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    The Fallujah Strain: Power After the Ebola Apocalypse
    The Fallujah Strain: Power After the Ebola Apocalypse
    The Fallujah Strain: Power After the Ebola Apocalypse
    Ebook144 pages2 hours

    The Fallujah Strain: Power After the Ebola Apocalypse

    By Thomas Porter

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    About this ebook

    Three men outside Fallujah, after four years of disciplined, persistent, methodical attempts to develop a strain of Ebola worthy enough to represent their hatred for the West, strike viral gold. They call it no. 289, their 289th batch of weaponized Ebola and it sweeps across the globe until almost no one was left. In the aftermath, those immune to the virus discover they can keep sick survivors alive through transfusions of their immune blood. They use this power to create a new state in which they are the dictators. They bring sick survivors into collectives and use them as slaves.
    Maya was a child when the world was destroyed and she is not interested in this new power or in enslaving others. She just wants a video game and a clean swimming pool. But as she grows, she learns there is more to life than her selfish desires. As she comes of age after Ebola, she learns to love those around her, and to fight for those she loves.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThomas Porter
    Release dateNov 27, 2014
    ISBN9781310552991
    The Fallujah Strain: Power After the Ebola Apocalypse
    Author

    Thomas Porter

    Author of The Power to Live, a story of girls sold into slavery in San Francisco who break the grip of their oppressors with unexpected powers, and raw strength of will, inherited from their Native American ancestors. Author of The Fallujah Strain. This short novel watches Maya develop from a selfish young girl blessed with blood immune to Ebola, which allows her to command others to serve her, into a young adult who may help change the world.

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      Book preview

      The Fallujah Strain - Thomas Porter

      The Fallujah Strain

      Power After the Ebola Apocalypse

      T homas Porter

      Copyright 2014 by Thomas Porter

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      To my daughters

      Author's Note

      This novel is a reimagining of Mutant Blood, a novel by the same author.

      Prologue

      The upper left corner of the thick plastic sheeting covering the doorway of the cinder block building outside Fallujah blew in the wind.

      Inside, three men wearing medical protective suits lay on the floor, dead. Vomit smeared the inside of their surgical hoods.

      After four years of disciplined, persistent, methodical attempts to develop a strain of Ebola worthy enough to represent their hatred for the West, they struck viral gold. They called it no. 289. Their 289th batch of weaponized Ebola.

      The speed at which no. 289 reproduced itself, and its ability to travel on the slightest of breezes, were indeed a tribute to the men's skill. Its virulence, the speed at which it killed each person it infected, were a tribute to their rage.

      The first particles of no. 289 escaped through the stopper in the vial, then passed through their breathing filters like a bug through chicken wire.

      They never stood a chance.

      It killed them, brutally, quickly, and mindlessly. It used their lungs to duplicate itself ten thousand fold, then disposed of their carcasses where they lay. It circulated through the still air of the room for several seconds before finding the gap in the upper left corner of the doorway. It found a lone man walking near the side of the road. It attacked his lungs, duplicated itself, and moved on.

      It spread across the Middle East in two days, across Europe, Asia, and Africa in another five. It traveled across the globe like burning natural gas. It hit people in cars stopped at traffic lights, killed them, duplicated, and moved on. It swept through train stations in Europe, open air markets in Africa, and the plains of Asia at a speed that would have made its creators proud. It burned through the streets of Rome and Shanghai in an afternoon. New York City, Vancouver, and Los Angeles succumbed the following day, then Santiago, Minneapolis, and Muncie the day after that. It moved with the wind, infecting, duplicating, killing. Infecting, duplicating, killing. Most were dead within minutes of being found by no. 289, but some unlucky few, about 3 percent of the world's population, survived for a few days, writhing in agony as their organs were liquified. Another 1 percent lasted months before death.

      But some very few, less than 1/10th of 1 percent of the world's population, were immune to no. 289. After exposure to the virus, they lost all their hair and the upper layers of their skin took on a blue tint, as if they suffered from severe cyanosis, but they were otherwise unaffected. They lived.

      About a month after Ebola no. 289's burn through humanity, an immune phlebotomist in Brownsville discovered that daily transfusions of his blood kept his infected wife alive. Word of this power, the power to keep others alive, spread quickly. But, throughout history, power's constant companion has been the desire to abuse that power. The 1/10th of 1 percent were immune to Ebola but not to this desire.

      No. 289, the Fallujah strain of Ebola virus, broke out five years ago. This is the story of Maya, an immune girl orphaned by the virus who abused the power of her blood in her own immature way, and of what happened next.

      Chapter 1

      Maya woke up slowly and comfortably, her bald head cradled in three of her favorite pillows. She leisurely opened her eyes and looked up at the ceiling, painted in cheerful yellows and greens.

      As she had instructed.

      Her eyes followed the curves of paint while she remembered. She was in sixth grade, five years ago. The door to her classroom opened, the teacher fell to her knees, clutched her chest, and died. Shortly afterwards, the students began vomiting violently. Maya watched from her desk, unaffected.

