"After All We've Been Through. Everything That I've Done. It Can't Be For Nothing."
                                                                                                                                                                                                

I had a pretty easy childhood If I say so myself.
Raised by my American dad and Dutch mother, we had a very warm and loving family.
I’ve spend most of my younger years in Haines, growing up with a lot of friends around me, and people told me I was very socially skilled, and that they loved to be around me.
I enjoyed my time through middle and high school and always did decent with my grades. I wasn’t the best of the class or anything, but it wasn’t hard for me to reach the goals that I wanted to reach.

I was looking up to my dad for as long as I can remember. He was a Police Officer for the Haines City Police Department and I wanted to follow him in his tracks and become a Police Officer as well.
And so I did. I signed up for the Police Academy as soon as I was done with high school, and they took me in. I loved it there, I could finally do what I wanted to do from when I was little and I had the best times learning and working at the academy.
I was flying trough all of my courses and had massive drive and motivation to reach my goals and become what I always wanted to be. But after almost a year, everything changed..

At the end of 2019, just after short from a year of training at the police academy, rumors started spreading about an outbreak. They said a virus that came from China started spreading and they called it AVM-FLA-19. The government started issuing lockdowns and all kinds of restrictions to keep the virus from spreading but many Americans thought it was a hoax, or that the virus was created to distract them from the politics or other things that were happening around the world. Many thought it was against the law and that their freedom was being violated.

Rumors started turning into facts, and by the end of January 2020, almost every part of the country had some sort of restriction. People started protests against the restrictions; Protests became riots and not much later everything started to spiral. I didn’t really know what we had to do. The academy stopped after the riots became worse and I was just waiting till everything that was going on stopped and we could turn back to normal. Unfortunately.. That never happened. Shortly after the outbreak of the mutated version of the virus, AVM-FLA-BETA, my parents both got infected. Everything went quick and I lost them not long after the first symptoms were showing. I know that if you were hosting the mutated version of the virus there was no way you could escape it..
The Government lost grip of the situation and everything went to shit. The country got cut off from the internet and all other services, people started panicking and chaos was unavoidable.

I was staying at home for a week or two after all these big events happened but it didn’t feel safe anymore.. This was the place where my parents died; The place that I called home, but It didn’t feel like it anymore. On top of that.. The neighborhood was slowly turning into a wasteland; Almost everyone got infected and were now just wandering the streets as mindless shells of what they had been before. I was thinking about leaving and so that night I left. I’d packed some stuff to keep me alive and most importantly grabbed my gun. It was a gift from dad when I turned 18. He knew how much I loved the service weapons and so he gave me a Glock 19 on my birthday.
                                                                                                                                                                                                       

I started wandering around, there was no real goal to achieve anymore..
The only thing on my mind was survival. I remember thinking about how empty everything was.. Nobody on the streets, abandoned buildings and cars everywhere. If you saw someone.. Or should I say something, walk, it was almost definitely one of the dead ones.
I was checking some buildings and cars here and there, just to see if there was something useful left in them, but that was one of the things I should’ve been more careful about.
A car that I had looked into wasn’t abandoned, it belonged to a group, a group of prisoners, or at least they were before the world turned.. They followed me without me noticing it. I sat down by a fire to cook some meat that I’d found and before I knew it, I was looking into the barrel of a gun.
They told me to stay quiet, follow them and not to try anything stupid. If I did I would be dead they’d told me, so I had no choice.. I was all alone with a group of 6/7 people standing around me. They took me with them and the only thing that followed was torture. They were playing happy songs while they were at it as well, just to fuck with my mind. I felt anger I’d never felt before.
After what seemed like hours they let me go, I ran as fast and as far as I could. It was a cold night when they’d let me go and at the start of the morning I arrived at a medical camp; A community you could say.

They took me in, patched the wounds up that the torturers gave me, and gave me a goal in life again. A place to call home. Other people, like minded survivors to communicate with, it felt good.
This camp is also the place were I’ve met one of my best friends.

Life at the camp was good, although there were conflicts between certain groups.
Our camp was neutral; Most of us were doctors just trying to help everyone in need of medical assistance. One of the rivalling groups were those fuckers that tortured me; The filthy prisoners who I’d rather seen dead than alive. On the other side there was this Russian group, where I did get along quite good with some of the members. Conflict started getting worse by the day, and at one point there was not a day without a big firefight between the two on our neutral campground.

Except for the conflicts between those two groups, the infection started taking the upper hand. At one point, all hell broke loose. The camp got overrun by infected from the inside, and death started to spread all throughout. That camp became the place we needed to leave, and the couple people that were still alive tried their best to save as many people as they could. Not many made it unfortunately. We managed to acquire a boat some time ago that we kept maintained, and we left Florida and the States in general after that.
                                                                                                                                                                                                       

Adam Clive