The Bump

Samuel Clemens

April 10/2032

Just fifteen years ago, it would have been ridiculous to call a forty-year-old man old, but after the "Bump," that all changed. Now any male over thirty was considered old and nearing the end of their usefulness.

The Bump! What a stupid thing to call the event that changed everything. It sounds so trivial, like bumping into a stranger or bumping your knee on a table or the funny thing we called sex when we were young, “bumping uglies.”

No, it shouldn’t be called the Bump; something like the change or the man-killer would be more appropriate.

Yes, I believe "Man-Killer" would be the correct name as seventy percent of the male population died within six months of the event.

Our leaders had seen it coming for over two years but decided not to inform the public, fearing panic and unrest.

They’d lied for over a year before the truth was revealed; telling the world the light in the sky was from a star that had exploded thousands of years before.

The satellite photos released on that day revealed something completely different. The light wasn't from an exploding star but an asteroid, half the size of our moon, on a direct collision course with our planet. They said three different scenarios could play out at impact.

The worst case would be a direct hit which would cause an ELE or extinction-level event.

The second and not much better would be the asteroid glancing off our moon and raining down thousands of large meteors onto our planet, killing millions of people and forever altering our environment and, in turn, our lives.

The third and best-case scenario, if there could be such a thing, was what they called the bump. If we were lucky, the asteroid would glance off our atmosphere and be bumped out into space. But, even in this case, life would change drastically. The energy released by the asteroid would knock every orbiting satellite offline and shut down all communications on the planet.

What they didn’t count on was the impact causing a tear in our atmosphere that would take weeks to repair itself, releasing intense amounts of radiation and causing irreparable harm to any male directly exposed.

For reasons the scientists couldn’t explain, this radiation attacked and changed the part of the male brain that controlled the endocrine system, which includes the testicles, thyroid gland, and adrenal glands.

If they were lucky enough to survive, these men would never be able to produce sperm again. Lucky is a relative term as life as a beast of burden was not something to be thankful for.

The vast majority of the men exposed died within a few months, as no treatment had any effect on the new form of cancer that attacked every organ in their bodies.

Within a year, the initial thinning of the human herd had stopped, and the human race was on an extinction course. The problem was this new world was not balanced in any way. In any populated area, women now outnumbered men by a ten thousand to one ratio.

Police and military collapsed as most of them died from the massive exposure they received in the days following the event. Violence rose exponentially, and people started forming in groups, protecting their areas with lethal force.

Eventually, large bands of mostly women left the cities and set up camps in the mountains and forested areas. In my area of central Canada, they escaped to the northernmost regions.

They lived together in peace and considered themselves family, but this family was missing an important member. Because of the lack of viable males, the number of children being born was very low. In two years, just seven hundred children were born, seventy percent of which were female. Something had to be done, or they would never survive as a society.

After two years, a meeting was called to pick a leader and develop a plan to increase the birth rate.

Doctor Carla Lang was chosen as the leader for two reasons; she exuded a strength that was unmatched by the other nominees, and even more importantly, in the old world, she was famous for helping women to conceive. She even had her own television show before everything went to hell.

She was also a little crazy, and now that she controlled all the important decisions, she became drunk with power and slipped farther into her warped view of this new world. She surrounded herself with strong women that held the same beliefs as her; the belief that this new world belonged to women

An order was given that every viable man would have to couple with three different women each day. This plan lasted less than two weeks as the men started refusing to comply. Doctor Lang grew angrier every day, frustrated with the men’s refusal to mate.

Until the morning, she was called to the cow barn as the milking machine had stopped working. That's when everything changed, and the men became something to be milked.

A machine was designed to achieve this goal and was in operation in less than a month.

Our sperm was tested once a month, and if the count dropped below a certain level, we were deemed unviable and transferred to the worker's pen. The donor group, as they called it, was replenished with new milk suppliers whenever our numbers dropped, by men kidnapped from the city.

The leaders didn't know that several of the women in our compound didn't believe in their views and were horrified by how the men were treated.

Their leader, Lina Su, was in contact with similar groups in several other compounds and had devised an escape plan.

This plan included me. I didn’t realize it at the time, but the reason Lina had developed a friendship with me was that for the plan to work; she needed one of the men to help.

