Prologue

Year 1

Dierna speaks.

That day wouldn’t be the last
time Keirnan held my hand, nor would it be the last time over the years I would
hold him all night as the world turned upside-down around us. But it would be,
until the day of my death, the last time I ever saw him cry. Something broke in
us that night, I think. Only when our own parents died did the reality of our
own situation sink in. All the adults around us had been growing rapidly sick
and dying—all in the past year. Our parents had been fine at first—and hope was
still held that there might be a special gene carrying immunity in it that
doctors had yet to discover. But there weren’t many doctors left, and my family
had long ago boarded themselves into our little home to hide from the rioting
children and teens that now roamed the street.

I remember the night that they
passed. Both were lying, wasted away, on the double mattress Keirnan and I had
managed to drag down the stairs for them. He was only nine at the time, too
young to understand why death was inevitable and younger still for the grisly
act of burying our own parents. I was fourteen at the time, and I thought I
knew so much more than the younger children of our neighbourhood, but I cried
just as much as he did that night. Only it was I, not Keirnan, who had no one
to look after them.

The first year after theirs
deaths was the hardest for us. The parentless children of not only our
neighbourhood but also the whole city, and perhaps the whole world now that I
think about it, had become tribal. Older children than I had taken on roles of
leadership, but it was those over twenty that got the worst retribution. You
would scarcely find anyone with facial hair and those young people over twenty
but under the age of disease—we now know that to be around twenty-five—were
persecuted by the children at first. We couldn’t understand why they were
adults but could not fix our problems for us. I watched a “two-oh” killing only
once. A young woman with red curls who begged for her life the entire time the
tribe tortured her.

I started my own tribe then,
taking originally only my brother and one other boy from that tribe we had
spent a few months in, but as we travelled it grew to a group of twenty, not
all of whom remained alive over the next few years, but there were always more
to take their place. We stole a bus to travel in, and another vehicle to haul
supplies in. Eventually we gained two motorcycles with a pair of good scouts.
At first we raided for food and gas only, but as times got worse we eventually
looted weapons too. Eventually the persecution of the “oldies” stopped. The
disease turned out to be something related to age and as the young population
grew and hit their mid-twenties they, like our parents, got sick and wasted
away to death. I never let the tribe give up hope of a real solution though,
and we raided numerous old libraries and collected what biology and chemistry
texts we could find. A number of us studied them, but without a real lab I
doubt we’ll ever solve this crisis.