The year is 2301. Governments have been disbanded. Towns have been evacuated and abandoned. Survivors do what must be done to live. Some sacrifice for their families, while others turn on their fellow man. Food is scarce. Days are hot. Nights are co...
Ever since she can remember, June Flanders has feared the constant, looming shadow of death, a presence made all the more terrifying by its apparent fascination with her. Now nineteen-years-old, June has flirted with the Grim Reaper more times than she would care to admit, and while she has always escaped with her life intact, her luck has begun to run out. As her adopted mother grows weaker and weaker only to finally succumb to death's cruel lure, June is left alone, heartbroken, and afraid, still a naïve daydreamer at heart in a world where dreams come to die.
Then there are the memories.
Beginning around the time she turned six, June has had memories that were not her own, yet still belonged to her. Her mother had a theory before she passed on, one that June now feels determined to prove in any way she can: this life is not her first.
The word "reincarnation" chills her to the core, but as more and more lives begin to untangle themselves from the swirling tempest inside her head, June can ignore her memories no longer. There is one problem though; someone is following her, watching and waiting as days and night slip by. They disappear when June tries to confront them, flying into the night as if the plague was on their heels, and she ultimately decides that until they become a threat, she will leave them alone.
June travels to the ruins of Old York, one of the last official quarantine zones to fall as panic dug its nails into the skin of the city and ripped it to shreds. As she investigates the abandoned settlement for any remaining traces of her previous reincarnation, June is ambushed by a wolf pack, a group of roaming militants with a taste for human flesh.
However, before they can kill and cannibalize her, a man and a woman come to her rescue. This couple, Hale and Adelaide, whisk June to their hideout in the city's underground where she gradually begins to trust them, telling the pair about her memories of previous lives. She decides one night after waking from a fevered dream filled with hazy feelings and thoughts that were not her own that she must return to ground zero: where everything began and everything ended.
Hale and Adelaide accompany June to a faceless, dilapidated town in the former state of Florida, danger clawing at their heels as the wolf pack begins to track them. Once there, June is filled with a rush of memories, remembering a mugging, a river, and the birth of a plague. It is then that her stalker emerges from the shadows and explains everything to her, revealing a secret older than the land itself.
After three hundred years of tragedy, June has finally found where everything started: that fateful night in Miami 2017.
WORD COUNT: Summary Only--476
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AUTHOR'S NOTE:
Hi everyone! I hope you are enjoying the way this contest is revealing things so far, I'm certainly excited to be sharing June's story with you!
But now I have one thing to ask of you:
If you are enjoying Miami 2017 so far and want to know how this whole story ends, I have a task for you. If you could, please comment:
"I pledge my loyalty to you in the Herculean"
If this story ends up with the most commenters, it will gain automatic immunity from elimination this round, so please, ghost readers and avid commenters alike, band together and we shall ram the gates towards victory! Tell your friends, have them bring their armies to the field! Any way you can! (This would mean so much to me if you did <3)
