Chapter 1

In an empty city ravaged by a sudden and unknown disease, a woman scavenges for survival, alone.

17 Jan. 43

Today a woman broke into the apartment saved my life.

Alex wakes when the daylight first begins to fade. Stars that should have been invisible behind a screen of light pollution spread themselves out, daring the world below to ignore them. Eyes moving back and forth, she idly searches for satellites. Satellites that were indistinguishable from the stars, save for their movement. That unnaturally fast past of humanity, still leaving its glowing mark on the sky. With each breath, the thin cloth covering her lower face rises and falls, its movements reminding Alex of those of a large moth barely glimpsed at the edge of her vision.

With slow movements, she begins to gather her meager possessions. A winter jacket used as a pillow, a piece of tarp used as a blanket, a ring of tin cans used as a warning, and a solar powered flashlight, now fully charged. Each is picked up in turn, and is stuffed into her large rucksack. She is careful to avoid making too much noise. Even at night, the occasional burst of laughter or screaming - the difference between the two grows blurred - can be heard. Her gas mask lies within of a few feet of where she had slept; she shakes any bugs loose, and puts it on. The thin white cloth that she had been wearing previousy is also shoved into the rucksack.

In a vain attempt to delay action, she starts to stretch, taking painful satisfaction from the numerous popping noises her joints give in response. After a few minutes of this, her blood begins to flow, and her body fights off the encroaching cold of night. Making her way to the edge of the roof, she squats, and lets a very yellow stream of piss fall the twenty stories to the street. "Enjoy your morning cuppa," she says to the empty air as she finishes up and moves away from the edge. For a moment, she feels the urge to throw herself forward, but - like every morning before - she ignores the call of the void, grabs her rucksack, and makes her way off of the roof and into the building proper.

Because of her arrival that morning being later than she would have hoped, the majority of the building still remained unexplored. She begins trying door after door, empty stomach urging her on. They were locked, understandably. People staying home, trying to avoid the quickly spreading riots and disease, only to succumb to the sudden illness themselves. Dead within their own homes. It is because of this likely outcome that Alex never tries to force open the doors. Knowing as little about the disease as she does, she is unwilling to risk more exposure than necessary. Whether or not it's even airborne is a mystery to her, though she wears the mask anyway. Stay on the safe side, some dead voice advises her cheerily. She ignores it. The dead of the past have been becoming too talkative for her tastes lately. They had their time, she thinks. They need to let go. I need to let go.

As she travels further into the building, trying a door here and there, the last light of the old day begins to fall away, and Alex is forced to switch on her flashlight. The pale circle of luminosity reveals glimpses of the surroundings, but never the whole. A school girl always dropping hints of a secret, but congratulating herself for never telling it outright. Leaving the listener to solve the puzzle on their own.

Eventually she finds an open door, tucked away at the end of a hallway, two floors down from the roof. The apartment inside is full of dust tossed up by the shifting air currents, but the furniture all seems to be in place with no signs of a struggle, so Alex closes the door behind her and begins setting up glow sticks. When there are enough to cover the entire room in their dim green and orange glow, she switches her flashlight off and begins searching the cupboards. Most of the food she finds is coated in mold and mildew, but the pantries for the most part were fully stocked, and several days worth of edible food finds its way into the rucksack.

Among the food found is a box of sugary cereal, three quarters full and with no signs of rot. Setting herself down on the floor, Alex crosses her legs and begins to eat the processed delight. Her dirt-stained hand goes in and out of the box, each time emerging with a new mouthful of the cereal. Once the vague void in her stomach is satisfied, Alex leans back against the kitchen drawers and begins creating a possible story for the apartments missing inhabitants. It's a game she's begun playing more as time goes on, a way to fight the constant isolation and its steady toll upon her humanity. The imaginings of these hypothetical others lets her convince herself that she still has a solid grasp of what it means to have motivations and moralities, to be filled with persuasions and personalities. The gilded rewards of society and community, so easily forgotten in this new, barren world.

As the door was found open, it stands to reason that whoever had lived here - Alex decides a family of four based on the size of the apartment - had been home when one of them began to fall ill. They had been a trusting family, and didn't have enough paranoia to lock their doors when they were home. Perhaps the father had been ill, Alex decides on a whim, and the mother tried to take him to the hospital when he first started showing signs. The signs varied, of course, depending on what particular strand of the virus you were infected with. Or perhaps the symptoms were simply randomized within a single strand. Or even were dictated by the genetics of the infected. There were simply too many unknowns. The symptoms, however, had shown themselves often enough in the first few days.

