For starters, my thanks to PokingFun for keeping her head above the rip tide long enough to edit this work.
To Smutol, who fought with me - A LOT - but provided invaluable input into character interactions and was often the voice for 'the little guy'.
To Talonwolf because apparently the ATF can't do their jobs to my satisfaction.
To the Voice Howling In the Wilderness and many others who helped with the feedback and e-mails.
A note on the stories direction. I know it took an abrupt shift, yet as I moved past the first chapter I realized that I either had to write Israel's destruction - poignant or pointless - or I could write a story where he succeeds in his quest - to be free. There was little hope in a story where Israel lives the rest of his life in hiding.
So, with a very high-tech society, how does he escape? Outside of hiding in some forgotten corner of the globe, the society had to come crashing down. The previous chapters, were the struggle of males to have their grievances heard, was not pointless. It is the very serious backdrop to the fall of civilization.
The great apparatus man- and womankind have built doesn't stop overnight. Every catastrophe has continuing effect. The plague doesn't kill everyone. Oh, it is terribly lethal, but communities can isolate themselves, be they urban, rural, scientific or military. What happens when the plague first burns its way through? The rift between men and women is still there and growing.
Wouldn't they work together in time of crisis? That sounds far more reasonable if you are a woman than a man. Men trusted women once and look how well that worked out for them. Finally, there will be more sex. This does not mean Israel is 'cured'. It means he's trying and, more importantly, being helped. I hope you continue to enjoy the story.
In Peace, daughters bury their mothers. In War, mothers bury their daughters. The death of sons is too painful to recount.
*****
(Behind the Scenes)
By act of Science I had ceased to be a rarity of one. All seven of my sons were capable of producing the T1I1 - the Israel 1 - antivirus. Their underdeveloped testes could do it, but weren't. The watch word was puberty. The current scientific consensus was that removing a portion of their sex organs was also unlikely to produce positive results.
Still unknown to the Federation researchers, the Chinese had the answer to the production dilemma and it was coming their way, one infection at a time. If they had, they probably would have started praying. After all, could the T1I1 kill the T2? All the mothers were getting lawyers - and private security. Before long, the Ministry of Justice would start issuing warrants.
In Shanghai, where the first mass burnings of corpses was beginning, a tired hospital worker was touched by a patient in the Dying Ward. It was across the street from the hospital and had been a mall before commandeered by the city. The worker was, in reality, a part-time supply clerk. After being laid off from her textile job, this was the only job she could find.
She'd been given extensive first aid training when she started work a few months ago, so now she was in charge of a whole section of the Dying Ward. People reaching out wasn't all that new to the worker anymore. People were being eaten alive and their fevers were extreme. This one though - her eyes were clear and she asked for water in a weak but steady voice.
The woman was dying, that was certain. She'd been given minimal support for the last...4 days? The clerk's heart began racing. This was a 'day 2' center. The Plague ran its course in a total of 4 days...so this woman should have died two days ago. The clerk rushed over, took one of the two thermometers for the entire ward and took her charge's temperature. 39 C.
The clerk raced over to the one doctor (a male medical student actually) and dragged him over to the patient. The dying woman had risen to the rank of patient in that attendant's eyes. The doctor examined the patient's body, ignoring her shame, and nearly fell over. The clerk had been quiet so as to not cause an alarm. The doctor yelled for two of the volunteers to grab a stretcher and come running.
These volunteers were women who had decided to help out at the hospital in this crisis because...it seemed the right thing to do. Now they removed the dead women from the Dying Ward and took them to trucks for cremation. It was doing something. They arrived with the stretcher, but the woman still appeared alive. 'We are going to the hospital' he informed them.
That was new. They crossed the street, passed the soldiers and the group walked straight to the Hospital's Chief of Staff's office. Her assistant informed the medical student that the doctor was asleep. 'We have a patient in Day 9' he responded. The assistant nearly tripped over herself running in and rousing her boss.
Ten minutes later, he was happy to be allowed to simply observe the specialists at work. The woman was nearly dead alright. She'd been fighting off the T2 Plague for nine days now. For half that time she'd only had an IV drip to sustain her. Three things made her different. She'd been gifted with a small dose of T2J1 (Java) antivirals.
