Late Stage: An Apocalyptic Short Story

By Eric Horn

A group of survivors struggle to find safety and supplies in an increasingly hazardous city behind the quarantine lines. A city where the living dead, aren't the only enemy that you have to contend with.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Eric Horn
• Release date: Apr 25, 2016
• ISBN: 9781310145001

Eric Horn

Eric I. Horn was born in 1991. He has had an avid love of writing since he was 6 and after reading years of Fantasy and Science Fiction has endeavored to put his own work out for the market.

Book preview

Late Stage

By

Eric I. Horn

Copyright © 2011 by Eric I. Horn

Cover Art © 2016 by Eric I. Horn

Cover Design © 2016 by ebookcover_xper

All rights reserved. This book or any portion thereof may not be reproduced or used in any manner whatsoever without the express written permission of the author except for the use of brief quotations in a book review.

All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons living or dead, is purely coincidental.

Edited by: Jim Moreland

First Printing January 2016

Prologue

In the later years of the twenty-first century, the world was considered to be peaceful at last. However, in the background of this peaceful setting, costly government research diverted revenue towards the military research sector. This growth resulted in an explosion of small independent contract research companies competing for government contracts. It was in one of these hastily constructed facilities that research was being done on a virus which would make people more docile. A failure in the sterilization process resulted in the virus escaping with results far from the intended.

The nature of the virus and its design resulted in an unusually long incubation period while the airborne portion of it was dissipated. After that incubation, Stage One in proper emerged: High fevers, which debilitated the victims, hospitalized the entire scientific staff and everyone they'd come into contact within the three months since the containment failure. During the incubation period, the virus mutated to be passed by intimate human contact. Many people died in Stage One only to be revived by Stage Two of the virus's infection cycle.

Stage Two was considered by the committee that approved of the research to largely be a success; the resurrected people showed little to no self-determination thus fulfilling the original docility requirement. This lasted for an average of three days. Stage Three introduced a finalized mutation of the virus, which altered the affected people such that their primary motivation was the continual spread of the mutated virus. This was achieved by either biting or clawing at the selected victims. If the skin had been punctured by a bite, there was a ninety-nine percent chance of successful infection. Of course, the infected did not always stop at a bite, the virus had the unexpected side effect of stimulated hunger, a ravening, driving hunger in the infected; they would devour their victims until distracted by live prey