Thursday, November 19, 7:00 PM.
The Thursday evening sun was low and cruel, painting the highway with an orange glare that mismatched the ashen tone of his mood. Dr. Kane was driving an old, blue sedan, lent to him by Lisa, one of the nurses at Eldridge.
She had insisted: "Take it, Doc. This car can't go far without Javier here anyway... And you have to go."
The window was slightly ajar, letting in the cold air and the monotonous hum of the engine. Eldridge was already just an invisible speck in his rearview mirror, a small parenthesis of fleeting heroism and domestic horror that had interposed itself between the corporate paranoia of LyraGen and the imminent chaos he knew would soon break out due to how everything was progressing.
The road was eerily quiet, reflecting the current state of the world: an artificial calm maintained by a well-funded military cover-up. The chaos hadn't arrived yet, but Kane felt its weight, its gravitational mass, pulling him toward madness.
He gripped the steering wheel until his knuckles were white, and a memory forced its way through, compelling his mind to relive the hours following his encounter with the reanimated in the town.
The deployment of Chief Ruiz and Sergeant Harlan was surprisingly orderly. Unlike the cold fury Kane had expected from the bureaucracy, the town's response was viscerally communal. Seeing their own firefighters and police, familiar faces from their neighborhoods, the inhabitants obeyed the instructions: stay indoors, report any incidents. There was no hysteria.
"Not everyone can accept this kind of reality so quickly," Kane had told himself, watching the first four families arrive at the Medical Center, dragging their relatives who were now only ravenous, struggling husks.
The police, with Kane's scarce information, had improvised. They restrained the "patients" to reinforced gurneys. The sound of growls echoed through the emergency hallways while family members wept, asking for a cure, for a miracle. Kane had approached each family, his inner virologist wrestling with the moral man he had become.
"We have found a very aggressive infection, one that attacks the central nervous system irreversibly," he told them, using gentle medical terms that sounded like a known, unfortunate prognosis. He avoided the word "zombie"; he avoided the word "reanimation." Only the look of pure terror in the eyes of Lisa, the nurse who had lost Javier, reminded him that lying, solely to prevent the chaos from erupting, was a viable option in these cases.
It was Chief Ruiz who proposed the temporary solution. They would restrict the zombies to a single location, away from their families, and let the military handle them. Ruiz seemed very reticent about taking charge of the zombies as Kane had suggested, so delegating the responsibility to others, though somewhat cowardly, was the best option.
Harlan, the police sergeant, nodded, his face grim beneath the fluorescent light. "The old security office in the precinct. It's a concrete bunker. We'll take them there. Whoever wants to see their relative... can do so. We'll keep the truth local and prevent blind panic from spreading."
It was an act of miniature civil resistance, the communal unity of a small town opposing corporate and military manipulation. Kane felt a fleeting warmth of pride and despair.
During that same transfer, the wife of one of the reanimated was isolated. She had been bitten. The nurses cleaned the wound, but it was a ritual without hope. Everyone, from Kane to the officer guarding the door, knew they were assisting at a slow-motion funeral. She would turn... It was inevitable.
A few hours later, two more cases were brought in, directed straight to the police station. One of them broke Kane's fragile emotional containment barrier.
A firefighter staggered in, carrying a struggling, restrained woman and a small boy in his arms.
The reanimated subject was a mother.
The boy, barely five years old, had been bitten on the arm. The mark was a purple and black crescent, already swollen.
Helplessness. Rage. Sorrow.
The helplessness filled him, aimed like a projectile against the cold executives at LyraGen.
Alongside Sarah and Martha, Kane worked on the little one. They cleaned the wound, administered analgesics. His eyes were wide, watery, fixed on the door through which his mother had been taken.
"Why did she bite me, doctor?" he asked, his voice a scraped whisper. "Was I bad?"
That guilt, that shattered innocence, was the moment Kane ceased to be a frightened scientist and became a broken man at war. He was not a virologist; he was not a fugitive: he was a witness to a cruelty that money had financed.
Kane found Harlan in a silent corridor, under the dim light of a streetlamp.
"Sergeant," Kane's voice was a thread of scraped rock. "We need to talk. About the boy."
Harlan turned, his face tired and dusty. "Doctor, we are doing everything possible for the military to—"
"No, Sergeant. Listen to me carefully." Kane stepped closer, forcing him to look at the despair in his eyes—not fury, but entreaty. "The bite gave him the bacterial infection that will kill him painfully in hours, or even minutes, and then... then he will return. There is no cure, only a finality... Please, Harlan. We cannot let this happen to that child."
Harlan looked at Kane with a mix of instinctive anger and revulsion, but then he noticed something. There was no cruelty in the virologist. There was only a terrible truth and a plea for ultimate compassion.
After a silence that lasted an eternity, Harlan nodded. They would do it discreetly, under the guise of an urgent transfer.
