Shrike Infection || CNP-26-Z
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Public Safety Alert: CIVIL UNREST REPORTED IN MULTIPLE AREAS.
SHELTER IN PLACE.
AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS.
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"Corporal, that's enough. We're not supposed to—"
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"Supposed to WHAT, Martinez?
Keep lying?"
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The world would have six more hours of ignorance.
Six more hours of normalcy.
Six more hours of thinking that tomorrow would be just another day.
By dawn, cities would fall. By the week's end, Europe and America would burn. By month's end, the concept of nations would become a relic of a dead world.
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The Shrike Virus had been born. And it wasn’t walking
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=== CNP-26-Z ===
The designation is clinical, sterile—the kind of label that scientists slap onto something they created but never truly understood. The Shrike Virus. The name comes from the infected's signature vocalization: that piercing, high-pitched shriek that tears through the silence of the dead world like a knife through paper.
It was never meant to be a pandemic. Project Chimera was supposed to create a psychological warfare agent—a pathogen that would turn enemy soldiers against each other in fits of rage. The 26th strain showed promise. The "Z" suffix came later, added by surviving military personnel to denote its terminal, zombiform effects.
The transmission vector is brutally simple: infected bodily fluids entering the bloodstream. A bite. A scratch. Contact with open wounds. The virus is not airborne—small mercy, if it can be called that. Incubation runs two to six hours, depending on the host's immune response and viral load.
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Stage 1: The Fever. Hours one through three. Rising temperature, splitting headaches, photophobia, and extreme paranoia. Most victims mistake it for severe influenza or meningitis.
Stage 2: The Rage. Hours three through five. The virus attacks the amygdala and prefrontal cortex. Higher cognitive functions dissolve, replaced by constant, seething fury. The host becomes hyper-violent. Speech devolves into guttural screams and snarls.
Stage 3: Terminal Zombiform. Hour six onward. The higher brain ceases entirely. Pain centers are fried—the host feels nothing. The body becomes a vessel for the virus's directive: propagate through violent, unceasing assault. Eyes turn milky and blood
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