Black River

07/15/2066

In The Fall, the first thing to go was the power. The last thing most people heard on their radios, or saw on their TVs before their screens went dark, were the reports of a strange and dangerous illness. It was a flu. Fast moving, with a fever that burned up the senses. After that, and with no communication, it was only a matter of days before most of the world was consumed.   Over a month of chaos later, exactly 45 days after the start of the outbreak, the ninety two percent of the population that caught the sickness, simply laid down and died. No one knew if it was the symptoms, the madness, or some gruesome divine intervention. In the course of a single morning, some 7.4 billion infected people took their final breaths. The world was all the more barren, for all the people who fell victim to the wicked violence of the infected, the looters, and the fires that raged and consumed most every major city.   Nine years later humanity, or at least the three percent of the population that remained, is beginning to pull itself back together. Whole Territories growing up, seemingly from the ashes. In some places, the progress is slow, the scattered population doing little to spur growth or trade. But in a few places, communities have banned together to form entire pockets of civilization at the end of the world. No place more so, than the Black River Territory.   Hyatt Sawyer built Black River from the ground up. Starting with his family and just a few survivors, he pulled together a community. Hyatt shed blood, his own and other's, to bring Black River and its people out of the encroaching dark, and for his territory and its citizens there is nothing he wouldn't do. No price he wouldn't pay. But Hyatt has secrets. Secrets that could turn his people against him, and bring everything he's worked to build crumbling down. These secrets could also lead to the answer to the question that still burns in everyone's hearts.   How? How could the world that was beginning to pull together, fall apart so fast? How could one illness gut the entire planet of life, and yet leave others, a select few, alive and somewhat... different. With the dangers of the wider world bearing down on the small utopia Hyatt has built, these questions become a mantra that he may not be able to escape. With his beloved and hard won Territory under threat, Hyatt may have to make an impossible decision. Keep his deadly secret, or save his only home?