Prologue

As the people of Initium Novum, Antarctica, and a bunker in the mountains of Eastern California woke on November 11 to watch the Veterans Day Ceremonies there seemed to be nothing amiss. The members of Congress that attended were planning flights to return home for the Thanksgiving Day break. There were thousands of out of town visitors that attended those ceremonies, and who would return home within twenty four hours. The amount of people they would infect would be in the tens of thousands, and secondary infection from those could reach the millions.

Three days later a special news bulletin stating that both the US President and Vice President had died of a mysterious biological germ of unknown origin. It seemed that the cities of Washington DC, New York, Los Angles, Denver, London, Paris, Rome and Moscow were also infected. Several smaller outbreaks in other locations had been reported, and it seemed that the carriers were people that had recently visited the infected cities. The CDC had stopped all travel, both commercial and private.

For a few days the biological germ begins to spread like wild fire then seemed to go dormant. The CDC warned that it could become active if the source could not be found or a vaccination developed. At the CDC research center, scientists did not understand the link to the human DNA and the ease which the germ could be transmitted. Humanity was lulled into thinking it was over when no new cases were reported after a couple of weeks, no new cases, but over ten million people had died.

On November 15 there was a short message from Ralph with some numbers included but no mention of what they were. Silvia said they were a code she and Ralph had used as kids, and then she provided the radio frequency needed to contact him.

In the US, since the elected government was in no condition to lead the people, the military decided the ranking flag officer would institute marshal law. A four star Admiral in Jacksonville, Florida became the head of the government. He mobilized all military troops including National Guard, and basically stopped travel outside a twenty mile radius of your home. As for food, he ordered that the local authorities take control of all food supplies and ration supplies according to family size. It became apparent that local authorities were making money by black marketing food to those who had money and were willing to pay for it. It was not long until the masses resolved the issue, when those in charge of the supplies were killed and it became a free for all to get whatever you could.

Farmers started to band together to protect their farms and food resources. As roving gangs would enter a farming community, if any hostility were shown the gangs were killed and their bodies hung for display to show what would happen to the rovers that entered a self protected community. This seemed to become the standard way of life the world over, as communities isolated themselves to maintain their food supplies and protect their way of life.

The world was relaxing as they felt the threat of additional attacks was not imminent, and most of the world governments had relaxed marshal law. Food was on the move again with store shelves stocked with most foods.

As December approached, the terrorist were glad they had moved all the canisters into their designated locations before the first trial. Those controlling the release believed that if they died they would be rewarded in heaven by Allah. December 23^rd dawned as an unusually warm day, with the malls filled and people in somewhat of a festive spirit. Starting in Iceland at noon, the contents of the biological germ filled canisters began releasing their contents. Over a million canisters world wide would be triggered at noon local time in the most populated locations. The real unknown to the terrorists was the African continent, but all they could do was wait and see. By noon Icelandic time the next day, approximately eighty percent of the world human population had been infected.

With the sunrise of December 30^th, people were dying by the millions. With no one to bury the dead the stench of the rotting flesh encompassed the world. The leadership of the terrorist group was horrified to see almost one hundred percent of the Islamic nations were dying. He called his scientists to find out what had happened, but they had died the previous day. The seven top leaders of the group huddled together when a messenger brought a letter from the Imam that had initially blessed their plan, condemning them for their actions. What they did not know was the messenger had been infected and passed the germ to the leaders of the terrorist group.

Once infected, the germ took from three to five days before death. The germ seemed to attack the body's organs and cause them to dissolve, which initially caused vomiting and then bleeding in urine and finally the bowels. When the lungs and heart was attacked, death came in a few hours. From pictures shown, the pain was extreme, and because it happened so fast there was no relief for the pain. People were killing infected family and friends just to stop the suffering, then finally killing themselves. By mid January over seven billion humans had died.

As the community slept, Robert and Nancy traveled back to early November again looking for more information. The thing they were looking for was to see if any vaccine against the germ had been developed. They were in the lab of the scientist that had found and mutated this germ. He had his head in his hands muttering something about those fools. Robert entered his mind and saw why he was so distraught. He had asked for a delay until a vaccine could be developed to protect the Islamic people. Robert saw a part of his mind that was developing a vaccine, but it was far from complete. He took the information for Sophia.