The high-pitched hum of the chamber abruptly ceased, replaced by a hollow gurgling as cobalt blue liquid seeped through hidden pipes. With a hissing hiss, a glass door swung open. Sam's body slid to the concrete floor, landing with a wet thud that reverberated around the sterile room.
Ellie found a step, her hand instinctively reaching for the knife at her belt. Not out of fear of him, but out of the habit of someone who has survived too long to trust blindly.
Sam stood there, singled out, his tanned skin glistening with the sticky exhaustion of the cryogenic fluid. His dark red hair, soaked through, clung to his face, dripping onto the tiled floor. Ellie held her breath, her eyes trained on his chest, searching for the slightest sign of movement. After decades… was he still alive? The thought cut through her like a blade of ice, but she didn't move. She had to be sure.
A barely perceptible tremor in Sam's fingers. A shallow, almost inaudible sigh.
He was alive.
Ellie grabbed a towel from her backpack and threw it over him, crouching down a safe distance away. "Hey," she called, her voice firm but tinged with caution. "Are you okay?"
Sam's eyes flew open—black, deep as abysses, shining in the clinical light of the lab. He blinked, disoriented, his gaze sweeping around the room before settling on her. "Where am I? What is this place?" he said, playing with his dry throat.
"Calm down," Ellie said, raising her hands in a placating gesture. "You're in a lab. I found you. My name is Ellie." She watched him, the confusion on his face turning into a flicker of clarity, as if pieces of a puzzle were quickly falling into place in his mind.
Sam tried to steady himself on his arms, which shook and gave way. "Cowards," he muttered, referring to whoever had put him here, as he wiped the viscous liquid from his face. He scanned the room, his dark eyes narrowed, cataloging every detail. "I recognize this place. They… they sedated me. My 'mother'…" The word came out thick, and he stopped, his jaw clenched. "What is your purpose here?"
Ellie felt a chill. Sam's confusion had dissipated like smoke. Those eyes that had swallowed the light now glowed with an intensity that was impossible to ignore. He sat up, a towel thrown over his shoulders, and began to study her—not just look, but dissect. The way she held her backpack, the tension in her shoulders, the suspicious glint in her green eyes. It was as if he were processing every detail.
"What's wrong?" Ellie teased, crossing her arms to hide her discomfort. "Why am I staring at myself like that?"
"I'm processing the variables," Sam said, his voice firming, his tone clinical and direct. "You're no ordinary raider. Your clothing, your weapons—they indicate a survivor's experience. But this is no ordinary ruin, it's an advanced research lab. The risks of exploring it far outweigh the potential rewards of scavenging for supplies." He paused, his dark eyes locking with unnerving precision. "So let me ask you again, more directly: What, specifically, did you come here to find, Ellie?"
Ellie frowned, her heart pounding. He wasn't 'reading' her with some strange intuition; he was pointing out the logical inconsistencies of her presence here. It was worse. It was a cold analysis that left her with no convincing way of lying. She swallowed hard, torn. Trusting a stranger went against all her instincts. But the surgical precision of his question showed her that half-truths would be useless. He wouldn't believe her.
She took a deep breath, deciding to risk it all. Not with words, but with the naked truth.
Slowly, she pushed back the sleeve of her jacket, revealing a jagged scar on her forearm—an old bite mark, faded but unmistakable. "This," she said, her voice low but firm. "I came to find answers about this."
Sam arched an eyebrow, his gaze now purely analytical, set on the mark. He processed the information for a second as he placed his hand over his chin thoughtfully.
"Are you immune?" Sam said, still holding his chin, something Ellie noticed.
Ellie nodded, her chin raised as if expecting an attack. "They wanted to use my blood for a cure. But they told me they'd given up on the cure…"
Now with the missing piece of information, Sam's mind seemed to work at high speed. He leaned forward, his dark eyes shining with an almost scientific curiosity as he studied her scar, then her face. "'Immune,'" he repeated, a word with a related meaning. "It's not just that, is it? You carry it as a curse, not a gift. There's something else… a uniqueness I can't fathom." He paused, his gaze intense. "I've felt it since I saw you: a weight beyond your form."
She blinked, taken aback by his vocabulary. It was the kind of jargon a scientist would use, not a teenager. But Sam was no ordinary teenager. His intelligence was a razor sharp blade. "You sound like them," she said suspiciously. "The guys in lab coats."
Sam gave a short, humorless laugh. "They shaped me this way," he said, his tone dry. "But I'm not one of them. And neither are you." He asked, moving with an almost predatory grace. "You want answers? Imagine me, imprisoned in this place against my will."
