AN: Here we go, another chapter.
Just to let you know, there will be OCs that appear in this story. This is a chapter where we'll meet one of those OCs and it will also start to give you some idea of the background of this story. I will also be tweaking character ages (particularly at the time of the outbreak) and some of their back stories for purposes to fit the story and the timeline that has to be established.
I hope you enjoy! Let me know what you think!
111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111111
"Just got the call in. Fifteen new transfers in a week," Randall Oliver said.
Samirah Lafram sighed and waved her hand at him to dismiss him from her office as quickly as he'd entered the space. She didn't even bother parting her lips from the rim of her coffee cup. The transfers had been coming in non-stop since she'd taken over this position and hearing about more to come was less surprising than if he'd informed her that, outside, the sun was shining.
There was no need to have any opinion whatsoever on the transfers—in or out—because it wouldn't change a thing. Samirah was currently in a position where she had just enough power to appear like she had power, yet she knew that she had relatively little more than the prisoners that she was somewhat in charge of.
Often she felt like her job was the bastard love child of a paper pushing position and the bearer of bad news. They called it the year sixteen and Samirah had been working for almost seven of those years simply being something of a go between for those heading up several different prisons and those who were, ultimately, the voices for the decision makers—or, perhaps, decision maker— for what was left of the free world.
The free world, of course, had never existed. Not really. Maybe the closest it had come was in the early years. Year one it had begun, maybe a turn toward being a free world—a truly free world—but by year seven? The freedom was waning.
They called it the year 16 A.T. It was sixteen years, give or take because the world stopped counting for a moment when it held its breath, after the turn. Some people had called it the end of days. Others had called it the end of the world. The closest, perhaps, that anyone came to the truth was when they called it the end of the world as they knew it. It had been that, but it had hardly been the end of the world.
Now, though, when they made maps? The maps would look very different than the ones that Samirah had learned from her father when she was younger. Populations of people were wiped out across the globe. The virus had pushed many people to extinction. Smaller countries had gone first for very practical reasons—there was nowhere to go, and when the virus spread? Space was a bigger commodity than most things. Distance between yourself and those infected, in the beginning, was what had saved those that had survived. Later there'd been other factors, for sure, but in the beginning? The room to get away from the threat, to assess it from the outside, and to figure out how to handle it was what had kept the entire human race from going extinct.
Of course, Mother Nature had a little help in cutting down the numbers of people and in virtually wiping out most of the world. Very few people knew, though, exactly what had happened. People, in general, had been too distracted by the virus itself—by the dead that had begun to terrorize the living—to even realize what else was taking place.
Every government had, in the early days of infection, had the same tagline. Don't worry. Don't panic. We have the resources that we need. We will prevail.
We will prevail.
None of them had ever said exactly who "we" was. The outbreak of the virus had been the perfect cover for a world war that was a long time coming. It had been the perfect cover for a world war that most didn't even know was being fought. When they'd first begun to take in prisoners, they'd all been questioned about what they saw and heard in the beginning of it all. They'd all been quizzed on their experiences—right down to the sights, smells, and tastes of the earliest days—to see what they knew.
Some remembered the helicopters. The planes. Most who would have had close, personal contact with the equipment were dead. Everyone else simply remembered them flying over in the early days. It was the government handling things. The government everywhere was handling things.
It just so happened that the earliest form of handling things, around the globe, was to try to eradicate the masses of people who were most likely to become infected. Already, early on and behind the scenes, those that were "important" enough – and rich enough— to be protected were being relocated. They were being moved to safe spaces and protected zones where they would be away from any chance of being infected. For all intents and purposes, they simply disappeared. They boarded very different planes than those that were dispatched to try to handle the masses like they were crop dusting undesirable humans.
At first, all the governments had been involved, from what Samirah knew. At first? It had been an understanding that had been reached more quickly and with more easy agreement than most anything the large unions had ever brought about.
But that didn't last long and the trouble started. That's how it always worked, wasn't it? People used other people, promising to share power in the future, and then? When it came down to it? They turned on each other. They turned against each other and tried to become the last man standing. It might be a lonely world on top, but it was a loneliness that many men hoped to experience.
Samirah, herself, had just reached thirty at the time of the outbreak. She'd been in New York working on an internship when everything had gone mad. Her dreams and desires back then had been to get some kind of government job working with finances. Her thirty year old self would have never imagined what that might mean for her future.
