A Mother's Love, - [best reads txt] 📗

It had been over three days since the power to Liz's house failed.  You might think this would be a major cause for concern, but that was far from the worst thing that had occurred over this last tortuous month.  It had been two weeks since martial law had been implemented, a city-wide curfew now in effect to stop the free movement of people.  Portland, they were told, was one of the few places to escape the worst of the virus and these controls were essential to keep it that way.  Those found breaking the curfew faced summary execution, no matter what valid excuse they might think they had.  Man or woman—if you broke the rules, you were deemed a threat and ruthlessly eliminated.

Of course, it was typically women affected by this, because most of the men had gone.

That was the way it had to be, they were told.  The same went for the political agitators, the rebellious and those who chose to break the many laws that were previously used to control people’s lives.  There was no tolerance now.  Either you did as you were told, or you were deemed unfit for what was left of the world.

Desperate times call for desperate measures, you see. That was what the talking heads on the limited number of TV and radio channels had told everyone.  And, on the whole, the population acquiesced because the military was the only chance they had to survive this nightmare.

New York had been the first city to fall, though the origins of the virus were unknown.  Nobody expected it; nobody predicted it, and when it finally appeared, nobody had a clue how to defeat it.  It was a silent menace at first, spreading through the population of the east coast, hardly presenting as anything more worrying than mild cold-like symptoms.  People were heard to complain that there was a bug going around, passing from person to person, throughout schools and hospitals, with colleagues infecting the people they worked with.

Just a handshake was all it took, or a kiss from a loved one.  A cough on a subway could infect dozens; the very air you exhaled could be home to millions of viral particles that floated on the wind ready to contaminate anything they encountered.  Anything human mind.  The virus didn't survive in any other species.

Then the change came, and everybody's world fell to pieces.

The prime responders were the ones worst hit, catching the virus from those they interacted with and spreading it on to further victims.  With a three-day incubation period, the virus was all the way across the city and the east coast before anyone even knew what hit them.  By the time the President was informed that there was a new virus going around, her entire cabinet was already infected.  The President, being female, might have survived the virus, but the men weren't so lucky. The men who were guarding her; the men who ultimately ripped her to pieces.

That was the way the virus worked.  The plague infected both sexes, but it only changed the males.

As the virus slowly ravaged the host's immune system, the very body itself began to change.  At the three-day mark, infected males stopped being human beings when their DNA mutated to allow a new species to rapidly evolve.  These new “Adams” didn't reproduce sexually. Instead, they created more of their kind via a much more unpleasant method, and they killed any female they could find.

Male Homo Sapiens warped into an entirely new species through mutation of their Y chromosome.  To the women, the virus was no worse than flu.

The first of the infected became Homo Vampirous at 11.13pm on the seventh of June in a small and sparsely furnished apartment in Queens, New York City.  Arthur Miller had been his name, an unassuming accounting clerk whose sole claim to fame prior to the virus was that he had once stood behind Robert De Niro in a Starbucks.  He was a nobody, a worker drone who went to a job he hated so that he could fulfil the tasks given to him by people who cared nothing for him.  Just another face in the crowd of eight and a half million people.  He hadn’t even been worthy of ridicule.

Nobody was there to witness his transformation, an event so violent and rapid that it drew the disapproval of the neighbours in the property below.  Those neighbours, despite deciding to keep their objections to themselves, were soon overcome by Arthur who went from apartment to apartment, spreading the seed of the planet’s destruction.  By the time a policeman's bullet finally ended Arthur's rampage, he had infected over twenty-seven men.  All the women he encountered he killed mercilessly, ripping flesh from them so he could bathe in their blood.  All those twenty-seven men followed Arthur on the murderous rampage he had started.

The transformed became known as Virals. Thousands changed in the span of a few hours; millions in the span of a few days.  Across America, human civilisation quickly began to fall apart.  That was how they lost the hospitals--the injured and the unwell ferried to those bastions of medicine that rapidly became central breeding grounds for the plague.

