United States

Jane Wood, a forty-year-old kindergarten teacher, lived in Vero Beach, FL with her husband, John and her four-year-old daughter, Lizzie, at the time that the Sleeping Death Contagion struck. She buried them at sea from their small sail boat.

After her husband and daughter perished, she immediately retreated to her parents cottage in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, near Buena Vista, VA.

She found her adopted daughter, Maria Sanchez (5), while scavenging for groceries and other living essentials in Buena Vista.

Jimmy Beech (16) joined their small survivor community later after meeing them in Lynchburg.

Canada

Michael Warren, a twenty-one year old junior auto mechanic, lived in the small town of Morrisburg, Ontario, when SDC hit. Morrisburg is situated on the north shore of the St. Lawrence River, across from the small town of Waddington in northern New York State and forty miles south of Canada’s capital city, Ottawa.

He met Sarah Wells (32) from Kanata, ON while searching for survivors in the areas around the Canadian capital of Ottawa. The became lovers and partners and settled in a bungalow on the shores of the St. Lawrence River just west of Morrisburg.

England

Margaret West, a thirty year old family doctor, lived in Ripon, a small city in northeast England. It was a market town in the center of a large farming community. After her parents died in their nearby home in the small village of Dishforth she started searching for survivors in the area. She found Jack Jacson (50) and his daughter, Julie (11) on his farm near Thirsk.

Shortly afterwards, they moved into a National Trust cottage on the grounds of Fountains Abbey with the orphaned David Wilson (8) who had lived with his parents nearby. After a while living with their new "family" in the Fountains Cottage, they became lovers and partners.

Kenya

Simon Kanaku was the sixteen-year-old son of a bus driver in the town of Voi, in the southeastern part of Kenya, about a hundred miles northwest of the Indian Ocean coast. After his parents and sisters died in Voi, he moved briefly into the Voi Safari Lodge, where he had worked as a dishwasher.

He moved to the Shanzu Beach resort area, a few miles north of the port city of Mombasa on the Ind1an Ocean when conditions at the Safari Lodge became difficult. Shorly after moving, he met Indira (22), eldest daughter of an Indian businessman who had lived in Mombasa. They decided to join forces and live in her uncle's beach house nearby.

They found Mary Lelo Wamuyu (60) and her brother's grandson Malcolm Ajuma Kanda (5) while searching for other survivors along the nearby Indian Ocean coast. They were the only survivors from the small village of Kanamai. They came together to live in Indira's Uncle's beach house. After some time, Simon and Indira became lovers and partners.

France

Henri Plouchard was a fifty-year-old baker in the historic city of Avignon in the south of France when the SDC catastrophe swept around the world. The youngest son of a farmer from a nearby village, he had lived in Avignon for more than thirty years. He was married to his childhood sweetheart, Josephine. They lived in a three-bedroom apartment above their small bakery with their two teenage sons, Jacques and Pierre. Henri’s routine had been very much the same every day of the week but Sunday for the fifteen years that he had owned and operated the bakery.

His family died after being infected by SDC carried by two tourists from the USA. Henri was left to face life in a new, empty world.

China

The SDC virus arrived in Beijing from North America on Thursday, July 16, with a total of six passengers on flights from New York and Los Angeles. Three were businessmen, and three were students returning home. All six were in the early stages of the infection when they boarded their flights. By the time they got off their planes in Beijing, after more than twelve hours in the air, most of the other passengers on both flights were also infected. They took the infectious SDC virus into the crowded city of Beijing, with a population of more than fourteen million people. The results were inevitable. The people of Beijing began to die from SDC in ever-increasing numbers two days later.

Within a week, Beijing was fairly well deserted, and the population of the city was reduced to the fewer than a hundred and fifty survivors who had the rare genetic immunity to the deadly effects of the SDC virus. Among these survivors was Lui Lian, a twenty-five-year-old who had recently married her childhood sweetheart, Wu. When Wu died, Lian was left alone to continue her life without him.

When she woke early next morning, Lian immediately accepted that she was not going to die and started to plan for her return to her home village of Linlu, just over a hundred miles south of Beijing. She knew from what she had seen yesterday that there would be no trains or buses operating and she couldn’t drive a car. Using her bicycle was the only practical option.