The Chasm

The ice screamed as it died.

A fissure split the Siberian permafrost, jagged and explosive, like a bolt of lightning frozen mid-strike. For millennia, this icebound vault had cradled secrets older than human ambition—bones of prehistoric creatures, primeval DNA, and something far darker. Dr. Elina Vesa, climatologist and reluctant prophet of doom, knelt at the edge of the rupture, her breath crystallizing in the air. Two decades ago, this tundra had been iron-hard even in summer. Now, it oozed meltwater, exhaling methane bubbles that popped with the stench of rotten eggs. She pressed a trembling glove to the fractured ice which vibrated with the aftershocks of something ancient and hungry clawing its way to the surface. The satellite imagery hadn’t prepared her for the site of this gaping chasm in the earth, stretching for miles.

“It’s not just methane,” she whispered, adjusting her thermal goggles. Her gloved hand hovered over a sample vial. The ice here was black, streaked with veins of ancient sediment. A colleague in Oslo had joked that her expedition was “climate tourism”—another hysterical woman chasing grant money. But the data didn’t lie. The Arctic was melting faster than models predicted, and now, as her drill bit pierced the ice, something hissed.

A mist rose, shimmering with microscopic malice —a billion diamond-dust particles catching the weak polar sun. Elina stumbled back, but not fast enough. The spores kissed her lips, cold and sweet.

Seven Days Earlier: The Boardroom

“Gentlemen, the future is bright.”

Marshall Crowe, CEO of PetroNova Energy, flashed a veneered smile at the shareholders. Floor-to-ceiling windows framed a December Manhattan skyline shimmering like a mirage, its towers piercing a sky smudged with the faint orange haze of distant wildfires. The climate at the 72nd floor was meticulously curated: 68°F, 40% humidity, a chill meant to keep the shareholders sharp. Or perhaps to mock the feverish planet below. The air smelled of espresso, Cuban cigars, and the faintest whiff of desperation.

“Our Arctic drilling permits are approved,” he said, tapping a holographic map. Ice caps dissolved into pixels, replaced by oil rigs springing up like metallic weeds. “The Russians have thawed the Northeast Passage for us. Free real estate.” He smirked at his own joke. “We’ll be pumping 200,000 barrels a day by Q3.”

A hand rose from a young investor, her brow furrowed. “Sir, the UN’s latest climate report—”

“—is a storybook.” Crowe’s laugh was a chainsaw revving. “Fear sells. But energy”—he leaned forward, palms on the table—“energy builds empires. The Earth isn’t some delicate goddess. She’s a resource. And resources exist to be consumed.”

The room erupted in applause. “Now,” Crowe said, nodding to a waiter refilling glasses, “let’s toast to legacy.” Glasses clinked. Across the room, a junior exec snapped a selfie with the hologram map, hashtagging it #DrillBabyDrill.

No one noticed the mosquito, engorged and resting on the windowsill. December in New York, and yet…

Day One: Patient Zero

Klara Kivi coughed into her scarf, leaving a faint crimson stain on the wool.

The subway rattled beneath Helsinki, packed with commuters. Klara, a forestry student, had spent the morning protesting the clear-cutting of Sápmi old-growth forests. Now, sweat glued her shirt to her spine. Just a cold, she told herself. The news said a flu was circulating. Nothing to fear. Around her, commuters swayed in unison—zombies of routine, their eyes glued to smart phone, scrolling headlines about heatwaves and celebrity divorces. Klara gripped a flyer from that morning’s protest, its ink smudged by sleet: SAVE SÁPMI’S ELDERS! Beneath the slogan, a photo of a 700-year-old pine, its rings a chronicle of plagues and revolutions. She’d chained herself to that tree at dawn, screaming as loggers’ saws drowned her voice. Now, her throat burned as if she’d swallowed embers.

The train screeched to a halt. A toddler in a puffer jacket reached for her stained scarf. Klara recoiled, but not before the child’s mittened fingers brushed the wool.

