An excellent short story, your blend of fact and fiction works well, and your speculations upon the future of the relationship between mankind and technology are believable within your continuity. A lot happens within your tale, starting with John and Carolyn's relationship, the attack, the aftermath, the rising of the FSA and then finally the virus. In short form fiction, taking on such a broad narrative can be a daunting task for some writers, yet you pace it well, focusing on specific events, and using brief descriptions of chronological dates to good effect.
I only have two minor criticisms.
The first is that the introduction didn't pull me in as well as I would have liked it to, yet after having read the entire piece, I cannot come up with any suggestions on how to improve it. I only mention it as it was a gut reaction, and many readers will not look past thier initial reaction to an opening.
The second criticism is the closing paragraph of chapter 5. The mentioning of the history books seemed jarring, and pulled me out of the story, making it difficult to settle back into the opening of chapter 6. Also, as a matter of continuity, if the when the population is ater reformed, and the information about the history of the attack is stored online, would history books exist? Would any hard copies after a certain date exist? And how would John know when his story is found that The Day The Earth Really Stood Still woud still be in print, if print does indeed exist?
Other than those two very minor points, fantastic story. I would suggest submitting to a publication such as Analog or Asimovs.
The writing itself I enjoyed. You are direct and created a clear picture in my mind as to what was going on. You didn't burden the text with superfluous description and continued to drive the story forward. However, I feel as though for short form prose you have tried to describe a world that was too vast for short form fiction, and in doing so have missed out on the opportunity to develop your characters and expose them to some detailed horror, which is what we all want from a zombie story.
On your second draft I suggest that you take one story thread and expand it into a character driven short piece. I say character driven based on what Joe Hill, author of Locke and Key, stated in a recent interview, (to paraphrase) “Horror comes from developing an emotional attachment to a character and then watching them go through something terrible.”
To bring it closer to the subject matter, the most horrific elements of The Walking Dead (I refer to the graphic novels, not so much the TV series) are when characters you have grown to love have to do something horrific to survive, i.e. cutting off a bitten appendage to stop an infection spreading, brutally maiming a sadistic rapist, or showing what can become of a person in an extreme situation, i.e. chaining up your zombie daughter and feeding it cut up body parts because you cannot bear to let go. Each section could be well expanded, but the one I feel I would like to see redone the most is Adam’s tale of euthanasia. Why did he go to those extremes? How did he feel about particular people he poisoned? Drugs with addictive qualities tend to be controlled in care environments (I know this first hand as my son is epileptic and even in hospitals giving him his routine daily medications requires several signatures and checks), so what lengths did he go to in order to acquire the morphine. All of these I feel are fertile ground for a gripping short story.
Overall, good attempt.
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