The Plum Island Conspiracy — Part 6

Series — Our trio reaches the lab with the necessary samples to complete the research, and secure safe passage off the island. But escaping to the docks may not be as easy as they think.

Photo by Ash Hayes

Sorry for the delay in rolling out the latest part of this story. I’ve been planning a cross-country move, which has occupied the bulk of my time recently.

As a brief editor’s note, as much as I hate to have to do this, I need to make a few retcons to the story.

• There is only one infected deer

• The deer does not lay waste to the facility; everyone becomes infected through an actual mistake

• The gene-sequence analysis can be performed with any donor’s marrow, provided they are infected

• Sam cuts off the staff member’s hand with the intention of using it for a sample to complete their tests

This was the original plan for my draft of the series. A lot of readers expressed a ton of interest in the mystery surrounding the deer in the earlier chapters. I made a misguided attempt to make some large rewrites to focus on it. Unfortunately, those changes somewhat blew up a lot of other important plot points.

All of these revisions necessarily needed to end with some kind of conflict between our little trio, and the monster in the laboratory. Based on what I had already alluded to this creature being capable of, I just couldn’t write my way out of that scenario in a way that made sense. If the group could kill it with just a simple gunshot, then the creature should’ve been easy for the rest of the team to dispatch.

I couldn’t kill Samuel because — sarcastic spoiler alert — he has to live so he can share his story with the in-universe author, Calvin. I couldn’t kill Marcus because he’s actually the protagonist in a Plum Island Sequel I’ve already written, which actually is bedrocked in the outcome of this story. I guess I could kill Jeffry, but the outcome still felt super cheap with the parameters I established for how OV-92 works.

For me, the horror in this virus was that it creates these perpetually bleeding creatures, dripping with an endless flow of infectious ichor. I should’ve stuck to my guns.