It had been nearly 15 years since the plague took its first victims. It went by many names: ICN-19, Greywater, Cough Syrup - settling on a single label was hardly a priority for the people watching their friends and families drop dead around them. Regardless, its effects were clear. Once infected, there was no hope for the host. First, they would develop a sporadic cough, and then, with few - if any - other visible symptoms, they would be dead within a week of their first contact with the virus. It was a fast, infectious, and invariably lethal disease, created to inflict death on a massive scale in an enemy nation. Obviously, it hadn't stopped in just one country. The plague had spread like wildfire, advancing through Asia and into Europe. Planes and boats had carried it into North America, along with other, more isolated countries, where it had devastated all it touched. The virus was man-made, created to finish the war that had been raging around the globe for 13 years. America had made it, China had developed it - some people even thought that the North Koreans had somehow weaponised it. It didn’t matter now - in this irreversibly broken world, the wars and politics of the old order were of little concern to anyone.
The strain of the war and the plague was too much for even the more powerful governments of Earth to bear. One by one they crumbled, plunging the world into an age of anarchy. Looting, mass desertion in the military, gangs of bandits and marauders rearing their heads all over the world, preying on those too weak to resist. Rumours of safe havens and peaceful communities materialised; all were proven to be false, and the world continued to spiral out of control, showing no sign of stopping. When the plague began to spread in England, gangs and looters quickly took hold in the major cities. People fled from urban areas to the rural countryside, desperate to escape the virus and the killings. Most were far too late.
It took a decade, but by 2033, things had begun to calm down. No longer were raiders and looters quite so prevalent. Small towns had emerged both in the rural countryside and from the ruins of their predecessors. The cities were no longer lit entirely by ceaseless gunfire, and the people seemed to have stopped murdering each other on sight. For the most part, anyway. One such town lay within what remained of West Bromwich, slowly but surely being repaired by its few remaining denizens. Before the plague, it had a population of around eighty thousand, and was undergoing a large-scale economic boom, resulting in shopping centres and retail parks being built not just in the town, but all around the local area. Nowadays, these gigantic complexes had fallen into ruin, picked clean by looters years ago. Vegetation had reclaimed what was left, creating towering spires of brick and leaves. The tarmac roads and concrete pavements had been ripped apart by the roots of the trees that had overgrown their roadside plots, making travel even by foot a chore. People existed in small pockets, inhabiting crumbling buildings or wooden structures built after the world collapsed. They lived simple lives; farming the land, hunting and gathering, and trading with other small communities.
Those simple lives, however, were by no means uneventful...
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