00: Prologue

AN: I'm totally going to have to rewrite this, I'm aware that it's rather incoherent in it's flow. I had something better in my head when I was planning out the idea in October, but alas the rules are only to write between the 1st and 30th of November. I plan on coming back and rewriting this again once I have a more set ideology in my head, hopefully that will come to me over the course of the next few chapters. So please do not judge me by this prelude.

 RegardsMea

Word Count: 1015

00: Prologue

The world was a very different place 160 years ago. To us that was only 3 generations. Our grandparents lived in a world far different from ours. Filled with technology that hindered their lives as much as it helped, forcing them to adapt the world around them and bend it to their will, and made them go blind to the greater picture all around them. The beauty being killed day by day, by their selfishness and greed, choking on the infestation that was the human race. All the talk of solar energy and green power, it meant nothing in the end... came too late as it were. Blinded by their world of information streaming to them hourly by the news channels, newspapers, and Internet websites; even phones would deliver messages to them from anywhere in the world at any time of the day, until they stopped paying attention to where they were walking; to the world that they actually existed in. They lived in the mighty "Digital Age".

Then it all changed, while they had their heads buried in their datastreams and gigabytes, it snuck up on them like a panther in the dark. Silent but deadly, no warning, just death. They called it... "Ixxium", named after Ixion from Greek Mythology. Ixion, in a fit of madness (or so he claimed), killed his father-in-law and was cast out by the neighboring princes who refused to forgive him his sins. He was forever known from then on as the first man guilty of kin-slaying. I'm sure there's more to the story behind his name than that, but it has currently be lost to time. 

To us Ixxium is a disease, a darkness that infects the very soul, takes the lives of whole families and leaves nothing behind in their wake but an empty shell. To us it was death itself, with no way out and no way to avoid it. At first those with Ixxium came slowly, one by one, starting in remote fields and small villagers. The people would just fall over dead wherever they stood. It cared not for age or race or gender. The old, the young, immunized or not. Nothing made a difference. Something killed them without visible marks, no wounds to be seen anywhere, just sudden death. Within hours the corpses got up, as if nothing had happened. But they weren't the people they used to be, they were just bodies still moving around but the very essence of the person inside, their soul if you will, was gone. 160 years ago they used to refer to them as Zombies.

Their only thought seemed to be to reproduce, to infect the living, to wipe out human kind. But never once did it touch anything that wasn't human. In time it spread from one person to the next, from one home to the next; enough that whole villages were closing their businesses and their homes to anyone they didn't know or trust. But even that didn't stop it. Soon enough various government departments took notice; the CDC sent team after team to investigate the spread of this plague, but even their hi-tech biohazard suits couldn't stop them from catching the mysterious disease. It didn't stop them from bringing it back to the cities with them either. Through their interference it soon enveloped the land, it left no one uninfected in it's wake; it seemed to be transferred by touch, by bite, by blood... by just breathing in the air around an infected person. And they were everywhere.

Within a week over 20% of the earth was wiped out, within a month it was 50%... within 6 months it estimated more 90% of the 8 billion people that used to populate the world were dead. Bodies rotted in the street with no one to take them away. The few that survived were barricaded in special containment facilities, or isolated in the most remote places in the word... and that's where they had to stay. With the human race on the verge of extinction and no one safe from Ixxium, there was no one left to cure it. To figure out where it came from or how it worked, or hw to stop it.

Only people... ordinary people... living in airtight Tupperware with no place to go. The survivors and the animals; the only ones to successfully take on the walking dead, for some strange reason Ixxium left them untouched as they cleaned up the leftovers of what was once the most predominant species on Earth. They'd tear off the flesh, and rend the bones to nothing, and not a single effect did it have on them. They carried on as normal... nature took back it's hunting grounds, the trees and plants spread through steel and brick alike. The world became greener, which is probably the only upside to this whole debacle honestly. The plague that was humanity was wiped out by a plague of it's own.

Well all but wiped out anyway. Lost is the history behind it all, the stories and tales that started everything; books like to fires, internet without power, all of the information that used to flood our minds on a daily and hourly basis is gone. 160 years later there are still humans... though they're far different from the ones that used to be. Somewhere along the way, things changed for us. In very different and dramatic ways. How or why we're not entirely sure because of all that lost knowledge. Now it all comes from stories told from grandparent to parent to child to grandchild. Stories that tell of the origin of Ixxium are only that, fictional tales of what might have happened beyond the facts I list above. Verbal stories are not the same as written stories. They're all lost, just like civilization as we used to know it is.

So now... now we start again. We start writing it down once more. We start again here and now. This is the story of how it all ended...

... by the hands of the first true survivor.