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Though it was night, the hallways of Laboratory Alpha (or ‘LA’, as the workers jokingly called it) were brightly lit underneath its fluorescent lighting, reflecting uncomfortably from the clean, white walls and shiny linoleum floors.
The soles of Walter’s trainers squeaked loudly as he tried to sneak down those brightly lit hallways, his shadow cast harsh and long whenever he hugged along the wall or crept around corners, keeping his head ducked low against the glints of the security cameras, his eyes and most of his face hidden behind his baseball cap and cold mask. While his passing will be noted, it won’t be until the hour was up - Walter knew the security guard on duty, and he’d be too busy watching his favourite show, complacent due to how nothing ever happened at the lab, safe as it was deep within Institute City.
If only they knew what happened on the lower floors.
He came to the last corner of the hallway and pressed himself against the wall, peeking around it. There, less than ten metres down the hallway, his ticket to freedom lay: an innocuous electronic door kept locked by a single card swipe and code.
Walter dug a hand into his jacket pocket, pulling out the keycard he had swiped only twenty minutes before from a scientist dozing in the break room. It had been an impulsive move, but no one else had been around and Walter knew he wouldn’t get a better chance, not with Nagai keeping such a close eye on him and Carla doing the same. Everything had aligned just so to give him this one chance, by sheer luck.
He clenched his hand around the keycard, feeling its plastic edges dig into his palm.
It’d been almost a month, a month since he was confined to this lab, cut off from his father who continued to do who knows what to god knows who, emboldened by the Institute’s board of directors, sprinting down a path that’ll end with…
Walter slid around the corner, jogging over to the door before he lost his nerve. He pressed the keycard against the keypad, like he’d seen Carla and his dad do many times before. A high-pitched beep squeaked out, and numbers in a random order lit up on the pad, waiting to be pressed.
Right. Right, if he remembered, for this guy, it was…
…beep, beep… beep…
“Um…”
…beep!
There was a split second pause, but it felt like an eternity to Walter as he held his breath, braced for failure or for an alarm to sound. But the keypad let out a cheerful chime and the door slid open.
Walter crashed through the open doorway instantly, the heels of his trainers squeaking against the linoleum floor as he sprinted across the small lobby to the elevator doors that lay at the end. He repeatedly pressed the call button, his heart in his throat as he waited for some sort of alarm to sound or for that security guard to take one passing glance at the camera feeds. It wasn’t unusual to see Walter prowling around the hallways like the caged animal that he was, but to see him outside of the Alpha labs was definitely not normal.
His time was short.
The elevator doors slid open so abruptly and silently Walter actually jumped, dropping the keycard he had half-forgotten in his hand. He hastily scooped it up and scampered inside the elevator, barely pausing to look as he frantically tapped the button for the bottommost floor.
The doors soundlessly slid closed, and with a barely perceptible shudder, the elevator descended.
Walter crammed his hands into the pockets of his jacket, fingers curled tight around the keycard, as he watched the numbers click down (32… 31… 30…). It was late, there shouldn’t be anyone else around except for the late night cleaning or security staff, so the chances of someone taking an elevator between the Alpha labs and the underground research facility was low - but there was still a chance.
…29… 28… 27…
He didn’t have a gameplan here, really. He knew things would get trickier once he was at the bottom, but only a select few about The Incident, as Nagai solemnly muttered whenever the topic was brought up. The rest of the research staff probably thought his father was too busy with his work to entertain Walter - it shouldn’t be… too abnormal to see a child trying to visit their father at work, especially since they’d been in those labs before.
Then again, that had been before the Coral augments started.
…26… 25… 24…
Coral.
Everything on Rubicon ran on it. From the global electric grid to everything that had a circuit board installed. It transformed Rubicon from some backwater frontier colony to a shining utopia that Earth was forced to simper at to get a slice of their miracle pie. Coral could only be ‘grown’ in the Rubicon system - any other attempts to do so elsewhere resulted in failure. Rubicon, his father had told him proudly, will pave the way for humanity - to new, glorious heights.
…23 …22 …21…
And for a time, Walter had believed that too. Had wanted to grow up to become a scientist and engineer just like his father and his mother, to continue their work with the Coral, to see how it could better serve humanity… only… only for everything to go wrong. For it to turn into a horror show.
…20 …19 …18…
All because his father had one day taken a step back and said “they act almost like neurons, don’t they?” Just that one innocuous statement had led his father down a dark, dark path as he compared and contrasted the electrical impulses and data transfer within a Coral swarm to the firing synapses of a human brain. A perfect comparison - which meant, wasn’t this compatible?
