Northbound

Travis Garland has spent years doing what's expected of him; the career, the house in the suburbs, the family he loves but too often takes for granted. On an ordinary Tuesday morning, sitting in a fluorescent-lit office nineteen floors above Tampa Bay, he is already carrying a secret that is quietly detonating his life from the inside. Then the sky turns green. When a chemical strike on MacDill Air Force Base releases an unknown agent over Tampa, the city comes apart in hours. The infected don't die, they transform, swelling and splitting and hunting by sound through streets full of the dead. Travis has no weapons, no plan, and no way to reach his wife Amelia or his fifteen-year-old daughter Olivia. What he has is a head start, a coworker who is considerably more capable than he is, and a guilt he can't outrun no matter how fast he moves. What follows is a single day's walk north through a city that no longer exists; through downtown Tampa, past Raymond James Stadium, up through the suburbs toward Sickles High School and the neighborhood in Westchase where his family may or may not still be waiting for him. Northbound is a grounded, character-driven outbreak story about what survival costs and what it can't fix. The monsters are real. So is everything Travis has to face when the running stops.