SECOND WAVE The second incident started on a screen, not in a freezer. Agent Erin Sato watched it unfold in a clipped video that looked like a thousand other clips. A shaky camera. A breathless voice. A man in a hoodie walking fast through a parking garage, carrying a hard-sided cooler with a biohazard sticker that filled the frame. The caption did the work the video didn’t.

The first alert came in as a nuisance. A single red square on a dashboard nobody checked after midnight. At 02:13, the sensor in Corridor C of the Huxley Biomedical Annex flagged a pressure drift. Not a full failure. Not a screaming alarm. Just a quiet deviation from baseline that lasted thirty seconds and corrected itself. Thirty seconds was enough.

The first packet left the building dressed as a safety report. It rode an encrypted tunnel that had existed for years, approved by lawyers, blessed by auditors, and ignored by everyone who trusted paperwork more than physics. At 02:21, the Huxley Biomedical Annex sent a file to a “secure partner repository.” It looked like a routine compliance upload. It even carried the right keywords. Incident. Containment. Exposure. The words that made people flinch.

The first alarm sounded like a mistake. It came through as a soft chime on the night shift consoles, then a flashing yellow box that no one trusted at 02:17. The lab ran alarms all the time. Doors. Freezers. Humidity. Pressure. A sealed building was a living thing. It complained when the wind shifted. But this one wasn’t wind. Mara Vance stared at the screen until her eyes focused. She wore a gray lab coat over a hoodie, hair pinned back, face washed pale by fluorescent light. She worked in the containment wing because she didn’t like surprises. Containment reduced chaos to numbers. Pressure. Flow. Temperature. Time.

This is a work of fiction. It uses real public controversies as atmosphere, not as proof. So, let us begin… I know how a jail smells when the night goes wrong. Cold bleach. Old sweat. Burnt coffee that sat too long on a hot plate. And that stale, damp odor that clings to concrete no matter how hard you scrub. You learn it in your first month, and it never leaves you. Years later, you can catch it on a stranger’s shirt in a grocery aisle, and your body tightens before your mind even places the memory. I did my time on the inside in South Carolina, at the state level, and then again down in Florida. County work. Not federal, but we still held prisoners for the Feds that had detainers. Still, a cell is a cell when the doors lock, and policy turns into habit, and habit turns into survival.

Why has the nation fallen? Atheism and liberals are to blame. Yep, I said it. Now, let's take a look at the evidence. Western civilization did not collapse because of invasion or famine. It weakened from the inside (atheists hate god, who they say does not exist lol) when transcendent truth was replaced by ideology, and moral authority (them, man) was shifted from God to the state (the self and lording over others, socialists and commies). Critical Race Theory, Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion frameworks, and militant atheistic secularism did not arise in isolation.

Donald J. Trump announced on a cold January night, not from a ballroom, but from a factory floor in Ohio. The cameras caught steel dust in the air and a row of tired faces behind him. He did not talk about himself. He talked about price tags. Gas. Groceries. Rent. He talked about borders and ballots in the same breath. He talked about the quiet people who had learned to stop arguing online and start voting early.

This stream opens the world of Faded Glory—a nation on the edge and the warriors who stand in the gap. Commander Sharp, Commander Carlos, and the War Hogs face corruption, chaos, and the fall of blue cities. Each note delivers a scene, a voice, or a moment from their world as they fight for truth, freedom, and the hope that America can rise again.