Black Parade

by Jacqueline Druga

  We had to cease and desist reproduction.

  Stop getting pregnant.

  In fact, because we wouldn’t figure out the virus or the cause, we issued a statement that any woman expecting could, if they chose... abort their child.

  Many did.

  By June, we figured out that by taking the child early before 30 weeks gestation saved the mother.

  So whatever was happening occurred in the final trimester.

  Most of the babies survived the premature birth. But the women never got pregnant again.

  No one got pregnant again.

  Of course, there were accidents. And the frightened mothers would come to us.

  2033 - two births.

  2034 - not a single baby was born.

  That’s not to say none were conceived. They were. Not conventionally.

  Back tracking….

  See when man is face with extinction, when the youngest person in the word is not seconds or days old, but rather years old, and the majority of the population was over forty, you start to think. You start to get desperate.

  We examined every birth. Every pregnancy. And we found four mothers that gave birth, never got sick and the children were healthy.

  Why? What was the difference?

  Five men, old men, that were scientists before the plague hit, were working on the conception problem.

  These four women were artificially inseminated.

  So were others, but they died. So what was the difference? They had all been impregnated with embryos that were frozen years earlier.

  Obviously the virus or whatever it was, affected the fertile males somewhere around January 2029. Because every baby naturally conceived after that point, their mothers died.

  We were able to round up a few test women and impregnated them.

  They delivered and were fine.

  But here was the clincher. The women, the ones that aborted or that lived through premature births never menstruated again. They lost the ability to reproduce.

  So our numbers kept dwindling.

  But the embryos didn’t.

  Thousands upon thousands of frozen embryos were discovered. They had been stored by George and the Society when they were trying to repopulate the world.

  Why let them go to waste, right?

  You must understand. Although we had seen war, we had ten years to recover. No, wait. Fourteen years to recover. We were back on the technological track. We were in the clean up phase. There were cities that had been abandoned and destroyed, standing as monuments to the Great War, but we were on the road to recovery. Civilization was being rebuilt and we were living free. Frank ran a great country.

  We were focused, you see, on man not becoming extinct.

  That’s why we made the decision. We got the word out.

  The decision was to use those embryos.

  People were excited. I mean, they had believed that another child would never be born. Then, low and behold, a miracle occurred.

  Yes! We will multiply.

  Coolers and freezer were located underground. They were protected with solar generators as a safeguard. Life vaults we called them. Thousands upon thousands of embryos had been discovered. Thousands upon thousands of women signed up for the inseminations.

  We recruited every medical professional we could find. It was like an implantation factory.

  A ninety percent attachment rate. No spontaneous abortions, miscarriages. We were on our way. Solution to the infertility virus had been found.

  We did it.

  We would carry on.

  We should have known better.

  18.

  Births

  Destiny and life both get in the way. No matter how hard you try at some things it’s almost as if you push and you push, but it’s meant to be one way. No matter how hard you try to achieve that goal, you’re not gonna reach it. Let me explain.

  I once saw a movie where a group of people defeated death and in doing so, death wanted to defeat them. Death chased them until one by one death got its way. I never believed it was death, I believed it was God. God’s will. Once in awhile, God gets in a pissy mood and he wants to have his own way. He wanted those eight people in the movie dead, they didn’t die, so he made sure his original plan achieved.

  Man, as I had said before, is only meant to live a certain amount of time on this planet before facing extinction.

  I truly believe that was God’s will. But mankind, a strong and determined species, fought against extinction. God then threw everything He had at us, to keep us back.

  That's just my theory.

  I never talked about Marcus … Yes, I know I digress. But allow me to touch upon him.

  Prior to my arrival in Beginnings, Marcus was born. Under Beginnings, as you recall were the cryogenically frozen scientists, resting within the tunnel labs. Also in the labs was a case which contained two hundred and fifty frozen embryos. Some of them were marked, some of them were not. Most of them were just numbered.

  One of them was marked ‘LEP’. Dean couldn’t figure out what any of them were. There was only one way to find out. Have someone give birth. He asked for volunteers. Melissa stepped forward. She was implanted with Marcus, and the embryo grew at an astronomical rate. His rate of gestation was six times faster than the normal rate. And he grew six times as fast.

  LEP is a Laboratory Enhanced Predator. Predator.

  That should tell you a lot.

  Though along the same lines as the killer babies, Marcus was an earlier version of the embryo because Marcus was easily domesticated.

  He never learned how to form more than one syllable, easily speakable words. He lived an normal life until about human age six, when Marcus … just died.

  I’ll explain that later.

  There was always something special about Marcus, and we assumed the LEP’s or killer babies, in the sector 32 region, were of the same breed.

  That’s my digression. It is important. We move on.

  On the eve of my fifty second birthday, I sat elated and happy in the waiting room of one of our birthing hospitals on the east coast.

