Seeing as everyone is already setting the mood, here`s my backstory. Took me a while to write it, so I hope the balance between information and imagination is still there.
The year is 2038 and the world as we know it no longer exists. Once bustling towns and cities are no more than derelict ruins, nature has reclaimed highways and airfields and the human population is but a mere shadow of its former self.
Twenty-five years earlier an ultranationalist group in the Chinese heartland began a sinister operation. A cabal of die-hard party officials, radicals, xenophobic industrialists and high strung intellectuals secretly amassed an exotic collection of the world`s most horrifying weapons. Suitcase nukes, nerve agents, biological weapons… Some of the threats were so exotic and obscure that people simply held their existence to be the stuff of myths and bad conspiracy theories.
The goal of these ultranationalists was a liberal interpretation of ancient imperial centralist ideas. A veritable return to the `Middle Kingdom` by creating an island of civilisation in a sea of barbarity. Although their obscure nature allowed them to slip below the radar of most intelligence services, even the best laid plans can go awry.
As various bombs and diseases erupted all across the globe, one suitcase nuke and two highly contagious and exotic biological agents detonated prematurely in the western regions of China. As politicians fought over who detonated the nuclear device and how to strike back, people in Shanghai, Hong Kong and Qingdao started to display weird and repulsive symptoms. Sores covered the skin and rotted sections peeled off as victims slowly died suffocating in their own blood. As if the chaos of a nuclear explosion and a mysterious pandemic weren`t enough, reports started flooding in about “living dead”. As society plunged into chaos, the last news reports indicated a connection between the mysterious pandemic and these horror stories come true.
A similar scenario played out all across the world. What scattered news reports came through suggested that the United States, France and Great Britain held a short nuclear exchange with Russia and China, but no one ever heard which places got hit and around those cities that got hit, the mayhem was so all-encompassing that nobody realised there was a war going on. In the end, war, politics and society lost all meaning as small groups of survivors fought just to escape zombified people and nuclear fallout. Civilization ground to a halt.
But mankind doesn`t go extinct that easily. Those who survived the chaos and the initial waves of diseases banded together and now try to carve out a living in the wastelands around the world. Living in walled and fortified towns, they get by on agriculture, craftsmanship, trade or theft and piracy. Some communities try to investigate how their lives could change so drastically. The following is an excerpt from the diary of a survivor living in what used to be Vallstedt, near the ruins of Braunschweig, Germany.
“It seems that the world has gone mad. We run into all sorts of things that we never held to be possible. Zombies are the most common. As society collapsed, they were the first to appear. A strange disease wracked entire cities. It turning people into husks, rotting hunks of flesh that seem to be without soul. They only seem interested in eating live things, if they can catch them. Gyorgi thinks that it was some sort of biological weapon that made them like this; I think he knows more than he`s letting on. After all, he used to be a scientist and we have little reason to trust in science nowadays.
There is another kind of zombie that roams The Badlands, one even more horrific than the bio-zombie. These seem to stick to certain regions and they look and behave differently. It seems almost as if there are areas where people just lose their minds, literally. We`ve seen these groups of people, just mumbling the most incomprehensible things, milling about, bumping into each other and looking completely at a loss to do any coordinated action. Then out of the blue, they`ll stagger towards you and try to harm you with flailing fists and biting. Some carry sticks, clubs, axes…we`ve even been shot at once, but it seems that they`ve lost all the sort of control required to properly wield and aim weapons. The most horrific thing is that some still seem to have at least a bit of awareness as to who they are and what they do, but are powerless to fight it. We were driving slowly past a group once and there was this young woman, not even 25 years old if I`d have to guess, who suddenly looked up. Her face was dirty and what had once been beautiful blonde hair was now a pale and tangled mess. The look in her eyes was one of pure desperation; all light within them had been extinguished. Then she started crying and begged us to take her away from something she called `The Voices`. She told us how they said different things all the time and that she couldn`t satisfy them no matter how hard she tried. She wanted to tell us all about those voices, but then it was as if something took her voice away. She just gawped at us like fish sometimes do. You could see that it took all the effort she could muster to say her last words: “Please end us.” She then slumped to the floor, coughing up blood, before falling completely silent again. She didn`t make any effort to wipe the blood from her face.
