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 toprocess 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 eachother 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.”