It’s Not Easy Making Money In The Apocalypse

There was a flash of light, and I appeared once again in the hallways of the defunct laboratory. Of course, I didn’t bring the monster with me. Once his body had burned down enough that I was confident I would start the factory on fire if I left, I returned to the world of the Apocalypse. The place had taken on an eerie feeling, even though the monster was gone. It was too quiet and smelled wrong.

Pulling out a beef jerky I had purchased from the gas station and biting into it, I considered my next action. I had brought a took kit with me. If I couldn’t find that valve, then it was still possible I could get that door open. I even put a welding kit into my digitizer if needed. My eyes went to the console where I had locked Zara between the automatic and manual doors that lead outside. I couldn’t hear her banging or yelling. Had she already given up hope?

Part of me wanted to plug the Perco in and let her out, but we still couldn’t get out of the colony for certain unless I found that valve. Furthermore, I still had one place left I wanted to visit. I wanted to see whatever legacy that doctor had. Considering the difficulty he left me, he at least owed it to me to give something. It felt a bit selfish, but I didn’t want to have to share anything I found with Zara, or even let her know that I had found anything.

I pulled my hand back and quietly stepped away. I barely knew Zara, and she hadn’t done anything for me. She could wait another hour while I searched for the valve. I headed in the opposite direction from the direction I had originally come, and when I came upon a sign that was still readable that said Laboratories, I knew I was heading the right way.

Before I made it to that laboratory, there was a mess hall. When I came out into that room, my body couldn’t help but freeze. It appeared like a bomb had gone off in the mess room. In the center was a skeleton of some kind of creature. It wasn’t massive, but it look menacing. Weapons seemed to be graphed into its skeleton and appeared to have been shot many times before finally collapsing in the center of the room. It was surrounded by dozens of bodies, which had eventually melted into an oil puddly in the middle of the room. As I took a step forward, the Geiger counter started to go off.

I noticed a body slumped over near the entrance. He seemed to be clutching something obvious now that the hand had become skeletal. I cautiously reached over and peeled the hand open, pulling out what looked to be a recorder. My finger hit a button as I picked it up, a miniaturized CD popped out. I blinked a second, before taking it popping it into a slot on my Perco. A moment later, audio began to play.

“We’ve managed to get the bioweapon cornered in the cafeteria. Send more firepower! We can bring it down.” A man cried while roars and gunfire were going off nearby.

“That won’t be necessary. The facility is going into permanent lockdown.”

“Lockdown? What do you mean lockdown? There are still people in here.”

“We’ve decided that the risk of continuing this facility is no longer viable given then encroaching virus. This facility will be abandoned and we’ll be retreating to the main facility. Current facility assets will be abandoned.”

“Alright, alright… we might be able to trap the bioweapon in here.” The man seemed to be thinking. “Just give us fifteen minutes to retreat.”

“You misunderstand. All assets will be abandoned.”

“What’s that sound? That’s the manual doors! Once closed, they can’t be opened! You bastards are trapping us in here?”

“Lethal levels of mutagenic gas will now be released through the facility.” The was a sound of hissing.

“You bastards! You bastards… agghh… fuck… you… cough… you…”

The fire slowly dwindled, while the sound of screaming diminished. The guy didn’t say anything else. The final sound on the disk was him collapsing to the ground. The disk stopped, and when it popped back out, I carefully set it back in the guy’s hands. This was the final proof of what happened in this place.

“That… abomination with the eyes… that wasn’t the weapon, was it?” I asked quietly.

“It appears not,” Cecelia spoke. “Mutagenic gas was developed with the MGV in mind. It kills all MGV and mutated creatures. However, at high enough concentrations it can kill humans too, and at low concentrations, it can cause rapid mutations similar to the MGV virus. Someone might have survived by closing the automatic doors to stop the gas from getting through. Some of the mutagenic gas must have leaked in and over the years mutated them to that point.”

The real weapon wasn’t some slow-moving abomination of flesh and eyeballs.  It was a zombie with weapons attached to him. He hadn’t been able to survive the mutagenic gas any better than the rest of the people.

“What about the gas?”

