Chapter 2: New York City
Alexandre stepped outside his apartment and locked the door securely behind him. His apartment complex was run-down, with warped walls, torn carpeting, and creaking stairs—but this was what he'd asked for, after all. He'd wanted an unassuming place to live while he made his long-term plans.
The outside of the building looked nicer than the inside, at least. New York had invested a lot of money into maintaining a good appearance for even its tenement buildings over the past few years.
The millions of refugees who had flooded both the East Coast and the West Coast states during the Great Wave had been fairly unusual compared to most refugees who came to the US throughout history: many of them had been quite rich. Indeed, unlike most people fleeing war and gang violence, the refugees of the Great Wave had often been those rich enough to charter a ship or plane out of their country before the zombie threat could reach them.
The US and other countries in the Americas had taken heavy advantage of this, providing resources to these refugees at high costs. There was little need to collect extra taxes or donations to house and feed these displaced people, because they could actually afford it!
For major cities like New York, this provided the existing local economies with huge boosts that slightly offset the global economic catastrophe of the Great Wave itself. Major emergency construction projects extended Manhattan further into the New York Harbor, and they were filled at once with housing projects which were sold and rented immediately to the African, Asian, and European immigrants who arrived with full bank accounts and little else.
But for most of these immigrants, they had no way to continue their businesses, and many of them even lost fortunes which were tied up in several European and Russian banking institutions whose gold and silver bullion had to be abandoned when Virus Z's victims consumed the cities where they were stored.
Without this collateral, and with no hope of ever seeing it recovered in a meaningful way, the rest of the financial world simply declared the accounts of these poor people to be worthless.
So New York, along with many other major cities in the White Zone, grew richer while the billionaires who fled to its shores grew destitute.
In the year 1885, France gifted the United States with the famous Statue of Liberty, a monument celebrating both freedom for France itself and the end of institutionalized slavery in the US.