Chapter 1
Alone
I am alone. The only survivor in this deserted place. My hometown of Housatonic, Massachusetts has been whipped out by the KV virus. Most of us anyway.
All other survivors besides me have been transformed. They have lost all their hair. They are more muscular, which made them stronger, faster, and swifter. It also made them lethal. They are the deadliest thing this side of the Appalachians. They were my friends, teachers, neighbors. I try not to remember. My eyes fill with tears at the very thought of them. That's what happens in a small town. Every single, goddamned person I knew is dead or deadly.
But I have adapted. I am hardened. Before I could never kill a person; now, I am as deadly as they are. My stock of guns and archery equipment (my neighbor was a hunter) has grown. I have taught myself to use each one of these guns, the bows and arrows I already knew.
Nasuada nuzzled at my hand. She is a mountain lion. Abandoned as a cub by her mother, a lioness bitten by the mutants. I raised her. It's a little out there, I understand. But "out there" has become as near as I am to the clothes on my back. I had named her after Ajihad's daughter in the Eragon books. Strong and fierce, but somewhat collected.
My house is just below Flag Rock. It was a church in the 1850s. Not anymore, though. It looks like a regular house; emphasis on looks. I took scrap metal from the junk cars across the river and the gravel bed. I used them to make coverings for the windows and doors. I sandbagged and cemented a wall around my house and its grounds. I stole generators to power my house. Well, it technically isn't stealing. If everyone else is dead or mutated, they have no use for it.
The mutants are wild. They live in the forests, large dark buildings, anywhere where light does not touch. They cannot speak except for roars and growls. They have almost no civilized notions. They have a hierarchy, like a wolf pack does: alphas (the alpha male and his mate) and so on. But from them, I have no one else.
I have seen things unimaginable.
Death and insanity.
The world is ending.
And I, Sloane, stand here hoping
to survive the apocalypse.