Chapter 4

Frankfurt Airport
Terminal 1, Gate Z18
14:47 CET

Marcus Brenner had felt fine in Singapore. Better than fine—the stomach bug that had ruined his first week of vacation had completely cleared. Three weeks later, sitting in Frankfurt's gleaming Terminal 1, waiting for his connection to JFK, he noticed his hands trembling as he reached for his coffee.

The terminal hummed with its usual choreography: corporate assets marched along hologrammed efficient corridors to their next connections, while families corralled their children with haptic barriers, oblivious to the flow. The sound space was a jagged intrusion of competing bird-songs mixing German, English and Mandarin so that non-faced guests might still reach their flights. Through the curved canopies of towering glass, A380s taxied past like aluminum whales.

The tremor spread up his left arm.

Marcus set down the coffee. The paper cup rattled against the table.  The coffee sloshed and crested the rim, splashing to the tabletop . A woman at the next table glanced over, then away. He tried to stand, to walk it off, but his right leg buckled. Not weakness—something else. The muscles were firing wrong, pulling against each other.

"Entschuldigung," he said to no one in particular. "I need—"

The quaking seizure hit mid-sentence. His body went rigid, then began jerking in waves that started at his feet and hands, and invaded inwards—a Jacksonian march from all directions, though he wouldn't have known the term. He managed no defensive postures as his skull smashed into gleaming floor tiles.  His pupils pulsed erratically. Pink coffee foam drooled from his lips.

A child screamed.

The woman from the next table backed away, knocking over her chair. "Hilfe! Somebody—medical—"

By the time the airport medical team arrived—ninety seconds at most—Marcus had progressed from tonic-clonic to worse.  The infrared thermometer read 36°C, he was cooling.  His NEI had gone offline.  They broke more teeth forcing an airway through a mouth already shattered by clenching muscles.  A severed tongue was swept aside.  His heart struggled to maintain any rhythm.

"Was hat er genommen?" the paramedic demanded. What did he take?

"Nothing," Marcus's colleague, Johan, was rushing back from an ill-timed bathroom break. "We were in Singapore together. He had food poisoning three weeks ago but—"

Marcus's body contracted violently, his spine arching backward until only his heels and his crown touched the floor, pivoting on the depressed skull fragments. The paramedics tried to restrain him, but the force was inhuman. Something tore—muscle, tendon, perhaps both. The sound was wet, sucking.

Then the bleeding started.

Not from his nose or ears, though that would come. This was from his pores—tiny pinpricks of red appearing across his exposed skin like sweat. The crowd, which had pressed close with morbid curiosity, suddenly reversed, stampeding backward. A dozen alarms went off as children were swept past their invisible boundaries.  Corporate players were knocked off course as escapees collided on their flanks.

"Quarantäne!" someone shouted. "It's the Asian thing—the virus—"

But it wasn't Asian anymore. It was here, in Terminal 1, spreading panic faster than any pathogen could spread. Security guards tried to establish a perimeter, but passengers were already scattering, some toward their gates, others toward exits, all of them capturing HUD-streams, their eyes somehow wild with panic and glazed in sharing, spreading Brenner's death across a thousand feeds.

He lasted eleven more minutes.  No airway, no breathing, no pulse, no circulation, no attendants.

Whether it was official or not, a full evacuation was in progress. Flights were grounding. The hazmat team was suiting up. And in a small office three floors above, a flight surgeon from the Robert Koch Institute stared into the distance, watching the same video from twelve different angles, all trending with the same hashtag: #FrankfurtOutbreak.

She opened a secure line with the emergency operations center.

"It's here," she said simply. "And it's not drugs."