Description

When the sky burns red, the air itself becomes the enemy.

In the remote mountain town of Ironvale, Dr. Mara Keene watches the world collapse in real time.
A strange solar flare fractures the sky into colors no human should see, and within hours, hospitals fill with patients suffocating from within—their veins turning silver, their blood to wire. Humanity’s greatest innovation—nanite-based medical technology—has turned against its makers. The cure has become the infection.

When the cities fall silent, Mara flees to Ironvale, where isolation might be salvation. But the fallout follows: metallic rain, ash that hums, and a low-frequency pulse that seems to come from the earth itself. The people of Ironvale cling to routine, religion, and rumor as their world rusts around them. As faith hardens into fear and survival becomes ritual, Mara races to understand the phenomenon consuming the atmosphere—and the human mind.

Every drop of rain carries memory. Every breath carries code.
And something beneath the soil has begun to listen back.

As the nanite plague evolves into something self-directed, the survivors face impossible choices: go dark and live without power, or risk awakening what sleeps in the ruins of their machines. The townsfolk fracture into factions—the believers, who see divine punishment in the storm, and the rational few who know that science has simply birthed a god without mercy.

When the first drone falls from the sky carrying a message that shouldn’t exist, Mara discovers the pulse is more than signal—it’s a language. One designed to overwrite humanity’s most basic function: to breathe.

From the author of The Vanguard Incident comes a chilling new standalone in the Voodoo One universe—a fusion of hard-science realism, apocalyptic dread, and survival horror.
The Iron Lung transforms medical innovation into existential terror, blending the moral ambiguity of Michael Crichton, the procedural tension of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, and the haunting atmosphere of Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation.

As the Iron Rain falls and humanity drowns in its own invention, Mara Keene must decide whether to destroy the last remnant of progress—or use it to rewrite life itself.

Because in this new world, breath is both weapon and prayer.
And the air remembers everything.