This short story was awarded the 2017 High School National Scholastic Gold Medal in "Novel Writing".
Mara Spencer strolled down the hallway, nodding her head in acknowledgment of her clapping coworkers. She couldn’t lie; it felt pretty good—especially considering half of these people had called her a quack only a few years before.
“Miss Spencer!” Mara blinked. One of her interns had broken into her morning reverie; the applauds faded to the sidelines and the clapping hallway, proof of Mara’s success, was replaced by a college student’s face, full of concern and framed with square pink glasses. “Miss Spencer—sorry—I just wanted to ask you if you had seen the news this morning?” Mara’s surprise vanished instantly, replaced with annoyance. Of course there would be a news story today: it was the one-year anniversary of Lyvax. It had been hard, millions of disbelievers as well as a rather embarrassing failure with the lab mice, but they had done it. In one year millions of lives had been saved, in one year the vaccine had been made available in every first, second, and third world country; naturally there would be a story on it. Mara donned a reassuring if not patronizing smile and slid her keycard through the security panel.
“No, I haven’t seen the segment yet, but I assure you the media is nothing to worry about.” Refusing to speak any further, she returned the card to the lanyard around her neck and allowed her thoughts to return to where they had been a moment before, leaving the girl gaping in the hallway.
It was already a year later and she was still awestruck by how much she and her team had accomplished. Just ten years before, no one could have believed cancer could be cured with a vaccine. But times had changed and, truth be told, it was a bit more complex than that. Mara had developed Lyvax herself. It was a synthetic liquid that caused any cell it entered to lyse and dissipate. Healthy, normal cells of all types could easily block themselves, but when the vaccine came into contact with a tumor or another compromised cell– poof – gone. And now it ran through the bloodstreams of almost every child and adult throughout the world.
Mara plopped herself down behind her desk. A sizeable pile of unopened mail sat on her computer, which she ignored. She knew what they said, at any rate, and the congratulations could wait. She opened her laptop and impatiently waited for it to reboot. After a few dull seconds, she spun her chair toward the window and gazed out over the city. People milled through the streets, desperately looking for last minute holiday gifts, each one with the same violet cure pumping through their veins. Each one alive because of her.
She hadn’t done it for the money. It wasn’t even an option. Lyvax as a compound inserted itself into the extracellular fluid, triggering apoptosis when it entered a cell. It incorporated itself into embryonic fluid as well; meaning any child born from vaccinated parents would be born already immune to any disease. And the compound only became stronger with time, growing up as the child did. Of course, the media fawned over her apathy for fortune, which guaranteed her real prize: remembrance.
Mara poked the keyboard. It took a few more seconds of irritated tapping before the display illuminated and her home screen came into focus: a collage of magazine articles, newspaper headlines, and photographs—the center-most one depicting herself, younger and beaming, as she received her Nobel Prize in medicine. Mara let her eyes slip past and clicked instead on the blinking mail icon at the bottom of the screen—and blinked herself. 523 new messages? In the span of a twenty-four hours? That was surprising—even for today. With a sigh, she rested her hand atop the arrow keys and flipped through each. The bylines contained a variety of senders ranging from the heads of prestigious hospitals to family and friends. Most sent links and URLs; all were about Lyvax. Mara stopped. She had barely made a dent in the fan mail but one message stood out: Larry Blueford’s, the friend that had made Lyvax possible. Without him, today would be meaningless, she wouldn’t have fame, respect, or her own laboratory. She selected his message and read it through:
heyMara itsLarry
i knowits the one year anniversary ofLyvax and congratson that (im sureyouveheard) butisawthison the news this morning and u might want to checkit out. It probably has nothing to do with our vaccine, im justletting uknow. congrats again! ☺
