Day 88 of the Outbreak
Berlin – Elias Wirth's Apartment
The rhythm was gone Elias knew it the moment he woke up. The pulses those soft patterns hidden in static, tapping from the vents, clicks from beneath the floor they had vanished.
And in their place, there was only pressure.
The Pain Begins
It started behind his right eye, a dull throb that felt like the world pressing in. By midday, it had become a burning ache that pulsed in sync with something… imaginary.
By nightfall, the pain had spread to his chest. Then his gut.
He sat curled on the kitchen floor, gripping his abdomen, drenched in sweat. Every few minutes, the pain spiked like a knife and then dulled again, always returning to that same rhythm:
Three. Pause. Two. Pause.
But the sound was no longer external. It was inside him.
Rosa Changes
Rosa didn't bark anymore.
She didn't sleep, not really. She would lay still for hours, her breathing slowed almost to nothing.
Elias watched her closely, trying not to panic.
That morning, he'd noticed an extra toe growing from her front paw. Pale, veined, boneless but moving. The fur around it had darkened into fine, sharp quills, clustered like thorns near the joint.
She walked differently now lower, tighter, as if stalking unseen things in the walls.
The Turning Point
By the third day of pain, Elias was nearly delirious. The sounds had become pressure, and now the pressure became hallucinations or something close.
He saw shapes behind his eyelids. Veins glowing like circuitry. Nerve branches moving like language. At one point, he tried to scratch behind his ear and his fingernails bled.
He staggered into the bathroom.
Pulled up his shirt.
There, just below his ribs, was a faint blue lattice beneath the skin veins rearranged into something like a symbol. A net. A frame.
He vomited.
From the living room, Rosa let out a low growl.
The First Attack
That night, something came through the vent a rat larger than usual, bloated, moving too slowly. Its eyes were cloudy, its ribs twitching like something pulsing beneath its skin.
Elias froze.
Rosa didn't.
She launched at the thing with a ferocity he'd never seen snarling, smashing it into the wall, tearing with teeth and claws.
The rat never squealed. Never struggled.
Rosa didn't eat it. She didn't even hold it long she ripped it apart, as if on instinct.
Then, calmly, she returned to Elias… and sat by his side.
Her fangs were stained red.
A Shared Mutation?
Elias slept that night on the floor, wrapped in his coat, Rosa's warm, changed body curled against his side.
When he woke the next morning, the pain had faded just a whisper now, like a bruise beneath the skin.
He checked his ribs again.
The blue network was still there.
Fainter, but present.
As he turned to look at Rosa, she was already watching him head low, ears forward.
Not hostile. Not quite protective either.
Something else.
Recognition.