She held a master's degree in electrical engineering and, in the old world, had worked as a designer for the largest technology company in the world.

Over the last few months, she’d designed and built a tiny electronic device that was easy to hide. It was constructed from a material that was non-magnetic and couldn't be picked up by the scanners. It could only be activated with my fingerprint, and my job was, once inside the milking building, to place my thumb on the device while holding it close to the main power supply. She said it would shut down all power in our compound and lock the doors to the leader's building and armoury while unlocking every other lock.

April 12/2032

We've been on the run for two days now. The device worked exactly as planned, and now our small group of forty-six, twenty-six women and twenty men are running for our lives. Lina estimated we’d have about a four-hour head start before Dr: Lang and her followers would be on our tail. She was right. I spotted their campfire smoke early this morning, and by my estimate, they were gaining on us. We broke camp quickly and started out at a jog, trying to put distance between our hunters and us.

April 13/2032

Everybody’s in a great mood today for two reasons. At first light, we spotted the smoke from Carla’s camp on the ridge we’d crossed a day and a half before, and Lina told us where we’re going. At first, we laughed because the place she spoke about was a myth, or at least we thought it was. A place where men and women lived and worked together to build a better future couldn't be real. But Lina convinced us all when she explained how she knew. It was still another three-day trek north, but we set out with a purpose in our step today.

April 16/2032

Writing is difficult today. Two fingers on my right hand were broken in the attack. Last night we set up camp in the forest above the valley where our destination was supposed to be. As it was getting dark and we still had a good four hours to go, we decided to rest for the night.

The attack came at daybreak. We were awakened by the sound of gunfire to see Carla and her followers standing amongst us holding automatic weapons, eight of them in total. Carla was standing over Lina, pointing a gun at her head and screaming. She told Lina to stand and then dragged her by the hair into the middle of our group. I tried to get up, but one of Carla's followers slammed the butt of her rifle into my right hand, breaking my fingers.

She hit Lina in the face with the handgun and held her by the hair as she screamed at us, “I want you all to remember this day. Think about what this girl's face looked like after I put a bullet between her eyes."

Carla turned to Lina, but as she pointed the gun, there was a loud crack, and her head exploded before she fell to the ground, dead. We were shocked for a few seconds until we heard several more cracks as all of Carla’s followers fell to the ground around us.

We didn’t know what was happening and cowered together, wondering if we were next. After about a minute a voice came from the forest telling us not to worry, we were safe.

Several people appeared from the forest dressed in camouflage and carrying assault rifles. They blended perfectly into the surroundings and smiled as they approached us.

There were six of them, but what shocked us all was, three were women, and three were men.

The man that seemed to be the leader of their group dropped his gun and ran to Lina. It was the man she told us about, her brother Michael.

Still in shock, I watched Lina’s brother, Michael, try to revive her as she lay face down covered in Carla’s blood. The fear on Michael’s face was palpable as he turned her over and saw her face was a mess and bleeding profusely from the impact of Carla’s gun. A large gash ran from her lips to her left eye, which was swollen shut.

As Lina regained consciousness, she started choking on her own blood, and Michael, looking panicked, called to one of his team, "Linda, help. She's choking."

Linda, who was obviously a medic, ran to Michael and pushed him out of the way as she rolled Lina on her side and cleared her airway.

As I was standing close to them, Linda looked at me while pointing at a large oak tree and said, “You. Go there, beside that tree and bring me the black bag with the green X on it.”

I didn’t move, staring at what was left of Lina’s face, until Linda screamed, “Now! Do it now. I need to stop the bleeding.”

I discovered rather quickly that Linda was much more than a medic; she was a surgeon in the old world. Within about fifteen minutes, she'd stopped the bleeding and stitched Lina's face back together.

Thirty minutes later, Lina, after an injection of a sedative, slept peacefully as we loaded her onto the makeshift stretcher/travois we’d built from tree branches and clothing.

I couldn’t believe my eyes when we exited the cover of the forest canopy at the top of a gently sloping hill, and looked down into a beautiful green valley with a clear blue sky overhead. It looked to be about a hundred feet deep and a couple of miles across, covered in lush green foliage and every colour of wildflower you could imagine. There were small stands of trees scattered throughout, close to the banks of a slowly meandering river that ran down the centre of the valley. It was the most tranquil and idyllic scene I'd ever seen, and I couldn’t help but think, “This truly is Eden.”