…17 …16 …15…
(Walter was drowsing, head pillowed in his crossed arms, his half-complete science homework beneath them. It was late and his parents had let him quietly work in a corner of a lab, though he’d noted their tension and barely contained energy as they whispered over monitors, graphs and simulations-
“We’ll need a successful product to show the board to let them greenlight the research,” his father muttered. “But there’s no way anyone will volunteer to something this invasive. The chance for failure is too high…”
“Then I will,” his mother said, quite simply. “I’ll be the test subject.”
“What? I can’t-”
“We’ve run the simulations a thousand times, Ed. The odds are a little risky but… I trust you.” A quiet laugh. “Besides, it’ll be a good motivator to make sure it succeeds, right?”
Walter opened his eyes, watching from beneath his eyelashes. His mother’s back was to him, but he could see his father: he looked anxious, unsure… but excited, his eyes bright with the thought of possibility… )
…14 …13 …12…
It had been a glorious success - and a horrible, gut-wrenching failure.
Walter gritted his teeth against the nauseous feeling in his gut remembering his mother’s last days, how she had been so out of it she had barely recognised her surroundings, talking to people who weren’t there, muttering as he clutched his hand “oh, I wish you could see it, baby, look at their beautiful voices…” before she…
But before that, there had been months where she had been fine - more than fine, magnificent. Her mental acuity and ability to interface with digital equipment had been several thousands leaps forward of anything humans had invented. For those few months of her life, Walter’s mother had been the Eve of a new Humanity, a glimpse into the potential they could achieve if they opened themselves fully to the Coral.
…11… 10… 09…
Then she deteriorated - quickly, abruptly, without warning. She began hallucinating, seeing and hearing things that weren’t there, her quick and sharp mind dulling and degrading into something scary and incomprehensible. His father had been frantic, trying to find out why, nothing in the charts or the scans explained - why was she getting worse-?!
In retrospect, that was probably when he started going insane, but maybe it started before that, when his mother offered herself as the sacrifice to his research and he didn’t say ‘no’. Walter still remembered how his excitement and hunger to know overruled his caution and hesitation.
…08 …07… 06…
Nagai started pulling Walter away from his father around then, but Walter had ignored him at first. They just lost Mom, he wasn’t going to abandon his father. It was fine, she volunteered, it just went wrong, such things happen (both parents had told him that, several times, when it came to science: sometimes things just go wrong, it happens), his father knew better now, he knew not to do the procedure until it could be made safe, it was fine.
(It wasn’t).
…05… 04… 03…
It wasn’t until The Incident that Walter realised his father no longer existed. He’d been replaced by something else, something driven by that monstrous potential that dwelt in the Coral - the monster that ate his mother whole and was taking bits and pieces of his father as time grinded on, as the Institute rained ‘volunteers’ and funding onto him, egging him on because of that miraculous glimpse his mother had given them, blinded by ambition and greed…
…02 …01 … 00…
Nagai couldn’t put a stop to it anymore. No one could. No one… but Walter.
…B1… B2… B3…
He was his son. He held some responsibility for all of this.
…B4.
The elevator shuddered to a halt, the doors sliding open soundlessly. Walter stepped out, lingering by the elevator until he faintly heard the slight scuff of the doors closing behind him. Overhead, the fluorescent lighting buzzed quietly.
In front of him lay the security doors leading to the research facility - the one for dangerous and experimental projects kept from the public eye. Walter took in a deep, slow breath, walking forwards until he stopped right in front of the doors. They were thick slabs of steel, with yellow warning strips along the top and bottom with ‘BIOHAZARD’ and ‘CORAL’ warning signs splashed across them. There was a little sign next to the door detailing that appropriate PPE was to be worn at all times when transiting through the facility, but Walter ignored that and tapped the stolen keycard against the keypad next to them.
The keypad chimed approvingly, the randomised numbers flashing on the pads. Slowly, Walter inputted the code, and stepped back as the security doors groaned open, creaking and squeaking loud enough to wake the dead. Walter squared his shoulders…
…and walked into hell.
Two years ago, on Walter’s tenth birthday, his parents got him a dog.
It was a momentous thing at the time: to get an animal approved to live in the lab required a lot of hoops to jump through, an administrative nightmare designed to turn off any but the most determined. Carla had a cat, and that was the only animal Walter was aware of in the laboratory complex - but unbeknownst to him, his parents had worked tirelessly behind the scenes, alongside their research, to get him a dog.
