Dr. Taft owns a dog. Unlike the little yappy ones at Paul's house, this one is large, black, with a jowled face and sunken eyes. It sits silently at Dr. Taft's feet, taking up the entire length of the table. Forty watches it nervously out of the corner of her eye. It stares at her with an unblinking intensity, its large teeth on display.

The apartment is on the topmost floor of the compound, the one completely bordered by sky. Where the lobby, green floor, and blue floor are built into the sheer limestone cliff on the edge of the tree line, this room sits above even the gray floor, which sits like an overhang on the top of the grassy hill. It also has windows lining each wall, with absolutely no privacy as far as Forty can see. She feels like she's in a glass Petri dish.

Dr. Taft clears his throat. Forty looks up quickly, drawing her eye away from the piles of old clothes and paper clutter. It smells inarguably human in here, like Dr. Taft has lived in this room for decades. "I see the surgery was successful," the gnarled man says. If Forty squints, it looks like his flesh is melting off of his bones.

"I'm so high on painkillers I can't eat properly," Forty says back. She can't quite get her jaw to recognize it's attached to her face, and her lips are so numb that blood dribbles past.

"Small price to pay for a cure," Dr. Taft says coldly, reaching down to scratch the head of the beast at his feet. "You can't fathom how invaluable your venom is."

"It's all I've heard lately," Forty grunts, reaching up to scratch at the metal placement in her cheek. Dr. Taft's hand shoots out and snatches her wrist, forcing it down to the table. She's struck by how strong his grip is.

"No. You don't get it. None of you do. All of this—" he says, gesturing at the neglected room, "is all for a greater purpose. You can't see beyond your selfish pain."

"That's easy to say when you're the one benefitting," Forty snarls, feeling her nails start to poke out. With the loss of her facial senses, her predatory form is much more eager to come out. She feels constantly anxious, like danger is just a breath away.

Dr. Taft sighs, steepling his hands. "Let me tell you a little story, one you might recognize."

Forty rolls her eyes. What could this man and her possibly have in common? He looks at her like a caged animal, like something incapable of reason and emotion. Forty wants to bury her teeth in his throat and shake him until his brain reboots. Still, she's here for a reason, and no matter how much she hates entertaining him this is her only shot at seeing Thirty-Seven. She gestures for Dr. Taft to continue.

"Once, way before you were even a fucking whisper of an atom in the universe, there was a boy. He grew up in a town you could travel in one step, and his dad was a right mean bastard. He'd hit him, cuss at him, threaten to put his cigarettes out on him." Dr. Taft's eyes go dark, angry, his hands shaking. "He'd– the boy was never safe, even where he was supposed to be the safest of all, so he ran away to the neighbor's house, who had a daughter." He smiles wistfully, curling his fingers against the table to get them to stop tremoring. "She had the prettiest red hair I've ever seen, and she liked to take me out to the river and we'd fish all day, find little ammonites and skip rocks. We got really close, her and I. Much like you and Thirty-Seven, if my hypothesis is correct."

"You don't get to say his name!" Forty spits, lunging at him. The dog jumps to its feet, putting two ginormous paws on the table and snarling at Forty. Her head swims with movement, the latest opioid dosage making her bones quiver.

Dr. Taft pats the dog's back and it curls back around his feet, waiting like a coiled snake to pounce on Forty. "Actually I do, Four-Zero, because I named him. I named you too."

Forty's vision swims, and she has to slowly lower herself back in her chair to avoid vomiting. Dr. Taft lets out a cruel laugh, staring down the tip of his nose at her. A burning anger travels through her veins, making her cheeks heat. "Anyways, we got very close, her and I. Got married, all of that stuff. We lived in this little cabin by that lake, and after working for a couple years I saved up enough to go to college for medicine." His smile drops, his gaze lengthening. He doesn't look like he's in the room anymore, but rather stuck somewhere in the distant past. "While I was away, she got really sick."

Forty can't help it. She lets out a mirthless laugh. "Let me guess," she snarls, finally letting her claws slip out. The two on her right hand splinter the bandages, and she holds them up to show Dr. Taft. "She became a Chupa."

"It's not nice to interrupt stories, Forty," Dr. Taft tuts, his hand whipping out like lightning to slap against Forty's stub. This time she does vomit, doubling over as waves of throbbing pain wracks her arm. "Be fucking silent and let me finish, please. Anyways, she got really sick, and suddenly she didn't know me anymore. It was like she was rabid, and I was just food to her. You don't know how hard it was for me, to walk by her everyday where we kept her in the shed, trying to feed her and give her water. She acted like I was trying to kill her. God, her screams." He shudders.

"She wasn't the first, and she sure wasn't the last. More people started cropping up with this illness, all in the town of Vaine. No treatment plan or vaccine worked, so we were all put on quarantine. It was a tense time in the eighties, with the Cold War, so it was believed there was a biological agent at play." Dr. Taft shakes his head, letting out a bitter chuckle. "No. It was just good old-fashioned Mother Nature throwing a curve ball."

"The original nineteen," Forty says, the story starting to form in front of her eyes. She breathes through the pain in her hand, trying to regain control of the situation. "That's where they came from. The quarantine."

"You're so smart, Forty. I'll give you that."
Dr. Taft ruffles her hair. Forty snaps at him, her teeth narrowly missing his wrist. "But yes. That was the original nineteen. The government put me in charge of studying the infected, since I was the only one in the quarantine zone with medical experience. They built a facility in the Vaine Nature Park, which hadn't been used for a few decades. That's what you see here today." He gestures at the desolate building, its white walls and spotless tile floors.

