Three minutes before it happened, the air tasted foul, the kind of stale bitterness that settled on the tongue and made people instinctively hold their breath. Morgan was halfway to the church when the familiar pressure came back.
It was the kind of wrongness that made his teeth hurt and his vision blur at the edges. He had felt this before, at 3:47 AM when the first outbreak started and he was in his bedroom, but this was different.
It felt more powerful and more on point. It was as if someone had taken the original signal and made it louder until it was a scream instead of a whisper.
He stopped walking, and his body froze as decades of survival instinct screamed warnings that his conscious mind was still processing. People on the street around him were starting to notice that something was off.
A woman tripped and put her hand on her head. A man dropped his grocery bags and turned pale as he swayed on his feet. Two teens across the street fell to their knees at the same time and started clawing at their heads.
"No fucking way," Morgan said softly, even though he already knew. "It's too early."
The second wave wasn't supposed to happen for at least a week, and when it did come, it was in the original timeline, with cases all over the world instead of a single event. But this moment was different.
It was intense and happening right here in his city. Morgan knew with horrible clarity that his presence had changed more than just the timing.
He had sped up the Syndrome. As dozens of people fell in the streets, the screaming started all at once, a chorus of pain that came from all sides.
Morgan saw a businessman in his fifties pull at his collar like he was going to die, a young mother drop her toddler's hand to hold her head, and an old man fold in on himself like his bones had turned to water. The change was happening faster than it had with Claire's brother.
It was violent and happened right away. Morgan could see the energy patterns moving through the air like visible currents of wrongness.
He got a call on his phone. The screen lit up with Murphy's name.
"Get to the church," his father said right away. His voice had a hint of excitement that made Morgan's blood run cold. "Now! Don't stop for anything that caught your attention because this is an emergency!"
"What's going on?" Morgan asked, even though he already knew.
"The first miracle," Murphy said, and there was a sense of awe in his voice that didn't belong with this kind of pain. "God is calling his chosen ones."
"Get here safely, son, because we have things to do that need to be fulfilled for the God."
The line went silent. For half a second, Morgan stood still, watching the chaos spread around him like a disease that had come to life.
In the original timeline, he was too stupid and weak to help during the first outbreaks. Instead, he spent those first days hiding and staying alive while thousands of people died.
But now he knew what needed to be done, even if his body wasn't ready to do it. He had knowledge and experience.
A scream broke through his thoughts, and it was closer than the others. Morgan turned around and saw a fifteen-year-old boy having a seizure on the sidewalk twenty feet away.
His back was bending in ways that shouldn't have been possible, and his muscles were spasming as the Syndrome changed the way his nervous system worked. The boy's mother was kneeling next to him and trying to hold him down. She was crying in a way that made it clear she knew she was losing him but couldn't accept it yet.
Morgan moved without thinking, and his body fell into patterns that his mind remembered, even though his muscles had forgotten them. He got to the boy in a matter of seconds, dropped to his knees, and grabbed the teen's head to keep it from hitting the concrete. The mother looked at him with eyes that were both desperate and thankful.
"Please help him," she begged. "Please! You... you have to help him!"
Morgan wanted to tell her the truth because there was no way to help once the change started, her son was already gone, and the person who came out the other side wouldn't be the same person she raised. He couldn't say that, though.
He couldn't take away her last few moments of hope, so instead he just nodded and tried to keep the boy from hurting himself while the Syndrome did its job. It took 90 seconds for the change to happen.
Morgan counted each one, feeling the boy's body change under his hands as bones changed shape, muscles got stronger, and something very basic about his biology changed at the cellular level. At the sixty-second mark, the boy's eyes flew open, and Morgan could see the moment when the boy's humanity left them.
The person who looked back wasn't her son anymore. It was something that looked like him but worked on an entirely different set of rules.
The changed boy moved faster than his mother could keep up with. One hand shot out to grab her throat.
Morgan acted on instinct and let go of the boy's head. He then hit the transformed throat with his elbow hard enough to collapse the windpipe. The boy's stronger body absorbed the blow better than a human's would have, but it was still enough to break his grip and send him stumbling backward.
"Run," Morgan told the mother in a flat, cold voice. "Get away from this place as fast as you can without turning your back."
She didn't move because she was still trying to make sense of what had just happened and how it related to the son she had been holding a few seconds earlier. Morgan didn't have time to talk her into it because the changed boy was already getting better, and three other people nearby were showing signs of finishing their own changes. He took hold of the woman's arm and pulled her up, pushing her toward the nearest building.
"Get inside and lock the door," he said.
She must have heard something in his voice that broke through her shock because she finally started to move. She stumbled away, looking back at what used to be her child.
"I'm sorry, son..."