GRENUN: When The Air Killed Us

Chapter 1: Holding My Breath

Forty-seven.

Forty-eight.

My lungs are on fire. A hot, tearing agony builds behind my sternum, spreading outward toward my ribs like liquid lead. My throat twitches involuntarily, trying to force my mouth open, trying to suck in whatever is left inside this room.

I bite down hard on the inside of my cheek until I taste copper. Pain buys seconds. Pain keeps the diaphragm still.

Forty-nine.

The floor beneath my knees won't stop vibrating. It isn't a sharp shock anymore; it’s a deep, nauseating thrum that rattles straight through my shins, up into my pelvis, and into my jaw. The reinforced concrete walls of Sub-Level 3 are weeping. Fine, grey masonry dust pours down from the hairline cracks in the ceiling like hourglass sand, settling into my hair, my eyelashes, and the back of my mouth.

It tastes like crushed chalk and hot iron.

Fifty.

Don't breathe. Whatever you do, Silas, do not open your mouth.

Three feet in front of me, the main containment door lies half-sheared off its heavy steel hinges. Beyond it, the central atrium of the Greifswald Bio-Chemical Research Facility is gone. It didn't just collapse; the four-minute 9.9 earthquake chewed it up and spat it into the rising, black floodwaters below.

Through the jagged hole in the wall, I can see the stairwell. The air out there isn't grey anymore. It’s tinged with a faint, sickly yellow mist that clings to the emergency lights like grease.

Regen.

My stomach turns over. My hand, buried inside the pocket of my torn lab coat, tightens around the handle of the small yellow emergency box. The plastic is warm. Too warm. It feels like holding a feverish wrist.

Fifty-one.

My vision narrows. Black pinpricks dance across the edges of my sight, swallowing the ruined doorway, swallowing the dust, swallowing the light. My heart is a frantic hammer knocking against my ribs—thump-thump-thump-thump—demanding oxygen that I refuse to give it.

I helped write the chemical structure for Regen-4. I sat in the glass-walled office on Floor 2 with Elena, drinking lukewarm filter coffee, running computer simulations on cellular regeneration in polluted groundwater. We were going to save the Baltic estuaries. We were going to win the regional innovation grant.

I signed the safety clearance papers. My signature is right there on the bottom of page forty-two in crisp blue ink: Silas Brandt, Junior Systems Tech.

We didn't account for the tectonic fault slipping. We didn't account for the backup containment seals shearing off under forty thousand tons of shifting granite.

Fifty-two.

I caused this. The thought repeats in my head, rhythmically, sickeningly, matching the throb behind my eyes. This is my fault. This is my fault.

Fifty-three.

I can’t hold it. My diaphragm spasms violently. A hoarse, strangled sound escapes my throat.

Panicking, my left hand fumbles wildly at my belt, grabbing the hard rubber edge of my Dräger dual-filter gas mask. My fingers are wet with sweat and engine oil, slipping off the strap twice before I manage to drag the heavy rubber seal over my chin, nose, and eyes. I yank the double straps back over my head, digging the edges of the silicon skirt into my skin until it hurts.

Exhale first. Clear the dead space.

I blow out hard. The rubber check-valve near my chin flutters with a wet phut-phut, pushing out the trapped air.

Then I drag in my first breath.

The sound inside the mask is deafening. A hollow, harsh SKRRR-HHHH as air is forced through the charcoal canisters on either side of my jaw. It smells like synthetic rubber, stale sweat, and the sharp, metallic tang of compressed activated carbon. It’s dry and tasteless, but it’s clean.

My lungs expand, taking in the filtered air, and for three seconds, I slump forward onto all fours, resting my forehead against the wet concrete floor, weeping with pure, pathetic relief.

I'm alive. I can breathe.

Fifty-six.

I pull myself up onto my knees, wiping the condensation off the inner lens of my visor with the sleeve of my coat. I check my pockets with frantic, trembling hands.