The most common was the laughter. It began with a simple feeling of giddiness, which quickly turned into constant bellows of joy over the course of the next several hours. The Clowns, as Alex had taken to calling them, seemed to find great amusement in the smallest of things. More than one had been witnessed laughing while engulfed in flames, chuckling until their last breath. While the Clowns weren't particularly dangerous - barring their tendency to try and come into contact with people and thus spread the disease - the never ending sound of their mirth was slowly wearing away at Alex's sanity. She had never been afraid of clowns before, but now she found herself having nightmares focused around them whenever she fell asleep.

The second group were the ones Alex thought of as the Sloths. They were the most benign of the infected, as their symptoms were composed solely of losing interest and motivation, seemingly content with the world no matter how bad it was, until they starved away. Once, in the earlier days, Alex had offered one a granola bar, letting curiosity overcome caution. The woman, sitting serenely on the sidewalk, had simply given her a small smile and looked away. In the end, the Sloths were quiet, unobtrusive, and easy to avoid.

Finally, there were the Sleepers. Of all of the infected, it was the Sleepers that Alex most feared. They were the only ones who seemed to retain their basic survival instincts, and they did so with complete emotional detachment. They never smiled, cried, frowned, or yelled. They followed a rigid form of logical thinking in their search for food and water. They resembled other survivors, if other survivors were cold, relentless, and bereft of any sense of morality. They reminded Alex of robots. The kinds found in dystopic sci-fi novels promoting technophobia.

Filled with a sudden chill, Alex abandons thoughts of the hypothetical family and continues searching the cupboards.

"Hello," a mans voice says from behind.

Having finished looking through the kitchen and packing away all the edible food, Alex had moved on to the master bedroom in search of other helpful supplies. Barring a box of tampons, the scavenging had been unsuccessful. Now, she found herself frozen, unwilling to turn and see who had followed her in. For several days she had avoided any form of human contact, and it had been even longer since a face to face encounter. For a brief moment, her mind shouted Sleeper, but as far as she knew, they didn't talk. Words were a social construct they seemed to do without. Whoever was behind her, it was almost certainly an uninfected. With that slightly reassuring thought, Alex stands and turns to face the stranger.

Tall, dirty, and stringy, he is what Alex expects to see in a fellow survivor. The right sleeve of his thick jacket is pinned up to his shoulder, like a war amputee at the turn of the century. A duffle bag hangs by his side, mostly empty from the looks of it.

"Been awhile," the man continues. "Since I've seen anyone, that is." Alex makes an noncommittal noise. She can feel her confidence and stability coming back, but trust has been a rare commodity for a long time. A few moments of silence pass by as the man waits for her to respond, only to be met by her stubborn refusal to comply. "Name's Jonathan."

"Hello," Alex finally allows. Something about the man warns Alex off, fills her with a sense of unease. She can't place her finger on what it is, but the feeling reminds her of dogs who instinctively know what people could and couldn't be trusted. A sense beyond the normally attributed five. Don't be turning superstitious on me now, darling.

"I'm from a group-" he begins.

"Leave," Alex demands, cutting the man off. The faint gnawing voice in the back of her mind grows stronger. At the mans confused look, Alex repeats herself. "Leave. I found this place first, I get the supplies."

The stranger offers a quizzical smile, "I don't think you understand. I'm not here for your supplies. I'm inviting you to join me. Us. The group."

Alex takes a step back towards the bed, where her rucksack lies open. "Doesn't matter-" She stops, struck with a sudden realization. "You're not wearing a mask."

The man glances down, then looks back up with a bashful look. Innocently embarrassed at attempting to see his own face. Alex feels her hands clench. "No, I'm not." He admits, "Haven't since the beginning. Whatever this is, I don't think it's airborne."

"I don't believe you."

His hands raise in supplication. "Why would I lie to you? You can trust me, I swear."

Reaching out, Alex pulls her rucksack closer to her, comforted by its presence. "I don't trust you because the world is s**t. I don't trust you because I don't believe a group can survive in this. I don't trust you because you're male and I'm not. I don't trust you," Alex reaches into the rucksack, "because you're pretending that you lost an arm."

The strangers genial and open face seems to collapse in upon itself, a visage of anger breaking through. The right side of his jacket bulges out, as though some long lost Siamese twin is making a bid for freedom, before a fake seam bursts open to reveal the hidden arm and the gun it holds. Alex whips her own hand out of the rucksack, pistol in its grasp. The two quickly take aim, and twin gunshots echo forth.

