Our story takes place in the fictional town of Sweetwater, Pennsylvania. Sweetwater is a quiet town with few tourist traps or frivolities; Aside from homes, the town has a few general stores, federal buildings, a school, several family-owned shops and a large, dried out lake for which the town is named. It is surrounded on all sides by scrubs of forests, craggy hills, and plains. One paved road to the highway that takes travelers to Portland, which is 30 miles south. Beyond the forests, the town's eastern coast has a craggy gravel beach.

The Tackett Farmstead is about 5 miles north of Sweetwater, and is owned by the Tackett family. Originally a family ranch that was only self-sustaining, Farmer Tackett has spent the last ten years making it into a profitable business.

The farmhouse is a three story colonial house, painted white with blue shingles and shutters, with a porch wrapping around the building. The Farmer lives here with his wife and daughter, as well as the farmhouse workers, ten women who live in a bunkhouse in the attic, who do the cooking and cleaning on the farm. To stop any "Unmarried Fraternizing", Farmer Tackett is known to fire the men he finds near the farmhouse worker's quarters.

The farm is 30 acres, surrounded on all sides by trees, though there is a buffer of waist-high grass between the farmland and the untamed brush, along with a stone fence wrapping around the property. There is a small pig barn with ten pigs, a goat barn with four goats, and a chicken coop with roughly sixty chickens that mostly roam around the farmstead, coming back to roost in the night. There are two horses in the animal barn, named Blackie and Brownie, although they are rarely taken out.

Though the farm keeps animals, they are mostly consumed by The Tacketts or sold at county fairs -- Nearly all of the money made by the farm is through agriculture. The farm has a cornfield, as well as five gardens and a small cluster of beehives used for honey.

Rhabdoviridae Hematemesis, colloquially known as "The Red Plague", is a highly mutated, hyperaggresive strain of rabies. The first cases being deer, the beginning of the outbreak started with reports of extremely aggressive stags charging at hunters. Originally assumed to be the actions of injured or starving deer, little was done in response by authorities. After about a month of inactivity, reports around Maine started coming in rapidly of riots and grisly murders, all centered around hunting communities.

The virus enters the circulatory system and is quick to manifest itself into the victim, causing symptoms within minutes and full infiltration within an hour. As the virus infiltrates the host, they experience a spasmodic effect. Shaking and or shuddering of the outer extremities in a rapid manner. Following that, seizures and frothing of the mouth will occur as symptoms progress. Copious amounts of infected blood is continually gibbered out of the due to internal hemorrhaging. The last stage is known as "turning", wherein a victim's eyes turn red shortly before suffering a stroke. After victims regain consciousness, they retain only a minimal amount of brain use, and have the same mental capacity as a fairly intelligent chimpanzee.

The Red Plague causes its hosts to permanently enter a primal state of murderous rage with a biological imperative to spread the infection or kill the uninfected and consume their flesh above all else. The infected are reduced to an animalistic state of permanent hostility and aggression, driving them to attack non-infected with no concern for their own safety and no moral inhibitions that could control their actions and behavior. The infected retain the ability to use primitive tools such as sticks and rocks, and can conceptualize simple plans if given enough time.

Adrenaline is constantly being produced and utilized by the infected body, as even days after the change, an infected specimen can perform display extraordinary feats of strength, agility, endurance (especially in pursuit of the uninfected), and ignore wounds such as stabbing, explosive amputation of limbs and even immolation.

While the infected will attempt to bite their victims, it is usually as a means of either infecting or killing them, often by biting into the main arteries in their neck. The infected do not consume each other, and can recognize (and will readily eat) any and all edible food from canned goods to wild animals. Since infected specimens are still living human beings, they can be killed using means that are fatal to uninfected, though they will ignore any wounds that are not immediately fatal such as decapitation or destruction of the brain.