August 18th, 2020. [Part I]

The moment I woke up, I knew something was wrong.

Without Chloe to keep me in check, I slept far past sunrise. Not that I had any way to know the exact time, but I’d have guessed a little after noon. When I finally came to, I was sweltering and sore from the last couple of days, eager to head home myself. I still had unfinished business to take care of, though.

I pulled myself out of the bedroll, slick with sweat, and got dressed as usual. I won’t sugarcoat it—my clothes stunk. My hair was frizzy and tangled, the way only soap and water could fix. That wasn’t anything new, of course. Final exam prep had done the same to me countless times.

My hair’s condition (or lack thereof) made it damn near impossible to braid it like usual. I spent a harrowing fifteen minutes in front of that same shattered window, getting progressively more pissed off. I was so desensitized that once I successfully braided it, I instinctively went to untie it and nearly cried when it came undone.

I settled on my first order of business: retrieve that bucket I’d set upstairs. Sure, I needed water for all manner of things, but mostly I was just very thirsty. Plus, all things as they appeared to be, I’d be out of here in just a couple hours.

Climbing up the stairs proved a mild challenge thanks to my sore calves, but upon exiting the stairwell I was met with the gracious sight of a handle still hung on the rebar. I shimmied over to claim my prize, and…

Meh. It was around half-empty. (Half-full according to Chloe—not because she was an optimist, but because Maya’d grilled optimistic language into her.) I unhooked it and lifted it up to my lips, taking a big gulp. Some water spilled onto my scarf, but I wasn’t too worried about it.

“Mm. I’m calling you Bucky,” I said aloud to the bucket. It had nothing to say in return, which is a little rude if you ask me.

Don’t get onto me for this, but I lied a little when I said I used to be bad at naming objects. I was still very bad at it, but it was something I took pride in. Bucky the Bucket would join the likes of Backy the Backpack, Wally the Water Bottle, and of course, Flashy the Flashlight.

It wasn’t that these names were meant to personify the items, no—it was actually an organization routine. By giving them all names, I could run through my list of ‘friends’ and easily know who I’d forgotten. More convenient than carrying a notebook around everywhere. Which, on second thought, I actually also did that. My structure had some pretty gaping flaws, it would seem.

Anyways, I returned to the first floor and made myself some ‘breakfast’, including a dried beef stick and a few more sips of water. I was just about through with this whole ‘explore an abandoned laboratory’ thing, so I decided I would just give it my all and climb down the elevator shaft one last time.

I say it like I had many other choices. The rope outside would have been perfect if we’d gone ahead and tied it yesterday, but we hadn’t in the midst of our argument. As it stood I’d just be pulling a rope from a tree and watching it fall, which wouldn’t be very exhilarating.

When I walked through the hallways and approached the shaft—tall, dark, and horrifying as always—I second-guessed myself. Did I really have to go down there again? Maybe I could just… not. Calling it off and heading home suddenly seemed like the best move.

“Niko, run the numbers,” I said aloud. “The chances it’s real are… I don’t know, let’s say five, ten percent. Chloe would say zero, but she’s not here. She's… fuck, she’s back in Serpho. That basically means anything I do here doesn’t matter. Five-to-ten percent chance the world is gonna end, is what that means.”

Talking through it, I grabbed for the cable and leaned out, gripping tight with my legs and slowly descending. It was oddly easier to push forward when I rambled to myself.

“Doesn’t mean it’s not worth it to go and find out for sure. Chloe has that show to run tomorrow, but I don’t think she’d be interacting much with anyone beforehand. Climbing—agh, my hands, oh my God—uh, climbing down here sucks, but it could still save the world depending on what Chloe’s doing out there.”

I was getting the hang of scooching down the cord, and without Chloe to pressure me into landing in one way or another, I just continued downwards. I’d land next to my skeleton buddy at the bottom, which… still unsettled me just enough to not give it a dumb name like Skelly.

“Hah… I needed this workout, honestly. Maya keeps telling me I’m gonna end up all chubby if I don’t work out. Which… always bugs me, because she says I’ll be like Chloe. And Chloe’s not fat. She’s basically all muscle. Maya should know that, since they’re sisters… so I always get weirded out when she says it. I know they don’t like each other, but still…”

When I finally reached the bottom of the elevator shaft, I was of course greeted by a familiar cadaver. The soft light from above bled well into the lab itself, further than usual. Makes sense, I guess. Not as much fog down here today.

I started to venture further in as usual. I was still a pretty queasy person, sure, but I’d had long enough to process the casualties down here that they’d become easier to work around. Today’s challenge: find out why the lab was here in the first place.

“I can pretty much figure out what’s up with the virus if I know what was up with the lab,” I said to the several dead bodies around me. “How’d they even build it out here? Do you have any idea how much dirt they had to dig up? …Oh, you probably do. Damn, maybe I should pick up necromancy.”