Same as the others, the message was followed by a link. This time, Mara clicked it. The screen warped and a video of a grey haired news reporter and his blonde co-anchor popped up in front of her screen. The last segment had clearly been some sort of fluff piece, for the blonde was still giggling when he—grinning as well—began to speak, “A New Jerseyan couple gave birth to a stillborn boy yesterday morning. The young child was diagnosed Progeria, a disease characterized by cells with abnormally shaped nuclei. Both parents were vaccinated with Lyvax when it was first released in 2028.” Mara frowned as the anchor continued the story and the footage flipped to show the hospital followed by interviews with the parents—every sentence delivered in grins and giggles. Mara’s mind churned. Could Lyvax do that? If every cell in his body was wrong, could the vaccine manifest itself in his parents and kill him before he was even alive? She clicked back into her inbox and scrolled through each email she’d skipped, reading them through one by one: Hey Mara, did you see this story about the baby with Progeria? ...Mara I saw this on my local station about these kids that were sunburned at the beach… Mara someone sent me this video, you might want to watch it before the media gets their hands on it….Miss Spencer there was an anomaly today at the hospital please come at your earliest convenience… The original segment still played in the background of her screen, though now it had moved on to a new story about a two-legged racing hound. Mara closed her laptop with a soft snap and the room fell quiet. She snatched up her cellphone then stared. She was unwilling to make the call, to ruin her personal celebration. She suddenly longed to sweep up the letters on the floor and roll through the thank you’s. Just one, she heard a voice say in her head, one letter, just one selfish second. The world won’t end. Mara reached for an envelope near the top of the pile. True the call was unavoidable, urgent even, but today was supposed to be more than work—and she could enjoy one more minute of celebration before it all fell apart. Something told her her special day off would end with her working late.
Mara split open the letter and a newspaper clipping toppled onto her desk. She held it right side up and began the story about a thirteen-year-old boy. He’d been skateboarding when the front wheel hit a patch of black ice; the kid had gone flying into a neighbor’s jeep with enough force to shatter his femur. However, when doctor’s x-rayed his injured leg, the bone itself had disappeared. It was a medical marvel and many, as the reporter summed up, suspected Lyvax for dispelling the splintered bone.
Mara reached for her phone.
A few blocks south, Larry stood patiently in line at The Bean Whiz, contemplating whether to get a honey-glazed or cinnamon scone. Both were hot and fluffy, both looked sweet and delicious, and both had too many calories to constitute a snack. Of course, his diet wasn’t what was actually bothering him at the moment, rather Mara, who had yet to respond to his email. He supposed it was understandable; she tended to live in a bubble—today especially.
The man in front of him shuffled out of line, and Larry greeted the barista, ordered a chocolate chunk muffin at the last second, and sat down in the corner regretting his spur of the moment decision. Larry pulled out his tablet and with growing anxiety scrolled through the pages of emails and links clogging his inbox.
“Just you, hon?” Larry glanced up. He hadn’t noticed the waitress, a cute redhead, until she had spoken. He straightened his bowtie, responded that yes he was single, and the two chatted for a moment until Larry’s cellphone rang and the redhead excused herself to the counter. Larry sighed then nearly jumped when he read the caller ID. He answered breathless.
“Mara! I’m assuming you saw my message?”
“Yes, is this really happening? I mean what’s happening?” Mara’s voice was strained and almost petulant in its nervousness. It’s not fair she seemed to be saying why does nothing ever go my way. However, he knew her selfish exterior was only skin-deep. Mara was a good friend, who leaned on him as much as he did her, and with a rare mixture of confidence and humility that made her so successful.
Larry realized that Mara was waiting for him to respond and hastily answered, “Well...I’m not completely sure.”
“Explain.”
“Well, in the first few months kids with birth defects were born normally, even if their parents had received Lyvax but, well, we always knew it would get stronger as the human body began producing it itself.”
A pause. “And how many incidents have there been?”
“More and more each time I refresh… Mar, this isn’t good.”
In her office, Mara glanced down at the envelopes strewn on the floor. “Alright, I’m coming down, where are you?”
“Few blocks away at The Bean Whiz….did you want any—?” click. Larry pocketed his cellphone, and made his way back to the end of the line of customers. He could use a coffee, plus Mara would probably appreciate something sugary.
It barely took Mara, sprinting through Manhattan, five minutes before she stood in The Bean Whiz. The door behind her slammed shut, sealing the biting December air outside as she made her way through the steamy cafe. It was quiet. Panes of ice covered the windows, blocking the outside world, and soft guitar strums wove themselves through the speakers, squeezing past the hosts of mumbling voices and echoing through the earth-toned walls. By the time she made her way to Larry, dark haired and freckled in a striped bowtie, her scarf had returned to her purse and the pressure of desperation too had disappeared. She pulled the seat opposite her friend and plopped down.
