Carolina Blues
The year is 2026, the location is North Carolina, and the world has gone to shit.
Some four years ago the world was hit by a pandemic of biblical proportions; an infectious disease which ran riot through the global population. It was believed that the first cases began in Paraguay, first spreading to neighbouring countries then making it's inexorable way north to the good ole US of A. Regardless of what people believed, the fact was by the time it reached Texas it was already far too late.
Of course, in this version of Earth no-one had ever heard of zombies outside of the practitioners of Voodoo; George A Romero was a man who'd never existed. So when the illness called the 'black mottle plague' (named from the discoloration it caused to the skin) made the recently deceased rise from the ground and start making meals out of their loved ones (heedless of blades or bullets to anything except the brain, naturally) the police, the national guard, even the army were ill equipped to subdue the irresistible tide that soon rampaged through the streets. The only silver lining that came in the terrible months that saw the entire world fall one civilisation at a time was the development of a vaccine from the bites of its original carriers. It was no surprise that rats were found to be the culprits; they had already tried to wipe out the human race once, no reason they wouldn't try to do it again.
What followed was a fever dream. Two nightmarish years of running and hiding passed before the human race managed to rally, reorganise and start rebuilding in the remains of a once great civilisation. It was a sobering realisation in those early days that 'black mottle' had come within 1% of destroying human beings as a species entirely. It was two more years before things like electric lights and heated housing became the rule rather than the exception. Nowadays America exists as a series of mostly isolated towns; barricaded behind walls of scrap metal and timber, populated by survivors who've seen the worst that the natural world had to offer and lived to tell the tale. Life is taking it's first baby steps back to normalcy; there are farms, working generators and markets, even the pale ghosts of things like refineries and munitions factories exist, although truthfully on life support.
This story begins in one such makeshift town. It is called Rosa's Charm (named after the town's Founder and Mayor's daughter, who has a flair for the poetic) and is home some five hundred souls scraping a living in the dirt or on the road some twenty miles south of the husk of the once great Charlotte. Life is tough here, but at least now the people have a fighting chance.
Where the story goes? Well, that's up to them.
I'll expand on this later. But this is the rough outline so far.
The year is 2026, the location is North Carolina, and the world has gone to shit.
Some four years ago the world was hit by a pandemic of biblical proportions; an infectious disease which ran riot through the global population. It was believed that the first cases began in Paraguay, first spreading to neighbouring countries then making it's inexorable way north to the good ole US of A. Regardless of what people believed, the fact was by the time it reached Texas it was already far too late.
Of course, in this version of Earth no-one had ever heard of zombies outside of the practitioners of Voodoo; George A Romero was a man who'd never existed. So when the illness called the 'black mottle plague' (named from the discoloration it caused to the skin) made the recently deceased rise from the ground and start making meals out of their loved ones (heedless of blades or bullets to anything except the brain, naturally) the police, the national guard, even the army were ill equipped to subdue the irresistible tide that soon rampaged through the streets. The only silver lining that came in the terrible months that saw the entire world fall one civilisation at a time was the development of a vaccine from the bites of its original carriers. It was no surprise that rats were found to be the culprits; they had already tried to wipe out the human race once, no reason they wouldn't try to do it again.
What followed was a fever dream. Two nightmarish years of running and hiding passed before the human race managed to rally, reorganise and start rebuilding in the remains of a once great civilisation. It was a sobering realisation in those early days that 'black mottle' had come within 1% of destroying human beings as a species entirely. It was two more years before things like electric lights and heated housing became the rule rather than the exception. Nowadays America exists as a series of mostly isolated towns; barricaded behind walls of scrap metal and timber, populated by survivors who've seen the worst that the natural world had to offer and lived to tell the tale. Life is taking it's first baby steps back to normalcy; there are farms, working generators and markets, even the pale ghosts of things like refineries and munitions factories exist, although truthfully on life support.
This story begins in one such makeshift town. It is called Rosa's Charm (named after the town's Founder and Mayor's daughter, who has a flair for the poetic) and is home some five hundred souls scraping a living in the dirt or on the road some twenty miles south of the husk of the once great Charlotte. Life is tough here, but at least now the people have a fighting chance.
Where the story goes? Well, that's up to them.
I'll expand on this later. But this is the rough outline so far.
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