It took three days for us to learn of this. Three days of radio silence from them, and we went down.
Dean was the only survivor .. barely. He lived for a few days and that was it.
Frank was never the same after his best friend and wife died.
Never the same.
The toll of the deaths of his brother and then his wife hit him hard. At least he still had his children.
The Slagels, the mighty family spared of the plague, went down in the Great War and after.
But even with the heartache and the loss, and Great War gave Frank another leadership position.
He was named President of the United States. That was after the death of his brother and granddaughter and retirement of his father.
But it wasn’t long after that Joe too left us. It was the greatest loss of all.
But it wasn't before Jack.
Jack Slagel is very important.
While his daughter was ill, Johnny met an immigrant nurse named Natasha. They married and on Oct 28th, Natasha bore a son. However, like Johnny’s grandmother, Natasha died giving birth.
I still remember when Jack was born.
Johnny was proud of his son, yet drowning in grief over the loss of his wife.
He asked me to be his godfather, an honor I proudly accepted.
“Look at him, Danny. He is so strong,” Johnny said.
“He is.”
“He looks like a Slagel. This is the next generation.”
“Of course Johnny,” I chuckled. I mean wasn’t that obvious?
“No, Danny, in a world that has fallen. In a world that needs to be lifted up… he was born to be a hero.”
I remember the look on Johnny’s face when he held his newborn son, lifted him, looked at him and told him. “You were born for greatness, Jack. You were born with a great purpose. I know it. I feel it. One day, so will you.”
Jack Joseph Slagel was anointed with an honor he was too young to understand. A legacy was bestowed upon an infant.
Johnny sensed something that day.
Jack was the last baby born of that decade. The last baby born before everything
Moving to Extinction
17.
Living Beyond
When the very first plague hit, surviving women were outnumbered by surviving men. Often times hundreds to one. But after the Great War and the arrival of the enemy, many immigrants and refugees were women.
Women weren’t as rare.
Especially the young ones.
To someone like me, it wasn’t an option.
Frank Slagel passed the reproduction law. Now, I know that sounds pretty lame, and those who knew Frank in his ‘early’ years, when he wasn’t always the brightest bulb, they may have thought it was a joke. But it wasn’t. It was needed.
As boring as they may be, let me give you the stats.
In the ten years after the plague and before the Great War, four hundred and twenty-six babies were born. The biggest percentage was around the seven-year mark.
In the four years following the plague… six. Six babies were born, nearly a hundred thousand people and only six babies. Fifteen percent of the population were women in their prime birthing years.
Two years following we had an increase, but it never hit fifty.
In the beginning of 2028, when Frank became president, he issued the official Reproduction Proclamation Law.
In a sense, but in a more humane way, Frank was following the George law. If we wanted to continue as a species, we had to reproduce.
Therefore, any woman living in the United States between the ages of 19 and 40, unless medically excused had exactly two years to conceive, or they would be artificially inseminated by a donor of their choice or a volunteer.
They would be placed in pregnancy detention centers to ensure conception.
Sounds harsh, I know but we were dwindling.
He came to me with it first and we laid out the plan. Actually, he came to me before becoming president. We made sure we had the cows, and the processing centers for food and milk for these women. Special farms and greenhouses were set up for the ‘expectant’.
Also, special medical care.
These women and their offspring would get the best of the best.
We found out after the law went into effect that it wasn’t that these women didn’t want to have children, they couldn’t find suitable partners.
Wow. The return of conventional relationships.
It was amazing. I never thought I'd see the day where one on one relationships would return. When women were outnumbered, women married more than one man.
At least most did.
I remember Joe, right before he passed away, talking to Frank about the law.
“You are acting like George two,” he said to Frank. “Next thing you know you’ll put these women in vats and farm the kids.”
“If need be,” Frank said.
“You’re an ass.”
“And man is a dying breed.”
Goddamn if it didn’t work.
End of 2028. Five hundred births.
By the fall of 2029… 8,000 babies were born.
Jack was the last baby born that year.
In January 2030, over four hundred women were registered as ‘due’.
Four hundred and seventeen gave birth.
Four hundred and twelve died right after.
Like Natasha.
The other five went comatose eventually passing with in the year.
Something went wrong. And without someone like Dean, we were lost as to the reasons for it.
February rolled around and nearly the same numbers were expected to be born.
When the first few women died giving birth, we immediately moved to C-sections.
It didn’t work.
Some sort of fetal maternal blood transfusion was taking place, some sort of virus, that upon the detachment of the placenta, the mother instantly bled to death and went into cardiac failure.
All attempts to save them were futile.