  Frank as with me. Mainly because that particular hospital was expecting the most January arrivals.

  When we did the implantations, we did them quickly and factory like.

  None of them were marked.

  We screened the embryos.

  Just so you know.

  We did sonograms, constantly checking. After all, we didn’t want a repeat of the killer babies or even Marcus. They were Society embryos. We couldn’t trust them, so we checked them rigorously.

  All the data was in the system. Data about the embryos. Most of which were and had been frozen for thirty years.

  We were a bit concerned. A thirty year old embryo?

  Two batches were implanted, the twenty two women were a mix of both batches.

  We safely concluded none were LEP, the gestational rate was normal. The pregnancies were normal.

  We were having a dual celebration. Frank had managed to get me a cake. We were chuckling, laughing and having a grand time waiting on the babies.

  So many to be born.

  The first one was born healthy. Fantastic. Second was the same. Hal Slagel, who was down in Virginia, called with the news. Both the baby and mother were fine.

  Baby and mother fine.

  Yes! We did it. We beat whatever it was that was stopping us from continuing on.

  We had twenty women on that first particular day giving birth to the first batch.

  One of which was Protum 27.

  Around two in the afternoon we knew.

  Despite our best efforts. The first of the LEP were born.

  It rolled out in its fetal position. The mother was fine but immediately, in its predator state, it began to attack.

  We lost a doctor and nurse in that delivery room fiasco, after which the baby took off at an astounding speed.

  While the search was on for that baby, we started to fear. Ho
w many babies were implanted from that batch.... Protum 27?

  ***

  By the end of the first day, seventeen babies were born from that batch. Identified positively by visual and behavioral traits. How we would handle it was the question. What was the next step?

  If Marcus was domesticated, surely we believed the Protum 27 offspring could be as well.

  Once again, Frank as President of the United States had a task placed squarely on his shoulders, or shall I say burden, he’d rather have not handled.

  All we were trying to do was preserve life. To keep it moving on. But with every turn, every attempt, came another obstacle.

  19.

  Making it work

  Immediately we started implementing a plan. We had a lot of LEP births with even more pending births and we had to figure out what to do with them.

  Keep them, raise, them or … kill them.

  A lot of the mothers wanted to raise the children and a lot of them did not. We had to concentrate on that aspect.

  We were banking on our knowledge of what we learned in the raising of Marcus. It was a good thing Melissa was still alive and she could guide us in the knowledge of that time.

  Knowledge.

  We had to rely on the knowledge at hand. What information did we have about Marcus?

  Marcus had the same distinctive qualities and characteristics of the other LEP’s so why would things be different? He had the agility and ability to run. His leathery textured skin could withstand up to twelve hundred degrees Fahrenheit, and minus fifty without making a mark or change. He had three rows of razor sharp teeth. When born, LEP infants exhibited animal like tendencies. They survive on the basic drive of hunger. The scent of food guided them. Like most predatory animals.

  That was where the training of Marcus came in.

  We had to break that cycle.

  We had to keep the LEP babies in a controlled environment.

  Mid-February rolled around and fifty-two LEP babies, the bulk of which were from Protum 27, would be born in June, July and August. We had some time, but not much.

  The old Fort Bragg was our designated location. It was weeded and cleaned out. The mothers who wanted to raise their LEP babies would move to the base. Caretakers were found for the rest.

  Food would be brought in and the LEP’s would be trained as Marcus had been. They would be raised and treated as equals. It would be a new race, that was all.

  A controlled environment, as we planned.

  Perfect.

  It could be done.

  We did it with Marcus.

  Little did we realize, Marcus was different in more aspects than we ever expected.

  ***

  It was once asked of me, how was Marcus different?

  We really didn’t notice at first. But the genetic research done by Dean Hayes was still accessible.

  Marcus was human through and through. He had been genetically manipulated and his chromosomes had been enhanced to make him an unstoppable human being.

  In Dean’s research, it was discovered that Marcus was created with a ‘control’, a safety. Genetically altered, his body, at six years would stop producing the coenzyme Q10. CoQ10 in responsible for energy and cellular regeneration.

  Without it, the body gets sick and dies.

  Dean knew this years before Marcus passed on.

  We suspected this was the reason for his passing.

  Protum 27 infants were not engineered with that stopping point.

  On the positive side of things, Protum 27 were the only LEP embryos implanted. The number of births would dwindle as the months rolled on.

  We still had an estimated 2000 LEP expected when it was all said and done. Then all the embryo implantations would have reached full gestation.

  Two thousand was a lot of babies.

  Survival instincts made them able to survive in the wild. But did we want them in the wild?

  No.

  If we wanted to domesticate them, it had to be started from day one.

  10 months, ten structures, that’s what we figured. Well, we needed a bit more to handle the June and July births.

