NEW YORK CITY, NEW YORK
MARCH 10, 2017
6:00 P.M

Sunset.
Far to the west, you could see the burning orange glow of the sun lowering itself down behind the distant horizon.
On any other day it would look beautiful.
But today, all it appeared to be was ominous, as it slowly lowered itself, further and further down, darkening New York City.
For this truly was the darkest day that New York had ever seen.

The majestic and hulking Big Apple was now naught but a hollow shell.
It's once noisy and ever busy streets and sidewalks were now silent and foreboding.
It's massive skyscrapers and towering structures were now dark and lifeless, nothing now but hollow shells.
What was once one of the greatest cities in all the world was now a broken wasteland.

The streets were filled with crashed and parked vehicles alike, as well as abandoned and disheveled vendor booths and tents, and too much silence.

And not to mention the corpses, thousands of corpses.
One could say that there was not a street in sight that wasn't strewn with them.
Mass numbers of bodies, those of "clean" citizens and fallen infected alike.
The stench of too much death already drifted freely in the air, intensifying the already dark and sinister mood.

Even with all else that was utterly, for lack of a better term, wrong, one could still tell you that the total silence all across the city was still the most terrifying aspect of the cities' current crisis.

Or at least, for Major Travis LaRocca it was.

The National Guard Major stared out across East River at Manhattan Island.
He had a perfect view of the islands' broken structure from where he stood, which would be the second floor of an old warehouse along the East River line, just north roughly of Brooklyn and the Williamsburg Bridge.

Travis stood at one of the windows, which was closed, his eyes scanning over the fallen city.
He was fully adorned in his National Guard uniform, although minus his helmet, which lay on a nearby crate bottom up.
His M4 rifle was slung over his shoulder, and his backpack sat on the floor leaned up against the crate where his helmet lay.

He eyed the sunset with a feeling of emptiness and isolation.
He had been in this warehouse for over an hour now, having made his way here after his Humvee crashed coming across the Williamsburg Bridge.
His four squad mates were killed in the crash, forcing him to fight his way through those...things, those infected humans, alone.
He had blasted his way through what seemed like over two hundred of them and managed to lose them just after getting off the bridge, and had then made his way here, where he would lay low till morning.

His plan was simple, get to the airport, find a plane, and get out of New York City.
He had tried multiple times to radio for help but his radio picked up nothing but warbled static.

Cut off from the main force along the state lines, and for all he knew abandoned by his superiors, all he could do was escape to a safe destination by his own effort and link up with the main force later.

Haphazardly, Travis lowered his gaze toward the street below and caught an unwelcome surprise.
More of them, those things, those diseased and deranged humans.
It was an entire column of them, shambling down the street below, walking along in a massive wave heading South.
He couldn't count them obviously, but as he watched the seemingly endless wave of monstrosities, he assumed it could be well over a thousand of them.

Travis slowly eased away from the dirty old window, carefully taking each step.
When he was finally away from the window, he slowly sat down on a nearby crate.
He glanced around at the staircase that led up from the first floor, which he had barricaded with four big hulking crates.
As for the small cargo elevator, it was still sitting up top where he was.

He was reassured by this as well as remembering he had closed all the loading bay doors below and locked all of the smaller doors.

Travis released a small sigh of self assurance and leaned his head back against a pair of crates behind him, closing his eyes and, before he knew it, nodding off to sleep, while out in the distance, the final edge of the sun slowly eased down beyond the horizon, ushering in near total darkness.