Lonely World, Season One Prologue
February 21st, 2018 - Three Months before Day Zero…
Smith Household
The city of Toronto was bustling with life as it usually was. Traffic jams on the highway made worse by the snow of February, sidewalks packed with people trying to make it to work and snowplows desperately trying to clear the inner city streets. It was a frosty morning in the great city, the temperatures having dropped to a bone chilling -25 Celcius ( ) overnight. Snow was falling at a slow rate and clung to the city’s buildings and streets like a disease. Clouds hung low in the sky and casted a grey, overcast light over the city. Overall, a normal winter morning in Toronto.
Only small outbreaks of both the Zika virus and HIV had been seen up to this point and people went along with their daily lives for the most part. The outbreaks were under control and being dealt with by the collaborative effort of the world’s best doctors and no other cases of either disease had been reported anywhere else in the world. Passive ignorance swept most of the planet and everyone quickly forgot about the issue that would one day consume them.
Elizabeth woke with a yawn as alarm clock rang out. She sat up in her bed and pulled up the blankets, rubbing her eyes before looking over to the windows. A grin spread across her face as she saw the large clusters of snow falling past and she quickly leapt from her bed to get a better view. Down below the apartments, traffic was at a halt and snowplows littered the city. Lizzy quickly ran back over to her side table and grabbed her iPod, her thumbs flying across the screen as she rushed to find out if it was a snow day.
Minutes later she was in the bathroom. She quickly brushed her teeth, did her hair up in something that resembled a ponytail and then bolted to the kitchen. After quickly sending off a message to her friends she poured herself a bowl of cereal and then doused it with milk. Lizzy ate as if she had been starved for a week; snow days were few and far between in the Greater Toronto Area as they had an almost flawless snow removal service. It was not a day to be wasted eating cereal.
After the filling breakfast and a quick swig of orange juice, Lizzy pulled on her snowpants and then laced up her snow boots. She slid on her arctic white jacket and zipped it up before pulling on her Toronto Maple Leafs tuque and black ski gloves. She paced across the apartment and knocked on her mother’s office door, not completely expecting an answer. After no answer for a good five minutes she eventually gave up and just left a note, leaving the apartment and descending to the streets below to join her friends at the park next door. It happened to be visible from their apartment and her mother never really had a problem with Lizzy going down on her own.
The brunette had a ball in the snow. The group of high school freshman wrestled, had snowball fights and took turns telling stories of their dreadful teachers in school. They were out for hours enjoying the mythical snow day in the cold metropolis of Toronto, unaware that their world would be quickly taken by surprise. Ignorant to the fact that these next few months would be the last normal ones that they’d ever get a chance to see…
