A Long Island Tale:Feedback please.

[kalos72]

Rumors started to circulate that one of the local Greenport teenagers, Johnny Bush, and a group of his friends had recently taken a boat to Plum Island Research Center looking for medical supplies or food, bringing back more then they had anticipated.

Talk of people getting terribly sick and dyeing within days began to fly. As the death toll rose, more and more people began to think that Bush had brought back some sort of “virus” from the Island. For years people had assumed it was some secret government testing facility for bio-logical warfare experiments, and now it seemed that had the deadly proof. A fact that cost both Johnny and his father George Bush their lives as the towns blamed them for the “infection” for getting out to begin with.

As the “plague” spread, people started to move further and further west trying to outrun the “outbreak”. People moved from town to town, unknown to them, slowing spreading the “lethal virus” ever further. Soon victims fell in towns as far west as New Hyde Park and Valley Stream.

The local population living in Queens and the few left in Brooklyn started to hear the rumors of the “deadly virus being brought west by the hoards from the east.” Soon small outbreaks of the “virus” touched the outskirts of the major populations of Queens and Kings County.

As the fear rose about the “virus”, hostilities did as well. To most, the fear of dying to some random virus that some “dumb ass fisherman let lose” was as real as the constant threat of starvation. Mobs started to gather and the better parts of humanity were lost as locals killed anyone they thought might be infected, or even from the eastern part of the Island at some points. Riots broke out, fires were started, many of thousands died.

After more then 3 weeks of violence, the outbreak seemed to subside. The mobs began to focus once again on their most constant adversary, hunger. But the weeks of “witch hunts” cost the local population more then they would realize.

As the turmoil settled, people started to see how the 3 weeks that had been “fighting off the infected”, had also cost them precious time. That time which they should have been used for planting more food for the winter harvest, was lost. Sadly, most of the crops didn’t’ get planted in some of the larger areas and it would cost them dearly next year.