The Truth we Bury. True intentions

“Of course I want to save the world,” Victor replied.

Leland stared and returned the gun to his pocket.

“Everything I recorded is on my personal logs on my computer... It details everything I found out, including weaknesses and their evolution stages. I only infected two people directly, Reynolds and…the woman.”

“The one from the bus crash months ago?” Emily asked stepping in.

General Kiyora smirked after seeing her but didn’t say anything. He stood at the corner listening to conversations he barely understood.

“Which woman are ya’ll talking about?” Cassie asked returning with a glass of water and handing it to Victor. He grabbed the glass as it spilled on his hands.

Victor nodded. “Thank you Cassie.”

“Hmph,” Cassie snorted.

“She was clinically dead when I found her,” he continued. “The other humans in the accident had all passed but she had a small pulse. I reacted on instinct, i touched her attempting to save her life. After Reynolds, I had ran numerous experiments on rats and saw that my blood healed them from injuries inflicted. It was a small drop of blood on her stomach, but it was enough to wake her up slightly. By the time the medical team had arrived, most of her shredded stomach was fully repaired.”

Dr. Leland paled. “You resurrected her?”

“I thought so,” Victor whispered. “I went to the hospital to see her again and saw she was fully healed. I hadn’t noticed that she had followed me from the hospital all the way to the lab. But she wasn’t like the others, her mind was fully operational and she could coherently speak. She said she followed me to thank me for saving her.”

“Are you saying...” Emily said, voice dry, “…she recognized you?”

Victor shook his head slowly. “No…she said her unborn child did. Before it became.... Zero, the child was something new. A hybrid. My blood and human DNA…spliced together. Unlike the infected whose genetic makeup gets rewritten, Zero would be born already changed. Intelligent. Faster and stronger. His mother knew exactly what her son wanted and like any mother wanted to make her child happy. The last thing she said to me was she had to give birth to the future of humanity. It was only after seeing the video Leland showed us that I recognized her.”

Leland’s face went rigid. “So what, Zero thinks he’s saving humanity?”

“That’s what I believe.” Victor looked up, eyes haunted. 

Emily backed away, her voice catching. “Where is he now?”

Victor hesitated.

“Where is he, Salvatore?!” Emily shouted, her hands clenched.

“I don’t know,” he said. “But he’s getting stronger, calling others. every infected out there —they’re drawn to him. He’s building an army, a new world order.”

Kiyora cursed under his breath. “You think this thing is organizing them?”

Victor nodded. “It’s not just instinct. It’s strategy now. After our interaction, I could feel he was changing and so were the infected as a result. Before...I could feel the infected but now they’re out of my reach.”

Keller stepped back in, holding a tablet. He froze at the look on everyone’s face. “…What did I miss?”

Leland moved, touching his glasses. “Everything.”

“Well, it gets even worse,” Keller said, pointing to a tablet.

The screen flickered to life, showing a breaking news segment from Rio de Janeiro. A live feed displayed a massive, burning sigil scorched the clouds above the Christ the Redeemer statue — fire twisted into ancient, unreadable shapes.

The world reacted in chaos. Some believed it was an elaborate hoax. Others saw it as divine prophecy. But when the symbols began appearing everywhere—etched into the sands of the Sahara, glowing etched into the Arctic ice, even forming in the veins of the infected—denial became impossible.

The tension was suffocating. Everyone stood frozen, the room dimly lit by the glow of the tablet in Keller’s hands. The burning symbol in the sky crackled on loop from the tablet’s speakers, a pulsing sigil made of fire and shadow suspended above Christ the Redeemer.

Even the sound of static on the newsfeed felt ominous.

Keller swallowed hard and tapped the screen again. “You need to see the rest.”

The footage changed. Security cam graininess bled into chaos. A wrecked street corner—cars overturned, smoke curling into the air like dying screams. Emergency lights flashed in red and white stutters. Then came the bodies. Dozens. Some writhing, some still. The footage jumped forward.

A figure stalked through the smoke, dragging a body in one hand like it weighed nothing. Blood soaked the street and the figure turned.

The face was unmistakable.

Cassie’s breath caught mid-throat. Her hand rose to her mouth. “No...no, that’s not…”

The figure on the screen moved with terrifying purpose. He plunged his hand through a man’s chest. No hesitation. Just cold execution.

Cassie let out a strangled sound, stumbling backward as if struck. A glass on the table hit the ground, shattering.

“Mr. Everett?” she whispered. “That… that can’t be him…”

Victor turned his face away. Emily stepped forward and grabbed the tablet from Keller’s hands to confirm it for herself. Her mouth tightened. It was him.

“But why are they killing people instead of infecting them?” she asked.

Cassie fell into a nearby chair, arms limp at her sides, her entire body trembling. “He was—he was kind. Why is this happening…”

Leland’s phone buzzed almost immediately against the table. He looked at the number, a secured line.

He glanced down, his gut already knowing who it was.

“Secure Alpha Channel: Executive Office.”

He stood stiffly and turned toward the hallway. “One moment.”

He pushed open the metal door and stepped into the corridor, the buzz of fluorescent lights overhead humming like a warning. He put the phone to his ear and answered in a tight voice.

“This is Dr. Leland.”

A pause.

Then the familiar voice crackled to life — no warmth, only barely contained fury.

“Tell me this is some kind of containment breach we can still lie about.”

Leland closed his eyes.

“No, sir. It’s… it’s out. Public now. We can’t put a lid on this any longer.”

A hiss of breath. The President didn’t shout — he seethed.

“You told me you were handling it. That this Plague incident was a fluke. You sat in my office, Leland, and looked me in the eyes!”

Leland swallowed. “At the time, I believed it was, Sir. We didn’t account for the rate of mutation. Or …intelligence.”

“We’ve got symbols appearing worldwide. Riots in Paris. Panic in Shanghai. My Secretary of Defense just got off the line with NATO, and half the goddamn council thinks this is a religious awakening. The other half thinks we’re facing the beginning of an alien occupation. So I don't care what you believe.”

Leland pressed a hand to his temple, his fingers twitching with adrenaline.

“Sir, listen to me. This is neither alien nor divine. It’s engineered. A bioform infected with recombinant genetic structures, evolving into sentience.”

“And what the hell does that mean in English?”

“It means it’s not longer just a disease. It thinks it’s a messiah. And now it’s not just infecting — it’s commanding.”

Silence.

“Then you damn well better find a way to unmake your messiah. Because if you don’t, I’ll initiate global strike protocols. Martial law. Full lockdown.”

Leland removed the phone from his ear and cursed something silently, punching through a wall. The wall’s only damage was dust falling slowly as he winced in pain.

“Dr. Leland?!” the President called out on the line. “Don’t test my patience!”

“Sorry sir, there was a small... incident,” Leland said calmly. “Please sir, we’re not that desperate yet. You’d kill half the population trying to stop it.”

“Then give me another option. You have 48 hours. I’m sending a team to your location. You tell them everything. I want results!”

The line went dead.

Leland lowered the phone slowly and stared at the opposite wall, his breath trembling. Then the sharp pain from his hands came and he winced loudly.

He returned to the room, where everyone was now gathered around the large monitor — watching international broadcasts play back-to-back. A map of world hot zones glowed on screen like infection blisters.

Emily turned toward him, reading his expression.

“What did they say?” she asked. “And what the hell happened to your arm?”

Leland looked haunted. “Don’t mind that. We’ve got 48 hours to stop a god… or they’ll kill the world trying.”