Left to Wither

Prolouge: Nine Hours Before No Return

      I watched the city skyline light up with explosions. Bombs whistled in the distance hitting home crackles of fire springing from the dim landscape. Cannons could be heard for miles, and the deafening crack of guns shook me into trembles. I stood perched on my apartment balcony watching what was once beautiful New York City, fall to shambles.

      Two years eight months and twenty-three days, that's how long this war has been in action. Since the uprising of the Northernmost American Empire, better known as the N.A.E, the Central American Alliances, or the C.A.A, have tried our hardest to join half the Unites States' forces and all of the Mexican forces to defeat the uprising. As soon as N.A.E rose, seeking to take over all of America, the C.A.A forces knowing they had to settle their differences in order to silence the N.A.E's sudden need for complete American control.

     As soon as the war was waged, we realized we were in over our heads. The N.A.E, consisting of Canada and majority of the U.S.A's bordering states, had an army to kill. We wouldn't go down without a fight though. With the C.A.A having the most brilliant minds of our time, we were able to create a super germ. This super germ soon formed into a deadly virus, and we were planning on using it as a chemical warfare technique. This virus had the ability to enter a person's nervous system, and slowly shut it down, eating away holes in its subjects nerves. The gruesome virus would attack its host and create holes in their brains until they were nothing but a pile of meat. We thought that with this virus we would be unstoppable, but that's when everything started going wrong. When the virus was loaded onto a battle plane, it was planned to be dropped somewhere roughly over Montreal, but something went incredibly haywire and the pilot went extremely off course, he found himself flying over the malicious battle grounds of Pennsylvania. Instead of releasing the Virus in Canada, the pilot was shot down and the virus was released in Philadelphia.

     Joseph G. Caller, known for creating the virus, received word on what happened. He knew that there was always a possibility that the virus could enter our premises, but he had planned to give out vaccinations to prevent infection to all the C.A.A.  He calculated that they had three whole weeks to give out second rounds of the vaccination, but he didn't account on the virus landing in Pennsylvania. With only one round of vaccination given out, that meant that the virus was going to catch, and spread fast. He immediately issued the rest of the vaccinations, and the C.A.A government quarantined the city of Philadelphia. This proved to be a vain attempt because the virus spread faster than a forest fire. When Caller realized the toll that his people were taking, he was set on finding a cure. He had known that in creating this virus it would be extremely deadly, so he had given it what he considered a "kill switch". The "kill switch" in simpler terms meant that this virus would only have the ability to infect one person, and could not be passed person to person; it could only be contracted through ingesting the virus. Caller thought we were safe, because the plane's load would eventually run out, and due to the fact that people couldn't spread the virus to other people, only the unfortunate ones who ingested it could die.

     Caller captured the virus, viewed it in his lab, and was determined to find a cure for it before any person could perish, but what he found terrified him beyond belief.  He checked, and checked again, but his discovery was true, and the effect it would have on people was unbelievable, the virus had morphed. What was once a simple super germ virus had changed, any regular scientist would have never noticed the change, but because Caller was its inventor he recognized the change with ease. One strand, one single strand of the virus had changed; making it stronger than he ever thought was possible. Caller realized that now this monster could be passed from person to person as well as through the air. It could pass through about three people before the stand was too weak to move on, he also discovered that the virus could live up to twelve days on its own. This devastation was so phenomenal he had no choice but to release the news to the press, to warn the C.A.A people to stay inside.