Chapter 3

A crushing wave of despair engulfed me.

Why? The children I'd vaccinated earlier had all been perfectly fine. Why was this happening now?

Was I destined to relive the same ending no matter what I did?

On the hospital bed, the child who'd been injected less than five minutes ago was convulsing violently, each breath weaker than the last.

Watching him suffer, I was half-tempted to inject the remaining VRX-17 into my own veins.

If I died, it would prove the vaccine was contaminated, and the hospital would have to stop using it immediately.

Just as I reached for the syringe, my phone screen lit up.

A message from Mom.

[Evelyn, are you off work yet?]

[The chicken's already in the oven. Your dad also got that apple pie you love. Come home early tonight.]

No. I couldn't die yet. Not until I'd treated every sick child.

And my parents were at home waiting for me.

Most of the children hadn't been infected yet. They needed a doctor, not another corpse.

I held back my tears and hit the emergency alert button.

"Stop all injections! Recall every remaining dose! Initiate a full medical lockdown!"

If I could contain the patients before the virus spread, there was still a chance.

When I'd first noticed something off, I had already tried to pull the entire batch.

This time, no matter what Alaric or the Medical Council said, I wouldn't resume vaccinations.

Even if it cost me my medical license, that was still better than watching children die.

I forced myself to stay focused, injected the pup in front of me with antiviral serum, and prepared to move him into a negative-pressure isolation room.

But when the treatment room door opened, despair crashed over me again.

The corridor was packed with pups and parents waiting for their vaccinations, completely blocking the path to the isolation ward.

The nurses kept asking the crowd to step back, but no one was willing to leave their child's side.

Accusations echoed through the entire pediatric floor. The parents' shouted questions and the children's cries nearly pushed me over the edge.

While I stood there frozen, alarms shrieked again from the observation area.

A second child collapsed with infection, then a third, then a fourth.

The numbers on the monitors started turning red.

I rushed into the observation area to resuscitate them.

Every child who'd fallen ill had received syringes from the same tray, brought in by the same nurse.

I immediately ordered the head nurse to seal the tray, but in the chaos someone knocked over the medication cart. Empty syringes and patient files scattered across the floor.

"How did this happen..."

I stood frozen, my mind completely blank.

Bang!

A parent broke through the isolation door outside the treatment room, and more people surged in behind him.

Some clutched unconscious children and wailed. Others grabbed nurses demanding answers. Still others smashed the medication cart in fury.

The disaster had happened all over again. The entire pediatric ward dissolved into chaos.

I felt dizzy, yet somehow felt no pain at all.

Derek Collins, the father of the first child to fall ill, charged to the glass door and pounded on it, his eyes bloodshot.

"What did you inject into my son? Wasn't it supposed to be a vaccine?

"Open this door!"

Even having lived through this once before, I still couldn't face the same devastating scene.

More and more parents crowded around the treatment room until pack guards and emergency medics arrived, forcing a path through.

They found me slumped against the wall and assumed I'd been infected too, immediately breaking through the locked door.

"Dr. Hart, can you hear me?"