Six days before the first recorded human case, 8:22 am. Westview, Dalton ST, Creek Sanctuary,
Three days after Dr. Nividia's visit, the morning sun spilled gold across the pastures of Westview Creek. Jeb Tucker leaned against the fence, trying to keep his pulse steady as he watched his flock scratch around in the dirt.
The chickens were back to their usual noisy selves — pecking at grain, fluffing dust over their wings, chasing each other off scraps. No more frantic clumping away from a single bird. No odd circling. Nothing.
Looks normal enough, he told himself, though his stomach still felt like it was tied in fishing line.
The bills hadn't stopped coming in just because his animals had suffered. His cattle operation had never fully recovered after the last anthrax scare two years ago. Feed loans were overdue, and the property tax notice had a fresh red stamp glaring up at him from the kitchen table So when the big gray truck from Lakeview Poultry Co. rumbled up the drive, tires kicking up dust, logo of a cartoon rooster winking on the door, Jeb didn't hesitate.
A pair of men in faded uniforms jumped down, clipboard already in hand.
"Morning, Mr. Tucker," the taller one drawled, cheerful enough. "We're here to start loading for the haul to the processing plant. Still looking at a hundred and twenty head today?"
Jeb cleared his throat.
"Yep. Right through here. Coop's all yours."
He tried to keep his voice steady, ignoring how his palms slicked with sweat. As he swung open the coop gate, chickens bustled forward in a feathered tide, clucking and jostling. The workers didn't seem to notice anything strange, just went right to it, catching birds by their legs and loading them in stacked crates, truck ramp creaking under the shifting weight.
Jeb forced a smile, signed the purchase slip with a shaky hand, and watched them drive off down the dusty road.
Only once the tail-lights vanished around the bend did his forced calm crack.He sat down heavily on the porch step, head in his hands.
"They're just chickens," he muttered, as if saying it out loud would make it true."Just chickens. Gotta keep the farm running. Nothing wrong here."
But deep down, a small cold knot wouldn't untwist. Something in the way those birds had clustered near the crates. The faint, sour smell that still lingered despite fresh straw.
The Lakeview Poultry truck rumbled along the cracked county highway; crates stacked four high swaying gently with each turn. Dust trailed behind in a long, ghostly plume.
Inside, dozens of chickens shifted and clucked, claws scrabbling at slats, feathers drifting like bits of torn parchment. Most huddled together in sleepy discomfort, lulled by the hum of the engine.
Except for one.
Near the middle crate, a hen stood stiff and too still, head slightly cocked as if listening to something only it could hear. Its beak parted in shallow, ragged breaths.
Around the rim of its right eye, a faint dark stain wept through the tiny feathers, barely noticeable perse, not bright like fresh blood, but a dull, oily maroon. The skin beneath twitched now and then, as if something writhed there just under the surface. The bird gave a sudden, low click in its throat, an odd, wet sound that made the nearest chickens shuffle away, pressing tight against the wooden walls. Outside, the truck barreled on toward the Lakeview slaughter facility. The sun rose higher, warm and bright over the rolling fields, utterly indifferent to what nestled unseen within that single, quiet crate.
Six days before the first recorded human case, 2:36 pm. Westview, Clarkson International Lab
Kael was hunched over his cluttered workstation when the ping from his console finally broke the oppressive silence. A new lab folder had arrived, flagged with Borealis Institute's encrypted seal. He dragged it open in an instant putting down the cold coffee he was drinking minutes before.
For a moment, numbers and color-coded charts blurred together: colony growth rates, metabolic readouts, fluorescence markers highlighting cell walls that were strangely thickened and striated. Several images under high magnification showed branching filaments creeping across the agar, intertwining like fungal hyphae but too organized, almost engineered. A fresh sweat broke out along Kael's back. Because he'd already seen this.
Just the night before, Nividia had sent her own files. Raw test results of stained tissue smears from that chicken liver. The same curling structures, the same dark nodules, the same alarming note scrawled in her hurried script: "Possible multi-system infiltration, does not match known avian bacterial profiles."
Kael set the two reports side by side on his screen. It was like looking at identical twins born of different species. Rodent tissue and chicken tissue, both rewritten by something ancient and ravenous, blurring the lines between infection, symbiosis, and something far worse.
He sank into his chair, pressing his palms to his eyes until sparks danced behind the lids.
It's the same organism. Spanning mammalian and avian hosts without a hint of slowdown. God how far has it already spread?
A small, insistent voice in the back of his mind whispered that it might already be too late to stop anything at all. When he finally lowered his hands, Kael stared at the Borealis logo on the header of the report, feeling a spike of bitter fury.
"Six days," he rasped under his breath."And we wasted them, because no one wanted to admit what they pulled out of that ice."
Kael sat there long after the screensaver began its slow drift across his monitor, soft glow painting his exhausted face. His thoughts churned in endless loops — Borealis' evasions, Nividia's phone call and test results, the growing echo between their samples.
Almost absently, he pulled up his own cage logs again. Twelve mice. Documented. Processed.
Except… His eyes narrowed. One entry was flagged with a minor remark:
"Subject 7 — cage door unsecured upon morning rounds. Animal not present. Area searched. Possible intramural hiding."
No follow-up. No confirmation it was ever found. Just a casual procedural note lost amid the flood of daily data, the same day as the award ceremony, when his mind was everywhere but here. Kael's breath stuttered out of him. His hands dropped to his lap, cold and limp.
"It was right there. The whole time. While I was accepting applause and shaking hands, it was already gone…"
The weight of it crashed over him, nearly forcing him forward in his chair.All the models he'd run, the careful vector studies, none accounted for a simple door latch. Or human negligence. And now, that single oversight had threaded itself into forests, farms, maybe entire town. For the first time since this all began, Kael felt truly hollow.Not the driven scientist. Not the lauded pioneer.Just a man who missed the smallest thing, and doomed far more than a lab full of rodents', too much his demise some of them might be even going to fruition.
