Night had already settled over the dimly lit gali where Kabir closed his tiny mobile-repair shop for the day. The metal shutter screeched down as he tugged it with one hand, the other rubbing his tired eyes. Another ordinary evening. Another ordinary man no one in the city would notice.
Which is exactly why they chose him.
The shutter locked into place with a hollow clang. Kabir's fingers, still stained with solder and phone screen protector glue, fumbled with the padlock. The shop—barely twelve feet wide, crammed with spare parts and charging cables—was mercifully empty now. The last customer, a college student who'd dropped off a cracked iPhone screen, had left forty minutes ago.
Kabir was alone. This was the rhythm of his life: open, work in silence, close, return to the small rented room above the shop, exist in the margins of the city where no one particularly noticed him.
Forty-one years old. No wife. No children. No family that spoke to him anymore. His brother in Bangalore, his parents in Lucknow—they had all moved into lives that did not include him. No one was waiting for him. No one had called to check on him in months. No one would notice if he simply vanished.
He took two steps back from his shop, breathing in the cool November air of Delhi, the smell of diesel and street food mixing with the peculiar mustiness of old markets—
And a black van slid silently from the corner.
11:49 PM
No headlights. No noise. Only a hiss of tires against dusty pavement, so smooth and deliberate that it seemed almost rehearsed. Before Kabir could even frown, the van door flew open.
A cloth pressed against his mouth. The fabric was soaked with something chemical—something that tasted of hospitals and fear. His lungs tried to reject the fumes, but the hands holding the cloth were professional, experienced, pressing it deeper into his face.
A metal rod slammed into his ribs. Not hard enough to break bones—the impact was calculated, designed to stun rather than shatter—but hard enough to force the breath from his lungs.
A voice whispered coldly in his ear: "Perfect. No one will miss him."
Darkness swallowed everything.
12:13 AM
He woke strapped to a cold surgical table.
Light stabbed his eyes—white, harsh, unnatural, a fluorescent brightness that seemed to come from everywhere at once. Shadows moved behind a glass screen to his left. Through the haze of chemical residue, he could make out silhouettes in protective gear—medical suits. The kind worn when dealing with biohazards.
"My God… subject shows unusual resistance," someone murmured from behind the glass. The voice was male, clinical. "Look at the vitals. Heart rate is elevated but stable."
"He fits the criteria," another voice replied—female, older, carrying bureaucratic authority. "No family in the city. No police record. No one has posted about him on social media. If he disappears, the world won't blink."
"Subject is conscious," the female voice said flatly. "Proceed with administration."
Needles pierced both his arms simultaneously. Kabir felt the sharp sting of entry, then the immediate cold sensation of something being pushed into his veins. A transparent fluid—murky, with strange swirling particles—flowed through the IV lines.
He felt it immediately.
12:14 AM
Burning. Not the surface burn of a wound but something deeper, something that seemed to originate from inside his bones themselves. The sensation spread from the injection sites outward, racing through his arterial system like liquid fire. His muscles tensed involuntarily, his back arching against the restraints.
Then freezing. The burning was replaced in an instant by absolute cold, as if his blood had been replaced with liquid nitrogen. His teeth began to chatter violently.
Then something else—like millions of insects crawling under his skin, rearranging him. His skin crawled. His muscles twitched. His nerves fired in patterns that had nothing to do with voluntary control. It felt like his body was being rewritten by an intelligence that did not care about human comfort.
"The virus mutated ten times in the rat trials," the female voice said, speaking now with barely concealed excitement. "Fifty times in the primate models. But here—inside a human, it's slowing down. The replication rate is decreasing. My God, his immune system—it's not attacking the virus. It's stabilizing it."
"Interesting," the male voice said. "Very interesting."
They sounded excited. Kabir felt only pain that was approaching the outer edges of what a human nervous system could process without shutting down entirely.
12:31 AM
The straps dug deeper as his body shook, convulsing against the restraints with a force that made the surgical table creak. His veins became visible beneath his skin—thin lines that seemed to glow faintly, like threads of lightning ready to burst through the surface.
"Record everything," the female voice commanded. "We're transporting him to the Mumbai facility. If this strain stabilizes in a human host—it could change everything."
Kabir tried to speak, to plead, to bargain. But his voice came out as nothing more than an animal sound—a low, desperate keening that came from somewhere beyond language.
He only knew, with primal certainty, that he had to escape.
5:47 AM
When consciousness returned, he was already on a military aircraft.
His hands were tied with military-grade restraint material. His mouth was dry—so dry that his tongue felt like sandpaper. His chest burned like something inside him wanted to claw its way out, wanted to tear through his ribs and escape into open air.
Two soldiers sat opposite him, rifles resting on their knees. A third stood near the side door. The air smelled of recycled oxygen, fuel, and fear.
But Kabir wasn't broken yet.
5:53 AM
The fever had stopped. The burning inside his veins had transformed into something almost like energy—a manic electricity that made his muscles twitch. The humming of the plane masked the subtle sound of his bindings loosening.
Kabir had realized, through the haze of drug-induced delirium, that his hands, slick with sweat from the fever, had been slowly sliding through the cuffs. The movement was minute—millimeters at a time—but it was progress. It was escape.
The soldier closest to him—a young man, barely thirty—noticed too late.
5:54 AM
Kabir lunged.
Not with the strength of a healthy man but with the desperate, manic strength that comes from a body flooded with neurological chaos. The first punch broke the soldier's nose with an audible crack, blood erupting across the man's face in a spray that spattered across the aircraft wall.
The second punch knocked the rifle away, sending it skittering across the floor, out of reach.
5:55 AM
The third punch caught the standing soldier by the shoulder.
