ONCE INSIDE, PETER BUTTRESSED the armoire against the door.

He suddenly felt painfully alone. Too much had happened in the last few days, and he was suffering from the shock of loss. Ears had died, along with Stu and Polly. Molli was now gone and hopefully safe from their immediate threat in Boston. He was regretting letting her go alone and wouldn’t know her status until she contacted him later that night. And there was a new, unknown plague that appeared to be sweeping across the world’s major cities.

He returned to his laptop and opened multiple browser windows for various reports on local Boston traffic. Interstate 90 was clear with a few slowdown areas toward the western part of the city. With luck, Molli would be past Syracuse before darkness fell, and she’d keep driving until reaching Bemidji late morning the next day.

“Peter,” he remembered her saying before she left, “I may need to pee my pants to avoid getting out of the car. Please pack some kitchen towels at the top of the garbage bags.”

As the hours wore into the afternoon, the situation became increasingly grim in Europe and the Middle East. Similar cases were being reported in New York City, and Boston was next, in his mind. The President and other national officials came onto the live feeds at various times during the day, reminding people not to panic, to stay home and avoid work or public places until the threat was understood. By 5 p.m., the day seemed so long he could hardly recall their morning interview with Hats.

An hour later, the news became official. In concert with other global leaders, the President had agreed to inform the public. This wasn’t an optimal time, given that most of Asia was still asleep and Europe, Africa, and the Middle East were in the late hours of the evening. Peter listened intently on a single feed.

The President began his monologue with a slow, deliberate delivery.

“Scientists around the world confirmed that virulent geedee tech agents have been dispersed in major cities across the globe. We assume this is an act of terror, but no groups have self-identified. What baffled our scientists in the earlier part of the day, when significant numbers of cases were first reported, is that this tech has an advanced ability to jump from organism to organism. They determined that one bacterium in the same family as the Bubonic Plague is the primary causal agent.”

“No shit,” Peter mumbled.

“This gene drive jumping or scroll mechanism appears to easily replicate withing certain other types of bacteria, allowing common germs like Staph, Salmonella, and E. coli to become carriers of the same set of virulent code. It’s basically CRISPR tech turned back on itself for nefarious means, for those of you who understand. This explains why the illness spread so quickly across Europe, the Middle East, and African continents. It is imperative that all citizens stay at home until otherwise notified. Only essential services and law enforcement personnel as designated by governors or mayors in their respective areas are to be out on the streets.”

Peter stopped listening for a moment. He understood what this meant. People would either obey or not obey, but the latter case was most likely.

“Who will stay in any city after this? They’ll be graveyards,” he thought. “Thank God, Molli has a five-plus hour head start. But she needs to get past Chicago metro and any roadblocks. Crap.”

He envisioned millions of Chicagoans leaving at this moment for rural areas of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, despite the mandate to stay put.

“Damn, I should have mapped an alternate course for her between Cleveland and Pittsburgh, or even Kentucky. Stupid! How could I be so stupid?”

The lights suddenly flickered on and off for a minute, then the electricity shut off completely. He ran upstairs to peer out the bedroom window.

“Fuck. This entire section of the city looks affected.”

Rushing downstairs guided by the ambient light left in the day, he snatched his laptop to check if the internet was still working.

“Yes!” he exclaimed. “Modem and router still on from Ears’ battery backups. Fantastic.”

Anticipating a long stretch without electricity, Peter located a coat and pair of ski underlayer pants, then scrambled back to his laptop. The emergency press conference continued with a host of white-coated scientists nervously positioned behind the speaker at the podium.

“Geedee tech is involved,” the speaker confirmed, “along with a mixture of human and synthetic DNA. We’re getting reports as well of other geedee released across the globe, including various human-mammalian strains. We cannot determine whether these strains were actively released or accidental adjuncts to the primary infectious agents.”

An elderly lady approached from the white-coated crowd behind the speaker and whispered something into the speaker’s ear. Then he turned back to the microphone.

“We also just had confirmation of our multiple tests in major cities across the United States. The organism commonly known as Toxo has been released into various environments and is now present in the water systems of most large cities. In recent testing, we discovered the Toxo organism has been modified to become highly hydrophilic, or water-loving, with the ability to replicate in water-bound systems and organisms. This could explain the larger fish kills the world has experienced recent days.”

Someone angrily yelled ‘terrorists’ from the sparse crowd, and the speaker felt he had to respond.

