Old Glory Prologue 3

By 2072, large regions of Asia had gone silent. The magnetic storm expanded from the Himalayan impact zone and enveloped China and India. It pressed into Central Asia, Russia, and the Middle East, erasing everything in it's path. Major cities along the corridors suffered cascading grid failures, uncontrolled fires, and structural collapse as systems shorted and hard infrastructure was overrun.  Power and water became rare luxuries as entire cities found themselves first becoming the new front line, then just as rapidly abandoned as an unending wave of monsters.

The consequence was a running fight that never ended. The China-Indian border had been one of the most heavily fortified land areas in Asia prior to the crash. Tens of thousands of soldiers, backed by several armored divisions of tanks and artillery, all hardened by the fighting over the once-prized mountain range, and with them enough supplies to fight the entire war on their own, they were the first bodies fed to an implacable and horrifying foe. The creatures had no supply lines, didn't seem to feel fear or pain, and were terrifyingly resistant to conventional munitions. They gorged themselves on the dead and dying, tearing those they could get their claws on to pieces. It was a brutal meat grinder made worse once the magnetic storm covered their positions, grounding their aircraft and reducing any electronics to nonfunctional trash.

Units fell back from ridge to ridge while convoys stalled and burned on the roads. Ammunition ran low and field hospitals failed under the weight of casualties. As the fighting began to pour into the more populated areas of both nations, police and civil authorities began to collapse. Those that tried to maintain order quickly found themselves buried under a tidal wave of fleeing refugees, starving and terrified as they poured through the nation towards any escape they could find.

Within three months the most fortified border sectors stood open. The flood spilled through those gaps into Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar, and the western provinces. It moved like water through a broken dam and it did not stop. Those who could run, did, but far too many were caught between the closing jaws of a horde of slavering beasts.

It was then that strange, new monsters began to appear.  Humanoid in shape, though with elongated limbs and mouths full of fangs, these doppelgangers began approaching patrols and refugee groups wrapped in rags to hide their unnatural appearance. They could mimic human speech, sounding like children or women or the infirm, drawing as close as they could, before unveiling their monstrous forms. They were unnaturally strong and fast, capable of ripping a man in two with their bare hands, and what was worse, the more they killed, the more human they began to look, as if assimilating the traits of their victims.

They were the first, but not the most insidious.  As the never-ending flow of refugees poured through every border and road, uncaring of who or what tried to stop them, more and more of these doppelgangers began to appear. Unlike their hideous original forms, these were nearly indistinguishable from humans. They would infiltrate camps and transports and travel with the unknowing refugees, each one carrying a subtle, vicious version of the Plague that the ship carried, infecting everyone they could, until eventually they were discovered. Then the mutations would begin, spreading like cancerous tumors across the skin of those infected, driving them mad with pain as their teeth became fangs and their fingernails turned into claws, as their minds snapped and they became violent and animalistic, attacking those around them, until they were dead, or everyone else was.

Nearby island and coastal states absorbed the first shocks. Japan processed more arrivals than it could track. The Philippines declared national emergency and closed most ports. Australia mobilized reserves and established quarantine camps. These actions did not hold back the spread. The Plague acted with an almost intelligent drive, hiding within the host until they were released into an uninfected populace, where the cycle would begin again. Assistance missions imported the problem into staging areas. Hospitals were overwhelmed. Crematoria operated around the clock without pause. By early 2073, most of the major population centers across Asia and Oceania were wiped clean of life, with only the mutated and infected roaming the streets and alleys.

The decision to seal the Pacific was ordered on June 9th, 2073. Convoys formed from commercial and private craft were intercepted by blockade forces. North American navies enforced exclusion zones with brutal efficiency, backed by their regional partners where they could. The policy was severe, final, and necessary. The justification was simple arithmetic. One vessel destroyed meant one city spared. One life for a hundred, a thousand, ten thousand. No chances could be taken, no kindness spared. The death toll was staggering, all the same.

By the end of 2073, Asia had ceased all broadcast, and the landmass from the Pacific coast to the edges of Russia were consumed under a black, crackling sky that only seemed to grow with each passing day.  Australia was declared a quarantine zone, abandoned by the world at large after a series of well-meaning initiatives resulted in the decimation of it's population under an ever-growing surge of infected mutants.

