This story was edited by Ein ashan bli aish, and I thank her for all of her hard work.
The world didn't end in December of 2012 as the Mayan, the Hopi, and the Aztec's foretold. Quetzalcoatl didn't come to destroy man, but something else did.
In one of the old Soviet Satellite nations, a fundamentalist group, bent on terrorism, broke into a biological warfare lab, which had been abandoned for years, and stole a biological agent. At least that's the story that most of the world's governments released. The group released the agent in the west, in Germany to be precise, to punish the infidels at Christmas. Ironically it didn't only punish the infidels, but the whole world, and at Passover and Ramadan too.
It was only a bird influenza strain, but it was genetically enhanced by the Soviets. It infected humans at an amazing rate. There was a 95% infection rate and a 70% mortality rate. The bug soon became known as the Quetzalcoatl (or Q) flu.
Within three months of being released, Europe was decimated. The world's governments responded by quarantining the continent, but people forgot that it was bird flu. Birds were infected at about the same rate as humans, but with a lower mortality rate.
Of course you can't quarantine birds, and the infection spread to Asia and Africa. The genie was out of the bottle. It couldn't be stopped after that. There was no turning back. It was a catastrophe of global proportions.
North America was okay for a while. All travel was prohibited, and the first outbreaks in New York, D.C. and Los Angeles were quarantined. But in the end it was all futile. We got it too, and at the same rate as the rest of the world. We had just delayed the inevitable. Next to fall was South America and then Oceania. It was like the hand of God had swept another mistake clean.
The disease was particularly virulent in women. There was some kind of link with estrogen and the disease. No one could figure it out, and it wasn't known if the Soviets actually intended such results, but women in their childbearing years (roughly 13 to 45) were severely hit. The infection rate in women of this age group was roughly 99% and the mortality rate was closer to 85%. By June, nearly all of the young women of the world were dead.
Testosterone, to a lesser degree, had the opposite effect. Most of the world's young men were infected, but they were less likely to die, although they died in mass numbers too. The world's population, after Quetzalcoatl, was made up of young men and older women, with a sprinkling of mostly prepubescent girls.
I didn't get very sick, but my wife and father came down with it right away. My mother who was close to fifty also got sick, but only after she and I vainly took care of my father and my wife Jennifer. My wife died right away. My father held on for a week before he succumbed. That's when Mom got sick. She was too sick to get out of bed when I buried them in the back yard.
There were no funerals, no wakes, people in the cities where being buried in mass graves. When more than three-quarters of the population die, the rules tend to change. It's not like I didn't try. I walked into town, and got to the front door of the funeral parlor, before I noticed that it was closed. It was a hot day in early June. When I got home again I considered digging the two graves where the swing set used to be. I had seen other people digging in their back yards over the last few days. It took me longer to agree to such indignities for my wife and father.
First I went to check on my mom, and I noticed that her fever had gotten worse. The temporal thermometer read 105. She was burning up and unconscious. I couldn't get any medicine in her, but I needed to bring her fever down.
There was another more bothersome result of being infected by the Q-flu. Men tended to recover from the disease with a heightened libido. Or at least that was the rumor on the Internet. I myself noticed that I had been masturbating more. Whether it had the same effect on women was not known, since there weren't enough of them left for comparison.
I ran a bath of cold water and stripped my mom out of her bedclothes. As the water started to rise, I carried her into the bathroom and slipped her into the cold water. I sat on the toilet as the water rose up and over her body.
I was physically and mentally exhausted and half crazy with grief, but as the water rose over her body, I started to notice it. She was wearing a t-shirt and cotton panties, but it was if she was naked in the water. The cotton shirt lay like a second skin over her. Her nipples were red and erect, and her breasts were full and pouty. My eyes ran along her waist down her torso to her panties. They too were wet and see-through. I could see her pubic mound and then her labia. It was so wrong, but I couldn't take my eyes off her. It was as if I was possessed, and my cock grew hard in my pants.
