Page 71 of Outbreak Protocol
The small room is cold, stripped of all personality save for the three cots arranged against the walls of what was once a university physics lab. A faint scent of ozone and antiseptic clings to the air. Outside, the Munich Safe Zone prepares for its final night.
I sit on the edge of a cot, the thin mattress crinkling under my weight, and hold the book steady for Emma. It’s one Erik found for her in a stripped-bare campus bookstore, a children’s guide to constellations. Her small head rests against my arm, her finger tracing the outline of Orion.
"He was a hunter," she whispers, her voice sleepy.
"A great hunter," I affirm, my own voice quieter than I intend. "So brave, he was placed in the sky to be remembered forever."
Across the room, Erik is a silhouette against the blue glow of his tablet. He hasn't stopped working since we arrived, his fingers flying across the screen, reviewing epidemiologicalmodels and transmission projections. He’s surrounded by the ghosts of data, the millions of lives reduced to statistical curves. He’s trying to find a pattern in the chaos, a mathematical key to unlock our future. There’s a worn textbook on statistical mechanics on the floor beside his pack, a relic from a life before all this, a life where problems had elegant, provable solutions.
Emma’s breathing evens out, her hand going slack against the page. I gently close the book.
"There are new reports," Erik says, not looking up from his screen. His voice is flat, exhausted. "Unconfirmed chatter from the rural patrols north of the city."
I know what's coming. We’ve all heard the whispers. "The species jump?"
"Viral markers detected in avian and rodent populations. Still anecdotal, but the data sets are aligning." He finally looks up, his pale blue eyes looking hollow in the screen's light. "Statistically, it was always a possibility. A terrifying one, but not impossible."
"If it’s true… Erik, what does that mean?"
"It means containment has failed," he says, the clinical term a stark contrast to the horror it represents. "It means the virus has an endemic reservoir. We can't burn out the disease if it can hide in every bird, every rat. It means we're no longer fighting a human epidemic. We're fighting the ecosystem."
I look down at Emma, her small chest rising and falling in sleep. She is so fragile. My medical mind understands the cold calculus Erik speaks of—vectors, reservoirs, R-naught values—but my heart feels it as a physical blow. First, we lost the cities. Now, the forests and fields are turning against us.
"We need to get her to Switzerland," I murmur, tucking the blanket around her shoulders.
Erik's gaze softens as it rests on Emma. "Yes. That's all that matters now." He turns back to his screen, the grim determination setting his jaw once more. "The convoy leaves at dawn."
I watch them both—the innocent girl dreaming of heroes in the stars, and the brilliant man fighting monsters in the data.They are my world now. I lean back against the concrete wall, knowing I won't sleep.
Day 137
"Pack only essentials," Erik’s voice cuts through the pre-dawn gloom. "One bag each."
The order is simple, brutal. Three months since Anna was infected. Now, Munich is being evacuated, another city sacrificed. The virus has breached every wall, every quarantine, every desperate line we’ve drawn. We are being relocated to a high-altitude research facility near Geneva—the last intact bastion before the Alps.
Emma, solemn and awake, carefully selects her treasures. She speaks in soft tones to her stuffed rabbit as she tucks it into her small pack. Anna’s faded silk scarf is folded with a reverence that aches to watch; she holds it to her face for a moment, her eyes closed, before placing it beside the book of stars Erik gave her.
My own choices feel heavier. I run my thumb over a faded photograph salvaged from the floodwaters of our Hamburg apartment—my parents and sister, laughing on a pier, the corner warped and stained. I tuck it between the pages of a thick virology journal. One represents the past I failed to protect, the other, the future I'm fighting to create. There’s no room for anything else.
The convoy is a grim caravan of armoured military vehicles. We are herded into the back of a personnel carrier, the cold metal benches vibrating against my bones. The air is thick with the smell of diesel, floor cleaner, and damp wool. Emma sits between Erik and me, a tiny, tense figure dwarfed by the enormity of our flight.
As we clear the city's outer checkpoints, Emma falls into a fitful sleep, lulled by the relentless motion.
"The morality of it is what I can't reconcile," I say to Erik,my voice low. "If the species jump is real… a widespread cull is the only logical response. How do we do that? How do we justify it?"
Erik runs a hand through his hair, the gesture weary. "We justify it by trying to save our own species from extinction, Felix. It's monstrous, I know. But the virus doesn't operate on morality. Its only imperative is to replicate. If local fauna becomes a persistent vector, every animal is a potential carrier. Culling is the only tool that remains." He looks out the narrow, reinforced window. "I hate it as much as you do. But I can’t let my feelings compromise the analysis. Too many lives depend on it."
His honesty is a cold comfort. He sees the whole map; I can only see the individual tragedies that populate it.
An hour later, we see the proof. Outside Munich, the convoy slows. Through the thick glass, we see the first animal disposal teams—faceless figures in white hazmat suits, moving with an eerie, practiced efficiency. They are collecting the dead. A flock of starlings lies scattered across a children’s playground, like a handful of discarded black feathers. Further on, a family of deer lies in a heap near the edge of a wood, their elegant forms still and broken. I see a child’s red tricycle lying on its side in a driveway a few metres away from a golden retriever.
My breath catches. My doctor’s brain supplies the clinical rationale—epidemiological necessity, breaking the chain of transmission—but my gut clenches with a primal sense of wrongness. For a moment, I'm back in Hamburg, in the chaos of the hospital, making impossible choices about who got a ventilator and who didn't. Another triage, this one on a planetary scale.
"Don't look," I tell Emma, but it’s too late. Her eyes are wide with a child's unfiltered horror.
"Why are they hurting the animals?" she asks, her voice barely a whisper.
Erik answers when I cannot, his tone impossibly gentle. "The animals got sick too, Emma. Like people did."