CHAPTER THREE: The Leak
By 2028, America was finished.
The maps hadn’t changed, but everything else had. The cities were husks. The systems—transportation, healthcare, finance—collapsed. Grocery stores became tombs. Law enforcement dissolved. The flags still waved, but the country they once represented had bled out. Estimates said tens of millions were dead. Starvation. Riots. Plagues.
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And silence.
The kind of silence that comes after the last scream.
Meanwhile, Vale’s dream—his grift—was thriving.
Orbis Ascendant, once hailed as humanity’s ticket to Mars, had long been exposed as a shell game. Billions funneled into experiments not to reach Mars, but to shape the perfect body for space travel. Earth was never the problem. People were. Fragile, soft, easily broken.
Frogs could freeze and come back to life. They could sit dormant for years, then spring awake. That kind of adaptability—that hibernation genome—was the key. But now, the key had slipped from the lab.
Something was leaking.
At first, it was just a few sightings. Tanker trucks at night, unmarked, slipping down rural roads. Locals said they were dumping in the water. No one believed them. Then the frogs came. Thousands. Pouring into lakes. Into the Grand River. Into Vandercook Lake. Michigan Center. Even Portage.
All those bodies of water shared one thing in common: the same ancient aquifer.
Something had been introduced into the source.
And the people started changing.
It wasn’t obvious at first. A rash here. A spike in energy. Better hearing. Strange dreams. Kids talking to animals. Adults sleepwalking miles into the woods with no memory.
But soon, they began to see it.
A woman in Michigan Center lifted a car off her pinned son. A teacher in Vandercook wrote math proofs in a language no one recognized. A teenager from Portage regrew a finger he’d lost in a woodshop accident.
And behind all of it: the frogs.
But these weren’t gifts. Not really.
With every “miracle,” something broke. Noses bled. Eyes changed color. Skin grew translucent. Internal temperatures dropped below survivable levels. Some spoke in tongues. Others vanished entirely.
And now, kids in Jackson were falling silent—staring for hours at stagnant ponds. Whole families stopped eating. As if they were… waiting.
EdenBiotek denied everything. Claimed no responsibility. But locals had started digging—literally. Shovel by shovel, they unearthed pipes running from the facility into the groundwater. Sludge so thick it moved like it was alive.
They called it “God’s breath.”
What it really was… no one knew.
Vale hadn’t been seen in over a year.
Rumors swirled. Some said he’d left Earth. Others that he was the first true hybrid—the test subject who’d survived full transmutation. The only thing they knew for certain was this:
America wasn’t evolving.
It was mutating.
And it was too late to stop it.
To be continued…
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