"Terrorists. That's what they told us it was at first, just terrorists. That was never it, deep down we all knew it, we just weren't ready to admit it.

New York was the first to crumble, they knew where to hit, they planned it out so perfectly. You want to spread a disease? Grand Fucking Central Station at rush hour. You can barely breathe in there without coming in contact with someone else. If they'd dropped a bomb, things may have been a lot different. A bomb, you get threats for. A bomb, you might see it before it detonates. Get out of there before the shit hits the fan. This thing looked like a smoke bomb, some asshole must have just dropped it in the middle of the crowd and hauled ass out of there. Nobody even noticed it lying there until it started spraying this nasty smog into the air. Then it was hell. People choking, people screaming, running, getting fucking trampled. "Bomb! Bomb! There's a bomb!" they were all shrieking, hell, if I had a penny for every idiot who screamed Al Qaeda...well, I'd have a lot of pennies, but it wouldn't matter now anyway. I'm dead. The ones who got trampled were the lucky ones, at least they died right away.

By the next morning, the station had been cleared out, quarantined, secured in every way possible and crawling with bomb squad. The news called it a false alarm, which should have been a tipoff. We were the last country on earth to 'fess up if something was a false alarm. America: land of free speech and worst case scenario media. We'd have the threat-o-meter on high if someone so much as pledged allegiance wrong. Saying nothing's wrong is basically code for board up your windows and lock your doors, bad shit's going down. Within the week, it started going down. Out of nowhere, the hospitals were overflowing with patients, all superficially healthy, save for the fact that they were bleeding out of every possible orifice and vomiting blood all over the freshly sanitized linoleum floors. But wait, that's not the crazy part. Seventy-two hours after admission, every patient underwent a series of extreme seizures followed by heart failure after which they seemed to miraculously revive with very minimal heart activity, not enough to propel them the way it did and a severe case of what could only be described as violent dementia at the time. What characterized this violent dementia? These patients attacked everyone in their path, except each other. Not only did they refuse to acknowledge any verbal warnings from hospital staff, but also the physical force that the police eventually brought in. I bet you can already guess what the connection between all these people was. Yeah, they were all in Grand Central Station at the time of the first attack. So you figured that much out, what do you want? A gold star?

Here's the neat little catch though, the unfortunate healthy few who got in the warpath of these infected patients found out that this disease was communicable. Much like AIDS, it turned out to be in the blood. Unlike AIDS however, it was a little harder to avoid. These were people who had been bleeding in every way imaginable and heaving up all kinds fun internal bleeding. These were also people who were hell-bent on biting and scratching you if they could reach you. Doctors quickly figured out that getting infected blood in a wound, your mouth or eyes transmitted the virus a lot faster than the airborne form it had originated in. You didn't need a Ph.D to discover that little gem. All the New Yorkers had to do was look out their window. It wasn't just in the hospital, it was in the streets. Not everyone who had been infected had checked themselves into the hospital. Within days, New York was going down. It was all over the media. Evacuation. Quarantine.

Instead of putting money into research to help cure this disease, instead of dealing with the crisis in our own backyard, we, the good ol' US of A, kept on keepin' on with the war. Hundreds of troops who weren't already stuck over in Iraq were shipped over. Because who else could do such a thing to our fair country if not terrorists from Iraq? Nevermind the fact that we were so busy bombing them into oblivion that they wouldn't have had the time or resources to create such an advanced, new biochemical weapon. No. Ignore that part. They were obviously the deviants behind this all and had to be stopped. We didn't go in alone though, it wasn't hard to get Canada and Britain on board with the fighting, sending their troops over alongside ours. As if bombing another middle eastern country was the only method to keep what was happening to New York out of their fine countries.

But hey, guess what? London Victoria Station was the next to get hit. Being a hell of a lot smaller of a country than the States, Britain was in a panic. Lucky for them, they had the upperhand on the disease, after seeing New York plastered all over the news. The people of London took it upon themselves to evacuate the city before any government official issued an order of evacuation. Cut and run. They had the right idea. It didn't stop the infection completely though, a handful of people who were in the Station at the time the attack was planted managed to slip through the fingers of quarantine.

Soon enough it was like dominoes, Toronto, Paris, Berlin, Moscow, New Delhi, Dubai, Tokyo, Beijing. When security hit record highs in subway stations, the attacks were staged elsewhere. Shopping malls, bus stations, busy intersections. It took that long for us to figure out that this wasn't terrorism. This wasn't between America and Iraq. By now, this was bigger than all of us. A global attack of unprecedented proportions. In the midst of all this, guess what the great powers of the world were still concerned about. The crashing economy. Out of all the shit that was going down, they were pissed that the economy was a mess. Nevermind that the infection had taken out half the world already. No, just keep worrying about the value of our precious dollar.

