed to be entombed by the storm-surge protocol, and I needed to run. To contain this anomaly.
“Wait! Don’t!” It called.
My panicked gaze turned again and faced the anomaly, still not processing just what it was besides the fact that it was bipedal and partially clothed.
More so a man.
It was a man but nobody whom I recognized. His face was drained, and the invoke in his voice was crude, yet he was not supposed to be here. I knew it with my eyes. His left arm was stained with what seemed to be blood. He was more wounded than threatening.
“Please, wait!”
I froze and let the anomaly gradually approach me in my seizure. It was but a middle-aged man absent of hair, life, and blood beneath his flesh, thin with a revealing musculature that churned and limped toward me. Injury and fear ran across his face, yet the absence of something I could not place my finger upon stared beyond his eyes. The communicator trembled in my hands.
“Help me, please. Don’t call for help. I didn’t do anything.” The man was getting near.
I hobbled backward and maintained a distance until the man slowed to a near halt. A helpless arm reached toward me not as an advancement but as a plead; the grave yearning of his reach traversed the gap between us, and I could feel it in his voice. “How do I get out? Please, I don’t want to hurt anybody. Please.”
It was as though a feral beast had torn his clothes and skin, yet all I could see was something of an animal itself before me. An unimaginable fiend that was, unbeknownst to me, asking for my help.
Run. Hold the communicator onto dear life and run. The artery is going to close. Don’t look back—
My panicked instincts felt only mercy for the split second I rendered the man’s cry as a dire need for help, a beckoning for life as much as my own. My unthinking brain only registered action as instinct, and a subconscious arm of mine pointed to the northwest wing.
The man merely gazed upon me with dry and wounded eyes, piercingly pale as though blind. Yet they watched me full of vision, full of the image of my distraught figure as he shuffled past me to the northwest corridor, trudging with him the darkness of my visage. I watched him until he disappeared into the hallway.
For what felt like an eternity, it was all within a matter of seconds.
It was my turn to leave the premise.
#
And I did not show up again.
All projects conducted within the lab were liquidated. Much of our confidentiality now leaked across the globe. Everybody knew us. Our names. I did not know if anyone knew what I had done. I was afraid.
I did not know what I had released. There was no word of successful containment. What exactly was the anomaly that had crawled out of containment? Was I wrong to help when he was begging for life?
Perhaps he was sick, that he carried an uncontainable virus. But there were no quarantine protocols enacted; I saw no yellow suits and sanitary units. Everybody merely ran.
The anomaly itself was the virus, and nobody knew where it was. Nobody knew what it was capable of.
The first place I went to was the local supermarket. I knew I would need shelf-stable food for months.
#
The state had issued a public notice, and there was fear amongst all. All doors had locked shut, and every civilian was ordered to hide until the rogue anomaly was found. Nobody knew what it was, and neither did the state. People only knew to clear grocery store shelves, and their fever imploded upon the notion of an alien contingency amongst them. Anyone that set foot outside was at risk of unforeseen injury or death.
Executive persons of Celestial Query were silent with denial until they were summoned to court and published to the world; they spoke of no danger but the ignorance of a barbarous herd and the prompt containment of the anomaly. They were on trial for the endangerment of humankind—they were supposed to sustain the truths of the cosmos, and now we had become the heretics against the grace of God.
The fear of the unknown undermined the state. And it resulted in more deaths due to inward lunatics than what the anomaly was imagined to be capable of in a day. The streets were silent and awful, and only the hungry and feeble-minded youth dared to neglect the angst that suppressed the region.
State borders were closed. There was nowhere for me to hide but within my own home, and the landscape outside began its military armament of all regions within the state.
#
They could not make it my fault. How could they? I was merely a scientist. Those responsible for the anomaly were jeopardized—those who were incompetent enough to have led uncontainable research.
Anxiety. I was perpetually afraid.
