Humanaty's Blight

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“Tell me why I shouldn’t just shoot you right now,” the young woman said. She was holding a rifle pointed at my chest. Her tone was emotionless.

After a few seconds of self-recrimination for allowing myself to be ambushed so easily, I told her the truth. “The fact is, you should. If you want to survive, pull the trigger and hope no one nearby hears the shot and comes to investigate. That makes the most sense, but I suspect you already know that.”

I wouldn’t beg. I refused to. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good.

Two weeks earlier, when the mysterious new strain of a (H1-N1) mutated flu first struck and people started falling ill and swiftly dying by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, I was tucked safely away inside the basement of my parent’s home sitting in front of my computer and TV where I’d pretty much spent the last couple of years.

Home was located on the edge of Arlington, a sleepy little town at the foot of the Cascades in northwestern Washington State. On the first day, I had huddled down there in the dark basement, windows closed, even the furnace turned off to prevent it from taking in contaminated air from outside. Scared. Alone. My fingers had flown over the keyboard to glean any new information about the flu pandemic the media called a human blight, like a cancerous disease on stalks of wheat.

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