“Uh… yes. Yes, I’m still here.”

“Oh, good. It’s a delight to see color return to your eyes.” Victor chuckled. “So yes, at first, everyone wants to go home. They plead. They beg. They bargain. Then, toward the end, they give up. And at this point, over and over, I see the same pattern, the same demand. They start begging to be taken upstairs.”

“Really?”

“Yes, quite often.” Victor leaned back, crossing his arms. “They always want to go upstairs.”

“Fascinating.” Gabriel scratched his chin. “Perhaps if a study was done, it could—”

“Your move, Gabriel.”

Gabriel pondered his next move. He decided on moving the rook. In the background, John Morris was still pleading to go upstairs. Upstairs.

“This is such a bizarre place we live in,” Victor said. “It does strange things to a man, doesn’t it?”

Gabriel sighed. “Maybe. Probably. For instance, my roommate died last night—”

“I’m sorry to hear it.”

“No. See, that’s my point.” Gabriel shook his head. “I’m not sorry. I’m not even particularly saddened. That’s what scares me.”

“Is that so?” Victor raised one eyebrow.

Victor made a move. John Morris started coughing.

“Yes,” Gabriel continued. “Because when the man sleeping two feet away from me dies and I don’t feel any true grief over it, I… there’s something deeply wrong about that. I’ve become desensitized. I can’t bring myself to care about death anymore, and that disturbs me.”

“Well, you do see the painfully slow, gradual process of death every day. Every single day. How can that not have an effect on you? It would have to. A constant process of decay is occurring to everyone in this building, and your extensive medical knowledge makes this even more apparent to you than it is to others. While others see the wrinkles, you know the cause behind the wrinkles.”

“Yes. Yes, that’s true.”

“Besides that, well…” Victor’s eyes narrowed. “Death doesn’t actually scare you, does it?”

John Morris coughed again, a bit more hoarsely.

“No,” Gabriel answered.

“Of course it doesn’t,” Victor said, leaning forward. “A man like you? No, of course you’re not afraid of death. You’re afraid of living. Living trapped within your body as your mind slowly unravels like a roll of toilet paper. That’s your worst nightmare.”

Gabriel felt uncomfortably transparent. “Yes. Well…”

“I have to confess something to you, Gabriel. I’m a bit of a snoop. I keep track of all of the medical notes that pass through here, which is highly illegal, but I have my ways.”

“Impressive. They won’t let me within twenty yards of the medical records.”

“Of course not. You’re Gabriel Schist, the great immunologist!” Victor grinned. “But yes, after reading your records, I want to ask you something, man to man. Why have you never allowed yourself to be injected with your own vaccine? That just strikes me as a bit odd.”

Gabriel fingered one of his pawns. “You’re right. I’ve never been afraid of death. I didn’t want something inside my body that would make me more immune from it. Maybe I’ve always had something of a death wish.”

“Hurtsss,” John Morris muttered. “Kiiiyaa… ssss de ffflllluuuk …hurts. Hurts. Stomach… hurts. Hurts.”

Gabriel shot his gaze toward the receptionist. “What is he—”

“Hurts!” Morris shrieked. “Hurts! Hurts! Aaahhhhh!” He clutched his stomach. Then, his ears. His eyes. His scrotum. He couldn’t seem to figure out where the pain was coming from. He coughed—a cough full of mucus, just as Robbie’s had been—and then he howled in pain again. He started ripping off his clothes.

Gabriel gasped. “Good God.” He heard the rapid footsteps of nurses running to the lobby.

“Hurts! Hurts, hurts, huu… hh… hh…” Morris’s breathing became hoarse and raspy. He began shaking more violently.

John Morris pushed himself out of his chair. He crashed to the floor, and on the way down, his chinbone cracked hard against the side of the receptionist’s desk. Blood splattered across the carpet. He gyrated as if having a seizure. His eyes bulged, and he didn’t seem to be able to breathe.

Gabriel trembled. Normally, he could name any illness in seconds. But he had no idea what was wrong with Morris. Unless… unless it was what he’d been warned about in the middle of the night by the talking slug. The Black Virus. He shook his head. That was a hallucination. He was sure of it.

Several nurses rushed over to Morris. He thrashed around, violently throwing them off him. He was fighting desperately and still ripping off his clothing. A deep puddle of sweat appeared on the floor beneath him.

“Code Blue!” a nurse hollered. “Code Blue!”

Morris climbed onto his knees, gasping. He crawled toward the chessboard. His face became paler, turning a ghostly white. His body hair looked frizzled, as if it were ready to fall off in clumps. An eerily dark, oily sweat was dripping off him in buckets.

As Morris lunged forward, Gabriel noticed something utterly bizarre. The man’s body was covered in ink-black, bulging veins. The girth of them was as wide as snakes, wriggling across his flesh. They looked capable of bursting from his nearly translucent skin and crawling away.

Suddenly, Morris rolled onto his back, screaming. “Mmmm… spplll… mmmmy eyes!”

The nurses tried in vain to hold him down as Morris frantically clapped his hands over his eyes. Steam rose into the air from beneath his hands, and he started clawing at his eye sockets as if trying to gouge out his eyeballs. He began bashing his head against the floor.

Gabriel got out of his chair and backed away, gripping his chest. His pounding heart felt as if it was moments away from shattering his ribcage.

Three paramedics burst through the front door. The flurry of action resembled a firefight. The nurses moves aside, and the paramedics grabbed Morris’s writhing body and strapped him down on a stretcher. They raised the gurney, and on the floor where he’d been smashing his head were a couple of teeth swimming in a puddle of sweat and blood. The stench of urine filled the lobby.

“We need an empty room!” a paramedic shouted.

“What?” a nurse replied. “Aren’t you taking him to the hospital?”

“No. We need an empty room for quarantine. Those are direct orders from the hospital. This black veiny shit is going around, and we can’t let it spread. Where’s an empty room?”

The nurse pointed toward the hall. “North Wing has an open room, but—”

The paramedics shoved the gurney down the corridor in the direction of North Wing. Gabriel, though shaking with fear and confusion, forced himself to take one last look at the scared, sick man as he was wheeled away. Morris looked back at him, and Gabriel understood why the man had been clutching his eyes.

Morris’s eyeballs were black. Jet-black. No pupils. No irises. Just two black balls rolling around inside his skull.

The slug was right.

The Black Virus had arrived.

ACT II of III:

SPILLED MILK