The memory blurred, a film burned into his mind. Kane remembered a back storage room, the smell of wet earth and bleach. The child, calmed by the sedative he had administered, without pain, without guilt. Sergeant Harlan stood there, pistol in hand, tears silently dripping down the wrinkles of his weathered face. The first tears that man had probably shed in years.
And then, the dry, dull, final sound.
Back on the highway.
The blue sedan swerved. Kane started, realizing he had been crying. Silent, hot tears burned his cheek.
"Damn them," he whispered, his voice hoarse from the knot in his throat. "Damn everyone at LyraGen."
He wiped his face with the back of his hand. That moment, the necessity of ending the suffering of an innocent child, was the point of no return. It was no longer about science, but about survival and justified vengeance.
He tried to force his mind to the subsequent events, searching for the respite the town had given him.
He had woken up at 10 AM. Sarah, the nurse, had shaken him gently.
"No new cases," Sarah had told him with a smile of genuine relief. "Looks like we stopped it. For now."
They had breakfast at Sarah's house, scrambled eggs and bitter coffee. The atmosphere was one of tense but appreciated normalcy. Eldridge's hospitality was too obvious a contrast compared to the environment in the laboratory. Then, Chief Ruiz had invited him to lunch, treating the fugitive virologist like a town hero.
It was an ordinary, false life. A beautiful mirage that the world might return to how it was before.
That feeling of false control collapsed as soon as he returned to the medical center.
It was three in the afternoon. The late sun filtering through the windows. Kane was approaching the reception area when he heard Sarah's voice on the ambulance radio.
"...Yes, understood. We will be waiting. We have them secured at the precinct," Sarah said over the radio.
"Understood, await transfer and your 'recovery'..."
Kane stopped dead in his tracks, his heart beating like a war drum in his chest.
Recovery.
They didn't use the word 'cure.' They used the word recovery. It was the cover term, the keyword for containment, the excuse to seize control of the evidence. The term LyraGen would dictate to their military allies.
The military wasn't coming to help Eldridge. They were coming to sweep the evidence as cleanly and quietly as possible. They were coming to take the reanimated subjects and the bitten patient and transport them to their laboratories.
They saw him. They helped him. They invited him to lunch.
Kane spun on his heels. He sought out Lisa, the pragmatic nurse, and begged her for a car. He gave her a vague address heading north, toward a large city.
His time in Eldridge was over. He had to leave before the military arrived and realized that "Doctor Kane, the consulting virologist," was actually Dr. Kane, the fugitive virologist and LyraGen's primary target.
The only way to stop what had begun, to avenge the child, was by exposing them.
He pressed the accelerator. His hands still trembled from the memory of Sergeant Harlan, but the grief had solidified into a cold steel of determination.
TS-996 was going to unleash chaos soon, and what Kane desired most was to find a way to alert everyone. At the same time, his fears emerged. Things were getting more complicated than he feared. And while he considered that approaching a big city might be dangerous, it was also one of the easiest ways to find a means to disseminate this information.
Kane had to reach that city, gain access to a secure network, and, with the partial data and his secret notes, break LyraGen's control and release the truth to the world.
The road stretched out, empty and dangerous. He was alone, a fugitive, and he carried the only key for people to learn about the plot and the danger that was approaching.
Half an hour later.
The city did not welcome him with open arms. The asphalt shifted from the empty ribbon of a rural highway to a complex network of horns, flashing lights, and the viscous background noise of a nervously breathing metropolis.
The feeling of refuge he had felt in the town had vanished. Here, the danger was greater, more diffuse. The threat did not growl, but hid in the anonymous faces and polarized glass of the skyscrapers: the eyes and ears of LyraGen.
Kane drove slowly, feeling the blue sedan like an overly visible beacon. The initial plan was simple: contact an old mentor, Dr. Dale, or perhaps some colleague from his postdoctoral days. People with access to academic platforms or serious press networks. But as he drove toward the center, doubt hardened into a cold certainty.
If LyraGen is such a large corporation, wouldn't it be easy for them to find me here?
The corporation had ramifications everywhere. They had recruited Kane into their secret lab; surely, they had control over any renowned virologist in this city. Contact would be a death sentence for them and, certainly, for him.
What solidified his decision were the police checkpoints. They were discreet, almost casual, but frequent. Patrols randomly stopping cars on major avenues, officers in bulletproof vests checking IDs and peering inside vehicles. It was not panic, but containment.
"They must have had recent attack cases," Kane murmured to himself, his mouth dry.
Natural or accidental deaths were inevitable in a population of hundreds of thousands. Every deceased person was a potential trigger for TS-996. The network of cover-up was spreading, and the police, unknowingly, had become the virus's first containment wall.
He decided to postpone any personal contact until the next day. Now, the urgency was dissemination. He needed a place with network access that he could use and abandon quickly, a place where his digital trace would blend with thousands of others.