I made my way to the stairwell and only advanced one floor. Chloe’d been on the right track, inspecting the other floors. Nock Laboratories had been—maybe still was—an organization, not a one man show. Walking in, I saw the department was… ‘Quantum Mechanics and Computing’. Not sure how main-stage that kind of stuff was in the 1950s. This could mean it IS time travel bullshit.

Most notably, this floor looked pretty darn similar to B7. Same tiles, same wall panels. Lots of the computer interfaces looked the same. “So… I guess they were doing quantum shit down there, too. Doesn’t explain much.”

Quantum technology had basically nothing to do with my particular areas of interest. That said, I did know just enough about it to be certain I didn’t want to go into that field. Not even an ominous laboratory would change that. The thought made me chuckle a little.

“Look, Flashy. All this shit? Propaganda. They want me to go into physics. They’ll never take me alive.”

…

Flashy wasn’t in my hand. I’d needed both hands to climb down, and I wasn’t wearing my bag. I’d left him at the campsite on the first floor. At first I was just upset he hadn’t been there to hear my joke, but… what a hassle. I had to go get him if I wanted to keep exploring.

Well, did I? I mean, realistically, I could see well enough. The stairwell behind me illuminated most of what I needed to look for. I’d need him if I went back down the hatch, sure, but other than that, he was just companionship. Kind of. Again, I didn’t really personify him like that.

I decided to keep looking around. No use climbing all the way back up just yet—I’d probably convince myself to go home if I didn’t find anything else now. A lack of decisive evidence could only hold me here so long.

Searching through what I could, I came up mostly empty-handed. That seemed to be a trend here. I didn’t have any sort of evidence for the New Dawn Experiment, but I did find something else: more corpses.

I wish I’d had Chloe with me to list off the causes of death, but on my own I couldn’t find any notable injuries. No obvious bullet holes, no real fractures. All the skeletons still had clothes on (although covered in black sludge), ranging from business casual to full hazmat. Clearly something happened down here to kill them all off. But… what?

A virus! That would explain the lack of injuries, and the reasoning behind the hazmats! It just wouldn’t explain why the people in hazmats died too. And besides, even if it were a virus, it clearly wasn’t the New Dawn Experiment. The mission statement had said it would ‘reconfigure’ life, not destroy it. In short, all these guys would have been birds or whatever. Clearly not what happened.

Some kind of emergency evacuation? That seemed like the right call. We’d seen emergency panels ripped out of walls and lab coats scattered on floors. Some kind of catastrophe happened here. Given the time period, 1957, I wondered if it had been some kind of nuclear fallout.

“Except, that’s not possible,” I corrected myself, wandering the dark, misty corridors. My voice echoed against the walls so faintly it almost sounded like idle chatter down the hall. “If there was a nuclear meltdown, the lab wouldn’t exist anymore. Or, like, all of Serpho for that matter. So…”

So what? What did any of it mean? How had all of this gone unsolved for so many years? And why did none of it hold any of the answers we needed? On this floor, people had just collapsed and died. On the floor below, people had been shot through the skull. Why the disparity?

Without Flashy, I felt as if I were playing some kind of horror game. Every creak in the foundation caught me off guard. As odd as it was, I had begun to find comfort in the skeletons—at least I knew they were dead. If the virus had been real, I would’ve definitely ended up naming them. I had a few names lined up, too: Skelly, Skeletor, Crossbones…

Thinking about that kept my spirits up just enough to get me back to the stairwell. Decisive evidence be damned, I wasn’t going back down that hatch. There’d have to be some symptoms by now if the thing were real. That said, I wasn’t exactly sure how long I’d spent looking around, and as far as I knew, daylight hours could’ve been running thin.

My stomach growled at me when I surfaced. The sky still looked relatively bright—if I had to guess, around 4:30 in the afternoon—and given I had enough stamina, I’d be totally fine to make it home tonight. I tiptoed up the fallen tree and swung down its roots, ready to get the show over with. (I also tripped on a rock a couple seconds after I landed. But if anyone asks, that didn’t happen.)

It couldn't be that simple, though. Ever since we'd come here, things had stopped being 'simple'. Still, though, after all the odd scientific jargon of the abandoned laboratory, I didn't think I'd be placed at odds with nature itself.

I heard it before I saw it. Lucky, since stumbling into it would have been a disaster. I was only sure what it was once I peeked around the corner, through the broken doors and into the lobby.

Rays of sunlight hit its smooth black pelt through the shattered windows. Its claws made clear imprints in the mud around it, miniature knives made only to tear flesh. It satiated its gluttony digging into my backpack, scarfing down whatever it could find.

I gasped in surprise… and it turned its head. Bared fangs, pitch-black eyes, pointed right at me. Out of options and hoping it would just run away, I stood still and slowly waved my hand at it.

“Uh… hey bear…?”