When Humans Are Extinct

My name is James Jarvis. A big and tall young man of Haitian and Irish descent living in the City of Boston, Massachusetts. I was born to an Irish mother and Haitian father. My mother died shortly after giving birth to me and I was raised by my father's family. Being a biracial dude in the racially diverse but occasionally uptight City of Boston wasn't always easy but I learned to get by. Especially considering what I was fated to deal with in later times.

In 2009, a deadly plague gripped much of the world. It originated in Mexico. It killed many people there. It crossed over to the United States of America and killed thousands. It killed many more in Europe and other parts of the world. In 2010, the World Health Organization declared that the plague was contained. Millions of people worldwide had rushed to obtain the vaccine against the Plague. And my mother was one of them. Decades later, it was discovered that the vaccine against the 2009-2010 Plague had an unusual effect on pregnant women. And their offspring. Basically, any woman who was pregnant while vaccinated had a highly likely chance of giving birth to mutated offspring. An unexpected side effect of the vaccine, which turned out to be worse than the Plague.

There are millions of us out there. Young men and women whose mothers happened to be pregnant with them at the time of vaccination against the worst plague seen by humanity in the twenty-first century. The year is 2029. And mutants are real. Forget the crap you read about in old comic books. Or what you have seen in the movies. There is nothing fun about being a mutant. We don't wear brightly coloured costumes and run around trying to save the world. Mostly we run around trying to stop the world from killing us. That's a big part of a mutant's life these days.

Anyone looking at me would see a six-foot-one, big and tall young man with light brown skin, curly black hair and luminescent pale gray eyes. My unique looks a blend of African and Caucasian features, passed onto me by my Haitian father and Irish mother. I look like a regular guy I guess but the world considers me a monster. I have to eat raw meat every day otherwise I go crazy. I can't consume normal food. My system cannot digest what normal human beings like to eat. It wasn't designed to handle any of that. Only raw meat and the blood of freshly killed animals. And for the most part I lead a nocturnal existence. The light of the sun bothers me. It weakens me, makes me sleepy and saps my strength. I prefer to go out at night. This is just one of the many unpleasant facts of my life. I am stronger than a normal human. Not ridiculously so, though. I weigh two hundred and fifty pounds and I can lift seven and a half times my own weight. I can run faster than any of those bozos you see at the Olympic games. Not that they would ever let me compete. I heal quicker than a normal human too. That's one of the reasons why my kind are hated, I guess.

There are all kinds of mutants out there. My buddy Harley Chang is a short, stocky Asian guy with the uncanny ability to secrete a poison ten thousand times more lethal than arsenic. It comes out in his sweat, his spit and it's in his bloodstream. That kind of makes him the type of guy you should avoid. He alone is immune to the effects of his poison. Even with my healing factor, prolonged exposure to his poison would most likely kill me. I met Harley while running from the Hunters in New Jersey. He saved my life. Walked through a squad of Hunters, spraying his poison and slaughtering them like chickens. I'm telling you, snakes got nothing on this guy.

I should probably tell you about the Hunters. The day the humans found out that there were many people who weren't quite normal out there, the governments of the world went nuts. The United States of America formed an alliance with the Confederation of Canada and Mexico. Together they created the North American Protectorate. The N.A.P. enlisted hundreds of thousands of men and women from all walks of life all over North America ( with preference given to soldiers, firefighters and police officers ) and trained them to hunt us. Thus, the Hunters were born. They're armed with cutting-edge weapons. They've got helicopters, airplanes and tanks. They track mutants all over the world. They find us and kill us. Originally, they were supposed to arrest us and detain us to determine whether we represented a threat to human society. At some point, they stopped arresting us and simply shot us on sight.

Welcome to the daily life of a mutant in the twenty-first century, folks. Every human being on the planet thinks you're a monster and they want you dead. You and all others like you are routinely shot like animals on the streets. Actually, we're seen as worse than animals. There are animal rights groups operating all over the world. They protect domestic animals from abusive owners and defend wildlife from poachers. Well, there is no mutant defence agency that I'm aware of. The United Nations has issued a clear warning to all of its members that helping mutants is punishable by death or lengthy imprisonment. Isn't that cool?

Personally, I hate humans. And I'm glad I'm a mutant. A lot of mutants curse their lot in life. I like being what I am. I hate the Hunters. The way I see it, Hunters kill mutants and I kill Hunters. The last Hunter I killed was this particularly vicious bitch named Meredith Cromwell. A tall, red-haired and green-eyed, forty-something woman from the City of Galway in Ireland. She came over from Europe to join the N.A.P. Command Center. In Europe she distinguished herself as a mutant hunter. She went after our kind like Adolf Hitler went after the Jews a century ago. I still have nightmares about the TV specials I watched about Cromwell's exploits as a Hunter in Europe. She single-handedly slaughtered thousands of our kind. Marching through Ireland, France, Germany, England and Austria like Darth Vader and his Clone Troopers in those dastardly old movies.

Meredith Cromwell came to Boston to slaughter those of us mutants who still lived in the City. And she did her job well. I infiltrated her paramilitary unit with the aid of a mutant friend of mine named Ernesto McArthur. A young Hispanic guy with a sick sense of humour. My good old pal Arty had a really cool power. When he gets scared, his glands secrete an odourless gas which could temporarily blind anyone within a hundred-foot radius of him, depending on the direction of the wind. Arty and I went into Cromwell's compound. In front of the TV cameras we blinded her soldiers and slaughtered them. And I tore them to pieces, including her. Now the whole world knows me. I'm the most hated mutant on the face of the world. The guy that human mothers tell their brats about before wishing them goodnight. I'm the boogeyman.

