My name is Harry, and I lived my life better than most, or so I like to think. I was not unfathomably wealthy, but I was comfortable; I did not have all the friends in the world but those I had were dear to my heart; I did not marry a genius supermodel but to me she was perfection and I will be forever grateful that she chose me to spend her life with. I had two beautiful daughters and lived long enough to see their own families. As I lay there taking my final breaths, I could only hope that I raised them right, and that we weren’t all doomed.

  I left university when I was 25 with a PHD in genetics specialising in infectious disease, from there I went to work developing viral treatments for various diseases before I was swept up by Them. They told me I was curing cancer, which I absolutely could have been. What we developed in that lab was revolutionary and would have been incredible. I worked for Sacrosanct though, a top-secret R&D lab for the UK government, I knew deep down that there was the chance they weren't funding us for the right reasons but what we could do was well worth the risk.

  We had managed to create a virus, from scratch, that had an absurdly low mutation rate, could target any cell and all cells we wanted it to, could even combat other viruses. It was the next best thing to nanobots, but they could self-replicate, infections, cancer, genetic diseases, we could fix them all. In theory. There were things we had to work out, primarily making sure that any mutations that developed would not out-compete the original, we couldn’t have a rogue super-virus out and about.

  So when it started, when the world changed, I was in the lab creating a fresh culture when damn near everything in it exploded. Everyone else there died, I found out later; I was the only survivor of our team, but spoilers, I guess. As I was saying, as I lay there taking my final breaths covered in chemicals and samples of our virus, I could only hope them right, and that what we made here wouldn’t spread.

  Then after a long blink, tired from the blood leaking from my body from the pieces of glass that were perforating my body I saw something, something that had appeared earlier but I had been too focused on my work to notice. A message in front of my eyes.

  “What on earth? Generate?”

  I must mention with the clarity of perception that hindsight offers, that at this stage I was not in my right mind. I do not know to this day if it was the cocktail of chemicals and virus that covered me, my brain shutting down from exposure to an unexpected situation, or an effect of the system itself but I did not question my circumstances. There was no fear in my mind, nor excitement, merely a complete focus on what was in front of me and an acceptance of it.

  The new message was as followed and it started the path that I would walk down from here on out.

  And I was back, lying on the floor of my lab, in a pool of my blood but things were different now. I felt the change; I was simultaneously feeling the sensation of traveling through my own veins and the rest of my body; I had an intimate understanding of both my own state and that of the virus within me. Reflexively I closed my wounds, using the virus in my blood to somehow push out the glass shrapnel throughout me and plug the holes that punched through my body. Doing so however took something from me, some kind of energy I had never felt before, and then the bloodless overwhelmed me and I lost consciousness.

  It wasn’t like it would be normally, I felt my brain shut off, but I was still semi-aware. The sensations associated with my body disappeared, but I was still the virus. There wasn’t much of me, I was free floating in the blood, but my own immune system wasn’t attacking me, which I guess is a product of the systems design. I couldn’t think like this though, there was an intelligence that I possessed as a virus, something mild and limited, merely a set of instincts, and overwhelmingly what I wanted to do was replicate.

  I knew how, every virus does, I moved from the blood into a fatty tissue, there was a lot of energy here, I was far from a slim man, and I injected my DNA into the cell. Every one of me that wasn’t holding platelets together, and even those after the clots had formed, did so. Then there was no more of me left and I was truly unconscious.

  I awoke to the feeling of heat. My eyes sprang open immediately. There was fire everywhere. I must have fallen asleep in the lab or something. It would be far from the first time that it happened. I did a quick look around, there was glass everywhere and I was lying in a pool of blood. Was I bleeding? I looked myself over but other than being sore there weren’t any wounds that I could see. Whatever, I didn’t have time for thinking; I needed to leave before I burned to death. Strange, the heat wasn’t nearly as unbearable as it should be. There was fire spreading through the lab, the doors were blocked but we had a window. We were on the first floor, so this would definitely be unpleasant. Adrenaline was an unbelievable drug because I ran with an agility that I didn’t think would be possible for my 60-year-old body. I flung the window open, and immediately air was sucked in. The flames behind me surged, and I nearly flung myself through it before I thought better of jumping headfirst out of a window.

