All Chapters of The Silent Cure: The cure for humanity lies in the one man i: Chapter 191
- Chapter 200
301 chapters
Chapter 191. The Silent Chains
The universe was a devastating, brutal pendulum swing. One moment, the crushing pressure of rock and the crash of the fall. Then, a tearing pull back, away from the pouring debris and into a tenuous bubble of air, a pocket of survival trapped by the same fall that should have been fatal to them. Ken was knocked to the ground, the shock jarring through his broken body with fresh, burning agony.He lay back on the wet, chilled stone, panting, each breath a harsh, tortured effort. Dust plugged his nose and mouth. He felt the heat of a fire nearby, the acrid smell of ozone from wiring that had burned out, mixed with the metallic flavor of his own blood. He was in a half-overturned room, part of the derelict freight line where he had been partially protected by a fallen steel support beam. A makeshift jail.Rough hands heaved him up onto his knees. His wrists were bound behind his back with a vicious polymer zip-tie that bit into his skin. His eyes blurred, swimming around the faces of the
Chapter 192. Fire and Flood
The world was a bell now, and every explosion was a hammer smash upon it. The tunnels, already battered by the first attack, were now being sliced to bits methodically. Intentional charges, left behind by the withdrawing state forces to conceal their withdrawal and clear out the final rebel bolt-holes, burst with periodic, splintering booms. Each one was a mini-earthquake, releasing centuries of grime and stone, and along with it, the last rags of hope.Elara made her way through the chaos with a stillness within her that was more terrifying than fear. She had prodded Sophia into a great crevice in the stone, a narrow crack, hissing, "Do not move. Do not make a sound. Whatever you hear." The girl's shining, light-mirroring eyes had only stared back, a silent understanding passing between them. Tears had come and gone. Now the time for blood had come.The air was a haze of broken brick and smoke. The state troopers, deployed but bewildered by the collapsing world, moved in tight, cauti
Chapter 193. Escape of the Phantom
The world was a symphony of pain, one composed by the heavy, thunderous throes of the tunnels crashing down. With each new explosion was a clash of cymbals that rattled Ken's broken ribs, each scream from the troopers a staccato beat on his throbbing head. He was held prisoner in the midst of the cacophony, kneeling in the stale water now churning at his knees, his wrists ablaze of grazed skin behind him.The troopers had relaxed. With the tunnel system flooding and charges going off all around them, their concern had shifted away from their prized captive to survival themselves. They crouched at the entrance to the half-fallen room, yelling back at command over a sparking comms circuit regarding extraction points. The Ghost of the Tunnels was battered, bound, and drowning. What damage could he do?Ken had his head hung low, the very picture of broken submission, but his eyes, behind their lank, matted blood, were not. They wandered over the broken floor, the stinking water, searching
Chapter 194. Reunion in Ruins
The water was an encroaching, ravenous power, its cold kiss lapping over the edge of the narrow ledge, a reminder that their refuge was brief. Elara moved through the submerged tunnel with a hunter's silence, one hand flat against the slimy wall, the other grasping a worn glow-stick. The flood had reshaped the underworld, making known routes into perilous, neck-deep canals. She sought an exit, a route to the drier, older tunnels that might offer shelter. In its stead, she found a ghost.A grayish shape, half out of, half in water, on a shelf so thin it was only a crease in the stone. For one terrifying instant, she thought it was a corpse, one of the several the flood had claimed. Then she saw the shallow, slow rise and fall of his chest."Ken."His name was a prayer, a curse, a breath. She splashed through the water, her body awkward, her heart a bird in wild flight in her chest. He was lying on his side, his head away from her, his clothes torn and soaked. The water around him was p
Chapter 194. Reunion in Ruins
The quietness of the flooded tunnel was a thing to be felt, broken only by the lap of black water against rock and the jagged edge of Elara's breathing. She moved with the ease of a hunter, her body a whip-thin coil of tension, every sense drawn to its sharp edge. The glow-stick she carried cast a sickly green pallor, illuminating the swirling water with the curve of liquid absinthe. She sought an escape route, a path out of this water tomb. Her mind was a map of introspection and purpose: find higher ground, seek a way of protecting the girl, prevent the fire in her pocket from being extinguished.She did not search for another ember, nearly drowned.A pale figure, formless as a drowned corpse, half on, half off a thin limestone ledge. Her breath came short. Another victim of the state's tide of purification, another ghost to haunt her. And then she noticed it—the subtle, virtually undetectable rise and fall of his chest. A quiver, a flicker of life tenaciously clinging to a broken v