The lab was oppressively still, filled only with the low mechanical hum of incubators and the faint, rhythmic drip of a condensation line. Shadows stretched long across sterile counters cluttered with slides and printouts, mute witnesses to his unraveling thoughts. Kael stood motionless in the center of it all, breath shallow, ears straining against the quiet as if expecting some hidden thing to skitter out from beneath the cages. In that heavy silence, every tick of the wall clock sounded grotesquely loud, a cold reminder that time was still moving, even if it felt like the world itself had paused, holding its breath around him.
Soon after, Kael's hand hovered over his phone, thumb tapping the screen again and again. Each ring seemed to echo through the sterile lab, bouncing off the cold metal surfaces until it finally cut off to voicemail. He lowered the phone, staring at it as if willing it to light up with her name.
But it stayed dark and silent, as oppressive as the rest of the lab around him.
Meanwhile, miles away at Westview Creek, Nividia's mobile lab sat quiet and still beneath the towering cottonwoods. The door was ajar, swaying ever so slightly in the breeze, creaking with a slow, hollow sound.
Inside, the small space was empty microscope slides scattered across the counter, staining trays half-filled with dried reagents, a centrifuge lid left open as if abandoned mid-spin. A single latex glove lay crumpled on the floor, catching the sunlight that slanted through the narrow window, Nividia's phone rings at the counter filling the sound of the entity of her lab. Where was she, did she went to another self-adventure in the forest to collect data and samples. It spiraled across Kael's mind as he knows her damn well, that whenever something was unusual, she would definitely be the first to go out.
Kael's steps echoed sharply down the polished corridors of Borealis, his lab coat snapping at his knees. He reached Dr. Kim Sun Lee's office and found the door cracked open, the interior dim and strangely hollow.
A young female assistant inside looked up, startled.
"Oh—Dr. Kael. If you're looking for Dr. Lee… he took an immediate sick leave this morning. Didn't say how long. Packed up everything himself."
Kael stood there a moment, swallowing hard.
Coward, he thought viciously — though some deep part of him whispered it wasn't cowardice. More likely Dr. Lee knew exactly what those cultures meant… and fled before the walls closed in.
With no more reports coming and dread grinding holes in his composure, Kael had only one path left. He was halfway out of the city limits before he realized how tightly he was gripping the steering wheel; knuckles pale against the dark leather. The roads to Westview Creek Sanctuary grew narrower and rougher, trees crowding close in oppressive green. Still, he pressed harder on the accelerator, the engine's growl swallowing the quiet, driving straight toward whatever waited for him in that secluded, shadowed lab.
Kael pulled up beside the mobile lab, gravel crunching under his tires. As he stepped out, the cool forest air wrapped around him, rich with pine and damp earth. Birds chirped and flitted through the canopy. The only voices answering when he wrapped his knuckles on the lab's thin metal door.
"Nividia? It's Kael. You in there?"
No reply. Just the faint rustle of leaves overhead.
Frowning, he pulled out his phone and called her. It rang twice, and then, from somewhere beyond the door, he heard the muffled trill of her ringtone.
Typical of Nividia, he thought with a weak, automatic sort of relief. She'd always been so easily absorbed by anything new under her microscope, letting calls echo unanswered while she hovered over slides for hours. When Kael tried the door again, pressing harder this time, it didn't budge. Locked from the inside or stuck somehow.
A nervous breath left his chest in a shaky laugh.
Alright, Nividia. Maybe you're out here somewhere, chasing fungal and bacterial samples like always.
He turned from the mobile lab and started down a narrow, barely worn path into the bordering stretch of protected woodland. Birds darted through the canopy, their calls bright and careless. A few sunbeams broke through the dense leaves, lighting up motes of pollen that drifted lazily in the still air
"Nividia?" he called, voice echoing strangely among the trees."It's Kael. You out here? I've got your latest cultures as well from Borealis…"
Nothing answered him but the gentle rustle of branches.
He tried again, louder.
For a fleeting moment, he pictured her crouched by a mossy log, eyes bright with excitement over some odd new things, phone forgotten, door accidentally locked. The thought steadied him. Just a little. Enough to keep walking, hands tucked into his pockets to stop their anxious trembling.
She's probably just around the next bend, he told himself.Has to be.
Kael pushed through a thicket of young saplings, the branches snapping back to slap against his shoulders. He nearly stumbled when the underbrush thinned and revealed a soft patch of earth, damp, littered with leaf mold and pine needles.
There, pressed clear in the loam, were footprints.
Small, narrow-soled unmistakably from hiking boots like the ones Nividia always wore on her field rounds. He crouched down, fingertips hovering over the impressions as if he might read more from them by touch alone. They weren't heading back toward the mobile lab.
They led deeper into the forest, away from the old logging boundary and far beyond the protected perimeter of the sanctuary.
Kael's brow furrowed.
That's… not like her. She might wander a little off the main grid, sure — but several kilometers beyond survey range? Alone?
He straightened, glancing around. The trees felt closer here, trunks crowding in dark ranks, their canopies knitting tight enough to blot out most of the afternoon sun. His stomach tightened.
"Nividia?!" he called again, voice sharper this time, trying to cut through the hush that had settled over the woods.
No answer. Just the faint sigh of wind through branches, rustling leaves in a way that sounded almost like whispers. Kael drew in a slow breath, then started after the prints. Each step felt heavier than the last, weighed down by a gnawing certainty that wherever Nividia had gone he might not want to follow. But he did. Because he had to know.