February 3, 2010
It all began in late January, 2009. No one has ever been sure of the exact date. The media and the government did too good a job keeping everything covered up. The initial deaths were kept quiet until the chaos in Atlanta spiraled out of control, until the southeast was no longer salvageable. Now no one knows the day the world began its descent into Hell.
Idiots. If only the general population had been warned sooner, more people might have stood a chance of surviving.
A few facts have since been uncovered. The end of the world began at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The last place anyone really expected. The one organization whose job should have been focused on studying the virus, finding a cure for it, before it could do the damage it has since caused, completely failed at that task.
It began there, and it spread out rapidly. It first ensnared the population of Atlanta, then the southeast, and now the entire world. The sick, the elderly, the young, and everyone in between: It chose indiscriminately, like only a virus can.
The initial virus—the airborne version—started with a tickle in the back of a throat, a persistent cough, itchy, watery eyes. Maybe some sneezes. It looked like a bad case of allergies. Nothing to warrant alarm.
But then, when the virus became communicable exclusively by contact with bodily fluids, when it mutated with a rapidity never before seen, worse symptoms began to manifest. The fevers, the vomiting. Delirium, loss of coordination and speech. Reduced motor skills. Lethargy. Then a sharp drop in blood pressure and apparent death.
And then the world’s nightmares truly began.
I think I once heard that it took three weeks before the government publicly acknowledged that there was indeed a problem—at least, in the southeast. By then, it was far too late. People infected with a virus they didn’t even know existed had already been on and off planes, on ships and in cars, over borders, into restaurants and stores and schools. By then, the Michaluk Virus had already done its worst, and its victims had already begun their homicidal rampages. Only, they didn’t even know it yet.
No one remembers when the media first announced that the madness was caused by a virus. The news took over the airwaves in the span of a week, gradually at first, trickling out from Atlanta’s suburbs and washing over Memphis and Birmingham and New Orleans, being picked up by one news affiliate after another, as if following the virus on its journey. The news crept up on everyone outside the immediate spread zone with a rising sense of impending doom. The short evening news reports were overtaken by stories of growing numbers of infected. There were more and more of them, multiplying by the hour, one after another, always growing, always hungry, always killing indiscriminately.
By the time someone finally connected the dots, by the time the realization struck that the riots and the murders were all caused by this simple virus, it was far too late.
This is the world we live in now. It’s a world of terror, a world of our own making. One year ago, the first confirmed victim of the Michaluk Virus attacked his girlfriend on a crowded MARTA bus in Atlanta. A lot has changed since then. Things will never be the same again.
As for me, I’m somewhere north of Montgomery, Alabama. I’m approximately two hundred miles away from the new Ground Zero: Atlanta, Georgia.
My name is Avi Geller. I’m a former journalist for a newspaper that doesn’t exist anymore.
My colleagues have given me a task. My mission: to track down Ethan Bennett and his crew and convince them to come with me to Atlanta, to help me find the truth about what happened at the end of the world, or die trying.