"My parents were there," Forty says. "You knew them!"

"Yes, though they were much younger than the others when the original quarantine went into place. They weren't particularly interesting, those two, so I left them to their devices. Guess that was my mistake, because just over ten years later they defied my expectations."

"They had me." Forty hates him. He talks about people's lives so casually, mentions their pain and suffering like an inconvenience to him.

"Yes, they had you, but you were boring at the time too. You escaped my sight for a long time, but someone as special as you can't stay hidden forever," Dr. Taft says, looking at Forty like a pinned frog. "No, not you. Not when you have everything I've ever wanted."

"I bet you let your wife die in here, once you realized she was boring too. That's what boring means to you, right? Incurable, useless. We're all just numbers to you." Forty props herself up in her chair, trying to disguise the shaking in her hand. She's so frustrated, the rage palpable from the tips of her toes to the ends of her hair. And yet, her body won't move. It can't. It's broken, debased, tired. She's just a reanimated corpse, a dead girl walking.

Dr. Taft's grin takes up his entire face, making the flashiness of his cheeks expand. "You're wrong about that one, Forty. You've actually met her before."

Forty tries to remember all the faces she's seen, the different teeth, the anger in their eyes. They all melt together, forming one angry abomination of fangs and blood-red sclera. "She started tearing her hair out when she got sick, because she thought the red was blood. We dye it now."

Suddenly, it hits her. The original nineteen. Forty doesn't even know of any specimens in the teens besides one. "Sixteen," she breathes, remembering the top of that brunette head when she passed by the day she was brought to the gray floor. She's never seen the woman's face, just heard tell of her from Forty-Five. Sixteen is unpredictable, extremely violent, and a virulent escapee, with almost complete control over her predatory form.

"Her name was Nora," Dr. Taft says, running his thumb over the back of his hand like he's trying to remember a touch. "And she was perfect in every way. I just... I just want her back."

What scares Forty is that she can almost understand. She gets it, the urge to destroy everything in your path to reach the one you love. It's what she's doing now, breaking all of her morals and going against Thirty-Seven's wishes to get back to him. She'll keep doing it, too. Nothing matters but seeing that face again, those long lashes and that sharp smile. She wants him to pick flowers for her again, wants to hold him close and listen to the sound of their heartbeats matching. She gets it.

"You see now, right? Why I can't just let you go." Dr. Taft gives her a tired smile, a peek of his age shining through. "I'll do anything for her, even if that means destroying the world."

Ah. That makes Forty wake up. The reminder of Dr. Taft's homemade pathogen terrorizing the surrounding towns. He really could bring down civilization with that if it makes its way into the food supply. While Forty may relate to that drive to save the one you love, she will never put the lives of so many innocents at risk. "You're shortsighted," she says, meeting his tired eyes with a burning gaze. "Sure, you might find a way to cure her, but you've ensured that whatever world she comes back to will be a rotten one. You don't care about her, not really. You just want her."

Dr. Taft frowns, his fists clenching. "Just when I thought you were starting to get it," he snarls. He bangs his hands against the table, denting the thin metal top. "But you're just like all the others. Let me tell you something, Forty—" he grabs the collar of her scrubs, brings her so close to his face that their foreheads knock together. She can smell the rage rolling off him in waves, and underneath that is the fear. That's what humans always smell like, she's decided. Fear of failure, fear of not fitting in or saying the wrong thing, fear of hardship. It's always fear, the rabbit quickness of their pulse, the primordial psychopathy it takes to make such selfish decisions.

"You will fail," she says, grinning. The closeness of their breaths is far too warm, and just past his skin she can see the vascularity of his veins, that life pumping through him. For once, human blood smells appetizing to her, and all she wishes is for him to loosen his grip just slightly so she can bury her fangs in his neck. The large dog growls at his feet.

"No, Forty, you will fail." Dr. Taft reaches up, catches the nob on her right port with his finger nail and cracks it open. Immediately, the head rush knocks her backwards, makes her choke on her saliva. She can feel the venom leaking out, can taste it as it dribbles past her lips and splashes against the table. Her legs give out and she crumbles, sputtering as she lands in the puddle of her own venom. It's cold and stinging against her face.

"You see, though you may be a smart creature, you are still a beast. We humans have experimented on the lesser for centuries, and I will continue to do so. Just because you're strong, doesn't mean I won't always come out on top. You are nothing to me," Dr. Taft spits, getting out of his chair and grabbing Forty by the back of her shirt. He forces her to her feet, doesn't care as she vomits again when more venom falls out of the port.

Her eyes are hazy as he leads her through the maze of stairs and safe doors, but all the while her mind is alive. She connects with each of her senses, as dull as they may be, and memorizes the route like a pathway of stars. When Dr. Taft roughly trudges her past a locked door, she's surprised to see Ben slip out of it.

There it is, she thinks. I'm coming.

When Dr. Hanna comes later tonight to feed Forty using an IV, she doesn't see the chain link hidden under her pillow. She leaves solemnly, more ghost than a person. Forty supposes that's what grief does to you. Dr. Hanna doesn't so much as glance back before scanning her card to close the door.

Forty launches across the floor, ignoring the screaming in her body. With her mangled hand, she places the chain link in between the closing doors. The metal groans, a sound just barely noticeable to her ears, but ultimately leaves the barest sliver of space.

After the LEDs fade to twilight, Forty brushes her fingers into the gap. The doors part with the pressure, and Forty stares at the empty gray floor with a wide grin.