“As the President said, no credible claim has been made that any pathogen releases are associated with terrorist groups. In addition,” he advised, glancing to his right where the President stood with a frown on his pallid face, “we have no evidence that any pathogen has a unique or unexpected capability. In other words, it’s not appropriate to ascribe any of these pathogens to an extraterrestrial presence or the obelisk. What’s been found thus far is technology pre-existent in our own society, or variations upon current capabilities. Per the President’s request, we ask the American people not to jump to conclusions regarding the origin of this cocktail of biotech. I’ll say it again. Everything we found so far is either a known product of human manufacture or a variation thereof.”

“That won’t help things,” Peter thought. “In fact, it might make it worse. At least if it was the alien threat, we’d grasp that the end is near. If it’s humans, who knows what other nastiness someone may have up their sleeves?”

Another reporter asked, “Is this one country or terrorist group mixing this cocktail, or multiple?”

The speaker responded. “The Toxo has a hydrophilic capability that other species in the mix don’t possess. Our data shows the timing of the Toxo precedes this most recent outbreak.”

“How many bacteria or viruses are in the cocktail?” the reporter continued.

“I don’t intend to give the impression that all bacteria were released in the same batch, as if someone poured a glass of various poisons into a fountain. What we are seeing may result from multiple releases across many geographies, a few at a time, or even a single pathogen armed with a motile, transmittable synthetic biotech. We’re still testing.”

“More than a hundred?”

The speaker shook his head. “In that range, possibly. Easily in that range. We’ll determine more the next few hours.”

Peter lowered the volume and pushed the laptop aside. Placing his hands at the back of his head, he closed his eyes and took a deep breath. Molli was out there, no doubt stuck in traffic somewhere in upstate New York or overcome by armed bandits who wanted to steal her food – or worse.

“Stupid, stupid me,” he mouthed. “We are living in BioEthel’s nightmare scenario or in Eugenie’s dystopia. Or it’s a result of a converted whiskey still from a yokel out in the woods like Stu mentioned – times a thousand.”

The lights flickered back on just as the news cut away from the President’s press conference to a reporter at a national desk. Peter raised the laptop’s volume.

“News just in from our Asia desk. It’s unverified by our government, but nuclear explosions are being reported by news agencies in central or southeast Asia. This could include countries as far west as Georgia and Ukraine, or as far east as Indonesia or the Philippines. We had previously reported that armed organizations in certain countries were planning attacks on their perceived enemies whose governments are increasingly fragile as they cope with their immediate post-obelisk social crises. We’ll cut back now to the President’s press conference and keep you posted as additional details are obtained.”

“Oh, my God,” Peter agonized. “Fucking humans heaping pain upon pain. I wonder if my friend the Welcomer was right – this is how the end begins. I wish he was here now to link his Biblical prophecy to the mess we face.”

Peter’s gut sense told him the end could be on the near horizon, for him and everyone else. But his compulsion to complete his task drove him to recall Molli’s last request for an interview with Stoicholic. He spoke aloud, not caring if anyone could hear.

“Is that guy about Stoicism, or stoichiometry? I assume it’s a guy. I can’t recall after this red-letter day. His interview is supposed to be Sunday. I hope Molli joins from Bemidji. This final interview, and it could be our last ever. Molli edited the others and added the front and back stings. I’ll log-in and play them out and make sure we’re good. After that, I’m out of here – assuming I can get out of here.”

Muting the video volume again, he forced himself to verbally plan out his vital work.

“Unager plays tomorrow. After that, Brokers runs Wednesday the 28th, and the Hats interview from this morning will run a week from tomorrow. God, then we’ll be past this horrific October and into a more hopeful November. I can play Stoicholic on the 4th. Four more to go. Such a tense slog it’s been, and everything that can go wrong has gone wrong. I hate to sound pessimistic, but I’m being a realist for once. Molli would be proud of me for following-through. I need to let the anxious craziness slide away and push myself through this difficult period, just like she said with meditating. Better go check both bathtubs to ensure the water hasn’t leaked out. It can’t get worse than this.”

At 8 p.m., Peter turned his phone on for ten minutes. He waited for Molli’s text, email, or phone call – but nothing came in. His last threatening text, presumably from a radicalized mech, had occurred more than three days ago.

He decided to risk leaving the phone on a little longer, waiting to the half hour. Her message never arrived, so he shut his phone off for fear of being tracked.

That night, he heard with regularity the rat-a-tat-tat of automatic weapons fire and the occasional loud explosion in the distance.

“Must be in the heavy mech areas of Boston,” he hoped, “but not yet Cambridge.”

Peering out the bedroom window, he could see the evidence of several large fires. The night was eerily void of emergency sirens beyond the occasional car alarm that would start and stop as it ran out of battery.

