[ THEO-3 ]
Personal Log. Day 154. 08:11 hours.
We are still inside Outram Park MRT station concourse. We have not yet descended to the tunnel level.
Before we proceed I want to document the current situation clearly.
The station concourse is not empty.
I detected three infected on the concourse level when we entered. I want to be precise this time, I detected a minimum of three signals. Given what I now know about signal masking in close proximity situations, the actual number could be higher. I have informed Damian of this. He nodded in the way he nods when he is already thinking three steps ahead of the conversation.
I have also assessed the air quality in the lower tunnel level using the portable sensor from the medical pack. Oxygen levels are reduced but not critically so. CO2 is elevated. There is trace methane, likely from organic decomposition in the flooded sections. The tunnel has not been completely sealed, station entrances, ventilation gaps, and the flooding itself have allowed some passive air exchange over the past five months.
My assessment: breathable, but not comfortably so. Extended time in the lower sections will cause headaches, fatigue, and reduced cognitive function in humans. Damian is still in recovery. This is a concern I have noted and will continue to monitor.
I have the oxygen masks and the small supplemental tank prepared and accessible. We will not use them unless necessary. But they are there.
Echo is calm. Her leg was redressed this morning. She is bearing some weight on it now which I consider encouraging. She is in the modified backpack on my frame, head out, ears forward.
We are about to deal with what is in this concourse.
I have prepared for this.
End log.
[ DAMIAN ]
The emergency lighting in Outram Park MRT station cast everything in pale yellow strips running along the floor, the kind of light that showed you just enough to make the shadows worse. The escalators were frozen mid-step. The ticketing barriers were locked open, gates stuck in their last position from when the power died properly. Advertising screens dark. The whole place preserved in the exact moment everything stopped, like something had pressed pause on a Tuesday morning and never come back to press play.
Three signals, Theo-3 had said. Minimum.
I counted four.
Two were near the ticketing barriers on the far side of the concourse, moving in that slow overlapping drift that meant they hadn't locked onto anything specific yet. One was behind the customer service booth to my left, just the top of its head visible above the counter, moving back and forth in a short repetitive pattern like it had been doing that for five months and saw no reason to stop. The fourth was sitting on the floor near the station map display with its back against the pillar, not moving at all, which was somehow worse than the ones that were.
I looked at Theo-3. He had already seen all of them. The amber eyes moving steadily across the concourse, cataloguing.
"Four," I said quietly.
"Yes," he said. "I am updating my signal masking theory."
"Later. Can we get to the platform without passing them?"
He studied the layout. "No. The platform access stairwell is on the far side. We would need to pass within range of the two near the barriers."
I looked at the four devices on his belt. Then at the concourse. Then at the four infected.
"We're not using a device on four in an enclosed space we need to pass through," I said.
"Agreed sir."
"So we do this quietly."
I looked at him.
"I know," I said before he could say it. "We don't kill them if we don't have to."
Something in the amber eyes settled. Not agreement exactly. More like relief. "Thank you sir."
"Don't thank me yet."
I moved first.
The one sitting against the pillar was the immediate concern, closest to our path and unpredictable in a way the moving ones weren't. Sitting infected were harder to read. I had noticed this. The stillness could break in any direction.
I circled wide to the right, keeping to the wall, stepping over the dried remains of a spilled coffee cup someone had dropped on an ordinary morning five months ago. The infected against the pillar didn't move. Its head was down. Whatever it was tracking it wasn't us, not yet.
I got to within four meters of it and stopped.
Up close it had been a young man. Late twenties maybe. MRT staff uniform, the blue and grey still recognizable beneath five months of deterioration. Name tag on his chest that I didn't read. His hands were in his lap and his head was down and he was breathing in that shallow mechanical way they all breathed, like a body running on minimum power.
Something moved in my chest. I ignored it.
I needed him away from the pillar and contained. There was a maintenance room door to my right, padlock hanging open, the door sitting ajar. I took three careful steps to it, opened it fully without sound, and came back.
Then I picked up a plastic cup from the floor near my foot and tossed it to the far left.
The sound was small. Just a plastic tap against tile.
The infected's head came up.
It turned toward the sound.
I moved.
I came in from behind, left arm going around its shoulders, right hand coming over and pressing firmly at the base of its skull in the specific way that disrupts equilibrium without causing injury, a technique that worked on humans and apparently worked on whatever these things were because it went down sideways immediately, limbs not coordinating, no pain response but the body responding to the physical fact of its balance being removed.
I went down with it, controlled it to the floor, kept the pressure on until it stopped thrashing. Then I pulled the zip ties from my belt, I had taken a full handful from the supply room two days ago without telling Theo-3 why, and secured its wrists behind its back. Ankles next. Quick and tight.
