𝐀𝐈𝐍'𝐓 𝐍𝐎 𝐆𝐑𝐀𝐕𝐄 ( tlou.. )

001 | 𝘾𝙇𝙊𝙐𝘿 𝙎𝙋𝙀𝘾𝙄𝘼𝙇𝙄𝙎𝙏..

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📻 — CHAPTER ONE ..
' cloud specialist '

          THE NEEDLE OF AN empty syringe was stuck deep in the neck of an infected when a gloved hand wrapped around it and pulled it out with a grunt. Holding it up to the gas mask, the observation was easy to make: the needle was bent under heat in at least three different places. A sigh followed peacefully, as if it had aimed to give nature that which it missed at that point through the absence of the wind. The atmosphere was still over the neighborhood turned graveyard for the infected.

"There was a paper at some point affirming that you can still hear what's going on around you two minutes after death and that gives me just about a couple dozen seconds right now left to explain," the muffled voice struggled to speak to the dead Stalker from behind the mask. At that point there was no longer a matter of whether anything human remained under all what the fungi had made of the victim, because she's proven it, tested the theory and turned it into a fact, even if just for herself and Pete. 

"What I injected into your neck brings us a step closer to finding a way out of this," Wendy explained, at her usual fast paced speech, while beginning to remove the needle. Her hands were covered in plastic blue gloves, now stained almost entirely with dark blood, dried and coagulated over. 

"A cure," she tossed the needle away, far across the street. It probably rolled and stopped into another one of the bodies making the field of death look in flower. Blood mixed with dust and ruble. A massacre of infection turned yet another nature-overgrown neighborhood of Carroll into a scene that completed the painting of desolation initially abandoned into the tragedy of houses burnt and crumbled to ruin. 

"I've identified and isolated antibodies which decompose Cordycepin, then made a toxin out of them that triggers a chain reaction amongst remaining active enzymes of the host's system," she slipped the body of the syringe into her pocket. "Upon injection, they coordinate mass burning of all Cordyceps bodies it can identify inside the host. Unfortunately, it currently works too slow and it causes severe damage to any of the tissues that the fungi has infected and attached itself to."

Wendy took a moment for a single short breath, "I'm sorry for the excruciating pain you had to go through in your last moments." Looking down at the infected made it hard not to grimace. There were several stages of infection and while the first one has gotten easier to look at over the years and still see the reassembly to a human, from the second stage upwards, it was hard to swallow disgust and fear to comprehend that even if tendrils have grown out through their eyes, burst their skull and formed the first bodies of the Cordyceps fungi, a human consciousness was buried in that body turned maimed prison. "But I hope you understand."

"Hey-"

A single shouted intrusion on the hushed conversation with the corpse had Wendy grasp her shotgun and turn around with it armed and ready to fire. Keeping it up didn't last though, as the person she was showing the end of the barrel was the furthest thing from a danger to herself. "Sorry," Wendy lowered the shot gun and being offered a hand, she got herself pulled back to her feet from beside the body.

"Didn't you hear me?" Though their gas masks were blurred by blood and dust leaving close to no chance at even hoping to glimpse at each other's eyes, Wendy needed no sight of Pete's expression to tell that he had been worried sick not to hear her response. He shrugged his rifle on his back, readjusted the plastic recipient in his left hand and put the pistol in his right away.