Chapter 195. The Last Decision
The church crypt was a sanctuary of bone and dust. The atmosphere was chill and still, heavy with the gravity of centuries of quiet, a sickening contrast to the bellowing liquid chaos they had escaped. It was a location of conclusions. And now, it has to be the location of a start.Ken slumped on a stone coffin, his physique a topography of agony. Every breath was a shallow, flame-tipped pin in his ribs. The adrenaline which had carried him out of the flood had been burned away, leaving him with only the stark, shuddering reality of his injuries. Elara worked beside him in the light of one precisely set lamp, her face set in a mask of concentration as she scrubbed and stitched the worst of his injuries with a field medkit. There were no anesthetics left. He clenched his teeth against the sting of the needle and the tug of the thread, his jaw working so hard that it ached.Sophia sat beside him, watching, her knees to her chest. She held the padded case, still sealed, across her lap. I
Chapter 196. The Canal of Smoke
The world outside was dead, and Ken a maggot tunneling through its veins. He moved through Amsterdam's night-darkened streets, a ghost among ghosts. The air, once clean with the scent of the sea, was a stinking broth of smoke, decay, and the nauseating sweetness of charred flesh. Pyres were set alight in the big squares, their orange light casting hellish shadows on the gabled fronts, the final warmth gone from the world.He lurked in the shadows, a hunched, limping figure in a stolen, pungent fisherman's coat. Every step was a bargain with agony. Elara's sutures pulled tight in his side, a constant searing reminder of his frailty. His breath caught, not in the smell, but in the effort of staying on his feet. He was a clockwork man, wound too tight, his gears shrieking at each other.The streets were filled with the dead. They weren't piled up; they were where they had fallen, crumpled in doorways, hunched over empty market stalls, their bodies secreted in the intense shadow. The stat
Chapter 197. The First Transmission
The Noordzeekanaal's fog was a grey mantle, consuming sound and sight. It was a threshold location, this destroyed boathouse on the city's distant west side, where Amsterdam's rational terror oozed into the empty, flooded polders. The air was chillier here, tasting of salt, rot, and thin, anguished hope.Within, the universe was reduced to the pool of light from the single battery-operated lamp. It illuminated a scene that was both sacred and secular. Dr. Henrik Visser, a man whose countenance was a map of the plague's toll—pale complexion, sunken eyes bordered with the aura of exhaustion and loss—stood with hands that would not stop their trembling. He was a decent internist from one of Haarlem's hospitals, now a fugitive in his own country, running an underground clinic out of a borrowed cellar. The word had reached him in a series of whispers, a whisper of a ghost in the canals with a miracle.The ghost was there.Ken Ardent stood opposite him, looking less like a man and more like
Chapter 198. The River of Lies
The voice of the state was a hammer and every morning it pounded home the same nails into the collective unconscious. It roared from elderly loudspeakers mounted on lampposts, crackled across the few approved radio stations, rolled in large, unbeatable lettering on public display screens.".the so-called 'resistance' has been crushed. Its leader, the bio-terrorist Ken Ardent, is officially dead in the demolition of the network.".The voice was firm, assured, an ointment of calm in troubled times. It told of a triumph, a danger dissipated. The state's version was that the Crimson Sorrow was a fire that they were striving to keep under control, and the rebels had been adding gasoline to it. Now, the firebugs were out of the question.Due to the heroic efforts of Inspector De Vries and the Health Security Force, the quarantine zone has been stable. Citizens are reminded once more that compliance with health orders is the fastest route to total recovery. Believe in the system. The crisis
Chapter 199. A World Listening
The world had shrunk to the size of a wound. For the inhabitants of Camp Pieter, a filthy, putrid camp on the waterlogged Dutch-Belgian frontier, existence was measured by the widening death-rings in sight, the endless, damp cold, and the daily count of the deceased, carried on makeshift biers to the pyres that never dwindled. The Crimson Sorrow did not select; it fed in the mud and misery, the ultimate, macabre joke on those who had lost all already.Anya, whose youth had been stolen from her by a decade of fleeing, crouched in the mire beside her son, Lukas. He was eight, or maybe nine. Years meant nothing. His breathing was a shallow rasp, each breath a battle he was losing. The telltale red flowers had bloomed on his chest and spread to his throat. She wrapped his hand, her own hard and cracked, in hers and sang a lullaby her mother had sung, the words a hollow comfort to the hideous reality.Hope was not something people had here. It was a gamble, a fool's gamble, a precursor to