Well. Remember the bumper sticker? "God is coming and she's pissed."
So, here's how it went.
That doc in New York City got ebola. They contained it right away and everyone had a fit but nothing seemed to happen. Both New York and New Jersey forced immediate quarantines for 21 days through.
But that girl. 15. On the subway. He coughed, once. He put his hand on the seat. She wasn't even on it with him, she was just the next one on the seat. She put her hand there. She rubbed her eye.
Even then, it would have been ok. Except that she was already sick. She had asthma, she was back from the midwest where she's picked up enterovirus D68 and she'd stopped in Seattle to see her grandmother. Her grandmother was hoarse and coughing, but didn't seem that sick.... Panda strep. Yee-ha.
So two viruses and a bacteria held a war in this young woman. Her immune system went nuts. The Panda antibodies hit her adrenalin system: like her own personal methamphetamines. She was an A student, a really nice girl, church goer, had a boyfriend that she still was holding hands with.....
The pheramones from the strep antibodies made her and the boys insane. She went through the boyfriend, half the guys on the football team, the father of the kids she babysat, her male cousin a year younger and infected all of them. And lo and behold, Pandabola D68.... airborne. The boyfriend was the vector for that. Antibodies hit his brain and he jumped every girl he could lay hands on, paid whores and then shot four kids and himself at his school.
And oh, did it spread.
Mortality was actually lower, down from 70% in Africa to only 30%. But influenza hit too and that combination was lethal. Also, this strain only bled in about 50%. Some people were only hoarse, horny and coughing. Caffeine and gun sales went insane.
The government tried to intervene, but it traveled to Washington DC within the first two days and then it was in the super sekrit underground bunker. No one has gotten around to opening it yet. The screaming was broadcast. Airforce one crashed into Bejing. The Chinese were practical and basically barricaided that part of town and used guns and flamethrowers to stop the spread of the infection.
The United States citizens pulled out their guns. Houses and towns basically barricaded themselves. All motor vehicle traffic stopped. The grocery stores were instantly emptied. People took to their bunkers, the survivalists hunkered down, waves of infected insane Pandabola D68 people overcame a lot of the bunkers. That is, if the neighbors knew they were survivalists. And before the US lost the internet, people got lists of folks who'd gotten survival magazines, lists of mormons, lists of anyone that they possibly thought could help them survive.
We pushed the sailboat off from the dock. It had two broken chain plates and was unsailable, but we paddled. Slow, but who the fuck cares? We moored it near Old Fort Townsend to throw off pursuit and headed for one of the caches. I didn't have time to finish the little hidden yurt but we were only picking up supplies anyhow. Headed into the Olympics.
To meet the other women. Bitch central. Postmenopausal, menopausal, ovulating, premenopausal, toddlers, babies. Set up five camps scattered. Worked on the earth ships.
Then we waited. Rest of the country in a blood bath. We worked on woodcraft, taught the kids, set up the libraries, collected as many fucking edible mushrooms as we could find. If we found a really smart obnoxious male, we captured him, took sperm (we had some creative ways to do that, let me tell you) and then killed him. We had to assasinate a few with the poisonous mushrooms. I'd buried the silver. Looters went through every house. I had songs and poems in my head. Others had the bible, the Odessy, all of Hans Christian Anderson's stories, you name it. Anything any of us thought was important. We took turns at night telling stories and teaching songs. We rotated the long memories through the camps.....
Once the infection ran its course, about 80% of the US population was dead. We stayed in the mountains. And started stealing the girls. We'd find the survivalist patriarchal gardens. At first they'd set their kids to work in the fields. They were way too paranoid to communicate with each other so that actually worked for us for ten years. We'd wait, watch, and grab the girls, as young as possible. Before that patriarchal shit took hold. We were so fucking tired of it.
No boys. We didn't take them for 30 years.
But we did take sperm. That was quite fun. The girls were encouraged to study male encampments for at least a year, to pick an appropriate guy. The camps were so frantic by then that the girl just had to step out in front of a guy. He'd rape her, but since she'd been planning it for a year and was horny as hell when she stepped out some women argued that she was raping him. Sometimes a woman would go for a group, to let fighting choose who to impregnate her. Well, a few women got captured, but they got away or killed themselves. Any woman with any sense would say when she was going in, and then our hunters could put an arrow through the head of every guy at the gang bang if it got out of hand. Messy, but that was ok.
I'm 92 now. The Olympics got too small and we started colonizing the whole coastal range. We listen to the rest of the world on ham radios. China is the massive power currently, like we give a fuck about that. Our Chinese lessons are excellent and we've infiltrated the government there. Galatea is pleased. No more fracking. Airplanes went out of style during the Pandabola crisis. People live locally as much as possible.....
No More Room in Hell: The 2014 Halloween Horrorquest