epidemic ➳ payne / apocalypse a.u

part one | summer: one

"Shit." I hissed to myself as my hand slipped for the fourth time.

I'd been trying to pick the lock on the Drugstore for a few days now, and it was something I usually achieved first time. About a week ago, my friend Harry and I had decided to travel a few miles more than we usually did in search of supplies and our hunting trips and we'd found a whole mall. Living of the food that the government had been feeding us for the past ten years was almost impossibly, so every few months for about a week people got sent out of the Zone to gather as many extra supplies as possible to feed everyone - Liam and I had been doing it for around two years now.

Since the breakout the world, as far as I knew, had pretty much been divided into five groups - the first being the commoners, who were really just anyone who wasn't a part of the other three groups. They don't have any particular beliefs or morals. They're just getting on with their lives and trying to survive.

Then there's the hunters. They don't live in zones, and aren't in any association with the Fireflies. They live in small groups outside them but all seem to be associated with each other. Basically, they're the people that kill (well, hunt) other people travelling between zones or from abandoned zones to take their supplies and keep them to their selves. They're selfish, and in my opinion they've just given up on the world. They're probably the scariest group next to the infected. Definitely not who you want to bump into when you're travelling cross country or gathering supplies a long distance from the zone.

There was the government, who tried (apparently) to protect us from the parasite-ridden creatures beyond the walls of the zones. They didn't help much, in fact they didn't seem to handle the situation very well at all - a lot of people believed that they were the ones to cause the epidemic in the first place. They claimed that they had no idea where the parasite had come from, that it just appeared and must have been from either some animal or a foreign country. But to me, and nearly everyone else, it seemed like the perfect plan to wipe out most of the population and scare everyone so much that you can gain control over the nations that there was so little of before. With the scare of getting infected, they wanted the population to run screaming to them for protecting. Which we did. At first.

That brings me to the second group. The Fireflies, which were essentially the anti-government. From what I knew, there weren’t much of them left anymore. The government fought them and tried to wipe them out. The Fireflies give the message that there's hope, and are found spread throughout the entire continent trying to find a cure to this awful disease. They seem to want to do well, which is why it's confusing what the government have against them, which is a pretty good reason for people to believe this was their entire plan.

Then there's us. The middle class. We go against the government, but in a more subtle and hidden way. We hunt outside the zones to bring back food and supplies that the government don't give us anywhere near enough of. We associated with the Fireflies, we're basically their inside source. The Fireflies are mostly situated in labs, Universities and Hospitals whereas we're in the government assigned zones or districts. We deliver them information when we hear it; usually when we hear a soldier discussing an attack on one of their bases that they've discovered or when they plan on leaving the zones so that the Fireflies can attack them or try and convert anyone. Our name is pretty much undecided since just about all of the names sound utterly stupid. 'Housefly' is a pretty commonly used name for us, which is probably one of the least embarrassing one's and that actually makes since. We're found in the 'homes' and usually just travel around the zone unnoticed and not suspiciously. Then there's the most common, and definitely most annoying and ugly name - Maggots. The 'baby' Fireflies. The snitches, gatherers, whatever you want to see them as. The word makes me physically squirm but it's what we're stuck with.