Dead or Alive?

Prologue

DAY ONE - 6:52 A.M.

I don't really know how this all started; or if I did at one point I don't remember anymore. Whether it was the wrong pig meeting the wrong bat or bird or if it was some fungal or bacterial disease that had spread through the air or water. Maybe it doesn't even really matter. Maybe it never did. It certainly doesn't now. I only remember how it started, and ended, for me. The only problem is the end wasn't really the end and it turns out there is life after death.

I think we'd all fallen into a sort of false sense of security after having made it through the last pandemic scare. It had seemed to follow a similar course at first; hospitals overrun with people exhibiting symptoms not attributed to any known illness, stay at home orders were put in place, face masks were mandatory and people struggled through the government shutdown and losing people to the illness. It had taken a few days before people realised that this disease was much worse and by then it was too late to stop it. Panic set in and the world had become a dangerous place. People infected concealed their symptoms and boarded planes to get the hell out of dodge. The planes that didn't crash from being overrun as people turned took the disease global. Within days there were outbreaks through cities across the world. The heads of government and state went underground, global communication failed, and soon nobody knew what was going on. Between the Dead rising and and no one having any answers as to why, people were scared to death and no one knew who to trust.

For some, it was nigh on impossible for them to reconcile what the world had become. Death was always considered to be such a permanent event. People were supposed to go into the ground, and for those who believed in the Rapture they would be brought up into the sky, not come back from the ground. Parents killed their children to spare them from the awful fate and then took their own lives. People committed suicide in droves. The morgues were filled beyond capacity and funeral homes worked through the night to handle the onslaught. But the effort was in vain as more continued to break out of coffins and cold storage. Graveyards and morgues were now places to be avoided at all costs. Crime skyrocketed as police grew increasingly afraid that the next call they took would be their last. The line between the living and dead grew thin. Drastic measures were put in place as the world's humanity was at stake.

Then came the city cleansings. Plans to bomb the major cities using thermobaric weapons launched from overhead planes were set into motion. Being aerosol based, at detonation the bombs would incorporate the available oxygen and essentially set the air on fire; creating an explosion with temperature of almost 6,000 degrees, the bombs would ensure that nothing was left alive. Dallas had been the first city to go and then the whole world went to shit. The bomb hit its mark and people everywhere watched as the city went from buildings to rubble.

I think that was the moment when everyone knew that the zombie apocalypse had officially begun.