Chapter 4
Four
Sloane
Around lunchtime, I noticed it.
The whispering.
Whispering wasn’t unusual here; the younger staff ran on gossip the way the filtration systems ran on electricity, a constant background drone which kept everything functioning. Hookups, bad tattoos, whatever micro-celebrity was in the spotlight online that week. Normal noise.
This was not the case.
The voices dropped below their usual register, bodies drawn inward. More intense, rather than the relaxed, agreeable mood of normal gossip, was present on their faces. The charged stillness hinting at what’s coming, not what’s passed.
I was at the breakroom sink, working the lingering odor of thawed squid out of my hands with the grim dedication of someone trying to scrub away evidence, when I saw them.
Three of them clustered by the lockers, drawn around a glowing phone screen, the blue light throwing strange shadows up across their faces.
Protective, almost, like whatever they were looking at required guarding.
One of them made a sound.
A sharp intake of breath, short and involuntary. Not amusement, but not surprise exactly.
I set down the scrub brush and looked at them.
Jason was there. Pimple-faced, awkward Jason, whose employee ID photo looked like a mugshot for a crime he hadn’t committed yet.
The kid who wore his aquarium lanyard to bars on weekends with the optimism of someone who believed accessories were a substitute for personality.
He saw me looking and tried to appear nonchalant—his shoulders slumping, his phone tilting away, taking on the distinct posture of an individual who had learned about people from television comedies of the 90s.
“What?” I asked, crossing to them. “What is it?”
They hesitated.
That proved to be a mistake.
“What?” I said again, flatter this time. Not a question.
Jason’s throat worked, and with the resigned energy of someone who calculated handing it over was easier than explaining, he turned the phone toward me.
“It’s this video. It’s everywhere on VineThread.”
Of course it was.
I leaned in, braced for the usual—some influencer implosion, a prank gone sideways, the internet’s latest contribution to collective stupidity.
What I saw instead made me go still.
A woman was in the center of the frame. The footage was shaky, shot on someone’s phone—a crowded street, storefronts blurring at the edges, voices overlapping in a way that surpassed noise into something closer to panic.
The woman was screaming, her jaw wrenched open at an angle that didn’t belong on a human face, tendons standing out against her neck like cables pulled past their tensile limit, taut enough that you kept waiting for it to snap.
Blood was running from her ears.
Not normal screaming.
The sort which impacts your nervous system way before your brain processes it—something ancient recognized something it wasn’t supposed to exist.
Her hair hung in wet ropes across her face.
Her body moved in sharp, disconnected jerks, the movements off in a way that was difficult to articulate and impossible to look away from—like a marionette with half its strings severed, the remaining ones pulled by that which had no understanding of how bodies were supposed to work.
She staggered toward the camera, mouth stretched wide.
Black fluid leaked from the corners of her mouth in slow, thick streams, catching the light.
Her eyes rolled back. White. Then snapped forward with a focus so sudden it was like being targeted.
Her skin tinged a grayish-blue cast, the veins beneath risen to the surface and darkened—visible through the flesh like tattoos, branching toward her temples, her throat, the backs of her hands.
The surrounding bystanders had stopped being curious. They backed away fast, voices climbing over each other in overlapping waves of panic. Somewhere off-camera, a child’s soft wails—the a pitch that lives in your chest whether or not you want it to.
Someone shouted in another language. I didn’t know the words.
I understood them completely.
She lunged.
No buildup—just stillness followed by movement, inhuman in its speed, fingers hooked into claws. She caught someone slightly outside the frame. There was a sound—wet, tearing—the kind your mind tries to reclassify as something else, anything else.
The camera lurched sideways.
More screaming. A gurgling, bubbling sound underneath it that I wished I hadn’t heard.
After that—
A gunshot.
It echoed through the phone speaker, sharp and enormous, swallowing every other sound for a half-second that seemed to stretch.
I flinched hard, my heart jumping in my chest.
The woman dropped.
Not fell. Dropped, every muscle releasing at once, limbs folding beneath her with the boneless finality of something that had never been alive at all. She hit the pavement and didn’t move, didn’t twitch.
The camera stayed on her for a moment too long.
