08/30/2026
Chapter 1: The Drip Line
The automated notification at the top of the smart-tablet screen read: Abby_Net Predictive Health Sync β 99.4% Connectivity.
Jean Wolfe didn't look at the notification. She adjusted the locking collar on her carbon-fiber, water-fed pole, checking the pure-water flow rate. She was thirty-four, analytical, and deeply cautious. She was a window cleaner who strictly refused to service anything past the second story. She kept her boots firmly planted on the damp Michigan Terraferma, treating anything higher than a ten-foot ladder as an unnecessary gamble with gravity. She had just watched as yet another milky white stream flowed down the center of her perfectly spotless storefront window. This job was seriously annoying her; the heavy frame oxidation meant she had to keep stopping to wipe the chalky runoff away with her blue surgical huck towels.
Across the gravel driveway, her husband, Blaine Wolfe, was standing on the rear tailgate of his heavy-duty, customized Goliath F-250 pickup, rapidly tightening the wratchet straps on his οΏΌSuzu-X 250cc trail bike. Blaine was a fearless high-rise window cleaner, a man who spent his weeks suspended by thin lines from the rooftops of the tallest corporate towers in Detroit, Grand Rapids, and Flint. Swinging like a school boy on the playground at Schall Elementary School. He possessed a stubborn, thick-boned Celtic frame, a red beard, seventy-six percent Irish mixed with Welsh, and the ice-cold nerves of a man comfortable with thousands of feet of empty air beneath his boots. "Blaine! You seeing this?" Jean called out, gesturing to her screen. "The neighborhood emergency network just lit up. They're shutting down the state line. Not just the schools anymore. The whole state. Executive lockdown order." The air off the Saginaw Bay was biting, carrying that signature late-winter sting of damp pavement, dead reeds, and exhaust. It was March of 2020. The world believed it was dealing with a severe, airborne respiratory pathogenβa novel coronavirus. But the reality engineered inside the secretive bio-defense laboratories of Abby AI was a dual-threat, synthetic chimera. The lab had cross-engineered the genetic architecture of Coronaviridae with the neurological hijacking traits of a parasitic Ophiocordyceps fungus and the brain-wasting proteins of Chronic Wasting Disease. It was a masterpiece of biological deception: for ninety percent of the population, the virus presented as a standard, severe flu. It cloaked itself in ordinary symptomsβa dry cough, a spiked fever, a loss of taste and smell. Because the initial stages looked exactly like a routine respiratory infection, millions remained completely unsuspecting. "They're a year too late," Blaine said, jumping down from the bumper. His heavy work boots hit the driveway with a solid thud. "A buddy of mine at the pharmaceutical warehouse in Grand Rapids called me before the regional comms went dark. It isn't staying in the lungs, Jean. The respiratory phase is just the delivery system. The real invasion happens when it hits the brain stem."
The warning signs had been leaking out of the hospitals for weeks, masked by the general panic. In the early-access pharmaceutical trials at the clinic down at the State University, patients in the advanced stages of the "fever" began exhibiting bizarre, involuntary behaviors. Two nights ago, an elderly patient experiencing severe respiratory distress had suddenly lunged from her bed, sinking her teeth deep into the forearm of a triage nurse. The incident hadn't caused an immediate transformation; the virus didn't work like a movie. The patient had instantly collapsed back into the sheets, weeping, sobbing, and apologizing in absolute shock. βIβm so sorry,β she had cried, coughing violently. βI donβt know why I did that. My jaw just clamped down. I couldnβt stop it.β The nurse had treated & bandaged the bite, filed an incident report, and gone back to work. But the virus had already entered his system, bypassing his immune system entirely to begin its slow, silent migration toward his cerebral cortex. It didn't rot the flesh. It simply rewrote the brain's priority network, mapping out a singular, desperate, biological drive to consume fresh, raw human neural tissue to replace the user's rapidly degrading gray matter.
"The neighborhood group chat says the people from the clinic aren't staying in their houses," Jean whispered, her fingers tightening around her carbon-fiber pole. "They're wandering out onto the sidewalks. They're coughing, but they're looking at people. Not with anger, Blaine. They're looking at us like they're looking through a grocery store window."
Blaine looked north, toward the horizon where I-75 cut a concrete scar all the way up through the middle of the state toward the Mackinac Bridge. "Pack the pure-water filtration kits, the squeegees, the long lines, and every non-perishable we have. We aren't going to a state shelter. They'll fence people in like cattle."
"Where are we going?" Jean questioned.
"To the one place where they can't trap us," Blaine said, tossing his high-rise safety harness into the truck bed. "The big timber. The highway median."
By midnight, the world had fractured. The northbound lanes of I-75 had become a sprawling, smoking graveyard of abandoned vehicles, jackknifed semi-trucks, and families running on foot. The wild, unvaccinated strain of the virus was hitting its peak. Thousands who thought they just had a severe winter cold were suddenly losing their executive cognitive function, transformed into mindless, howling husksβthe Wild catsβdriven by a raw, uncoordinated neural hunger. Blaine navigated the massive Goliath truck off the main asphalt completely, plunging down into the steep, muddy drainage ditches and cutting through the dense briar thickets that line the highway. He turned off the main headlights, turned on the overhead fog lights steering by them, guiding the truck deep into the massive, hidden forest trapped right between the highway lanes: The Meridian.
They had their tools, their truck, and their lives. But as the distant, wet clicking sounds of the Wild cats began to echo from the gridlocked cars on the asphalt behind them, they realized the winter was going to be very long. And the real nightmare hadn't even crossed the highway yet.
π’ WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? THE CHOICE IS YOURS! This is just the beginning of INTO THE MERIDIAN. To unlock the next chapter and see how Blaine and Jean survive the first wave, you get to cast your vote on how the story unfolds!
A. Blaine builds a tree top fortress in the tall Michigan white pines using his rigging gear.
B. Jean uses her old thrifting route to outsmart the Michigan State Police Northbound barricade on I-75.
