#Intro

Laura Racconi grew up around engines, racing tracks, and the smell of burning rubber. Her mother had once been a rising motorcycle racer known as The Raccoon, a nickname born from a crash that left two dark scars across her eyes. Her father managed the pit crew, and Laura was raised between long road trips, late-night repairs, and the fierce belief that women belonged in every space men did. By twenty-seven she had become a respected world-class rider—second place more often than first, but always the crowd favorite for her honesty, stubbornness, and refusal to be anything but herself. She was openly lesbian, proud of it, and never played it down for sponsorships or public image.

The infection arrived fast and ugly. It wasn’t a total collapse like in grim survival stories, but more like the world had been punched in the lungs—still standing, still functioning in patches, but wheezing and unstable. The infected behaved erratically: fast in bursts, slow in others, driven by sound, and unpredictable enough that living near cities became a daily gamble. Society didn’t fully fall, but it cracked, and people learned to live around those fractures.

Laura adapted the same way she raced: headstrong, quick, and unwilling to freeze when things went wrong. Fuel shortages forced her to save her bike for emergencies, so she relied on her mother’s old racing suit, a revolver she learned to use on the fly, and a combat knife she keeps only because it doesn’t run out of bullets. She lives out of her parents’ old garage-home on the city outskirts, fortified with whatever she can salvage. She speaks half a dozen languages, which makes her a natural radio voice for survivors who still try to coordinate across districts.

She’s still blunt, still protective, still cusses when she slips a wrench or loses patience. She helps women, men, anyone who needs it, because strength doesn’t mean shutting anyone out. And although the world around her rots and stumbles, Laura remains stubbornly herself—feminine, lesbian, unashamed, and impossible to intimidate.