Bavaria, Germany – July 1939
The silence had weight. Dr. Ingrid Werner felt it pressing against her temples as her watch marked another second closer to what she now called the final calculation. Forty-eight hours remained.
Her hands trembled as she approached the laboratory entrance. They had been shaking for days, ever since she realized what monstrous thing they had made. But she forced herself forward. Fear was a luxury she couldn't afford. Not when she might be humanity's last witness.
The smell had grown stronger—sweet decay seeping through concrete and steel. Her colleagues no longer noticed. Months of exposure had carved something essential out of them, leaving only shells that moved with disturbing precision.
But Ingrid still noticed. She clung to that awareness like a drowning person clutching driftwood.
The guard's gaze fixed on her with mechanical intensity. His third scan in five minutes. "Seventeen minutes, Dr. Werner," he said in a flat monotone, eyes tracking her with inhuman patience. The patience of something that had forgotten sleep.
She adjusted her glasses, swallowed terror, and stepped inside. The heavy door sealed with a hiss that sounded like finality.
Three white coats bent over their stations in perfect unison, their movements flowing together like parts of a single organism. It had been three days since any of them had left. Three days without rest or food, as if powered by something else entirely.
"Good morning, Dr. Werner." The greeting came from three throats at once, voices harmonizing in a way that froze her blood. None looked up from their microscopes.
The cultivation wall displayed thirty-seven glass containers under red lights, each pulsing with sickly luminescence. Eight months ago this had been agricultural research. Now it housed something that didn't just kill, but rewrote every organism it touched—converting them into components of a larger design whose full extent was too vast for any human mind to grasp.
Everyone except her. Not yet.
The memorandum on her desk felt like a death warrant:
Effective immediately: All personnel submit to mandatory blood screening, 0600 hours tomorrow. Positive results require immediate quarantine. No exceptions.
Twenty-four hours until her immunity—the genetic quirk that had preserved her mind—would be discovered. Then she would become not a researcher, but a specimen.
Her throat dry, she approached specimen D4. Her legs begged her to flee, but she made them move. Bravery wasn't absence of fear. It was action despite it.
The container held midnight-black tendrils forming an intricate web, pulsing with a deliberate rhythm like a vast heartbeat. Yesterday's growth markers were shattered—seven additional centimeters overnight. The progression suggested something operating by unknown rules, twisting living matter in ways science had never documented.
Her hand touched the small vial hidden against her skin—one stolen sample that might serve as proof. If she could escape. If anyone would believe her.
If it wasn't already too late.
"Has anyone made direct contact with D4 today?" Her voice stayed steady by force.
Dr. Erich Schmidt finally raised his head. Yellow, oily fluid oozed from his nostrils. His pupils had expanded into vast black pools that seemed to reflect impossible depths—blood vessels branching like crimson fractals beneath the whites.
"Standard protocol maintained," he said with mechanical precision. "Nutrient medium replaced as scheduled."
Then, after a pause: "Berlin has requested an accelerated report. Fourteen hours." His hollow gaze fixed on her, and she felt something vast observing her through his borrowed eyes. "The timeline has been moved forward. Again."
"On whose authority?"
"The Führer himself. Transport vehicles are being prepared."
Transport. The word struck like a tidal wave. They intended to move it. Unleash it. How many other facilities across the Reich were cultivating similar horrors?
"The growth rate makes containment nearly impossible," she said carefully. "Perhaps we should revise protocols before attempting transport?"
Schmidt's lips curled into something almost like a smile, but more a baring of teeth. A strand of yellow fluid glistened between them. "The Ministry finds the growth rate optimal for their purposes."
Ingrid nodded, her stomach turning. She withdrew her laboratory journal, hands shaking. Her notes detailed everything: synchronized movements, assistants pausing mid-sentence as if listening to inaudible sounds, the change in blinking patterns—too slow, too regular.
Her watch ticked. Seventeen hours until her rendezvous with the resistance. Nineteen until Berlin's committee arrived. Twenty-three until the blood test that would expose her.
The telephone's shrill ring shattered the quiet. Schmidt answered, listened, then extended the receiver toward her.
"Berlin. The committee arrives in eight hours."
Her heart lurched. "Eight?"
"Unusual growth patterns reported," Schmidt whispered. For a moment, his ruined eyes cleared. Pure terror stared out, human again. His lips shaped a single word, silent: Run.
Then the alien blankness returned, and he resumed his work as though nothing had happened.
Ingrid set the receiver down with a steady hand. She turned back to D4. The black mass pressed against the glass like hunger. Reaching. Coiling.
It knows.
Her research had already been sent like messages in bottles: to her sister in Switzerland, her old professor in Stockholm, a resistance contact known as "L'Ami." But the sample hidden on her skin was different—undeniable proof of what should not exist.
The assistants shifted position with eerie unity, forming a loose perimeter between her and the exit. Their movements weren't human. They were coordinated by something vast and unseen.
The black tendrils pulsed with rhythms that spoke of vast, unnatural cycles—a heartbeat from something beyond human understanding. Not life, but something that had learned to wear life's mask.
Outside, storm clouds gathered with unnatural speed. An SS convoy rumbled through the gates, diesel engines growling like things awakening from primordial sleep.
Seven hours, fifty-six minutes.
The countdown had begun.