The Price of Corporate Capture

Dr. Elina Vesa pressed her spine against the cold metal shelves of the supply closet, her knees drawn to her chest. The darkness was absolute, save for a sliver of pale light piercing through the bullet hole in the door. Somewhere beyond it, the mob’s roar had dissolved into sporadic shouts, their fury spent for now. But she knew better than to trust the silence. Silence was the pause between trigger pulls.

The man’s accusation haunted her: “You lied.” She hadn’t lied—not exactly. She’d parsed data, softened truths for cameras. “Containment is feasible,” she’d told the press, while PetroNova executives smiled smugly in the background. Behind her, a hologram of Arctic ice caps gleamed, digitally restored to 1980s glory. Marshall Crowe had patted her shoulder afterward, his grip too tight. “You’ve got a talent for… simplifying complexities, Doctor.”

The memory surged uninvited: Crowe’s boardroom, the mahogany table reflecting her nervous fidgeting. “Your permafrost models are too alarmist,” a VP had said, sliding a revised draft across the table. Red lines struck through every mention of “methane bursts” and “pathogen risk.” “We need solutions, not doomsaying.” She’d signed the edits. For the funding. For the access. For the naive hope that half-truths could buy time.

Now, her face haunted the ruins, a ghost of false reassurance. She’d seen it two days ago, flickering on a shattered department store TV—a repeating loop of her lying to the world. The footage cut to riots in Mumbai, a field hospital in Cairo, a PetroNova rig still pumping oil into a sea choked with dead fish. The caption beneath her smirking face: DR. VESA: “NO IMMINENT THREAT.”

A rat scurried over her boot, jolting her back to the present. She held back a scream. The creature paused, beady eyes glinting, before disappearing into a vent. Its tail left a trail in the dust—a jagged line, like the fissure she’d drilled into the Siberian ice.

You opened the door, the Thawed God had whispered during her fever dreams. Now the fire must be fed.

Her leg throbbed where the infection had burrowed deepest, the muscle still knotted and hot. She’d survived the virus’s crucible, but it had left her… altered. Her sweat seemed to carry a faint bioluminescent sheen. Her nightmares were now in 4K: glaciers calving into human shapes, their ice-blue mouths screaming as they melted.

Dr. Elina Vesa’s breath fogged in the frigid air as she pressed her ear to the supply closet door. The mob’s shouts had dissolved into an eerie quiet, but the silence was worse—a vacuum waiting to be filled. They’ll find me, she thought. Unless I move.

The Mob Closes In

She eased the door open, the screeching hinges breaking the stillness. The clinic hallway was a graveyard of overturned gurneys and shattered IV bags, the walls streaked with blood. A corpse blocked her path—Nurse Amara, half her face blown away from gunfire. Elina knelt, her trembling fingers brushing Amara’s name tag. Three weeks ago, they’d shared whiskey in the break room, Amara laughing as Elina ranted about corporate “optimism metrics.” “You think you’re the first scientist they’ve gagged?” Amara had said, her smile bitter. “They’ll chew you up and replace you with another talking head.”

Elina pried a fire axe from the wall, its sharp blade a grim comfort. The weapon felt alien in her hands—a glaciologist turned scavenger. She moved past the reception, where a fractured window framed the ruins of downtown Anchorage. Snow swirled around skeletal buildings, their windows glowing with the campfires of squatters. In the distance, the PetroNova Tower stood untouched, its long obsidian facade reflecting the flickering auroras of the northern lights, as if taunting the wretched survivors below. Her grip tightened around the fire axe, her knuckles blanching as she stepped over Nurse Amara’s body.

A crash echoed from the west wing. Elina froze, her breath crystallizing in the air. The mob was regrouping. She remembered the journalist in Tokyo, screaming as security dragged him from her press conference: “You sold us extinction as progress!” His words had prickled her skin, a rash she’d scratched raw that night.

The crash echoed again, closer now—a gurney overturned, its wheels spinning like a macabre roulette. Elina’s breath hitched as she pressed herself against the wall, the fire axe trembling in her grip. The mob’s footsteps pounded like a war drum, their voices a slurry of rage and grief. She could smell them now—unwashed skin, burnt hair, the scent of desperation.

