Woman of the Past

Chapter 2

Peyton laughed but it sounded sad, “That stinks, I knew you wouldn’t be able to say your first word for a while but every time I saw you I would try to teach you my name. I wanted my name to be your first word.”

Law looked surprised and smiled lopsidedly, “It was my first word. Of course it was more like ‘pay on’ than Peyton but they said they heard it loud and clear and started to wake up again after that.”

Peyton’s smile was infectious, “I’m so glad; I wouldn’t want them to mourn forever. Not when they still had you.” They all four sat there smiling for a minute before Law went on.

His smile disappeared as he spoke, “I was seven when we first started hearing about outbreaks of the E-virus. It was small at first and they tried to contain it wherever it popped up. Pictures, videos of dead bodies piled up on the streets were everywhere. Mom and Dad wouldn’t let me out of the house. Dad tried to keep Mom from going to work but she kept saying they needed her. She would examine the bodies trying to find a way to stop the spread of the virus. She stayed away for weeks at a time.”

“The E-Virus attacked women faster than men, though it killed off large quantities of both. We lost a quarter of the world’s population within the first six months. By the time a year had passed, the military had taken over and half the population was dead with three-quarters of the female population lost. They started calling it the Extinction Virus, and everyone was terrified.”

The room got quiet as he spoke, “Looting, killing, raping, you name it and it happened everywhere. Quarantine wasn’t enough and the E-virus just kept spreading.”

“I got sick. On my eighth birthday, I started showing symptoms of the E-Virus. By then Mom was in isolation at a secure facility, working on a cure. When she found out, she panicked and spilt the chamomile tea the nurse had brought her, all over her work. She said she desperately tried to clean it up, but the tea had already contaminated four of the samples she was working on. By the time she was ready to throw the samples out they were done processing and the four contaminated samples out of the ten she had come back clean.”

“She got the nurse she was working with to bring her the chamomile tea again and started testing it. Mom says she could hardly believe that a simple herb found almost everywhere could cure a disease that had so ravaged the people of this planet. They made an announcement immediately. People started working together again in order to get the tea to the sick all over the world.”

Law looked up out of his daze, “Then reality set in. Men started to realize how few women had survived. Some men started kidnapping them, some fought over them, and things escalated from there. The military stepped up once again. They gathered all of the women, got their families to them, and started protecting them from what was going on out here.”

“Laws were passed to protect women. A man caught abusing a woman now receives the death penalty. A man caught raping a woman will lose his member.” The men around her flinched at the thought, as Law continued, “If your caught keeping a woman against her will outside of a Safety Zone, you’ll serve twenty years of jail time.”

“What if a woman doesn’t want to live in a Safe Zone? Would they force me to live there?” Peyton wanted to keep an open mind but the Safe Zones sounded a lot like prison to her.

Logan answered her question, “As far as we know, no one’s ever refused. The danger to women is very real. Even if you ignore the thought of men attacking them, there are other countries constantly trying to kidnap them. Some treat them well, but others use them only to make female children. Aborting or tossing aside any male children is very common.”

Peyton looked at the men around her. Catching Carter’s eye as Logan talked; she saw a flicker of hidden pain in his dark eyes. These were good men. She didn’t think they were going to attack her, “What about here? What happens with the whole repopulating thing here?”