Chapter 15: Resurrection

*

GenTek Morgue.

A place where not the temperature but darkness itself carried a chill and seeped into everything. Dim fluorescent lights trembled as they spilled their glow over the corpse lying on a stainless-steel table.

Two researchers pushed through the door. To them, corpses were routine, and death was merely a mechanical procedure.

"Hey... I remember this guy."

The first researcher muttered as he peered at the corpse's face.

"He was a Blacklight researcher."

"Yeah. A former researcher now, though."

The other replied indifferently. He already held a thick file containing the corpse's profile.

Lightly flipping through the pages, he read aloud.

"His name is... Alex J. Mercer. Next of kin: Dana Mercer."

"His wife, maybe?"

"Who knows."

Their conversation was as dry as if they were sorting paperwork on a desk. Mercer's death was nothing more than another “sample” to them.

Tap.

The dissection tool cart came to a stop beside the table, its sharp steel instruments gleaming mercilessly beneath the lights.

"Do you think this will be useful for Test No. 51?"

One researcher said.

"No idea. And I don't want to know. Just hand me the eight-inch scalpel."

The tool was passed over, and the instant the researcher's fingertips touched the corpse's rib cage...

"...Let's start with the torso."

Clack— Something moved beneath the muscle. The scalpel fell, striking the metal tray with a loud crash.

Then, the next instant—

The sound of breath bursting forth.

"...Hahk!"

It escaped the dead man's lungs.

Alex Mercer slowly opened his eyes, like a man being dragged out of a deep sleep.

The fluorescent light enveloped his murky vision, the scents in the air entered his lungs—and with a sudden gulp of breath, he reflexively raised his upper body.

The skin around his rib cage rippled faintly. His blood vessels pulsed alive like black veins.

The two researchers staring down at him staggered back as though crushed by terror.

"Shit...! Get out of here!!"

One screamed and ran for the door.

"Call the kill team!! Right now!!!"

As the other researcher fled after him, an emergency alarm soon blared throughout the facility. Red warning lights stained the ceiling.

Mercer staggered to his feet, gripping the table. His movements were rough and creaking, as if death had not yet fully left his body—but—

Life was returning to his eyes. Or rather, something closer to the hunger of something newly born.

He pushed open the morgue door. Slowly, yet irrevocably.

Screams from outside, radio chatter, the pounding of rushing feet.

Death was not the end, but the beginning.

He took a step forward, slowly but unmistakably.

“Something” had returned.

*

...The instant I opened my eyes, I knew.

This was not the containment room I knew so well.

The cold breath of an old underground space. A desolate place that felt as though no footsteps had touched it in a century. The walls and ceiling exhaled the musty scent of old concrete, and even the air was dead.

"What the..."

I pushed myself up from the floor. The virus inside my body twitched as it inhaled the cold air, like a beast awakening in darkness.

"...It's cold."

Not because of the cold, but because I felt that if I did not speak, the silence would swallow me whole.

When I looked down, I saw my pale, exposed skin—and a single PDA lying on top of it.

I picked it up and turned it on. A map of all Manhattan floated in the darkness. One red dot blinked upon it—like a heart, like a warning, like it was calling to me.

"...Am I supposed to go here?"

That was when it happened.

A sensation like a faint murmur stirred inside me. The virus cells, the little army within me, seemed to urge me onward.

As if they were silently pleading,

“Make clothes. You can't go out like this.”

I frowned and muttered.

"...Yeah, I know. I'm embarrassed too."

Though no one was around, I had the strange feeling that someone was watching me from behind the darkness. Becoming a viral being had not killed my sense of shame.

I slowly drew in a breath.

"All right, then... today's style is..."

Blackish-red biomass flowed out from my skin,

wrapping around me and beginning to take shape. Tentacles transformed into fabric, thread, and leather, weaving clothes precisely as I imagined them.

In an instant, what formed over my body was—

A black hoodie.

A long coat with red bleeding through its lining.

Sleek black jeans and boots.

And a baseball cap with a red brim.

I brushed up my collar and muttered.

"All black... Hmm. Not bad."

My voice spread through the silent underground passage.

When I looked around, amid tunnels that seemed to stretch on forever,

there was an old hidden door.

Creak—

When I opened it, an old metal ladder stretched high toward the sky. At its end was a dull circular iron plate: a manhole cover.

"...No need to climb one rung at a time."

I gathered my strength and leaped. In an instant, amid dust scattering through the dark, I seized the final rung.