Ellie nodded, her eyes fixed on him, the weight of truth visible on her face. "Actually, Sam, I've learned a lot about you. The first is that you were locked up here to... 'save humanity.'"
Sam's gaze didn't waver. He still held his chin in his hands, thoughtful, as if Ellie's words had merely confirmed a hypothesis of his own.
"Yeah, I figured it would be something like that," Sam said, his voice icy. "All those tests they did on me certainly taught me something. There's no cure for this plague."
Ellie froze. She knew what she had heard on the voice recorder minutes ago: Sam was the key, the powerhouse to salvation. If even his blood couldn't do anything, that made a cure impossible… But still…
"You don't know that," Ellie snapped, her voice laced with desperation.
"I know, Ellie," Sam replied, not looking away. "If the world is still here... How many years has it been since the virus started, anyway?"
Ellie swallowed, reality hitting her hard. "It's been... 24 years since the virus started."
He closed his eyes for a moment, an almost imperceptible movement that betrayed the intensity of his internal processing. When he opened them, the black abyss of his eyes seemed even deeper, carrying the weight of that information.
"Twenty-four years," Sam repeated, his voice hoarse and low, almost a whisper to himself. There was no anger, no despair, just the cold edge of logic. "If there was a cure, Ellie, it would have been found by now. Twenty-five years of a planet in collapse. Think of the resources that have been poured into me, the experiments, the hopes placed in a 'savior.' If my own fungus-repelling physiology was not enough to replicate a solution, then the fault lies not in the data, or the technique. It lies in the implementation itself."
He paused, his gaze fixed on her with disarming intensity. "The cure, Ellie, is an illusion. A narrative the powerful tell to maintain some semblance of control, or for obvious atrocities like keeping me here. The real 'anomaly' isn't your immunity, or mine. It's a persistent belief in a miracle that never came."
Sam gestured to the empty glass chamber, a bitter half-smile curving his lips. "They put me to sleep for a future that would never be. A future where your 'salvation' would be needed. But the present is this: a world that has learned to survive without it. Or perished."
The cold logic of Sam's words resonated with Ellie's own bitterness. As she held his gaze, she felt a strange mixture of desolation and an unsettling sense of relief. For the first time in a long time, she wasn't alone in bearing the weight of this truth. Sharing it, bitter as it was, made the burden a little lighter.
"Okay," she said, her voice firm. "Let's start by getting out of this place.
Sam nodded, the half-smile communicating determination now. "Then let's go. I don't intend to stay here for the next round of experiments."
The silence was broken by Sam rubbing the back of his neck. "I need food," he said, his voice thick with weariness and impatience. "I feel like I haven't eaten in… a century."
Ellie raised an eyebrow but didn't argue. "Okay, hold on." He rummaged through his backpack and pulled out a sandwich wrapped in cloth—hard bread with a drizzle of peanut butter. "It's not much, but it's what you've got." She tossed the wrapper to him, and he caught it in midair with a dexterity that surprised her.
Sam unwrapped the sandwich and took a bite, chewing slowly, considering. "Thanks," he murmured. He spoke to himself, the movement fluid, almost catlike. His dark red hair, long and shaggy, fell down his back.
"You need to cut that hair," Ellie observed. "You look like you're going to roar."
Sam stopped. A slow, enigmatic smile spread across his face. As he turned his head, the cold light of the lab caught something Ellie hadn't noticed before. He opened his mouth to speak, revealing fangs—canines noticeably longer and more refined than normal, gleaming like shards of ivory. They weren't grotesque, but they were unmistakably inhuman.
Ellie froze. "What is it?" Her voice cracked. She recoiled, her hand swinging toward the razor.
Sam laughed, a low, dry sound, as if he was used to this happening. "Relax, I won't bite you," he said sarcastically. "It's just... a birth defect. I don't suppose it's in the files. They never liked to mention anomalies."
"Anomalies like that?" Ellie said tensely. "What are you?"
He snorted, his gaze heavy. "Nothing that interesting. I was born on the streets. My mother... had me in a dump. When she saw me, she got scared. Those fangs were already there." He touched one of the canines. "She tried to nurse me, but... I hurt her. Not on purpose. She couldn't handle it."
Ellie felt the weight of the story. "What happened?"
"A rainy night. She left me on the doorstep of a fire station. Abandoned." He paused, his jaw soft. "Then the scientists found me. Took me in. Said I was 'special.' But they never explained the fangs. Just the blood, the tests, the infamous 'cure.'"
