The 'Virus'.
No one knows where it came from. And nobody seems to care.
In her travels, she had heard everything from Chinese birth control, to American bioweapon, to microbes brought back from Mars.
All that mattered was, in the four months from when it had first reared its ugly head, it had killed over 6 billion people. No one was spared from its wrath. The young, the fit, the elderly. It didn't target a specific group - you got sick, you died. Sometimes, the virus ravaged the body so fast, that someone who was infected that morning would be a bloated, disease-ridden corpse before they left work.
Civilization imploded practically overnight. What could you do when nearly the entire government died within days? Everyone was afraid to leave their homes. Stocks crashed, riots, martial law. Nuclear plants belched their poisons into the air as their reactors melted down. Oil tankers, set adrift after their crew died mid-voyage, sank in rough seas or beached themselves, pouring millions of gallons of crude into the seas.
Some countries fought until their armies literally crumbled under the siege of the virus. With no soldiers left to fight for them, some countries did the unthinkable. North Korea launched a thermonuclear crusade against its neighbor to the South. Israel was turned into a glowing smudge on the map. China and Russia incinerated each other over territory and resource spats... Saudi Arabia lashed out to protect the oil fields still sucking up the last drops their wells had to offer - as though oil would soon matter.
It was an anarchist's wet dream.
Lawlessness swept the land, as the few survivors abandoned their moral high horses, pulling every dirty trick they knew. The chaos that erupted after the virus had burn out probably killed almost half of those immune from the disease. It was also this violence that probably saved the other half. Banding together to protect themselves, they formed the first communities after the 'End'.
Of course, in the two years that followed, it didn't take long for the crazies to start flying their true colors. 'Cults' formed all over, from the small, one-man "Last Man on Earth' types, mid-sized clusters of Raiders, to groups a couple hundred strong, such as the 'Daughters of Amazon', a bunch of headstrong super-feminists, who tracked down and killed every man they could find, as retribution for what they did to 'Mother Earth'. There were some that even burned off a breast, so they might embrace the tradition of the Amazons. (Although there was no confirmed knowledge that the real Amazons actually did so.)
The rest were left to fight over the scraps - what little was left - like wild animals. She had killed, yes, to survive. She had eaten human flesh when she was starving, she had even offered her body the first winter, to keep a roof over her head, and a blanket wrapped around her. Any pretense of morality or taboo that the Old World had once held no longer applied. If you wanted to survive, you did what you had to do.
She didn't bother stopping at the already-decaying Service Station that she passed, knowing that the pumps had been dry for two years. Most of them were dry even before things went to shit - people having flocked to the gas stations, stockpiling on food and supplies. Most of the times, cities were just skeletons, picked clean of everything, just leaving the bones behind. But sometimes, sometimes, they missed something. And right now, with winter approaching, anything could help her last through the coming months.
The streets were packed with abandoned vehicles, left there when the owners dies behind the wheel, or the engines died on them, making a maze she had to wind her way through to get anywhere. The buildings were, more or less, abandoned husks, looking down on her with empty windows. Shattered glass crunched beneath her boots, as she kept her eyes moving, looking for anything out of place, anything that might show she wasn't the only one here...
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