Heart-Shaped Locket

“Where … Where did you find that locket?” the elderly scientist said with a set of mixed emotions. The name badge on his jacket said Dr. Simmons.

The locket was heart-shaped and silver in color with another gold heart inlayed on the outside of it. When the locket was open, it revealed a picture of a young girl with a bright smile which made it impossible to not smile yourself anytime you saw it. It was a reminder of a time before a mysterious new air-born virus quickly killed over half of the world’s population in a matter of weeks. Miraculously, some people had an unexplained immunity. It appeared random like the quickly mutating virus itself.

“This? I found it while I was scavenging for supplies from some house.”

The scavenger handed the locket to the scientist. It obviously meant more to Dr. Simmons and had some meaning to him. He turned away to look at it more closely and to hide his emotions. The scavenger paused momentarily before continuing.

“You can keep the locket. I can see it holds more meaning for you than it does me. For me, it was just an item I came across when I was out there trying to survive and it struck me for some reason. So, I decided to keep it. I mean I figured sometimes you have to remind yourself things weren’t always this way. You have already done so much for me Dr. Simmons by welcoming me into this facility and offering me a place to stay. The community you are building here already seems stronger and healthier than I would have expected considering everything.”

The scientist remained quiet still hiding his face. The scavenger had hoped he didn’t upset him by describing the heart-shaped locket as just another item he came across.

The outside world was full of rotting corpses. People died quickly from the virus and hospitals were immediately overwhelmed. The virus seemed to have a long lifespan and mutate quickly. It was also believed to easily stick to practically all surfaces as well as being air born. People weren’t safe even in their own homes. Militaries around the world couldn’t contain the virus even with extreme measures. The virus was that contagious. The fact some people were naturally immune for some reason was the only way some of humanity survived.

The scavenger, one of the few people who survived and continued looking for ways to survive, decided to risk asking the doctor a question.

“Dr. … I hope you don’t mind me asking. But, why does that locket seem to hold a special meaning to you?” He was almost regretting asking the question immediately. “I know it may be none of my business. I’m sorry.”

The doctor finally replied. His tone still had a set of mixed emotions to it.

“You don’t understand. This locket … this heart-shaped locket … holds … held … may still hold a special meaning to all of us here in this facility. You see, the reason I recognized the locket is because I knew the lady who wore it. Her name was Lillian. She was a fellow scientist here and one of our best. We were all part of a family. The girl in the picture inside the locket was her daughter Emily. She had died quickly from an aggressive cancer. There was nothing her mother nor any of us could do. Which seemed cruel based on the work her mother was doing here. Lillian worked in a Level 5 quarantine biological studies containment lab here in the facility. You know, the kind you may have heard of where everything is sealed and air is pumped directly into full-body protection suits. Her team had been nearing possible completion of a super vaccine which would boost people’s immune systems and automatically target and adapt to the widest range of diseases and viruses imaginable. It was showing it could not only protect against but also cure things like HIV, herpes, and all types of cancer that had been thrown at it. You name it. It was literally the holy grail and wonder drug everyone had been searching for. Nobel prize-worthy to say the least.

However, her daughter Emily quickly became ill and passed away. Despite this, Lillian said she wanted to throw herself into her work saying she saw her work as a way to help prevent what her and her daughter went through. Despite our own hesitations, and since she was also our friend and we could see the value in her work, we let her continue. But, one day she managed to do something unexpected and unthinkable. She was able to bring her locket into the containment lab because it had always been a fixture of her. There appeared no worry as it would be disinfected on the way out like everything else. However, security camera footage later showed Lillian had secretly injected some drops of what she had been working on into the inside of the locket. While the outside of the locket had been sprayed with disinfectant, washed with soap, subjected to ultraviolet light, and heated, … the inside was never subjected to any of this. It appeared Lillian had also quickly gone through an extra step to bend the clasp to make it hard to open making it appear broken. No one questioned it because the heart-shaped locked was attachment to her daughter.

We’re still not sure of Lillian’s complete intensions. She could have been planning on releasing something she felt needed exposing to the world immediately to prevent others from going through her pain. Or, maybe she wanted to see the world burn. Another one of our theories is the vaccine had a bad reaction with polymers in the glue or plastic inside the locket itself. This was one of the things we were hoping to investigate if we had access to the locket. Now we do.

I’m sorry, but you’ll have to excuse me for a bit. Thank you for finding this and bringing it to us. Again, make yourself at home and let me know if there is anything you need. I will personally try and see you get whatever it is you may seek.”

With that, the doctor immediately walked away at a fast pace and started waving down a couple of his colleagues.