A lot of mutants applauded my bravery, others condemned what I did. The way I see it, humans want to do to us mutants what the Nazis did to the Jews in Germany a century ago. In future time, the planet Earth will belong either to humans or to mutants. There can be no middle ground. They say mutation is an accident due to science gone awry. I see it as natural evolution. Humans are going extinct and mutants are there to replace them. The world is caught in the grip of global warning. If you think the massive earthquakes in the Republic of Haiti, Chile, Turkey and China along with the Volcanic Ash Clouds in Europe were bad, you're in for a surprise. The BP Oil Crisis of 2010 and the Floods of Pakistan were nothing compared to what's happened to the planet Earth in the twenty-first century. The City of Los Angeles was completely levelled by a massive Earthquake. Forty percent of the State of California is under water. The European country of Slovenia was wiped off the map by the biggest volcanic eruption since Mount Saint Helens. Taiwan has joined the fabled City of Atlantis under the ocean. Oh, yeah. Lots of places you thought would last forever are gone.

The human birthrate has dropped dramatically. The only places where human families are still having numerous offspring are parts of Africa. Even before the mutants came about, Europe had a dropping birthrate. Well, the Republic of China has joined Japan and most of the members of the European Union on the list of countries with rapidly dropping birthrates. The only population with skyrocketing birthrates is the mutant population of the world. Following a Civil War in Brazil, the mutant population now outnumbers the human population. The Republic of South Africa has been taken over by a cabal of mutants led by a man named Adonis Mulenge. He has resurrected South Africa's nuclear weapons program and now leads the only country where the hunting of mutants is outlawed. The United Nations Supreme Council has stated its intent of moving against him but he warns the world that he will defend his people by any means necessary. Yeah, mutants are coming up in the world.

This is my world, folks. Around the globe, mutants are organizing in armed militias for mutual defence and protection against hostile humans. The city of Kinshasa in the Republic of Congo has fallen into the hands of a mutant warlord of Nigerian descent named Timothy Adewale. He's united much of Africa's mutants into a single army. They've got tanks, helicopters and tens of thousands of soldiers. And they're marching across the continent, liberating mutants of African descent from their human oppressors. We're not going down without a fight. The humans have united against us. It's about time that we united against them. Especially since it's been recently discovered that the offspring of mutants are almost one hundred percent guaranteed to be mutants as well. Yeah, we've got second-generation mutants running around. Isn't that cool?

This is why I fight so fiercely. For the sake of family. After Arty's death, I went on a really self-destructive path. And the only person who was there for me turned out to be my old friend Victoria Kagame Hauser. A tall young Black woman born and raised in the city of Berlin, Germany. Born to a family of African immigrants, she was actually luckier than most of us. Her human family actually protected her after her mutant abilities emerged. She fled Berlin after the mutant population was quarantined by the authorities. The German version of the Hunters slaughtered her family in their attempt to get to her. She avenged them quite spectacularly by bombing a military base. Since then she has wandered all over the world, searching for others like her. Somehow, she ended up in Boston, where she met Arty, Harley and me. We became a team, and in many ways, a family. Victoria and I got close after the death of Arty at the hands of that Hunter bitch, Ireland's very own Meredith Cromwell.

Victoria has become so much more than just a teammate to me. We're lovers. And she's pregnant with my spawn. Yeah, she's carrying my future son or daughter. Isn't that awesome? Now more than ever I know what I must do. For the sake of my beloved lady and our future offspring, the humans must be wiped out. To that end, I've been meeting with a mutant scientist named Marguerite Saint Pierre. This fiery red-haired mutant gal from Canada has been working on the 'human problem' for years. And she's found the solution. The key to defeating the humans is found in the very DNA of my good friend Harley Chang. What can I say? My best buddy is just full of surprise. Unbeknownst to him is the fact that I've been collecting DNA samples from him for the good doctor. And thanks to him, the wicked batch of viral wonders she's been cooking up for two years is now ready. Dr. Marguerite Saint Pierre has come up with a lethal virus that is harmless to mutants but kills humans instantly.

We've moved past human testing. The virus works. Now we're just looking for a method of releasing it over as wide an area as possible. Kill as many of these wretched humans as possible. We've got a surprise for the humans, folks. Only the good doctor and I are aware of this. We're going to send the dreaded humans on the endangered species list where they belong. In one fell swoop we're going to wipe out these racist, sexist, homophobic and xenophobic monsters. They've pillaged and plundered the world's riches for ages. They've committed genocide across the continents, especially in the Americas but also in parts of Europe, Australia and Africa. Why shouldn't we wipe them out? They would do the same to us. We're only defending ourselves. Tomorrow the good doctor and I will release the airborne virus upon the planet Earth. Tomorrow humanity dies. I wish I could share the good news with my beloved lady or my friends. I can't take the chance that they have too many scruples to do what needs to be done. It will be a happy surprise for them when they discover that it's finally ordinary humanity's time of dying. And I will be happy to feign surprise along with the rest of them on that glorious day. The world ends tomorrow. It's going to be so cool. See you there. Good night.