The Definition of a Second

Carrie Vaughn’s latest story for The Sunday Morning Transport is as cool and thrilling as it is fleeting and tense.

~ Julian and Fran, February 15, 2026

For February, The Sunday Morning Transport brings you four stories to thrill, chill, and delight you, by Celia Marsh, David Bowles, Carrie Vaughn, and PH Lee. We are grateful for your support in helping us get here, and in continuing to bring more extraordinary writers and their work to the page.

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The Definition of a Second

by Carrie Vaughn

The gun fires. The shot echoes. The body falls.

Three seconds pass. The gun in her hand smokes. Her ears ring.

Five seconds. The three other people in the room turn to her, horrified, frozen, unable to speak. Five seconds ago there were four other people in the room. Then she fired and the body fell. She’s stuck on that moment, the punch of the bullet, the fall, the thump on the floor. Before the others can ask why, can move, scream, anything—

She flees out of the lab to the office next door and vomits into a waste bin. Thirty seconds, she can still see the face of the man she shot, the research team’s chemist, rock samples and spectrographic analyses spread out on his bench. The bloody hole in his chest runs on repeat in the back of her eyes. When she grabs a tissue to wipe off her face, she looks at her reflection in the glass of the door. Her eyes seem blank, still seeing the way the body jerked as it tipped to the floor, boneless. The gun is still in her hand.

A scream comes from the lab.

A hundred and ten seconds have passed when she returns to the lab, where the body on the floor is moving. Black pus pours out of its mouth. After that no one asks why she did it.

Worms crawl from the body’s ears, trailing slime along its cheeks to its eyes, which are half eaten, dripping. Worms slither from its mouth, from the bullet hole in its chest. The skin of its arms shiver, which is how they understand that the worms are inside it, moving it like a puppet, no longer a body but an undulating mass of worms forcing the shape of it to lurch over, get its knees under it, stand, then take a step.

They run, fleeing from one section of the lab to the next. The two field geologists and research lead follow her, even though she’s only the lab manager, the one making sure the rules are followed and the bathroom gets cleaned. The lab isn’t much, a couple of Quonset huts in a remote desert, which is why she has the gun, for security. She’d been worried about brazen coyotes.

Three minutes. A hundred and eighty seconds, each one counted with her heartbeat since the shot rang out and the body fell.

Of course their cell phones don’t work. There is debate: Should they barricade themselves somewhere and try to find out what’s happening? They’re scientists, this is a mystery, they ought to be able to do something. Or should they run? Get to the van, leave the site, flee from whatever this is, find safety, and worry about what’s happening later. As if the worry would ever stop.

She thinks they should run.