GRENUN: When The Air Killed Us

Chapter 2: 4 Minutes

Four minutes.

That is how long a 9.9 earthquake lasts when the earth decides to rip itself apart beneath your boots. Two hundred and forty seconds. I know the exact length because the digital clock on the lab wall froze at 04:01:12 when the power grid ruptured, its cracked red LEDs still faintly glowing in the dark.

The floor beneath my knees won't stop rolling. It isn't just shaking; it feels like the concrete is turning to liquid, buckling upward in sudden, violent thrusts that throw me sideways into the sharp corner of a steel workbench.

Pain shoots through my hip, hot and blinding. I collapse onto my hands and knees, my forehead slamming hard against the floor.

"Get up, Silas," I cough into the rubber cup of my mask. My voice sounds tiny inside my own head, muffled by the charcoal filters. "Get up."

My hands are slick with sweat and green grease. When I try to push myself up, my right palm slips on the floor, and I go down again, scraping my cheek against the rough cement. The water pooling around my knees isn't gray stormwater. It’s glowing with a faint, oily luminescence—a sickly yellow-green sheen that smells like crushed battery acid, burnt copper, and copper-tainted blood.

*Regen-4.*

It’s leaking straight out of the broken pipe joint above my head, dripping in fat, heavy drops that hiss when they hit the hot metal casing of the fallen server rack next to me. If that water soaks through my jeans, if it touches an open cut—

I scramble backward on my knees, my boots skidding in the slime.

My eyes dart frantically across the tilted floor. The yellow emergency box is lying three feet away, half-submerged in the chemical puddle. The hard plastic case is bright hazard yellow, stamped with a black biohazard symbol and sealed with a heavy brass latch.

*Elena’s voice echoes in my memory, sharp and loud over the hum of the centrifuges three weeks ago: "If the alarm ever goes off, Silas, you don't run for the door. You grab the yellow box. You hold it with your life. Everything inside that case is the only thing standing between us and total collapse."*

I reach out, my fingers trembling so violently I can barely grip the handle. The plastic feels hot—unnaturally warm, like a living body running a fever. I drag it out of the green sludge, hugging it tight against my ribs with my left arm while my right hand fumbles wildly at the straps of my Dräger mask.

The bottom strap has slipped. The rubber skirt near my left jaw is loose, letting a tiny, razor-thin draft of outside air leak across my skin.

*No. No, no, no.*

Panic hits me like a bucket of ice water. I drop to my elbows, pressing the box beneath my chest to keep it dry, and claw at the headstraps with numb, wet fingers. The rubber is slick. The plastic buckle catches on a clump of my hair, pulling violently, but I don't care about the pain. I yank the strap until it bites deep into the flesh behind my ear, sealing the mask back against my jaw until I can feel my own pulse pounding against the silicon frame.

*Exhale. Clear it.*

I force a hard, ragged breath out through my nose. The valve flutters—*phut*—pushing out whatever microscopic mist managed to slip past the seal.

I drag in a clean lungful of compressed carbon filter air. It tastes like dry dust, but it isn't poison. My heart slams against my ribs like a trapped bird—*one-two, one-two, one-two*—counting down the seconds of my life.

Through the shattered doorway, Frau Weber is still standing in the yellow mist of the atrium.

She hasn't moved a single inch. Her grey, slick fingers remain resting lightly against the ruined doorframe. Her milky, dead eyes stay locked on mine, staring straight through the glass visor of my respirator. And through the deafening groan of twisting rebar and crumbling concrete, her chest keeps rising and falling in that slow, terrifying cadence.

*Exhale.*

*Inhale.*

*Hum.*

She is still singing my mother's lullaby. The muffled vibration of it passes right through the floor, thrumming up through my knees and settling in the bone of my sternum.

*Schlaf, Kindlein, schlaf...*

"Shut up," I whisper, my breath fogging the lower corner of my lens. "Please, Frau Weber, just shut up..."

She doesn't hear me. Or maybe she does, and that’s why she’s doing it.

Suddenly, a new sound cuts through the disaster.

It isn't the earthquake. It isn't the hum.

It's a low, deep, guttural bellow that starts miles away out on the ocean—a sound so massive it vibrates the teeth inside my gums. It starts as a hollow moan, rising in pitch until it turns into the high-pitched, screeching wail of the Greifswald coastal defense grid.

*The tsunami siren.*

My stomach drops into a cold, bottomless pit.

The 9.9 quake didn't just crack the lab. It ripped the Baltic sea floor wide open. An eighty-meter wall of black, freezing water is rushing toward the low-lying coast right now, moving at the speed of a jet airliner. And I am sitting on Sub-Level 3, thirty feet below sea level, in a crumbling basement filled with poison gas.

"Move, Silas!" I scream at myself, the sound swallowed by the rubber cup of my mask. "Get up and move!"

I dig my boots into the concrete, hauling myself to my feet. I tuck the heavy yellow box securely under my left arm, my fingers locked around its handle like a vice.

I take one last look at Frau Weber. She doesn't run from the siren. She doesn't look at the ceiling as a fresh shower of dust and concrete chips rains down on her wet shoulders. She just stands there in the yellow fog, watching me leave, her pale lips curled into the faint, hollow outline of a smile.

I turn my back on her and sprint for the emergency stairwell.