Day 4 Part 2

When the alarm went off, I ran. Towards the lab it came from, I hurried to. I passed by Leavitt on the way, who was staring into the light, the flashing light, when I realized what was happening. I caught him when he fell and laid him down. Leavitt has epilepsy, and I wonder why he never told us. When I got to the lab, Burton was in there, and Stone was there at the door. The pathogen broke out of a test chamber and was with Burton in the room. Pure oxygen was pumping into the room, but Burton was still scared. Scared... I went to thinking to what I might be doing now, normally, coming back to work. The speed limits maximum 65 minimum 45 seemed mockery at rush hour, maximum and minimum... It was here I saw through our first mistake. I quickly punched in the command, and confirmed my thought. The pathogen grew badly at the wrong pH of blood. The man was acidic. The baby, he cried, losing acid.
I ran back to the lab, stopped the oxygen and told Burton to breathe fast. He had to go into respiratory alkaltosis. Burton breathed faster and faster, when Stone saw through our worst mistake. A rat was in the room. It was normal. And it was exposed to the pathogen and had not died! The organism mutated. Perhaps it now ate rubber gaskets, like the in the plane... As if to confirm our suspicion, a gasket started to degrade in the central core, and quickly, the whole base was contaminated. The sector that I was trapped in had no substation. The base would explode in 3 minutes, spreading horrible mutations of the Andromeda Strain into the atmosphere, and we'll never be rid of it. Stone told me to climb through the core to Level 4 to get to a substation. I climbed, while the computer shot ligamine darts toward me, and I was hit in the shoulder. I don't know how, but I inserted my key into the substation and turned off atomic detonation. But then, everything faded to black...
-Hall