Born 01 - Born

After the machine gun escort, that is."
    He laughs again. I like the sound of it, but it reminds me of Jake.
    "Well, that a is big timber wolf, Emma. How did you end up with him?"
    "His mother gave birth and must have gotten sick shortly after. Leo was waiting for me at the door to the cabin one day. He was tiny then. I could hear his brothers and sisters in the woods. I found the mother dead and half eaten surrounded by the other cubs who were weak and sick. It was awful. I shot them and burned them. It’s the closest infection ever got to my cabin. He's immune anyway, so that's helpful."
    "He's immune? Naturally? Maybe he never ate any of the mom."
    I shake my head. "She wasn’t the only sick thing Leo has eaten. He likes the infected."
    He grimaces. "That's disgusting. Disgusting and lucky all at the same time."
    I nod. "It is."
    "What do you know about the start of the infection?"
    I shrug. "People got sick. Some died and others lived but went a little crazy."
    His eyes look dark as his expression loses its humor and the sun sets completely, "No, Emma, people didn’t just get sick. The infection was spread on purpose. Everything that’s happened has been a plan all along."
    "That can't be true."
    "I wish it weren’t. There was something called the United Nations. They did all of this."
    I feel sick. "They were evil?"
    He shakes his head. "Not evil, just detached. The world was running out of resources, and everyone was constantly putting a hand out to them and asking for aide, food, and money. The UN had been warning us forever about the global warming and the ice melting and Ocean becoming acidic. Anyway, in 2012, all of Greenland's ice and snow melted in a week. The earth started to enter a drought. We thought it was a cyclical event but it wasn’t. It was manmade. We had pushed it too far. The same time all this was happening, a conference was held in Rio about the environment. Canada, the US and China pretty much pulled out and admitted they had no intention of slowing their pollution to the recommended level. It would be too hard on their economies. That was the final straw. Apparently, the UN had a backup plan for a worst-case scenario such as that. They had a plague. It had a vaccine, which made it easy to spread and then control. The problem was that it mutated. They spread the virus at the same time they had bombs placed deep in the Ocean along the Japanese coastline. They bombed the shelf and pretty much wiped Japan off the face of the earth, making the west coast of North America a target for huge tidal waves."It felt like a movie. It didn’t feel real. It felt like the ramblings of my father, before.
    I shake my head. "How could you know all this?"
    He shrugs. "The work farms. I met people who had been part of the initial plan. The plan was to reset everything. Instead, the UN decided they wanted to start humanity over but set it up to succeed this time. The breeder farms were built where only the fit and healthy were allowed to reproduce."
    I shivered imagining it.
    He laughed. "It isn’t what you think. I know what everyone thinks happens but it's not. The girls only breed every three years and only up to three times. The pregnancy isn’t the result of rape; it's done using science. The baby is made in a lab and then inserted into the woman's womb."
    I gag and he laughs.
    "The religious had the same reaction. The UN never mentioned this plan to anyone but the very high up. It never went well."
    I frown. "The girls are still taken against their will and made to make babies against their will."
    I see his head nod in the dark. "Yup, and the babies are not God's children to the Christians. Anyway, the UN runs the military, but again, they sit in their closed offices and plan using numbers, facts, and data. They don’t leave it to see what the world looks like or how corrupt the military is. They have built six cities worldwide from the ashes and rubble of the previous cities. They plan on cleaning every inch of the world."
    My head spins. "What about the borderlands?"
    "They can't use any more bombs without affecting the weather and pollution again, so the plan stands at leaving us to our own devices until they have this part of the world cleaned up. Then they will round us up."
    "Why?"
    "They want the diseases and illnesses bred out. They won't allow those people to live and breed."
    "Oh my God. it's like a nightmare."
    "It is. On that note, we need to sleep. You sleep first, and I'll keep