Chapter 2
Law watched his sister eat spaghetti in wonder. Growing up he’d talked to her all the time, thinking she was an angel in heaven. Yet here she was nineteen, alive, confused and more than likely scared out of her mind. He was scared too. If the government found out there was a woman outside of the Safe Zone, well let’s just say it wouldn’t be good. He closed his eyes at the thought, a shudder of icy fear running through his veins. When he opened them she was staring directly into his eyes, “You were going to explain while I eat remember?”
“Right, sorry, I was trying to gather my thoughts. Do you remember what year it is?” He asked.
She looked at him strangely before answering, “Last time I checked it was 2034. Why?”
“You disappeared on June 5th, 2034. Today is June 7th, 2059. Somehow you’ve skipped all the horrible things that have happened to the human race in the last twenty-five years.” Law’s hands moved expressively while speaking, trying to make her understand.
Peyton made a spluttering noise as she tried not to choke on a spaghetti noodle. Carter patted her on the back, as she coughed, “You can’t be serious. How is that even possible?”
Law ran a hand through his hair, “I wish Wolfram was here. He was always talking about stuff like this. He saw you hit by the lightning too. Mom said working on time travel theory was his way of coping.”
“Well call him up. We can just ask him about it. Wolf will recognize me, I know he will.” Peyton leaned forward on the edge of her seat. Now that they had mentioned him, she wanted to see him.
Law just shook his head no, “I’m sorry. We haven’t heard from him in what, three years?” He looked to the others to confirm the number. They both nodded.
“Last we heard he was working with the military. Some highly classified shi… a stuff.” Carter put in trying to clean up his language, knowing their mom wouldn’t appreciate him cursing in front of her eldest daughter.
Logan chimed in, “Maybe May would know? She’s just as smart as her Dad and she’s the only person I know that could actually follow everything Wolfram talked about.”
“Wait, Wolf has a daughter? Okay, stop talking right now.” They all three stopped and watched her as she pinched the bridge of her nose trying to alleviate the headache that was starting to form. She took a deep breath, “Now, I just want a few highlights about what’s happened in the last twenty-five years. You mentioned horrible things happening to people. Tell me in the order of what happened please.”
Law looked at her again, and this time she saw the pain, and the ghosts haunting him within his blue-green gaze. He was quiet for so long that she started to think he wasn’t going to say anything when he began talking. His voice was soft and raspy, the painful memories still affecting him.
“I was told that after you disappeared, Dad reported it to the police. There was an investigation and they tried to say Dad murdered you. They found the evidence of a lightning strike in the ground, as well as the charred mess that was your phone and your clothes. They also had Wolfram’s testimony. He told the police what he saw and when they found out his IQ, they started to believe Dad’s story.” Law rested his hands on his lap.
“They were devastated for a long time. Aunt Mandy and Wolfram moved in with us for a while to help. She said they were practically zombies for almost a year. Dad painted the painting I showed you and would sit in front of it for hours. His other paintings were dark and sad. Wolf said they didn’t come out of it until they heard me say my first word.” He paused trying to organized things he’d been told.
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?”
The men all looked back and forth at each other as if silently debating what to tell her. Logan held up his hands as the other two both stared at him, “Why do I have to tell her? She’s your sister.”
“Yeah but you know the women’s point of view better than us. Alicia talks about things like that with you and so do the others. Carter and I just know about becoming lovers.” He lowered his voice to a whisper she could still hear. “I don’t particularly want to discuss that with my sister.”
Peyton decided to save him, “I agree, especially since I literally changed his diaper at 11:30 this morning, right before I went to chase my dog and got struck by lightning. I think I’ve been through enough traumas for one day.”
“I don’t really like talking to my sister about it either.” He sighed, “Fine, I’ll explain.” Logan paused a moment, rubbing his hand under his chin and along his jaw, “Well, once everything calmed down the Government decided to create a system to match women up with suitable men. The system excludes men with diseases, criminal backgrounds, and men that can’t have children. Women would have the final say in which they were with and would be able to choose from the list.”
“The women fought it at first. The things they had been through traumatized a lot of them. The government finally gave them an ultimatum: no babies, no protection.” Logan’s face reflected the anger he’d felt on his sister’s behalf. He stopped talking, and brewed in his anger.
“Please tell me they didn’t just cave. Tell me they had more backbone than that.” Peyton knew the women would have been fearful but she couldn’t stand the idea of them forgetting how strong a woman could be.
