12 parts Ongoing MatureIt had been six years since the first case of Naegleria Fowleri was reported in a hospital in Bishop Parish, Louisiana. The second case was reported in Arkansas one month later. By the end of that year, the sickness had completely consumed the entirety of the United States, Mexico, and South America, and had swept over half of Canada.
It had been five years since the sickness had mutated and the first corpse had risen. And in the five years since...life on earth had been changed forever. Five years wasn't an incredibly long stretch of time, but it was long enough for nearly an entire hemisphere to be thrown into utter chaos and then complete collapse. Five years was long enough for millions of people to be lost and anything resembling normalcy to be blown on the wind. There was no hope of normal, of safe or secure, when the world had fallen apart and the dead walked the earth...
It had been one month since she had been tested for the gene, one month since she had left her family and had been taken to The Sanctuary where the other carriers were kept. She had been attended to by a physician, fed so well it seemed almost shameful, and watched closely for signs that she was nearing her most fertile days. It had been three weeks since she had been permanently marked as a carrier, permanently set apart from the rest of the world.
It had been a few hours since she'd been told she was going to meet the young man she was expected to mate with, a few hours since she had been taken to the house where she would live out her life, which would probably be spent birthing children, who would grow up to birth children, who would grow up to birth children...
