Ellis Leesburg had always believed in thresholds.
There was the theoretical line—where data stopped being clean and started becoming dangerous.
There was the ethical line—where research brushed up against consequences no one wanted to own.
And there was the physical line—the fences, checkpoints, clearances, and kill-switches that existed to keep certain things out.
Hunter Army Airfield was built around those lines.
And tonight, every single one of them was bleeding.
The first siren wailed at 10:42 a.m.
Ellis noticed it the way a surgeon notices a sudden drop in heart rate—not panicked, not surprised, just instantly alert. His fingers paused above the touchscreen console, neural imaging frozen mid-rotation.
"That's not scheduled," he said quietly.
Around him, the lab continued its hum—servers whispering, refrigeration units cycling, soft shoe squeaks on sealed tile. No one ran. No one shouted.
Yet.
The siren cut off abruptly.
Then another took its place.
This one deeper. More urgent. Not a test tone.
Ellis straightened.
"Status?" he asked.
A junior analyst looked up from her station, her brow furrowing as incoming data scrolled faster than she could read. "Gate Bravo just went restricted. Manual override."
Ellis frowned. "Manual override requires—"
"—a confirmed breach," she finished.
The room stilled.
Ellis crossed the lab in long strides, pulling up the security feeds himself. Gate Bravo filled the main screen—concrete barriers, armed guards, the morning sun throwing long shadows across the tarmac.
At first glance, nothing looked wrong.
Then the camera jolted violently.
A soldier stumbled into frame, half-running, half-dragging one leg behind him. His uniform was soaked dark at the thigh. Blood had matted his pant leg so thick it looked black.
"Who is that?" Ellis demanded.
The feed zoomed automatically.
Private First Class Aaron Hensley.
Twenty-one. Infantry. No prior medical flags.
Hensley slammed into the gate barrier with enough force to rattle the steel. One of the guards shouted—Ellis couldn't hear the audio yet—but the man didn't respond. His head jerked up slowly, eyes unfocused, mouth opening and closing like he was trying to remember how to breathe.
"He's injured," someone said.
"No," Ellis said softly. "He's altered."
The guard nearest Hensley approached, rifle lowered but ready.
Hensley lunged.
The speed was wrong. Too sudden. Too powerful for a man who should have been losing blood.
He collided with the guard, teeth snapping inches from the man's throat. The guard screamed, shoved him back, and raised his weapon.
"Don't fire!" someone shouted.
Too late.
The gunshot cracked across the feed.
Hensley barely flinched.
He surged forward again, grabbing the guard's arm and biting down—not reflexively, not defensively, but with full-body intent. Blood sprayed the camera lens.
The second guard fired.
Then fired again.
Hensley went down only after the third shot, collapsing in a tangle of limbs that kept twitching long after he hit the concrete.
The room around Ellis erupted.
"What the hell—"
"He didn't go down—"
"That's not adrenaline—"
Ellis didn't speak.
He felt something cold slide down his spine.
Because he recognized the posture.
The motor response.
The absence of pain reflex.
The same degradation curve he'd been staring at for days.
"Lock the base," Ellis said. His voice cut through the noise, calm and absolute. "Full lockdown. No ingress. No egress."
A colonel appeared on the edge of the lab, his expression already grim. "Doctor, we've got reports of similar incidents near civilian housing. One at the commissary. Another near the medical bay."
Ellis closed his eyes briefly.
The Penn lab had warned them.
A week ago.
Not explicitly. Not cleanly. But the message had been there—buried under jargon and frantic addendums.
Neural degradation accelerating beyond projections.
Aggression unresponsive to sedation.
Subjects responding to auditory stimuli only.
Ellis had argued then.
He'd insisted it was a contained outbreak. A lab failure. A local event.
Pennsylvania had gone silent forty-eight hours later.
Ellis turned back to the screens as more feeds populated—security footage from across the base. A soldier convulsing near the motor pool. A medic backing away in horror as a patient tore free of restraints. A woman screaming in the distance, her voice cut off by a wet, horrible sound.
"How many confirmed bites?" Ellis asked.
The colonel hesitated.
That pause answered him.
"Unknown," the man said. "We've lost visual on at least three sectors."
Ellis nodded once. His jaw clenched.
"Then assume exponential spread," he said. "Sound discipline immediately. Shut down alarms unless actively evacuating."
"You're telling me to kill the sirens?" the colonel asked.
