This story has a painting to go with it...but obviously it's a bit more difficult to upload one of those, especially when you do not own a digital camera and the painting itself is still hanging high up on a wall in your art class. Anyway, read and enjoy, and I would be greatly honored with reviews.
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The Fire Within
by Lamenting Fox

It is said that no living creature is above man on the food chain. But suppose that a doctor somewhere infected a single animal with a virus that could quickly claim the lives of every human in the world if unleashed. Only the plastic walls of a simple cage keep the animal seperate from humankind. But suppose the animal escapes, and the virus begins to infect humans. Who, then, is at the top of the food chain?

Hidden deep in the Rocky Mountains is a government laboratory that specializes in developing biochemical weapons. No written records of the laboratory exist, and only a handful of people know of its presence and purpose in the mountains. It has no name, and the doctors who work there know it only as Lab Nine.

One these doctors is a man of middling years, perhaps forty or forty-five, with graying hair and a perpetual frown. His name is Tim Hutchinson, and he has worked on various top secret projects since he graduated second in his class from the best medical school in the nation. He knows perhaps more than he should, and has seen far more of the horrors of life than is healthy for any human mind. Understandably, his coworkers see him as harsh and cruel, and few have the courage or desire to speak to him when it is not absolutely necessary. Because of his incredible work in his field, Dr. Hutchinson rarely needs to work with others, so he is always alone, his only company the rats he experiments on and occasionally tortures to death when his experiments fail.

His experiments have not been going well lately, and his superiors are displeased, to say the least. Their monthly meetings are becoming hostile, and it is after one such meeting that the doctor decides to scrap his current experiment and start anew.

In his personal laboratory, no one hears his half-crazed mutterings as he dumps all of the rats into one cage. In the morning, he will destroy them and burn their bodies to erase all traces of his experimentation, just as he was instructed to do after every experiment when he first became a government doctor so long ago. A new batch of rats will arrive the following afternoon, specially bred for their miserable lives, and his experiments will start once again.

"Maybe I just got the proportions wrong," he mutters to himself as he closes and secures the overcrowded cage. "If I increase the amount of sodium in the compound containing the virus..." His voice trails off as he reaches for the lightswitch. He stares at the puncture mark in his hand and the tiny trickle of blood in puzzlement, then shakes his head. I must've been too wrapped up in my own thoughts, he decides, and mentally berates himself for his carelessness. It's no wonder they want to take me off the project, he thinks bitterly. One of the rats had bitten him, and he hadn't even felt it.

But as Dr. Hutchinson reaches for the lights once more, making a mental note to clean and disinfect the wound as soon as possible, he laughs quietly to himself. The bite was as good a reason as any to destroy the rats slowly tomorrow. He closes the door and walks down the empty hallway.

He does not see the red eyes glowing faintly in the darkness. And he does not hear the terrified squeaks and anguished cries that fill the room for hours.

It is morning, and Dr. Hutchinson opens the door to his laboratory with a joyful gleam in his eyes. It is time to destroy his rats, his failed experiments, and he is looking forward to the act with a sick pleasure. But as he closes the door behind him, he is hit with such a sense of strangeness that his head reels in confusion, leaving him faint and dizzy. It takes him nearly a full minute to recover, and by then he has realized what stuck him as odd: the laboratory is still as death. Not a single squeak or rustle comes from the rats, all seventy of them, and he wonders briefly if another doctor had already taken them down to the incinerator. The idea fills him with rage, and he takes quick, long strides towards the cage on the other side of the room.
He stops and stares in shock, uncomprehending of what he sees within the plastic box. Littered on the floor are tiny bones and tufts of matted fur. The bedding itself is soaked in blood, and strewn about the cage. Crouched in the far corner is a brown rat. His fur is stained red, like the bedding, and Dr. Hutchinson wonders for a moment if the rat is alive, for he sits as still as a statue, unblinking and calm.

In an instant, he realizes that all of his plans for the doomed rats, all of his anticipation and joy, were just stolen from him by a stupid animal. One of the same filthy creatures, he thinks to himself madly, that cause me to fail time and again. With a roar of anger, he sweeps the cage onto the floor. The lid to the cage cracks and falls off, but he hardly notices. The rat climbs out, and stares up at the human.

Dr. Hutchinson clutches his head and growls in rage. The anger seems to be pulsing through him, making the wound on his hand throb with every heartbeat. His entire body feels hot, feverish, and his skin turns pink and then red as it is burned from within. A sudden pain twists his stomache, and the doctor falls to the floor. His body is trembling, and blood foams around the corners of his mouth, and at once he is struck with a terror so strong it instantly surpasses his anger. Out of the corner of his eye, he sees the rat sitting serenely a few feet away. It is watching him carefully, red eyes burning with a strange hunger even as his own body burns itself, searing him from the inside out.

Looking into the rat's eyes, Dr. Hutchinson suddenly knows. He knows that his experiment was not a failure at all. He knows that he is dying, that it was the rat's bite that had infected him, that the poison--the virus the rat now carries--is causing his metabolism to speed up exponentially, and that his very cells are breaking down to give his body the energy it needs to survive. But even as his body goes into convulsions and he feels his bones splintering and melting and reshaping themselves, even as he screams in agony, he wonders if this is some sort of divine retribution for all of the innocent lives he has helped to end with his research, the lives of both animals and other humans. And for an instant--just a single instant, in his last breath of consciousness--Dr. Hutchinson feels regret.

His internal temperature rises even more, and his skin bursts into flames. The fire alarm wails through the building, and footsteps race through the hallway outside. Several workers armed with fire extinguishers burst into the room, but they all stop and stare in confusion and horror at the scene before them. There, in the middle of the room, lies the burning, misshapen skull of a human. And perched on top of the skull, with the flames reflecting on its fur and smoke obscuring its body, is a large brown rat with strange red eyes.

So who is at top of the food chain? The virus killed Dr. Tim Hutchinson, and the rat infected him, but it was the doctor who created that virus and gave it to the rat, and so man remains at the top, his own greatest enemy.