“What did you find?” she asked. In response, Larry spun his tablet towards Mara, revealing a collection of YouTube clips, editorials, news segments, Facebook photos, and magazine articles on Lyvax. She scanned through the pages. The oldest result was almost two months old. It was a blurry post of a teen at the beach with a group of friends and the caption “cancer cure > sunscreen”. Mara read between the lines to determine her formula had removed the top layers of damaged skin cells, curing the kids’ sunburns as they slept. That makes sense, it’s doing even more than it was designed to do. Had Mara seen the photo when it was posted she’d have been exhilarated, but now the knowledge of Lyvax’s growing strength sat in her stomach like a lead weight. She scrolled through the more recent results, noticing how quickly local news stories appeared scattered in the mix of family videos and social media posts. It was unbelievably rapid; the story she had seen earlier that morning had been the first on national news, but reports on small town stations had appeared a week and a half before in almost every country with Lyvax shipments. She clicked on a few of the videos and watched them in stricken silence. Stillborn births, the disappearance of elderly citizens with degenerative diseases…there were some good stories as well, of Lyvax exceeding her vision and curing other kinds of cellular disorders, but the worst was last. She watched the video all the way through: a family had vacationed in Hawaii for a week and the young son had ventured outside without sunscreen and burned his lower back. About an hour later, he was rushed to the hospital, the skin on his back completely dissolved, leaving nothing but a gaping bloody hole that would never heal completely. She checked the date on the post: it was already five days old; Lyvax was advancing faster than she thought medically possible.
“Isn’t that messed up?” Larry asked. He was stuffing packets of sugar into his shirt pocket, though Mara had no idea why. Larry couldn’t care less how his coffee tasted, so long as it was hot. He patted the last pink packet into place and continued. “Listen, you can’t ignore this, depending on how you look at it, Lyvax could be considered a biohazard.”
“Well…we can fix it.” Mara casually pulled the sugar container out of Larry’s reach and tugged on the packets herself with nervous fingers. “There has only been one national story so far, we can figure out a way to weaken it before this gets out of hand. We don’t have to get rid of it forever—and only two real casualties? A lot of people would consider that a pretty good trade off considering the alternative. ”
“No they wouldn’t. People prefer getting killed by something they understand, not freaks of science. Take poor Frankenstein for example. He burned up and his creator got to live the rest of his life broken and alone, knowing that he’d messed things up for everyone and wishing he could fix it. But he couldn’t.” Larry raised his eyebrows at Mara. “It’s a cautionary tale.”
“This is a little different.” Mara tapped a sugar packet on the table in annoyance. “We can find something to dilute it or disrupt the production of Lyvax in the body. We could send it out like a… like a booster shot.”
“Oh booster shot, yep that sounds better than ‘Oh, sorry everyone, turns out that life-saving miracle cure is actually deadly. Our bad.’” Larry retrieved his tablet and glanced back up at Mara, his joking tone gone, “Listen, I know it’s hard to grasp, but if it really is Lyvax that’s doing this, we need to do something. Like four months ago we need to do something, get it? Do you actually know how to actually fix this?”
Mara thought for a moment. “Some variety of a phosphorous-based substance, strengthen cell walls? That way only the most decrepit of the deformed cells would be removed.” Larry shook his head.
“That could work for some types of diseases, I suppose, but the issue’s with burns and gashes and there isn’t enough phosphorous you can pump in that can prevent those… Make individual Lyvax bigger, so that they couldn’t fit in skin capillaries and stayed in the main bloodstream?”
“You can’t just change molecule size,” Mara shook a sugar packet at him, “Not to mention the consequences of having something the size of sugar grains blocking up the bloodstream.”
Larry held up his hands, “Fine, fine, fair enough…. What about the mice? Remember?” He broke off at the sudden appearance of a scone in the middle of the table. Mara glanced up to see a red-haired waitress, already turning towards Larry, “A cinnamon scone for the young lady, and a black coffee for you. Careful hon, its hot,” she balanced a mug in front of Larry so full of steam it appeared to be smoking; Larry grinned. He watched the waitress stride away then turned back, noticing Mara’s deadpan expression.
