In the trenches of World War I, death didn’t always come from bullets.
Soldiers who survived the battlefield often fell to something worse—a silent, unseen force that slipped into their wounds, turning scratches into death sentences.
One of those men was Private James Calloway.
He didn’t die in the heat of battle. He didn’t go out in a blaze of glory. Instead, he lay in a field hospital, watching the light fade as something crawled through his body, unstoppable, inevitable.
A doctor named Alex saw it happen.
He had seen it before. He would see it again.
Ten years later, that same doctor returned from a much-needed vacation to find his lab in ruins—stacks of petri dishes overgrown with things he didn’t care to examine. He almost threw them away.
But then he saw it.
A gap in the chaos. A hole in the devastation.
Something had crept into his failed experiment—not to kill, but to fight back.
He scraped it away. He studied it. He tested it.
And still, he didn’t understand what he had found.
Not yet.
Years later, a policeman named Albert Alexander cut himself on a rose bush. Nothing serious. Nothing that should have mattered. But the thing that took James found Albert, too.
It clawed into his body, hollowed him out, made his doctors whisper words his wife wasn’t ready to hear.
Except this time, Alex was ready.
He pulled a vial from his pocket. A golden liquid. A last chance.
And it worked.
For the first time in history, the thing that had taken so many men finally lost.
Only then did the world learn his full name: Dr. Alexander Fleming.
And only then did the world know the name of what he had found:
Penicillin.
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