All at once, the US pulled every last soldier out of Iraq. They'd been fighting alone for months now, the British and Canadians had tucked tail and ran the second London was attacked. We wanted the boys home to serve and protect. Against what? Against disease? Do you know how well a virus responds to an AK-47? Not that well. This was when the heavy-duty evacuation and quarantine measures started. We were the first to abandon our own people. Every state touching New York was beyond saving, so we levelled them. With people still there, we levelled them. Because we'd let this get to a point where the only way to stop it, to control it, was with controlled blasts. Within a month, every state boasting a high population was nuked into a wasteland.

The land of the free became a death trap. We were generous enough to send some nukes up to Canada as well, took care of their little issues. Toronto, Ottawa, Montreal. Hell, Montreal wasn't even that bad. They were trying to contain the infection. At this point, I think our government was just a little trigger happy. Countries with a nice little spread out population were doing okay. Not us though, not China, not Japan. We were fucked. Cramming too many people into too small a space. We screwed ourselves over. Figured that modern day medical science would save us from any wildfire disease.

Months to late, someone came forward in Russia, claiming to have fled from China, 'fessing up on international television that they were part of an international, internet-based anarchist group, responsible for the attacks. This individual was one of the ones responsible for planting the disease in Beijing. They detailed the years of planning gone into this, their mislead goal to level out the economy. The disease was stolen from a military research lab, it was a synthetic virus, created for biochemical warfare by the Russians. It was intended to be a flu, just bad enough to cripple the enemy long enough to get the upper-hand. The early result was rejected, it was so unstable and unpredictable that they couldn't risk using it. Apparently, the dumbass anarchists that stole the supply weren't aware of this. They launched it expecting a bad flu. What they got was a blood bath. Apparently, after New York and London were destroyed, they tried to put a stop to the subsequent attacks, but the people in charge of them either couldn't be contacted or refused to stop at this point in the game. Leave it to an anarchist group to be that goddamn disorganized. I always knew it was an oxymoron.

While the President of the US was busy nuking the shit out of his own country, other countries were coming up with different ideas on how to stop the spread. Canadians were evacuating into the islands of Nunavut, the Northwest Territories, Nova Scotia and Newfoundland. Basically, anywhere they could hide that didn't touch the mainland. After that, everyone who could get on an island got on an island. People scrambled for ships and airplanes, for freezing temperatures and inhospitable deserts. The infected couldn't survive there. A few cities tried one damn brave thing though, they barricaded themselves in, rather than fleeing. Walls, fences, heaps and heaps of sandbags were erected to keep them safe. Most of these places had a breach in their defenses, all it took was one little mistake and, surrounded by the infected, the city went to hell. Two places accomplished this feat, both taking cues from 1961's design of the Berlin wall.

Then the broadcasts stopped. Around the world, radios, televisions, the internet, phonelines, it all collapsed. We had lost communication. We lost electricity. The people to the North were fucked. We knew it, they knew it. The cold killed them. Then it was the desert folk, heat and dehydration took the ones who weren't used to surviving there. Dwindling supplies spelled death for people the weather didn't get to first.

We were in the middle of an apocalypse.

Now, twenty years later, the world is a wasteland. There is one city left on Earth. They call it Utopia, our own little private joke, since it's basically one giant slum. Call it New Berlin if you want to be a technical douchebag. And if you really want to get technical, there are actually two cities left fully intact, but the other one is hell. Half of Utopia's original residents died of starvation, regular illnesses, heartattacks, even 100% natural causes. But the other city, they must have barricaded some infected inside with them. We've seen that city. It's nothing but a festering hole of diseased cannibals. Even the toughest, bravest survivors don't go near there. Thankfully, the Germans did such a damn good job of cleaning up Berlin after the initial attacks. They acted quick. Didn't screw around, didn't waste any time attacking middle eastern 'terrorists'.

For twenty years, they've kept this city safe. The last safe place on Earth. The infected remain scattered, still mostly centered around metropolitan areas. Their numbers have dwindled with the rest of the human race. Survivors from all over the world have found this place, people who remembered the final broadcasts claiming Berlin was secure. From Canada to Australia to South America, they found this city. Took refuge here. Made a new living here."