A figure rounded the corner, silhouetted by the flickering emergency lights. Not a stranger. Omar. The clinic’s janitor, his once-kind eyes now hollow, a makeshift mask hanging loose around his neck. She remembered the photos he’d shown her of his twins, their round faces grinning under knitted hats. “They’re coughing black phlegm. You told us it was under control,” he’d said last week, cornering her in the break room.

“Found you,” Omar rasped, his voice a serrated blade. In his hand, he clutched a pipe wrench, its edge crusted with blood. Elina’s throat tightened. He stepped into the light, and Elina stifled a gasp. His skin was mottled with the Thawed God’s signature cyanosis, veins pulsing black beneath the surface. One of his pupils had burst, leaving a red fissure across the sclera. “You think hiding makes you innocent?”

Elina’s leg throbbed, the infection’s heat radiating up her spine. The Thawed God’s voice slithered into her ear, a sound like ice splitting bedrock: Feed the fire.

“I didn’t know,” she whispered, though the lie curdled on her tongue. She had known. She’d seen the unredacted reports—the virus’s mutation rate, the 82% mortality—before PetroNova scrubbed them.

Omar lunged. Elina swung the axe, its blade biting into his shoulder with a wet crunch. He crumpled, howling, but his fingers clawed at her ankle. “They’re dead,” he spat, blood frothing on his lips. “Because of your feasible containment.”

Behind him, the mob surged into the hallway—a dozen faces she recognized. The pharmacist who’d slipped her extra painkillers. The receptionist who’d always watered her wilted office fern. Now their eyes gleamed with the same feral hunger, their hands clutching scalpels, shattered glass, a spiked bat.

Run, the Thawed God commanded, and this time, Elina obeyed.

The Underbelly

Elina bolted, her boots slipping on half-frozen blood. The mob’s howls pursued her, echoing through the clinic’s hollowed corridors. She skidded into the east wing, where quarantine tents had collapsed like deflated balloons. A skeletal hand jutted from under a tarp, fingers curled around a syringe. The Thawed God’s first victims had died mid-treatment, their bodies left to freeze in place.

She ducked into a supply room, barricading the door with a crash cart. The mob’s fists pounded against it, the metal denting inward with each blow. She fumbled for the vent cover, but it was clogged with ice. Elina hacked at it with the axe, her muscles screaming. The mob’s chants crescendoed: “Liar! Liar! LIAR!”

She wriggled into the duct, the metal biting into her ribs. Behind her, the door gave way. Elina kicked blindly at the hands reaching for her, connecting with something soft. A scream, and then silence.

The vent shaft exhaled a frigid breath, its metal ribs creaking as Elina crawled deeper into the clinic’s underbelly. Behind her, the mob’s voices warped into echoes, their fury muted by the labyrinth of pipes and ice.

The duct opened into a boiler room, its walls webbed with frost. Piled in the corner were dozens of hazmat suits with PetroNova’s logo embroidered on them. Elina staggered to her feet, her infected leg buckling. A radio crackled on a workbench. She turned the dial, slicing through static until a man’s voice broke through: “—evacuating Sector 7. Crowe’s orders. Burn everything.” Gunfire erupted, then silence.

Elina’s fist clenched. Marshall Crowe. The architect of plausible deniability, the man who’d patted her shoulder as she peddled the world a sanitized apocalypse. She grabbed a half-empty vial of morphine from the bench, jabbing it into her leg. Elina’s veins pulsed like live wires beneath her skin, the morphine’s cold embrace doing little to quell the Thawed God’s whispers. Feed the fire, it hissed. 

The PetroNova Tower loomed ahead, its obsidian surface refracting the shifting northern lights like the blinking of a malevolent eye. She slipped into a hazmat suit and tightened its straps, the corporate logo itching against her skin. A glacier cradling an oil rig. The irony was not lost on her. The suit’s visor fogged with her labored breaths as she armed herself—crowbar in belt, fire axe in hand—and disappeared into the frozen labyrinth beneath Anchorage. The service tunnels beneath the city were frozen arteries, their walls weeping ice. A distant rumble shook the ground—PetroNova’s demolition charges erasing evidence in Sector 7. She quickened her pace.