“What? That scone looks delicious. Also, hot coffee is delicious. I don’t know what else you could be referring to.” Mara rolled her eyes and poked at her scone. It was a small, battered looking thing and baked a little too dark. She took a bite and scowled.
“Well,” Mara pushed away the scone, “this could certaintly use some of that heat.”
“Oh, cmon Mar.” Larry balanced his scalding mug on top of the scone and grinned up at her as the pastry warmed. “See? Just give it a moment. Anything can be fixed.” He thought for a moment, watching his precarious tower. “You know, the mice really aren’t a bad place to start, isolate whatever it was that—eip!” A hipster couple a table away gave Larry a disapproving glance and Mara burst out laughing. The brittle scone had inevitably collapsed, sloshing the scalding coffee across Larry’s frayed shirt cuff. Mara tossed a napkin across the table.
“’Delicious?’” she taunted, thoroughly enjoying Larry’s senselessness even as her world seemed to be falling apart. “Yes, it sounds delightful.” She paused as Larry inspected his wrist and considered his suggestion. “You know… I think you’re correct about the mice. There’s certainly something there, and any rate and you know I would never…” she trailed off. Larry had made no move towards the napkin in front of him. In fact, he hadn’t moved at all. His neck was still, lowered towards his wrist, captivated with something more than vague concern. Mara frowned at the other end of the table and waited. Finally, Larry raised his head, his eyes abnormally bright. He set the steaming mug on the napkin and, with a small grin, held up his left hand.
“I think this answers our question.” Mara stared. The first thing she heard, before she even grasped what she saw, was a small voice in her head exclaim, it works, Lyvax works—the burn is gone. But it wasn’t just the burn that had vanished, his skin was gone. All that remained was a gouged cavity in his wrist, pulsing with blood so that his entire lower arm and shirtsleeve clung in to his skin with a wet uniform scarlet. The wound itself looked like it had been gouged out with a spoon—not unlike an abscess—with smooth steep walls only an organic form could create.
Mara still hadn’t reacted. A voice, either still in her head or from a patron who recognized her from TV, shouted: You’re a doctor! Do something! Mara dragged Larry onto the hardwood floor, and raised his left wrist so that it rested elevated on his vacated seat. He was hemorrhaging, and the blood pooled into an opaque pool in the curve of his chair. The disembodied voice continued: stop the bleeding. Mara knelt, and, doing her best to ignore her rasping friend, reached for the striped bowtie curled around his neck. She tugged at the center knot, and, expecting it to loosen, stared dumbly when the perfectly tied bow toppled whole in the palm of her hand. It’s a clip-on. She cursed, tossed the useless bowtie behind her, and reached up to the table above, blindly patting it down in search of something else she could use as a tourniquet. Her frantic fingers closed around the threadbare corner of the napkin she’d tossed to Larry and yanked it down without a second thought. By then, everyone in the cafe had noticed something was wrong, and in the chaos of the situation she didn’t have time to think, Oh that’s right, Larry put his mug on the napkin, before something dark and smoking toppled from the side of the table. Mara instinctively ducked away and the cup landed on Larry’s heaving chest, soaking it and his throat in a flood of steaming caffeine.
For the next few seconds, everything played like a movie. Something in Mara’s head told her that any further action would be useless, and so, making no attempt to rise, she sat on the floor and watched the unfolding events with horror and, perhaps, a touch of morbid curiosity. Larry jumped up and struggled to pull himself upright, his bloody wrist forgotten. His chair crashed to the floor and the crimson pool splashed against the wood. Mara had never seen blood act that way before, the quantity of it seemed to take away any sanctity the liquid held and reduced it to colored water. Something a child might play with.
Larry yanked the coffeehouse’s embroidered tourniquet from Mara’s silent hands and struggled to dry his neck and collarbone, but it was too late. His skin had begun to redden. First in small splotches reminiscent of blush, then in angry scarlet puddles that deepened across his throat. Larry met Mara’s gaze and his eyes fixed on her with a look of unhidden vulnerability before they slid down and focused around her neck. In the centermost burn on Larry’s throat, a small pinprick of blood appeared. With unnatural speed, it ate away the singed flesh, exposing the slippery muscles beneath, still moving like skinned fish. Only a second had passed before the hole completely replaced the burn, tracing the red and leaving the healthy skin untouched. Larry fell to the floor, his throat gone. Blood spilt out over his shirt onto sanded wood floor.
