@apartofthegrey
New york New York — god how had his beloved city turned into this. A shell of the bustling life it used to hold — with a gloom-and-doom music seemingly to play in every corner. He remembered when it’d all started, the quarantine: the sounds of helicopters and notices splayed out on every radio frequency. The cautions and prevention measures that doctors and the president adamantly advised. but then. The virus spread again, touching every inch of American soil before crossing the Atlantic and Pacific to touch those of other cultures.
It seemed — pretty apparently — that the world was coming to an end. The spread of the virus, the virus itself had hit fast so quickly that no one had time to react. There was yet to be a cure, but there were few survivors and those who were immune. Jack — for better or for worse — was one of them.
It’s already been a month, and a month Jack had found no survivors — at least not after the second wave hit. His entire family dead (or at least, the ones that were in New York). He’d watched Ana slit her throat when she began to turn, the little humanity still in her saving Jack from doing the inevitable. Saw Austin’s life give way because he the cure (that the doctors had spread) was actually just a method to kill those with the infected cells in their systems.
The only thing that kept him from killing himself was the fact that a few of his siblings were still alive, though across the pacific — Maribelle, Tyler & Wes, Krystal, Adam, Rose, and Belle — who’d all accompanied Krystal to meet her birth mother in seoul. Weeks after the virus had hit, they’d managed to contact Jack (if only briefly) and they managed to set up a radio frequency to use for short-term-contact.
The five minutes on the phone he had to hear the voices were what kept him going. What kept him from killing himself. “there are doctors here — scientist” Maribelle said, ‘from arcanum. they can develop a cure.’ she insisted, ‘but you, you need to keep fighting until we can find a way to come get you.’ Maribelle urged. ‘Your system has the blood that can survive the third wave.’ she stated, ‘you need to stay alive.’
And so he did. He tried. But while he was physically and mentally equipped (given his past experiences) emotionally, Jack was beginning to give way. He wasn’t sure how much longer he could stand the silence of being alone — in a city that had once housed millions, once boomed with so much voice you could kill yourself, — now fallen eerily silent. With the occasional corpse and zombie roaming the streets before Jack shot them dead.
“where are the fucking survivors.” he cursed to himself, kicking open a door the an apartment to scavenge for supplies — and then he heard a noise. Instinct brought whipped the gun out, eyes peering into the darkness for signs of those beady red eyes.
