in the wake of a certain issue about how the storyline's lack of representation anywhere outside of the threads so i'm going to try and summarize:

Three years to the year that the survivors are in right now, A Solanum outbreak occurred and as a result it left almost the entire world except for 10 million survivors infected with the virus. Solanum does not seem to exist in nature except in its hosts, which can be found worldwide, the infected are shuffling and have limited motor skills and no abilities of logic. remnants of the military remain and by this point the pockets that stayed together inside the infected zones have had successes staying in contact but the majority of North American Survivors are behind the line of the Rocky Mountains. All over the world cities have fallen to "Zack"'s infected forces, anyone who has survived by now knows what they face and what to do to defeat the infected.