The coffee shop erupted. Mara sat with her back pressed against the leg of their table. She raised her hand to her own neck where Larry had glanced just before he…. Her fingers found her lanyard, the perfect tourniquet.
Red liquid oozed along the floorboards, slow and steady in the face of the coffee shop’s high-pitched caterwauling. Mara drew in her knees. The trickles of blood kept coming, seeping through grooves in the artistically worn floorboards, encroaching in dozens of tiny streams. One stream pooled around her boot and as the blood lapped around her she saw the purpling silver shadow mingled in the red, so faint she knew she was the only one in the café that could discern it. It was a color she was familiar with, a color she had spent almost a decade of her life creating.
It wasn’t difficult for Mara to leave the shop. She didn’t care whether or not she was seen and let the shouts of the coffee shop fade with the whines of sirens and traffic. The air was as just as biting as it had been when she ran from her office to the café, only now the wind’s direction was reversed. A head-on gust had picked up, interspersed with isolated flurries of snow that stung against Mara’s cheeks as she made her way madly through the crowded roads and sidewalks separating her from her lab.
Under other circumstances, Mara would have enjoyed the walk. Her laboratories were in a separate building, just past her offices, and the way was littered with holly-soaked department stores and skyscrapers that swam in electronic Santa Clauses. Only now it was different, the floating red streamers seemed morbid and the hordes of gaping tourist were no longer endearingly quaint as she had thought of them the day before. A Christmas carol rang out somewhere behind her and, as the sky darkened, she pushed her way past the bells and chirps and one ignorant man’s exclamation of how beautiful the city was in the snow.
Mara picked up her pace; the isolated flurries had become thick sheets that showered around her from the smog above. If she could get to her lab…Larry had been right the least she could do was follow his advice. Nothing was impossible and it was a lot harder to build something than to break it. What was that famous Thomas Edison line: I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work? There had to be a million scenarios in which Lyvax would become ineffective, and Larry had already pointed her towards one.
It had been the first major setback to their research. By that point, Mara had invested eight years developing the vaccine privately, using microscopic amounts of prototype Lyvax on cells afterhours in one of the hospital’s generic labs. Larry had only just joined her efforts and, after hearing about a growth that some sort of diet pill had caused on a lab mouse, suggested testing Lyvax for real. Confident in their previous cellular and theoretical tests, Larry invited several respected doctors, as well as some of the hospital’s board members, to observe the inoculation. Mara injected her vaccine into the mouse herself, notwithstanding her dander allergies, and the whole party waited with bated breath for the mouse’s gimpy leg to right itself. It hadn’t. If Mara had funding on her project to begin with, she would have lost it. A week later, a report had appeared on Mara’s desk outlining the differences in cell-receptors found in mouse and human blood and, in just over a month, another meeting was called and Larry became the first of many to have Lyvax pulsing through his veins.
But could that work? Cell receptors were just proteins and carbohydrates; they could easily enough be concentrated and introduced to the blood stream. She could isolate and harvest it within a few hours, inject some in herself, and dedicate her lengthened life to get the supplement to everyone else. They would no longer be immune to cancer, but what did it matter in the long run? She had a high hereditary risk coming from both sides of her family—her mother’s death being what set her on the path to develop the vaccine in the first place. If she could compromise the Lyvax in her veins, surely everyone else would understand this was the better alternative.
Mara crossed the street; the stone steps to her lab were barely visible through the snow yet she skipped up them two at a time and sprinted down the main hall. Despite the holiday season, the research facility was by no means empty. Almost every room she past was bathed in fluorescent light and more than once she found her path blocked by a chatting group of interns, students, and scientists, most of whom gushed congratulations as she hurried past.