He’d been a mutt, with no one sure of his exact breed, but he had a lurcher look about him, all gangly limbs, long whippy tail and floppy ears, with a piebald coat. For Walter, who was only ever surrounded by adults too busy to entertain a child for long, and his care mostly delegated to whatever overworked intern drew the short straw that day, Walter had been ecstatic.
(“This is our way to make it up to you, for not being there as much as we should,” his mother had said, while Walter handled having a lapful of happy dog asking for scritches. “But he’s also your responsibility, okay? Make sure to walk him often!”)
Lucky, he’d been called. For two years, Walter had a staunch friend that was also a very good listener, keeping him company when he went days without seeing his parents, buried in their research, and letting him cry into his fur when his mother died. Walter could admit that he probably ended up loving that dog more than his parents in those short two years: Lucky had been there for him more than they ever had, but it was something he only realised retrospectively.
After The Incident.
(“Dad… what- what’ve you done to-?!”
“Ah, Walter, sorry. I needed a test dummy for the Gen Four implants, but the next batch of subjects isn’t until the end of the month…”
His father turned from the operating table, where Walter could just see Lucky’s hindlegs dangling limply off the edge. The overhead lights cast his father’s face in a deep shadow, his eyes gleaming unnaturally.
“Don’t worry. I’ll get you a new one.”)
The memories of that horrifying day crowded close to the forefront of Walter’s mind as he crept down the wide corridors of the research facility. Every door was heavily marked up with danger and warning signs, but everything was dark, light only blooming to life when the motion sensor detected him close by. Behind him, lights switched off as he moved away.
It was eerie, to be the sole beacon of light in this dark pit. When he passed some doors, he could hear muffled sounds that sounded too agonised to be human, but were also so tragically human in how they whimpered and cried out, reacting to the glimmer of light that no doubt seeped beneath their doors.
‘#C1-021’, ‘#C1-045’, ‘#C1-086’ said the signs on some of the door. Walter felt his pulse rise as the hallway branched off, with one sign pointing left to ‘C2 Ward - 001’, one pointing forwards to ‘C3 Ward - 001’, and another pointing right to ‘Research Lab 1 and 2’.
Walter headed right.
Things became more silent down here, so quiet he could hear nothing but his trainers squeaking against the floor and his own heavy breathing. He buried his hands into his jacket pockets, curled his fingers around the warm handle of the scalpel he’d filched from Nagai’s tray earlier that day. Walter had initially stolen it to deface the wall of the break room in an attempt to protest his unfair detainment, but now it might serve a different purpose.
Just in case.
He came up to another branch in the path, with one leading to Research Lab One and another to Research Lab Two. Walter headed towards Lab One, the hallway already lit up here. At the end was a door, the green light above saying that it was occupied.
A clipboard next to the door had a list of names and timings. Everyone else who worked in these labs had signed out except one: Dr. Kohler - 0621’. It was almost 10pm, a near fourteen hour shift.
Walter took a moment to collect himself, knowing that he had to maintain his cool throughout this confrontation. Last time- last time he’d been too upset about Lucky, hadn’t explained himself or managed to construct a coherent argument about how his father had turned into a monster. But Walter had spent his detainment by Nagai composing over and over again the perfect speech, the perfect words to use to have his father realise that what he’s doing was wrong so that he’d stop and everything-
Well, nothing would go back to what it was, but Walter could have a sliver or normality back, at least.
He pushed the door open. It was dimly lit at first, the faint glow of monitors sitting on desks, reflecting off a whiteboard covered in incomprehensible, scientific scribbles, papers and charts neatly organised across tables and pinned up on walls. Glass walls separated the room into compartments that offered no privacy, and Walter’s gaze slid to the left, where a partially opened door let a slice of light cut through.
He stepped inside and silently closed the door after him. He pulled the scalpel out of his pocket and walked, slowly and quietly, across the laboratory, sidestepping around desks and whiteboards. Everything hummed, a soft murmur of machinery and circuits, interspersed with a gentle ringing noise that was characteristic of Coral-run equipment - covering up the sound of his shallow and soft breathing as he finally reached the ajar door and pushed it fully open.
