Ellis Leesburg learned about Pennsylvania on a Tuesday.
Not from a briefing. Not from a classified alert. Not even from the quiet knock that meant something had gone wrong inside channels that weren't supposed to fail.
He learned because a civilian research packet slipped through a dead route.
The timestamp was wrong. The header corrupted. The encryption sloppy.
Someone had sent it in a hurry—panicked fingers, protocols abandoned in favor of speed, fear bleeding through every technical mistake.
Ellis had been halfway through a protein bar when the data populated his screen. He didn't finish chewing. He didn't swallow. He just stared as the neurological scans resolved into something he had spent his entire career hoping never to see outside theory. The fluorescent lights above him buzzed faintly, a sound he usually filtered out, now sharp as a blade drilling straight into his skull.
Accelerated synaptic collapse. Executive function failure. Pain response muted. Motor control intact.
Onscreen, a restrained subject convulsed weakly, jaw slack, eyes unfocused but fixed—tracking movement with unsettling precision. The restraints bit into skin already bruised and inflamed, tendons standing out like cables beneath the surface. Saliva pooled at the corner of the subject's mouth, thick and tinged pink.
Not rabid. Not feral. Directed.
"Run it again," Ellis said quietly, his voice steadier than his pulse.
No one questioned him.
The Pennsylvania lab had been studying post-viral neurodegeneration. Cognitive decline after infection. Memory erosion. Parkinsonian symptoms. Safe work. Clean funding. No weapons. No enhancement. White papers and peer review. The kind of research that saved lives slowly and without headlines.
Until the bite.
The report was clinical until it wasn't.
Salivary transmission confirmed. Aggressive behavior observed within hours. Neurological override escalating.
The author's tone fractured near the end—sentences shortening, margins uneven, annotations bleeding into one another like the mind behind them was already unraveling.
We cannot contain this. If this leaves controlled exposure, we lose population centers. If you are receiving this, assume we are already compromised.
Ellis read it three times, lips moving silently on the third pass, his jaw tightening with each word.
Seven days ago.
By Wednesday, the Penn lab stopped responding.
By Thursday, two adjacent research facilities went dark.
By Friday, Ellis stopped sleeping, the stimulant edge of coffee and adrenaline grinding his nerves raw until his hands shook even at rest.
Now it was Sunday morning.
Thirty-six hours awake. Fluorescent lights humming overhead. The secured wing at Hunter Army Airfield felt smaller than ever, air stale and recycled, packed with exhausted scientists, military analysts, and officers speaking in numbers instead of names. Whiteboards were crowded with arrows and acronyms that no longer meant what they should have, plans erased and rewritten until nothing felt solid.
"This isn't an outbreak," Ellis had said early on. "This is containment failure."
He had believed it.
Because outbreaks could be boxed. Mapped. Slowed.
This thing didn't behave like a virus.
It behaved like a directive.
Ellis pulled the neural imaging back up, tracing the devastation with a gloved finger, the latex squeaking faintly against glass. The prefrontal cortex—decision making, restraint—obliterated. The amygdala burned bright. Motor pathways untouched.
"You remove fear," Ellis said to the room. "You remove empathy. You remove pain. What's left isn't a monster. It's a body executing its last biological command."
Someone finally asked it. "Is it intelligent?"
Ellis shook his head. "It doesn't need to be."
Saturday night, he told himself it hadn't reached Savannah.
Military channels would've flagged it. The base would've locked down. He would have known.
That lie lasted until the gate cameras switched feeds.
The sound came first.
A scream—short, sharp, cut off mid-breath.
Ellis looked up as the monitor near the ceiling flickered to life. Gate Bravo. Morning shift. A single vehicle idling crookedly just inside the checkpoint, its driver's door hanging open like a question no one wanted to answer.
A soldier staggered out.
Uniform torn. Blood soaked through the front of his fatigues. One arm hung useless at his side, flesh shredded down to muscle, bone flashing white beneath torn fabric.
"Medic!" someone yelled off-camera.
The soldier took three unsteady steps forward.
Then he lunged.
Ellis watched in frozen disbelief as the injured man slammed into the nearest MP, teeth snapping, hands clawing with strength that didn't match his wounds. The MP went down hard, helmet skidding across concrete.
Another soldier fired—not a warning shot.
The infected man didn't stop.
He took the round and kept moving.
Someone screamed again.
Ellis's pulse roared in his ears, drowning out the lab.
"That's not—" someone whispered behind him.
The second MP tackled the infected soldier from the side. They hit the ground in a mess of limbs and blood.
The bite happened fast.
Too fast.
Ellis watched the soldier's head snap sideways, jaw clamping down on exposed skin at the base of the man's neck.
Blood sprayed.
The feed cut.
The base sirens detonated into life.
Not a drill.
Not scheduled.
Real.
Red lights strobed across the lab as lockdown protocols slammed into place. Steel doors dropped. Keypads flashed red. Someone cursed. Someone prayed. A chair scraped loudly as someone stood too fast.
Ellis stood slowly, every nerve screaming, the room tilting just slightly beneath his feet.
"No," he whispered.
Then the civilian feeds forced themselves onto the main screen.
Savannah.
Traffic cams showed gridlock. People abandoning cars. Running. Screaming.
A school parking lot—kids being sent home early, parents yelling, teachers shouting directions that no one followed.
Ellis's stomach dropped.
Tally.
Another feed: Memorial Health intake.
Stretchers overturned. People flooding the doors. Security backing up.
Sharon.
A man fell on the street cam.
Didn't get back up.
Something dropped onto him.
Ellis leaned closer, breath shallow, fingers braced on the console like it might keep the world steady.
The thing bit.
Ellis felt the room tilt.
"No," he said again—louder this time, voice cracking.
The junior analyst beside him went pale. "Sir… the infected soldier came from civilian housing."
Ellis's chest locked, breath stuttering.
The virus hadn't crept.
It hadn't waited.
It had detonated.
Ellis dragged a hand down his face, exhaustion crashing into something colder—recognition.
He had been wrong.
So catastrophically wrong.
"Fuck," he said aloud, the word cracking through the lab.
Every head turned.
Ellis stared at the screens—at the city he lived in, the hospital his wife worked in, the streets his children were on right now.
"Lock the base down," he ordered hoarsely. "Full containment. No one in. No one out."
His phone buzzed uselessly in his pocket.
No signal.
No Sharon.
No kids.
"Get me every file Pennsylvania ever touched," Ellis said. "Every note. Every failure. Every dead end."
Because the virus wasn't coming.
It was already here.
And everything Ellis loved was standing directly in its path.