Left pocket: one half-liter plastic bottle of mineral water, unsealed but still full. Right pocket: two sealed half-liter bottles of mineral water. Belt loop: one spare charcoal filter cartridge, slightly dented. Right hand: the yellow box.

Three bottles of water. One mask. One box I was explicitly ordered to burn if the containment alarms ever went off.

Suddenly, a sound cuts through the steady hum of the crumbling building.

It isn't the grinding of shifting concrete. It isn't the distant, low roar of the sea breaking over the outer seawalls of Greifswald.

It’s a voice.

"Silas..."

I freeze. The air inside my mask stops dead.

The voice didn't come from the radio on my shoulder. It didn't come from the intercom system—the power grid died three minutes into the shaking. It came from right outside the shattered door.

It’s low, soft, and wet, like someone trying to speak with a mouthful of heavy syrup.

"Silas... please..."

My blood turns to liquid ice. I slide backward across the wet floor, my boots scraping against loose gravel, my back slamming hard against the overturned filing cabinet behind me.

There shouldn't be anyone alive on Sub-Level 3. The entire administrative wing collapsed into the lower sump ten minutes ago. Everyone who didn't make the elevator shaft was drowned in the first wave of chemical overflow.

"Who's there?" I whisper into my mask. The rubber cup muffles my voice, turning it into a wet, terrified rascal. "Stay back! I'm... I'm wearing a level-three respirator! Stay back!"

A pale, grey hand reaches around the jagged edge of the doorframe.

The fingers are long, thin, and slick with green-tinged fluid. The nails aren't broken; they are stained a deep, bruised black near the cuticles. Black veins, thick as thick twine, bulge against the grey skin of the forearm, pulsing rhythmically in time with the flickering yellow light.

Then, the face moves into view.

It's Frau Weber. The fifty-two-year-old night custodian who used to leave small wrapped peppermint candies on my desk every Tuesday morning.

Her hair is wet, plastered across her forehead in dark, clumped strands. But her skin... her skin isn't human anymore. It has turned the dull, waxy shade of ash. Her eyes are completely milky white, the pupils dissolved into cloudiness, yet they are turned directly toward me.

She isn't bleeding. She isn't biting her lips. She isn't snarling like a rabid animal.

She just stands there in the doorway, framed by the yellow mist, holding her hands loosely at her sides.

And then, she takes a breath.

Her chest expands, pulling the thick, poisonous air of the hallway deep into her lungs. She holds it for two seconds, her grey throat swelling, and then exhales a long, visible plume of pale green vapor straight toward the threshold of my room.

She doesn't move toward me. She doesn't take a single step.

She just stands in the doorway, breathing.

Sixty seconds, my mind screams, the safety manual text flashing behind my eyes in bright red letters. Inhalation of unrefined airborne Regen-4 induces systemic cellular necrosis and neural hijacking within 60 seconds of exposure.

Frau Weber parts her pale, grey lips. A soft, horrible sound vibrates out of her chest—a sound I used to hear coming from her small radio when she cleaned the hallways at night.

She begins to hum.

It’s a slow, gentle melody. A quiet German lullaby. The exact one my mother used to sing to me when the winter thunder rolled in over the Baltic coast.

Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf...

My hands shake so violently that I almost drop the yellow box. Cold sweat pours down my neck, soaking into the collar of my lab coat.

She shouldn't know that song. Frau Weber was a stranger. We spoke five sentences to each other in two years.

"Stop," I choke out through my mask, pressing myself as hard as I can against the filing cabinet. "Stop it. Please."

She doesn't stop. She stands in the doorway, her milky, dead eyes staring right through my glass visor, her chest rising and falling in a slow, steady rhythm, filling the small room with her poisoned breath.

Waiting for me to take off my mask. Waiting for me to come out and join her.

Outside, far in the distance, the high-pitched, wailing scream of the city's tsunami siren finally begins to blow.