Chlorophagus

When Dr. Meredith Voss and her team extract a core sample from Arctic permafrost and culture what they find inside, they do not yet understand what they are looking at. By the time they did, Chlorophagus dormantis had escaped the laboratory's ventilation system and was already in the soil outside.

It spreads by air and targets plants' chloroplasts. Every plant it reaches stops producing energy and slowly dies. There is no natural barrier, no border, no country it will not eventually reach. The Norwegian government covers it up, and Meredith disappears.

Over the next decade, the world comes apart.

Chlorophagus: Dormantis follows that decade at ground level: The world that followed reorganized itself around a secret council that decided how many people the remaining food supply could support, and then acted on that number, where pregnant women were taken into government facilities and not returned. Prisoners were dropped on islands with little or no food to kill themselves for it.

Meredith spent nine years in hiding, and the only lead she has left on stopping the diseases is in the Arctic. Getting there means going through rebel territory, government checkpoints, cannibals, and worse, with a pregnant woman beside her and a government hunting both of them.

The biology is real, and the horror is that it could work.