Like most of the people she was around, she evacuated the city at the first sign of the outbreak. She knew that some very influential people that she had some contact with were gone, flown somewhere else for the time being, but she didn't know where. She didn't know the details then. She only knew some of them now—she knew enough that she had to be careful to keep her mouth closed lest she be thought a threat. She knew at the time, though, that every measure was being taken and that, for her own safety, she should head for the least populated areas. They were setting up safe camps in less populated territories to protect people from the outbreak.
Space was important. Space and limited contact with anyone who had been even near the earliest signs of the virus. That was the earliest key to survival.
She remembered, in far more vivid detail than she wished to have burned into her mind, the way that things had gone. What started out well—with so much promise—had gone bad so quickly. Those who were in control—or those who thought they were in control—soon lost control.
Behind the scenes? There were power struggles and power shifts. One would be leader fell to another, fell to another, fell to another.
But all of that? It was taking place far outside the realization of the masses. The "people?" The everyday, average, run of the mill, unimportant people? They were fighting for their lives in a very different context.
Samirah had fallen on both sides before the virus started to really run its course.
Nobody knew for sure, but the history books would say that it was five years after the turn that the virus became a mid to low level threat. At that point, most of the world had figured out that the whole population was infected. It was in everyone's blood. When you died, you turned. There was no avoiding it. There was no cure. There had been mass infection.
But the virus wasn't a danger by itself. It was only a danger if the dead were left to attack the living. If put down promptly, it was no more a threat to society than the herpes' virus that caused fever blisters. It was a nuisance, perhaps, but it wasn't fatal.
By the year 5 A.T, the active level threat of the virus was fairly under control. People were adapting. They were changing. Society as it had once been was gone. It was a distant memory. A new society was rising up and it was made up of people who knew how to survive—against all odds, perhaps. It was built by people that were slowly taking their world back from the dead and were choosing to live the only way that they knew how anymore.
As the population of dead already walking started to fall "under control" and people were beginning to manage the numbers before they even grew again, the world was starting to breathe again. At least, the parts of the world that had survived the behind the scenes war were starting to breathe again.
As far as Samirah knew? Most of the world was dead now. Most of the countries that had once been something were now nothing. Maybe they were wastelands. Maybe they weren't. Maybe the powers simply said they were. Perhaps, one day, people would go exploring again and "rediscover" the other places in the same way that Columbus had discovered America.
Those in power would certainly consider whoever they found there to be savages. After all, they considered most of the masses located here to be savages.
By year 7 A.T, captivity motions were underway. Those who had come searching for civilization had already been taken in, rehabilitated, and put into "positions". They were called the people of the first wave. They were as close to untouched by what had happened as it was possible to be.
In theory? Samirah was one of the first wave people. In practice? She was never so certain, but she didn't dare to say anything. Silence, these days, was more than golden. It was required. Silence was a survival mechanism.
By the year 7, the wars that had raged on behind the scenes were quieted. A new power rose up—won fair and square in the dirtiest ways possible. A new world order was being put into place. The population would grow, but it would be a carefully culled population.
The prisons had filled, in the beginning, like the people were being poured in by the bucketful. Out of those earliest prisoners came the second wave citizens. They were tamed and rehabilitated. Those found suitable for release were turned loose to rebuild the world as the new common man. Those that remained, though, on the outskirts of the new society?
Theirs was a dark and dangerous world.
The earliest "Surrender Notices" were posted in random locations and expected to be followed by law. Samirah remembered, when she'd first heard about the practice—before the crack down on captures began—thinking it reminded her of the stories her father had told her about the Native Americans who were expected to obey relocation notices that they never saw and had no way to understand. Their obedience, though, was expected under penalty of death. Similar, she had thought, were the practices surrounding the Surrender Notices.
But she hadn't said anything. It was clear that she would have been in the minority, and the new order? It didn't take well to criticism. Not from anyone.
Samirah kept her mouth closed and worked the jobs that she was given. She moved from being nothing more than a paper pusher to a position where she worked over a small prison on the border between what had once been Tennessee and Kentucky. Her education and her new experience, as well as the fact that she was pretty good at managing things, had landed her the job that she had now.
Now?
Now she was a go-between still, but she was a go-between for the government—or at least one voice for the true power, since there were many voices that spoke for the one—and the largest prison that they currently had running.
Region Thirty Three was their special interest project.
And Samirah was expected to keep the project from failing.
