Day Zero: The Last Bite

Access Logged

Nobody moved for a second after the speaker clicked off. Then Reyes lowered his rifle and looked at Marcus.

"That wasn't a recording," he said. "Somebody's watching us right now."

"Or listening," Priya said. She scanned the ceiling corners of the room, checking for cameras, and found one mounted above the door, a small red light blinking steady next to the lens. "There."

Marcus felt his skin crawl. "How long has that been on?"

"Long enough for whoever's on the other end to know we found the beacon," Reyes said. "Which means we need to move. Now."

They hurried out through the propped door, Elena's hand gripped tight in Marcus's, Mrs. Hart moving as fast as her hip allowed with Priya supporting her other side. Outside, the parking lot floodlights still burned over empty tables and sealed water crates, the whole place staged like a set nobody had bothered to strike.

"Where do we even go?" Mrs. Hart asked, breathing hard. "If they were watching that building, they could be watching everywhere."

"Not everywhere," Priya said. "Whoever's coordinating this needs infrastructure. Cameras, beacons, broadcast towers. That signal came from somewhere specific."

Marcus stopped at the fence line. "You think you can trace it?"

"I think I can try." Priya pulled her phone back out, the same one that had been recording since the subway platform. She scrolled through her earlier footage, then pulled up a signal-tracking app Marcus didn't recognize. "I kept a research contract's worth of tools on this thing even after they cut me loose. Guess that's finally useful for something other than paranoia."

"How far?" Reyes asked.

Priya studied the screen, walking a slow circle to triangulate. "There's a research annex three blocks east. Decommissioned, according to public records, but the signal's coming from inside it."

"Decommissioned," Marcus repeated. "Convenient place to hide something nobody's supposed to find."

They moved as a group through side streets Reyes chose carefully, sticking to shadows, avoiding the low moan of distant infected drifting somewhere behind them. Elena stayed quiet the whole way, watching everything with wide, tired eyes, no longer asking questions Marcus didn't have good answers for.

The annex came into view exactly where Priya's app said it would—a squat concrete building with boarded windows, a faded sign reading CITY BIOMEDICAL RESEARCH DIVISION hanging crooked above the entrance. No lights. No guards. Just a chain looped through the door handles, cut clean through, like someone had already broken in before them.

"Somebody's been here recently," Reyes said, examining the cut chain.

"Or somebody left in a hurry," Priya said.

They pushed inside. The lobby was dark except for one working terminal near the back wall, its screen glowing pale blue, untouched, waiting. Priya crossed the room straight to it, fingers already moving over the keyboard before anyone could ask if that was a good idea.

"Priya," Marcus said. "Careful."

"I know what I'm doing. I used systems like this for three years." Her fingers kept moving, pulling up directories, scanning file names. "This is old outbreak modeling software. Population density mapping, infection spread projections—"

"That sounds like exactly what we need," Reyes said, standing guard near the door with Mrs. Hart and Elena behind him.

"It's more than that." Priya's voice went tight. She pulled up a new file, a map of the city with color-coded zones and timestamps layered over it. "Marcus. Look at this."

He crossed to her side and looked at the screen. A map of the district, split into sectors, each one marked with a release timestamp. The subway platform where it all started sat dead center, timestamped 6:04 PM. Exact to the minute Marcus had watched the first man collapse.

"This isn't a model," Marcus said slowly. "This is a record."

"A record of what already happened," Priya said. "Somebody logged the release before it went live. This isn't projection software predicting an outbreak. This is deployment software confirming one."

Reyes looked over from the door. "You're saying somebody planned exactly where and when this thing would start."

"I'm saying somebody planned exactly where and when it would spread," Priya said. She scrolled further down the file, and her face went pale. "There's a secondary release zone flagged. Scheduled cleanup radius, forty-eight hours out."

Marcus leaned closer to read the coordinates himself, and his stomach dropped clean through the floor.

"That's Elena's school," he said.

Elena, still standing near Reyes and Mrs. Hart, caught the tone in his voice even without hearing the details. "Dad? What's wrong?"

"Nothing, baby. Give me one second."

Priya kept working, copying the file to her own device as fast as the old terminal would allow. "I'm pulling everything I can. Deployment logs, release coordinates, whoever authorized this program in the first place."

The screen flickered once, then twice.

"Priya," Reyes said, watching the terminal. "Something's wrong."

"I see it." Her fingers moved faster. "Copy's almost done, just give me—"

The lights in the annex died all at once, replaced a second later by a dim red emergency glow. The terminal screen flashed a message across it in stark white letters: ACCESS LOGGED — SECURITY NOTIFIED.

"That's not good," Reyes said, already moving toward the door, rifle up.

A heavy clunk echoed from somewhere in the walls, metal against metal, and the door Reyes had just been standing near sealed shut on its own, some mechanism Marcus hadn't even known existed locking it from the inside.

"The door," Mrs. Hart said, voice rising. "The door just locked itself."

Priya yanked her phone free the second the file transfer finished, tucking it away fast. "I got what we need. All of it."

"Great," Reyes said, throwing his shoulder against the sealed door without moving it an inch. "Except now we're locked in a building that just told whoever's watching exactly where we are."

Elena grabbed Marcus's hand, her small fingers gripping tight. "Dad, I don't like this place."

"Neither do I," Marcus said, scanning the dark room for another way out, another door, a vent, anything. Somewhere above them, faint through the ceiling, footsteps started moving—slow, deliberate, coming closer, and nothing about the rhythm sounded like it belonged to anyone infected.