"Your Chinese app is crawling with infected footage," Jane said, scrolling with wide eyes.

  Miranda stared at the comments. "They've really spread!"

  Van noticed the oncoming traffic thickening.

  "Hold up. This pattern is wrong." He cut off the women's chatter.

  Miranda glanced at the road. "Crap. Just like when I bailed on Hurley."

  With the southbound lanes gridlocked, drivers were already veering into the desert.

  Others barreled toward them in the northbound lanes, ignoring Van's horn.

  He wrenched the wheel to avoid a head-on collision. The Express slid onto the shoulder, unable to regain the asphalt.

  Every few seconds, another wrong-way vehicle roared past, engines screaming.

  A sheriff's cruiser skidded to a halt beside him. A lawman in a khaki short-sleeve shirt leaned out, waving frantically.

  Van cracked the ballistic window.

  "Don't go north!" the sheriff shouted. "It's spreading! Two towns north of here are compromised!"

  "Head south! Take Highway 25 west! National Guard and State Health Services are mobilizing! The state is ordering evacuation!"

  With that, he sped off, swallowed by the honking chaos.

  "What do we do? Follow them?" Miranda's voice pitched high.

  Panic was contagious. The flood of refugees on the two-lane road had even the tough mechanic rattled.

  Van gritted his teeth. "We turn around. Stay with the herd, but we don't stop."

  He swung the Express into the desert, executing a three-point turn. He matched the speed of the exodus, keeping the truck ready to bolt back into the wilderness if things turned sour.

  At the bus crash site, most vehicles diverted through the sand to avoid the wreckage.

  A few had stopped before the debris pile. People climbed out, searching for survivors among the twisted metal.

  "Damn it, there could still be Rotters inside!" Jane cracked her window, shouting at them as they passed: "Get back in your cars! Infected might be inside!"

  Van shook his head. "Doubt it."

  At Jane and Miranda's questioning looks, he explained:

  "The Navigator driver. Your van's driver and passenger."

  "They were heavily decomposed. I've been thinking about what they had in common."

  The Lincoln Navigator had rolled into open sunlight. The van's driver seat was equally exposed. Both had turned while strapped in, unable to free themselves under the morning sun.

  Van glanced at the still-overcast sky. "They might be vulnerable to sunlight."

  That explained why Hurley's infected had stayed indoors at first.

  Jane nodded. The theory held—for now.

  Watching the wreckage shrink in the mirror, Miranda asked: "Will the military clean up the refugees too? Like they did Hurley?"

  Meanwhile, in Santa Fe, northwest-central New Mexico.

  Five soldiers in desert BDUs sat in a Humvee, watching Army paratroopers file into a C-17 Globemaster III.

  The lieutenant in the passenger seat checked his PDA. A red dot pulsed near Hurley on the tactical map.

  Two days ago, he'd been home. Then the call came: a special recovery mission.

  He'd raced to Kirtland AFB, where command assigned him four men from the base. After skimming their files, he selected his team. Then came the briefing.

  "Search and extract within our own borders? What about the target's identity?" he'd asked.

  "Sensitive asset. You'll receive the data when you reach the AO."

  Standard operational security. He'd done this dance before.

  But the wording was different this time. The briefing emphasized extracting the target from a population displaying "highly violent tendencies."

  He scoffed. Nothing could match the Shiite militias in the Middle East.

  He signaled the driver. The Humvee rolled into the transport's belly.

  Ground crew chained the vehicle to a heavy cargo pallet. The five men dismounted and sat with the airborne infantry.

  As the C-17 lifted off, they checked their gear.

  Sitting in the dim cabin, the lieutenant and his team waited for the tail ramp to open.

  They would parachute with 180 soldiers north of a town called Central, in southwestern New Mexico.

  Ensure your favorite authors get the support they deserve. Read this novel on Royal Road.

  Their orders: punch south under National Guard cover, straight to the target's last known position.

  That location came from a Longbow Apache's camera feed.

  His PDA would receive the target's live signal once they closed within ten kilometers.

  He didn't know why a simple snatch-and-grab needed National Guard support. He knew better than to ask.

  That was the rule when doing black ops on home soil.

  The aircraft descended. Everyone checked their chutes one last time.

  WHOOOOOSH.

  The C-17's rear ramp yawned open.

  The heavy pallet slid, chains rattling. At the ramp's edge, the parachute lines snapped taut, and the Humvee plunged into the sky.

  The lieutenant signaled his men. They moved to the tail.

  "Execute!" he shouted.

  One by one, they stepped into the void.

  Two days earlier. The desert outside Hurley.

  Kaelor Roy shivered in his bespoke suit, clutching a titanium briefcase as he trudged through the sand.

  He had opened a hellish Pandora's box. One that would swallow the world.

  He collapsed onto a dune, staring at the gray sky.

  As the unlisted Director of Unit Three at Meyer Corporation's Biological Research Division, he should have been rolling into El Paso tomorrow evening with the convoy. Under the escort of the Texas National Guard, he would have delivered the "cargo" to El Dorado—the reigning cartel kingpin of Juárez.

  The warlord had paid for a weapon to massacre his rivals.

  Roy's mission was simple: assist with the offload at a warehouse in Juárez, disable the signal jammers from a vantage point, and document the devastation for the board.

  He would have returned to Meyer with generational wealth. If the investors approved his strain, he could retire his parents and children to Scandinavia for ten lifetimes.