Ellis met his gaze. "I'm telling you the sirens are ringing dinner bells."
Another explosion rocked the base—controlled, but close. Smoke rose near the vehicle yard.
Ellis pulled up neurological overlays again, magnifying the Penn data. The virus—if that was even the right word—didn't behave like influenza or rabies or anything that belonged neatly in a textbook.
It moved like a hijacker.
Crossed the blood-brain barrier within hours.
Targeted inhibitory control.
Shut down empathy, fear, higher reasoning.
Left the brainstem intact.
Breathing. Motion. Hunger.
"They're not dead," Ellis murmured. "They're locked out."
Someone nearby swallowed hard. "Locked out of what?"
Ellis didn't answer.
His eyes drifted to a new feed.
Savannah.
Traffic snarled at intersections where lights had gone dark. People stood in clusters, shouting into useless phones. A camera near a school showed parents arguing with staff at locked doors.
Ellis's heart stuttered.
Tally.
He zoomed in frantically.
The feed cut.
"Switch to hospital," Ellis snapped.
Memorial Health appeared on screen—chaos barely contained. ER hallways flooded with patients. Police wrestling someone to the ground. A nurse scrambling away as a man lunged.
Ellis leaned forward, breath shallow.
"Sharon," he whispered.
She was there. Somewhere in that building.
Still trying to save people.
His phone buzzed uselessly again—no signal, no bars, just a mocking vibration.
"Doctor," the colonel said quietly, "this is bigger than we planned for."
Ellis let out a harsh, humorless breath.
"I know," he said.
Outside, the base sirens wailed once more.
Then cut dead.
And in the sudden silence, Ellis Leesburg understood the truth he had refused to accept for a week:
The virus wasn't coming.
It was already here.
"Shit," he said aloud.
And for the first time since this began, fear—not theory—took hold.
The silence was worse than the sirens.
Ellis felt it settle over Hunter Army Airfield like a held breath—heavy, expectant, wrong. Alarms had always meant action. Noise meant procedure, response, order. Silence meant the system had reached the point where it no longer knew what to do with itself.
Or worse—someone had decided noise was too dangerous.
"Sound discipline confirmed," an officer reported from the far end of the lab. "All external alarms disabled. Internal alerts switched to visual only."
Ellis nodded, though his mind was already racing ahead. Sound discipline worked on paper. In simulations. In places where fear didn't make people scream, cry, shout names into the dark.
Fear made noise.
And noise brought them.
A new feed cut in without warning—grainy, handheld, the jittery perspective of a body cam.
A soldier was running.
Not tactically. Not in formation. Just running.
"—don't know where they came from—" the soldier panted. "They were in the med bay. We thought—Jesus—"
The camera swung wildly. A corridor flashed past. Blood streaked the floor in long, smeared arcs like something had been dragged—no, pulled—by hands that didn't care about friction or pain.
A shape slammed into the frame.
The feed went down.
No scream. No final words.
Just static.
Ellis stared at the dead screen.
"They're inside," someone whispered.
"Yes," Ellis said quietly. "They always were."
He turned back to the neural models, pulling up progression curves from Penn, now overlaid with real-time data from the base's casualties. The curves matched too closely. Too perfectly.
This wasn't mutation.
It was deployment.
A colonel stepped closer, lowering his voice. "Doctor, we need to know what we're dealing with. Is this reversible?"
Ellis didn't answer immediately.
He thought of the Penn lab's final attachment—an image that hadn't made sense at the time. A neural scan lit up like a city grid at night, except the light was wrong. Not healthy firing. Not organized signaling.
Override.
Something had rewritten the rules.
"Not once it crosses the midbrain," Ellis said at last. "Before that… maybe. After?" He shook his head. "You're not curing damage. You're witnessing replacement."
"Replacement of what?"
Ellis swallowed. "Of choice."
Another tremor rippled through the base—not an explosion this time, but impact. Something heavy. Repeated. Rhythmic.
The sound made his stomach twist.
"West barracks," someone said, reading from a tablet. "Reports of… pounding."
Ellis closed his eyes.
They weren't smart. He knew that. They didn't plan, didn't reason, didn't organize.
But they didn't stop.
And humans got tired.
"Seal it," Ellis said. "All interior fire doors. Lock stairwells. If anyone's bitten—"
"—isolate immediately," the colonel finished.
"And if they resist?"
Ellis looked up.
