Infected

Prologue

I was born before it happened. Earth was whole -not this shattered dog-eat-dog world. Well as whole as it could be with the human race being the stupidest species with weapons of mass destruction. I grew up in a world when the Infected were a part of movies and imaginations or theories that only crazy doomsday obsessed people like myself would think about. Back then they didn't exist. They were the walking dead of our imagination -something that no one had imagined would happen in the real world. It was almost physically impossible.

They say it started in a lab in America, some low grade sociopathic scientist got bored and tried to see if he could cause a virus that essentially turned people into what we would think as zombies. What the scientist didn't count on was that the rat he infected would bite him and escape, then bite other rats before we knew it and could stop it the world rat population suddenly dropped and from what everyone could tell something was attacking them. What the researchers didn't know at the time, was that they were attacking each other.

That scientist who got bit? Well he got what he was looking for. If he got a cold but he didn't think anything was wrong, and kept going about sneezing and coughing everywhere. He traveled to different countries, attending science-related conferences, but in reality he was just spreading his sickness everywhere, ninety percent of the people he would come into contact with would catch this so called "Flu" he had. No one had any clue what was coming next for the human race. When we finally noticed that majority of the world's population was sick it was too late, it had spread so easily. It was an adaptable virus that lived in any weather conditions and everyone caught it no matter how much they tried to avoid it. Eventually this 'stage' got its name, the Illness.

After the Illness came the Turning. All of a sudden people everywhere who had caught the Illness were thrashing around screaming with burning temperatures, hallucinating, with splotches that looked like burns all over their bodies, their faces and necks scratched and shredded by their own finger nails. In hope of finding a cure, countries with known cases of the Turning worked together to figure out what was happening. The human race had thought this was the worst thing that could happen. It had brought the world together whatever war was going on in some far off country had stopped, too many people had the Sickness or the Turning to fight. Not enough people were the Uninfected to help with much of anything.

People had thought that the Sickness and the Turning were the worst parts but then after the Turning they became what I had dubbed the Infected. Mindless humans turned into something that hungers and craves human flesh, once you had turned into the Infected you were safe but anything else, you may as well be dead. Suddenly the world started to fall apart, the economy fell out from under us, governments were no longer functional, people robbed houses, killed anyone who was sick or turning. The world fell apart, all that was left was survivors and Infected. They were things of our imagination that a scientist made real, we used to see them as the living dead. But now they're not even dead they're just the Infected, something you don't want to become no matter what it costs you.