United States, Texas, Austin City.
"Come on! Don't stop now… Hold on a little longer!" A hot breath was exhaled as Alan moved up and down, doing push-ups non-stop. His increasingly heavy breathing indicated that his body was reaching its limit.
After finishing his training session, Alan collapsed onto the ground while he regained his breath.
It took him a long time to recover. Only after a while did he get up from the ground and mark a training session on a piece of paper with a pen. "At this rate, I'll reach three hundred…"
This was a very common piece of notebook paper, densely filled with words: sit-ups, push-ups, and weights. Each time Alan completed an exercise, he made a mark next to the day's goal. He had already marked more than ten objectives that day within the dense notebook.
This meant that Alan had been undergoing this intense training for more than a month, something hard to imagine.
Because Alan was a depressed soldier, yes, one of the many with PTSD, and to avoid ending his miserable life, he exhausted his body every day to the point where he couldn't lift a pistol with his hand.
During these long years locked in his house, he blamed himself for accidents that happened under his command on missions. The deaths he caused tortured him, and when the army realized this, he was honorably discharged.
From being a special forces captain to becoming nothing. Everything he did never had real value, the people he killed, the mistakes he made didn't really mean anything.
But was it just because of that that he trained until extreme exhaustion? The truth was no, he still had family, and he didn't fight specifically for them, but just in case they ever needed him.
The confidence Alan had in himself to serve others had diminished. He didn't expect his brother to need his help; after all, he was also military, but just in case he needed him.
After finishing his morning exercise, Alan went to his kitchen and muttered to himself, "I still have a five-kilogram bag of rice, lentils, some beans, but the milk is gone. A pack of sausages, some raw potatoes, and peanut butter, not bad."
After making this food inventory, Alan lifted his gaze to the shelves above and murmured, "Three packs of Oreo cookies, one and a half boxes of spaghetti pasta, several cans of tomato and olives."
These foods weren't nutritious, especially when he was still doing high-intensity exercise, but nowadays they were worth more than gold.
If it weren't for his brother's visit last month, Alan wouldn't have all this food stored. Luckily, the anniversary of his parents' death took place last month, so he and his brother Steven gathered here to remember old times.
That was the only time Alan found it necessary to go out on his own in search of food. And to this day, it had kept him alive.
Although Alan had depressive thoughts along with his PTSD, that didn't mean he didn't know how to feed himself. That's why he always bought the necessary things to restore his energy.
In his lonely days, he truly wished everything would end. That God would give an end to all humans, and he could finally rest without any guilt tormenting him.
But unfortunately, the Mayan prophecy of 2012 didn't come true, and Alan lost all hope of resting without feeling guilt.
Then he researched the topic more and found out that, like many, he had misunderstood this historical event. For modern humans, it seemed like the end of the world, but for the Mayans, it was just the end of a cycle of their Mayan calendar, known as the Baktún 13, and the beginning of a new one.
But as if it were a science fiction movie, last week, especially on September 24, 2013, chaos erupted throughout the country.
From Alan's perspective, they were just protesters causing chaos, but then it turned into terrorism. And when he opened the news without finding anything, the real doubt started to grow.
"Why isn't the army doing anything?" Alan thought the country was being attacked with chemical weapons that were driving people crazy, infecting others in the process.
But this same thing began to happen in Russia, Canada, Mexico, and South Korea.
Still, Alan ignored all of it, immersed himself in his training, and soon received a radio call from his brother.
He told him everything that was happening, and then Alan learned that what initially seemed like a series of isolated cases of violent behavior in urban areas was quickly confirmed as a mass fungal biological infection.
The pathogen agent, identified as a mutated variant of the Cordyceps fungus, directly affects the human nervous system, causing loss of control, extreme aggression, and rapid spreading through bites or exposure to spores.
Alan thought the army would contain it; after all, martial law had been declared.
But that day, when he finished his call with his brother, who recommended not leaving the house until he could come, he heard a scream from downstairs.
At first, he ignored it, but then he heard sharp cries for help and people obviously fleeing.
That's why Alan, out of curiosity, rushed to the balcony, only to look and see what was happening.
Then, he saw several people pinning a man against the wall and biting him. Only then did Alan realize that the entire lower area of where he lived was in chaos.
Thanks to binoculars, Alan could clearly see everything from start to finish.
In just a few moments, that man was bitten in several places, but unlike the zombies with which he was slightly familiar, these, after biting, would immediately run to infect someone else.
The infected, as his brother had said, only focused on infecting those who weren't already infected.
After being stunned on the balcony for a while, Alan finally regained his senses. He sat on the floor and watched as the "crowd" below dispersed.
His hairs stood on end, and he felt extremely alert, but in reality, he couldn't move at all.
It was unclear how much time passed before Alan felt he could move again. He crawled back to the living room in one and a half steps. Leaning against the wall, he gasped for air.
This was not something the army could stop with conventional weapons. This wouldn't stop; there wouldn't be a happy ending in a few months.
While waiting for his brother, who assured him that everything was fine, Alan didn't know what to do. Going out was useless. Anywhere he went would be the same, and as for the shelters, there would surely be more infected people.
Thanks to the food he had, he was able to avoid the crisis for a short time, but he couldn't be aloof from it all the time because he needed to eat and drink.
He knew all of this, but he decided to simply pretend ignorance.
He was no longer a soldier; he had no obligation to go out and do things right. Surely people would be fine being cared for by those who still had a sense of duty.
The only reason he lived was to know more about his brother, who was military. But the food was running out, he was alone, and if he made a mistake, he would die before his brother came.
That's why he continued living in silence during the following days, eating, training, cleaning his weapons, and waiting for everything to keep progressing.