Chapter 20: Explosive Breakfast
Next morning, I put away the Koala that was stuck to me and heads to a Hot shower... It will be a long time before the next one...
Breakfast, I look around the table and smirk. Everyone is with a hungover. Glenn wants to die because of the agony and Daryl laugh at him. Some fight for the coffee, T-Dog makes us scramble eggs. We start eating the breakfast in silence.
When Jenner arrives, Dale starts to ask questions about the virus.
Andrea concurs, saying, "We didn't come here for the eggs.
Finishing or breakfast, he lead us to the control room and starts the presentation of what he calls TS-19.
He tells Vi to display the brain scans from the episode's namesake "Test Subject 19." The top-secret brain-scan video shows someone who was infected and allowed the process of reanimation to be recorded by the CDC, Jenner explains.
Synapses are shown throughout the brain.
"Experience, memories. Somewhere in all that organic wiring is you. The thing that makes you unique and human," Jenner explains.
The display shows the virus attacking the brain - the "first event." The brain goes dark; the body dies. "Everything you were or ever will be - gone," Jenner says.
"Is that what happened to Jim?" Sophia wonders innocently, and Carol nods.
Jenner fast-forwards to the "second event" — TS-19's resurrection.
"It restarts the brain?" Lori asks.
"Just the brain-stem," Jenner corrects.
"The human part - the you part - that doesn't come back."
A bullet flies through TS-19's head in the video playback. He admits he doesn't know what the disease is or how to treat it. He also states that he has lost contact with other research facilities.
"I've been in the dark for almost a month," he admits.
"There's nothing left anywhere. That's what you're really saying, right?" Andrea accuses him.
Dale interrupts the stunned silence to ask Jenner about a clock on the far wall, which is counting down from an hour. At that point, Jenner says, "the basement generators, they run out of fuel."
At zero, Vi explains, plant-wide decontamination will occur?
Rick, T-Dog, and Glenn head to inspect the generators. While they're in the basement, the building's emergency lighting switches on, bathing the four in darkness. Upstairs, Lori and Carl are in their room when the building's air cuts off.
With the lights now shutting themselves off inside the panicked survivors' rooms, they confront Jenner in the hallway. He explains that the building is slowly starting to shut itself down.
Rick, Glenn, and T-Dog return from the basement, and Jenner states that the system is designed to keep the computers running until the last possible second. "It was the French," Jenner says. They stuck it out as long as they could before they too ran out of power," he says,
He states that in thirty minutes, the building would decontaminate and that it is too late to stop it since there is no fuel. Rick yells at the group to grab their things and run as the emergency alarms start blaring. Before they are able to, Jenner locks them inside the control center.
"There's no point in struggling", Jenner explains. Everything topside is automatically locked down. "When that door closes, it won't open again - you heard me say that," he points out as Rick tries to demand that he open the door.
"It's better this way", Jenner says. When Rick presses him about what happens when the clock gets to zero, Jenner reminds the survivors where they are. To prevent organisms from getting out if the building's security was ever compromised, HITs (High-Impulse Thermobaric fuel-air explosives as defined by Vi) would deploy, setting the air on fire. It would destroy the building and everything inside.
He tries to help the case and convince Rick and his group to accept their fate by stating that the death would be instant and painless. "There's no hope. Last night, you said you knew it was just a matter of time before everybody you loved was dead," Jenner argues. He calls the Outbreak humanity's "extinction event." Rick's family and friends look on fearfully.
Daryl futilely attempts to break through the door with axes, but Jenner states that it's built to withstand a rocket launcher. Rick, T-Dog, and Dale throw Daryl, wielding an ax, off Jenner.
Rick also demands to know why Jenner stayed if he didn't think there was any hope. "I made a promise," Jenner says, to his wife — Test Subject 19, the woman in the photograph — to keep going as long as he could.
"She was one of the finest scientists in the world, "and if anyone could have done something about this, it was her." he says. "Me?" he admits, "I'm just Edwin Jenner."
Rick and Lori tell Jenner that they just want their chance to keep going as long as they can. Swayed, Jenner agrees to open the door, but also tells them that they still won't be able to get past the lockdown upstairs. Jenner opens the door to the control center.
"I'm grateful", Rick says before he exits, but Jenner counters, "the day will come when you won't be". He shakes Rick's hand and pulls him close, whispering something into his ear. It's the same thing that he said to me last night. Now, why I don't try to save him? What's the point to saving someone who as loses hope? Oh, yeah where I was while they panicked? I pack all their stuff so now I'm a mountain of bags running toward the exit...
"We've got four minutes left - come on!" Glenn shouts.
Jacqui stays, she also loses hope...
In the lobby, the door is closed, the men try to break the window but to no avail.
"Carol, grenade," I says
She looks at me puzzled but then her eyes enlarge, she took a purse.
"Your first morning at camp," she tells Rick.
"When I washed your uniform? I found this in your pocket." She pulls the hand grenade that Rick found in the tank from her bag.
She is a scary woman... She has a grenade in her purse... Way before Ed die, what happens if he crosses the line once more?
Quickly, Rick detonates the grenade, blasting out one of the windows with mere minutes to spare before decontamination. We run toward the car, while Daryl, T-Dog, and Rick shoot the nearby walkers. I have my hand full so I can't help them. At the cars, I throw the bags on the ground and they quickly load the cars. I hop on my bike and we start off. A few minutes after leaving we heard an enormous explosion... And with this, we start our roaming...
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