We made our way down to the valley floor and started across the flatland to the river, where we would turn east and follow the river for about ten miles to the village. When we arrived at the river and stopped to rest, we were missing five people. Looking back in the direction we’d come, I could see them in the middle of the grassy area picking wildflowers and berries.

That’s when all hell broke loose. We could hear loud grunting as Michael and two of his team took off running towards our missing members. The grunting was coming from several large male moose that were charging towards the berry pickers.

Being a Canadian boy, I knew something was terribly wrong here. Moose did not travel in herds, especially bulls. They were the least social animals on earth.

But these moose were charging in a pack and were the largest I ever saw. They had to be seven feet tall and weigh close to two thousand pounds. Their antlers looked to be as wide as they were tall, and it sounded like a freight train as they barreled into our panicked friends.

I couldn't turn my eyes away from the carnage I was witnessing. Bodies were thrown into the air or impaled on antlers while others were jumped on and trampled by the herd that killed in a crazed frenzy.

I watched as Michael and his team fired into the herd, dropping four of the animals before the rest scattered up the hill and into the forest.

Then something even crazier happened. Linda, the doctor, and two of her mates ran to the scene carrying medical bags and went directly to the downed moose and injected them with something.

Michael took us aside and explained what was happening. They'd shot the moose with tranquillizer darts. He told us that since the bump fifteen years ago, the bull moose has been in constant Rut, or mating season, while the female has not. He was telling us that the human male was not the only male affected by the change. Other large mammals were experiencing changes in their makeup and behaviour.

The hormone level increase that the Bull Moose felt during the normal fall, rutting season was now doubled and never shut off. What Linda was injecting was a drug that would reset that hormone clock to normal levels.

April 17/ 2032

We decided to set up camp beside the river last night. By the time we’d cleaned up and buried our friends, the energy was sucked out of us.

Because of the rest stop, Lina improved a lot overnight and is walking on her own now. She called us all together this morning and ensured us that everything would be okay, we just had another four hours, and we would be at our new home.

Nobody wanted to stop for any more breaks, so we made it to where the village was supposed to be in a little over three hours. When we stopped, and Lina said, "Where here, Welcome to your new home," we looked at her, confused. There was nothing here but the river behind us and a forest so dense we couldn't see more than a few feet in front of us.

Michael smiled at us before turning to face the forest, and that's when the magic happened. He cupped his hands to his mouth and made three loud sounds that sounded exactly like the call of the loon. He waited about a minute, and then the same call came back to us from the forest.

We watched in astonishment as, about twenty feet in, a part of the forest pulled back away from us and slid to the left. The opening was about ten feet wide and ten feet tall, revealing a long tunnel that went uphill to a light that looked like sunlight. Following Lina and Michael, we climbed the hill as the opening closed behind us.

As we got close to the end of the tunnel, I could hear something that brought tears to my eyes; it was the sound of children playing and laughing.

The slope flattened out at the end of the tunnel, and we came out into a village teeming with life. It was an incredible sight. The forest had been cleared for several acres leaving the village completely hidden from the outside world.

The area seemed to hold somewhere between seventy to one hundred small log cabins, each with its own vegetable and livestock garden. As I looked around, I could see happy couples, male and female, working the gardens and tending to the livestock. To my right, several hundred feet away, I could see where the sound of the children was coming from. It was a school, and the children were playing in the playground beside it. There were at least fifty of them, and I smiled as I realized they were equally male and female, or at least very close to equal.

April 20/ 2032

Everybody in Eden was expected to contribute in some way, so I started my job today as the keeper of the cows. At first I was shocked by the sign on the building door.

As we approached the building I could feel and hear a familiar sound that filled my heart with fear. There was a sign on the door that made me freeze in my tracks, it read, “Keep door closed during milking,” but Lina took my hand and said, "Don't worry, Samuel. Everything is ok. This is not what you think."

We walked into what I thought would be my nightmare to find that the sound I heard was from a generator that provided heat and light to the twenty or so milking cows that lived there.