I was locked inside my home. I did not answer any outreaches to communicate with me. My devices were off. I alienated myself from all persons; there was likewise no family with which I lived anymore. Everything was my fault. There was no longer the comfort of companionship when I longed for it. Everything appeared to pass through time under my selfish needs. I had taken my family away from myself.
To say the least, food would last me longer. But I did not know how long I could live like this; I needed someone helplessly, but that was beyond my power. I had lost all control.
My home was a mess of strewn garbage and things I could not recollect; it had somehow become the lunacy I had borne. I threw waste into the backyard, where neighbors could not have seen me.
#
Every person was ordered to cease all physical contact with others at the risk of anomalous injury or death; they were asked of suspicion toward even their household members. Now the details were clear: the anomaly appeared as one of us, and nobody knew who it was, what it was capable of, or where it resided. The state borders had become militarized, and impregnable quarantine was effective. Nobody was to come in or out, and all residents were equally incarcerated.
Nothing but an outdated radio spoke to me about the landscape beyond. My home entrances were boarded off with heavy equipment. The insects of my imagination crawled under the withdrawal I feigned.
#
The anomaly was promised to be soon contained, the radio said. It was a false hope. Optimism in the face of destroying that which had no means of destruction: this was the last resort of our sovereignty, to retain the faith of people under faithless damnation.
It had been almost one month since I stepped foot into Celestial Query. I had found nothing but insanity and hunger in my home.
Yet nobody could see my face. I could not set foot outside my home. The fear had evolved for two months, becoming analogous to the anomaly that haunted the state. I was insane for I was associated with Celestial Query. Because I liberated that thing. I did not know if my face drew a line to the lab, if my name meant nothing, or had been sought in the calamity. I was nothing but lab personnel, a project conductor, and a helpful hand in leading science. What could they possibly want from me?
My thoughts were heavy and unmitigated. They had lost all focus. I needed food soon.
#
It was about time. The military had announced that they were handing out rations to citizens trapped at home. A week’s ration would be delivered throughout the state to every household that answered the door.
Answer my door?
I could only wait for so long.
Soon enough, they would drive up my street and announce rations on a loudspeaker. It was only a matter of when. Personnel would drop it near the door if it were confirmed that there were living residents—but they did not need to know who I was, did they? I just needed food, and my paranoia was not worth the starvation. They just wanted to help.
I waited my turn, sitting in the living room by a pencil of sunlight between closed curtains; the birds and buzzing HVAC encumbered the light under which I sat, flickering mournfully in the dust that traversed between the plaintive sun. I scarcely knew what the landscape looked like beyond the sounds that resembled tranquility and sunshine—peace before the absence of civilization, a landscape no longer mine.
After several hours the sun neared the horizon, a distance I felt in the parting light that carried over eternity, and I began hearing vehicle motors droning in the distance. The sounds of heavy vehicles grew gradually into a suspenseful tick, passing through each second that heightened my anxiety out of chronic paranoia. There must have been three or so armed modes of transportation outside. I swallowed my lump and pressed myself up with my grimy palms.
Rations, we have your rations! They called over a sound system. The intervals between house to house rolled with revving engines as their vehicles sauntered the street on idle. Rations, they called once more. I was standing like a blind feline, a fretting child, ogling through curtains that imagined the military units slowly approaching my home, armed and on edge as I was.
They went door to door. The vague intervals of their orchestra were each a moment closer to my inevitable despair. One door at a time, their instruments would groan an octave higher, organs bellowing as they churned within the approaching mammoths.
I trembled from an uncontrollable subconscious, a nerve of its own accord. I could now hear the chatter and movement of military personnel, sounds displaced here and there until they receded behind a revving engine.
We have your rations!
Their movement closed in.
I could not open the door. God, this pretentious lunacy was too much. It was far too much.
