The impact was not as violent as it could have been. The taxi had been moving through morning traffic—approximately fifteen kilometers per hour—when Kabir's involuntary seizure had jerked the steering wheel hard to the right. The resulting crash into the sweet shop's storefront was more of a violent collision than a catastrophic demolition. Glass shattered. Metal crumpled. The display case of jalebis and laddus exploded across the pavement in a spray of color and syrup.
But it was enough.
The driver—whose name was Rajesh Tiwari, forty-eight years old, two daughters, a mortgage he was perpetually behind on—had been thrown forward by the impact. His chest slammed against the steering wheel. His face impacted the windshield, creating a spiderweb fracture. Blood ran down his forehead, mixing with the sweat that covered his entire body.
For a moment, everything was silence.
Then Rajesh began to move.
8:40 AM
He pulled himself out of the taxi with the jerky, uncoordinated movements of someone whose nervous system was no longer entirely under conscious control. His left arm hung at an odd angle—dislocated or broken, he couldn't quite tell. Pain was there, somewhere in the background of his awareness, but it was distant, mediated by something else that was running through his bloodstream like electricity.
The scratch on his forearm—the one from Kabir's nails approximately one hour and fifty-two minutes ago—had stopped being a simple wound. The virus that Kabir had transmitted through that brief contact had been replicating steadily throughout Rajesh's body for the entire duration of the drive. But unlike Kabir's initial infection, which had involved a massive viral load and deliberate injection into his veins, Rajesh's infection was taking a slightly different progression path. It was slower in some respects, faster in others.
Right now, it was accelerating.
Rajesh stumbled out of the taxi and into the street, making sounds that were not quite human. Not screams. Not words. Something between a growl and a vocalization that seemed to come from deeper in his chest than normal speech. His eyes had taken on a peculiar quality—the pupils dilated to an extreme degree, the whites of his eyes beginning to show the faintest tracery of red capillaries.
A woman buying sweets from the vendor across the street saw him and took a step back.
"Arre, bhaiya," she said, her voice carrying concern mixed with irritation. "Are you alright? Did you hit your head?"
Rajesh looked at her, but his gaze seemed to pass through her rather than focus on her. He was still growling—a low, continuous sound that made the vendor's dog, tied to a post nearby, begin to bark in response.
"Drunk," someone muttered. "Probably drunk. Crashed his car and now he's acting like an animal to avoid paying for the damage."
This assumption—this perfectly reasonable, perfectly wrong assumption—was already beginning to shape the narrative of what was happening. The people on the street, the vendor, the woman buying sweets—they were all constructing a story that made sense within the framework of their experience. Drunk drivers. Insurance fraud. The daily chaos of Delhi traffic. Nothing in their experience had prepared them for what was actually unfolding.
8:41 AM
Rajesh's body continued its transformation, moment by moment. The virus, moving faster through his system now, was beginning to affect his motor control in new ways. His muscles were becoming hypersensitive to neural input. His reflexes were accelerating. The parts of his brain that normally filtered and modulated aggressive impulses were beginning to show signs of malfunction.
He took a step forward, unsteady, still making those low growling sounds.
That was when the dog approached.
It was a stray—the kind of semi-feral dog that haunted Delhi's markets, existing in the spaces between human civilization. Brown and white, approximately thirty kilograms, with the kind of street-smart wariness that comes from years of surviving on scraps and avoiding vehicles. It had noticed Rajesh immediately—the unusual sounds, the uncoordinated movements, the smell of blood and sweat and something else, something chemical that the dog's sensitive olfactory system recognized as deeply wrong.
The dog approached carefully, sniffing the air, trying to determine whether this was a threat or an opportunity.
Rajesh's head turned toward the dog with jerky, mechanical precision.
8:42 AM
In the normal world, a man would have perhaps shouted at the dog or ignored it. Rajesh's current state was not normal. His body moved with a speed and certainty that belied the neurological chaos that was occurring inside his skull.He lunged forward—not with the measured movements of a healthy human but with the desperate, instinctive aggression of something that had lost the ability to distinguish between threat and prey.
His hands grabbed the dog's neck.
The dog yelped, a sound of shock and pain and sudden fear. It struggled, trying to twist away, but Rajesh's grip was impossibly strong. The virus flooding through his system had done something to his muscles—something that had made them respond to neural signals with an intensity that normal human biology could not achieve.
Rajesh's mouth opened, and his teeth—teeth that had begun to sharpen at the edges as part of the viral restructuring, teeth that were no longer quite human—sank into the dog's shoulder.
