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I never thought that I would be one of the chosen few to survive this mess; however, I have made it through. I managed to escape the laboratory where I had worked for almost a decade. The horrible workings of the virus that had infected the whole world has caused a total shut down of the central power plant. The entire United States was now without power.



 I watched from the top of the mountain as the black clouds darkened the sky, and the air became thick with soot from the power plants that were being cannibalized for food. The entire world was doomed.





The entire people were eating each other. The threat of starvation was high. This happened when the ill-fated virus caused the flow of the blood to stop. I was working in the laboratory when the virus first was sought out. My team was sent to the site of the original installation where the vast supply of the virus was found. We had found it to be a bacteria that was naturally occurring in some small lake deep in the Amazon forest.



We spent months trying to understand its function and how it worked. It was perfectly harmless. When we reached the point of identifying how it worked, the lab was besieged by infected laboratory workers on the outside that had been released from the control of the lab complex due to lack of electrical power. 




I watched as my colleagues were eaten by the infected. It was terrible. I only survived because of this security door at the entrance to the lab. It was constructed like a vault door. I lived off of the food supplies in the lab for a couple of years, waiting to descend and try to find some semblance of order in the chaos. When I heard that there were still a few pockets of survivors scattered throughout the earth, I knew what my mission was.





I began my descent into hell around the year 2026. It had been ten years since the events that I have already described. I was unaware of the exact date at that time. Some of the towns and villages were still intact. However, the vast majority of them had ate each other. I saw many strange sights and did not understand them at first.




 After a few months on the road, I started seeing a few people carrying weapons, then I started to see the symbols that they carried. Everything was a blur just like in Stephen King's book, The Stand, where a plague was spreading across the country. I did not know the date, but I knew that it was the end of the world.






I have now learned that the plague that had infected the world was manmade. The virus was altered in the laboratory to be able to take over a person's brain and cause it to start over the normal network of neurons with the new network of the virus. The result was a person that would devour another human being.




 Strangely, the new brain could not adapt as fast as the brain of the person who had been infected with the virus. The new brains didn’t feel that the need to fight to survive and the groups of people who were left were only partly infected. The rest was unaffected.





So the survivors were already split into two factions of people. The slightly infected would not fight, and were trying to coexist with the healthy humans. The rest of the survivors would go on to fight for their lives and for the life of their people.



 Because of this, there were also the completely infected following around the healthier humans. I was caught up in the cross fire. I now carried the same symbol that the infected used.





The infected are few, but they are dangerous. They are mostly harmless, but will attack and eat other human beings upon the sight of them. Also, they have an aversion to moving water and would not cross a river. 




They have been described as small gnomes with hooves and some people have described a face in the symbol of the infected. They will attack any human unless it is one of their own that is close to death.





I had managed to find a group of survivors who would take me in. The leader, Leo, had been the head of the lab. He had suffered an infection and had been able to maintain his mind and turn the symbol into a clan that moved as one accomplishing many peaceful tasks. They were like nuns in Catholic history.




 The leader, Leo, was able to make a very stable group of survivors, but after a while they began to roam around the country, taking advantage of the sudden total lack of power to carry out the tasks they had set out to do. They put the safety of the group first and the needs of their country second.






The leader of their group was a woman named Leah. She seemed to have a special connection to the infected that caused her to turn the symbol of the infected in her clan on her skin for times of great need. She was perfectly sane, but her association with the infected was bringing her closer to them. 



They were becoming a family. They had formed communities where families were safe. I also called them "the club", because of the way that their gatherings were held. Also, I was their only member who was a different color of skin. The color of mine was reddish-brown.


The group of survivors was made up of the families of the leader, Leo. They were traversing the country to try to find the rest of the survivors. The camps they would set up were stable and they strived to survive and make it to a safe area. The first was closer to the mountains than I would have liked it. It was a high plain which had a lot of the infected there. The second camp was in the middle of a forest that was left untouched for the most part. They were extremely lucky. The camps were in beautiful locations, and they were easy to defend from any threat.



Besides the camps that the group stayed at, there were other camps with other families. Some of them were not as well organized as the camps that were with the others. Besides the two that I mentioned, there were other camps that had been set up by survivors from the area. I made many friends in these camps and through my friendships, they found out that I was collecting some information. It had something to do with my job title, information analyst.