This is, and I say this as a guy that’s written a lot of horrible stuff including the mad scientist conducting his own autopsy in Issue #3, just about the most horrible thing I’ve ever written.

Ellard is trapped in a room with no food and no water. So he’s going to die of thirst, or starvation, or of sheer boredom eventually. He may, given the awesome number of sharp implements available to him, just kill himself.

But then he’s going to come back as a Returner, and — he’s already uncorked the vial in anticipation of Harvey breaking the door down — the virus is already loose in the lab. So however Ellard goes, he’s going to come back as a Returner, and get infected with the thing he helped create. Which, according to what we’ve seen so far, ain’t pretty.

Depending on how long the bunker is supplied for, this might all happen in the dark.

Ugh.

That being said — if I had the whole thing to do over, I’m pretty sure I’d drop the “only friend I’ve got” line. I’m convinced it’s true; that Ellard is a person that’s never had friends, or seen much use for social contact, and he can see what’s in store for him as much as anyone. Better, since he’s had first-hand exposure to what the virus does. So I believe that he believes that John is the only person in the world that knows him in any deep personal sense, and that he wants to spend his last few minutes-to-hours at least in human contact with somebody. Maybe to try to sell John on letting him out. But that’s not going to happen. It can’t happen, since he uncorked the vial. I don’t think I’d keep the “friend” lines in there, though. Just a plea for contact, one that John is morally and emotionally obliged to respond to.

Incidentally… Fulci succumbed to his own screwing around with his innards to see what made him tick, not the virus. I’m not sure if I was clear enough on that. There’s a potential read in there that Ellard killed him, perhaps even with the virus, but no — Fulci just couldn’t resist experimenting on himself to see if he could figure out the Returner biological process, and pushed himself past a point of no return at some point off-panel.