The bite was deep and vicious. Blood poured from the wound, spilling across Rajesh's chin, mixing with his own blood, creating a tableau of violence that was shocking in its brutality and its speed.
The dog screamed.
It was a sound unlike any sound a dog would normally make—a shriek of pain and terror that cut through the morning air of Chandni Chowk like a siren. The sound caused immediate reactions all around: vendors looking up from their carts, customers freezing mid-transaction, a rickshaw driver slamming on his brakes.
What they saw was a man biting a dog.
The narrative was already being written before Rajesh even released the animal. That man bit the dog. He's drunk or insane. The dog snapped at him, and he bit it back. That's why it's screaming.
8:43 AM
Rajesh released the dog, which immediately bolted into the street, bleeding heavily from the bite wound. The dog's behavior, however, was no longer normal. The virus, moving at an accelerated rate through the dog's much smaller and simpler nervous system, was already beginning to manifest in ways that would have taken hours in a human.
The dog's aggression was no longer defensive. It was something else—a manic, uncontrolled drive to bite, to attack, to spread the infection to anything that moved.
The dog charged at the first person it saw—a young man in his twenties who had been standing near the sweet shop, phone in hand, already filming the chaos.
The attack was sudden and vicious. The dog's jaws closed around the young man's calf, tearing through cloth and skin. The young man screamed, a sound of genuine terror and pain. He fell, and the dog continued to attack, biting at his arm, his shoulder, his face.
"Arre! The dog's gone mad!" someone shouted. "It bit that man, and now it's attacking!"
The narrative was adjusting, adapting, still wrong but closer to something that made sense: The dog has rabies. It's infected. It went mad because the drunk man bit it.
No one understood that the dog had not gone mad. The dog had been transformed, reconfigured at the neurological level, in the span of approximately sixty seconds.
8:44 AM
Panic was beginning to spread through Chandni Chowk now. People were running, screaming, trying to get away from the infected dog. A vendor threw a broom at it. A shopkeeper emerged from his store with a stick, trying to defend his territory. The dog, in its manic state, simply continued to attack anything within reach.
The dog bit a woman's leg. She fell, screaming. It bit a child who was running away from the chaos. The child's mother grabbed him, scooping him up, trying to carry him to safety.
In the span of two minutes, the infected dog had made contact with at least six people. Not all of them had sustained deep bites—some had been scratches, glancing contact—but contact was all that was necessary. The virus, now in six new human hosts, would begin its replication cycle once again.
What made this different from Kabir was the speed of recognition. People knew something was wrong with the dog. They were already calling it mad, already constructing a narrative of animal disease rather than human infection. This narrative would persist for hours, possibly days, even as the infected people began to show their own symptoms.
8:45 AM
Rajesh Tiwari, meanwhile, was still standing near the crashed taxi, making low growling sounds. A small crowd had gathered—not close, but within viewing distance—keeping their distance but unable to look away. People were filming now, phones raised, capturing the moment for social media.
"That man should be arrested," someone said. "He crashed into the shop. He attacked a dog. He's clearly dangerous."
Another person was already dialing the police. "Yes, yes, there's been an accident on Chandni Chowk. A man crashed his car into a sweet shop. He's acting very strangely. Yes, yes, please send someone quickly."
The police would arrive soon. This was Chandni Chowk, the heart of old Delhi, surrounded by shops and vendors and pedestrians. Police could be here in five to ten minutes.
Rajesh's condition was continuing to deteriorate. His skin had begun to take on a peculiar pallor, as if the blood beneath the surface was beginning to circulate irregularly. His muscles twitched in irregular patterns. His eyes seemed unable to focus on anything specific, instead scanning the crowd with a predatory quality that was deeply unsettling.
But he was still recognizably human. Still capable of speech, even if that speech was mostly growls and incomprehensible vocalizations. Still moving in a way that suggested conscious control, even if that consciousness was fragmenting.
8:47 AM
The dog control van arrived first.
It was a small white van, marked with the Delhi Municipal Corporation logo, driven by a man named Vikram who had been capturing stray dogs for approximately fifteen years. Vikram knew the signs of a dangerous animal: the manic behavior, the unprovoked attacks, the total disregard for human presence.
He was relatively certain the dog had rabies.
What he did not know was that he was wrong. Rabies was one disease. This was something else entirely—something new, something that had emerged from a combination of military bioweapon research and biological accident and the chaotic improvisation of viral evolution.