Africa, unlike Asia, had never been a stable place, a century of intermittent civil war, famine and genocide had left the cradle of humanity ill prepared for the unending waves of refugees. The Plague found supple soil to take root in, the jungles and deserts teeming with fresh creatures to assimilate into it's never-ending menagerie of horrors. The fall was sudden, but horrifying in it's entirety as government and rebel forces alike, armed with ancient weapons and too caught up in their own petty conflicts failed to notice the doom that approached. It was far too little, far too late, when the great powers of the region finally began to take notice of the monsters that poured from it's jungles, and by the summer of 2074, Africa, from it's southern tip to it's northern desert, had gone still.

Europe entered this period in a weakened state. The years before the arrival of the ship had been marked with chaos, unrest and riots. Many of the old bureaucracies had been replaced with governments totalitarian in all but name. Civil liberties had been long since suspended, and the era of tolerance had died a violent death as nations cracked down with all the force of a jackboot. This left them in a unique place when the Plague and it's monsters poured over the borders. Europe found itself fighting against the tide as so many others before it. Conscription became the standard policy, the faces of the soldiers growing both older and younger as their standing forces were devoured. Internal borders were hardened under military control. Ports and airports were nationalized and turned into logistics hubs. Travel became restricted, then banned, as the truth of the Doppelgangers and the Plague became known. Media networks moved under direct oversight, and became centers of propaganda and government censure. The public accepted these measures, and those who tried to fight found themselves shot in the street, or shipped to the front, and many didn't know which was a worse fate.

It was all for naught. The collapse of the Middle East had gutted the export of fuel and natural gas. Pipelines were cut, and shipping had all but ceased as the tanks and stations ran dry. The modern armor so heavily depended upon ground to a stuttering halt, becoming static emplacements when their engines finally died. The supply trains so desperate and hungry for gasoline began to falter, reloads of ammunition, food, and vital medical supplies taking longer and longer to reach entrenched units on the slowly collapsing front, and many soldiers were forced to use whatever they had on hand as their bullets, barely effective as they were, ran out.

Urban centers were converted into layered defenses. Perimeter districts were cleared and mined, bridges were prepared for demolition, and subways became troop movement corridors and shelters. Power was reserved for hospitals and command posts. Rations were reduced several times without public notice. Military police enforced curfew, and later, handled the execution of an ever-growing list of deserters. Even children weren't spared, forced to work at looms and presses to keep the flow of material going.

Attempts to cross the Atlantic increased as more and more sought refuge in the Americas. They were met with orders to turn back, at first, and those who refused found themselves under fire. The threat, they were told, of the Plague spreading across the ocean was too much. Many perished without even that courtesy, often dragged into the depths by strange, impossible creatures as they sailed on ships too small to make the passage to begin with.

By the end of that year, the French and German lines had completely collapsed, and with it the mainland of Europe was lost. The United Kingdom held out for some time more, cut off from the rest of the world with the horde on one side and an uncaring wall of naval guns on the other. Their last transmission came through on March 3rd, 2075. "Damn you all, for this."

Russia sustained organized operations longer than most. The depth of territory and hardened stockpiles helped early defense. Nuclear stockpiles from the last century were wheeled out, to limited success, and older, more brutal weapons hidden away also saw a resurgence on that front. Chemical and biological weapons, gas attacks, and indiscriminate shelling and bombing marked the campaign, but by the time the cold season hit food stores were exhausted, and it's people with it. It was then that they realized their oldest ally, General Winter, had seemingly found a new friend in the unending tide of slavering flesh and disease, as millions froze to death in the frigid north.

By 2076, Europe held only fragmented redoubts. France and Germany maintained several small bases under constant attack, trapped like rats in the tide of nightmares and horrors.Sweden, Norway and Denmark, as well as several others, retreated to the mountains and their strongholds there, hoping to one day be able to reclaim their lost lands, but as the year closed out, it was clear that Europe had fallen, and with it, any hopes of slowing the final twilight of mankind.