  That was the plan. Two days ago, he had followed the bus in the Lincoln Navigator without incident. But Hurley—that pathetic, final stop before the border—had become his grave.

  I only stepped out for a taco.

  How had someone gotten bitten in five minutes?

  The bus held forty Black men—carriers for the fungal spores. Some white-trash redneck just had to lay his filthy hands on them. On the lesser humans he had selected as biological vessels.

  The Necro-Fungus was a multicellular organism discovered by Aden, one of Meyer's reclusive co-founders. During rodent trials, Aden observed that once the deep-tissue fungus colonized a host's organs, it exploded into aggressive mycelium threads. These fibers infiltrated muscle tissue, tripling strength while hijacking the brain's basest instincts.

  The host became a vector with one imperative: spread the spores.

  Hence the aggression. The biting. The fluids exchanged through wounds, carrying microscopic seeds of the apocalypse.

  Aden had recognized the weapon's potential. Drop the infected into enemy populations and watch civilization eat itself.

  Meyer's Bio-Division cultivated five strains. Unit Three's directive was control. Nobody wanted a weapon that would turn on its master.

  Roy's strain had a failsafe: photophobia. Without the stimulus of blood, sound, or movement, his subjects retreated to darkness.

  He had been so confident. Then Hurley happened. That damned convenience store. That degenerate redneck who couldn't control his baser urges.

  Roy also cursed the science. Cross-species adaptation was hellish. If the fungus had taken to rodents or canines, he wouldn't have needed human carriers.

  He replayed the disaster from the sand:

  The headset crackled before his taco arrived. The bus driver: "Subject bit a civilian. The redneck started it."

  Roy's first command: "Neutralize the biter. Immediately."

  Then the driver's voice turned to ice: "Carrier showing early activation. Vocalizing."

  The low moan. The synchronization signal. If one woke, they all woke.

  Roy made the call: "Terminate the activated unit. Proceed to El Paso. I'll catch up."

  As for Hurley, he had the drivers help him unload a signal jammer from the Navigator's trunk—a military-grade unit capable of blacking out thirty kilometers of comms. They hauled it into the scrubland and spent two hours calibrating the device.

  Let them burn for his sins, Roy thought, spitting into the dust as he climbed back into the Lincoln.

  Then the weather turned. Unseasonal cold fronts collided with the desert heat, birthing a fog that swallowed the highway.

  The farther southeast they drove, the thicker the mist became. Roy monitored the bus GPS with sweating palms.

  Then the scream came through his earpiece.

  "They're active! Uncontained! They're tearing through the restraints!"

  Roy felt his heart stop. Activation before delivery meant total mission failure.

  The driver's scream twisted into wet gurgling. Metal shrieked. Glass shattered. The channel dissolved into static.

  Roy ordered his own driver to stop. Catching up now meant feeding himself to the fungus.

  Through the fog, civilian cars whipped past—refugees fleeing Hurley. When visibility dropped to three meters, the driver turned to him.

  "Director? Where to?"

  Roy tore at his hair. "Where? To hell!"

  CRUNCH.

  The impact came from behind. The heavy Lincoln lurched sideways across the asphalt.

  CRASH.

  A second strike flipped the SUV. The world spun—glass, steel, and sand blending into a blender of destruction.

  When the motion stopped, Roy hung upside down in his harness. He grabbed his PDA and the satellite phone from the engineering case.

  He didn't see the red "M" USB drive slip from the case and vanish into the sand.

  "Director... help..." The two drivers hung in their seats, blood pouring from their noses and mouths.

  Roy kicked open the door. He reached for the lead driver's seatbelt.

  Then he saw the silhouette in the fog. That gait. The lurching, broken stride he had observed in a thousand homeless test subjects.

  Infected.

  Roy withdrew his hand. The driver stared in disbelief as his superior turned away, sliding into the mist without a word.

  The screams followed him as he crept through the whiteout. He walked until his legs gave out, then slept in the sand until dawn.

  The satellite phone rang.

  He reported the catastrophe. The line went silent.

  "Will the cargo return to Hurley?" his handler asked.

  Roy confirmed. His strain could detect human blood from two kilometers away. The moaning in the town would draw them like sharks.

  "Hurley is my problem. As for you—remember the contract. If your heart is still beating in twenty-four hours, your family disappears into a federal black site."

  Roy's hand trembled against the receiver.

  He lay there, paralyzed by indecision, until he heard the rotors. An A-10 Warthog screamed overhead, dropping Mk 82 Snakeye bombs onto the town. The GAU-8 Avenger cannon opened up—a metal python's tongue licking the earth. Two AH-64 Apaches followed, emptying their Hydra 70 rocket pods into the dust.

  Roy watched the firestorm. He understood the message. If he didn't act, his wife and children would vanish into the same ash.

  The moon rose. The phone rang again.

  "Decision time. Two hours."

  Roy's voice was dust. "Touch them, and I'll find you."

  "Inject yourself, and I guarantee their safety."

  "Fine."

  He ended the call. He found the auto-injector in the case—a metal tube resembling an EpiPen.

  Kaelor Roy laughed—a broken, hollow sound—and plunged the needle into his thigh.

  Under the moonlight, a figure rose from the dune. Its finger bones stretched, sinews popping, skin splitting like overripe fruit.

  The Architect had become his own monstrous design.