It was ‘Dr Kohler’s office that also functioned as a workshop. The overhead light was bright, and it was in a state of organised chaos - the desk with his terminal and stacks of paper groaning beneath the weight of charts, folders and scans piled up high. The walls plastered with more scans, papers with scribbles and theories that strewn half onto the wall itself, becoming increasingly erratic the further along the wall you got… to the workshop area, where his father stood in front of three large monitors displaying three different brains.
Walter didn’t know what he was looking at, and neither did he care. He stepped inside and stared at his father’s back, struck by how he looked… normal. He was wearing his white lab coat as usual, with no suspicious signs of wrinkling. His hair was a little tousled but didn’t seem greasy or unkempt. He didn’t seem underweight underneath his labcoat either. He seemed fine.
“...Dad,” Walter said.
There was a brief pause before his father turned around. There were bags under his eyes, but not worse than usual, and though his jaw had some stubble, he had clearly shaved the day before at least. Walter had expected some shock, though, or confusion, but instead his father just blinked at him like having his son approach him in the middle of the night, scalpel in hand, was perfectly normal.
“Oh, Walter. Dr Nagai didn’t say you were coming to visit,” he muttered, already turning away back to his monitors. “Sorry, but I’m very busy right now - I’m on the verge of figuring out why Gen Four implants causes a rapid onset of psychosis in the patients…”
Walter clenched the scalpel so tight he felt its handle bite into his palm.
“I need to talk to you,” he said, taking a few steps forward. “It’s important.”
His father sighed loudly - irritably - and turned back towards him with a frown. “Walter, I said I’m busy.”
“What,” Walter snapped hotly, immediately feeling his forced calm dissemble violently, “busy lobotomising people?”
“As I’ve told you multiple times, it’s not a lobotomy-”
“I heard them,” Walter said, taking another step, the metal handle of the scalpel slippery against his sweaty palm. “The patients. I heard them cry and- and groan when I walked past. Whatever you’re doing is hurting them, like- with Mom.”
His father said nothing, the irritation edging his expression melting away into something blank.
Walter ploughed on, feeling like he had a foothold at last, even while the perfectly crafted speech he had practised over and over turned into ash in his mind. He couldn’t remember a damn word. “I’m, I’m here to ask you to stop. Dad. I- I heard Dr Nagai talking about it- the augmentations aren’t working. They keep… they keep failing, and I thought, this is meant to help people, but you’re just hurting them.”
“...it’s unfortunate, but progress requires us to hurt people sometimes, Walter,” his father said with surprisingly gentleness, a flicker of the person he used to be before it was swallowed up by his emotionless expression. “All of this is to ensure that what happened with your mother won’t happen again-”
“But it has!” Walter yelled. He drew in a sharp breath and struggled to moderate his voice: rational, calm. That was how an adult would approach this. “It’s happened over a hundred times already. How many more until progress is made? How many more until- until this stops?”
“Until I get results,” his father replied, unmoved. “You don’t understand, Walter, this is the next step to human evolution. Once we figure this out, our lifespans will triple, diseases will be eradicated and our understanding of the galaxy will reach heights that would’ve been impossible, otherwise. Once it’s perfected, you’ll be the one to benefit. It’ll be perfectly safe for you.”
But Walter didn’t care about long lifespans, perfect immunity or intellectual enlightenment. He wanted nothing to do with this at all - despised how it had taken so much from him, when he hadn’t even-!
“I don’t want it,” he whispered.
“You will, when you’re older,” his father said dismissively. “Now, I mean it, Walter. I’m busy. I’ll entertain your debate on ethics when it’s not…”
He paused to check his watch, and did a double take.
“Almost midnight? What’s Dr Nagai doing, letting you roam around so late?”
“He doesn’t know I’m here.” Walter could feel something ugly rise in him, bloated and barbed and sticking in the gaps between his ribs. The concerned father pantomime sickened him. “I slipped out.”
His father sighed and ran a hand through his hair. “Really, Walter…”
There was an odd sense of detachment, suddenly. Walter looked at the person that had once been his father, and could see so much resemblance it was painful. He acted like him, he sounded like him, he looked like him… but he was also a complete stranger. Even after realising Walter was running around after bedtime, seeing how upset he was, his father was glancing over his shoulder at his monitors with a distracted expression - uncaring and unbothered.
His parents had always been busy, but they’d always tried to make time for him when he outright asked. Now… a revelation dawned on him, one so heavy and grim it felt smothering.
“You don’t really care about me, do you.”
The words slipped out before he realised, and his father, already half-turning, paused.
