I'll Never Tell

24 Jan 2022

Today’s prompt: “Start with ‘I never told anyone…’”

I never told anyone how to get into the vault. They cajoled me. Threatened me. Beat me. They tried to force the door, to crack the combination, to cut their way in, but either the vault was too well-secured or word got out to the experts they hired to break in that opening the door was sudden death. I wasn’t going to reward their lies, and I certainly wasn’t going to make your death meaningless.

We were duped, pure and simple. They told us we were synthesizing life forms found by a Mars rover. In fact, we were developing a bioweapon. And just like all those scientists in the movies, not only did we fall for it, we didn’t realize what we’d created until it was too late.

But we had the vault. And it was airtight.

We gathered all the samples into the vault, and all of our handwritten research notes, and all our electronic data – thank god we’d never uploaded anything to the cloud or saved anything to the network. Maybe we always knew not to trust them. And then we realized within seconds of each other that someone would have to be in the vault to destroy the samples. And that’s when you shoved me out, and locked the door behind you.

I watched you through the tiny shatterproof pane in the vault door as you lit our research notes on fire and shattered our equipment into fragments too tiny to be reconstructed, then opened the sample cases and exposed them to air. I watched your face as it wracked with agony.

Two weeks, I thought. Two weeks, according to our research, and it should be dead without another host. I wasn’t completely sure of our calculations, so I vowed to do everything in my power to keep the vault closed as long past that date as I could. I knew I would honor your memory more with the absolute safety of the human race than with a timely burial.

I wake up to your face every night. I cannot hear your screams – I never could. But I can see them.