Whatever the changes to humanity’s DNA caused by the virus, it made the Virals strong, durable and allowed for regeneration of all but the severest of injuries.  It also made them crazed for the taste and the consumption of human blood, especially those of females who were hunted down in their droves.

Despite the best efforts of the government, the onslaught of the virus was too great to be kept secret for very long.  Even with internet restrictions that nobody ever thought would be needed, word got out before the lid could be put on it.  Through social media and the dark web, the reality of what Virals were was released to the world.  And the world shook with the enormity of it all.

What male could be trusted after that?

Faced with a Viral, those with the means often ended their own lives rather than being forced to become part of the growing horde.  Better to die than become one of those things, was the general consensus.  Better to end it all than be eaten alive and drained of blood as the last spark of life drained from you.

Suicides skyrocketed.  Understandable really, when you thought about it.  Existence hadn't been that appealing to many as it was, and now the apocalypse had arrived.

There was also a misunderstanding over what the Virals were.  In the beginning, it was thought that they were just partaking in a mindless whirlwind of insanity and infection.  It soon became apparent that the Virals rarely killed the men they attacked; only the women.  They would gouge and bite and rip the eyes from people’s skulls, but the majority of those males dined on would be kept alive until the virus changed them.  Even more surprising was that, as the number of Virals grew, the females would often be left unharmed until an area was cleared of all opposition.  Only then would former husbands, brothers, sons and fathers return to the places they called home.

Then the feasting would begin.

Other animals on the planet didn't fare so well.  There was no sparing them, though the virus only affected human DNA.  Cattle, household pets and even the rats that scuttled in the streets all became food for a creature whose sole purpose seemed to be to strip all life from the planet.  The hunger of the Virals was ravenous, their stomachs sometimes distending with the volume they consumed.

Occasionally a male naturally immune to the virus would be encountered.  They would be ripped to pieces so that no remnant of their rejection remained to threaten the new order that was taking control.

At first, the scientists thought that Homo Vampirous was a rabid, insane creature, incapable of reasoning or conscious thought.  It soon became apparent that, whilst many of them did not speak, the Virals did in fact communicate.  Everything they did soon revealed itself to be coordinated and calculated, with the Virals acting in the way that best helped propagate their growing species.  Seemingly mindless attacks suddenly revealed their strategic purpose, with the military quickly becoming overwhelmed by the forces legioned against them.  Rumours began to flow that there was a hierarchy amongst the vampires; that some had retained much of their human consciousness.  Nobody seemed to know for sure.

What they did know was that it took mere days for humanity to be brought to its knees.  As bad as it seemed, there was worse to come.

***

Chaos surrounded her.

Liz had done her best to keep to the edge of the crowd, not wanting to be swallowed up by the desperate masses.  In her right hand, she clutched the tiny digits of her ten-year-old daughter.  In her left, she clung to the chain link fence that had been erected to help funnel the panicked toward the waiting trains.

The trains screamed hope.  They screamed rescue.

They hadn't let her bring a suitcase or a rucksack.  The small shoulder bag with her most valuable possessions was the only thing she had been allowed.  Ruby, her daughter, held tenaciously onto the teddy bear, the last semblance of a childhood that had been ripped from her.

Hundreds of people were here, moving steadily forward, with only one direction now allowed for them.  Even if she had wanted to turn back, the push behind Liz would have prevented it. There was barely any room to breathe in the throng that pulsed with the prospect of instant insanity.  If not for the soldiers guarding the perimeter, madness might have taken them, dozens being trampled to the ground.  The trick was to look forward and keep moving.

One thing she noticed very quickly was that, with the exception of the soldiers, there were no men here.  Most were off fighting on the front lines against the plague, but there should have been old men or even boys.  If there were, Liz couldn't see them.  This was a female exodus taken against many people’s better judgement.

Portland had been designated a safe city, and then suddenly it wasn't.  One day they were being told how the army was winning the battle against the forces brought into being by the virus, and the next they were being told to flee.  They had no choice in the matter. Men with guns and NBC suits were going house to house, loading those unlucky enough to escape the virus onto trucks and buses.

It was always men who did this.  Throughout history, men had always used their strength to