Blackbird's Fall - Jenika Snow

Preface

It was a flu vaccine that collapsed civilization, which destroyed humanity.

What was supposed to help prevent a common virus ended up being the cure for cancer. It had been hailed worldwide as a miracle, a medical breakthrough, one in which the scientists thought they had come across something monumental. They had, but what they brought to humans was a hell on earth. The ones who had gotten the vaccine started exhibiting signs of cannibalism and necrosis immediately. The infection was far too advanced and spread too quickly for a cure to be created.

Everyone thought they were safe if they stayed away and waited for the sickness to die off. The scientists and physicians refused to take responsibility for what they’d done, what they created. They thought they were helping people, curing something that up until then was incurable.

They’d been wrong.

The infected had the ability to contaminate others through bite and scratch, and the virus spread at a monumental rate. They were not simply the sick, but the “infected,” becoming crazed, hungry for human flesh.

They were no longer considered human by any means. They were, in every sense, walking corpses.

The virus slowly killed them from the inside out, made their flesh rot, every orifice bleed, and all logical reasoning vanish. The infected focused only on the primal need to feed.

This was the world they lived in now, tried to survive in with each passing day. Starvation, death, rape, and being hunted by the infected was the world now, and the ones standing, the healthy, needed to be the strongest and have no remorse in doing whatever they needed in order to survive.

1

The fall of civilization

It was the anarchy and chaos that was the most frightening at first, the fact that humanity was slowly crumbling and that nothing was ever going to be the same.

The news reports blared that people should go home and stay there until they got official word that everything was okay.

Maya knew it wasn’t going to be okay.

Those words were just something to placate society, to make everyone stay calm in an otherwise crazy situation. It was just something to keep everyone in line, but it wasn’t doing its job, not in the cities, at least.

There was no cure, would never be a cure, not given how fast the infection was being spread.

Bites.

Scratches.

Blood-born infection.

That’s how it was spread. The healthy humans walking around with those little white paper masks probably thought they were safe, but they were far from it. That wouldn’t save them when the infection wasn’t airborne. The ones that thought they were safe were fools, especially when they got bitten, a chunk taken out of their body, and the infection pushed into their bloodstream and changed them from the inside out.

Maya had seen an infected only once, but she knew as time passed that would change.

“Turn that off, sweetheart,” her father said from the bed.

Maya looked over at him, saw the ashen look on his face, the fact that he had dark circles under his eyes, and that he was starting to bleed from his nose and mouth. She turned off the radio that was repeating an emergency broadcast about the infection, one she’d heard countless times.

“How are you feeling?” she asked and moved toward him. The slight commotion of her mother in the kitchen couldn’t hide the noise coming from her father: the sound of dying.

He wheezed and pushed himself up on the bed. “How do I look?” he asked and tried to smile, but it looked weak, sickly.

“Honestly? Like shit.” She was teasing, but it was obviously the truth. Her father had always told her never to sugarcoat anything with him, that honesty was a genuine reaction.

Her father, before he got sick, had been full of life, always teasing, calling it like it was. He wouldn’t have had it any other way. To even think that he’d die, and most likely very soon, was too much for her. So Maya joked about it, and so did he. It was their way to cope.

He chuckled softly and reached for the glass of water beside him. She grabbed it before he could wrap his hand around it, held the straw for him, and brought it to his mouth. He took several long sips from the straw but started to cough. Swirls of redness filled the glass, and she felt her chest clench painfully. “I feel like shit.”

She grabbed a washcloth and dipped it in the cold water before wringing it out and bringing it to his