That could only mean she had sex with that poor, dead boy. Unlike the other patrons, she'd been given enough of his seed to last this long. The second difference was almost a fatal one. She'd been cannibalizing her own body to save her unborn child, who was really nothing more than a lump of tissue at that time. It was good old Mother Nature trying to see the next generation through the womb and into the light of the world.
The final difference - somewhere, the doctors guessed a day and a half earlier - the antivirals hovering around and protecting that little lump of proto-boy realized that the tissue had grown to a sustainable size and they attacked it. It wasn't out of cruelty. It was out of necessity. They were fighting that battle to keep the mother alive, but without the ability to replace their losses, they were succumbing.
Quite frankly, there weren't enough of them and they were dying by the minute while the T2 kept getting stronger. The T2J's needed a factory and the lump of boy was it. A few select cells died and became antiviral factories and the counter-attacked into the mother's body - and they were starting to come out on top.
The swelling was going down, the fever was breaking, plus her heart rate and breathing were steady, if weak. For the team of doctors at their breaking point, this was a breath of fresh air. One was going to live. They also realized that this little boy wasn't going to be saving anyone else for quite some time. Extracting him would most certainly be fatal and provide a onetime dose for only a handful of people.
Instead of keeping thousands of patients alive, they now had to keep one boy alive. They conferred, agreed that they all were of one mind, then separated. The head of the WHO mission had been supplied with her own satellite hook-up this time. She called Geneva then the UN, giving them all the data they had. What she got back was surprising.
They already had a virtual carbon-copy of the T2J antiviral, but they were calling it the T1I1. Apparently there was an adult male in the Federation running around with it. There was also a nasty rumor starting to surface that he'd been killed in a police action in his home town. The WHO doctor wept silently at her desk. It felt like her gender was trying to commit genocide on themselves.
The Chief of Staff sat down with the battalion commander of the unit assigned to protect the hospital. By disease and fortune, it was a young captain. The Chief of Staff laid out the whole story. The boy wouldn't be saving anyone but himself and his mother for months. Most likely, everyone in the hospital and her unit would be dead by then.
If they harvested the boy, there would go the last, best chance for any of China to survive. She had to tell Beijing before their spies told them. Beijing would demand the mother and boy, she would delay as long as she could. Eventually they would see through her deceptions and then they would come to take him by force. The Chief of Staff wanted to know what the captain going to do when that happened.
(Back at Home)
"What do you want?" I requested.
"We are here for you, Israel Jensen," the voice answered. I looked to Flame once more.
"What if I don't want to go with you?" I tried to sound brave as I responded. There was a pause.
"We are with Zara," the voice countered.
"There are two of them," Flame whispered. "I can do this."
"Bitch, we are dangling off the edge of a bridge. Have you lo..." I mumbled. "Yeah, you have. Knock yourself out."
"Why isn't she here then?" I inquired.
"She is here," the voice said. I put a hand on Flame's thigh.
"Don't move," I whispered. "They have a sniper."
"You sure?"
"Yeeeaaahhhh, pretty much," I nodded.
"I'm tossing you a phone," the voice informed me.
"Toss it to the woman," I pointed. "Her hand-eye coordination is much better." The phone didn't fly high. It actually skidded to a stop less than a half meter away. I looked at Flame who looked at the phone then back at me.
"Bitch, it's right there. Pick it up yourself," she groused.
I picked it up, flipped open the opaque cover and was gifted with the sight of Flame's back with a little red dot centered between her shoulder blades. Flame was looking out over the city. I thought she was bored. After nudging her, she looked over the picture and smiled. She leaned into me. The dot followed. She leaned away and the dot followed.
"Good sniper," she smirked to me. "Okay ladies, you can have him," Flame called out to our visitors.
I typed *HugsZara*.
A few seconds later *Come In*.
*Not Ready Yet*.
*Please*.
*You probably can't understand how much that means to me*
*No?*
*Not yet*.
The closer woman began backing away. A few meters and on the other side of the roadway, a second woman did the same. I had to wonder about their interest. What rejection would be one too many? Did other men get this much leeway? No, they didn't. They bailed out the first chance they got, yet I was sticking around.
I stood up and followed them for a few meters before stopping. I still had no plan.
"Hmmm," Flame walked up to my side. "You don't see that every day."
"You are not supposed to see them at all," I confided.
"Do you know what's weird?" Flame tapped me with her gun.
