The Laughing Plague - A "Crossed" TL

Morning, May 22, 2020.
Western Europe.

The end of Operation Jupiter should not mark the end of enemy "activities" on French, German or Belgian soil.
While the greatest threat in terms of numbers had been wiped off the map, there were still groups of infected wandering around, mostly with no purpose in mind (other than to torture or butcher any living thing). Worse still, the prospect that Crossed Alpha (or even the existence of several of these individuals) might have survived as a fallback from the initial wave that had hit Rouen or Reims, had everything to worry NATO and the French general staff.

The little information that could be gleaned from commandos or units infiltrating infected territory was critical to the success of Operation Jupiter, and it was felt that keeping small units (often from the French 13éme Régiment de Dragons Parachutistes, German and Belgian parachute groups, and some Dutch marine commando units) infiltrating the "red" zone after the bombardment of the area, would at least make it possible to understand and anticipate the enemy's progress (for obvious security reasons, none of the men or women infiltrating knew of the existence of Operation Jupiter), this amounted to a certain scale to sacrifice excellent soldiers for tactical gain that may ultimately prove useless.

However, it was during a fortuitous engagement (again, chance played the humanity card) between one of these units and a group of infected who would finally decide on the death of the unique Crossed Alpha , recorded in Europe, during the events of 2020.


Thomas L (well, that was the only name his sick brain could remember, between the cries of pain and the pleasure that consumed him each time he committed a barbaric act) had stifled what we might have called a scream of rage as the heavy spike-shaped cloud rose from the area, the instantaneous flash followed by a flying blast had blinded him and propelled him out of the cart (which he was dragging by his slaves), rolling him in a mixture of earth, mud and broken glass.

It would have been hard to determine what really enraged him (it was certainly not the physical pain): the atomic destruction of several million toys? or the prospect that he was, in the end, just a human being who had made the wrong strategic choice?
"FUUUCKK, FUCCKKINNNGGGG MAGGOTS, BITCHES" were the only words Europe's smartest "Crossed" uttered before groping blindly for one of his "disciples", most of whom were lying on the ground, either dead, either killing each other or sneering self-harm: his influence on his followers had begun to fade the moment he fell, the prospect of turning Europe into a gigantic blood-red carnival dimmed by minutes in minutes as Thomas L, King of the Crossed, trampled on his ancient followers, seeking the light his scorched eyes would never see again....never again.

Morning of May 22, 2020

The success of Operation Jupiter had in the end taken many people by surprise in Europe, where fears of the worst of the worst were already beginning:
The French general staff had counted on two very simple options: Operation Jupiter or, in the event of failure, Operation Apocalypse, this roughly provided that the oceanic strike force, therefore strategic, would strike the entire french territory, with the exception of Corsica, where it would be hoped that a remnant of government could settle away from the infected.
Fortunately, Operation Apocalypse remained a simple disaster plan, at the cost of several million lives.
However, there was another threat further north, that of the United Kingdom: while the infected were annihilating Belgium and northern France, the British forces had fought with the energy of desperation against the increasingly numerous and motivated infected, with very little help from other European countries: not only the bombardment of Brize Norton by French planes went quite badly (although justified) but the French, German and Dutch Navy had received very clear orders on the fate of the refugees trying to leave Great Britain: a compromise on the ground was reached however, and the European sailors most often disobeyed, allowing the securing of the Channel Islands and the creation of a security pocket on the island of Wright, constantly supplied.

But there was a very serious risk that Great Britain would succumb entirely to the Crosseds and that Operation Jupiter would have served no purpose: thus were conceived two variants of a strategic plan, so devastating for relations between Europe and the United Kingdom that it was hidden from the public for decades: Operation Deluge.
The first variant of the plan was for an official call from the British government asking NATO and France for an atomic bombing of British territory (this was the most optimistic plan), the other variant dealt with outright disappearance of any government across the Channel.
Operation Deluge overlapped with a whole series of corollaries involving the hunting and destruction of Royal Navy ballistic missile submarines (it was feared that without orders or confirmation from the British Admiralty, these fire their missiles in accordance with the protocol in the event of the destruction of the United Kingdom), the bombardment of areas that are in principle safe (but which could serve as bait for the infected) such as Northern Ireland.

Fortunately for all, Operation Deluge would not have to be applied.