Ellie swallowed. Discarded, used, experimental. "We're not so different," she murmured. "I got me too. They promised me a purpose. In the end, all lies."
Sam's gaze met hers, filled with mutual understanding. But then a new piece fell into place in his mind, and his expression changed from empathy to analysis. "Your search for answers… it didn't specifically bring you to this lab, did it? Finding this chamber… finding me… was a coincidence."
Ellie hesitated for a moment, surprised by his accuracy. Finally, she nodded in confirmation. "No, I was heading back to Jackson, but a group of infected ran after me and I happened to end up here. I left Star in a quiet place and ended up here."
"Star?" Sam asks, his hand on his chin as he thinks.
"My water," Ellie replies.
"Oh, yes, of course. There are no cars anymore, so of course society has regressed years and we're back to the horse era," Sam said, smiling.
"Tsk. Don't badmouth my friend, she's saved me many times," Ellie retorted angrily.
"I'm not badmouthing her, I'm just being punctual."
"Security here, while degraded, appears to be top-notch," Sam observed, his gaze roving over the terminal and the door lock. "How did you gain access?"
A trace of grim pride appeared on Ellie's face. "I tried everything. Codes, default passwords… nothing worked. Then I stopped and thought… what kind of password would a nostalgic, work-strapped scientist use on the day the world ended?" She gave a bitter half-smile. "Use the data. The outbreak data. Open the main terminal like a magician."
Sam nodded, a gleam of reluctant respect in his eyes. "Clever," he declared. "With that in mind, let's see what other secrets this place holds." He walked over to the terminal where the green cursor blinked in invitation.
The tension in the lab was palpable. Sam's eyes focused on Ellie, no longer with the scientific curiosity of before, but with a deeper intensity.
"Jackson, you said," what would that be? Sam asked Elie.
a community, Ellie replied
"It's about finding something to fight for," she said, her voice a mix of weariness and stubbornness. "Family. Community. It's about having a reason to get out of bed, even when it feels like the world is trying to pull you down." She stepped closer, determination on her face, but the idealistic glow gone. "It's about trying to keep something going, you know? Not just for ourselves, but for whoever comes after."
Sam's eyes studied her, the piercing analysis returning, but now mixed with a new curiosity. "Build. A surprisingly ambitious word in a world of ruins. My 'creators' spoke of 'rebuilding humanity' too, but for them it was always based on data, on probabilities, on a control they, ironically, never possessed. In Jackson… is it any different from the mathematics of survival they preached?"
"Yeah, it's different," Ellie said, her voice now filled with brutal honesty. "We built it with what we had. With effort. With sacrifice. It's not paradise, Sam. There's always some problem, always someone getting screwed over something. It's exhausting. But at the end of the day, people there know how to get by. We help each other. It's not perfect, but it's real. And it's ours." She held out her hand to him. "If you want… if you have nowhere else to go, Jackson is there. It's a place where you really live. Where you have a chance to be something more than just an experiment or a lone survivor."
Sam studied Ellie's still hand, and for an instant the corner of her lips curved into a barely perceptible smile, tinged with the irony she had expected.
"I have nowhere to go, that's a pointed observation, Ellie," he said, his voice dry. His dark eyes lifted to meet hers, a gleam of something between amusement and dark approachability. "Considering my last address was a cryopreservation tank for a quarter of a century, your chances of me having a busy social calendar are…nil. Jackson, you say?"
He took a step toward her hand, but didn't touch it right away. Instead, his gaze swept around the lab one last time, as if saying goodbye to a prison.
"I'm not a fan of certainties, Ellie," Sam continued, his voice quieter now. "But this 'chance at real life' is so… different. And being something more than an experiment? Now that's an intriguing proposition." He finally opened her hand, his grip firm and surprisingly warm, considering where it came from. "Take me to your 'non-heaven.' I have some new variables to analyze."
Ellie rolled her eyes, a small smile escaping. "You're so weird, Sam. 'Variables to process'? Seriously? No one talks like that."
Sam didn't respond directly to the barb. He nodded slightly, as the light in the lab seemed less obtrusive now that they were moving. "I don't plan on staying here for the next round of experiments, Ellie. The air in this place… smells musty."
Ellie sighed, a confused issue of tiredness. "Yeah. The air in here has been gone for a while now. Let's get out of this glass box, what do you think? Or would you rather stay in there, enjoying your own personal care?"
