Declan stepped back into the launch bay right behind Second Sarah. He’d already dubbed her that before her realized what he was doing. He doubted she would want to be referred to as Second Sarah, so he’d have to come up with a way to make her distinctive from his own Sarah, Sarah Prime. His feet clinked against the metallic floor of the bay, making him wince. He’d hoped to come in silently behind her. He didn’t want to have to take another beating from her, not that she’d hurt him, but he did not want to cause her even more stress. Instead, he found that she didn’t even notice him even when he stepped up right beside her. She was staring out the Bay Window that currently looked out over her Earth. She was frozen in place, nearly comatose in his eyes as she stared out at the planet she had known as home. She hugged herself, grabbing her upper shoulders and squeezing until the skin around her fingers was white.

“I guess you were really out of contact, huh. I guess this explains why you didn’t call.”

“Actually,” he began, “I have no idea what happened to your Declan. The Declan that you knew. I am not from your dimension or even this one for that matter. I am from an alternate reality, one in which I lost my Sarah, and I have vowed to never let you go again. I’m going to save as many of you as possible.”

She turned with a quizzical look on her face, “What you mean you aren’t the Declan I knew? I know you better than any other man on that world floating out there, and you are him. I have no doubt, you are Declan Mason. My best friend, my confidant. You are the one person that I turn to when I am lost or hurting. How are you not him?”

His stomach dropped the moment that she said that he was her best friend, but he recognized that all that meant was that he could take the time to get to know her and see if he could get emotion to grow in the direction he hoped. “I told you. I come from another world. There are, it seems, endless Earths and that sometimes they are destroyed by beings greater than us. I don’t know why they do it, but they do it. My world exploded, and I was the only one to survive.” He paused and let that sink in for a moment before he continued. “Like you I have lost my Earth, and can never go back.”

Her whole body turned to him and her arms dropped to her sides, “Like me?” She looked from him to the planet that was slowly turning outside. “My planet is still there.”

Declan nodded sadly. It hurt him more than he realized that he was the cause of what she was about to discover. “The planet is, but the people aren’t.” He cut her off before she could ask, “What do you mean?” or “Why aren’t there any people?” He opened his HUD and looked at the screen, he noted the time and wiped his forehead. It was just starting. “I can show you, but I have to warn you, it is going to be graphic and possibly traumatic. Do you still want to see?”

She bit her lower lip and arched an eyebrow. Her look shifted from concerned to constipated, but she nodded in the affirmative. “Okay, I’m going to pull up an image from the surface, but nowhere near any place you would have a connection with, let’s say we zoom in on China? Sound good? No friends or relatives there, right?” She shook her head almost imperceptibly. “All right, China it is.” He punched in some co-ordinates and the Bay window became a magnifying glass. It rocketed from their position in space to the Asiatic coast; eventually locking onto one of the larger cities there. The municipality of Shanghai filled the window, and they could see people walking, riding, and driving along. “Ten seconds.” Declan’s voice was cold and emotionless; it was as if it had been cut off from his emotions. Sarah counted out Mississippi’s in her head and sure enough, as soon as she had hit zero people began to vomit, drop to the ground, scream, and bleed. Cars crashed into one another and ran over prone pedestrians. Sarah noted that it had all happened in unison as if it had been orchestrated by a master conductor. Bodies did not drop here and there, people fell in groups. The hardy few who kept their footing were purged of bodily fluids as they bled and vomited over themselves and their neighbors.

Most of them died in the first few minutes, but some took longer and managed to hang on for as long as they could. That made it harder on them, as the longer they managed to survive the worse their symptoms became. She watched as they struggled to breathe or shook uncontrollably from fever. She was thankful that she was unable to hear their cries or she would have lost her mind. She looked over at Declan, who had shifted from being the concerned friend to having a very business-like appearance on his face. His whole demeanor had changed. If she had to have made a guess she would have said that he was very clinical in his analysis of what was going on before his eyes. He was as detached as a photo-journalist who was snapping away shot after shot as child was mauled by a bear. It chilled her to look at him like this.

Declan, however, was busy watching the population count of the planet drop steadily on his HUD and was to absorbed in the event to even notice how Sarah was reacting. What had started out as six billion people was now down to just three billion and the numbers were getting lower with each passing second. Mother kept him up to date with each event. Not only did she tell him how many people were still alive, but she also let him know what stage of the disease progression they were on. He had learned, from Headnet, that no disease was so virulent that it could wipe out an entire population. So, he’d created multiple ones to do the job. He hadn’t liked the idea of a Plagueocalypse, but knew that he would need to create one at some point in the future, this just provided him with valuable data to help him later on. His initial dislike for the apocalyptic medium was washed away as he observed the death count rapidly growing. He could see a lot of potential with disease.

Sarah stared in horror as more and more people died, and suddenly she realized that Declan had saved her. He had come down to that planet and pulled her away just before things happened to her. He had risked everything for her. He was, without a doubt, the best man that she knew. There was a reason he was her best friend. He couldn’t let her go any more than she would have been able to let him die, and in that instant she understood. In spite of everything that stood between them, he would never let her down.

She reached over and plucked his hand away from the HUD that she could not see. She gripped his hand in hers firmly and brought them down between them. Declan almost pulled his hand away so that he could continue observing the data collection, but snapped back to reality when he realized what she had done.

What in the hell had happened? It was as if he went into a form of autopilot, and did not even realize that he was human once the numbers started crunching. He had gone away, and was replaced by something less than he. Lesser, but greater in some ways, as it was able to process what was happening far better than he could have hoped to do so. The thought terrified him. He planned on talking to Kristine and Mother to learn what was going on with him.

“You saved me from this,” came Sarah’s trembling voice. “I would have choked on my own vomit or bled to death from my ears or some other horrible way if you hadn’t come for me.” Tears ran down her face, and he was just about to tell her that it was his job to do this to each world he was set to when she continued, “I want you to know how much I appreciate that, and that I will do everything I can to help you kill the monster responsible for killing our worlds. We will figure it out together.”

Aw, crap, he thought.