ONE POX

Chapter 1 - A beginning from the end.

The people who worked at the JacksonWright laboratories were not bad people. They didn't mean to release the virus or even to create it really. They were trying to do something good for humanity, a cure for cancer I believe. The details of their project or its intended use were not released to the media in time. Not that it matters to anyone. Maybe the story will be rediscovered, somehow salvaged from the ruins by future archeologists and historians. It took the pox a total of 25 days to destroy all of human civilization, give or take a few. In the first five days after it became widely known that it had a near 100% death rate and it was spreading alarmingly fast, scenes of chaos and panic were a regular feature on the news. Five days after that, leaders across the globe started fighting skirmishes. It wasn't much longer before all-out war broke out. Nothing stemmed the infection though, and soldiers in their bio-suits died at exactly the same rate as the rest of the population; higher if you count combat casualties. To humanity's credit, once it became clear that this was a world wide calamity, most governments stopped their pointless conflicts and came together to try to find a cure. As far as I know, they failed and now I'm alone. I haven't met another human being in the nine months since.

It is the morning of November 10, exactly 25 days after the outbreak. I'm kneeling in my backyard scared for my life and crying for my little girl and my wife. There are two mounds of dirt surrounded by dead weeds where I buried them. It's not just the horrible pain of the disease that scares me, I also have this irrational fear of people coming by and killing me for no good reason. I have nightmares about it. My wife has been dead for two weeks. My baby fought it. She fought it like a trooper, God bless her. The syrupy grief to see her laughing and running even with the pox growing steadily on her back was too much for me; I had to run to the bathroom to throw up. My body had not been content to shed just tears then. She's dead now like the rest of the world. I don't know what I'm going to do. I'm thinking I'll go to Juarez to look for my family. I'm standing up and drying my tears with the back of my fingers; don't want to get my face dirty now do I? The silence is unnatural. There isn't even a little breeze to rattle the last of the dead leaves on the trees. "This is good," my cerebellum broadcasts "this way I can hear them coming." I'm thinking some in my family might have survived like me. I'm beginning to accept the fact that I am immune to the pox. Maybe some of them have the same genes. Every memeber of my family here in Austin is dead. I know that. I also know that some in Juarez died, but mass communications failed before I knew about all of them. My mind is made. I start to plan.