Variant: Alpha

Prologue

This all would have been over if they had just listened. People can be so stupid sometimes. And look where stupidity has gotten us.

Everything was fucked after the Virus. So fucked we were afraid to give it a real name. To name it meant to give it power, and the more power it held, the worse things would get.

No one even knew where it came from. It was just... here. A new flu, they called it, spreading through the town in Afghanistan. An outbreak. With low immunity and no preparation, it wasn't long before the reaches of the virus extended farther beyond, making its way into the major cities.

An epidemic. The entire country was shut down, and the U.S. pulled out its troops before they could suffer any more losses. Another stupid idea. They were already infected.

Rules were laid down when it became clear this epidemic was spreading over the globe. To contain this virus to beat it. But people are just so stupid. Of course, they thought there was no risk. It was only a type of flu, wasn't it? No one died from the flu anymore. They had already forgotten the considerable damage the Spanish Flu had dealt in its time.

But it wasn't a flu. It may have mimicked one, but the title was a ruse, to divert our attention away from the much higher infection rate, the speed at which it mutated to cause more damage, ... A distraction, to cover up the governments' ineptitude to deal with it.

Entire countries shut down, economies teetered on the brink of collapse. Millions of workers sent home without a job, sacked "for their own protection", leaving them unable to pay their bills and groceries. Poverty and homelessness worsened, and more died from starvation or cold, unable to provide themselves or their families with the barest minimum for survival. The initial death toll was estimated at almost three billion.

Thousands of mass government meetings, of changes to the rules, none of which made a difference. People kept on dying, money was bleeding out everywhere, the streets remained busy despite the best attempts of the police to stop it. Until finally, after two years the UN came to a decision.

A vaccine, mass produced and rolled out worldwide. They decided on this as the best course of action. The virus would keep on mutating, they told us. Enough to bypass the vaccine, but we would be fine, as long as we kept shooting ourselves up with booster injections to counteract them. And it worked. For a while. Borders were lowered, and it seemed that we were almost ready to begin the first steps back to normal life.

If only that was the worst of it.

It was the birth of the Plagued that destroyed us. The introduction of the vaccine caused more mutations than predicted. Like I said, the virus mutated, to counteract the antibodies we produced after previous infections. So it could keep causing damage. Keep infecting us. Most of these infections were harmless. Just changed enough that we were sick again, and again, and again. Little difference in the symptoms. But that changed with the vaccine.

In less than a year, it caused more and more mutations, turning the virus into superbugs that were almost impossible to stop. The worst was Variant Alpha. The only one they ever gave a name, however unofficial. The first ever virus to directly attack the brain. It ate away at the frontal lobe, warped the amygdala, and the hypothalamus. The result? The infected were driven to insanity, their consciousness lost to the virus, no longer feeling pain and subject to a hunger that would never stop. They had no limits; with no sense of pain they would run at top speed for days on end to capture prey, and no injury imaginable could slow them down. Only a direct injury to the brain could kill them instantly.

We called them Virals, and we feared them with more than our lives. A bite, a small scratch from a tooth would infect you instantly. We had no defence against them, and they easily cut our remaining numbers in half. Some were lucky and died instantly. Those who weren't... became one of them.

The vaccines had failed. The UN had fucked up. Something else had to be done. It was no longer about stopping the Virus. It was about the preservation of humanity. Which brought about the Walls.

Giant walls were built around the major cities of each country, twenty kilometres high. Trapping humanity in, but keeping out the Virals. The idea was to provide a safe haven, to eradicate Virals and the Virus within the Walls. This way, at least part of humanity would survive. Ironically, the separation of our cities was what brought the world together.

Three Walls were raised in New Zealand, Christchurch, Auckland and Wellington, built around the documented area of each city and no more. The people who lived further out? They were forgotten. Left by the governments to descend into anarchy and eventually die while the people inside the Walls thrived, free of disease and poverty. Free of any of the world's problems.

I was fourteen when the Virus first appeared. Sixteen when the Walls went up, and my family, like so many others, were left adrift on the outside, to be sacrifices to the Virals. We could have died, like the rest. Become part of a monstrosity that now plagued our world, until we found others. The families who knew how to survive on their own, through farming and hunting. The ones who discovered weaknesses in the Virals, one they exploited to save themselves.

It's been three years since. And we've gotten along nicely. Surviving on our own in our new way of life. Only ourselves to rely on. Because of a government that failed us.