They only wanted a
Nobel Prize. Instead, they will have to save the world.

It was going to be the experiment of the year. Preparing to blast x-rays
through a piece of palladium at the most dazzling European synchrotron, Anna
and five of her fellow scientists expected a few hiccups.

Not a horde of hungry spleen-eating zombies.

The world has succumbed to the virus, leaving only scattered
survivors.

When Anna and her friends realise that the infected can be cured back into
humans, they pledge to find a cure no matter the cost. Equipped with a lab
wrench and questionable lab ethics, Team ID26 are humanity’s last hope.

But what is the price of saving the world?

Running out of time, Anna and her friends will face the
impossible choices between life and death, morality and cure. When the future
of the world is at stake, what will they have to sacrifice?

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The Synchrotron

Day 17, 21^st of February, Wed

Steve didn’t call back. After I’d checked my phone for the millionth time, Kay patted me on the shoulder and took my phone away for safekeeping. I guess she meant my poor heart, not the phone.

“I heard that’s called ghosting,” Edsie told me.

“I heard that’s called tone-deaf, Edsie,” Kay bit back on my behalf.

Some say there are no heart wounds that a bucket of ice-cream cannot heal. How about treating those with instant noodles?

No?

Our noodle supplies are running dry, and even the chocolate bars we’ve hauled through the Ring back to ID26 won’t last us more than a day or two.

On a positive note, we’ve progressed on the spleen front.

After consulting Google Images, we agreed that the blob we initially identified as the pancreas was the spleen, the key to transforming people into blood-thirsty monsters.

We wrote and attached new labels.

“What do we do with the rest of it?” Tanya asked after we put the spleen aside and packed the other Ali’s organs into plastic sample boxes.

“Bin it. We’ve got the spleen,” said Dan.

“I’ll throw it into the biological waste,” Tanya said, loading the boxes onto a small trolley.

She was going to wheel Ali’s remains back to the wet lab. We could officially rename that wet lab into “Spleen-eaters’ Mortuary”. As one of them, Ali belonged there, too.

“I’ll help you,” said Edsie. “What if you have another seizure?”

Kay, Dan and I stared at them in confused silence while Edsie grabbed the trolley and rolled it out of the hutch. Tanya picked up the hammer and followed him.

Okay. What have I missed?

Since Tanya started taking her meds again, she seemed to be back to her usual self, no issues with her whatsoever, apart from this unexpected feat of helpfulness from Edsie. Had he been bitten?

“What now?” Kay asked after the door closed behind them.

“I don’t know. That’s weird. I’ve never heard him offer help before,” I said.

“No. What do we do with that?” Kay pointed at the chunk of flesh on the workshop table. It smelled rancid and unhealthy. Was it a typical smell of a slowly rotting spleen, or did the presence of the virus make it foul?

“If the virus is in his cells, we should find and isolate it,” I said.

“No shit,” said Dan.

“Microscope?” I suggested.

“We have to cut it very thin for a microscope,” said Kay.

“Not with a knife, I suppose.”

“It’s not a piece of meat, Anna, of course not with a knife. With a microtome. I even know where we can find one,” said Kay.

A Message From The Author

About me

I was trained as a materials scientists and intended to pursue a scientific career until I realised that it came with a lot of instability, an unbearable amount of rejection and 25/8 working hours. I still don’t know why some people call it a career (or calling) – it’s more like a punishment. I bet if science was used as an a alternative to prison sentences, the crime rates would go down immediately.

So, I quit, but it might have been too late. Like a bullet you don’t remove quickly enough, it had already found its way to my heart. I got attached to the world of science, and the Synchrotron is a love letter to all the people who I worked with.

They are eccentric, no doubt. But the characters in my book took it even further – they are properly unhinged. Flawed, incompetent, unstable, selfish, but ultimately so full of hope and grit.

I often think back to the Covid era. While we were hiding at home, waiting for the plague to go away, the scientists were working their arses off to make us a vaccine. If a zombie virus ever hit, who would be there to save the world? Probably not some action-hero with bulging biceps. In real life, heroes don’t wear capes. They wear lab coats and sleep twice per month.