PATIENT ZERO -The lone survivor
The twelve-mile drive back from the Makuyuni plains was a blur of burning rubber and absolute, suffocating terror.
They had left the shattered remnants of the Vanguard and the smoking wreckage of the landship behind, tearing across the arid steppe in the modified jeeps. But as Mount Meru loomed on the horizon, the reality of Eliana’s panicked radio call became visibly, horrifyingly apparent.
The sky above the mountain had been pierced.
There was no localized gravity storm, no fleet of UN bombers raining fire. There was only a single, perfectly straight, glowing column of dissipated atmospheric heat—a trajectory line cutting straight down from the stratosphere, terminating directly into the j