  I climbed out and held to the window with a strength I didn’t know I still had, hanging down feet first. Then I saw my hands. Those weren’t my hands. They weren’t covered in wrinkles; they didn’t have the marks that had developed with my age. They looked like they had when I was 20, young, strong. I let go of the window in shock at the sight and landed a second later, on my feet.

  The impact was hard, but there was no pain in my knees, my hip didn’t twinge in fact I felt perfectly fine. I looked up as something broke and flames erupted from the open window with a terrifying WHUMPF showering me with broken glass. I shielded myself from the falling shards with my arms and backed away from the building.

  What was happening?

  There was a fire. If there was a fire, we all met at the assembly point in the carpark, so I started making my way over there. I very much avoided the person reflected in the windows. My reflection. My reflection that looked how I did when I was still in university. This wasn’t possible, I was going insane.

  I turned the corner of the building and saw chaos.

  The car park looked like it had been targeted by an airstrike. All the cars were destroyed and scorch marks surrounded them, there were craters everywhere, there was fire. I looked towards the front of the building and saw the bodies. People had gathered, but they had suffered horrible fates. They were scattered to pieces all over the ground, limbs spereated from bodies, and blood. So much blood. I emptied my stomach onto the ground.

  What is going on? I went back around the building so I couldn’t see them anymore. I patted myself down, looking for my phone, hoping for any kind of information as to what was going on. Of course, I didn’t have it, there were no mobiles in the lab for obvious reasons, nothing that could bring anything out, even our lab coats stayed in the lab. The lab coat I was wearing. The one that was red and sticky. The blood.

  I emptied my stomach again.

  I stood there for several minutes, just trying to focus on breathing as things started to come back to me. The explosions, the messages. I couldn’t understand this. In my youth I had read stories about this, they were popular in the late 2010s and peaked around 2025, but this was different. Knowing what a fictional character would do in a situation isn’t helpful, they always just magically soldier on. I can’t do that. Where do you start in the real world? Are my family ok? My wife passed on years ago, but my daughters were living in Europe right not. How was I going to contact them without electronic devices? Everything was electronic these days. Had they been hurt, were they ok?

  AND I WAS A VIRUS NOW? What does that even mean?

  I had too many questions, not enough answers, and no idea how to proceed.

  Then I noticed the screen. In the corner of my vison tucked away in the corner of my sight that I hadn’t noticed until my vision had tunneled from my hyperventilation. I slid down the wall, curled on myself as I sat there, the strength in my legs no longer enough to hold me up. Maybe they would hold answers.

  As soon as I had read the message, I began to feel a tug in a specific direction. It was only a few miles away. It was as good a thing as any; I needed something; I needed to find people, and I needed to be anywhere but where those bodies were. I didn’t think about the numbers.

  I started walking, out of the carpark and down the road. I didn’t look around me. I stared at my feet as I heard the roar of flames, as I smelled the horrible scent of the dead, and I walked. I couldn’t have done it that morning, I walked for hours, my feet would be sore, my joints would hurt. I’d spent too long with too much weight when I was younger, it wasn’t until I was 50 that I got myself together physically and down to a more average size but by then it had already done a number on my body. All that was gone now though. I felt young and healthy, I still flinched whenever I saw my hands. They were red. They were young. It was all wrong.

  I kept my eyes on my feet; I ignored the sounds and the smells; it was stupid, I could have hurt myself, I could have been attacked, hit by a car, anything. I wasn’t though because there was no-one to do that. I turned when I was meant to turn. I went around obstacles. I walked. Eventually I found myself somewhere. The tugging had stopped, and I looked around. I must have been here, the largest gathering of people. I looked up. There was a couple in front of me. I was stood next to a bench. There were 3 people on it, a young couple, they couldn’t have been more than 20, they had a baby. That was it, the biggest gathering of people within 50 miles were these 3, and now me.

  There were at least 4 cities within that distance to me and of all of them there was apparently no group of survivors bigger than 3. The couple looked as horrified as I did. I sat next to them on that bench and I wept.