Logan snorted, “Naw, Mom wouldn’t let them. She made them send back a list of demands to be met.” He started listing them on his fingers. “The women would pick out a group of men from the lists for a Meet & Greet once a week. They would have full and final choice of whom they wanted to father their children. No woman has to have more than one pregnancy every two years. Mothers would raise all children unless the mother decided to give up the child. And the last one, if a woman chooses to marry, she never has to go to another Meet & Greet again.”
“That sounds fair enough. Did they agree?” Her curiosity ran wild with her.
“Yeah, they agreed. Oregon had the largest population of female survivors in the country, mostly because they were the first to learn about the cure. They have more control over what happens in this country than the politicians do. Our society is more matriarchal than it was in your time. They have affected everything in the last fifteen years.”
Peyton sat back on the couch and was quiet for a while, “I don’t know how to believe this whole thing. It feels like I’m stuck in some late night mindbender film.” She took a deep breath, steeling herself for whatever answer she got to her next question, “I don’t want you to fill me in on history anymore. I need to know, are Mom and Dad alive and are we,” She gestured between all of them, “related somehow?”
They all three smiled at her question, which she took as a good sign. Law answered, “Their alive and well. We don’t have any biological brothers and sisters, but we have five more sisters and fifteen brothers. Five of us are old enough to live outside of the Pearl district now. We chose to live here where it’s quieter.”
Peyton’s eyes practically boggled out of their sockets, “Twenty other siblings! How?”
“They couldn’t stand seeing kids alone. Three of the girls were orphans from the epidemic. One lost her Mom in childbirth, and the other is your cousin May. She’s fifteen now. The others, well girls are wanted and boys aren’t. Many of the women are abandoning their male children. Mom and Dad couldn’t stand it and took all of us in. They took care of us, fed us, and loved us, as our biological parents no longer could. Ellen and Max Parker showed us what family was all about. So we are brothers, and that’s that.” Carter spoke eloquently, his love for their parents apparent in every syllable.
Peyton wanted to cry but remembered Law’s reaction from before and managed to stop herself. Instead, she made her exhausted body stand up. The men around her stood too and she set her bowl down on the table. Logan and Carter stood next to each other and she stepped towards them, wrapping them both in a hug, “Sorry it took me so long. Welcome to the family.” She pulled back and smiled. They both smiled back. Logan with a lighthearted smirk and Carter with a flashing white smile dentists would swoon over.
“Right back at you… sis” Logan laughed as Peyton turned to Law.
“I’m so sorry I wasn’t there, we have a lot of things to catch up on.” She moved over to Law and hugged him close. He hugged her back and she couldn’t believe how tall he’d grown. She reached up and brushed his hair away from his forehead. When she pulled her hand back a snort of laughter escaped from her.
Law stepped back as she broke out in half hysterical laughter, “What’s so funny?”
Peyton half doubled over, laughing so hard she had to gasp for air a couple times before she could give him and answer, “It’s nothing really.” She snorted again in a completely unladylike way, “It’s just that… when I put you down for a nap this morning, I thought you were growing like a weed.” She managed to get out through the laughter, the last word coming out in a squeak, “Just look at you now!”
She couldn’t see the looks exchanged by the others through the tears of laughter stinging her eyes. She heard Logan though, “Okay, I think she’s at her crazy limit for the day. The three of us need to talk and she needs to sleep off the hysteria coming on.” He didn’t ask her, he just picked her up as she continued to laugh. “Whose room used to belong to her? Maybe sleeping there will calm her down.”
“Jaxon’s room was hers. He has four births due any minute so he’s staying in Zone for the week.” Law told him as he followed them up the stairs.
“Hey why can’t I carry her?” Carter pitched in following.
Logan was the fastest to reply, with an easy bantering developed long ago, “Because she’s been traumatized enough and doesn’t need you hitting on her.”
Carter mumbled something that sounded like “No fun,” under his breath but smiled to show he was just joking.
Peyton had finally stopped her laughter when Logan placed her on a bed and Law came to tuck her in, “Time to sleep Princess Peyton."
As soon as her head hit the pillow, she realized how tired she was. She groaned and rolled to her side, burying her face in the pillow. She breathed deeply and had just enough energy to notice that her pillows smelt fantastic before she fell into a deep healing sleep.