  It wasn’t going well and the Domesticated LEP era came to an end on July 28th.

  Out of the 2000 expected births, by July we had 1500. 900 of them had reached a certain level of maturity.

  The two month mark.

  That was when the domestication process went awry.

  Frank was out in the West and since I was closest, I was summoned to Fort Bragg. Something had occurred in four of our warehouses.

  Upon my arrival, I found out that the caretakers hadn’t been inside in days.

  “You’ll see why,” the one captain told me.

  See, at this point I believed we were well on the way to making them into copies of Marcus. When I entered a warehouse I realized how wrong I was.

  Imagine if you will a huge storage facility.

  Long, tall and wide.

  The interior was hollowed out, but there were beds, eating areas and a play room.

  Now imagine my horror when I stepped inside.

  They made me put on what we called an attack suit.

  The suit was made of a thick material I had designed that shielded body temperature and scents so the LEP’s, should they turn, couldn’t sense the wearer. If they did attack, it was hard to break thought that thick layer.

  Any bite they delivered would deal them an electric shock.

  No caretaker had the need to wear an attack suit, so this struck me as odd.

  I went in.

  It was then I learned another difference between our new LEP’s and Marcus.

  Marcus was asexual. He had no distinctive sex organs internally or externally. No sexual organs meant no reproducing.

  The new LEPs developed internal sexual and reproductive organs, like a lot of animals, at three months.

  Rapid.

  I stepped inside to see proof of this with my own eyes.

  An entire wall, long and high. From ceiling to floor, every square inch, was a nest containing hundreds upon hundreds of developing LEP’s.

  They bred like alien beings, or at least the nesting looking liked something out of a horror flick.

  They charged at me in attack mode immediately. I was able to flee with minor wear and tear to my suit, along with my life.

  We had problems, yet again, and another solution had to be found.

  A DNA break down of the new LEPS showed that they were not one hundred percent human. That their DNA was hybrid with cheetahs.

  Great.

  The LEP were fast becoming a growing threat.

  We couldn’t shoot them. We tried, but they were too fast.

  Gassing them was out.

  We even tried to poison them. But they were smart.

  Very smart.

  On September 1st, after the births of the new embryos in the nests, the LEP’s dug their way out right under our noses.

  They dug out and set forth upon our soil.

  Hence, the dawning of a new enemy.

  LEP WARS

  20.

  Year one

  They were about the size of a pudgy ten year old by the time they reached the age of one. We clocked them at a speed of sixty miles per hour.

  There were so many of them, we had to plan.

  Science had created a new breed of man. A new species. Then science tucked that secret away. We, in our ignorance, unleashed madness.

  Like Frankenstein’s monster.

  The only thing we had in our favor is they still hadn’t reached a full level of intelligence. They probably wouldn’t. They would only get smarter with survival as time went on.

  And they did. The older they got the faster they learned our fighting tactics and maneuvers.

  But in the first year or two, we had opportunities.

  We tried to take them.

  Armor penetrating bullets worked. Instead of gunpowder Henry’s red dye was used. For some reason the LEP had an interna
l allergic reaction to this dye. When the bullet penetrated and the dye went into their blood stream, they died.

  But we still had to be able to stop them.

  They moved too damn fast.

  Though there were thousands of them, they never attacked in more than a pack of eight.

  I suppose they never really felt threatened.

  Hal and Frank worked on building a new army. One specifically designed to fight the LEP.

  We had our scientists working on weapons.

  Our soldiers received different levels of LEP certification. The lower level you were the more you were placed in low risk areas. If you reached a level five, you could face off against a pack and win.

  The only way to train for that level was to face off against the LEP.

  Frank of course was a level five, so was Hal. All of Frank’s sons were, too.

  Johnny was in his mid thirties. Frank was getting older and he knew it. And though Nick and Joey were still teenagers, they became level fives faster than any adult man I knew.

  Billy … he was a level five. But Billy is another chapter.

  We had to secure the farmlands. Which we did. But, even with our best efforts, the LEP hit our food supply there.

  Johnny, though medically trained, was on inner city LEP security. Frank didn’t want him out in the field. Not when Johnny had Jack.

  For the first year or so it was a constant battle, but we persevered and prevailed. Then the LEP grew. They grew in size, speed, and they multiplied faster than man.

  It got ahead of us for a while and we had to rethink again. Only we no longer found our self on the offensive. We were on the defensive.

  A new war had begun. One we inadvertently started.

  But soon Frank had initiated LEP patrols hitting their camps and nest areas. And though there were daily outbreaks and attacks by the LEPs, they were on the outskirts of our cities and food sources, thankfully away from populated areas. If we could keep it that way, eventually, we would get rid of them all. It was ironic that we needed to cause the extinction of the beings that we created to stop our own extinction.