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Towards morning Matt dreamed he was awakening in the rural Illinois farm country he had known as a boy with the sound of birds chirping and calling to announce the Sun's imminent arrival. Suddenly his mind jerked awake to the silence of the store, except for Billy's soft breathing, and through the window the silent village, never again to hear that precious noise, the raucous chatter of avian joy for another day of life beginning. Matt thought, another day of life for us will be to gather weapons, attack the predators before they attack us and capture our little patch of river against the ever-growing populations of alligators, snakes, mosqitoes, flies and every other kind of reptile and insect imaginable, a losers' game anyway he looked at it, the outcome inevitable. "We will be overwhelmed, not today, but next year, or the next. Possibly the Earth may be reverting to a neo-Devonian or Carboniferous Period in geologic time, which meant that everything human civilization had struggled so painfully to accomplish would molder, rot, dry up, disintegrate and be lost forever. Are we really the last?" Matt wondered. It didn't matter. "So what if we find Maria Alvarez and all three of us retreat up into the Andes mountains to some dead rich man's wealthy estate, there to grow greenhouse veggies, and so what if gentle Maria consents to marry and bear children with teenage Billy, what future could there be for such a family? Would brothers and sisters marry? Nor do we dare approach any Indian villages in the Amazon jungle who might somehow have missed contact with the general population because, although immune, we are carriers of the virus, and soon we would again have only dead people for neighbors." Matt refused to delude himself as humans normally did to get through a bad day. Wherever they wandered and searched, there simply were not enough humans left alive to form a genetically workable future. Even if everything else worked to their advantage, they would inbreed themsleve to extinction, like the little hobbit people the archeologists had excavated in East Java. Matt thought he might rather die than follow such a hopeless path, but he couldn't leave the boy to suffer alone. As the Sun winked over the horizon and another silent dawn revealed the silent village, Billy yawned, stretched and smiled, having wet-dreamed of an older girl he liked when he was 6. Now he looked forward to a day of guns and hunting, his young manhood reaching for an adventurous and powerful future of his own. Matt thought of expaining his latest revelations, but decided to let the boy be himself for as long as possible, however short that time might be. They could survive here long enough to prepare an expedition to the mountains, if they were lucky --- but it seemed to Matt the human race had run out of luck, forever. So, he decided to follow Billy's young life to help when he could, politely step aside when he couldn't, and keep his despair hidden. He had been wrong before. Perhaps there are more survivors. |
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