The Patient Zero 2

Dr. Leland led them through a restricted corridor on the fifth floor, a place walled off from the rest of the facility by biometric locks and steel-reinforced doors. The hallway was cold, silent, and wrapped in sterile light. At the end stood a reinforced elevator, flanked by a biometric scanner and sealed by a door thick enough to withstand explosives. It hissed open like something in a military bunker.

Unlike the standard elevators they’d used before, this one was matte-black on the inside—lined with insulated steel and pulsing fibers that glowed dimly beneath the panels, like veins in a sleeping giant. The air inside was unnaturally cool, and it carried a faint metallic tang, like blood on iron.

A soft chime sounded. A retinal scanner emerged from the wall and scanned Leland’s eye with a mechanical click before the elevator sealed shut. It descended with the smooth, soundless weight of something ancient being lowered into the dark.

Cassie clung to Emily’s arm, but Leland gently placed a hand on the girl's shoulder.

“She can’t come,” he said. “Security protocols. Take her to my office. Let her watch some cartoons.”

His secretary, a middle-aged woman with a surprisingly warm smile, appeared from a side hallway and took Cassie's hand. She offered Emily a nod of assurance.

“I’ll stay with her.”

Once Cassie was out of earshot, Leland turned back to them, his tone shifting instantly to something colder, clinical.

“I apologize for the secrecy,” he said as the elevator slowed. “But what I’m about to show you will be too scarring for a child her age.”

As the elevator doors reopened on the fifth floor, the temperature dropped further. The hallway was dark and silent. No windows. No hum of fluorescent lights. Just rows of servers and thick black cables snaking across the floor. Cameras followed them, whirring softly.

“This is our containment floor,” Leland said. “Or what’s left of it.”

He led them into a central lab with a raised control platform. Screens lined the walls. In the corner, a medical station buzzed quietly. He approached the largest console and keyed in a string of alphanumeric codes.

“What you’re about to see,” he said without turning, “has only been viewed by two others.”

Victor, Emily, and Keller stepped closer.

The screen flickered to life as the recorded video began.

A sterile delivery room appeared. Clean, cold, overlit. The woman strapped to the gurney was visibly deteriorating—skin flushed red, beads of sweat clinging to her forehead. Her limbs twitched. Deep bruises traced her veins like mold on fruit. Machines beeped furiously as her blood pressure was peaking near hemorrhagic levels, and her heart rate danced just shy of lethal tachycardia.

“She’s in cardiac distress,” Victor murmured, eyes narrowing. “She should’ve coded already.”

Her screams filled the room—raw, ragged. Not labor screams. Agony.

The doctors moved frantically around her, sweat on their brows, one of them shouting for an emergency C-section.

Then it happened.

The ultrasound technician dropped his probe. The screen showed the fetus twisting violently, limbs stretching outward. The technician backed away, horrified.

The woman’s back arched off the table. Her spine cracked audibly. Blood burst between her legs. But instead of crowning, two thin, waxy arms reached outward from within.

Emily gasped. “Oh my God…”

The arms didn’t reach for freedom—they slashed. Fingers like knives tore upward from the vaginal canal to the stomach wall in one fluid, grotesque motion. The woman’s abdomen tore open like wet paper. Her scream turned into a choking gargle as blood sprayed across the room. She made a glance towards the camera as the last of her tears fell down.

The thing crawled out of her.

It wasn’t a baby. It wasn’t even human.

It stood upright as soon as it emerged, its limbs too long, too developed. Its body slick with blood, its skin nearly translucent—like wax melting over bones. It had no hair. No umbilical cord.

Its eyes were already open—wide and unblinking, their irises an impossibly deep shade of blue, swirling like ink in water. Blood seeped from its sockets, but it seemed unaffected.

Then it turned.

The child looked directly at the camera, through the glass, right at where Leland had been standing during the recording.

The doctors panicked. Two rushed for the exit, but the child was faster. The footage turned into a frenzied blur of motion and screams. Blood painted the glass and walls. One doctor tried to inject it—Leland paused the video just as the child caught the man’s arm and bent it backward at the elbow, bone exploding through skin like ivory splinters.

The screen went black.

Emily staggered away, hand clamped over her mouth. “What the holy fuck was that?”

“Our Patient Zero,” Leland said softly.

Victor stared at the blank screen, unmoving. His face was unreadable. Not horror, not even shock. Just calculation.

Keller shook his head slowly, backing away with his palms raised. “I thought the woman was Patient Zero.”

“No,” Leland said, pulling off his glasses and rubbing his eyes. “She was the vessel. That thing… whatever it is… was already changing inside her.”

“So he’s the source of the outbreak?” Victor asked, voice low, measured.

“Yes. We believe he infected Leon Mitchell and the others. And I believe he’s still out there. Watching. Planning. Getting smarter everyday.”

Emily swallowed. “But… how? He looked like a kid in the video.”

Leland put his glasses back on, his face grim.

“He’s not a kid anymore. He doesn’t age like us. If he kept growing at the same rate as in the womb, he could already be the equivalent of a twenty-year-old. It’s been four months now since then and he has infected plenty of people in the country already who are all linked somehow. Like some kind of hive or something.”

Emily’s voice shook. “Like a hive? Cassie said Everett used that word…right before he bit her.”

“Hmm, it’s possible,” Leland said steely.

“Okay, I get that the devil-baby is responsible for the new infections but who infected him?” Keller remarked. “Is anyone not worried about that?”

“of course we are,” Leland replied softly. “But it doesn’t matter for now. It could be nature or evolution. Maybe it’s a response to overpopulation or an act of God. The truth is this might be something we’ll never completely understand. But our job isn’t to argue philosophy. It’s to contain it.”

He tapped a folder labeled PROJECT ECHO.

“That’s what this facility is. Epidemiological Containment and Host Observation. That’s why I brought you here. Our objectivity is clear; rid this world of this virus before it destroys humanity as we know it.”

They were quiet for a long time.

Until Victor stepped forward.

“Okay,” he said. “Where do we start?”