by Wrath_of_Sparta
The summer air in Liberty Rises is thick, heavy, and completely still. For seventeen-year-old Aurelian Krueger, an ordinary July heatwave brings nothing but relentless insomnia. But at 3:14 AM, looking out his kitchen window, the mundane reality of his small town shatters. Walking down the sidewalk with a strange, rhythmic, unbothered pace is Andy Laswell—a five-year-old boy who went missing in the freezing wilderness eight months ago. When a local woman spots the child and follows him into the dark tree line, she is found the next morning in an alleyway, brutally torn to pieces. As the community panics over the rumor of a loose serial killer, the local shopkeeper confesses a terrifying secret to Aurelian: she witnessed the attack, and it wasn't a man who fractured human bone. It was the boy. Trapped in a web of mounting paranoia, Aurelian and his sharp, red-haired classmate Elira Thompson begin to map out the anomalies. Their search leads them to a hidden concrete bunker beneath an abandoned property, unearthing a stolen manila folder that changes everything: Pathogen Classification: Raccoon Virus. The missing winter, the mechanical sleepwalking, and the horrific physical mutations aren't a ghost story—they are the controlled parameters of a rogue bio-weapons outbreak operating completely under the radar of the United States.
