She kills with the burning purity of her touch, a ghost delivering death to all unlucky enough to cross her path. This is her fate, her future. She spent an entire decade (and half of another) sealed behind concrete and glass. To save her, they said, but she knows the truth. They never wanted to cleanse her of the sickness. They were determined to control it again, force it to become an obedient minion again, but the virus cannot be stopped. Even she holds no real power over it. All she knows is that her touch brings death, and that is enough.
Humanity as a whole cannot comprehend such knowledge. They aren't prepared to rule over life and death. But human beings are curious and clever, and this is what happens when a curious child lifts the lid off of Pandora's Box.
She passes through the corridors without challenge. No one dares stop her, and she dares not stop from her mission. Spread the Death as far as you can, then the prisoners can be rescued. She thinks she's finished her work, but she's compelled to round the Sector once again. There might be others still alive, and they cannot be given that burden. All must be killed, else no hope will be left.
A howl of anguish from someone below her. The virus has already ravaged this man's body and his sanity. He weeps blood from sightless eyes, tracks of it running down his sunken cheeks. He's a soldier, or so the uniform suggests. Now he's a dead man, and she stoops to caress his cheek with the same soft fingertips she used to doom the entire facility.
"Al...somebody's...alive?" It's difficult for him to speak around his swollen tongue, but he manages. "Can't...see..." He swallows and tastes his own blood trickling down his throat, warm and familiar. It's all he's had to ingest for days.
"Shhhhhh..." She places a finger on his cracked lips, studying the young man's face. He was handsome, once. Desirably so. Broad-shouldered, sharp-featured. She imagines his dead eyes as keen and knowing. Perhaps he had family in Valhalla Sector. The son of a politician perhaps, or the son of a soldier. Every death takes away a son or a daughter. A husband, wife, mother, father.
She's responsible for it all, and she prays for God to forgive her.
For a moment, the young man's features are intimately familiar; he wears Markus' face. Markus' eyes bleed. Markus' mouth is split and dry and his voice creaks from the hollows of his chest. She gasps and blinks, relieved when the face shifts back to the young man's. This would have been Markus' fate had she stayed with him, locked behind glass or no. She would lose the one person in this world whom she couldn't live without.
She eases forward and cradles the man's head in her arms. It's the first time she's hugged another human being in sixteen years, and she feels no joy, no relief. She's empty, used up. So tired.
He rages against her, howling for his mother, and after a few moments, convinces himself that she is his mother. "I'm sorry!" he wails. "I'm so so sorry..." His breath gurgles in and out of his fluid-filled lungs. It won't be long before...
...he stops.
She releases him from her embrace, allowing the body to slump to the floor. Her clothes are damp with his blood. She wanders, encountering more like the mock-Markus: all dead or close to it. They hear her coming, though their vision fails. They all cry out for help, but she cannot aid. How could she when she had a central role in their apocalypse?
She stumbles towards a section of living quarters, rummages through the closets and the drawers until she discovers something more suitable for her than the blood-soaked pantsuit she's worn for too many days.
On the final day of her life, Meaghan Lee Rose wears white.