I had never realized how alluring my mother's body was. It wasn't as if she had kept it hidden. She was always fashionably dressed, which included tight jeans. I guess, until now, I had never noticed. Well, I was noticing now. I half thought about jerking off, but then I came to my senses once more. Besides, I had to take care of her. I got out the thermometer again and put it to her forehead. It was 102. Better, but still not down enough.
I ran into the kitchen and got out the ice tray. I was lucky, we had only lost the electricity the day before, and the ice still hadn't melted. Drastic times call for drastic measure. I poured the ice into the water.
Half an hour later her temperature was below 100. That was enough. I didn't want to get her temperature down too much, only to have her die of hypothermia. I spread some towels on her bed, carried her there and stripped off the rest of her clothes. Now I had to dry the parts of her body that I had been lusting for before. I tried to control my desire as I dried her breasts, her ribs and stomach, her legs and ultimately between her legs. Thinking clearly, I laid a wet sheet over her and got to work in the back yard.
Mom was the pampered, rich wife of a corporate lawyer. He had been a partner in the firm, and they had met when mom was working as a paralegal one summer. Dad was thirteen years her senior, but he became instantly smitten with her. "She was the most beautiful woman I had ever met," he had often told me.
Being of Middle Eastern decent, she had dark hair and dark eyes, with an hourglass figure, round hips and long legs. She was a little taller than most women. She didn't appear to be very ethnic, and if you didn't hear her distinct Middle Eastern accent, you would think that she was a classy, cosmopolitan New York woman.
She had come to America as a young woman, and she'd seen the law, and New York City, as a way of getting ahead. She might have been born the daughter of a restaurateur in the Middle East, but she had quickly adjusted to the new lifestyle, and been living in the upper class Long Island town of Garden City when she married my father. I came along a few years later.
That's were we lived. I knew we were well off, but I never thought of us as rich. No matter how much you have, there is always someone else who has more. All of my friends were well off too, even when I went to college.
Now on a hot, humid, summer day on Long Island, I didn't feel so fortunate, especially as I dug the two graves for my wife and father. I was covered in dirt and perspiration, and I was in tears half of the time. It was well into the evening when I got done. My progress was slowed because I had to keep checking on my mother. I then got two old blankets out of the attic and wrapped the bodies in them. I used duct tape to seal them in their make shift shrouds.
By midnight I had both bodies in the ground, and covered with earth. I had nothing to mark their graves. I wanted to get something, but I was falling asleep standing up. I hosed myself off and fell asleep on the floor next to my mother's bed. It was at this time that I was most despondent.
I was awoken the next morning by a low voice. "Ed. Ed where are you?" It was my mother. I got up on my knees so that she could see me. "I'm right here, Mom." She was gaunt and frail, but still very beautiful. "Why are you sleeping on the floor? And where is your father?" I didn't know whether to laugh or cry. Eventually I succumbed to the latter.
I gave her plenty of soup when she could keep something down. At first she didn't want to eat, but eventually she became ravenous. I too, realizing that I hadn't eaten in two days, was insatiable. I started to wonder if we had enough food in the house. I would have to make a run into town later.
"Ed, why am I naked?" my mother said to me after I brought her lunch. "Mom, you had a fever of 105," I said ashamed. I remembered, guiltily, how I had lusted over her naked body. "I had to get your temperature down somehow." My mother gave me a quizzical look. "I had to immerse you in an ice bath." I added.
"You poor child," she said motherly. "You really took care of me, but you had to see a little more of your mom than you would have preferred."
"I would have lost you if I didn't get that temperature of yours down," I rationalized. "How did you know that? You have no medical training." "Amazingly, we still had the internet until a couple of days ago when the electricity went out. I got a lot of information from there. There were web sites on how to combat the disease."
"How many people are left in the country?"
"Not many. There are no official reports, but if there was only a 30% survival rate, then there is less than 100 million people left out of population of 320 mil. And of that 100 million, most of them are men. The disease targeted mostly young women for some reason."
"My God, they're all dead?"