Brakes whined to a stop, and the chatter bantered like animals just beyond my front door. Like hyenas gamboling in a troop, and they were cornering their prey. A door from one of the vehicles opened and closed, shuddering the floor in my home and the studs in the walls. Approaching footsteps now walked upon my ears, and I could feel the tread of boots pressed into my skin.
They knocked three firm times on my door. I flinched violently, having found myself standing flush against it.
I raised an aimless hand and paused, seized by nothingness.
Come on. This hesitation will not feed me.
But the silence felt safer than the door. I could lay low and wait a little longer. I would be safer then. I restrained my breaths; they could not hear me breathing.
Knock, knock, knock. They were just on the other side of the door, separated by only a few inches of wood. Their actual voices spoke to me.
“We have your rations! If anyone’s inside, please confirm your presence!”
I could not, but I had to.
It was for survival, wasn’t it? I had to live. I had to eat to live.
I had to.
My breathing was shallow. I reached for the doorknob.
The door kicked in violently, and I was thrust back to the floor with an impact on my head. I screamed. Three soldiers trained with assault rifles entered and surrounded me. They were yelling, and I could not discern anything behind my screams. I scrambled backward like flailing prey, caught already within the predator’s tongue. The hyenas were going to feast.
The middle soldier fired at my right leg, and I yelled horrendously, wishing I could beg through a formless wail that I had done nothing wrong. I gripped my leg and rolled onto my side, and another soldier fired two rounds through my kneecaps. My legs were paralyzed below my hips, static from shock and an unbearable heat throughout my body. My unsung wails gagged into a helpless invoke, becoming nothing but vocalizations of terror.
I turned to look at the soldiers. They stared through gas masks and gun barrels that admonished my intensifying screams. Abysmal eye sockets judged my absolution as they breathed through filters shaped like apish fangs, pumping sustenance into their Neptunian eyes.
Another soldier entered through the front door and approached me with an unrecognizable heavy rifle, firing two metal projectiles that slung and locked onto my wrists. Their aim was ruthless. The projectile pulverized my wrists upon impact. I could only ogle at these devices before a powerful static drew them together, binding my arms together. Projectile handcuffs. The devices on my wrist were inseparable. I was bound and bleeding from my legs. I could only scream and beg for life to stop seeping out of my body.
And to my surprise, the clamps tightened. My hands were already senseless from it all, yet a blade from within closed around my wrists.
My hands fell from my arms, and I cried feebly at the blood that began draining from my wrists. I was being killed. Violently, savagely.
They were remorseless.
They must have found the real monster, and this was my repentance. I had somehow become the monster without willing to prey, without thirsting for the blood of the innocent, yet I was all the same. Strangled by the same oblivion as two quantum-entangled tardigrades, I had bound my begging body to the apparition from which I had tried to run, and I was now to die the hellion I damned.
I was the monster, after all.
#
“Command, this is Task Force-323. Subject-03 has been apprehended. Hands have been detached and neutralized. Target is now obsolete.”
Copy that, 323. What’s your status?
The first soldier to have fired upon the subject held the comms. The others searched the house and reported back. The anomaly was on the ground, writhing and whimpering in a pool of blood, permanently traumatized and disabled. Absent of hair, life, and blood beneath its flesh.
“Command, I’ve got two casualties: one female, middle-aged, and a boy, roughly ten to fifteen, both located in the backyard. They’re missing limbs and parts of their face. Christ, subject must have eaten his fuckin’ family.”
Copy that. Can you ID subject-03’s host?
“Affirmative, it’s Maxwell Finch. Molecular biologist at Celestial.”
Copy that. Do you have an ID of the casualties?
More soldiers from outside entered the premise. A special-containment trauma team entered from behind.
“Affirmative, it’s his wife and son. Leila and Nathan Finch. Maxwell probably has no idea what he did to his family. Subject appears to have reached one hundred percent transmutation at this time.”
Roger that, 323. Thor has already been returned to site-13. Bring in ASAP for further analysis.
“Over and out.”
THE END