Welcome to the End

World War III started in 2015 because the Russians refused to stop experimenting with nuclear weaponry. The United States allied with Britain, France, and Germany, but Russia gained the support of many of the Middle Eastern countries who felt that the United States wasn’t doing its job in protecting them or who wanted to see the mighty U.S. fall. The Allies told Russia that if they didn’t stop recruiting countries to join its cause, then they’d have no choice but to declare war. Russia told them to bring it on.

The world was split into two alliances: the Allies and the Nuclear Alliance. There were no neutral countries. Everyone had to pick a side or feel the wrath of the countries that had already chosen. For more than ten years the war raged on. Smaller countries were annihilated and left abandoned. Battle fields left much of the larger countries barren and deserted. Millions of people died, innocents that had become the victims of bombings. Ten more years after that, it came down to America versus Russia. Everyone else had been wiped out. Those that were left of the empty countries had fled to their respective sides.

It wasn’t enough that the population was decimated, the universe still had more tricks up its sleeve. Global warming had finally taken over. Rain became a foreign concept. Lakes dried up. Antarctica was almost gone. The largest rivers had dwindled down to small streams. The merciless sun was now taking its toll on the oceans, which were slowly but surely lowering their water levels. The world people had grown up on was disappearing before their very eyes. With the world turning into one spherical desert and the war showing no signs of stopping, people were losing hope that things would ever get better.

American grew desperate. It set up dozens of facilities throughout the country to work on new types of warfare. One type was viral warfare. Rumor was that whatever it was that scientists were working on was big. It was going to revolutionize war forever, if there was any hope of a forever left. The Russians caught wind of the news and were determined to stop the research. They carefully planned an attack that would destroy the facility.

At noon on March 29, 2042 the Russians dropped a bomb on the facility, which was supposedly hidden in a town called Maybrook. It was disguised as the City Hall. The bomb, as planned, destroyed the labs and the town. But not everything died. The scientists had indeed stumbled upon something big.

They’d found a way to bring the dead back to life. And they didn’t die again so easily.

The idea was to create soldiers that wouldn’t die, soldiers with only the notion to keep going, keep fighting. It was America’s last chance at winning.

There were two different experiments. The first merely reanimated the dead. They came back, bumbling and moaning, unable to speak. They didn’t need to eat or drink anymore and they couldn’t be killed by weapons. But they had no drive to fight, their instinct was flight, and thus they were virtually useless. So the scientists tried again.

The second experiment was much more successful. The virus not only brought the dead back to life, but it instilled in them a thirst for blood. They were deranged creatures with glowing red eyes. They were still incapable of speech beyond moans and groans but they were faster and stronger than the first set. Nothing could kill them. They showed signs of keen intelligence. They were unstoppable. They were zombies.

When the bomb hit, it released the immortal creatures. The zombies went rabid and walked for miles until they reached the next town. They hit it like the plague. Half the town went down but they didn’t stay dead. Zombies were created when a human was bitten by a zombie. That human was then infected with the virus which worked against the body until it died. They would then reanimate as zombies within a day after “dying”. The window between the time of infection to total zombie varied depending on the person but no one could hold out for longer than four days.

The first experiments, which were called the living dead, didn’t attack a town but their numbers did grow. You were made into a living dead if you came into contact with one of them and somehow mixed bodily fluids. It happened more often that you’d think. Many times it occurred when you were fighting said living dead. They were gooey and if you shot them, their blood would go everywhere. They were mostly left alone.

The zombies spread it like a wildfire, claiming town after town. No one knew how to stop them at first; all the scientists, save for a select few with limited knowledge as it was, had died in the bombing. Thousands of soldiers were turned or killed trying to figure out how to, at the very least, slow them down. A Navy SEAL named Zach Happerling was the one who figured that they couldn’t reattach themselves. Chopping off a head would save your life and end their plight. But there was always another one to join the ranks after a fallen comrade.

It was harder to become a zombie but as they were supernaturally strong, it happened far too frequently. A zombie had to actually bite a person before they turned. However, their spit was poisonous and could induce paralysis if it entered the bloodstream.

WWIII ended soon after the viral outbreak. Russia heard what had happened and pulled out. They didn’t want to risk their own turning into undead corpses. But they’d pulled out too late. They returned home infected soldiers and soon they, too, were fighting zombies and the living dead. They weren’t as lucky as the United States. Russia had been stupid. They’d compiled all of their people into one area and the outbreak destroyed their compound within months.

The United States had been only slightly smarter. The remaining people split into many groups – known as colonies – around the country. On average, a colony was about 100 people, sometimes less, rarely more. All the colonies kept in contact and alerted each other to areas thick with zombies or good places to hide out and camp. A colony became a person’s family, especially since so many people had lost theirs. And despite the harsh world around them, people continued to reproduce. There were considerably less children in the world. If woman survived her pregnancy and birth, the baby was likely to die in infancy or early childhood due to lack of nutrition or attacks. It was rare that they lived long to grow up. The age of maturity had changed and if a child made it to its thirteenth birthday, they were trained to defend themselves and their colony.

I was one of those children.

I was born in 2050, eight years after the outbreak. The colony I lived in was one of the larger ones, housing nearly 150 people. We moved around a lot; it was hard to keep a colony of that size safe. I was born premature and was sickly as an infant. But against all odds, I survived. When I turned thirteen, I was given a gun and extensive training on how to use it and other weapons. I practiced on the living dead who wouldn’t hurt me if I failed to incapacitate them. But they’d also adapted to the world where they were hated. The living dead avoided humans if they could and tried to amble away when we attacked. But they were slow and mostly stupid and the perfect targets for beginners like myself.

This was the world. And it was coming to an end.