Further east, others were also making big plans: Poland, Romania, Slovakia and the Czech Republic, all had reason to fear the future:
If the Czech Republic had mobilized specialized troops, which will shine in the defense of the Netherlands, it was also the country most optimistic about the chances of developing a vaccine, or at least an effective remedy, for the disease: at the Têchonin biological defense center, they were already working on a solution (it should be noted, however, that two laboratory workers will be accidentally infected, and will have to be incinerated urgently, significantly slowing down the efforts).

The optimism of the Czechs were not shared by Poland and Romania, who saw another threat looming in the East: the Polish nationalist government had indeed promised planes for the defense of the West but they were never deployed against the crossed but against the Russians.
Warsaw had enormous reasons to be concerned: the Russian invasion of the Baltic States and the Ukraine was imminent, Hungary had walled itself in behind kilometers of barbed wire and minefields, refusing any prolonged contact with the Outside, the Czechs and the Slovaks came to the aid of the Germans, the French and the Dutch, Warsaw had only been able to make Bucharest aware of the Russian threat to the east.

The two staffs were already familiar, and the confirmed presence of American officers isolated in Europe, within their structures, probably helped in the development of Operation Storm (a tribute to the 1944 insurgencies against the Nazis ): as soon as Russia went on the offensive in the Baltic and Ukraine, Warsaw and Bucharest would respond as soon:

The Romanian soldiers would enter Moldavia and disarm the hundred Russian soldiers in Transnistria (with or without the agreement of the Moldavian authorities) in order to make their connection with the Ukrainians (a first plan even planned to push the Romanians to Odessa) as for the Poles, they would take care of the Russian enclave of Kaliningrad, a big piece.

Beginning of hostilities for May 24.

May 22nd 2020
Noon (Central European Time)

One of the biggest problems in implementing Operation Jupiter was containing the Crossed advance right up to the urban traps, and it has to be said that the French enjoyed a stroke of luck that could very well backfire.
While the Crossed leadership seemed to have been eliminated for the time being (the special forces scattered behind the front line would soon be announcing good news), a sizeable group of infected had been separated from the main group heading for Reims, and were wandering between Charleville-Mézières and Sedan.

While the French general staff remained highly optimistic (after all, such an eventuality had been foreseen), the French government hardly shared this sudden excess of confidence: the danger being that the infected would cross the Belgian border, isolate themselves in the Ardennes forest massif and carry out raiding campaigns on the Belgian security pocket stretching from Givet to Saint Vith, bleeding once and for all the thousand men remaining in the Belgian army.
The simplest decision would have been to bomb or even raze Sedan to the ground, but a more dangerous and audacious alternative had been suggested: to understand this alternative, we'd have to go back in time just a little and look eastwards.


Before the crisis, a handful of Western countries had biosecurity facilities for research into the pathogen responsible for Crossed: with the mad rush of infected people to the east coast of the USA, the destruction of much of England made it impossible or very difficult to carry out research on an international scale.

The second problem was that the vast majority of P4 laboratories in Europe had been built in or near major urban centers, which, given the dangerous nature of Crossed, made any research on "live" samples impossible.

In the end, Switzerland and Hungary, which had such facilities, relatively far from any urban center, and under permanent military guard, had refused or dragged their feet in carrying out research on living samples, most often under the pressure from their public opinion.
This left only two choices, the biological defense center of Vert le Petit in Essonne (France) and that of Techonin (Czech Republic).
A serious incident of contamination of two laboratory workers at Techonin (the two people were exhausted and had committed a series of serious mistakes during handling) had not only rendered a work room unusable (it would take weeks of work to rebuild the room , burned with flamethrowers) but spoiled the only sample of the fresh pathogen available to the Europeans.

The third and final problem was the very nature of the pathogen, whose infectious value degraded rather quickly, outside of its host: if the crossed had massively used splashes of bodily fluids to infect healthy people, it had done so in a way very fast.
In fact, the pathogen was degrading very quickly, too quickly in the presence of the external environment.
While most scientists agreed on what it does to the nervous system and brain of a human being, none of them was yet able to understand how the pathogen forced the human body so quickly to to get under its control, and no doubt one of the keys to a vaccine or a cure would lurk in that process but to get there you would need to have a set of living reservoirs and caution increased.

