Chapter 12: Hunting Store
Since she was a child, Maya Collins was considered a genius. Born into one of the royal families that ruled large territories of Jyera before the Great Unification. Maya received the best tutors and attended the best academies in Jyera, and with her talent and family resources, she graduated as a doctor before she was even considered an adult. Not only was Maya a genius, she was hard-working and obsessed with medicine, and when she graduated at such a young age, she didn’t stop there.
Soon after, she obtained her doctorate in microbiology, and her many articles and discoveries in the area of alien pathogens made her one of the biggest names for the first interstellar colonization of Jyera.
But Maya ended up refusing, choosing to be part of the second group. All because she would not have a leadership position in the first group. Which, for her, due to her pride in having so many achievements at such a young age, was considered unfair. But she understood that there were more experienced people from other powerful families occupying these positions in the first group.
With that, Maya continued to improve herself even more, obsessed with her studies, she had no interest in anything else. Be it the opposite sex or friends. For Maya, everything was just distractions.
It was due to her talents that three days before the apocalypse began, Maya was one of those selected and received a high-level confidential mission from the government to study a strange pathogen that was infecting all the animals in the world. The objective was to try to quickly discover a cure, or ways to contain the infection...
But the worst seemed to have happened; Maya only received a few samples of the virus, and some animals that were already dead when they arrived at her laboratory. The other scientists who were supposed to join her on her mission never came, and contact with the government was cut off.
A day before the chaos began, she received a message from her father, saying that the disease had spread to humans as well, and he was one of those infected. Most of the high-ranking officials, fearing the lethality and aggressiveness of the disease, decided to flee, joining the first colonization group in the hope of escaping the disease.
And before communications were cut off, her father’s last message told her not to hold back in protecting herself from infected people and animals, and that the family’s state-of-the-art jet was on its way to pick her up... But as it turned out, her ride never arrived, and the one who came to Maya’s rescue was a young firefighter.
Despite being young, Rick was fearless and demonstrated great experience and leadership skills. He also had a lot of information about what was happening, and most of this information matched what Maya had obtained from the Government so far. The way he treated the infected, eliminating them without mercy. It could be considered cold and frightening to others.
But for Maya, who had to deal with the many corpses coming back to life inside the quarantine area... She knew that this was the norm now, and those who didn’t adapt quickly would die in the first few days of this new pandemic.
The Virus, called ZY by Rick, would continue to mutate through its hosts to continue its spread until the entire world was infected. There was no cure, nor anyone to come and save us; everything would depend on whether we would adapt or perish.