The world is at rest. No longer an urgent rush to travel, to build, to tear down. Bucolic, rural, small enclaves of people live in a landscape of beauty.
Cities molder away, buildings covered in vines, trees growing on rooftops, toppling walls. Or gone entirely, replaced with round lakes of clear water, all that's left after the blasts that erased the teeming millions, sterilized the land around.
No jet trails in the sky; no vehicles crowding the cracked highways. Rusty signs calling out places that are not even remembered.
Clean water in every stream, every river. It hadn't been that way at first, the contamination had to rot, be digested by nature. Twelve billions of bodies, half of them animals, half humans, rotting over the course of one hot summer.
Birds thrive - there are no ground vermin to predate their nests, their eggs. No competition in the trees. Flocks of millions darken the skies include crows, parakeets, passenger pigeons! Must have been some hiding out, somewhere. Back now.
Locusts are getting bad. The simple solution, for our hardy farmers that remain - when they destroy crops, we harvest the locusts, dry them by the ton. Bread, fat, protein, fiber. Healthy. Keep seed back in metal boxes, old scavenged safes, away from insects, we can try again the next year.
No dogs! I miss dogs. A bird, a fish-tank, just not the same. Ant farms - pretty popular, ants are having a grand ol' time. Their hills can cover acres in some places.
Lizards are happy, the warmth and the lack of egg predation, they've actually become a problem. In the lakes left in bombed-out cities, apparently alligators are making a vigorous comeback. Living on birds and fish, they probably don't know anything had changed, their little lizard brains uncurious.
Not gonna make a pet out of a lizard, though some try. I've eaten alligator, gamey and tough. Not popular, they raised the idea of a herd, a hedge against a bad crop. Not much interest.
Some say it came from China, or Russia. I think we did it. Targeted virus, matches a particular gene sequence, eliminated certain populations of middle eastern descent, but these days folks are so mixed, maybe ten percent 'success'. Some miserable old bigoted bastards made it, I hope they died first.
Then it mutated.
Burned through the human population like the flu. Stay indoors! Wash your hands! You can slow it but not stop it, everybody gets the flu eventually.
Hospitals quit accepting flu patients - no point, they didn't last a day. Just barricaded the doors, posted armed guards.
Trucks and construction equipment to clear the streets, remove the contamination. Until the construction workers died too.
Only trauma cases admitted. Folks began injuring themselves to get in, then the hospital staff all died, then it didn't matter.
The internet lasted six months, then it went down, around here anyway. Chicago burned, that was where we got ours from, all the lines melted or equipment lost, power outages.
Bombs for a while, wiping out centers of infection. That meant, whole cities. Then they ran out of pilots, bombing stopped.
Some clusters of people are left! Here and there, we have two copies of resistant genes, it creates a protein the runs along, destroys the 'bad' gene, you do fine. Just the flu, sucks but survivable.
The gene occurs in clusters of related people, who all inherited it from some ancestor.
Like here, in our town - an old Czech community, can't tell that anymore, just regular Americans of every race but if you had two copies from old Micala, great-great-grandmother, well then you are fine. Lots of intermarrying going on around here, I guess! Second, third cousin was enough to get some of the 'blessing'. Get it twice, and there you are.
Got Micala's gene from four ancestors, I'm a real mixed bag, six different races in me but Micala's line on all sides, every time.
Hits men harder. Women got several sites that the gene hangs out: men, only the Y. A few percent of men have two, lots more variation in the ol' Y chromosome. And Y is a slut, exchanges genes all the time with other chromosomes, that's how it has any of the good stuff at all.
It can lose it, too. Most males born doesn't last twenty-four hours. We try, by god we try, oxygen tents and assisted breathing and praying why not, we're desperate.
Our community of some twelve thousand is down to just a handful of men. And half those men, sterile! The flu that keeps on giving.
I'm one of the potent ones, a Stud.
My job, my entire existence is, you guessed it, trying to preserve the Human Race. Yeah we all think of it like that, with capital letters. Like we're something special. Don't feel so special most days. Just doing my job.
They try to spread me around. No sense in 'couples' anymore, not the way we used to do it. Plenty of multiple-Mom families, makes raising the kids easier. Plenty of pussy-licking going on, everybody needs some loving, all sense of prudishness gone, probably for good.
No coupling-up for me! Sure, I can live with a woman, sleep with somebody who can get along with me, warm my bed. But she comes up pregnant, then off she goes to the maternity camp, treated like a queen, fed extra calories and pampered, treated with whatever medicine we preserved from the ruins.
Then I gotta find somebody else to sleep with. Not what you'd call long-term relationships. I'm apparently pretty potent, most 'catch' the first month. Even with my schedule, even worn out and fucked-out from work seven days a week, she sleeps with me a month and she's a baby-momma, off on vacation. A pretty sweet deal, for her.
The planet continues to heat up, got a little rough for a while, some places burned just from that. It's slacking off now, around 80 degrees year-round. We get extra crops, sometimes three in a year!
If you can tell what a 'year' is any more. We use a calendar, try to keep track but there's actually no point. The cycles of birds, locusts, what fish remain in the hot streams are more important by far, to our survival.
Teenaged me would have loved this life! Walking around in a world of near-universal topless women! Tits of every size, shape, color. I admit it; I gotta grin, just thinking about it.
I'm a tit guy. Really does it for me.
I see some I am extra pleased by, smile at a sweet profile, a droopy bouncy pair of glorious breasts that take my breath away, almost universally she's willing.
For whatever reason - wants that baby, wants to feel a real cock again, hell just the novelty. And if she gets pregnant well she gets time off from work, full year maternity leave, that's a bonus.
I'm cruising a farm, on my schedule today, accompanied by my handler, she's here to do the paperwork, lets me choose, I have that much control of my life anyway.
So there, that young filly with the pouty pink nipples, tanned on the top, not a tan-line, just browner on top because she's out in the sun standing all day. Inventory control, keeping records of crops, electronics, frypans, whatever.
By hand, all paper, we have electricity but it's mostly for cooling, keeping our foodstuffs from spoiling. One laptop allowed in the maternity camp to keep genetic records.
She's counting bushels of seed corn as it goes into the hoppers, planting season, it's always planting season, we do it continuously, the weather hardly changes.
Leans over the hopper, those tits bobbing wonderfully, always look extra-sexy when they hang down, that's what I feel anyway, and my opinion matters.
She's bending in, stirring the grain with one hand, one tit pressed against the lip of the hopper, deforms from the pressure, nipple pokes out crooked, delicious! I could cum in my pants, if I wore any pants.
I'm smiling, she looks up, sees me, a surprise right there, most women don't even see a man much of the year. Sees me smiling, gets that look. That 'who-me-am-I-gonna-finally-get-sum?' look.
I nod, approach. She sets the clipboard down, walks over by the tractor, starts stripping.
Doesn't take long, she's wearing sandals, shorts, a floppy hat, that's about it. Not a stitch of underwear, too hot. No makeup, that's for holidays, and mostly to please themselves. Takes just a moment and she's stark naked. Waiting for me.
She's got that healthy outdoor look that makes anyone appealing. Add her bouncy tits, wide hips, friendly smile and I'm interested.
