Chapter Text
Bilbo flipped through his journal before he began his new entry. He was diligent in his writing, for multiple reasons, which varied by the day. On good days, it was to leave a record of what occurred, what life was like, so that if humanity ever returned to its once great (great being a disputable term) size and power, future generations would know what happened. On bad days, he wrote to hold onto his sanity.
Because he was alone.
He didn’t always read his earlier notes. Sometimes he preferred to not remember the beginning of the end. That day he did. And he recalled the events with horrifying clarity.
The strain was called A-Z-Zero-G or AZ0G.
It had driven humanity to near extinction.
It was also called the Pale Flu, because of how the infected became so white just before death.
They say Patient Zero was a criminal. A bush-whacking poacher who got bit by an animal—no one knew what—and got sick. His doctors assumed it was just a common infection. In their defense, he had gotten similar things in the past. He was a hunter, a massive man with a cruel grin and scars of bites and claws littering his body. Didn’t seem like the type of guy to worry about.
But they should have.
Because he was also a traveler. He went all over the world often enough, looking for new prey or meeting dealers. It just so happened that he was meeting one in London the next week.
And that’s went everything got so devastatingly worse.
He had the first strain. A virus unused to human hosts. So he lived a lot longer than future victims.
And he infected so many.
On buses and trains and planes and in the streets AZ0G spread like wildfire. People just thought it was the flu at first. But then doctors started to notice its unusual…characteristics.
The paleness.
The muscular dystrophy.
The uncontrollable bleeding.
Because this virus didn’t act like a normal flu. The seasonal flu, even H1N1, killed through fever. They dehydrated a person and the infected died of it. AZ0G was much, much worse.
It made you rot.
Muscles shut down. People lost mobility. Nerves died. Limbs had to be amputated just to avoid gangrene infection!
And it stopped blood clots. A prick on the finger could make someone pass out.
The virus also had what one doctor had called an ‘unpredictability factor’. The oxymoron was named for the virus’s ability to lay dormant in the human body. Some people could show symptoms within the hour of infection. Some didn’t show it for weeks.
But it was always contagious.
So the hub of London became a distribution factory.
And within the year the human population was less than 10% of its original size.
Within another it fell to less than a tenth of a percent.
And it kept falling.
The fact was there were immune people. Approximately half a percent of the world’s population was estimated to be safe from the disease.
They could still be carriers.
But as time passed, and the last of the non-immune humans died off, a new problem arose. Basic survival.
There were no more supermarkets or gas stations or any western luxuries. Electricity and running water were only found where they were built in naturally, off city or town pipe lines. People who could not fend for themselves died as quickly as the sick.
The most dangerous part of the world now though, was the people.
Roving bands of marauders roamed the streets. They had guns from fallen soldiers or stolen from shops. They took all the spare food. And they killed whomever they felt like.
Bilbo was not one of them.
He hid.
He had been living in a small town in Ohio when the world (for all intents and purposes) ended. He was a grocer. The only survivor left in his entire town. Luckily for him, he hadn’t seen any bands of killers or marauders in months.
He hadn’t seen another living person in months.
He had been surviving with a small supply of canned goods, his large garden, and a larger hoard of ramen noodles he cooked over a Bunsen Burner powered by a crank generator. He lived in the local library. And he tried to stay sane.
It was difficult.
There were days where he would lose himself in a book and not eat or sleep until he had finished the entire series. There were days he’d go to the mall and draw faces on the manikins and wish they would answer when he spoke to them. There were days where he wished he could find a gun and end it.
There were good days too. Days when he would write his own novel on his typewriter and feel accomplished. Days when he went to the park and fed the squirrels. Days he dreamed of the world reborn.
Perhaps living simply became a habit of his. Physically, it was not a hard life. No one harassed him. There were no dangerous animals in the area. He could finally read a book without worry someone would interrupt him.
Sometimes he wondered if he was the only person left in the world.
It was one of those times when he began to write his latest entry.
And then he heard someone knocking at the door.