Fearful someone could still enter through the front door with enough force, he decided to sleep downstairs on the sofa bed. Exhausted and unable to stay awake, Peter pulled the covers over his head.

“How many millions of people met their end today? How many tomorrow?” he wondered.

* * *

Peter awoke in a daze at 7 a.m., frazzled from restless sleep and stress. Without switching on lights that might alert someone unfriendly to enter, he quietly walked upstairs and peered outside. Four inches of snow had fallen. Cambridge seemed for a moment like the peaceful place he had known for many years.

Just then, a large explosion occurred a few miles away, rattling his windows and shaking the ground. Gunfire erupted once again.

The electricity had remained on during the night, but he was uncertain how long that might continue. Opening his laptop, he could find no evidence of current outage reports online. Then he checked the news.

“Two hundred million estimated dead in Europe” he mumbled. “Transmission to the United States. Reports from the night just coming in. The President urges all to stay at home.”

His hands shaking, he searched his usual news feeds. Many were down entirely, and he assumed the servers were incapacitated from power shutdowns.

Because Molli had not contacted him at 8 p.m., he decided to turn his phone back on at 8 a.m., thinking she might have gotten the instructions confused after the long drive. Another image flashed before his mind of Molli driving through the snow on unplowed roads in the Minnesota wilderness, her eyes bloodshot and a few soaked pee rags discarded on the floor. Minutes before that time, he searched around the condo for his phone.

“Damn, where did I put it?”

The search got more frantic. At ten after, he finally saw it on the bottom shelf of a white wicker table in Molli’s bathroom.

“You can’t be this stupid, you freaking idiot!” he snapped.

He turned the phone’s power on and waited anxiously for it to register with the network, then instantly checked his texts but saw nothing. Despite the risk, he left the phone on for a few more minutes and still received no messages.

“Dude, just push the texts to online. Tracking my texts on fixed is less dangerous.”

Disappointed that Molli had sent no messages but unable to do anything about it, he dug back into the news feeds. Few active sites from the national media were available, and some reports trailed off mid-sentence as if the camera crews died in place. With the lack of national news, he searched for sources outside the country, finally finding a live one from Columbia.

“Damn,” he whispered, “and I’m the guy who screwed around and learned nothing in my Spanish courses.”

But he didn’t need to interpret the reports to understand what they were saying. The images implied enough. One video of Rome taken from a cellphone camera showed vehicles precariously stopped on the roads. Bodies were littered in disarray on the streets where it appeared people writhed in pain before dying. The next video was Norfolk, Virginia where bodies of sailors were washing-up on shore.

“Muerte in dos a quatro horas,” he uttered. “God, it’s taking only two to four hours from infection to death.”

His mind raced. How long could he last here? What was the risk of staying? Because he was in a condo, it was likely that many other people were within lethal proximity. How did the pathogens travel? What if infected snowmelt on the front porch seeped indoors through the door sill? Or was it airborne transmission? If so, this place was not safe, not with many others close by who were breathing the same air.

He searched frantically for the HVAC system but couldn’t determine if the air entered from a centralized source or if each condo unit had its own individual system.

“Is this modified Toxo already in Boston’s water system? Is the water in the two bathroom tubs infected?” he wondered.

He then recalled his stash of sodas in his small garage basement at his house.

“Those could last a few months,” he calculated, “and they wouldn’t be infected.”

Peter placed his hands over his pounding heart. “Calm, dude. If you die, you die.”

After a few more hours of scanning the reports of massive deaths across the globe, he was getting thirsty.

“Damn, Ears, I wish you were a soda drinker! You were so into the anti-aging food. I don’t know if this tub water is tainted or not, but I must drink something, and how would I know if it is? Would I start talking out loud to myself as if someone could hear me in this empty room? I’m already doing that.”

Minutes later, he heard voices outside. That was not good. Until now, he’d noticed little activity outside the condo beyond a few car doors slamming, which he assumed was from people leaving town.

The voices got closer.

A loud shot rang out from the other side of his door. He flew from the couch to take cover behind the thick wood of the armoire, then searched for the saber. It was where he had placed it the prior night, beneath the couch.

He pulled the laptop quietly from the coffee table. With hands trembling, he scanned the screen for the icon.

“Where is that little bastard camera icon? Ah, there!” he mouthed.

The cameras activated on his screen, giving him a view of three large men outside his door. One was banging hard on it with both hands.

“Mechs!”

The condo’s front steel door started buckling where the mech on the other side was pounding. Then he saw one of them pull a large crowbar from a pant leg and wedge it between the door and jamb.