It was making a sound. Low and continuous and not quite anything. I didn't listen to it.
I pulled it into the maintenance room, set it against the wall, and came back out.
Theo-3 was at the concourse edge watching me with an expression I was starting to be able to read. The amber eyes had a quality when he was processing something unexpected. Like the data didn't match the model and he was quietly rebuilding the model.
"The other three," I said.
"The two near the barriers have separated," he said quietly. "One is moving toward the south wall. One is stationary. The third ... the one behind the customer service booth ... has moved. I cannot currently see it."
"Where."
"Unknown. It went below the counter line approximately forty seconds ago."
I looked at the customer service booth. Long counter. Solid base. No visibility underneath from this angle.
"Fan out," I said. "You take the stationary one near the barriers. Same method, get it isolated, get it down. I'll find the one behind the counter."
"Sir—"
"I'm not going to hurt it, Theo."
A pause. "I know sir. I was going to say be careful."
I moved toward the customer service booth from the left side, keeping low, checking the gaps under the counter as I approached. Nothing visible. The infected had been back there, Theo-3 was certain of it, which meant it was either still crouched behind the counter or it had moved somewhere I hadn't tracked.
I reached the near end of the counter and stopped.
Listened.
Breathing. Close. The shallow mechanical sound of it, just around the corner of the counter end.
I rounded the corner.
It was crouched against the far end of the counter with its back to me, facing the wall, doing that repetitive motion thing, small rocking movements, back and forth, like a system stuck in a loop. It had been a woman. Business clothes. One shoe missing.
I got two meters away before it sensed something.
The head came around fast, faster than I expected, and I saw the moment the signal registered, the eyes finding me, locking on, the body already moving from crouched to standing in one continuous motion that shouldn't have been as quick as it was.
It was on me before I could set my feet.
We hit the counter together, my back taking the impact, its hands going for my collar and finding it. I got one arm between us and pushed, buying centimeters, and its face was close enough that I could see everything I didn't want to see up close about what these things had become. I turned my face away by instinct and drove my knee up hard into its midsection.
It doubled. Not from pain, they didn't feel pain the way we did, but from the mechanical fact of the impact disrupting its forward momentum.
I spun it, got behind it, arm across its shoulders from behind, and took it down the same way I had taken down the first one. Floor, controlled, zip ties, done.
My shoulder hurt where it had grabbed me. I rolled it next to the counter and sat there for a second catching my breath.
From across the concourse I heard a brief scuffle and then Theo-3's voice, very calm: "Contained."
"Same," I said.
The last one took another ten minutes to isolate. It had drifted toward the platform stairwell in the time we had been dealing with the others. I used the same cup-toss distraction, the same approach from behind, the same technique.
When it was done all four were secured. Wrists and ankles. Maintenance room for two of them, the customer service area for one, the gap behind the barriers for the last one.
I stood in the center of the concourse and looked at what we had done.
Then I found a notepad at the customer service desk and a pen that still worked and wrote on four separate pages in large clear letters:
LIVING PERSON — INFECTED — RESTRAINED — NOT DEAD
IF YOU FIND THIS — HANDLE WITH CARE
THEY WERE PEOPLE. THEY STILL ARE.
I put one note with each of them.
I don't know why. Nobody might ever come. Nobody might ever read them. But I put them there anyway and I didn't think too hard about what that meant.
Theo-3 was standing behind me. I could feel him watching.
"Sir," he said.
"Don't," I said.
A pause.
"Okay," he said.
It was near the barriers that I found the police officer.
He had been in uniform when he turned. The dark blue still intact, the badge still on his chest catching the pale emergency light. He was one of the ones I had zip-tied, the first one I had taken down, the one sitting against the pillar. I had put the note on him without looking at the badge properly.
I looked at it now.
I looked at it for a long time.
Then I looked at the holster on his hip. Empty. But on his belt, below the holster, still clipped in its carrier, a stun gun. And on the ground near where he had been sitting, partially under the barrier base, like it had slid there when he fell, a service pistol. Safety on. Still loaded based on the weight when I picked it up.
In his chest pocket, a spare magazine. Full.
I looked back across the concourse. Theo-3 was at the platform stairwell entrance, checking the air quality meter, his back to me.
I unclipped the stun gun. Put it in my jacket pocket. Ejected the magazine from the pistol, checked the count, put both the spare and the loaded magazine and the pistol in the deepest section of the supply pack, under everything else.
"Ready sir," Theo-3 called from the stairwell.
"Coming," I said.
I shouldered the pack and walked across the concourse without looking back.
End of Chapter 8