The Becoming: Ground Zero

• Title Page
  
• Prologue:
  
• Chapter 1
  
• Chapter 2
  
• Chapter 3
  
• Chapter 4
  
• Chapter 5
  
• Chapter 6
  
• Chapter 7
  
• Chapter 8
  
• Chapter 9
  
• Chapter 10
  
• Chapter 11
  
• Chapter 12
  
• Chapter 13
  
• Chapter 14
  
• Chapter 15
  
• Chapter 16
  
• Chapter 17
  
• Chapter 18
  
• Chapter 19
  
• Chapter 20
  
• Chapter 21
  
• Chapter 22
  
• Chapter 23
  
• Chapter 24
  
• Chapter 25
  
• Chapter 26
  
• Chapter 27
  
• Chapter 28
  
• Chapter 29
  
• Chapter 30
  
• Chapter 31
  
• Chapter 32
  
• Chapter 33
  
• Chapter 34
  
• Chapter 35
  
• Chapter 36
  
• Chapter 37
  
• Chapter 38
  
• Chapter 39
  
• Chapter 40
  
• Chapter 41
  
• Chapter 42
  
• Chapter 43
  
• Chapter 44
  
• Chapter 45
  
• Chapter 46
  
• Chapter 47
  
• Chapter 48
  
• Chapter 49
  
• Chapter 50
  
• Chapter 51
  
• About the Author
  

The Becoming: Ground Zero

Jessica Meigs

Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

Copyright 2012 Jessica Meigs

www.PermutedPress.com

February 3, 2010

It all began in late January, 2009. No one has ever been sure of the exact date. The media and the government did too good a job keeping everything covered up. The initial deaths were kept quiet until the chaos in Atlanta spiraled out of control, until the southeast was no longer salvageable. Now no one knows the day the world began its descent into Hell.

Idiots. If only the general population had been warned sooner, more people might have stood a chance of surviving.

A few facts have since been uncovered. The end of the world began at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. The last place anyone really expected. The one organization whose job should have been focused on studying the virus, finding a cure for it, before it could do the damage it has since caused, completely failed at that task.

It began there, and it spread out rapidly. It first ensnared the population of Atlanta, then the southeast, and now the entire world. The sick, the elderly, the young, and everyone in between: It chose indiscriminately, like only a virus can.

The initial virus—the airborne version—started with a tickle in the back of a throat, a persistent cough, itchy, watery eyes. Maybe some sneezes. It looked like a bad case of allergies. Nothing to warrant alarm.

But then, when the virus became communicable exclusively by contact with bodily fluids, when it mutated with a rapidity never before seen, worse symptoms began to manifest. The fevers, the vomiting. Delirium, loss of coordination and speech. Reduced motor skills. Lethargy. Then a sharp drop in blood pressure and apparent death.

And then the world’s nightmares truly began.

I think I once heard that it took three weeks before the government publicly acknowledged that there was indeed a problem—at least, in the southeast. By then, it was far too late. People infected with a virus they didn’t even know existed had already been on and off planes, on ships and in cars, over borders, into restaurants and stores and schools. By then, the Michaluk Virus had already done its worst, and its victims had already begun their homicidal rampages. Only, they didn’t even know it yet.

No one remembers when the media first announced that the madness was caused by a virus. The news took over the airwaves in the span of a week, gradually at first, trickling out from Atlanta’s suburbs and washing over Memphis and Birmingham and New Orleans, being picked up by one news affiliate after another, as if following the virus on its journey. The news crept up on everyone outside the immediate spread zone with a rising sense of impending doom. The short evening news reports were overtaken by stories of growing numbers of infected. There were more and more of them, multiplying by the hour, one after another, always growing, always hungry, always killing indiscriminately.

By the time someone finally connected the dots, by the time the realization struck that the riots and the murders were all caused by this simple virus, it was far too late.

This is the world we live in now. It’s a world of terror, a world of our own making. One year ago, the first confirmed victim of the Michaluk Virus attacked his girlfriend on a crowded MARTA bus in Atlanta. A lot has changed since then. Things will never be the same again.

As for me, I’m somewhere north of Montgomery, Alabama. I’m approximately two hundred miles away from the new Ground Zero: Atlanta, Georgia.

My name is Avi Geller. I’m a former journalist for a newspaper that doesn’t exist anymore.

My colleagues have given me a task. My mission: to track down Ethan Bennett and his crew and convince them to come with me to Atlanta, to help me find the truth about what happened at the end of the world, or die trying.

“You have
got
to be insane.”

Avi Geller glared at the man who stood in front of her. She crossed her arms and shifted her weight to her left leg, scowling, irritation and impatience rolling off of her in waves. She sized up the man’s reaction, cataloguing everything she knew about him and matching it to his words and body language.