By dusk, Klara’s head was throbbing. The walls of her dorm room started to expand and contract, as if breathing. Shadows slithered across the walls and pooled into oil slicks, thickening into shapes—skeletal trees. Their branches scraped at the ceiling. Klara staggered to the sink, retching a black slurry that hissed against the porcelain. When she dared to look up at the bathroom mirror, her reflection was gone. In its place stood a forest. Not the Sápmi pines she’d fought for, but a grotesque parody: trees stripped of bark, their trunks studded with chainsaw teeth, roots coiled around human skulls polished smooth by time.

She collapsed, twitching, as her phone buzzed with alerts:

EMERGENCY BROADCAST:
AVOID NON-ESSENTIAL TRAVEL.
UNIDENTIFIED VIRUS SUSPECTED.

Too late. That morning, Klara had kissed her girlfriend goodbye. Coughed on a cashier. Ridden the Metro at rush hour.

The Thawed God had found its apostle.

Day Three: Immolation

The Rio de Janeiro ICU was a pressure cooker of despair. Fluorescent lights buzzed like angry wasps, flickering over bodies swaddled in sweat-slicked plastic, their outlines blurred and contorted. The air reeked of charred meat and antiseptic, undercut by the pungent, nauseating odor of necrotic tissue. Bodies lined the hallways, their skin blistered and purpling, limbs twisted as if still writhing from the inferno inside them. The morgue had overflowed at dawn; now, the dying lay shoulder-to-shoulder with the dead, their plastic shrouds rustling like morbid party decorations in the stale breeze of overworked air conditioners.

Dr. Carlos Sousa’s Hazmat suit chafed at his neck, the rubber seals digging into his collarbone as he ran. His goggles fogged with every panicked breath, turning the chaos into a murky nightmare. Somewhere, a ventilator alarm wailed incessantly.

“Code blue!” a nurse screamed, her voice cracking.

Carlos skidded to a stop beside the gurney. The patient was a fisherman, his chart said—Paulo Barone, 54, Ponta Negra. His hands told the real story: calloused palms salt-etched and cracked, fingertips stained with engine grease, still clinging to the briny scent of the sea. Now those hands were curled into blackened claws, his arms mottled with hemorrhagic blisters that wept yellowish fluid. The monitor screeched, his temperature 108°F and climbing, EKG lines spiking like seismic waves.

“Charging to 200!” Carlos barked, his voice muffled behind the mask. The defibrillator whined, a sound that always reminded him of a mosquito swarm.

He pressed the paddles to the man’s chest. The flesh sizzled—a sharp, acidic stench of burnt pork and singed hair flooded the room. The fisherman’s back arched violently, tendons straining against skin that had begun to split like overripe fruit. His eyes flew open, pupils dilated into dark voids.

Then he laughed.

A wet, gurgling laugh, blood-speckled sputum bubbling at the corners of his mouth. “It’s so warm here,” he rasped, his voice a warped and distant echo, as if something deep inside him was speaking through a staticky intercom.

Carlos froze. Before he could react, a sickening crack reverberated through the room, like the sound of dry kindling snapping in a bonfire. The fisherman’s rib cage collapsed, ribs folding inward and splintering. Steam hissed from his chest cavity, carrying the sickly-sweet odor of cooked viscera and the acrid, metallic tang of coagulated blood. The monitor flatlined, but the man’s jaw kept working, lips peeling back in a rictus grin as his tongue, swollen and black, lolled against his teeth.

Across the room, a young nurse retched into her mask, her shoulders shaking. Carlos stared at the paddles, their metal surfaces smeared with flakes of seared skin.

Another alarm blared. Carlos turned, his neoprene Hazmat suit creaking, and caught a glimpse of the hallway. Shadows stretched and pooled under the flickering lights, and for a heartbeat, he swore he saw the plastic-wrapped bodies twitch.

Outside, the Guanabara Bay shimmered under a white-hot sky, its currents sluggish, its surface choked with dead fish and algae. Somewhere, a child wailed.

The fever was just getting started.

In Australia, Melbourne simmered. The Yarra River, swollen with runoff from record-breaking rains, lapped at the bottom of the Queen Street bridge. Islands of bloated rat carcasses drifted in its waters. The summer heatwave had smothered the city in a wet, suffocating embrace—42°C at noon, the asphalt bubbling like molten tar. Mosquitoes bred in the thousands of stagnant pools of water collected in the back alleys and recesses of the city. By dusk, they descended in humming clouds, their bodies iridescent in the hazy light, drunk on the carbon dioxide exhaled by a million panicked lungs.