The Sanctum of Lies

She emerged near the tower’s loading dock, where guards in black exosuits hurled crates marked Biohazard-4 into incinerators. Flames roared, devouring evidence of the virus’s origins. A PetroNova drone buzzed overhead, its camera lens whirring. Elina melted into the chaos, her PetroNova disguise granting her passage through checkpoints.

The elevator to Crowe’s penthouse required a senior executive’s keycard. She watched a suited man—face gaunt with panic—scan his badge. As the doors opened, she swung the crowbar. He crumpled, and she dragged him into the shadows, stealing his badge and sidearm. The elevator ascended, glass walls revealing the hellscape below: neighborhoods burning like funeral pyres, their smoke staining the sky.

The penthouse was a mausoleum of greed. Marble floors gleamed; abstract art worth millions hung beside holograms of stock surges. Marshall Crowe stood at a floor-to-ceiling window, his reflection a pristine contrast to the ruin beyond. He turned, crystal tumbler in hand, as Elina ripped off her helmet.

“Dr. Vesa.” His smile was a scalpel. “I wondered when you’d die.”

“You engineered this,” she spat, axe raised. “The virus wasn’t an accident. It’s a culling.”

Crowe sipped his Scotch. “A recalibration. The Arctic strains needed…direction. We tailored them to target overcrowded cities, resource drains. Post-collapse, PetroNova controls the cure.” He gestured to a vault door behind him. “Enough doses here to rule continents.”

Elina’s grip tightened. “You’re burning the evidence—and anyone left.”

“Efficiency,” he said. “But you already knew. Signed every report, smiled for every camera.”

The truth lanced through her. She had known—not the specifics, but the rot festering beneath PetroNova’s promises. 

Crowe drew a pistol from his desk.

A shot rang out just as Elina ducked. The bullet shattered the window, polar wind screaming into the void. She lunged while swinging her crowbar in a wide arc, striking the gun and sending it along with his severed thumb skidding across the marble floor. Crowe grabbed her throat, slamming her against the hologram table. Mumbai’s death toll flickered and pixelated beneath her.

“You’re a footnote,” he snarled.

Elina’s vision darkened—then ignited. She clawed at his eyes and desperately flailed her legs, kicking him square in the groin. His grasp weakened and she pushed him away with her feet, the momentum hurling him backward. His heel caught the shattered window’s edge. For a heartbeat, he hovered in the aurora-lit void, a man who’d sold the world for control, now grasping at empty air. Then he fell, his scream swallowed by the howling winds of the tundra.

No More False Gods

Dr. Vesa staggered toward the vault, her breath ragged. The biometric scanner blinked green—Crowe’s blood-soaked thumb still warm in her grip. Inside, rows of crystalline vials glowed faintly, their contents swirling with what she’d once prayed would be salvation, a way to stitch the world back together. Now, PetroNova’s emblem glared back at her from each one: a glacier speared by an oil rig, a monument to the hubris that had melted the poles and drowned the world.

She lifted one of the vials; her hand trembling as she held it. For a moment, she imagined distributing them, playing redeemer. But the memories surged: Crowe’s smirking dismissal of climate data, the boardroom applause as PetroNova greenlit another rig atop thinning ice, the mob’s liar chants, Amara’s corpse. Humanity had bartered its soul for convenience long before the thaw. They deluded themselves into believing tomorrow could be cheated. They’d scorched the Earth for cheap energy, silenced whistleblowers for quiet compliance, traded dignity for delusions of safety.

And hope? Hope was their deadliest addiction. The same boardrooms that had fueled the collapse now stamped their logo on the cure. They’d package hope in a glass and sell it back as poison. She knew how this would unfold: the vials auctioned to the highest bidder, smuggled into black markets, wielded as bargaining chips to crush dissent. The powerful would live. The desperate would slaughter each other for scraps. And the cycle would spin again, grinding souls into dust. 

“No more false gods,” she whispered.

The vault’s emergency self-destruct system—a feature Crowe had installed to erase evidence during raids—flashed red under Elina’s trembling fingers. She slammed her palm against it. Alarms wailed as flames erupted from the vents, engulfing the vials in an inferno more searing than regret. The cure hissed and boiled into acrid, curling smoke. The vault’s steel walls groaned, warping under the assault of the blaze. She stumbled back, the flames painting her face in hellish hues as the Thawed God’s laughter echoed in her head.