The Hunters

Introduction

Introduction: The Infected

What if...

You've all seen the movies, watched the television shows, played the video games... and the outcome is usually the same: once the zombie apocalypse happens, humanity is doomed. Every scenario is different in some way or another, but regardless, society usually collapses. Either the zombies win, or civilized men and women turn on one another. Boom... game over; end of story.

But, what if?

Let's say that, by some miracle humanity manages to rebuild... to move on... to form governments, establish supply lines and defend themselves against the undead menace. What if cooler heads were to prevail, and people with honor took control instead of humanity falling back into its darkest times where the strongest ruled... and did so by fear and intimidation? What if things like racial inequality, gender bias and the general hatred of anyone who didn't fit into society's norms became outdated and irrelevant? What if the sins of the past were erased to create a better future? What if people were allowed to worship as they saw fit without being ridiculed or persecuted for their faith? What if mankind finally grew up?

Wait, who are we kidding... we're talking about humanity here. The Earth's apex predator. One of the few animals that preys upon itself: Mankind.

Humanity has managed to do some wonderful things in the few thousand years that we've ruled the planet, but in the grand scheme of the universe, we are an afterthought, a footnote; a single line in Father Time's glossary. Throughout history, empires were raised: Assyria, Egypt, Rome, China, England, the United States... but each of these great nations finally fell, whether due to outside attack, internal struggles, or most often: political turmoil (although the demise of the latter is the focus of this story). Most empires didn't fall to invaders, however, they fell because arrogant men assumed that their ideas were stronger than the invading army's weapons. Sometimes they were right; Solomon, Alexander, Churchill... but more often than not, a sharpened sword could pierce an iron will.

But I digress. In late 2021, the first zombie attack was recorded in Wichita, Kansas. Three people were killed by a crazed individual, and as police surrounded the obviously uncooperative assailant, they were forced to open fire. When that didn't work, fifteen armed police officers tackled the man, and while the cell-phone videos of police brutality went viral, they finally managed to get the deranged man subdued. Of course, things didn't end there. The bitten officers were treated and released from area hospitals, and subsequently went home to infect their families. As you might expect, much like the videos, everything went viral.

The CDC figured it out within a week, but by then the 72-hour incubation period had allowed several people across the Pacific and the Atlantic. Containment became irrelevant, so one single researcher at the CDC had a good idea, and the powers that be actually listened. Instead of cordoning off the infected and protecting the healthy, which obviously never worked in the movies, the infected were abandoned and the healthy were advised to move into the vast open areas of Montana, Wyoming, and North Dakota. Millions of people were living in refugee tent-camps, while the major cities were simply abandoned. The situation was far from perfect, but it saved lives, and in the end, that was all that mattered.

Now, for the entire "Zombie Apocalypse" scenario, here is what the CDC discovered: as far as the 'living-dead' zombies from the movies, that was just a scientific and biological impossibility. The human body simply cannot reanimate after death, as the muscles would contract rigor-mortis without a steady supply of oxygenated blood; no matter how much electricity the brain was producing. Instead, the infection affected the individual's higher brain functions, and eliminated everything that made them just that: individuals. What happened after the infection took hold was similar to a lobotomy, and the now brain-dead person's only thought was hunger... insatiable, unending hunger. They were unable to feel pain, remorse, or regret, and as such they would march forward on broken limbs to attack friends or family regardless of what prior relationship each might have had. To be blunt, they weren't the living dead, they were literally the living brain-dead.

How did it happen? That is somewhat of a controversy. Immediately, the west blamed the middle-east for creating a biological weapon that clearly defied the laws set by the Geneva Convention. But after further research, nothing could be proven. Furthermore, the first (known) victim was an auto mechanic from Wichita, who hadn't left his home-town within the incubation period. The virus didn't rot the skin or cause the individual to lose teeth or hair like in the movies, so besides the telltale groaning and the thousand-yard-stare, they exhibited no other symptoms, and the mechanic in question didn't seem to have any suspicious marks on his body. The results were inconclusive, and all the biologists could do was assume that the man consumed some sort of bacteria that bonded with his DNA; forming the virus over a period of months... if not years. Other theories existed, but we'll explore those later.

Unfortunately, the CDC also discovered that the infection seemed to be irreversible... at least at the time. The affected portion of the brain simply stopped working, and several post-mortem examinations showed rot in the frontal lobe. In the mid 2020's, science and medical technology wasn't advanced enough to repair the damage or stop the infection, nor could biologists isolate it enough to create an inoculation. Instead, groups of the infected were rounded up for various experiments, everything from testing new drugs to developing different medical techniques to learning what a new weapon could do to an otherwise healthy, human body. In short, zombies became the new lab-rats.

The world changed as well. The [uninfected] population now existed at one-tenth of its early twenty-first century levels, and many smaller and undeveloped countries simply ceased to exist. The 'superpowers' remained, but now they had minimal armies and war became irrelevant. Each turned away from their allies to protect their own, and a new age of isolationism began. This ideology wasn't created by the once-great United States, but they did adopt it, and with large swaths of healthy farmland and abundant livestock, it was assumed that they could survive indefinitely without any outside help. This is where our story begins.