We had to cease and desist reproduction.
Stop getting pregnant.
In fact, because we wouldn’t figure out the virus or the cause, we issued a statement that any woman expecting could, if they chose... abort their child.
Many did.
By June, we figured out that by taking the child early before 30 weeks gestation saved the mother.
So whatever was happening occurred in the final trimester.
Most of the babies survived the premature birth. But the women never got pregnant again.
No one got pregnant again.
Of course, there were accidents. And the frightened mothers would come to us.
2033 - two births.
2034 - not a single baby was born.
That’s not to say none were conceived. They were. Not conventionally.
Back tracking….
See when man is face with extinction, when the youngest person in the word is not seconds or days old, but rather years old, and the majority of the population was over forty, you start to think. You start to get desperate.
We examined every birth. Every pregnancy. And we found four mothers that gave birth, never got sick and the children were healthy.
Why? What was the difference?
Five men, old men, that were scientists before the plague hit, were working on the conception problem.
These four women were artificially inseminated.
So were others, but they died. So what was the difference? They had all been impregnated with embryos that were frozen years earlier.
Obviously the virus or whatever it was, affected the fertile males somewhere around January 2029. Because every baby naturally conceived after that point, their mothers died.
We were able to round up a few test women and impregnated them.
They delivered and were fine.
But here was the clincher. The women, the ones that aborted or that lived through premature births n
ever menstruated again. They lost the ability to reproduce.
So our numbers kept dwindling.
But the embryos didn’t.
Thousands upon thousands of frozen embryos were discovered. They had been stored by George and the Society when they were trying to repopulate the world.
Why let them go to waste, right?
You must understand. Although we had seen war, we had ten years to recover. No, wait. Fourteen years to recover. We were back on the technological track. We were in the clean up phase. There were cities that had been abandoned and destroyed, standing as monuments to the Great War, but we were on the road to recovery. Civilization was being rebuilt and we were living free. Frank ran a great country.
We were focused, you see, on man not becoming extinct.
That’s why we made the decision. We got the word out.
The decision was to use those embryos.
People were excited. I mean, they had believed that another child would never be born. Then, low and behold, a miracle occurred.
Yes! We will multiply.
Coolers and freezer were located underground. They were protected with solar generators as a safeguard. Life vaults we called them. Thousands upon thousands of embryos had been discovered. Thousands upon thousands of women signed up for the inseminations.
We recruited every medical professional we could find. It was like an implantation factory.
A ninety percent attachment rate. No spontaneous abortions, miscarriages. We were on our way. Solution to the infertility virus had been found.
We did it.
We would carry on.
We should have known better.
18.
Births
Destiny and life both get in the way. No matter how hard you try at some things it’s almost as if you push and you push, but it’s meant to be one way. No matter how hard you try to achieve that goal, you’re not gonna reach it. Let me explain.
I once saw a movie where a group of people defeated death and in doing so, death wanted to defeat them. Death chased them until one by one death got its way. I never believed it was death, I believed it was God. God’s will. Once in awhile, God gets in a pissy mood and he wants to have his own way. He wanted those eight people in the movie dead, they didn’t die, so he made sure his original plan achieved.
Man, as I had said before, is only meant to live a certain amount of time on this planet before facing extinction.
I truly believe that was God’s will. But mankind, a strong and determined species, fought against extinction. God then threw everything He had at us, to keep us back.
That's just my theory.
I never talked about Marcus … Yes, I know I digress. But allow me to touch upon him.
Prior to my arrival in Beginnings, Marcus was born. Under Beginnings, as you recall were the cryogenically frozen scientists, resting within the tunnel labs. Also in the labs was a case which contained two hundred and fifty frozen embryos. Some of them were marked, some of them were not. Most of them were just numbered.
One of them was marked ‘LEP’. Dean couldn’t figure out what any of them were. There was only one way to find out. Have someone give birth. He asked for volunteers. Melissa stepped forward. She was implanted with Marcus, and the embryo grew at an astronomical rate. His rate of gestation was six times faster than the normal rate. And he grew six times as fast.
LEP is a Laboratory Enhanced Predator. Predator.
That should tell you a lot.
Though along the same lines as the killer babies, Marcus was an earlier version of the embryo because Marcus was easily domesticated.
He never learned how to form more than one syllable, easily speakable words. He lived an normal life until about human age six, when Marcus … just died.
I’ll explain that later.
There was always something special about Marcus, and we assumed the LEP’s or killer babies, in the sector 32 region, were of the same breed.
That’s my digression. It is important. We move on.
On the eve of my fifty second birthday, I sat elated and happy in the waiting room of one of our birthing hospitals on the east coast.
