No one really knew what happened, how the virus got out of the laboratory where scientists worked on trying to figure out what it evolved from. Or maybe someone knew, once, but that person was probably one of the first to get infected and turn into one of them, into a Sleeper. Since then all computers that contained information about the virus and the Sleepers has been destroyed in fires or when survivors has tried to protect themselves from the Sleepers and now people live without really caring about how their world became what it is today, their only goal is to survive to live another day.
Now, almost seven months after the first outbreak, a group of survivors has moved from London, following the river Thames, out to Birchington-on-sea, a small seaside village that had a population of around 9800 people before the outbreak and that now is relatively calm since most of the Sleepers started moving towards bigger towns almost immediately after turning. The group, consisting of seventeen people from different backgrounds, has moved into three houses next to each other on Cliff Road, just by the sea and are now doing their best to get by. When they first left London they were ten but since then they've met more people and made new friends as well as lost some people to the Sleepers. Out of the seventeen, fourteen have had to kill someone, both Sleepers and "normal" people. The other three are the also the youngest in the group, Jason, a sixteen year old from Brighton who lived alone until he joined the group, Danielle, an eighteen year old girl from London, and Danielle's eight months old son Aiden. Together with Danielle and Aiden the two friends Liam and Zayn left St Ann's Hospital just days after Aiden was born, hoping to find a safer place for them to stay when the virus started spreading and the first Sleepers reached the hospital and soon turned most of the already sick or wounded people. Out of all the people in St Ann's the day the Sleepers came, only twenty made it out alive and it didn't take long for them to split up into smaller groups, all going in their own directions hoping to find a safe place, free from Sleepers. After spending two days hiding in an abandoned apartment the small group met two young men, Louis and Harry, when they were out looking for food. These boys seemed to be much better off than themselves and it didn't take much to get them to agree on coming with them to their group. Louis and Harry took them to a house just by the Thames where they met the first adult people they'd seen since they left the hospital, Simon and Paul, two men with military training who seems to have everything under control, and Harry's older sister Gemma, who worked as a midwife before the outbreak and helps Danielle take care of baby Aiden. Just a few days after that they were joined by another young man, Paul's niece Niall. He seemed to be the kind of guy who always managed to look at the bright side of things, but what he knew seemed much more important at the time. He had managed to get from Bristol to London and he told them that it wasn't just in London the virus was spreading but all over England. Just a few days after Niall's arrival they decided to try and get away from England, over the English Channel to France or Belgium. Said and done, the next day they packed as much food and weapons they could carry and left the safe house by the river.
It took them almost two months to get to the coast and by then the group had gotten almost twice as big as when they first left London. They lived on the beach for a few days, searching for a boat big enough to take all of them over the Channel. On the third day however, they met a woman who claimed she came from France, that she had tried to do the same thing as them, she left her home and travelled to England in the hope of getting away from everything, only it was the same thing there. The whole Europe seemed to be infected. The woman, no one thought of asking he for her name, turned out to be infected as well and turned sometime during the night. Simon killed her without too much trouble but not before she had bitten two of their own, a young man named Josh and an old lady called Mary. Mary was bitten in the neck and it only took an hour for her to turn but the lady had bitten Josh in the arm and they knew he had hours, maybe even days, before the virus would reach his heart and turn him into a Sleeper. No one knew what to do, they couldn't just leave him there to die but taking him with them would slow them down and if he turned...it was too big of a risk. Simon and Paul left the rest of the group and when they came back they gave Josh two options. He could either be left on the beach, with some food and water and a gun, or, this seemed to be the more humane thing to do at the moment, they could kill him right there and then. If things had been different the rest of the group would have protested more than they did but they knew, they knew that that was the only other option. Josh knew that as well and maybe that's why he picked the later option and then quietly stayed behind with Paul when Simon led the rest of the group away from the beach. No one said anything, there was no way they could avoid hearing the gunshot.
Since that day on the beach they haven't lost anyone to the Sleepers. Not long after losing Josh and Mary they found a small village where there was almost no Sleepers and they decided to stay there. At first they moved from one house to another every day but eventually they just stopped. They stayed in two houses right next to each other just by the sea and their lives became almost...normal. The Sleepers became a part of their worlds just like homeless people used to, they learned when it was safest to leave the house, where they could find food and how to get down to the beach without being seen. They didn't live in constant fear anymore, some of them even found it funny to take risks and see how close they could get to a Sleeper without getting hurt. They grew closer as a group as well and it was hard to believe that some of them hadn't known each other just a few months earlier. Niall for example, he and Liam had become the best of friends and he was, in some ways, happy this had happened because otherwise he wouldn't have met Liam or any of the other guys. He would've just lived his life unaware of the amazing people living just a few hours away from him.
Louis and Harry had always been close, ever since Harry moved in across the street from Louis, and they just seemed to get closer as time went by, so no one was really surprised when half the group walked in on them all but eating each others faces off in the kitchen one day. They actually found it quite funny, everyone except for a girl called Jasmine who might have had a rather big crush on Louis. Even though they were a bit embarrassed, Harry and Louis were relieved, now they didn't have to try and hide it anymore. They could sneak away on dates if they wanted to, they could sleep in the same room without people asking why, Harry was especially happy because that meant he didn't have to pretend he was scared of the dark anymore, and they could hold hands when there was other people around. I guess you could say they were happy, unfortunately that didn't last for long.