"Then you restrain them," he said. "And if that fails—"
The words stuck in his throat.
He forced them out anyway.
"—you neutralize them."
The colonel nodded once, grim acceptance etched deep. Orders were already being relayed, but Ellis knew how this went. There would be hesitation. Arguments. Someone would say we can't just shoot our own people.
By the time they finished debating, it would be too late.
A junior tech approached hesitantly. "Sir… civilian feeds are lighting up. The city's losing power sector by sector."
Ellis turned.
Savannah was unraveling in real time.
Traffic cams showed abandoned cars at impossible angles, doors flung open, keys still in ignitions. A woman ran across an intersection clutching a child, tripped, disappeared beneath bodies that swarmed not with intelligence but with instinct.
Ellis's breath caught.
School zones flickered onto the map as power grids failed.
"No," he whispered.
He pulled up the timestamp.
Two hours earlier.
Right when Tally's school would've been in second period.
Right when administrators would've been deciding whether to dismiss early.
Ellis's chest tightened painfully.
Justin would be driving. He always drove. Careful. Responsible. Too responsible for his age.
And Ella Belle—
Ellis shut his eyes hard, bracing his palms against the console as if the metal could hold him together.
"You were wrong," he told himself. "You were wrong."
A week ago, he'd argued against escalation. Against pulling families from base housing. Against shutting down civilian corridors.
He'd said the spread required proximity.He'd said it wasn't airborne.He'd said we have time.
Time was the one thing they never had.
"Doctor," the colonel said quietly, "civilian authorities are requesting guidance."
Ellis laughed once—short, bitter. "Guidance?" He gestured at the screens. "Tell them to be quiet. Tell them to move slowly. Tell them to pray."
"That's not protocol."
"No," Ellis agreed. "That's survival."
Another feed cut in—this one from inside the base's medical wing. A patient convulsed violently on a gurney while two medics struggled to hold him down. His eyes snapped open mid-seizure, pupils blown wide, mouth opening in a soundless scream before he lunged.
The camera dropped.
Ellis felt something inside him fracture—not shatter, but crack. A clean break between who he had been this morning and who he was becoming.
"This isn't an outbreak," he said hoarsely. "This is collapse."
The colonel studied him for a long moment. "Can you fix it?"
Ellis thought of Sharon. Of her steady hands. Of the oath she lived by even as the world burned.
"I can understand it," Ellis said. "Maybe slow it. Maybe interrupt it early."
"And a cure?"
Ellis shook his head. "Not yet."
The colonel nodded. "Then we buy you time."
Outside the lab, gunfire erupted—short bursts, controlled but unmistakable. Screams followed. Then more gunfire.
Ellis flinched despite himself.
"Doctor," someone called urgently, "we've lost Gate Charlie."
Ellis straightened.
"Evacuate non-essential personnel to hardened zones," he said. "Cut lights in unused corridors. And for God's sake—no shouting."
The irony wasn't lost on him. Orders barked in whispers. A military base tiptoeing through its own halls.
His phone vibrated again.
This time, a single bar flickered on.
Ellis snatched it up.
No calls.
Just a text notification struggling through the chaos.
UNKNOWN NUMBER:Emergency alert. Shelter in place. Avoid noise. Avoid crowds.
Ellis stared at the message, then at the city feeds.
Too late.
He typed with shaking fingers.
ELLIS:Sharon. If you get this—lock down. Sound discipline. Do not open doors.
The message sat unsent.
No signal.
Ellis exhaled slowly, forcing air into lungs that felt too small.
For years, he had worked with the brain—mapping it, understanding it, respecting its fragility. He had believed knowledge could protect him. Protect them.
Now knowledge was a curse.
Because he could see the pattern.
And he knew how bad it was going to get.
Ellis looked around the lab—at the tired faces, the flickering screens, the base that was no longer a fortress but a trap.
"Listen to me," he said, raising his voice just enough to carry. "We document everything. Every progression. Every deviation. If we fall, this data goes out. To anyone still listening."
"And if no one is?" someone asked.
Ellis met their gaze.
"Then we become the record."
Another scream echoed faintly through the ventilation system—cut off almost immediately.
Ellis closed his eyes.
"Shit," he whispered again.
But this time, it wasn't fear.
It was resolve.
Because somewhere out there, his family was fighting blind.
And if Ellis Leesburg had one thing left to give the world—
It would be the truth.