It all happened so fast. Disaster. Widespread panic.
A Pandemic.
It wasn't long before the Infected were everywhere.
When Hayley Brookes near-perfect life comes crashing down around her - due to a new, widespread, incurable strain of virus and she...
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No.
This can't be happening.
This can't be real.
It just can't. This wasn't meant to happen. I was supposed to find him. We would find him and everything was supposed to turn out fine. I thought he would be here.
But he wasn't. No one was. Not even the dead dared to roam.
I felt the hot tears slip down my face as I took in the lifeless surroundings. The acrid stench of smoke still lingered around the dead city filling my nostrils, almost overwhelming. Dark ash crumbled under my feet as I walked forward into the empty nothingness.
Everything was gone. The whole city was in ruins, burnt to the ground. It stood silently, completely unrecognisable from the place where life once thrived. The buildings were shells of their former glory, unstable, seeming as though they would cascade down at any minute. The inky soot blanketed the entire city, the slight breeze causing small wisps of smoke to waft towards us. The horizon was black as far as the eye could see, the only visible colour emanating from the sun.
Compared to it, Manhattan was heaven. And this, this was hell; the still-blistering heat lingering long after the flames closely resembled the firey pits.
What the hell happened here?
Whatever did this was bad, worse than the virus. I couldn't imagine the Infected causing this. They didn't seem to display any sort of intelligence, relying purely on their primal senses of sight, smell and hearing to track down their prey. No, this had to have been done by people. Alive people.
It could've been caused by the chaotic, panic-stricken public, though something nagged at the back of my mind. Something instinctual doubted that this was an accident. The immense scale of the destruction had to have been intentional, planned. Perhaps a way to combat the growing numbers of Infected?
Somehow I found that hard to believe. From what we had seen and been able to drive through, at least half of the city was completely destroyed. The amount of devastation and death it must have caused was inconceivable. There would have been thousands of good, healthy people still here and alive, Jason could've been among them. But now they were all gone. I couldn't comprehend how somebody could do this to them.
"Oh, Jace," I whispered mournfully, crouching down and picking up a fistful of ash before letting it sift through my fingers and float away in the breeze. "Where are you?"
For all I knew he had been here when the flames erupted. He could be dead or alive and I wouldn't know. I prayed it was the latter, that he had been halfway across the country when the city was torched. Any chance that I would see him again had been ripped from my grasp. I had nothing, no clues or hints of his whereabouts. This had been my last hope and it was useless, futile.
I wiped my eyes, my composure hardening. It didn't matter that he wasn't here. I knew the chances were slim to none, yet I let myself get excited anyway. I had to carry on surviving regardless. He had trusted me to look after Lily and that's precisely what I would do, to the best of my ability. Nothing would prevent me from looking after my baby sister and I'd like to see somebody try and get past Ace. It was like he was her personal bodyguard.
