Dr. Elena Vargas POV´s
The choice had weight. It wasn't metaphorical; the sample box was a dense, cold block of lead and polymer in my hands, heavy as a coffin.
Clang. Clang. Clang.
The boots on the ladder were no longer echoes; they were percussion, vibrating through the floorboards.
"Go!" I hissed, shoving the blinking box into the rusted maw of the ventilation shaft. "Move!"
Sofía went first, her machete scraping against the galvanized steel, carving a path through decades of accumulated grime. Miguel scrambled in after her, whimpering as his shoulders caught on the narrow frame. Then Camila, dragging Julián.
I looked back one last time. The freezer door was open, spilling a fog of white nitrogen vapor across the concrete floor—a ghostly tomb for a body that wasn't there. The soldiers would see the empty space. They would see the melted frost where Julián had fallen. They would know.
I dove into the shaft just as the maintenance room door exploded inward.
The concussion wave hit me like a physical blow, driving the air from my lungs. Dust and rust rained down from the tunnel ceiling. I kicked out, scrambling backward into the darkness, my elbows scraping raw against the corrugated metal.
"Clear left! Clear right!" A distorted, synthesized voice echoed from the room we had just fled. The Sweepers.
"They're in the vents!" someone shouted.
"Sofía!" I screamed, the sound swallowed by the tight space.
A burst of gunfire shredded the opening of the grate behind me, sparks showering my boots. I scrambled faster, blindly following the heels of the person in front of me, dragging the sample box—the beacon—deeper into the throat of the city.
We weren't running anymore. We were being swallowed.
Julián 'El Capi' Herrera POV´s
The darkness was a mercy, but the heat was a sentence.
For the first hundred meters, the lingering chill from the freezer clung to his skin like a second layer of clothing. But as they descended, slithering down a 45-degree drainage pipe that smelled of sulfur and dead things, the ambient temperature of the earth began to rise.
Medellín is a city of eternal spring, but its bowels are a humid, festering summer.
Julián felt the change in his blood first. The silence in his head—that blessed, empty silence the cold had bought him—began to fill with static. A low-frequency hum, like a wasp trapped in his ear canal.
Thump-thump. Thump-thump.
His heart. Or maybe the box.
He crawled on hands and knees, the concrete rough against his palms. The frantic shuffling of Miguel ahead of him sounded like prey scurrying. Prey. The word tasted metallic on his tongue. He swallowed hard, fighting the urge to lunge, to sink his teeth into the ankle moving just inches from his face.
"Julián?" Camila's voice drifted back to him, tight with fear. "You okay?"
"Keep... moving," he gritted out. The words felt jagged, tearing his throat.
The static in his vision was getting colorful. Fractals of violet and neon green bloomed in the darkness. He looked at his arm. In the gloom, the veins were no longer black. They were glowing faintly, bioluminescent pathways mapping the invasion of his nervous system. The heat was waking the passengers in his blood.
They slid out of the narrow pipe and dropped into a larger chamber—a junction of the old 1950s stormwater system. The ceiling was high here, arched brickwork dripping with condensation.
"Light," Elena whispered.
Sofía cracked a chem-light. The harsh green glow illuminated the space. It was a cathedral of waste. Rats the size of cats scurried along the ledges, their eyes reflecting the emerald light. The water in the central channel was sluggish, thick with oil and trash.
But it was the sound that froze them.
From the pipe they had just exited, far above, came the mechanical whine of a drone.
"They deployed a crawler," Sofía said, her face grim in the green light. She pointed to the sample box in Elena's hands. The red light was blinking faster now. A frantic strobe. "That thing is screaming our position."
"We can't ditch it," Elena said, hugging the box to her chest. "If we lose this, we lose the cure."
"If we keep it," Julián rasped, leaning heavily against the slimy brick wall, "we die before we find a cure." He was sweating. Profusely. The fever was back, and with it, the hunger. He gripped his left wrist with his right hand, squeezing until the knuckles turned white, trying to strangle the impulse to kill.
Dr. Elena Vargas POV´s
We were at a crossroads. Literally.
The storm drain split into two distinct paths. To the left, the tunnel descended sharply. I could hear the roar of rushing water—the main artery feeding into the Medellín River. The air wafting up from it was surprisingly cool, chilled by the mountain runoff.
To the right, the tunnel remained level, dry, and silent. It headed deeper under the city center, toward the catacombs of the old foundations. The air there was stagnant, warm, and smelled of rot.
I looked at Julián. He was deteriorating before my eyes. The sweat on his forehead wasn't just fever; it was the metabolic overdrive of the virus rewriting his DNA. He was shivering, not from cold, but from the sheer effort of remaining human.
"He needs the cold," I said, realizing the terrible physics of our situation. "The heat down here... it's incubating the virus faster than I calculated."
"The water?" Miguel asked, looking terrified at the left tunnel. The roar was deafening. "That sounds like a death trap. If the current is too strong..."
"It's mountain runoff," I argued, my mind racing. "It's cold. Hypothermic cold. If we submerge him, we buy time. We slow the replication."
"Or we drown," Sofía countered, looking at the dry tunnel. "The right path is safe. We can move fast. We can lose the crawler in the maze."
"If we go right," I said, pointing at the sweating, trembling form of Julián, "he turns. Maybe in an hour, maybe less. And trapped in these tight tunnels with a turned Alpha..."
I didn't finish the sentence. I didn't have to. We all knew what an Alpha variant could do in close quarters.
Whirrrrr-click.
The sound of the crawler drone echoed from the pipe behind us. It was close. Maybe two hundred meters.
Julián looked up. His eyes were bloodshot, the pupils two different sizes. He was losing the battle. He looked at the rushing black water to the left, then at the dry, dark tunnel to the right.
"I can't... hold it back... much longer," he whispered.
Elena looked at the box, then at Julián. The drone's lights flickered against the tunnel curve behind them.
"Make the call," Sofía barked.