Kabir's teeth scraped against the man's forearm as they collided, teeth that were no longer quite human, teeth that had begun to sharpen at the edges as part of the viral restructuring.
"AAAH! He bit me—!" the soldier shouted, pulling his arm back.
It wasn't intentional. It was pure reflex. But that one scrape, that one moment of contact between Kabir's altered saliva and the soldier's open skin—
The plane erupted into chaos.
5:56 AM
Kabir seized a parachute, clipped it to his chest, and sprinted toward the open hatch.
"STOP HIM!" someone screamed.
Bullets rang out. One round went wide. Another punched through the fuselage. A third round caught Kabir in the shoulder, a burning line of fire that only fueled his desperation.
He reached the door. The hatch was already partially open. Kabir grabbed the edges and pulled.
Wind tore the breath from his lungs—not a gentle breeze but a hurricane force, a wall of air moving at hundreds of miles per hour, trying to tear him backward, to pull him deeper into the aircraft.
He jumped.
5:57 AM
Freefall swallowed the world.
The sensation of falling from an altitude of approximately 3,500 meters was beyond the vocabulary of human experience. There was no down, no up, only the sensation of gravity asserting its absolute dominion, pulling his body toward an earth that was still invisible below the clouds.
Behind him, the aircraft was already receding into the distance.
His hand found the ripcord.
He pulled.
5:58 AM
The parachute deployed with a jolt that was almost worse than the impact of hitting the ground would have been.
The sudden deceleration was brutal, every restraint in the harness straining under the pressure of his falling body's abrupt arrest. His ribs screamed in protest. His shoulder, where the bullet had passed through, erupted in renewed agony.
Kabir looked downward through the thinning clouds and saw the lights of Delhi sprawled below like a circuit board.
5:59 AM
The impact with ground was harder than his drugged, fevered state had prepared him for.
His left shoulder dislocated on impact, the joint tearing through its socket with a sensation like lightning, bone separating from bone.
His right leg broke somewhere between the knee and ankle—the fracture audible as a sharp crack. The bone was not a clean break but a complex shattering, fragmenting into multiple pieces that immediately began to disrupt the vascular and nervous tissue around them.
His ribs fractured in at least three places. His breathing came in gasps that sent spikes of pain through his chest cavity.
But Kabir was alive. Damaged but alive.
6:23 AM
The taxi driver who picked up Kabir at the edge of the construction site would later report that he had never seen a human being in such visible distress.
Kabir was bloodied, broken, his body covered in the fluids that human bodies produce when subject to extreme trauma. He was barely coherent, his voice reduced to a rasp.
"Where?" the driver asked, taking pity on the broken man.
"Chandni Chowk," Kabir whispered. "My shop. Please. Chandni Chowk."
The driver, a man in his fifties, made a quick assessment: victim or criminal. He decided he would take the man to Chandni Chowk, confirm the location, and then call the police from a distance. A reward, perhaps. Recognition for civic responsibility.
What he did not know was that he was making contact with something that had been deliberately created to become a transmission vector, something that was now actively shedding infected material with every breath, every drop of blood.
As the taxi pulled onto the main roads, Kabir's mouth watered. His breath came shallow and quick. The fever spiked once more, cresting to 43.3 degrees Celsius.
6:45 AM
minutes passed.
Kabir sat motionless for most of the journey, his consciousness drifting in and out of coherence. The virus had moved into a new phase of its progression. The acute symptoms had plateaued into something worse: a grinding, systemic reorganization of his cellular structure. His bones ached as if they were being slowly rewritten from the inside out.
Halfway through the drive, the driver's eyes drifted to the rearview mirror one more time.
And froze on the dark blood spreading across Kabir's chest.
"Arre—what happened to you?" the driver asked. "Should I call police? Ambulance?"
He reached for his phone.
6:48 AM
Kabir panicked.
The thought of police, of hospitals, of any institution that might trace him back—the panic was overwhelming.
"NO!" he shouted.
He grabbed the man's wrist.
The driver jerked back instinctively—
Kabir's nails scraped across his forearm.
It was barely more than a surface wound. But it was enough. In that moment of contact, the virus found a new vector of transmission. A thin line of blood appeared on the driver's forearm.
The driver's fear vanished instantly—replaced by something else.
Greed.
This man was not a victim—he was a criminal. A criminal who had just attacked him. He closed the small middle glass partition. He locked all the doors.
And smiled.
"Bhaiya," he said, his voice taking on a new tone, "looks like you're in trouble. Real trouble. I think I can get a good reward for handing you over to the right people."
He didn't know the scratch had already sealed his fate.
8:37 AM
The lights of Chandni Chowk finally appeared ahead—crowded lanes, sweet shops, honking rickshaws. Everything normal and ordinary.
Until Kabir's body snapped with the strongest tremor yet.
8:38 AM
His vision turned white. Not from loss of consciousness but from something else—the virus accelerating its neural alterations at a pace that his brain could not process.
His bones felt like they were bending. Not breaking but bending, as if the structure of his skeleton was becoming flexible, malleable.
And before he could even scream—
—his hands jerked against the steering wheel.
The steering wheel jerked hard to the right.
The taxi spun.
8:39 AM
The driver shouted.
And the car crashed straight into a sweet shop, smashing through glass and metal, raining jalebis and laddus everywhere like exploding fireworks. Enough to shatter the shop windows. Enough to send the driver through the steering wheel, his body broken by the impact, the virus in his scratch wound accelerating toward transformation.
Then everything went still.
Only a low, unnatural sound came from the back seat.
A growl.
Not animal.
Not human.
Something in between.
Something waking up.