I finished the Outline for Fall Down Autumn about three days ago. I had previously finished pretty much the entire series, but a small part of me wanting to take the idea in a different direction led me to scrapping everything and starting over. I'm no longer writing this for a small budget, I'm writing it as I fully imagined it would be. Here's a quick summary of the idea.
Terrorists set off a dirty bomb in a small Nebraska town, and a virus quickly begins to spread across the US. The government is helpless against the agressive virus, and it quickly ruins all chances of containing the virus to one city or state. Instead, the government quarantines the few cities that aren't infected. A few weeks later, the entire Americas is infected, and it is shut off from the rest of the world.
Come now to Kansas, one of the states hardest hit by the virus. A few survivors are holed up in the home of college dropout Nick Autumn. They are tired, desperate, and hungry. After two failed attempts to go out and scavenge for food, the group is slowly starving to death as those infected wander around the streets killing anything that is still living. At wits end, Nick decides that, instead of trying to raid places that obviously have food, they'll dash from house to house, grabbing whatever they can carry and bringing it back. This plan backfires when they come across military deserter Paul Morgan. Now, that's all I'm going to really tell you, other than the fact that Paul knows more than he's letting on and Nick is desperate enough to try anything to save the lives of the people who trust him with their survival. That, and the infected are changing, becoming a predator unlike anything anyone could have predicted. This all leads up to a cross country escapade in which every single fiber being belonging to Nick Autumn is tested.
Now, I just need to start working on the script.