In Fitzroy Gardens, a child named Amelia chased pigeons through wilting flowerbeds. Her sundress stuck to her back, her cheeks flushed with the same feverish pink as the cherry blossoms rotting on the trees. She slapped at her neck, leaving a smudge of blood and a large swollen welt. Her mother, scrolling through heatwave survival tips, didn’t notice until Amelia collapsed at midnight, her tiny body convulsing on the floor. By dawn, her temperature hit 107°F, her veins clearly visible beneath her skin like the delicate roots of a plant. “Mommy, the mosquitoes are singing,” she whispered before her pupils dilated into dark pools.

Day Seven: The Unraveling

Dr. Elina Vesa woke to the stench of burning hair and rot, her lungs still raw from the virus that had ravaged her body. Her breath hung in frozen plumes, the clinic’s air sharp with a cold that bit to the bone. She’d survived—barely—but the world outside her makeshift clinic hadn’t. The city of Anchorage was a carcass, picked clean by panic.

Riots had gutted downtown. Storefronts smashed, their contents looted or trampled into slush-gray snowbanks. Fires smoldered in trash piles, the smoke blending with the ashy haze of bodies burned in open pyres. The dead outnumbered the living now. Municipal services had collapsed weeks ago; corpses lined the streets, frozen into grotesque sculptures—limbs splayed, faces locked in frozen sneers, skin mottled blue-black under a glaze of ice.

The global economy—a precariously balanced house of cards—had imploded. Shipping containers rusted in ports, their contents frozen into useless bricks of grain and medicine. Stock markets were ghost towns. Currency was worthless. In the alley beneath Elina’s shattered window, a woman traded a diamond necklace for a bottle of antibiotics. Her fingertips necrotic, blackened by frostbite. Someone else screamed for insulin, offering a Rolex, their voice cracking in the freezing air. The barter economy of the desperate.

Elina limped into the chaos, a surgical mask plastered to her face. Her leg, still weak from days of fever, throbbed with every step, the cold seizing her joints like a vise. She needed electrolytes, maybe a stolen IV bag—anything to stave off the hypothermia clawing at her core. The pharmacy three blocks east had been her target, but the streets were a gauntlet. A mob surged past her, faces contorted, battering down the doors of a bullet-riddled supermarket. Glass shards rained as they fought over cans of beans. A middle-aged man in a business suit swung a fire axe at a teenager—crack—and Elina turned away, stomach churning.

She detoured through an alley clotted with bodies. A toddler’s hand peeked from a pile of the dead, clutching a stuffed rabbit. Elina gagged, her mind flashing to her own niece in Helsinki. Don’t think about Helsinki. The last news she’d heard, before the grid went dark, said Scandinavia had sealed its borders, shooting refugees on sight.

The pharmacy was a warzone. Shelves overturned, blood smeared on the bulletproof glass. She scavenged half a bottle of bleach, a single syringe. From behind her came a raspy voice: “Doc.” She whirled around to see a gaunt figure blocking the exit, a pistol trembling in his hand. “You’re… you’re that scientist from TV. The one who said it’d be okay.” His eyes glistened with rage, spittle flecking his lips. “You lied.”

Elina froze. The gun wavered.

A scream erupted outside—the mob had found a delivery truck, its cargo of expired food. The man turned, distracted, and Elina bolted, adrenaline coursing through her veins. She didn’t stop until she reached the clinic, heart slamming against her ribs.

That night, she huddled in the cold dark, listening to sirens that no longer had meaning. The virus had been just the spark. The world burned now, ungoverned and primal. Somewhere, an American’s voice crackled from a battery-powered radio: “—death toll estimates at 300 million and climbing. China’s sealed off Shanghai. NATO’s disbanding. God help us all—” The signal died, swallowed by a blizzard howling at the walls.

Elina stared at her hands, red and cracked, but still steady despite the shakes from hunger and cold. She’d survived the pathogen. But the real gnawing question grew louder every hour, as the temperature plummeted and the night stretched endless:

What came after survival?