Future Lost

15

We pass by a skeleton of a saber-toothed tiger and another of a woolly mammoth, along with a wall of dire-wolf skulls. Each exhibit looks exactly like it did when I was last here as kid, as if this is the one part of the city that’s remained untouched since the world fell apart.

“Where are we going?” I ask.

“I’m taking you to speak with our leader,” Paige says. She leads us into a long hallway with doors on either side, the light dim over the dark carpeting. We step inside one of the rooms at the end. As the door shuts behind us, a black woman with braided hair turns toward me. She’s wearing a heavy gray coat over cargo pants, but her face isn’t covered up like the others.

“Dr. Campbell?” I recognize her immediately, but I’m still surprised to see her here—and leading the survivors.

A weak smile splits her wrinkled face. “Elena. I can’t believe you’re here.” She gives me a loose hug, her movements slower than I remember. She gestures at the conference table and office chairs in front of us. “Please sit down, and we’ll try to explain everything.”

I take a seat and study the room we’re in. The power’s on, illuminating the paper maps that cover one of the walls. Most of them seem to be of Los Angeles or California, but there’s another one with a map of the United States. Some areas are filled in with different colors, while others have big X marks over them in red tape or pictures tacked onto them.

Dr. Campbell turns to Paige. “Were there any problems?”

Paige sits in a chair next to me and removes the scarf from her face, revealing an older, harder version of the girl I know. Her long hair is more gray than blond, and there’s a new scar through her left eyebrow. “Downtown is overrun with Infected again, but otherwise no trouble. We didn’t see any Militia. Didn’t find anything of value either, unfortunately.”

Dr. Campbell nods. “You brought Elena here, and you made it back safely. That’s all that matters.”

“Do you know where Adam is?” I ask.

“No, but I’ll get my best people to look into it. Don’t worry; we’ll find him.”

I’m antsy to get moving, but I can’t run out blindly looking for Adam. The world is too dangerous, and I need to know more before I rush into anything. “Can you tell me what happened to this future?”

“Where do I even begin?” Dr. Campbell sits in front of me and folds her hands on the table. Sadness overtakes her features as she watches me for a long moment before sighing. “It started twenty years ago. A bioengineered virus was released on Black Friday at dozens of different shopping centers in all the major cities across America, just in time for it to be spread by people traveling home after Thanksgiving.” She stares down at her wrinkled hands as she continues, her voice solemn but steady. “They called it the Black Friday Virus. It quickly became a devastating pandemic that swept through the United States, resulting in basic services being shut down. Hospitals were overrun. Looting and rioting became commonplace. The police couldn’t keep up.”

“It got so bad that we ran out of room to put the dead,” Paige adds. “They just started piling them up on the side of the road.”

“My God,” I whisper. I guessed some of this from what I glimpsed earlier, but hearing it out loud is even more horrifying.

Dr. Campbell glances at the map on the wall. “The largest cities in the United States, which were hit the hardest, were abandoned except for small, violent gangs of survivors. People were sectioned off into quarantine zones by the military, but the virus kept spreading, no matter what the government did to stop it. It became a global epidemic, and a few months later, the entire world had crumbled. Billions of lives were snuffed out in less than a year—and there was nothing anyone could do but try to survive.”

“We lost so many people in those early days,” Paige says. “Friends. Family. No one was safe. The only reason we survived was because you and Adam warned us, giving us some time to prepare.”

“How did it spread so quickly without anyone stopping it?” I ask.

“After the virus was released, no major symptoms were reported for over twenty-four hours, allowing it to spread unnoticed,” Dr. Campbell says. “The first sign of the virus was a light nose bleed about four hours after infection, but then there would be nothing until thirty hours, when the symptoms began to feel like a cold or the flu—fever, headache, muscle pain. Nothing that would make most people visit the hospital. It was only at sixty hours from infection that things started to really go bad. Severe pain in the stomach and chest. Vomiting blood, which soon became blood pouring from the eyes and nose too. This would go on for a few days, during which time doctors tried to treat the symptoms, but inevitably it ended in death. But by then, it had probably already infected someone else.”

“Only a few people seemed to be immune.” Paige rolls up her sleeve and reveals a large, mangled scar on her arm that almost looks like a bite. “An Infected did this to me a few years ago. Good thing I’m one of the lucky ones.”

“So those zombies out there have the virus too?” I ask.

“The virus mutated about five years after the pandemic, when we were just starting to pick ourselves up again,” Dr. Campbell says. “But people didn’t die this time—they became Infected. Stuck between life and death, their minds so decayed they don’t know who they are anymore, their bodies out of their control. It’s a miracle they survive at all, but the virus keeps them alive on very little food so that it can spread to others.”