Hence the establishment of the operation "Iaso" (the Greek deity symbolizing the recovery from an illness), this operation involved no less than the capture of an entire group of Crossed, who would be herded into a group of disused hangars, mined at will and under permanent control, before being "processed" for biomedical research.

From May 22 to the evening of May 23.
Sedan pocket


Operation "Iaso" was set up in record time by the French general staff, assisted by what remained of Nato's European Command, including the British defence attaché (York had considered a similar operation, but had to abandon it for lack of reserves to launch such an undertaking).
The general idea would be to corner the Crossed at the towns of Nouzonville and Boulzicourt, and gradually draw them towards Sedan (bypassing the Charleville-Mézières evacuation center) to catch them in a bottleneck between the villages of Dom le Mesnil and Donchéry.
Here they would be tear-gassed before men equipped with tranquilizer guns and protective gear were deployed, and could evacuate the sleeping infected to a handful of penitentiary buses hastily converted into quarantine vehicles.
The men and women deployed would all be drawn from the 21st Marine Infantry Regiment (held in reserve until then for possible evacuation to Corsica), a prospect that delighted few in the French army, but which at least had the merit of not emptying a still-fragile frontline that was likely to remain so for a long time to come, given the Poles' faux pas as a precursor to Russia's invasion of the Baltic States.
In the event of failure, a Mirage 2000D was ordered to napalm the entire valley. There was no room for error.

May 24, 2020, Western Front.

The day's actions were fairly short-lived and, compared with the preceding weeks, which had been rather calm, much to the relief of Europeans, no crossed was able to reorganize the herd of infected, who scattered haphazardly in the Belgian hinterland, with the possible exception of the group soon to be the subject of the Iaso operation.
At 9.45 am Paris time, a second piece of good news arrived: during the events of the previous weeks, the report from Sergeant T, 6 th company of the 13 th Parachute Dragon Regiment had mentioned the well-thought-out organization of the attack on certain border hamlets and villages, accompanied by certain photography specialists from the 2 nd Hussar Regiment, photos had been taken and recorded with growing interest in the leaders of the group of infected.
As luck would have it, the men of the French special forces identified the Crossed Alpha, who later turned out to be a Belgian policeman infected during the initial contact.
Unfortunately for many, these men's orders didn't involve shooting the infected, but observing them, and their observations and reports would get lost in the general confusion of Inherent Shield.
We'd have to wait a few days for the failure of the operation to sink in, before an obscure French air force analyst noted the quasi-military organization of some of the crossed during their attack on Charleroi.

From that point on, some people had been able to make the connection, and luckily someone had decided to give some credence to what seemed to be just a coincidence. Obviously, several French and Dutch towns had been reduced to irradiated craters and ruins, but the image of enemy number one was available.
The luck that had been so lacking for the human race over the previous two months had finally smiled, and so it was on the morning of May 24, 2020, that a group of Special Forces operating in the "Red Zone" were able to identify the Crossed Alpha body in a group of infected having killed each other.

Nigtmare was nearly over.

May 24, 2020.

No one could have said what thoughts were going through President Macron's mind when he was awakened at 2 a.m. (the President slept little, but the last events of the previous two months had taken their toll on his resistance), but it's almost certain that his reaction was one of sadness, to see Europe once again on fire, but this time through the fault of mankind.
Perhaps, implicitly, the crossed were right, and all humanity was doomed to the most barbaric and illogical violence.
Addressing his Russian counterpart, the President received only a dismissive response, interspersed with arguments about the need for Russia to preserve its territory from the terrible virus that had massacred so many Europeans.
The Polish President was more receptive, but declared that, in the absence of a joint decision by either NATO or the EU, Poland would take whatever decisions it deemed necessary to safeguard its own interests.

In the end, there was only one really credible decision left to try and achieve a peace - admittedly a compromise peace, but one which would enable the few forces in Western Europe to retake this dead zone known as Belgium - and that would be a very difficult one to take: at 7 a.m., in any case, the Elysée put its strategic nuclear forces on alert.

and declared that, in the absence of the Americans and the British, only France could safeguard the balance and full sovereignty of the European nations, including through the use of its strategic strike force, as it had just demonstrated on its own territory and would not hesitate to do on the soil of another nation.