People ran through the frame. Someone’s shoe caught the edge of her outstretched hand, and they didn’t stop.
The shouting had taken on a distinct quality now—less panic, more aftermath—the specific chaos of people trying to process something their understanding of the world didn’t have a category for yet.
The video ended, and the screen went dark.
I stared at it.
My stomach decided, and what it had decided wasn’t good. Cold was moving through me, the way water moves, finding every gap, every unguarded place, settling in without asking permission.
I didn’t like it.
More precisely, I recognized it.
The last time this fear had twisted in my gut, I’d been nineteen years old, reading an early paper on a then-theoretical pathogen with the ability to compromise the central nervous system of marine mammals, turning social, intelligent creatures into something unrecognizable.
I hadn’t slept properly for a week.
“What the fuck?” I said, my voice barely above a whisper.
Not a question, just the only arrangement of words my brain produced.
Jason shifted beside me, and I made the mistake of looking at him directly.
His shoulders had hunched forward with barely contained excitement, the kind that lives in people who have been waiting their whole lives for something enormous to happen so they can be next to it.
His eyes were wide and glassy behind smudged lenses, a thin sheen of sweat catching the fluorescent light above us.
“They’re saying it’s a virus,” he said, dropping his voice to a theatrical whisper that somehow carried further than his normal speaking voice.
“Started in Asia, some fishing village on the coast.” He paused for effect, clearly having rehearsed this.
“It’s making people crazy, like eating each other crazy. ”
I looked at him.
Really looked at him, the way I sometimes looked at a specimen I was trying to classify, searching for the thing that explained the behavior.
He couldn’t have been over twenty-one. His skin was a constellation of acne; his aquarium polo, three sizes too large, swallowing him in blue cotton.
His lanyard swung with his nervous energy like a pendulum that couldn’t find its resting point.
Vibrating with the excitement of someone whose entire worldview had been constructed from Reddit threads and energy drinks, and who had been waiting, consciously or not, for exactly this moment:
The end of the world as entertainment.
He was absolutely eating this up.
“They’re calling it neurological,” he added, leaning closer.
His breath, a horrible collection of energy drink and corn chips and sour underneath, was the smell of someone who had forgotten to eat an actual meal because he’d been too busy refreshing his feed.
“Some people are saying it spreads fast.” Another pause, weighted and deliberate. “Like, as in overnight fast.”
The cold thing that had run through me while watching the video changed.
Moved deeper.
I’d spent ten years studying what happened when something went wrong inside a nervous system: the cascading failures, the way behavior unraveled before the body did, the speed with which a contained system could become uncontainable.
Overnight fast wasn’t the part that scared me.
The part that scared me was that I believed it.
I let out a slow breath through my nose.
The fluorescent lights too bright overhead, the breakroom seemed to have become smaller. Too small. Too warm, as if the air had been recycled one too many times.
“It’s fake,” I said.
The words came out flat and certain, the way I needed them to. They settled in the space between us like stones dropped into still water.
Jason’s face fell. His mouth opened and closed. “No, it’s…I mean, there’s…”
“Look at it.” I kept my voice even. Reasonable.
The voice I used when I was explaining something to someone who didn’t want to hear it, which was a voice I had a lot of practice with.
“Blurry footage. Perfect framing. Someone was filming at exactly the right moment, at exactly the right angle.” I handed the phone back to him.
“Classic rage-bait. I’ve watched a dozen of these cycle through the internet. They all use the same playbook.”
People loved being afraid. They sought it out, curated it, passed it around like a dish at a dinner table. Fear was the most shareable thing humans had ever discovered.
I knew that.
I was telling myself that.
Jason frowned, a small crease forming between his brows. The gleam in his eyes had dimmed slightly, uncertainty moving in to replace the excitement.
“But there’s like…” He glanced down at the phone. “Multiple videos. Different angles. Different locations.”
“There are always multiple videos,” I said.
The words were right. My tone was right. Everything was exactly as dismissive and certain as it needed to be.
I just couldn’t quite get it to align with my thoughts.
I handed the phone back and stepped away, reaching for my coffee on the counter.
My fingers trembled against the ceramic.