Mara’s lab stood at the end of the first building and had been gifted to her by the institute a few months after Lyvax’s debut. When she first received it, she had lived in its sterile walls, making custom improvements to the space and consolidating her past work, but increasingly she found herself leaving it locked and unused. A gift of a dozen brown lab mice had arrived at the same time from one of the senior doctors who had witnessed both tests; the reminders were unwanted, yet she often found herself basking in satisfaction to think that she had become important enough for the executives to taunt.
Mara rounded the last corner, slid her keycard though her door, and stepped inside. Cool florescent panes in the ceiling spilled artificial light over the rows of resin tabletops topped with glinting glassware. On the opposite end of the laboratory, a full-length glass door winked in the same sterile light, creating a larger but otherwise identical gleam as the glass beakers and flasks.
It was this full glass door that Mara approached. She pushed past and clicked on the lights. Immediately, the difference between this room and the one she had left became obvious. Whereas her lab was bright, sterile, and grey, this modified supply room hummed with warmth. A swinging orange bulb offered the only light and the air seemed thick with humidity, sawdust, and assorted rustles and squeaks.
Mara inhaled deeply to calm herself before slipping on a pair of rubber gloves. She scooped each mouse into a single cage and carried them from the warm rustling storeroom into the laboratory. Mara set them down on a table and, for the first time since the fruition of Lyvax, settled down to work. She found a clean syringe and pulled as much blood as she dared from each of her mice. It amounted to about half a flask of blood; it wouldn’t be enough. Mara sighed, snapped her gloves back on, and reached again into the cage. It was stupid to worry about mice when the stakes were this high. She picked the syringe back up and one by one drained the last tokens of her success into the beaker. There was no need to return their bodies to the cage; they were piled besides her gloves at the end of the table.
For the next several hours, Mara hurried to complete each monotonous step of isolating the compound. The vials and beakers emptied and filled around her, and when she dropped one she ignored it, swept the broken glass into the pile of dead mice, and continued. She had no idea how long she worked, but at some point one of the dead mice at the end of the table jumped up. A streak of fur shot across the table—tripping over Mara’s hands and overturning half-filled centrifuge vials—before collapsing again on the opposite end of the table, overcome by blood loss and exhausted by the first few feet of its escape. Mara dropped the vial she had been holding and jumped up.
“Jesus Christ!” The stupid mouse slid a few feet further towards the end of the table. One of its hind legs twitched then lay still. Mara collected herself—and then the mouse—and dropped the rodent carcasses back into the cage. She certainly wasn’t going to risk that again. She could have sworn they were dead. Mara turned back to her workspace, three small vials lay overturned meaning there was even less to work with. She shook out her hands and examined the large glass vial that held the majority of the solution: there was still enough, provided no more unforeseen complications.
This small flask was funneled, strained, centrifuged, concentrated, squeezed and mixed with enough other chemicals that slowly but surely it morphed into a much more voluminous lemon-juice looking liquid. Part natural part synthetic, it was slightly warm—just enough above room temperature to remind her that it had recently been alive. It had a yellow tint like melted butter and although it didn’t look like much, in its concentrated state it would be enough to reset almost half of the city.
For the first time since the café, hope flooded Mara’s mind and possibilities emerged of how she could supplement it into the original Lyvax compound and make the drug she thought she had made the first time around. It wouldn’t be too difficult she would just have to incorporate this new yellow substance. Add enough so that it prevented death and catabolysis but not so much that it canceled out the healing powers early Lyvax possessed. She could write it down, redo it…. Mara scratched absentmindedly at her hand. Then again she should probably focus on nullifying the existing deadly drug before beginning another.
Mara fumbled through a cabinet to find a suitable sized bowl and set it on the table. She was confident it worked, besides there wasn’t much of an option, and he refused to die from her own cure. She scratched the back of her hand. Not a minute later, she found herself scratching the other. She frowned. Putting off the task in front of her for a moment, Mara inspected her hands under the light. The tiny pink bumps were immediately familiar: hives. She sighed and returned to the bowl. Apparently, even the second long encounter with the cannonballing mouse had been sufficient to give her an allergic reaction. She hadn’t had hives since she was a kid. The next steps of the process were sandwiched between bouts of scratching: Mara mixed the solution; Mara scratched her right hand. Mara filled an eyedropper with folic acid; Mara scratched the left. Mara squeezed three drops into the concoction; Mara scratched the right. Mara swirled the mixture; Mara scratched her right hand again. Tiny droplets of blood splattered over the bowl.
