Wicked Game → Wastelands Prequel

01 → "IMMUNE"

01 → "IMMUNE"

Eight years ago, at the age of two — back when I was known as Genevieve and Adeline did not exist — I resided with my family in Los Angeles. I lived with my parents, my older sister — Clara —and my older brother, who I only know as Aris, now. Nobody in the world would know it until that day, but, on one seemingly normal day eight years ago, the Earth was hit by a series of Solar Flares. It was unexpected, couldn't have been predicted, and the fallout was unimaginable. At first, our satellites burnt out. It created chaos. Caused fires. Famine. Thousands of instant death. Millions soon died over the next few days. Lakes and rivers swelled. Ecosystems fell apart. Long term, it affected our climate. We experience crazy fluctuations in our weather; most days, it was dry and hot. Other days, we could be hit with a random storm. For the first six years or so, until I was eight, the only worry in the world since the Solar Flares was the fact of feeding the large world population that still remained, with our now scarce resources since the Solar Flares. This worry was then degraded when the virus unleashed.

They called it the Flare from the moment the majority of the world was aware of it. It spread through human contact, bites and or scratches from someone infected and controlled its host until there was no signs left of them being anything human. Unfortunately, little did I know, that I would see the first hand effects of the virus too soon after its unleash. I  didn't know how my sister contracted the virus, as our parents had kept us away from outside as soon as news broke out about the virus, but, I had guessed that in its earlier days of being unleashed, she'd contracted it from one of her friends. Clara, twelve years old then, begun to show physical symptoms rather quickly. It started off with a sudden irritability, unable to keep herself from snapping at everyone, no matter what it was that set her off. Then, the irritability quickly became a number of symptoms. Fever. Coughing. Muscle cramps. Having known the symptoms, our parents acted rather quickly. Afraid of their younger children contracting said virus from our older sister, they locked her downstairs in our furnished basement.

But, within the next few hours, any signs of our sister being sane, had vanished. In a matter of hours, her face, neck, arms and legs were spiderwebbed with blackened veins, and her mouth was black with stringy, black blood that she hacked up each time she coughed. Her hair stuck to her forehead, which was breaking out in sweats. When our father went down to check up on Clara, he'd found that the virus also had ate away at her sanity, and when she noticed our father, without actually recognizing our father at all, she tried to attack him. In the process, my father was bitten on the arm. Our mother, who'd been paralyzed by fear at the doorway all those moments before as her oldest born child attacked her own father, managed to recollect her wits and knocked her oldest daughter out with a baseball bat. Meanwhile, us two younger siblings stood back and watched as this had all unfolded, watching our mother tie her own daughter up with rope against the banister of the stairs, before doing the same to our father, tying him up to the post that held up the floor above the basement. Within those next twenty four hours, that basement reeked of death. Our sister had choked on the darkened stringy blood that she'd been coughing up over the time she was tied up. Our father, by morning, was nothing but the outer shell of what we'd dubbed a Crank — the name of those who were infected. His eyes were two black abyss, and those veins spiderwebbed across his neck and face. The bite on his arm had been wrapped in gauze to prevent him from bleeding out, although our father's fate was worse than that of bleeding out by this point. With two family members out of the five infected by the virus, our mother locked the basement door for good. She didn't want her children to go down there and see the corpse of their sister and the empty eyes of their father.