Vikram took the dog control net—a long pole with a loop at the end—and approached the animal carefully. The dog, still in its manic state, lunged at him immediately. But Vikram was experienced. He dodged, circled, and finally managed to slip the loop around the dog's neck.
The dog bit the pole, bit Vikram's gloved hand, tried to escape. But Vikram was stronger, or at least more skilled at this particular task. Within thirty seconds, the dog was secured, placed into a containment cage in the back of the van.
"It's definitely got something wrong with it," Vikram said to a nearby police constable who had just arrived. "I'll take it to the clinic. They'll check it out."
What Vikram did not know was that the dog was contagious. That the saliva covering the bite marks on the pole and on his gloved hands was teeming with virus. That by handling the animal, he had likely infected himself.
8:50 AM
The police van arrived with two constables and a junior inspector. They took in the scene: the crashed taxi, the destroyed sweet shop, the man making growling sounds, the dispersing crowd of onlookers.
The senior constable approached Rajesh cautiously.
"You," he said in Hindi. "What happened here? Why did you crash your car?"
Rajesh looked at the constable, and for a moment, there seemed to be a flicker of recognition, a moment where consciousness attempted to reassert itself over the neurological chaos that was consuming his nervous system.
"I... I didn't..." Rajesh began, his voice hoarse and strange. "I couldn't... control..."
He didn't finish the sentence. Instead, his body went rigid, and a violent tremor passed through him. His head snapped backward, his mouth opened wider than mouths should open, and he made a sound that was not a growl but something deeper—a sound that seemed to come from the center of his being, from the place where his consciousness was being slowly overwritten by the virus's imperatives.
The constable took a step back, his hand instinctively moving toward his baton.
"He's clearly intoxicated or on drugs," the junior inspector said, appearing from the other side of the van. "We'll take him into custody. We can sort this out at the station."
8:52 AM
They approached Rajesh cautiously, handcuffs ready. Rajesh did not resist initially—some remnant of his human conditioning, some buried understanding that resistance to police was futile, kept him compliant as they secured his wrists.
"Easy, easy," one constable said, not unkindly. "Just come with us. We'll get this sorted out."
They were placing him into the back of the police van when Rajesh's body made another shift. The virus had reached some kind of critical threshold in his neurological system. The barriers between conscious and unconscious mind, between restraint and aggression, between self and other—these barriers were collapsing.
Rajesh lunged.
He moved with inhuman speed, his head tilting back and then forward with mechanical precision. His teeth—sharper now, more pronounced, no longer resembling human dentition—closed around the wrist of the constable who was securing him.
The constable screamed, a sound of shock and pain. The other constable tried to pull Rajesh away, but Rajesh's grip was impossible to break. Blood poured from the constable's wrist, dripping onto the pavement of Chandni Chowk.
The junior inspector, seeing the situation escalate, made a decision born of protocol and fear. He drew his baton and began to strike at Rajesh's head and back, trying to force him to release the constable.
8:53 AM
In the chaos, a second figure emerged from the crashed taxi.
Kabir.
He moved with the jerky, uncoordinated movements of someone whose body was in the final stages of viral transformation. His skin had taken on a grayish quality. His eyes were almost entirely black, the pupils dilated so far that almost no iris was visible. His mouth was open, constantly, as if his jaw had become disconnected from his normal muscular control.
He had been in the back seat of the taxi for approximately nine hours. The virus had been replicating, mutating, restructuring his nervous system the entire time. Unlike Rajesh, who was only a few hours into his infection, Kabir was approaching the threshold of something completely new—something that was no longer human in any meaningful sense but was not quite the mindless shambling corpse of popular culture either.
Kabir looked at the police officers and the gathered crowd, and he began to growl—a low, continuous sound that seemed to vibrate through his entire skeletal structure.
The inspector, seeing a second infected individual emerge from the taxi, made the decision that would prove catastrophic. He approached Kabir cautiously, trying to determine if this was another victim or another perpetrator.
"Sir, are you alright? Did this man hurt you?"
For a moment, Kabir seemed to focus on the inspector's voice. There was a flicker of something in his eyes—recognition, perhaps, or memory of a time when he had understood language and responded to social cues.
Then the virus reasserted control.
8:54 AM
Kabir's body moved forward, and his teeth closed around the inspector's neck.
It was not a careful bite. It was not strategic or measured. It was the pure, uncontrolled aggression of a nervous system that had been so thoroughly rewritten that nothing of the original Kabir remained except the biological architecture of the attack itself.
