The first several years were farcical. The government blamed everyone but themselves, then began to pretend nothing happened. It was the little things that changed. Going to doctors visits with full PAPR units spooked some of the old dumb boomers. Maybe the occasional racist bitched about how I should fuck off back to the rez as if I had a choice.

Time marched on. People forgot. End-stage capitalism continued without a care. Normalcy was hellbent on strapping every body onto the life raft and chuffing that big driftwood bitch away from reality. The problem was, like lazy giant whirlpools go, a body gets turned around, made into confusion, and put back into outcast nonsense.

We watched this pass by for 4, 5, 7, then 8 years. Now the trouble with a persistent infection that don’t kill your monkey ass is it’s treated like a cold. It doesn’t exist except when everyone gets it. I always thought that made no sense. Turned out I was right. Now it took about 10 infections for rats to just up and die for the most part. In humans, however, it progressively induced a sort of mass psychosis. We’d long since packed it up, moved to the most rural backwater, bought our fair share of guns at Walmart, and brought on folks with immune problems to live on the 100 acre property.

Treated it like the zombie apocalypse.

10 years in is when the wheels just came off the bus. Mostly coherent news announcers used to be shocked by people roaming the streets, usually shouting incoherently about campaign slogans or immigrants or the state of the economy. Sure enough, whether you heard it on the radio or a live local broadcast, young men were stripping buck naked and roaming around like wolf packs, fucking and eating whatever they could find before cops shot them up.

Must have been 15 years in, right around when the last parcel of land we sold for $1 got bought, that society just—well I wouldn’t say collapsed. Collapsed implies a war or mass extinction event. No it was more like a car that was just damn near out of gas. Widespread riots, food shortages, mass insurrections. Everyone had no functional immunity anymore and their frontal lobes were completely fucked by vascular problems hiding away in the bone marrow. I might have cared that the birth rate was barely above 0.15 on account of the fetuses not making it all that long. But when society decides to eat itself all ouroboros style, you just sit by the sidelines and watch stupid kill and eat stupid.

It is a shitshow to behold. Used to be we had to shoot the occasional roving gang of naked ne’er-do-wells that came near the property. Now you just hear them outside. It cost a goddamn fortune to put up an 8 foot concrete wall on three sides, but we had cleared all the trees around the immediate area so it just took time and material. Had to knock over what used to be a gardening supply depot a few counties over in the dead of night, but it was pretty easy.

Now here’s the point where I could go on and on about all sorts of hijinks. Introduce a cast of characters. Maybe talk about me some. But no. I’ll just say that this is our inevitable future.

We think a vasculotropic virus that constantly mutates and is over but infects about a million people a day is just a cold. A cold that causes stroke, waning immunity to other infections, and a whole host of bullshit. It’s all a matter of time.

The virus won.

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