THE APOCALYPSE HAS BEGUN

The first cases appeared at Wellington Railway Station. Commuters stumbling off the Hutt Valley Line, grey-faced, collapsing on Platform 9 before pulling themselves back up with a mechanical slowness, glassy eyes, slack jaws. The Transdev staff thought it was a gas leak from the construction site next door. Then the biting started. Within forty minutes, the grand Edwardian hall with its ornate arches had become something else entirely. The ticket machines still beeped. The departures board still showed the 5:47 to Upper Hutt as delayed.

Wellington is a city of two hundred thousand people wedged between harbour and hills, connected by a handful of roads that buckle in earthquakes and flood in southerlies. The urban motorway, that single artery running along the waterfront, turned into a car park within the first hour. The Terrace Tunnel became a trap. On Lambton Quay, public servants were still streaming out of the Beehive and Parliament House when the first infected lurched up from the railway station underpass, stumbling past the Wellington Cenotaph, past Old St Paul's, into the crowds.

People filmed. Of course they filmed. A video of a woman in a Kathmandu jacket biting a barista outside Customs Brew Bar on the waterfront went viral. Fourteen million views before the internet choked. The barista had just finished a perfect flat white. It was still sitting on the counter, untouched, when the cafe windows shattered twenty minutes later.

The Prime Minister addressed the nation from the ninth floor of the Beehive at 6:47 PM. By 7:15 PM, the Beehive was dark, its distinctive round floors visible against the sky like a hive with no bees left inside. By 8:02 PM, no one answered at Police National Headquarters on Molesworth Street. New Zealand, the country that had once shut its borders to keep out a virus and succeeded, discovered that some things don't need a passport.

The Defence Force tried to hold the hills. Wellington is built on ridges, and the thinking was simple: blow the roads at Ngauranga Gorge to the north and seal the coastal route south past Island Bay. But Wellington has never been a city that cooperates with plans. The town belt, that green corridor of native bush wrapping around the city like a scarf, became a highway for what moved through it. The hillside suburbs, those wooden houses clinging to slopes so steep that the letterboxes are at roof height, became vertical mazes with no way out but down.

Cuba Street fell with its boots on. In the bucket fountain plaza, buskers were still playing when the screaming started from the south end. The vintage shops and craft beer bars emptied in seconds. In Courtenay Place, the cinema crowds from the Embassy Theatre spilled into the street and ran straight into what was coming up from the waterfront. Te Papa, the national museum on the harbour's edge, locked its doors. Inside, the colossal squid floated in its tank, watching nothing, while outside the waterfront boardwalk filled with shuffling figures.

In Thorndon, the old wooden villas that survived the 1855 earthquake didn't survive this. In Newtown, the most diverse suburb in the country, families barricaded their state houses with whatever they had. The hospital on Riddiford Street held longest, its ICU staff working by torchlight after the power died, until the emergency department doors gave way. In Mount Victoria, the narrow streets that film crews once used to double for 1940s San Francisco became corridors with no exit.

On the hilltop, the wind turbine at Brooklyn still turned. It always turns. Wellington's wind never stops. From up there, if anyone had been alive to look, they could have seen the whole harbour laid out below, the ferry terminal dark, the container cranes frozen mid-swing at CentrePort, the lights of Petone across the water flickering out one suburb at a time.

Wellington. The coolest little capital in the world.

Not cool anymore. Not little enough.

And in the wind that screams through the streets between the hills and the harbour, two hundred thousand mouths opened. Not to speak. Not to complain about the weather. To feed.

7 roles. 28 days. Zero margin for error.

• 👑
  Leader
• 🏃
  Scout
• 🛡️
  Tank
• 💉
  Medic
• 🍳
  Cook
• 🔧
  Tech Expert
• 💀
  Bait