THE ONLY SURVIVING BREEDER AFTER THE APOCALYPSE

Mideast tensions were at an all-time high, which was saying a lot. Every major Western government issued warnings about potential terrorist attacks. It was serious enough that the U.S. government actually sent troops to patrol the borders to keep terrorists out. They also doubled security at the airports and inspected every single ship that arrived in our ports and every cargo container they carried.

What they hadn't counted on were more than a thousand terrorists willing to die painful, lingering deaths. Even the ones that got caught and were detained still carried out their assigned task to spread the virus they had been infected with. It had been biologically manufactured from a common cold virus, one of the more than a hundred serotypes of rhinovirus. They spent ten years cutting and splicing together genes from some of the most virulent diseases known to man before coming up with this one, building on Cold War Russian work they had purchased on the black market.

Upon infection, there were no symptoms for nearly a week. By then, the carrier had been contagious for three or four days. The air each new carrier exhaled was full of the germs, as was anything they touched after getting saliva on their hands or sprayed with minute droplets of saliva when they sneezed and coughed. The accompanying coughing and sneezing guaranteed the rapid spread of the virus.

Claiming an expected biological weapon attack from the U.S., the Arab world began vaccinating its people for several virulent illnesses. The vaccine for their own virus was quietly added into the mix. Only after vaccinating most of their population did they unleash it on the rest of the world.

Within a month, every country in the world was infected. Men succumbed faster than women but literally everyone got it. I was one of the lucky ones. I was in the first wave that had been infected and had the full resources of the fine medical care available in San Diego. The three men we interdicted trying to row ashore seemed perfectly healthy when we captured them. A day later they began sneezing. Within forty-eight hours, all three were dead. It was nearly a week later before the first man in my squad sneezed. The rest followed and within twenty-four hours all had started sneezing. They each succumbed despite the base medical staff doing everything they could. The men all died within forty-eight hours of their first sneeze. It finally hit me after everyone else in my squad was unconscious or worse. The staff had been constantly poking and prodding me to figure out why I hadn't gotten it, hoping to find some sort of natural immunity. When I sneezed a second time, they immediately put me on antibiotics and an IV.

Even so, it was four weeks before I was able to crawl out of bed. The IV had kept me from starving and becoming dehydrated for the weeks when I was unconscious or just too weak to do anything but lay there. I was doubly lucky in the fact that I had a healthy immune system. Everyone else who'd been hospitalized died, even with the IV and antibiotics. By the time I was able to crawl from bed without falling on my face, so few people were left alive that there was little left in the way of medical staff. They had been hit as hard as, if not harder than everyone else.

Initially, the Arab world laughed at us, having developed immunity to the virus. Their laughter died as rapidly as they did when the virus mutated enough that their vaccines didn't protect them. Anyone who survived the original infection, though, seemed to be immune to re-infection by the mutated virus. Nobody ever got it twice, not that there were many people left to spread it to a second time.

I learned from the one government-run news station still broadcasting that bodies had been piled up and burned when there were no longer enough people left to dig the mass graves to bury them in. There were only five people still at the hospital when I left, one male nurse, one female doctor, and three female nurses, all obviously infected. One of the nurses, a very attractive and very tall one at that, told me resignedly to take a set of keys from one of the bodies I was sure to come across. I protested, insisting that I be allowed to stay and care for the five of them, but they pointed out that I was their only patient that had survived.

The drive back to the base at Coronado would normally take me half an hour, longer during rush hour. I only saw one other car during the fifteen-minute drive, and it was driving very erratically going in the opposite direction on the freeway. The guard that stopped me at the gate couldn't even stand. Once I showed him my ID, he waved me through, not that he could have stopped me. He said that there were only a handful of people left on base that he was aware of. By the end of the day, I had dug a big enough grave with a backhoe for everyone I found and had covered the decomposing bodies. By then, there were only three left alive besides me. As senior officers left alive, I was given keys and combinations to most of the base. The parts I couldn't access, I knew I didn't want access to.