Blood sprayed across the pavement.
The inspector fell, his hand instinctively moving to his neck, trying to apply pressure to a wound that was far too deep to be controlled by simple first aid. His eyes went wide with shock and the sudden understanding that something catastrophically wrong had just occurred.
The constables, still struggling with Rajesh, who was continuing to bite and claw at them, now found themselves confronted with a second threat. One of them drew his service revolver.
"Shoot! Shoot the infected!" he shouted, though what he meant by "infected" was unclear—they still thought this was drug-induced violence, perhaps coupled with an animal disease that had spread from the dog.
8:55 AM
Chaos erupted in Chandni Chowk.
Gunshots rang out. A bullet caught Rajesh in the shoulder, but he barely seemed to notice. The pain, if he felt it at all, did not register as a deterrent. Another bullet caught him in the leg, and he fell, but he continued to thrash and attack even from the ground.
A bullet intended for Rajesh struck a nearby vendor instead. He fell, bleeding, adding to the confusion and panic that was spreading through the market like wildfire.
Kabir, hearing the gunshots, seemed to recognize the sound as a threat. He bolted, moving with inhuman speed down one of the narrow lanes of Chandni Chowk, disappearing into the maze of shops and alleys that made up the old market.
The police constables, faced with an active shooter situation (themselves), ceased fire. The inspector, bleeding heavily from his neck, was being supported by a constable who had finally managed to handcuff Rajesh despite his continued thrashing.
"Call ambulance," someone was shouting. "Call ambulance! The inspector is dying!"
8:58 AM
Rajesh was secured in the back of the police van, bleeding from multiple gunshot wounds, still growling, still trying to bite anyone who came within range. The inspector was being supported by a constable, blood soaking through his uniform. The constable who had been bitten on the wrist was holding his arm, looking at the deep puncture wounds with growing horror.
All three of them—the constables, the inspector, the dog control worker Vikram—had been infected. The virus was already beginning its work inside their bodies, replicating, adapting, preparing for the next phase of transformation.
But no one understood this yet. What they understood was that there had been a violent incident. A man had crashed his car, attacked a dog, attacked police officers. He needed to be arrested and charged. The infected dog needed to be quarantined and tested. The wounded needed medical attention.
It was the right response to the wrong situation.
9:02 AM
The radio in the police van crackled to life.
A dispatcher's voice, calm and professional: "All units, we have a situation developing at Mumbai airport. Military transport aircraft C-17 has just landed with multiple critical injuries aboard. Three military personnel showing signs of violent behavior and severe trauma. Civilian medics are being dispatched to the scene. All units in Mumbai sector, maintain alert status."
The constable driving the police van heard this broadcast and thought nothing of it. A military accident. Unrelated to anything happening in Delhi. Military incidents happened—training accidents, mechanical failures, the kind of things that occurred in any large organization.
He did not know that the three military personnel who had just landed in Mumbai were the soldiers who had been on the aircraft with Kabir. That they had been bitten or scratched by Kabir hours ago. That they were already beginning the transformation into something new.
9:05 AM
The police van carrying Rajesh arrived at the nearest police station. He was removed from the vehicle, still restrained, still growling, his body drenched in blood from both the gunshot wounds and the various injuries he had sustained during his arrest.
The constables who had been bitten were sent to the hospital. The junior inspector, bleeding from his neck wound, was rushed to emergency services.
The infected dog was taken to the municipal animal clinic, where the clinic workers had no way of knowing that they were handling something entirely new to medical science. They were looking for rabies. They were looking for conventional animal disease.
They did not find it, because it was not there.
What was there was far worse.
9:08 AM
The radio crackled again, this time in the police station's communication center. A different dispatch, this one from a hospital:
"Dispatch, we have an incident at Delhi General. One of the bitten constables from the Chandni Chowk incident is showing acute neurological symptoms. High fever, violent behavior, teeth... irregular. We're not sure what we're looking at. Request immediate biological hazard assessment and quarantine protocols."
The police station's duty officer, hearing this broadcast, felt a cold chill run through him. Multiple incidents. Multiple locations. An animal bite that had spread to humans. And now the humans were showing the same symptoms.
He was beginning to understand that something was wrong. Not just wrong in the sense of a crime or an accident, but wrong in a deeper, systemic sense.
He reached for his phone to call the health ministry.
He did not yet know that he was one of the last people in Delhi to understand what was beginning to spread.