falloutnpcs | Pʀᴇᴍɪsᴇ

Halloween was weeks ago, but decorations are still up everywhere. Rotting pumpkins sit on porches and driveways, starting to whither and turn brown while their insides squirm. Toilet paper hangs from trees and bushes, proof of some teenage pranks that had been played. Spooky lawn decorations, fake spider webs, blinking lights, they’re all in place, untouched. Somewhere, a motion sensor witch makes a dying, distorted cackle, batteries nearly dead.

The sky is overcast and there’s a chill in the air, just enough to make you think twice about going outside without a jacket. A breeze blows a scattering of dead leaves and trash down the street, but otherwise there’s nothing. Nothing moves, nothing makes a sound. There aren’t any cars on the roads, the birds aren’t singing. Everything is dead silent, there’s no one around but you.

There’s just one problem. If there’s no one else here but you, what are those shuffling footsteps with that staggering, uneven gait coming up behind you, that putrid smell of something rotting? What do you do?

Better think quick.

☣

It happened on the day before Halloween, October 30th. There was a new miracle drug that had been created, and it could do everything-cure cancer, regenerate missing limbs, restore sight to someone who was blind, and many other things. It was new and radical, and the average people of the world took to calling it Salvation due to how incredible it was. And then the horrific side effects were discovered.

Not long after Salvation, or YT-Virus 37 as it was known to the government, began to be introduced to the general public it started to have less than desirable effects on those that had been injected with it; deaths, mutations, and perhaps the worst of all-existence after death. Those that died returned to life, if ‘living’ was really an appropriate term for their renewed existence. Zombies is what people began calling the creatures who had lost all higher mental functions and existed only to kill and feed and sleep, and then repeat the process eternally.

Others just became superhuman monsters-stronger, faster, forever hungry. Some of them retained their humanity and are able to control themselves, some of them didn’t. Others mutated, becoming true monsters, and all the while the cure that had become an epidemic began to spread faster. Transmitted by bites or infected blood, it spread first across the country and then the world, leaving humans an endangered species. Even the animals, most of them also infected by the ‘cure’, are highly dangerous and not to be taken lightly.

All is not without hope though. A few weeks after the outbreak on Halloween Eve, news spread via radio broadcasts that there exists a safe compound where survivors would be safe from the infected. It is protected by a state of the art security system and a handful of genetically altered soldiers-their DNA twisted to safety harbor the virus without turning them into monsters, allowing them to benefit from the positive effects. They pay a price though, treated as outsiders by the rest of those living in the compound due to the fact that they can still transmit the virus just like any of the infected.

There is also word of a cure. Still being worked on, but supposedly it’s shown success. Only those who survive to make it to this compound in the mountains of New York will be able to tell if this is true or not though. To help them along, the commander of the elite guards has left the compound to search for survivors, putting his trusted second-in-command in charge until he returns, but only fate will know if he finds them or if they make it to safety.
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