It took us a while to really come to terms with it, but in the end, Matthias put them out of their misery with a machine gun. No one made a sound as they were mown down, they just died silently. On the way back he told me that he had heard whispers telling him not to pull the trigger, but to follow them into the forests. Now, Matthias is some kind of ex-military, but you could hear an undertone of light panic in his voice. Frankly, I don`t blame him. The whole episode was just blood-curdling. I still have nightmares of it sometimes…
Did science create these horrors? If you listen to Gyorgi theorizing about it you`d say yes, but so much more stuff is happening that doesn`t seem logical. A bio-weapon or a brainwashing might explain the zombies and I guess marauding bands of people who just steal, rape and kill can have an explanation through psychology, but we`ve also seen things that only appeared in ancient lore. Something that looks like a ghastly mangled corpse with wings. We`ve shot down a few and they seem to have transformed or mutated, somewhere halfway between beast and man. We call them Gargoyles or Banshees, because they like to sit up high and they issue high pitched wails, but they look mostly like demons. There are worse things than these gargoyles however.
One time we had an encounter with what looked to me like a dragon. Banshees go down after a few hits, but the time that we met a dragon, it took almost all our ammo to bring it down. It strafed us four times and burned Wilhelm to a crisp. Half an hour later it was dead, but we all suffered burns from it and our jeep was destroyed. The most disconcerting discovery that all its wounds were fresh: No scars tissue. It seems that is might have been a young dragon. At over 15 meters long from head to tail, it was cause for great alarm. What if there are bigger ones than that? We had heard stories of dragons to the South, in the mountains, but never really believed them. The fact that it might be true and that we may have to journey south one day, lead to the building of better vehicles. Finally we hear stories of trolls walking the forests and of vampires and evil sea monsters. We may not have an explanation for all of that (yet), but we do have a countermeasure…
Better vehicles are required, so on Matthias` advice we made our way to a derelict army base. It seemed that a few bandits had taken up refuge, but they were lacking in heavy weapons so with the help of two jeeps we cleared them out soon enough. We found some old German trucks as well as some Hummers with all kinds of weapons on them. Matthias said we should salvage the trucks because they are German. That way, spare parts would be easier to come by. We also found lots of weapons and ammo, so it looks like we might stay here.
We`re still at the army base. Our first truck was recently finished and I serve on her. We named her Ysolde. In the meantime we try to build more trucks and a few of those Hummers for close-by things that we need to take care of. They even found a tank and are trying to get it running. I don`t know how we`ll ever get it working, what with fuel being so difficult to come by, but if we meet a dragon with that thing, chances are we`ll finally have a fair match-up. For now, our objective is to go south to a place called München where there are supposed to be a few big labs. We need to get as much data from them as possible. Maybe it will bring us closer to the Deep South, beyond the Badlands.
The stories about the South are just as outlandish as what we hear around us. The air is supposed to be more pure there. It`s always warm and sunny and fruit you can eat without testing grows everywhere. The creatures there are all healthy and the same as they were before the Cataclysm. There are even stories of “Beastpeople”: part human, part animal, but nothing like the Banshees. As weird as this seems, we found an old archive which had both stories and old images of that, but more recent books show only pictures of normal people. What were they: a different tribe, gods? And what of these stories of trolls and vampires and giant lizards, like dragons but without the wings? Where did they come from. Did science make these monsters, or is there really such a thing as dark magic?
How did the world end up being such a strange, harsh place with nothing but chaos? Perhaps the answer lies to the South, or to the East. Whatever the answer is, we will continue to hunt for it as long as we draw breath.”
and with the right plans food wouldnt be too hard to get .
">me.