Frank as with me. Mainly because that particular hospital was expecting the most January arrivals.
When we did the implantations, we did them quickly and factory like. None of them were marked.
We screened the embryos.
Just so you know.
We did sonograms, constantly checking. After all, we didn’t want a repeat of the killer babies or even Marcus. They were Society embryos. We couldn’t trust them, so we checked them rigorously.
All the data was in the system. Data about the embryos. Most of which were and had been frozen for thirty years.
We were a bit concerned. A thirty year old embryo?
Two batches were implanted, the twenty two women were a mix of both batches.
We safely concluded none were LEP, the gestational rate was normal. The pregnancies were normal.
We were having a dual celebration. Frank had managed to get me a cake. We were chuckling, laughing and having a grand time waiting on the babies.
So many to be born.
The first one was born healthy. Fantastic. Second was the same. Hal Slagel, who was down in Virginia, called with the news. Both the baby and mother were fine.
Baby and mother fine.
Yes! We did it. We beat whatever it was that was stopping us from continuing on.
We had twenty women on that first particular day giving birth to the first batch.
One of which was Protum 27.
Around two in the afternoon we knew.
Despite our best efforts. The first of the LEP were born.
It rolled out in its fetal position. The mother was fine but immediately, in its predator state, it began to attack.
We lost a doctor and nurse in that delivery room fiasco, after which the baby took off at an astounding speed.
While the search was on for that baby, we started to fear. How many babies were implanted from that batch.... Protum 27?
***
By the end of the first day, seventeen babies were born from that batch. Identified positively by visual and behavioral traits. How we would handle it was the question. What was the next step?
If Marcus was domesticated, surely we believed the Protum 27 offspring could be as well.
Once again, Frank as President of the United States had a task placed squarely on his shoulders, or shall I say burden, he’d rather have not handled.
All we were trying to do was preserve life. To keep it moving on. But with every turn, every attempt, came another obstacle.
19.
Making it work
Immediately we started implementing a plan. We had a lot of LEP births with even more pending births and we had to figure out what to do with them.
Keep them, raise, them or … kill them.
A lot of the mothers wanted to raise the children and a lot of them did not. We had to concentrate on that aspect.
We were banking on our knowledge of what we learned in the raising of Marcus. It was a good thing Melissa was still alive and she could guide us in the knowledge of that time.
Knowledge.
We had to rely on the knowledge at hand. What information did we have about Marcus?
Marcus had the same distinctive qualities and characteristics of the other LEP’s so why would things be different? He had the agility and ability to run. His leathery textured skin could withstand up to twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and minus fifty without making a mark or change. He had three rows of razor sharp teeth. When born, LEP infants exhibited animal like tendencies. They survive on the basic drive of hunger. The scent of food guided them. Like most predatory animals.
That was where the training of Marcus came in.
We had to break that cycle.
We had to keep the LEP babies in a controlled environment.
Mid-February rolled around and fifty-two
LEP babies, the bulk of which were from Protum 27, would be born in June, July and August. We had some time, but not much.
The old Fort Bragg was our designated location. It was weeded and cleaned out. The mothers who wanted to raise their LEP babies would move to the base. Caretakers were found for the rest.
Food would be brought in and the LEP’s would be trained as Marcus had been. They would be raised and treated as equals. It would be a new race, that was all.
A controlled environment, as we planned.
Perfect.
It could be done.
We did it with Marcus.
Little did we realize, Marcus was different in more aspects than we ever expected.
***
It was once asked of me, how was Marcus different?
We really didn’t notice at first. But the genetic research done by Dean Hayes was still accessible.
Marcus was human through and through. He had been genetically manipulated and his chromosomes had been enhanced to make him an unstoppable human being.
In Dean’s research, it was discovered that Marcus was created with a ‘control’, a safety. Genetically altered, his body, at six years would stop producing the coenzyme Q10. CoQ10 in responsible for energy and cellular regeneration.
Without it, the body gets sick and dies.
Dean knew this years before Marcus passed on.
We suspected this was the reason for his passing.
Protum 27 infants were not engineered with that stopping point.
On the positive side of things, Protum 27 were the only LEP embryos implanted. The number of births would dwindle as the months rolled on.
We still had an estimated 2000 LEP expected when it was all said and done. Then all the embryo implantations would have reached full gestation.
Two thousand was a lot of babies.
Survival instincts made them able to survive in the wild. But did we want them in the wild?
No.
If we wanted to domesticate them, it had to be started from day one.
10 months, ten structures, that’s what we figured. Well, we needed a bit more to handle the June and July births.
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