The bolt lock began to snap. Hunching down onto the floor, he pushed his shoulder against the armoire and dug his heels into the carpet. The three mechs were using their combined force, causing the door to open slightly.

He felt the cold rush of outdoor air invading his space. Just above the lock, one of the mechs pushed his hand through the crack that formed, attempting to wedge the door open further.

Peter seized the saber in his right hand and stopped his resistance against the armoire for a moment. With one quick downward stroke of his arm, he sliced the man’s hand off at the wrist, watching in disbelief as it fell to the carpet. Blood spurted from the arteries, and the arm retreated.

In the moment that Peter removed his resistance, the armoire moved backward slightly and raised up on its edge, causing it to wedge diagonally between the heavy steel doorknob and the carpet-tile separator. The men kept pushing, but the resistance of the wedged armoire outmatched their combined strength.

Still hiding behind the armoire, he heard two more piercing shots of gunfire through the door. Then there was a momentary silence, except for whispered voices.

A fist banged loudly on the wall beside him, a few feet to the right of where the armoire was wedged. He saw a hand crash through both the brick outside wall and indoor drywall. The mech’s complete upper arm was now exposed.

Grabbing the saber again, but cautious they might shoot through the door or the wall, he crawled a step forward to slice off the man’s arm.

Suddenly, more shots rang out. But these were more distant, not from the mechs.

He heard a few brief screams and moans but had no idea what was happening. Staring again at the mech’s arm, he watched as the fist slowly opened, then relaxed. It twitched for a few seconds. All motion and sound halted.

Peter waited for death to return. He continued pushing against the armoire, ready to use the sabre in his last act on Earth.

But there were no more gunshots, no movement of the arm, and no pushing at the door. He was afraid to move at all for fear that someone passing by might notice. Perhaps they were quietly waiting for him outside.

“Nobody is that patient,” he thought. Remembering the arm protruding through the wall, he became concerned that someone coming by could remove the body, then peek through the large hole and find him there.

He checked the cameras via his laptop. The three men were clearly dead. All were missing their heads, and two of the dismembered heads were visible within camera range.

“It wasn’t just bullets,” he mumbled. “Don’t puke, don’t puke. Life is instantly different now, so get used to it.”

His entire body was shaking both from fear and the cold air pouring in through the bloodied crack in the door.

“I must leave,” he mumbled. “Ears’ condo is no longer a safe place for me.”

He closed his eyes and imagined running through the snow to his house.

“Cycling jacket and pants. Tennis shoes. Backpack cinched with laptop and cord. Saber under arm. Only three miles to my house, with strong legs from bicycling. And if the house is not habitable, or if someone’s there? Take it as it comes, live by your wits, Peter. These may be your end of days or not. Molli may be fighting somewhere, too. Hopefully, she’s in Bemidji. Ears never got the chance. I’ll find courage on their behalf.”

A steaming slice of pizza flashed across his mind.

“Why the hell am I thinking of Boston pizza? Hungry. Must pack light food in the backpack in case the house has been ransacked. Can’t stay here. Can’t even consider it with a hole in the wall the size of that guy’s massive bicep. Once that body is moved, anybody can see inside. Plus, the door is no longer lockable. They can peer through that crack just as easily. No other choices, so I must leave now.”

He ran upstairs into the bedroom, dressing in an instant. Rushing down to the kitchen, he crammed a few handfuls of ramen noodle packages into his backpack, then added his phone, cord, and laptop. Placing the bloodied saber under his arm, he looked around the condo once more to ensure he had forgotten nothing.

Peter surveyed his exit. The door jamb and lock were pulled apart, and the armoire was tightly wedged. He pushed the key in the lock and turned it to the right, but it didn’t budge. Forcing it, the key snapped in the lock. Darting into the kitchen, he returned with a Phillips screwdriver and a picture hammer with a claw end. He carefully removed the screws from the face of the lock, then pulled it apart and pushed the other end outside. Next, he slipped the claw under the carpet separator and gradually extracted a few of the nails.

Halfway through the process, the armoire started to slip under the carpet. It landed with a loud crack on the tile floor.

“Jesus. I’m sure everyone heard that!” he groaned.

With the pack tightly attached to his back, he dragged the armoire onto the carpet to create just enough room to open the door.

“Last chance,” he uttered.

Poking his head out, he searched for signs of life and saw nothing. The bodies of three beheaded mechs lay before him, each with bullet holes at various locations in their bodies. Their cold white corpses were already freezing in the snow and blood.

The gruesomeness of the scene was not lost on him.

“Who could do that?” he wondered. “Shot first, then beheaded? That’s pissed off."