The silence in the Blackwood Institute was a living thing. It was composed of the hum of emergency lighting, the drip of water from a broken sprinkler head, and the distant, wet sounds of feasting. Dr. Lucian Kael stood in the center of the main atrium, a place that had once been a pristine monument to scientific progress. Now, it was a charnel house.
Bodies lay strewn across the polished marble floors, their lab coats and security uniforms stained dark with blood. The large plate-glass windows that looked out onto the manicured grounds were shattered. But Kael did not see the destruction. Not really. He saw a canvas.
He was alive, when by all rights he should be dead. Or worse. He was not one of them, the twitching, mindless creatures that now populated the halls of his life's work. But he was not the same man who had walked into this building yesterday morning, either.
Something had changed within him. It was a subtle shift, a quiet alteration in the very fabric of his being. His eyes, when he caught his reflection in a dark computer monitor, seemed to hold a new depth, an unnatural intensity. The chronic anxiety that had plagued him his entire adult life, the constant worry about funding and peer reviews, was gone. In its place was a profound, almost serene sense of connection to the chaos he had unleashed. It was not a feeling of power. Not yet. It was a feeling of… belonging.
His mind drifted back to the moment it all went wrong. The moment of conception.
He was in his private lab, P-4, the heart of the Institute. The Kael Strain, Project Chimera, was his masterpiece. A retrovirus designed to rewrite damaged DNA, to accelerate cellular regeneration to unprecedented levels. It was meant to be the cure for everything from spinal injuries to cancer.
He was working with Sample 7-B. The most promising, the most potent iteration. His assistant, a bright young woman named Anya, had been prepping it for animal trials. There was a sudden, sharp tremor—the news would later call it a minor, localized earthquake. A rack of unsecured cryo-vials shimmied, then tipped. Anya cried out, stumbling backward.
The vial containing 7-B shattered on the floor. The failsafe protocols kicked in instantly, the lab doors slamming shut, the decontamination misters hissing to life. But it was too late. A fine, invisible aerosol of the virus had filled the air. He remembered the brief, sharp sting in his nostrils as he inhaled. He remembered looking at Anya, seeing the same understanding, the same terror, in her eyes.
The transformation in her was horrifyingly fast. It was not a sickness. It was a deconstruction. He watched as the higher functions of her brain were systematically erased, her humanity stripped away layer by layer, replaced by a raw, primal aggression. Her eyes glazed over. A low growl rumbled in her chest. She had looked at him, not with recognition, but with a sudden, predatory hunger. She had lunged.
He had defended himself, his survival instinct overriding his shock. The struggle was a blur of violence and terror. When it was over, he was alone in the sealed lab with her body. He was exposed. He waited for the change. He waited for the mindless rage to consume him. But it never came.
For him, the virus had worked differently. The regeneration, the change—it had integrated with his consciousness, not erased it. It had bonded with him. It had chosen him.
Now, he walked through the ruins of his institute, a ghost in his own creation. He made his way back to his office. The door was ajar. Inside, everything was as he had left it. His desk was neat, his papers and research notes stacked in orderly piles.
He picked up the primary research folio for Project Chimera. He ran his fingers over the diagrams, the complex equations, the projected outcomes. Guilt was a distant, intellectual concept, a phantom limb he could no longer feel. What he felt now was a burgeoning, twisted sense of purpose.
This was not an apocalypse. It was not an extinction event. It was evolution. A violent, messy, brutal leap forward. He had not created a plague. He had created a new form of life. His strain. His children. And they needed a shepherd.
He walked to the shattered window of his office, which overlooked the main entrance plaza. Below, a small group of his creations, his Kael Strain, were moving across the plaza. They moved with a twitching, uncoordinated grace, their senses attuned to the world in a way he was just beginning to understand. He felt a connection to them, a faint, nascent pull. It was like a radio frequency he was just learning to tune into. He could not give them commands, not yet. But he could feel their presence, their simple, driving instincts. Hunger. Aggression. Propagation.
As he watched, a new group of infected appeared from the direction of the outer perimeter fence. These were different. They were the victims of his victims. Second-generation. They were slower, more shambling. Their movements were clumsy, their aggression unfocused. They were a diluted, inferior version of his perfect creation.
This inferior strain shambled towards one of his. The Kael Strain creature, a woman who had once been a security guard, turned to face them. The inferior ones swarmed her, their clumsy hands grabbing, their teeth snapping.
A wave of pure, primal rage washed over Dr. Kael. It was an instinct he had never felt before, a fierce, proprietary anger. He felt a visceral urge to protect his own, to cleanse the world of these flawed, shambolic copies. They were a corruption of his work. An insult.
His gaze intensified. He focused all his will on the scene below, on his embattled creation. He did not shout or command. He just… pushed. He sent his will, his rage, his intent, down into the chaos.
And something happened.
Another of his Kael Strain, which had been aimlessly wandering nearby, suddenly stopped. Its head snapped up, and it turned directly towards the melee. A new purpose entered its movements. It broke into a lurching, high-speed run and crashed into the group of inferior infected, its limbs a whirlwind of violence. It tore them apart, protecting its own.
Kael watched, his breath caught in his throat. A slow, cold smile spread across his lips. It was not a smile of joy or triumph. It was a smile of revelation. A smile of terrible, awful purpose.
He could not just feel them. He could influence them. He could guide them. He could protect them. He was their mind. Their will.
He was their shepherd. And his flock would inherit the Earth.