Intro
Everything we know and love is gone. Societal structure collapsed, civil and government structure is non-existent, along with nearly every military power in the world. It didn’t take long for countries to fall either. The world superpowers, China, Russia, Japan, France, UK, Germany, Italy, Spain, and the United States all held out for a while, but they, too, fell in a matter of months. Now, every country in the world has no supporting infrastructure. The US is without allies, in a world full of anarchy there are no alliances. Anarchy has taken hold and with a world full of sick, desperate people, all wanting to escape the science fiction/horror nightmare no one can wake up from. If ‘They’ get you, they bite you. If they bite you, you better have an extra bullet for yourself and the stones to do it before you succumb to your injuries and become just another one of them. Welcome to the new world, where no one can be trusted, when every single day of survival is an achievement, and where every single thing that can talk, walk, or even move is a potential threat unless proven otherwise. In the borough of what used to be Brooklyn, a number of individuals caught posters in a three-block radius all leading them to one specific place; a church in the middle of the Brooklyn neighborhood.
In 2001, late June, a senior-level bioterrorism attack was simulated at Andrews Air Force Base in Maryland. It simulated the way society, government, and how all the people under it would crumble so the government could properly develop a response to it. The main events of such an attack, or similar event, would all corroborate to the events of the first five days. Day one, hospitals will reach capacity. Waiting rooms will be backed up with people affected by an unknown disease that no civilian or doctor has ever seen before, or at least hasn’t seen since medical school. Even worse, panic among both medical staff and their patients will strike and spread just as fast as the pathogen. By day two, transport in and out of cities will be shut down. Sections of cities, boroughs, and towns will be quarantined. All available supplies will be rationed. By day three, international transport outside of scientists and government VIPs will be locked down. International trade, the stock market, and oil wells all crash, shut down, and are rendered, forgotten, or completely decimated. By day four, power will fluctuate, water taps will dry, and shelves in just about every single store will be absolutely barren. By day five, once panic, fear, and desperation take hold, everything that walks, talks, and has a set of eyes, teeth, a stomach, especially a will to keep all of those abilities and parts becomes a possible threat. Directive 51 was quietly written into law as a response to this, with rumors among the civilian populace of what Directive 51 included. Operation Dark Winter, decades later, would be set into motion and be somewhat spot-on, but the pathogen was one that spread in a way no one could expect. Not the way it happens, not the type of pathogen, or that it would happen for them to see it.
Hospitals filled up to capacity within a matter of hours. No one knows how people were infected, no one knows why, all they knew was that this pathogen was one that simply spread through the human body like a wildfire, a disastrous concoction as these Patient Zeros would be diagnosed with a simple cold and sent home. With it happening in the summer, people would be vacationing, going back home, using international travel. Many would become aggressive within days. That’s when the next phase starts.
Phase Two begins as the military roam the streets, martial law having been declared and rationing supplies to the population, approaching civilians is almost suicidal since you never know when they might take a bite out of you. Forcing the soldiers to open fire on some civilians, now having threats on both the inside and outside of the walls they made.
Phase Three went by in hours. Visiting government officials overrode the lockdowns to get back to their home countries. By the time they stepped off their planes, the stock market along with other forms of international trade had cashed and been shut down, most likely forever.
Phase Four took little to no time in initiating. Other people stayed home with their families, fortifying their homes, abandoning their jobs. With no one overseeing power plants and water treatment facilities, they would be forced to either be shut down or become left to their own devices, possibly captured by some or playing God over others. In time, abandoned jobs begin to include those that provide basic services, a number of them including the police and any protective law force. The military is scattered, desperate and instead of the battalions they once were, they are now only mere squads. That’s when the raiders came about. With lack of civil order and those to maintain it, gangs rose up, raiding armories and stores, taking whatever they wanted and killing whoever they wanted because they could and knew there was little to no one to stop them.
Soon, without food, water, or power, by Phase Five, all of this had cycled through within two weeks and every single person on the planet is considered an active threat. Raiders, survivors, anyone that turned into “Them” as they are often referenced in ‘society’, and anyone turning into one, all can kill you, capture you, or convert you, and you better hope you can find a way to put a bullet in your head before that third thing can be completed.
