Introduction
From her hospital bed Kat watched the clouds roll over the afternoon sun, sending a dappled pattern across her blue robes. She winced as it re-emerged seemingly brighter than before, almost triggering a migraine which was one of the minor symptoms of her condition. The doctors said that she was lucky to get off the island alive, which was far more fortunate then the rest of her ‘friends’. She had been in the hospital for almost 3 weeks and wondered how much longer that she would have to spend trapped there, waiting impatiently to die. She pondered how long it would take for the rest of the symptoms to show, if they would come in waves, or if they would onset all at once and that would be that. She was surprised and mildly disappointed that it hadn’t been as quick with her as it had been for Davie. Poor, hopeless Davie who had seemed to contract a much more angry form of the disease, he had no chance of survival and only made things worse for himself and everyone who came into contact with him. In that short window of 24 hours, Kat knew that her mission had been a success.
She had always been a keen lover of animals, especially birds, and when her grandfather gifted her a bird watching book for Christmas back when she was 11, it brought a whole new meaning to her life. She would sit for hours watching the birds in the garden, making sure they had the correct feeders and baths set up. It gave her a good excuse and distraction to get out the house when her father came back drunk from his frequent liquid lunches and decided to make it a living hell for all her family inside. The increased time she spent outside, in their habitat and the older that she got, resonated the feeling that humans were destroying the planet around them. Not just the killing and trafficking of birds, she became aware of issues such as factory farming, fox hunting, dog fighting, the poaching industry, and partnered with trophy hunting, it all needed to stop. It was as she walked from her house along the road to her college, the debris of roadkill and litter strewn across the suburban town where she lived, she decided to create the plan. It was what had landed her in hospital with a fractured shoulder, a cut on her leg which required 48 stitches, deep bruising around her cheek and eye socket, a broken nose, and a missing hand.
The doctors were right about her getting away lightly compared with the others. However she knew that they were keeping the real issue quiet. There was a reason why she was being kept in isolation in the intensive care unit, no one being able to come in the room without protective clothing and a lot of decontamination- before and after coming into contact with her. That reason was because she was infected. Infected by a new strain of a very old disease. A disease which there is no known cure for and one that had presented itself to spread like wildfire. She was part of the new Plague.
