THE NIGHT OF DEPARTURE

A Zombie Apocalypse Begins in India In a city of millions, some people are chosen not because of who they are, but because of who they aren't. Kabir Ansari is a man no one would miss. A forgotten shopkeeper in the lanes of Chandni Chowk, living in the margins of Delhi, invisible to the world. He has no family, no connections, no digital footprint. He exists in the silence between moments, in the spaces where the city forgets to look. Which is exactly why they selected him. When a highly classified military experiment goes catastrophically wrong, Kabir becomes something unprecedented—a biological weapon, a living incubator for a virus that rewrites human neurology from the inside out. He is not meant to survive. He is not meant to matter. But survival, in the face of deliberate dehumanization, becomes an act of rebellion. What unfolds is not a story about heroes fighting the undead. It is a story about the systems that create disasters, the choices that amplify them, and the terrifying speed with which civilization can unravel when those in power prioritize containment over compassion. The outbreak doesn't begin with a mysterious disease or a natural phenomenon. It begins with a man who was never supposed to matter, carrying a pathogen that will force India to confront the real horror: not what monsters do, but what humans create when they believe some lives are disposable. As infection spreads from Chandni Chowk outward, as the virus tears through India's dense population centers, as the military grapples with a containment that is already failing—**the real question emerges: Who is actually infected? The ones transforming in the streets? Or the systems that engineered their destruction? A visceral, unflinching chronicle of how epidemics truly begin. Not with a bang, but with a single man, a single scratch, and the catastrophic failure of those who believed they could control the uncontrollable. This is how the world ends—not in India's cities, but in the margins. Not with the powerful making hard decisions, but with the powerless paying the price. A novel about the virus we created, and the world we deserve.