Patrick McCarthy, or as his friends call him, Pat, is a 24 year old post grad student at Trinity College Dublin; or atleast was. Raised by a single and busy mother in Dublin, Pat was a troublemaker at a young age, but he was brilliant. Pat's mother was a tenured Professor of medicine at Trinity, where Pat himself would eventually attend; much to the dismay of his mother however; Pat studied Arts and English, he did minor in psychology though, just to keep his Mother happy. In August of 2021, Marianne McCarthy, along with 15 students from Trinity, travelled to Oslo, Norway through a volunteering program to assist the PLIKT in an Oslo AVM-FLAquarantine camp. Pat was one of these 15.  For the first few weeks at the quarantine camp things were calm, his mother was extremely busy helping with research and study of the virus, but Pat was loving his role; he volunteered to help the few psychologists that were stationed at the camp in their day to day jobs. However, the volunteering was not without its drawbacks. Pat had seen a staggering amount of death, and heard many tragic and harrowing stories. Pat was able to compartmentalize, he figured that these people needed his help and he was more than willing to give it, that was until things descended into chaos in mid Semptember. 

Pat had seen on social media videos of trucks spraying mist through busy streets, and subsequently, videos of people viciously attacking eachother without prejudice. Everything changed after these reports had surfaced; the quarantine camp became overcrowded and there was a palpable feeling of severe panic in the air. People stopped being friendly to eachother, everyone was standoffish and isolated. The next few weeks were a blur for Pat; he was constantly working and getting little to no sleep. By the time October came around, the group was already supposed to be home, but they weren't allowed to leave, and Marianne wanted to stay behind to help. Through the chaos that gripped the camp, Pat and his mother were seperated into different sections of the camp. Pat knew his mother was busy and just hoped that she wasn't worrying about him. Soon after the seperation, reports started coming in from the perimiter of the camp of groups of agressive people attacking others. On October 29th the camp was overrun; in the ensuing chaos Pat managed to find his mother. They were able to slip out of the camp and find a working car; they headed into the city in an effort to find out more about what was happening. By the time they were entering the city, it was too late. Broadcasts started coming through the car radio talking about Napalm and the QZ; Pats mother started panicking and their car crashed. When Pat woke up a few hours later he was unconscious and his mother was no longer in the car. Pat stepped out of the car and was met with a wave of heat like nothing he had ever felt before. Delirious, he looked up to see that the city was shrouded in flames. Luckily, their car had crashed just a few hundred metres from the city port, which by some miracle had not been engulfed in flames. Pat looked for his mother for a few hours, screaming her name, but the fire was spreading towards him and he was forced to retreat to the port after being chased by a group of infected. As he was running down the docks away from the infected and trying to find a boat, he spotted one that seemed to be slowly moving away from the jetti. There were several people on the boat waving their hands at him and yelling out to him, but he couldn't understand what they were saying. He ran towards the boat and managed to jump onto it in the knick of time. The boats captain explained to him in broken English that the city was lost and they had to go. Several days passed as they travelled South West along the coast of Norway. Even though they were hundreds of kilometres from Oslo, they could still see a faint orange glow. Their bad luck seemed to continue, as they travelled South West and then North along the coast looking for somewhere they could port, they only saw darkness, smoke and fire. A few weeks passed and they managed to get as far North as the Lofoten Archipelago, but they soon began running out of food and water, and wiuth nowhere safe to port, they were left with little to no choice; the captain told everyone on the boat that their best bet was to head towards Iceland. This seemed stupid to Pat, as they probably wouldn't make the trip without enough water, but not knowing how to captain a boat, he decided it was better to go along with it. Just as they were leaving Vestfjorden, an enourmous storm seemed to come out of nowhere from the North. They became hopelessly lost at sea in the storm, with their navigation tools either broken or overboard, and no sun in sight to use for bearings, they simply tried to outlast the storm. Things did not go well; the storm became more severe and several of the survivors on the boat went overboard. The storm eventually passed, but they were now hundreds of miles of their course and hopeless lost, not to mention, there were now only three of them left, among the survivors thrown overboard during the storm was the captain. It seemed all hope was lost; Pat couldn't even speak with the other two survivors as the captain was the only one who could speak English, and even his English was poor. Even though they couldn't converse with one another; there was nothing they could do; so the three of them lay down in the cabin and gave up. Several days passed, on the fourth day after the storm they ran out of water, and still could not see land. Eventually the two other survivors perished from dehydration, exposure and exhaustion. Pat couldn't bear the smell anymore and threw the bodies overboard, he then went to the cockpit, sat on the captains seat, and prepared for death. 

Some time later

Pat woke up drenched, freezing and close to death. His vision was foggy, but he could make out the slight sound of waves coming ashore. He meekly stood up, confused as to where the boat was and how he had gotten onto the shore; he looked behind him and could just make out the boat, it had crashed into a large, jagged rock that was sticking out of the water. Pat looked at the boat and cried, but he was so dehydrated that no tears came. He turned around, and headed inland, looking for water and food; but in the back of his mind he knew what horrors lay ahead.