The Fox, the Hound and the Virus

The Virus

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Chapter One

The Virus

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Rule 1: Always have an escape plan.

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'Are you sure we're going the right way?' Zoe asked, peering over his shoulder.

'About as sure as the last twelve times you've asked me,' Will snapped back. His sister gave him a look of mock outrage.

'My brother. So aggressive,' she said, voice thick with false trepidation. Will shook his head, loose light brown hair flopping over his eyes before glancing back down at the map. They had to hit the town soon. It was Zoe's idea. Will would have been content to stay away from the once populated areas. He preferred to stick to the woods and avoid the buildings, but they were running short on supplies. They needed medicine, bandages, and new clothes.

She had managed to convince him with the reminder that they hadn't slept in a proper bed in over a week. It's odd what things one can miss until its gone and a lovely soft mattress was definitely one of them.

Finally, after more than half an hour's more walking, the road twisted sharply down and to the left, corkscrewing away from the main road and into a little town. They both stopped, listening hard. It was still quite a while until sundown so they would have enough time to get squirrelled away before they came.

It was strange that the world could become so different in such a short amount of time but really it was the speed of the infection that had made it so successful. It had started out as a bit of a joke. Though it had been hotly debated, it was thought that the first strain had begun in the Netherlands. Within a week more than a hundred people in a local area were exhibiting similar symptoms. This cold-like strain didn't cause fever or sit on the lungs but instead produced small itchy lumps and a tickly throat. It was more annoying than harmful.

It was also, they soon found out, incredibly infectious.

From the Amsterdam Airport Schiphol, the infection spread first to Beijing, then Los Angeles, Tokyo, and Germany. Still, no one panicked because aside from these initial irritating symptoms, people seemed perfectly functional. Most even appeared to recover for a short time. It wasn't until the second month of the infection did people start dying. The infection, as it turned out, had a very long incubation time. It spread fast but seemed to then lie in wait, spreading throughout the body.

Insomnia was the next symptom. Paranoia came with it. Once someone got to that stage, the patient went downhill at the speed of a bullet. By the end of the third month half of those people who were originally infected were dead and another half a million had caught the disease. The world began to lock down. Countries closed their borders, but it was too little too late.

People were too sluggish to react, too deadened to the metaphorical cry of 'fire' so soon after COVID-19. No one was sticking to curfews or border restrictions. Despite the rising death toll, people still took the whole thing as a bit of a joke. There was no proof it was that serious, no one had conducted proper studies yet, that's what people said. Fuelled by self-denial, lack of funding and aided by the paranoia the virus itself caused, entire countries were soon swept through in less than a year. No one knew where the sickness came from and more terrifying, no one knew how to cure it.

If the world was horrified by the death toll, it was nothing to what was about to happen to those who had survived the incubation period...