Mara stopped and glanced down at her hands. The level field of pink bumps had been stripped completely by the crisscrossing overlapping marks of her fingernails over the Lyvax weakened skin. All remained of the back of her hand was a gouged pool of purple blood with long slender logs of bone bobbing on the surface. She stared frozen in place. Pinpricks of blood appeared on each of the remaining bumps and, with the same silent unnatural speed from the coffee shop, spread outwards over her hand, eating away skin like flame across paper. However, this time, the crater was not contained by the limit of the damaged skin. Now the Lyvax compound ate away at very wound it was creating, growing exponentially, and eroding the healthy skin down towards her elbow.
An alarm bell rang out in her head and a voice screamed: Stop it! Mara jumped up. In that moment, overcome with desperation and enough medical knowledge to know what would happen when the Lyvax severed her radial artery, Mara panicked. She threw her body against the table and slid her decorticated hand across the table. Her hip knocked against the corner and the entire countertop shuddered. The sunshine-filled beaker near the edge tipped.
Mara’s next reaction would be chewed over so much in the following hours that it would seem unremarkable. When she thought it through step by step—over and over again as her last moments passed—one aspect she would focus on was the numbness. She felt no pain, not when her hands ripped open; not when her body slammed against the laboratory table, knocking off the yellow glass; not when her skeletal fingers fumbled the falling flask, and not even when she purposely rubbed the exposed muscles of her hands, wrists, and arms against the broken glass on the floor, trying desperately to mop up the puddle of pale buttery liquid.
The advance stopped.
Mara sat hunched on the floor, hearing for the first time the crushing silence around her. A college intern walking past the door would have had no idea anything had happened save for a thump—perhaps someone had stubbed their toe against the table—and the subsequent shatter as something toppled from the top. Still, there had been no yelling or cursing, absolutely no reason for anyone outside to think it important. They’d perhaps give a sympathetic wince and continue on with their day.
Mara’s heart echoed in her empty chest. The room was cast in utter silence; the night was dark, the city outside muted in snow. She stared at her hands. The numbness ebbed with each hollow heartbeat and both the pain and implications came into sharp focus. Her last hope for survival and redemption lay in a puddle on the floor mixed with shards of glass and purple-tainted blood.
Mara made no move towards her destroyed project; there was no reason to. Her hands were mangled beyond use, skinned up to her elbow with glints of bone clearly visible until her wrist. The bleeding had stopped with the Lyvax’s expansion, but there was no way she would be able to swipe her card, turn the door handle, dial a phone, remake the cure…and no one but Larry knew where she was.
Instead, Mara raised her head to the window. The glass was nearly completely crusted with snow, cutting out the ambient light of the city and darkening the room. Everything not bathed in fluorescent light sat in a violet shadow from the night sky. The sounds of the world below crept through the clear opening in this window: last minute shoppers, car horns, carolers, pedestrians: the ever-present sounds of the sleepless city. Then, a crash of metal on metal, shouts, and within a few minutes, sirens.
Mara closed her eyes and listened as the scene played out below. She imagined walking to the tiny porthole and gazing into the indigo night. She imagined a sizeable crowd gathered around a crumbled taxi or maybe an SUV, the bodies pulled from the crash already carried into ambulances. In her mind she saw the people who should have emerged scratched but otherwise unscathed, draw their last breath on the pavement in a pool of purple blood. The color wasn’t faint this time, it was bright neon violet; everyone could see it and understood. She’d be remembered forever—however long that lasted. Purple dyed the city. It ruined the effect, the purple paired with the white of the snow, it wasn’t gory or grotesque—it matched the decorations.
Mara bent her head against the lab table and stared at the pale puddle. If only she’d put the mouse back into the cage, if only she had caught the flask, she could be out there preventing this. But you’re not trapped here, said the voice in her head, you’re smart you can get out. Push the handle with your elbows, kick the door. You have the cure in your bloodstream, you’ll be fine. Mara closed her eyes again, bent her head against the frosted glass, and watched the snow bury the city.