“It would have dissipated a long time ago,” Cecelia responded. “Zara would have been affected by it before you were if it was still around in deadly enough levels.”

“I see…”

There were so many dangers to the wasteland, and some of them I hadn’t even considered a possibility before. I wasn’t an adventurer. I shouldn’t even be in this place, risking my life. I just wanted to make money. I had allowed greed and a desire for more wealth quicker to lead me to this dangerous place where I nearly died. In the future, I’d stick to being a merchant.

With a sigh, I continued. I might still be in trouble. It sounded like the valve we need didn’t exist. It was always their intention for that door to be one way. I still wanted to give it a chance though. Maybe there was something we could do. If all else failed, I still had the welding torch, but that could take hours or even days. I had the food, but what about Zara? Why is she started getting hungry for blood? I didn’t want to become her last meal.

It wasn’t too far from the mess when I ran into the laboratories. Most of them were locked, but I wasn’t in the mood to go randomly poking in places where live MGV was being stored and researched anyway. All I needed was to get infected and become a feral or something. Instead, my eyes were aimed at the names on the doors, and it was when I came to Doctor Anweil’s nameplate that I knew I was in the right place.

His door was locked, but all that lock required was a plugin from my Perco and I was able to override it. Walking into his lab, I could see a large tube that had been shattered. That was probably what housed his bioweapon. There was a computer terminal, a lab bench, and other stuff, but most of it was a wreck. The monster had been released here, so it had naturally laid havoc on the lab before leaving. Just about everything was smashed or broken.

That’s when my eyes landed on a corpse in the corner. It was just a skeleton, but they were wearing a lab coat, and on the breast was the name Norman. This was the scientist who I had been reading about. He was both a genius and a monster. I noticed he was lying right under a keypad. I might not have even noticed it if he wasn’t right there. The pad was not against anything and was even flush with the wall. There were no lights. The only way you could see it was the dim shape of the numbers just colored slightly off from the rest of the wall. It was made more obvious by the years of dirt, so that helped me see it as well.

“2-5-3-1.”

I entered the numbers. There was no Perco slot or anything. I had considered that this might be a trap or something. Maybe there was a bioweapon 2, although if such a thing existed, it would have been long dead. I supposed that was why I decided to take the risk. I heard a clicking noise, and then an area of the wall popped open. It was completely hidden. I didn’t know if this was something this guy had built, or if the facility just happened to have it. If the latter was true, it seemed like that would have made it useless for him to keep it.

I walked over and swung open the door, revealing three items on the inside. There was a syringe with some kind of liquid in it, a Perco mod, and a medium-sized blade that sort of looked like a machete. The final item was a note, written on plain paper. I pulled it out, and although it was aged and the scratch was messy, I just managed to make out what it said.

If you’re seeing this, then I am dead. I always predicted that this would be an inevitability. I’m unable to just leave my intellectual property forgotten. I never had children, but I still wish for my legacy to live on. That’s why I’ve left these three things, the culmination of my life’s work. The blade is a negative ion saber. The blade itself isn’t powerful, but it can use crystals to coat itself in a negative ion coating which allows it to cut through anything. The chip isn’t a Perco mod, but a Perco mod modifier. If you attach it to a Perco mod, it overclocks the mod. This is perfectly safe. You don’t need to worry about toasting your mods. Perco was always far too cautious when taping into the capability of their devices. Who needed 100,000 years of life on a battery anyway?

I’ve tested it on a few mods already. If you have a shield mod, it can increase the number of hits. If you have an inventory mod, it can increase the size. It’s that kind of item. As for the final syringe… this is the cure for the MGV. That’s right. I figured it out. However, it can only be administered through injection, and the person injected usually dies unless you can get it to them before they transform into a feral. It doesn’t matter. How will it help our current situation? If we can inject someone, we can put a bullet in their head. It also doesn’t immunize someone or anything. It’s just a one-time cure that only works during the two-week asymptomatic period before infection takes hold. Perhaps it could cure a mutant, although I’ve never tested it on a living mutant before. This is all I have left. This is my legacy. Take it, and remember I was the one who cured the MGV.

Doctor A.