I smiled as the smell enveloped my senses and reminded me of the home of my youth.

Growing up on a small farm in Northern Ontario, I knew the scent of a hay barn. I lived with the smell of hay and cow shit all through my youth until I fled to the city to build my own future.

I would speak to my parents once a week up until the Bump happened and everything changed.

My father died a few weeks after the event and it crushed my soul that I couldn’t get to my mother because of the chaos outside my door.

The phone systems collapsed shortly after my father died, and the only contact I had with my mother for the following year was through a short wave radio owned by her neighbour. We would talk every Sunday at noon, for a few minutes, until that one Sunday they didn’t answer.

The turning point for me came on the day that my apartment was broken into by rampaging teens. I was beaten badly and left for dead for what little supplies I had, and after several days of nursing my wounds, I started the five-day trek north to my childhood home.

After five days of walking, I arrived at what used to be our small farming village. There was nothing left standing as every house was burned to the ground. The only thing I found of any value that day was the heart-shaped locket my mother had always worn around her neck. It held a picture of our family, showing two proud parents holding a smiling baby boy.

For several years that locket was the only thing I possessed that held any actual value to me. That is until the day that Jennifer broke my arm, for the first time, and confiscated it.

It was shortly after the milking began, and Jennifer, Carla's second in command, was collecting anything metal from the men. My anger rose as she removed the locket from around my neck, and I screamed, “No!” as I pushed her to the ground. This resulted in one of her team smashing her rifle into my head and knocking me to my knees. That's when Jennifer, who loved nothing more than inflicting pain, walked to me holding the steel bar she always carried. She smiled down at me as her friend held a gun to my head and swung that bar as hard as she could, breaking my right arm at the elbow.

April 21/ 2032

As I write this, everybody in Eden is working on fortifying the village and preparing for an attack. Michael and four of his team were doing their daily rounds of the area this morning when they were ambushed. About three miles from the village, they came across a band of heavily armed women camped on the river’s edge. The woman, maybe twenty in all, immediately opened fire on Michael and his team.

Michael and another member of his unit were wounded before returning fire and escaping into the forest to find themselves trapped with their backs against a cliff wall.

Michael said that they downed four or five of the band but were in real trouble as they were running out of ammunition. They had nowhere to go and felt doomed as the invaders got closer until fate stepped in. Just as the attackers got within a hundred feet of cover, a group of rampaging moose charged into their midst, causing chaos and confusion as Michael’s unit escaped around the rock wall and into the dense forest.

They arrived at the village wounded and exhausted, ordering everybody not part of the defence team into the underground shelter.

The defence team worked like a well-oiled machine as they set up defensive positions around the village's perimeter. I watched, in astonishment, as eight perfectly camouflaged snipers dropped into small holes in the ground before pulling false grass over their heads.

April 22/ 2032

Today we buried the bodies of our attackers; all but the two that survived and were being questioned by Michael’s team.

The village was dead silent when they appeared out of the eastern forest and walked towards the milking building. There were only twelve of them, so the moose must have eliminated several. It was over in seconds as the ground snipers popped out of their holes and mowed them down before they had advanced more than a few hundred feet.

Lina called me to the downed attackers and asked me did I recognize them. She knew what my answer would be as they were several of the most violent of Carla’s followers. I looked at the bodies of the women that had beaten and tortured several of my friends before going to the two survivors.

The one sitting against a tree with her hands tied behind her back I didn't know, so I walked to the one that was lying face down and moaning in pain. She was shot in both legs, and Michael rolled her over just as I approached.

A rage I never knew I had exploded out of me when I saw her face.

It was my torturer, Jennifer, and I lost all control as I jumped on her and wrapped my hands around her throat. Michael grabbed me from behind, pulling me away as he said, “No, Samuel. We need information.”

I begged him, "Wait, please. Just one second. I need to check her for something."

Michael agreed when I told him what I was looking for and let me go. She had lost consciousness, so I bent down and searched her pockets' finding nothing. I was about to give up, but Michael said, "Wait a second," and ripped the front of Jennifer's shirt open, revealing the locket around her neck.

He lifted her head as I gently removed the locket and hung it around my neck.

I could feel my mother’s heart beating next to mine as I walked away, with tears streaming down my face, to be alone with my family.