The Division: Beyond Survival

Introduction

By Matt Shields

@SplinterShields

authormatthewshields@protonmail.com

Lemme catch you up on current events. If you could see New York right now, you would think it had taken us a year to get here: trash choking the streets, abandoned vehicles everywhere, CERA outposts and depots on every block, the walls of the Dark Zone cutting through the middle of Manhattan, but saddest of all, the bodies. Manhattan has a population - had a population of about two million, and on weekdays the commuters pushed that up to four million. The virus killed enough people to fill up Central Park with CERA coffins (the Catastrophic Emergency Response Agency), and put piles and piles of coffins and body bags in the Dark Zone.

All of this happened in a month.

A virus was unleashed on Black Friday at the Abel's department store. Yeah, the place where they have the Thanksgiving Day Parade every year. Someone figured out that a virus can survive on a dollar bill for days, and they went out and used all these contaminated bills in the biggest store in the world, on their busiest day of the year. When this was discovered, we called it things like the Dollar Flu, the Green Poison.

Within a couple weeks, thousands were dead and probably hundreds of thousands more were sick. The doctors realized that it wasn't just another flu season within days, but no one understood what it really was until it was too late. There just wasn't enough resources to find and quarantine all the sick. With so many dead and dying, and everyone getting scared, everything broke down pretty fast.

The military came in and set up a quarantine area right in the middle of Manhattan. When you wall off Central Park and the Empire State Building, you know that people are going to feel some kind of way about that. But when the military was going out and just taking people from hospitals and their homes and putting them in the quarantine area, people got angry. Yes, people were dying but it was too fast - no one had the whole picture like the government and the military did, and they were... reluctant to share the real horror of the situation.

The purpose of the quarantine area, the Decontamination Zone, was to isolate the disease from the healthy people. The sick and the dead were sent there to be logged and processed by trained people in hazmat suits, to make sure the dead weren't spreading the sickness, and so families could at least know where their dead were buried after the crisis was over. Doctors and scientists, the best and brightest, came in to study the virus. But the bottom line for most was that after you were taken into the Decontamination Zone, you never came out.

The speed at which the virus spread forced CERA to expand the Decontamination Zone many times, sometimes giving people only hours to leave before sealing off their street, and putting up walls around their buildings. At the end, there was a massive but short-lived effort to screen and evacuate all of Manhattan. As more sick were being found in the surrounding areas, this effort was abandoned, but all tunnels and bridges that had been closed and sealed off remained that way. The uninfected either found a way out, or found ways to survive in Manhattan. Food, medicine, and sundries were being airdropped onto the island and distributed by CERA, but it was like any other government bureaucracy - slow, unadaptable, too little, too late.

The civil unrest was exploding, like a nightmare where things were getting worse, but the more you do to fix things, the angrier everyone gets at you. There were daily protests at the gates of the Decontamination Zone.

The inmates in Rikers Prison broke out and came down to Manhattan, almost all 20,000 of them. It was sometime after the convicts in orange jumpsuits started appearing around midtown that the power in the quarantine area went out. As the afternoon wore on and the military couldn't restore their power grid, the order came down to evacuate all their personnel in a few hours, before nightfall. With the lights out and the military gone, all the wrong kinds of people were finding their way in there to snap up all the supplies and weapons left behind, and the Decontamination Zone became the Dark Zone.

After the fall of the quarantine area, hope died. Even though no one liked it, we knew they were working on a cure in there. It wasn't long before people were looting whatever they could and rule of law collapsed.

Lots of the city workers that had been trying to keep the basic services going, like trash pickup and utilities, they gave up and ganged up, trying to do what, in their minds, the Feds couldn't do - eradicate the disease by burning it out. We called them the Cleaners because a lot of them had been garbage men keeping the streets clean, and because now they thought were doing the same thing by burning bodies. But half the time it didn't seem to matter if the people they burned were still alive and basically if you so much as coughed, they just assumed the worst and torched you.

What was left of the cops, National Guard, and other alphabet agencies, they got together and made the Joint Task Force, or JTF. But with everything falling apart, supplies low, morale low, it was going to take a miracle to pull the city back from the brink of total chaos.

The Strategic Homeland Division, or just "The Division," was an agency created by executive order, and they were meant to be the last line of defense in the face of catastrophic disasters. They have special training to deal with unthinkable threats and carte blanche authority to do whatever it takes to re-establish the rule of law after everyone else has failed.

The first wave of agents had been activated a few weeks after Black Friday, but there just weren't enough of them. A second wave was activated a little after New Years. Within weeks they had established the Farley Post Office as the Base of Operations in Manhattan, found the necessary people to staff it, and taken out the leaders of all the biggest factions trying to take over New York. People were organized and there were supplies being distributed. Hope was rekindled.

The world would never be the same again, but the race was on to find a cure to the disease.

What follows is the story of one Division agent who went beyond the call of duty.