Featured Fiction: The Plague S:1 EP:1

A New Author

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EDITOR’S NOTE: This week Eagle Eye writer Zack Webster will begin publishing his first longform work of fiction in the Eagle Eye one chapter at a time.  The summary of his work is below followed by the opening chapter.  Look for chapter two to be published soon.


 

Brothers Ryan and William only have a matter of time to leave their hometown of Tyrone, PA before a relentless, fast spreading virus, breaks city limits. With their friends Lance, Kenny, Jamal, Hailey, and Shawn they’ll try to survive the disease by disappearing into the forest and living among the cliffs and overhangs of Bilger’s Rocks in Clearfield County, PA. Leaving behind technology, family, other friends, and their old lives, they’ll create a new type of society, returning to the stone age.

Ryan is your typical 15 year old, defiant, and independent (or at least he thinks he is). His dream has always been to become a writer. Before the apocalypse, he wrote short stories for his high school newspaper, they were usually dark in content but taught incredible morals. he was short and weak physically, but had a steel vault for a mind, nothing got in or out without him wanting it to.

William is the more responsible 24 year old older brother who only wants the world for his brother. He knows Ryan can do whatever he wants to but he needs some way of controlling him. William is built, he always has a bandanna around his right wrist and loves to mock his brother, but the apocalypse changed that.

These two brothers and their friends will do whatever they can to preserve the past, bring it with them, rewrite it, all while surviving day by day in the new disease ridden world, defending themselves from other survivors and disease ridden ‘carriers’.


Chapter 1

“Come on, we need to get going if we have any chance of escaping it!” my Brother Says.

“Ok, let me grab some food and an axe before we get going.” I say, worried out of my mind that I might have it, but If we prepare for it and I turn over, at least my brother can continue to survive, I’m the little brother so I really can’t defy anybody right now.

“Alright,” I say as I sling a duffle bag filled to the brim with food over my shoulder, while wielding an axe in my left hand, “Let’s Get Going.”

“Ok, get that in the truck” He demanded. On my way out the door I grabbed a notebook and two pencils, one half sharpened and blue, the other ‘out of the box flat’ and yellow.

“Why you grabbin’ that kid?” My brother asked, I blushed but told myself that I was just hot under my teal sweatshirt

“Well, if this is how humanity will survive, might as well rewrite history.” I said. William made no remark and only gestured me to get in the truck, with a smirk plastered across his face.

Our plan was to drive to Bilger’s Rocks in Clearfield PA with tarps, flint, knives, and food. We’ll set up camp with the overhangs with five other people, three of his friends, two of mine.

It’d be a while before we pick them up. They live a few hours out of town.

We start the drive from Tyrone PA, and for a while I was Paranoid but I calmed down and began to write in my book, blue pencil in hand.

”We’re kinda lucky to have lived it now instead of earlier in history. We used dangerous nuclear power until 2039, should ‘the end’ have happened back then, there wouldn’t have been anyone to fuel the nuclear coolers and we would have been done for. A man named Todd K. Quinton invented a way to better utilize solar power, by recycling electrons and recharging them, paired with Lithium Ion Batteries, he made the world’s first fully functional 24/7/365 solar power grid that took up less than an ½ an acre and could sustain New York for an unprecedented amount of time. Soon these plants were all over the world, and some even installed on electric cars, making nuclear fuel unwantable. With cheap, small, and powerful rockets, we were able to send the extremely radioactive and unstable spent nuclear fuel far into space. These carriers would be millions of miles away and unable to hurt earth when they inevitably blew up…”

“What are you writing Ryan?” William asked. 

“Hu? Oh. I’m just writing about our history. Not like Civil War history but more or less about what life was like before the infection.”

William Shrugged and gave a muffled ‘mmn’ noise, sounding somewhat interested but in disapproval.

I took a knife from the bag and resharpened the blue pencil

I continued to write

“…The dawn of 2040 brought the Fossil Fuel War. This war sprouted when all the coal, oil, and natural gas had been used up and poorer countries couldn’t find a means of power or money. But North Korea, disgusted with the bickering, unleashed the man-made virus HZ-1Y. It went worldwide, even in North Korea, by March 2041 and was killing fast. Few were immune to HZ-1Y and those where the few able to survive through it. Humanity went from 14 billion to about 1 thousand in less than a year. As Far as me and my brother know we’re the last living people on earth, we haven’t seen another breathing human for a few hours, which is all the longer the disease needs to infect an entire town. We left our home town of Tyrone PA on May 28th 2041 and are on our way to Bilger’s Rocks to set up a small community with 5 other survivors. We don’t know if they’re immune, we just know they haven’t come into contact with HZ-1Y yet.”

I put down the notebook and pencil, and began fiddling with a knife in my hands.

I think to myself ‘What if Nobody is really immune? What if we are the last ones?‘

I brush it off and try and get some sleep, but it floats in my mind, keeping me awake. ‘What if…’

‘What… if…’