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          In the first years of the epidemic scientists knew nothing about the virus, about how it spread or how it killed its victims. Scientists did not even know from where it had originated.
         All that was really known about it is that once contracted, it acted as a sort of gateway thorough which an as yet unknown secondary infectious agent was allowed to enter the human body.
    The two “viruses” worked in tandem. The initial infection had no symptoms, and its only function it seemed was to disable a specialized defense in the body’s immune system which would allow the secondary agent to invade the victim’s body.
        Much was discovered about the initial virus in the intervening years of the pandemic, but the defense system which it disabled and the secondary agent which caused the actual illness had as yet to be discovered; scientists simply had no clue as to what was happening in the secondary phase.
         Some of the infected had antibodies of the primary virus, but had yet to acquire the secondary illness and most of these had been infected for several years with no ill effects. Others fell ill very soon after the antibodies were discovered in their blood.
         Once the victim began to show signs of illness, death was imminent and their demise was relatively swift. The person would begin losing weight and would soon refuse to eat, their body would begin wasting and they would quickly succumb to respiratory or cardiac failure.
         But, after this secondary infection and the victim’s death, the third and most shocking phase of the illness began. Those who had passed on were reawakening, this occurred exactly twenty-two hours after their demise, death became a temporary condition.
         Scientist attempted embalming the dead immediately following the cessation of brain activity but this did not stop their reanimation. The virus or whatever it was now was unofficially known as the Resurrection Virus.
         Governments around the world began programs to dispose of the bodies of those newly dead. Large trucks were dispatched and the deceased were gathered up in huge numbers and taken to incineration sites designated by the local governing bodies. This worked for a while as once the body was burned it no longer posed a threat, later though it became impossible to keep up with the enormous amount of corpses and the effort was universally abandoned.
         These resurrected corpses craved the blood and flesh of the living. They were carriers of the secondary infection, but they carried a variant of this agent which did not require the primary virus to initiate the illness.
         Now, not only were individuals falling ill from the two viruses but the bodies of the recent dead were roaming about infecting others through their bite, this in turn rapidly increased the population of the reanimated while decreasing the population of the living.    
         Governments worldwide had gone underground, the U.S. and Canadian Governments had retreated to the Cheyenne Mountain Operations Center, as had U.S. and top foreign researchers from around the world who were studying the plague.
         Above ground Planet Earth was now a hostile environment and the human race was threatened with extinction.
     
     
    July 2031: The seventh year of the plague
     
         Charles Lynch, Charlie to his friends, had been a father and husband, now he was alone and he preferred it that way. His wife and all five of his children had passed away when the disease first made its appearance.
         He had in the early days, joined one of the militias that had formed. The government had called up all able bodied men and women to assist the armed forces in an attempt to keep some semblance of civil obedience, the effort failed miserably and chaos now