“You just care about the Coral.” But the first stone had shifted, and though Walter couldn’t remember his meticulously crafted speech, the emotions were still there, bubbling and rancid, and came pouring out like a mudslide; “You just care about these stupid augmentations and getting it right so everyone would love you for being such an amazing scientist.”
His father turned to him with a frown. “That’s enough.”
Walter didn’t hear him. “You killed Mom for this stupid Coral research, and it didn’t give you anything but an invention that doesn’t even work. What’s the point of giving people implants that drives them crazy within months? Did you learn anything while lobotomising Mom?”
His father said nothing.
“You always told me that, that we’re to use Coral to improve humanity,” Walter continued, hoping, praying, that he was finally getting through to him. “This isn’t improving anything! It’s- It’s evil!”
“Walter-”
“I wish we never discovered it!” Walter’s voice rose into a shout, drowning out whatever his father was trying to say. “We were better off without it! We should- put the Coral back in the ground and pretend we never found it! The way you’re using it- you’re not improving humanity, you’re worsening it!”
His father looked at him for a long moment, as Walter caught his breath. His expression was utterly emotionless, his eyes unfathomable as he crossed his arms and tilted his jaw, peering down at Walter like he was some lowly ant that had dared to try and pinch the bottom of his boot.
“Are you still angry about the dog?” his father finally asked.
The dog.
The dog.
Walter - never, had he felt such a surge of seething, furious hatred as he had then. Never, had he looked at someone with such visceral disgust, with such- such- rage. The dog. The dog. Like this all boiled down to that one thing, not his mother, not the poor victims that came on her heels, ignorant to what they were signing up for, not the carnival of horrors his father had set up in the basement of their home. Not any of the earnest words he had shouted at him - none of that, not any of that, just are you still angry about the dog.
His vision clouded with red, a tremendous thundering in his ears deafening him, his sight narrowing down to his father’s blank, uncaring face. The dog. The dog? Lucky, his best friend and the only creature that had probably ever loved him, genuinely loved him and not out of obligation. The dog?? The one that his father had strapped down to the operating table and cut off a portion of its skull to expose the grey matter while it was still alive. The dog??? Kicking and seizing limbs, rolling eyes - the dog????
Walter was no stranger to extreme emotion - he had run the gamut when his mother had died - but in that moment it was as if his brain had realised he’d encountered something too much for it to process and promptly dislocated his consciousness from the situation. Walter was both inside and outside of himself, his overboiling emotions separated from him by a very thick pane of glass where he could see but not really experience it. That ugly, barbed emotion catching between his ribs had finally ruptured.
“The dog,” someone said in his voice.
“I know you were upset by it,” someone said in Dad’s voice. “But it’s been almost a month. I think you’re too old to have this long of a temper tantrum about it.”
Oh.
“Temper tantrum,” the someone said.
“Walter,” someone said. “What are you doing-”
Okay.
What happened next, he didn’t really remember too well.
The red in his vision had been more than just a psychological thing: it had been real, sticky and slick between his fingers, the scalpel slipping between them and slicing up his palm. The unwrinkled, unmarred white of his father’s labcoat let the red show up starkly, in shiny patches and smeared shades of drying brown.
But the red was all neatly tided away now. He was back in Nagai’s laboratory, his hands swaddled in soft linen that made it hard to bend his fingers. The sleeves of his jacket were stained - already drying into a rusty brown. His jacket was dark blue, though, so the dark brown didn’t stand out as much against the white labcoat - could almost be overlooked, at a passing glance.
Which made him wonder - why did they make the labcoats white? Was it to let stains show up better? Was it to be an unmistakable visual signal - hello, I am a scientist, you can trust me with your life, your grey matter and your existence as a person. His father looked very normal and personable, anyone would trust him to cut open their skull and pump Coral in there. The white coat probably helped trick people into thinking that. How could you distrust anything with such blinding purity wrapped around them?
“Kid.”
Carla’s voice cut through Walter’s idle, meandering thoughts, though he didn’t respond to it. He kept staring at the dark brown stain on his sleeve, picking out where it soaked into the fabric, making it look crusty.
Above him, Carla sighed, and he heard the scrape of metal against linoleum. He glanced upwards when he heard her sit down heavily - she was seated in the chair next to him, her own labcoat wrinkled and marred with dark stains that were either burns or engine oil. She had a habit of stubbing out her cigarettes on her labcoat when an ashtray wasn’t handy: ‘it’s fire retardant, isn’t it?’ she’d laugh in that husky way of hers.