      The sounds of the students, all the students almost in unison, suddenly retching violently remained vivid in her memory. And she could not forget the silence of them lying on the floor, all dead. Some were twisted horribly, as if writhing in agony before death. Most emptied their stomachs and bowels and the memory of the smell was her constant companion.

      At times like these, in the morning when the beach house was quiet, she tried to remember the moments before the classroom door opened, to understand. This morning, like all others, she failed.

      Was she doing something, saying something, thinking something, that saved her? Why did she survive but everyone else died?

      But, like, whatevs, she thought.

      She rolled on her side, pulled a tablet computer onto the bed and pressed the ON button. As the character on the screen jumped from platform to platform and floating gems disappeared, so did her desire to remember the old world. The battery indicator showed three bars. That should last at least six more hours.

      Three hours later thirst drove her to put the tablet down and get out of bed. She picked up the tablet carelessly, descended the stairs, and went to the kitchen. She poured a glass of water and downed it in one gulp. The virus in the water, which was collected for her from a hand pumped well behind the beach house, was deadly to most. But Maya seemed to thrive on it.

      With a tablet computer in hand, she walked into the room with wall-to-ceiling glass which overlooked the ocean, her favorite room in the house, and sat in the oversize couch. She called it her window room.

      Much like those animals in the Galapagos which survived due to a quirk of nature that endowed them with just the right mutation needed to survive, Maya did not feel lucky or unlucky. She just felt the desire to take, to get what she wants, to be served.

      And after the power of Ebola-immune blood was discovered, the power of her blood, she wanted for nothing.

      And so, as her body needed water, she drank. As she needed protein, she cut off another piece of deer or salmon. If the supply was low, she ordered more brought to her. If her computer battery was dead, she demanded another.

      If Maya wasn't wearing headphones while playing, she would have heard the gun shots outside.  Instead, her bluish finger tapped on the tablet screen as she chewed, lost in her game.

      ~ - ~

      In the gravel road outside the north wing of the beach house, Abel and Pryce fired their Remington rifles into the tree line.  The grass was dry and about knee high, lower than usual but this was an unusually hot summer.

      Are you sure that was a deer? Abel asked, fired again, and chambered another round.  Unlike the grass and grasshoppers, deer were not impervious to the Fallujah strain and most were gone. But some immune deer remained and that is what Abel and Pryce hunted that morning. Unfortunately for them, though, grasshoppers seemed to thrive in the new post-Ebola world and throngs of the insects plagued them constantly.

      But Maya liked venison, and so the two men hunted.

      Pretty sure it was.  I didn't see its white tail though. I don't think it saw us, Pryce said.  Grasshoppers bounced off his pant legs.  Stop firing.  Let's go check it out.

      They leaned their rifles against a tree, pulled mosquito netting down from their hats, and stepped into the grass.

      Abel, who had his transfusion yesterday, reached the trees well ahead of Pryce, who had skipped his.  He stopped to let his eyes adjust to the relative darkness and to give Pryce a chance to catch up.

      Can I have some of your water? Pryce asked when he reached the trees.

      Sure thing.  You need to get a transfusion today. Skipping another one is not an option. I think I see it over there, Abel said and pointed into the trees at a bluish mound about 50 feet off.  They reached it a couple minutes later, bleeding from several places but definitely dead.  Like their human counterparts who were immune to this apocalyptic strain of Fallujah Ebola, Ebola-immune deer were perfectly hairless and bluish-gray.  Pryce kneeled next to the deer and looked it over.

      This one is smaller than last week's, he said casually as he scratched at the yellow tag on his ear and absent-mindedly traced the outline of the embossed letter R on it.

      Abel, several yards farther into the woods, was also kneeling down.  He put is face close to the ground and examined some wet spots on the light brown underbrush.  Then he stood up but continued to examine the ground, moving his hand from his ear to the thinning whiskers on his chin.  He took a few more steps into the woods and knelt down again.  Hey Pryce.  Check this out.  It looks like blood, maybe a blood trail, but what's it doing here?  I'm pretty sure the deer didn’t run into the woods this far.

      No, I think you're right.  It didn’t run that far.  Let's get this thing dressed and see where this trail leads.  Maybe we got two-for-one on deer today.

      ~ - ~

      James Sparrow, the registration scout from Infected Resource Communal Control, pressed his brown uniform shirt onto the wound in his blue and hairless right thigh. One of the bullets passed through it cleanly, missing his major arteries and bone. He limped and hopped away from the sound of the shooting, then dropped into a depression in the forest floor and waited.

      James' goal on this, like previous trips, was to identify potential resources, people who depended on immune blood to survive. They were rapidly dying off and what IRCC considered a good find, a person not immune but worth collecting as a resource and putting to work, was becoming a very rare event.

      Blood continued to drip onto the

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