I glanced across to the clock… it was a little after four in the morning, not that time really had the meaning that it once had, but today was a day of note as it would mark one of the few occasions I had to leave this complex… to see the ravaged world outside the sterile confines of this almost enforced imprisonment…..

….Fifteen years ago the orbital path of the Earth took it to the very fringes of a comets tail, I was just a child then, I don’t recall much but I remember my parents taking me out into the garden of our Notting Hill home and we all stared up in wonderment as the twilight skies glowed an incandescent reddish green… there were of course the doomsayers and the false prophets who immediately proclaimed this as divine judgement, using the opportunity to spread their poison that this was indeed the end of the world and that the apocalypse was upon us… as fate would have it they were right but for different reasons of course.
The proximity of the comet caused a global electrical storm that at first knocked out communications satellites and then produce an electromagnetic shockwave that took out anything electrical… plunging the world back into the dark ages. But it didn’t stop there…

As the comet passed, something got trapped by our atmosphere… something microscopic that bonded with and mutated one of our most innocuous and common pathogens, creating a virulent disease which we had little way of combating. More than two thirds of humanity was wiped out in less than a month, causing a worldwide firestorm of panic. My family were some of the ‘lucky’ ones, my father was a renowned Biogenetics professor and he was quickly hurried away to this complex which I now called home… others survived too by all accounts, those who lived in small isolated communities where the disease moved slowly as compared to the big cities with its dense population that would be wiped out in a matter of days sometimes…

For nearly six years my father slaved away trying to find a way to counter this disease, taking me under his wing, teaching me all that he could… but it was all for nothing, after six long years of pain staking research and futile experiments he died a broken man… I had nothing left in my life but to continue with the work he started… at first it was merely a way of marking days of the calendar, until the chance discovery of a mutated T cell… that not only slowed the ravages of the disease but also actually seemed to fight back. The mutation seemed naturally occurring, and despite our best efforts we couldn’t replicate it in our facility… we needed to find a pure strain of it… we needed people from the surface who had come into contact with it and had produced this strain of T cell.

The world above was far removed from that of my childhood… London was a virtual wasteland, a battleground of civilisations… a place that either shimmered with a tropical heat, or was ripped asunder by violent electrical storms.

The last expedition above ground had proved fruitless… all those that they bought back bore none of the genetic material that I needed… it was a week ago that I made the decision to join the next available hunt, hopeful that my experience would seek out what had so far proven so elusive.

My thoughts were suddenly shaken as the alarm clicked over to 4.30 and the shrill alarm shattered my contemplative silence… I quickly quieted it and set about trying to prepare myself for what was to come… pulling my leathers from a drawer I shed my robe and began to peel the figure hugging black across my naked body feeling its coolness against my skin… as I prepared my mind for the hunt…