Chapter 6: The Progenitor Strain

Chapter 6: The Progenitor Strain

The rendezvous point was a place of neutral misery: the cracked asphalt parking lot of a 24-hour diner whose neon sign flickered like a dying heartbeat. Reagan pulled her car into a spot at the far end, away from the weak glow of the lights, and killed the engine. The silence that followed was a relief. Driving had been an ordeal, every passing headlight a searing blade, every rumble of a truck's engine a physical blow against her eardrums.

A few minutes later, Nikki’s small sedan pulled in beside her. When Nikki got out, the change was startling. Under the diner's sputtering sign, her skin was pale and waxy, her eyes huge and dark in her drawn face. Her once-vibrant hair was streaked with the same premature, shocking silver as Reagan’s. They stared at each other for a long moment, two living ghosts in a sea of shadows.

“It’s real,” Nikki whispered, her voice trembling. She hugged herself, her gaze darting around the empty lot as if expecting monsters to pour from the darkness. “I thought I was going crazy. I tried to eat a piece of toast and it tasted like… like licking a penny. A hot penny.”

“For me it was cheese,” Reagan said, the memory making her stomach clench with a phantom mix of craving and revulsion. “Smoked Gouda. I couldn't get enough of it.” She ran a hand through her stiffening, greying hair. “The sounds, the hunger… it’s the same, Nik. Whatever happened in that store, it’s happening to both of us.”

The unspoken name hung between them. Jamie. Their name was a premonition, a final destination. The memory of that guttural, rasping voice whispering ‘Hungry…’ was the true reason they were standing here in the dead of night.

“That call…” Nikki began, her voice cracking. “Reagan, what was that? What’s happening to them?”

“What will happen to us, if we do nothing,” Reagan finished, the words cold and hard. Her pragmatism was a shield, the only thing holding her together. Panic was a luxury they could no longer afford. “We can’t go to a hospital. We can’t call the police. We saw what happened to the evidence of Butters. It vanished. They'll either dismiss us as crazy or lock us away in some lab. We’re on our own.”

Nikki’s frantic energy seemed to collapse, replaced by a bleak despair. “Then what do we do? Just… wait to turn into… that?”

Reagan’s mind, newly sharp and unnervingly clear, had been working on that question since Jamie’s call ended. It had retraced every step of that horrible day, searching for the point where the world had tilted off its axis. “It all started with Butters,” she said, thinking aloud. “He was normal when I took him from the store. Annoying, but normal. I drove him to the vet. An hour later, I drove back with a monster in a plastic box. Something happened there. At the vet’s office.”

“They said they used gas,” Nikki recalled. “That it was painless.”

“A vet tech told me that,” Reagan clarified, a new, cold suspicion dawning. “CO2 displacement. Standard procedure. But what if it wasn't? What if they used something else?” The pieces began to click into place, forming a picture of terrifying clarity. “That’s our source, Nikki. That’s where we’ll find answers. We have to go back.”

An hour later, they were crouched behind a neatly trimmed hedge across the street from the Northwood Veterinary Clinic. It looked different at night, its cheerful daytime facade of paw-print logos and welcoming posters transformed into a dark, silent monolith. It was a place of secrets.

“We’re going to break in?” Nikki hissed, the idea clearly warring with every nerve in her body. “We’ll be arrested!”

“We’ll be monsters if we don’t,” Reagan countered, her gaze scanning the building with an intensity that felt alien. Her new senses were on fire. She could hear the hum of the security camera motor on the front corner, smell the chlorine from the kennel cleaning through the brick walls. And she could see, with absolute certainty, the faint gap at the bottom of a window on the side of the building, half-hidden by a large azalea bush. “That’s our way in. The latch is loose.”

She didn’t know how she knew. She just did. The knowledge was there, an instinct she never had before.

Getting across the street and into the shadow of the building was a masterclass in controlled terror. Every rustle of leaves was a shout, every distant car a searchlight. Reagan moved with a strange new grace, her body coiling and unspringing with an efficiency that surprised her. The persistent, maddening itch on her lower back pulsed in time with her heart, a secret engine driving her forward.