He veered sharply toward an older, less polished district, finding a small, gloomy internet café called 'The Dead Pixel'. He parked the sedan two blocks away, partially covering the license plate with dry mud and leaving his jacket in the back seat to make it look like an abandoned car.
The interior of the internet café smelled of stale coffee and sweat. The monitors emitted the sickly blue glow he knew so well from his nights in the lab. He approached the counter, where a burly man barely looked up from a worn comic book.
Then, he saw it.
In the upper corner of the receptionist's monitor, taped with faded adhesive tape, was a handwritten sign:
ATTENTION: DO NOTHING THAT COULD HARM US... WE ARE WATCHING YOU.
The message was likely a generic warning against fraud or pornography, a harsh phrase put up by the owner to deter problematic customers. But for Dr. Kane, who had just escaped a corporation playing with the fate of humanity, it was a punch to the gut.
His paranoia spiked.
"I'm going crazy," Kane muttered ironically.
He forced himself to breathe. His heart hammered the rhythm of flight.
"A computer, please," he said, his voice tense but steady.
He sat in the darkest corner, unrolling a small silver pendrive containing the partial data of TS-996, samples of the Eldridge brain analyse, and the blurred video of the prisoner reanimating in the LyraGen lab.
The people of Eldridge helped me... I hope they can survive.
His fear was a dead weight, but his steel of determination, forged by the image of the innocent, bitten child, did not waver. He had to start the leak now. He would post fragments on anonymous forums, videos without context, confusing technical data that only a virologist would understand, but that would trigger the appropriate alarms.
As he inserted the pendrive, in another part of the world, the world was moving to trap him.
Interlude 7: TRACKED
Eldridge, a few hours earlier.
A convoy of olive-green military trucks and vans broke the calm in Eldridge. The convoy stopped in front of the small police station, their engines dying with a grunt.
An army officer, Captain Davies, in an immaculate uniform and with an impassive face, stepped out along with a squad of soldiers. Sergeant Harlan was waiting for them, his stone face harder than usual.
They exchanged greetings. Davies went straight to the point, his voice dry and professional. "We have reports of compromised subjects, Sergeant. Are they contained?"
"Yes, sir. In the security office. Seven in total," Harlan replied, guiding them inside. He offered no further explanations, only facts.
Upon reaching the office, Davies was visibly surprised. The seven reanimated subjects were in individual cells, restrained to reinforced gurneys, and unusually, they wore leather muzzles.
"The muzzles?" Davies asked, frowning. This was too much foresight for a local police force.
"We discovered a pattern in the incidents last night, Captain," Harlan explained, lying without blinking. "It seemed the attack mechanism was through biting. To prevent any additional accidents before your arrival, we took that preventive measure."
Davies nodded, satisfied with the logic, though not with the source. His mission was simple: transport the "compromised and wounded subjects" to the Provisional Camp for "study."
He ordered his men to begin the transfer. Davies observed the nearby family members, who watched the process in silence and deep sadness. He ordered a quick search for wounds or bites among the civilians. They found nothing.
Then, they headed to the Medical Center. Davies ordered a body check for all nurses and workers. Martha, Sarah, and Lisa passed the inspection without problems. Captain Davies felt a pang of frustration. The town was strangely controlled, too clean. But time was pressing. He ordered a general inspection of the town.
A young soldier, Corporal Miller, approached a small local restaurant while the rest of the team focused on the square. He heard fragments of conversation floating through the open door.
"...a real disaster last night, wasn't it?"
"...yes, but if it weren't for the doctor..." "...Dr. Kane saved our lives, if I tell you the truth..."
Miller stopped, his mind registering the surname. LyraGen had issued a low-profile internal and external alert about a "dangerous, fugitive employee" whose name was rumored to be "Kane" or "Kain."
The corporal asked no questions. He walked away slowly, acting calmly. Turning a corner, he pulled out a secure satellite phone and typed a brief, cold message, sending it through LyraGen's encrypted networks.
Message: Subject K, located... last known location: Eldridge Town. Direction of travel unknown.
Mission Status: Confirmed.
.
----
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[A/N: CHAPTER COMPLETED
Hello everyone.
First, I want to sincerely apologize to the readers for my absence these past few days, but I had some family issues to resolve, and it took me a while to get back into the swing of things.
I could have given you a heads-up, but I wasn't sure when I'd be back.
As for this chapter, I wanted to move things along a bit. The chapter I had prepared was literally just the beginning of this one, and frankly, it would have been boring. So I decided to speed things up a little. The next chapter is similar, but then there's a pause.
Why, you might ask?
Well, for those who have read either of the other two novels, November 20th is when the chaos begins.
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Read my other novels:
#The Walking Dead: Vision of the Future (Chapter 90)
#Vinland Kingdom: Race Against Time (Chapter 124)
#The Walking Dead: Emily's Metamorphosis (Chapter 34) (INTERMITTENT)
You can find them on my profile.]