When I pushed up the manhole above my head, outside air rushed in.

Cold, harsh, free—

Air so alive it seemed to mock the twenty years I had spent imprisoned.

I whispered slowly.

"The outside world..."

Beyond the metal lid, Manhattan's breath lay open before me.

"...We meet again."

The moment I pulled myself up through the manhole, cold air seeped deep into my lungs with a numbing bite.

The night air after twenty years. The scent of freedom, breathed in for the first time.

I slowly looked around. Streetlights watched over the streets with blinking yellow eyes, while somewhere nearby, a car's brakes screamed.

Voices and footsteps mingled, as if an entire city were alive and writhing.

"...If Father is there, then surely—"

The rest of my words quietly vanished into the air.

Kir had said,

“We'll meet again.”

I turned on the PDA and looked at the red dot on its map. The location Father had entered himself. The first place I was meant to go after waking up.

"...Because I promised."

My lips traced the faintest curve. An oddly trembling expression made of anxiety and anticipation.

The emotions inside me glimmered like shattered glass. I felt dread, anticipation, and a faint, strange fear whose source I could not name.

But one thing was certain.

Mother and Father would not abandon me. They had always protected me somehow. Even in a reality like a laboratory where I could barely breathe, every word they spoke had always been why I remained alive.

"Just wait a little longer, Father, Mother. I'll be there soon."

I pulled my cap low and stepped onto Manhattan's bustling streets.

The city's air swept past me, and as I slipped silently through the crowds, I muttered to myself.

—Father and Mother are alive.

—And where he is,

—we will meet again.

That certainty, completely concealing the cruelest truth, made my steps impossibly light.

*

Manhattan.

An inhospitable city where high-rises like iron bars soared up, clawing at one another's shadows. To someone who had lived in a cramped containment room for twenty years, this place was like an immense wilderness.

The city was breathing. No, more precisely... it felt as if the city were exhaling, ready to chew me up and swallow me whole.

"...This is what they call romantic?"

I sampled the air brushing past my nose.

The smell of dust, meat, tires, people... and the subtle stench of sewerage. It was foul, but strangely, it did not disgust me.

Maybe it was because even these smells were new to me.

The path to the safehouse was like the most troublesome toy box imaginable.

It was Father's particular kind of consideration: tossing me a map and saying, “Here, figure it out yourself.”

Thanks to that, I slipped into an alleyway to avoid the crowd.

Humans were impossible to understand. They moved around so busily, yet they seemed not to know where they were going.

Did they really have destinations? Or were they rushing about just so they would not step on each other's heels?

I snorted in amusement.

"Father... honestly, this feels less like a safehouse and more like a lost-and-found center for children."

As I squeezed through the crowds, a car horn blared loudly from somewhere. It was not directed at me, but the thought still crossed my mind.

—Maybe that noise contains all twenty years of life in the outside world.

Cars were lined up one after another, overhead wires like brooms tangled across the sky, and the mouth of the alley reeked with the bizarre stench of rotting garbage.

Even so... I felt strangely calm.

New scents.

New lights.

New sounds.

At all of it, the virus within me reacted quietly. A world I knew nothing about seeped in through my senses.

"Well, it's not bad..."

I admitted that strange feeling with that casual mutter, in a tone that would have sounded utterly indifferent to anyone listening.

*

By the time I arrived at the safehouse, the sun had already sunk beneath the buildings.

The door was cleaner than I had expected, and the old lock gave way like it was surrendering the moment I touched it.

The inside was quite ordinary. A desk, a bed, an old sofa. Only faint traces remained of the scent of a living person having long ago departed.

"...I'm home."

I greeted the empty room.

Whether it was a joke,

or whether I meant it a little,

I did not really know myself.

When the words ended, a small silence drifted through the room. Naturally, there was no one who would answer me.

"Right. No one's here to say, ‘Welcome home,’ either."

I shrugged.

Should I wait until Father came? Mother too...

I felt a little foolish for thinking such things. And yet, the moment I lay down on the bed... my body sank deeply into it.

This bed was remarkably soft.

How long had no one lain here for it to feel this cool?

But... I did not dislike the coolness. Maybe because it was familiar.

My eyelids grew heavy, and my thoughts blurred like a blanket.

"...I'll just... close my eyes for a little while. Father. Mother."

Did I mean it, or was it a joke?

Even I could not tell.

And then I slowly sank into a deep darkness.

*

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