2 New York City
Alexandre stepped outside his apartment and locked the door securely behind him. His apartment complex was run-down, with warped walls, torn carpeting, and creaking stairs—but this was what he'd asked for, after all. He'd wanted an unassuming place to live while he made his long-term plans.
The outside of the building looked nicer than the inside, at least. New York had invested a lot of money into maintaining a good appearance for even its tenement buildings over the past few years.
The millions of refugees who had flooded both the East Coast and the West Coast states during the Great Wave had been fairly unusual compared to most refugees who came to the US throughout history: many of them had been quite rich. Indeed, unlike most people fleeing war and gang violence, the refugees of the Great Wave had often been those rich enough to charter a ship or plane out of their country before the zombie threat could reach them.
The US and other countries in the Americas had taken heavy advantage of this, providing resources to these refugees at high costs. There was little need to collect extra taxes or donations to house and feed these displaced people, because they could actually afford it!
For major cities like New York, this provided the existing local economies with huge boosts that slightly offset the global economic catastrophe of the Great Wave itself. Major emergency construction projects extended Manhattan further into the New York Harbor, and they were filled at once with housing projects which were sold and rented immediately to the African, Asian, and European immigrants who arrived with full bank accounts and little else.
But for most of these immigrants, they had no way to continue their businesses, and many of them even lost fortunes which were tied up in several European and Russian banking institutions whose gold and silver bullion had to be abandoned when Virus Z's victims consumed the cities where they were stored.
Without this collateral, and with no hope of ever seeing it recovered in a meaningful way, the rest of the financial world simply declared the accounts of these poor people to be worthless.
So New York, along with many other major cities in the White Zone, grew richer while the billionaires who fled to its shores grew destitute.
In the year 1885, France gifted the United States with the famous Statue of Liberty, a monument celebrating both freedom for France itself and the end of institutionalized slavery in the US.
Eighteen years later, an excerpt from a poem which had been written in dedication of the Statue of Liberty was installed on a plaque at its base:
"Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!"
For over a hundred years, these words and bronze colossus promised hope to all who fled their homes and searched for a new one in New York.
But they were a small comfort to those who, leaving homes where they were in the top 1% to become almost penniless in what remained of the civilized world.
All of that had happened years ago, of course. It was now over a decade since the Great Wave had begun, and New York—and the rest of the White Zone of the Americas—had stabilized.
The White Zone was generally a good place to live, aside from the enormous overpopulation problem. There were huge initiatives to start new cities in the middle of the vast wildernesses of Alaska, Texas, and parts of Canada, but these were many years from coming to fruition. In the meantime, the streets were packed with the homeless, most of whom had once been wealthy immigrants.
And above the streets, in skyscrapers that gleamed like rosy beacons in the red light of the rising sun, lived the wealthy Americans who had only gotten richer on the backs of those who had sought refuge in their city.
Despite this disparity, this striking caste system, Alexandre saw determination in the faces of those who filled the streets as he stepped outside his apartment building.
Bodegas and street vendors sold coffee and breakfast sandwiches to hordes of people who could afford it while soup kitchens provided food that was not much worse to those who could not. Men and women stood patiently in line at government work stations set up throughout the city, waiting for the opportunity to earn a day's wages.
Though the city had stripped everything from them, it had given something in return: the essence of the city itself had filled the empty spirits of its new inhabitants, giving them the grit and determination to keep going, no matter what. It had kept New Yorkers going even during the horrors of the Great Depression a hundred years before, and it kept them going even now.
Still, they fought on.
Still, they worked, ate, loved, cried, lived, and died.
This was the so-called "Spirit of New York."
During his time in the once-great city, Alexandre believed he'd absorbed some aspect of that spirit. He hoped it would carry him forward throughout his plan, that it would give him the grit to keep fighting despite the trials he knew lay ahead.
***
Several bus transfers to progressively better neighborhoods brought Alexandre to the John F. Kennedy International Airport. Though it had once been world famous, it was now only a shadow of its former self. After all, there was much less of a need for international flights these days.
After arriving, Alexandre stood impatiently in line for the government-chartered plane to Hunter Island, an isolated landmass located off the northern coast of New York where the government had established a school to train future Hunters, known simply as the Hunter Academy. Indeed, when Alexandre arrived at the boarding terminal set aside for those heading to Hunter Island, he saw a huge queue of eager students ahead of him.
In the nine years since the first generation had appeared, Hunters had become real-world superheroes. They were treated like Hollywood stars and many of the veteran Hunters had become incredibly rich, driving fancy sports cars and marrying beautiful women.
For most people in the White Zone who were not already wealthy, the old methods of achieving wealth and power—or even basic comfort—were useless. Especially for immigrants, only becoming a Hunter held the sure promise of a good life.
Many Hunters, after all, had incredible abilities: superhuman strength, incredible agility, and even psychic powers. Becoming a Hunter meant a change at gaining capacities far beyond those of most humans: one could possess the intelligence to become one of the few high-paid CEOs left or even the sheer power to become a superhero.
Unfortunately, not everyone could become a Hunter. The Genesis Project hadn't provided a path for all mankind to achieve salvation, but only for a select few: a person required a specific gene to become a Hunter.
The absolute truth was actually quite chilling: most people believed that becoming a Hunter made someone immune to Virus Z. In reality, genetic immunity to Virus Z was a precursor to becoming a Hunter in the first place... because the transformation involved injecting the subject with a modified version of Virus Z.
This shot was no mere inoculation, and the transformation process was severely dangerous to the subject's body. Because of this, the subject needed to be in perfect physical condition, with a flawless immune system and no lingering injuries.
In short, only 1% of the general population had the right gene to begin with, and only a tiny percentage of those people were physically fit enough to qualify. Almost every candidate, in fact, was a young adult between the ages of twenty and twenty-five.
Alexandre knew all of these details—and they didn't bother him in the least. He did wonder, though, if all the eager students around him knew what they were getting themselves into.
Finally, after two hours of waiting, Alexandre boarded the plane to Hunter Island.
As the plane flew over the vast ocean, the barrier which separated the White Zone of humans from the Black Zone of Virus Z's victims, he could only wonder what the future held for him.