Sam just tilted his head, his dark eyes fixed on her, not understanding her words.
Ellie looked at him, letting out a sigh. "Okay, weirdo." She rummaged through her backpack and pulled out a worn but clean shirt. "Put this on." As she held it out, she said, "Give me that towel. You don't want to get that wet stuff all over you."
Sam, who had been wearing soggy dark pants the whole time—at least he wasn't naked—handed over a towel.
Sam just tilted his head, his dark eyes fixed on her, not getting the joke.
Ellie looked at him, letting out a sigh. "Okay, weirdo." She rummaged through her backpack and pulled out a worn but clean shirt. "Put this on." As she held it out, she said, "Give me that towel. You don't want to get that wet stuff all over you."
Sam, who had been wearing a pair of soaked dark pants the entire time—at least he wasn't naked—handed over a towel without question. He picked up a shirt and began to pull it on, his movements still a little stiff, but efficient.
At the top, gray light and the smell of welcoming earth greeted them. Sam took a deep breath. The air…it was different. Unfiltered, unconditioned, but raw. It smelled of wet earth, of leaves in tune, of a wild life he had never seen before. His eyes, accustomed to the white sterility and the gleam of metal, opened to the vastness of pale sky and twisted trees.
For most of his life, he had been confined, a brilliant mind imprisoned in a laboratory, his only horizons the cold walls and thin screens. Now the world stretches out before him, broken, yes, but infinitely vast and free.
A surge of motivation, a feeling he had never consciously allowed to touch him, rushed through him. His hands curled into fists, clenching with a strength that surprised him. It was a primitive, almost feral emotion that he didn't know how to process. He was here, finally. Out. And the world, even in ruins, seemed to be calling to him.
So this is freedom? " Sam said as he breathed in the pure air that was in that place.
The return to Jackson was a daily lesson for Sam, and a constant revelation for Ellie. She taught him the basics: how to walk quietly through dry brush, how to identify the children of the forest—the rustle of the wind, the murmur of a distant stream, the crackle that indicated something moving in the thick undergrowth. She explained the common dangers, the natural pitfalls, the areas to avoid. Things that had taken her years to internalize through painful mistakes and scars. Sam, however, absorbed it all with astonishing ease. His dark eyes registered every detail, his ears picked up what hers sometimes missed. He learned in hours what had taken him months of experience. It was as if his mind, once focused on theories and laboratory data, was now optimized for survival.
But what was most remarkable was not how quickly Sam learned, but how the environment reacted to his presence. For the next few days, not a single infected person stirred. There was no usual urgency, no constant need to be alert for a clique or a screech from the darkness. The few who crossed his path—a Runner staggering in the distance, a Snapper hiding in the shadow of a collapsed building—no longer sensed Sam's presence. It wasn't as if they fled in panic, but simply swerved, as if the mere proximity of him was enough to alter their primal instincts. It was uncanny, illogical. The lab's audio narration about the infected instinctively fleeing from him reverberated in Ellie's mind like a haunting weight. How was that possible? How could something so destructive be so… selective?
As the days stretched into a week, an unexpected dynamic developed between them. Ellie, naturally reserved and suspicious, maintained an instinctive barrier. But Sam, with his incessant curiosity and peculiar way of analyzing the world, began to erode it. He didn't force the intimidation, but his direct questions and his complete lack of familiarity with the outside world forced her to open up. She found herself explaining the obvious, laughing at his clinical observations about nature or the lack of sanitation. With each answer, each laugh, the distance between them narrowed. What had begun as a mutual need for survival slowly blossomed into something approaching friendship. Ellie found herself forgetting the daydreams of her life, the losses and the lies, even as the question of how to confront Joel still lingered in the back of her mind.
With Sam by her side, Ellie felt strangely at ease, a rare and comforting feeling in a world of uncertainty. He, with his peculiar logic and his almost found worldview, somehow made her see things from a new, less burdensome perspective. He was a constant reminder that there was more to the world than the daily struggle.
The sun was already setting when a distant sound cut through the silence: the rapid gallop of another horse, accompanied by a hoarse cry.
"Ellie!"
The voice was unmistakable. Ellie's heart raced.
"Joel," he murmured.
"Joel?" Sam asked, his dark eyes narrowing, a shadow of recognition mixed with his usual curiosity and watchfulness crossing his face. His posture, previously relaxed with newfound freedom, became rigidly attentive. So this is Joel…
Ellie didn't respond with words. She turned to him and whispered, "Sam, please. Come down."