Apocolypse Thwarted

If you had asked me after I graduated high school what I would be doing in fifteen years, I am sure that I would have answered “raising children and living the boring life of a suburban housewife”. I always wanted children, but it never worked out for me. I wanted them, but my husband did not, and my second husband was too old to want to start a new family. Anyways, it seems that the pipe dreams I had for myself, were unrealistic as the apocalypse was to change my future in ways I could not fathom then.

People were dying and I was trying to like hell to avoid it. The disease started out slowly, the elderly were its first targets, kind of like the theory, survival of the fittest. Slowly and painfully all the grandparents died first. Then next were the parents. No vaccine helped, they all failed. We were down to middle age people and teenagers, because all of the babies had died along with the grandparents. We were living in chaos, struggling to survive, one day at a time.

Living off the grid, surviving by our wit, small clusters of people banding together trying to form sustainable communities. I had not traveled far and we were settling in at my uncles hunting cabin in upstate New York near the Canadian border. Sadly, he had passed on, but this was an ideal place to for us to set up a community. My husband, my brother, my nieces, nephews and myself all banded together hoping to protect each other. This new disease was horrible. It reminded me of EBOLA in Africa. Rotting your insides until there was nothing left except an explosion, literally.

When I was a young girl, my mother advised me to follow my instincts. So far that has worked well for me. My mother also told me that there was a time she would not be here with me. She handed me a gold heart shaped locket that she wore every day, and told me that this locket had been passed down from generation to generation to the oldest girl child. She told me that each generation should put a lock of hair from the husband and wife. I did as I was told, as I could see it meant a lot to my mother and wore the locket by my heart for comfort. In the future, I found myself wondering why I kept it, but I always reasoned that I was trusting my instincts like my mother advised me to do. You can always create reasons for the things you want.

A year later and our small community had dwindled. My husband was first, then my brother and then my nephews. For some reason the men seemed to go faster. I thanked God for all the training in survival and foraging techniques that I had acquired over my lifetime. At first, we grew our own vegetable and stored them. Then the soil and water became contaminated, and we had to boil the water and grow plants hydroponically.

I think for many people the failure to produce offspring was the worse effect of the Apocolypse. Part of the problem was the lack of men to try and reproduce with. People speculated that the disease had left the men infertile. A damaging blow to the male ego.

One day we hear a red cross vehicle nearing our encampment. We all hide and send out Eileen to try and communicate with these people. We had not seen another group of people for ten moons or more. They said they had a new vaccine, one that really worked and had shown great results in many communities. They said this would work for warding off the disease. However, they had no idea how to reverse the sterility issues. They did say that there was a medical group that had figured out how to clone people, and those clones seemed to be able to carry babies to term. But, and there is always a but, they needed uncontaminated DNA from our ancestors. I immediately thought of the hair in the locket. I celebrate the fact that I kept this sentimental trinket from my mother. This was a day of new hope for the world as it is. I am so glad to be a living part of life!