novelraw Chapter 457: Not On His Watch
Chapter 457: Not On His Watch
Agent Kade didn’t bother looking up from the book he was reading when the console alarm went off.
Region T’s systems screamed every day, and half of those alerts weren’t worth the coffee he drank while ignoring them let alone putting down his book when they were just about to discover the dead body.
Normally, they turned themselves off after someone at the location discovered they were going off, but even after ten minutes, this one didn’t stop.
Instead, the sound sharpened, climbed even higher in sound and urgency, and refused to reset itself. All that told him more about the situation than the tech beside him could. He put down his book, pushed away from the desk with a slow exhale, and stepped toward the primary monitor as the header populated across the top in thick, ugly red.
CONTAINMENT LOSS – LAB T-9
SIGNATURE: UNRESOLVED
MORTALITY: 100%
SURVIVORS: NONE
EXTERNAL INTERFERENCE: CONFIRMED
The tech swore under his breath, tapping keys with a frantic rhythm that told Kade he had no idea what to do next.
Rolling his eyes, Kade let out a long sigh. He really didn’t need the dramatics of a tech who could only read the handbook but not know what to do next.
T-9 was a hardened site, buried under reinforced steel and staffed with people too paranoid to open doors without half a dozen verifications. If it went dark, it wasn’t because of a power outage or a lazy guard.
"Get me satellite replay," Kade ordered, already sure about what had happened. If T-9 went down, it could only be because it was the end of the world.
Again.
The frantic sound of a keys being hit made he close his eyes. It was nice that the tech was able to find a job when most people were finding graves, but it would have been nicer if he actually could control his emotions just a little bit more.
"It’s corrupted," the tech said after a moment, his breaths coming out in pants like he had just ran a race. "The whole file chain is scrambled."
Kade pressed his thumb against the bridge of his nose and counted to three. "Give me whatever is left. Anything that didn’t fry."
Finally, the remaining feeds loaded one by one. Static chewed the edges as the color shifted between washed-out green and oversaturated red.
But the good news was that there was a picture buried underneath, and it took only a moment for it to appear.
A figure moved through one of the interior corridors without protective gear, without a weapon, and without a single sign of hesitation. Even Kade held his breath as he watched the video as the overhead lights flickered as she passed them, her stride easy and unbothered, like she was walking through tall grass instead of a restricted research facility.
Someone inhaled sharply when the frame caught her face.
White hair. Pale skin. Eyes that didn’t look like they reflected light the way human eyes should. She reached toward a man in a lab coat and tore something from his chest in a single, unbroken motion. The tech flinched back as if he was scared she would come through the video and kill him next.
But Kade wasn’t worried about that. He was concentrating too much on the image as another host lunged at her from the side. She turned, caught it, and broke its spine across a counter with no more effort than someone snapping a twig.
The entire lab flatlined two minutes after she entered.
Kade watched the replay without speaking, absorbing the fragments the way he always did when something inside Region T veered off the pattern. When the feed ended, he leaned one hand on the console and let the silence stretch long enough that the tech shifted nervously in his seat.
"Sir," the tech finally murmured, "what do we classify her as? She doesn’t match any category. She’s not a standard host. She’s not patient-zero material. She’s not anything that we have on file or has been documented."
Kade straightened and grabbed his gear from the chair. "She’s a problem," he finally said after a while. He picked up his coffee that was now colder than he liked and chugged the rest of it. "Get me the black-badge squad. Full kit. Full protocol. If she walks into another site, we aren’t getting a second chance at taking her out."
The tech swallowed hard and hit the emergency dispatch tabs with hands that trembled just enough to annoy Kade. He didn’t bother watching the man try to steady himself.
Region T had turned far stronger people into twitching piles of nerves, and T-9 was the kind of place that only failed if something worse than its blueprints walked inside.
A row of confirmation lights blinked across the communication panel. The channel opened into the ready bay with a hiss of recycled air.
"This is Black-Badge shift lead," a woman answered, her tone clipped and awake. "What’s the situation?"
Kade pulled the corded mic toward himself. "We have a total loss at T-9," he announced. "Full mortality. No survivors. External interference confirmed. You’re wheels-up in ten."
There was a sharp pause on the other end. "Interference by who?"
Kade glanced at the frozen frame still sitting on the primary monitor. The woman’s white hair. The torn clothes. The way she had watched the host under the gurney thrash before calmly ending it with her hands.
"Not a who," he replied with a shake of his head. "A what."
He released the mic and grabbed the tablet the tech finally managed to unfreeze.
The system had salvaged twenty-three seconds of coherent footage before the internal circuits died. He scrubbed through quickly until he reached the cleanest clip—the woman... no, the female because he didn’t know if she was human or not, stepping into the containment bay, not breaking stride.
He tilted the screen to the tech. "Where did her signature go after she left?"
The tech dragged a window open, relief obvious when the system didn’t crash again. "We caught her on three exterior sensors before they burned out. Last direction pinged southeast. Toward the old Omega corridor."
"Traffic?"
"Dead," the tech said. "Nothing out there except abandoned road and—" He hesitated long enough for Kade to lift an eyebrow. "—and one vehicle. Black truck. Old model. Five heat signatures inside. One in the truck bed. Looks like a large canine."
Kade didn’t react. "She joined them?"
"Looks that way. They stopped near the outpost ruins. She walked straight into their formation like she’d always been there."
That was the part that mattered.
Something like her did not join humans. It tolerated them...used them.
Picked its own timing before ripping humans apart.
He had seen it countless times before. Humans were now an endangered species, and he wasn’t going to let another monster go on his watch.