In the resulting moment of thunderous sound and ringing ears, Alex is blessed with the brief sight of her assailant falling backwards with a comet trail of red marking his passage before a spray of white pain tears across her face. Shouting profanities she can barely hear, Alex clutches at her face and stumbles forward. She finds the man - Name's Jonathan - sprawled out on the ground by the door, one hand clutching his chest, the other raised in a vain attempt to ward her off. Raising her pistol once more and aiming through the pain, she fires.

Again.

Been awhile. Since I've seen anybody, that is.

Again.

Hello.

After locking the front door to prevent any more intruders, Alex pulls out a water bottle she found earlier and heads into the washroom to deal with her face. The mans wild shot had struck the wall next to her, sending shards of wood spraying into the right side of her face. Carefully rinsing away the blood and removing the worst of the remaining shards, Alex forces away thoughts of infection. It's only been a few minutes, she tells herself. Household medical supplies found behind the mirror provide her with enough bandages to plaster a solid third of her face, vaguely resembling some form of botched skin graft. I am not a physician, she thinks.

She makes it into the hallway before collapsing, sliding down the wall and onto the carpeted floor, knees tucked up to her chin. She can feel her hearts erratic beating, providing her with a late and unwanted surge of adrenaline. Without a situation to react to, the fight or flight response simply leaves her mind blank, breaths shuddering through the stifling filters of the gas mask. Whatever stub remains of her logical thought tells her that she has to leave. There's too high a chance that other human predators - or worse, Sleepers - heard the gunshot and are coming to investigate. Noises like that could only mean sentience, and chances were that where there's sentience, there's easy supplies.

Instead she stays sitting against the reassuring solidity of the wall until the stubborn ringing in her ears clears away and her breathing returns to normal.

In the following silence, she hears harsh breathing. It takes her a few moments to realize that it's not her own, and that it's coming from another room in the apartment. A smaller bedroom at the end of the hall. Using the wall as a crutch, she climbs to her feet and goes to investigate, pistol held firmly in clammy hands. With a small nudge, she opens the door to reveal a room plastered with posters, pictures, drawings, and other decorative paraphernalia. And on the bed, a kid, staring at her with wide eyes above a doctors surgical mask.

He couldn't be more than fourteen, short, stout. He had the look of someone who had recently shed a few pounds, and Alex judges that he probably would've been described as borderline chubby before the events of the disease. Most likely high amounts of stress had resulted in the assumed weight loss, as the amount of food Alex had found disproved starvation as a theory.

"Is this your place?" Alex asks. The kid blinks, fear evident in his expression. Alex looks down at the pistol still held in her hands, then back up. She doesn't put it away. "Is this your place?" She asks again.

The kid nods, sharply. As though he could only muster enough courage for that single, sudden movement.

Alex looks around the room, noting a journal laying open on a desk next to the door. Today a woman broke into my apartment, it reads, the letters rough and uneven. It's dated January 17th. Alex assumes this is the current date, and gives a silent thanks for the momentary grounding of time. "Parents?" She asks, looking back to the kid.

"Gone," is the short reply.

Alex looks back down the hallway. At the far end, across the living room, she can see the front door. "You can't stay here," she says, "someone is going to follow the noise." Running a hand over her face, she lets loose a quiet curse. "Grab a bag - the largest you have - and pack quickly. We're leaving."

"I'm not going with you!" The kid exclaims, shock overcoming fear. "You're a murderer," He continues, quieter.

Putting the pistol back in her rucksack, Alex turns and begins heading for the bathroom. "I'm not going to hurt you," she says over her shoulder. She sounds unconvincing even to herself. Returning to the medical cabinet, she begins stuffing as many bandages and medications into her bag as possible. Her hand briefly hovers over the shelf of emotion control drugs. Relaxaid, BlissCorp's Calm Heart, Bottom Line - Focused Mind, and DozeAway all catch her fancy, but she decides against it. Faint memories of her old activist tendencies, crying out against drugs used for 'fixing' natural emotions, surfaces in her mind. Such things are trivial now, but it reminds her that such things could impair her ability to function. Moving on, she grabs a few painkillers and bottles of hand sanitizer.

By the time she's done rummaging, the kid is waiting by the front door, a blue school backpack slung over his shoulder. As she comes up, he tucks away the journal he had been writing in, and steps to the side. "I'll go with you," he says, as though he's graciously deciding to accept her offer. Behind the voice though, his eyes are still wide.

"No kidding," Alex replies, and opens the door.