Though Carla was older than his dad, she looked just as youthful as any intern working at Lab Alpha. Her mousy hair was tied up in a haphazard bun, strands of hair flying everywhere, her heavy-lidded eyes peering at him over her blocky glasses, a smudge of lipstick on the corner of her mouth where she’d been rubbing her bottom lip too much. She seemed almost disappointed in him.
“Oh, you’re acknowledging my existence now, hm?” she drawled once he unwisely made eye contact. “How’re the hands?”
Walter flexed the fingers as far as they’d go.
“...sore,” he mumbled.
“Considering you sliced yourself right up, I’m not surprised,” Carla said. “You’re lucky you didn’t permanently damage your hands. Useful things, those.”
She lapsed into a brief silence, her mouth twisting slightly. She wanted to say something, but it was obvious she had no idea how to approach it - but, it was Carla. She only ever approached things in one way:
“So, your dad,” she said, bluntly.
Walter looked away.
“I… get your feelings,” Carla continued a bit awkwardly, “but… you could’ve thought up a better plan than ‘walk into his office and stab him’.”
“I wasn’t planning to stab him,” Walter said, all while thinking i stabbed him? “It just happened. These things do.”
Carla sighed.
“...yeah, I guess,” she muttered. “In this fucked up place, at least.”
Walter didn’t blink at the crude word, even though he knew Nagai would be giving her a glare for it if he was here. He just returned his gaze to his bandaged up hands, and asked a question he already knew the answer to:
“Did I kill him.”
“No,” Carla said. “In fact, you got off worse than him. You’re twelve, kid. Even with a scalpel you’re not going to overpower a grown man.”
Walter sat there and tried to sort through the complicated surge of emotion at that news. He was relieved - I’m not a murderer - but he was also disappointed - a monster still walks free. He knew it was too late, anyways. His father had opened up Pandora’s box: even if Walter had managed to kill him, there were so many dedicated to his research. It wasn’t just Dr Kohler working down in the augmentation research lab, there was a team of almost forty down there.
“You’re lucky,” Carla said. “Your dad’s too deep in the Coral-sauce to even care you tried to kill him. The Institute would’ve punished you harshly if they found this out.”
Care. His father didn’t care even when Walter stabbed him, apparently.
Amazing.
Why was he surprised?
“I suggest you just… take this time to sort yourself out,” Carla said, fidgeting with the lapel of her labcoat in a way he knew to mean she wanted a cigarette. “Alright? Nagai’ll make sure you don’t have to see your dad anymore, and keep him far away from you. I’m working on something you might be interested in, too. No Coral, just normal machines.”
It was funny. Carla wasn’t the best when it came to emotional things - even now she sounded awkward, uncomfortable, but she tried anyway. Walter had known her for almost as long as he’d known Lucky, brought in to help research the integration of Coral with machinery and AI, but she had always tried to include him while his parents had been too busy diving headlong into increasingly dangerous research.
When his mother had died, Carla had dragged him off, even while he was sniffling and sulky, to help her test a dumb AI drone built for geological surveys. It had waddled around on thin legs and been a little clumsy, but its endearing antics had distracted him for a while. When Lucky had been strapped to the operating table, Carla had let him cry into her oil-stained labcoat while stiffly patting his head.
Even now, after he attempted to murder his father, Carla sat here with him and tried to distract him. Machines, no Coral, she said, even though he knew the board had been pressuring her on the C-Weapons project. It’d be a waste of her time, but she still made time.
“Okay,” Walter said quietly. “I’d like that.”
“Alright, good.” Carla stared at him for a moment, before slapping her palms against her thighs and standing up. “Well… c’mon, then. It’s after midnight. You should be in bed, or something.”
Slowly, Walter slid off the cot-bed he’d been sitting on. Nagai’s lab had an infirmary, if only because combining machinery with someone like Carla resulted in more than a few workplace accidents. Carla put a hand on his shoulder and pushed him along, her grip firm like she thought Walter was going to try and break free and try another attempt on his father’s life.
He was too tired. Now that he had come out of that red-tinged, maddening haze, Walter just realised the futility of it all. Nothing he’ll do will bring his mother back, nor Lucky, nor his father. They were all gone, consumed by the Coral, just bricks on the roadside that made up the path it led all of them towards.
At that moment, Walter despised it.
He hoped it all burned one day, that it ended up consuming itself until it was all gone - for good.