She reached the window and, just as she’d known, the latch was loose. Her fingers, stronger than she remembered, worked the lock open with a soft click. The window slid up with a faint groan of protest.

“I can’t,” Nikki whispered from the bush, her body frozen.

“Yes, you can,” Reagan ordered, her voice a low, urgent hiss. “Jamie is what happens if we fail. Now, come on.”

That was all it took. The fear of what they were becoming was greater than the fear of getting caught. Nikki scrambled through the bush and Reagan helped her through the window, their landing on the tiled floor of an examination room softer than she would have thought possible.

They stood in the darkness, surrounded by the ghosts of a thousand anxious pets. The air was thick with the sterile smell of antiseptic, a scent that now made Reagan’s stomach churn. Using the dim light of their phone screens, they moved down the silent corridor. Their goal was the back room, the place where the grim work was done.

They found it at the end of a hall: a small, windowless procedure room. A stainless-steel table stood in the center. Along one wall were cabinets and a small desk with a computer monitor.

“Check the cabinets,” Reagan whispered, moving to the desk. She remembered signing a form. Paperwork. There had to be a log.

Nikki began pulling open drawers, her movements jerky. Inside were neat rows of syringes, vials of vaccines, and surgical tools. Nothing looked out of the ordinary.

Reagan’s eyes scanned the desk. Tucked beneath a keyboard was a clipboard with a logbook. She flipped it open. Her finger traced down the list of appointments for that horrible Tuesday. And there it was. Her own handwriting, a signature on the intake form she’d filled out.

Patient: Mouse, Feeder. (Petropolis). Procedure: Euthanasia.

But in the column marked ‘Method,’ it didn’t say ‘CO2’ or ‘Gas.’ It was a series of letters and numbers: AG-R7-Trial. Beside it, in small print: Lygenesis Corp Protocol.

“Lygenesis Corp?” Nikki breathed, reading over her shoulder. “Who’s that?”

“I don’t know,” Reagan said, turning her attention to the computer. It was password protected. A long shot, but she typed in the vet tech’s name—the one from his name tag, a detail her mind had recorded with photographic clarity. KevinP. Nothing. She tried again. Kevin123. The screen blinked and unlocked. Corporate security was as lazy as retail.

A quick search for ‘Lygenesis’ brought up a firestorm of internal emails and password-protected research folders. One was labeled ‘Project Chimera.’ Her heart pounded. She clicked it. Inside was a single, terrifying document. A preliminary report on ‘Agent-R7.’

She opened it.

It wasn't a euthanasia agent. It was the opposite. A revolutionary, experimental regenerative serum, designed to trigger rapid cell repair and even regrowth of lost tissue. It was a miracle cure. But as she scrolled down past the corporate jargon and scientific diagrams, she found the section that made her blood run cold: ‘Observed Anomalies in Rodentia Trials.’

Nikki read the words aloud, her voice barely a whisper. “’Subjects exhibit extreme aggression… hyper-accelerated metabolic rates… development of bio-corrosive enzymatic secretions…’” Her finger trembled as she pointed to the screen. “’…and rapid, unpredictable cellular mutation. Test subject designation for this unstable variant: the Progenitor Strain.’”

The Progenitor Strain.

It had a name. Their nightmare had a name.

They weren't just sick. They weren’t cursed. They had been infected with a failed corporate experiment. Butters wasn’t an anomaly; he was the intended result. And at the very bottom of the report was a final, chilling sentence.

‘Infection vector appears highly transmissible via fluid contact. No viable reversion therapy currently known.’

Reagan’s hand instinctively went to her lower back, to the spot under her shirt where the small, fleshy growth was still nestled against her skin, a tiny, wiggling time bomb. It wasn't a tumor. It was a beachhead. The Progenitor Strain was rewriting her, cell by horrifying cell. And they had just read the last line of the instruction manual.

No viable reversion therapy. No cure.