Ethan Christopher Bennett. Forty years old, five foot eleven, one hundred seventy pounds. Green eyes, blond hair, former Memphis PD, and total hard-ass. The statistics rolled through Avi’s brain easily; she’d spent weeks drilling them into her skull. Ethan Bennett had essentially become infamous in the year since everything went to hell. The gossip over the limited radio broadcasts she and her colleagues managed to pick up on their ham radios suggested that Ethan was one of the most effective leaders left in the world. Avi’s cohorts agreed with the assessment. Under his leadership, Ethan’s group had become the very best at going into the more heavily overrun areas of the southeast and rescuing people who had been stupid enough to get trapped among the infected. Ethan Bennett was damned good at what he did.

And Ethan Bennett was one stubborn son of a bitch. Or so it seemed.

Avi had spent the past three months tracking this man down. She had traveled through the same infected areas through which Ethan had been, with nothing but her thoughts, worries, and stresses to keep her company, avoiding those
things
at all costs. She’d risked her life to find the man, and insults were the last things she needed to hear.

Avi should have expected it, though. Everything she knew about Ethan Bennett told her the man had a chip on his shoulder larger than a city block. Avi still wondered what compelled six seemingly sane individuals not only to accept his leadership, but to
stay
under it, even when they’d likely had opportunities to get out.

Avi knew the moment she laid eyes on this man that it would take more than sweet talk to crack his hard-as-nails exterior. To convince Ethan of her point of view might even be impossible. Avi willingly acknowledged that what she asked was incredibly stupid, dangerous, and suicidal. But she
had
to try. She and her colleagues needed to find
someone
willing to help, someone good enough to get into the city and stay in one piece, someone as recognizable—even if just in name—as Ethan Bennett. There wasn’t anyone better qualified than this man and his team outside of the city of Atlanta. She repeated this like a mantra, hoping that would help keep her story straight. She didn’t need to screw up and reveal too much, not now.

“I can’t say that I am insane,” Avi finally replied. She kept her voice mild, and her gaze didn’t flicker from Ethan’s face.

Ethan Bennett stared at her, the expression on his face the very definition of incredulous. “You’re actually serious,” he said. He looked her up and down, assessing her. Avi kept her eyes on him. She wasn’t going to allow Ethan to goad her into backing down. She wasn’t a coward. Another story she repeated over and over. “You actually want us to take you into Atlanta so you can, what, take a look around and write a little story that no one is around to read? Not just no, but hell no. I’m not risking my people on some bullshit so you can play investigative reporter like the good old days. We may be good at what we do, but we’re not crazy—”

“That’s debatable,” an accented voice interjected. Avi glanced behind Ethan and saw a woman with long dark hair sitting at the dining table, busily cleaning a disassembled rifle. A smirk graced her pretty features. Avi wasn’t sure if she was amused or horrified that someone could actually crack a joke in the world they lived in.

“—but we’re not crazy enough to go into Atlanta, of all places,” Ethan finished. He glanced at the dark-haired woman with an unreadable expression before he returned his vivid green eyes to Avi.

“It’s not a ‘little story,’” Avi argued. She attempted to push past the perceived insult and remember the instructions she’d been given. “It’s a research project,” she tried. “I want to find out what went wrong—”

“Research projects
are what got us into this mess to begin with,” Ethan snapped. He shook his head again and mirrored her stance. “Like I said, not no, but hell no.”

Avi huffed out a breath as the woman at the table chuckled in apparent amusement. Avi bit back a scowl and nearly sat on the closest flat surface without thinking. Her knees quaked inside her jeans, and she wondered if she were even the right one to be attempting this. She paced away from Ethan a few steps as she examined her surroundings.

Avi hadn’t expected to find the team in a place like this. It was a two-story family home converted into a base of operations. The windows were boarded over, casting the interior into darkness lit only by flashlights, candles, and lanterns. The detritus of seven people living together—bottles of water and packages and cans of food—lay scattered about, though there was evidence of some effort at general housekeeping. Numerous guns and knives lay on tables beyond Avi’s reach. Loose, boxed, and magazined bullets were lined up along the dining table. Several crowbars and even a couple of baseball bats lay next to the neat rows of ammunition. It was, by far, one of the largest caches of weapons that Avi had ever seen. She was sure that outside of the military and her colleagues’ own stashes, it was the largest left in existence.

There wasn’t much furniture left in the dining or living rooms. Avi suspected that the group had demolished the non-essential furniture for the fire that even now burned in the fireplace. They’d obviously stayed in this place for quite some time, judging by the room’s worn-out appearance. But it must have been secure enough for their tastes, considering all of her intelligence suggested that they hadn’t moved their base in five months.

On her arrival, Avi had discovered that the group was borderline militaristic when strangers showed up at their safe house. The moment Avi was allowed inside, she was searched and divested of everything that resembled a weapon. They even took her shoelaces and the elastic from her hair. The caution this group displayed bordered on a bad case of paranoia. It wasn’t Avi’s place to comment, though. To do so would risk alienating the very people of whom she begged assistance.

Avi studied the scratched, worn floorboards and contemplated her next line of attack. She
had
to get Ethan to Atlanta. Her colleagues wouldn’t accept less. To lure Ethan in would be to lure the others in, and that was all she had to accomplish. Avi considered what she knew of Ethan, what his normal tasks entailed in this changed world, the types of things he did on a regular basis.
That,
she decided, was her angle of negotiation.