Coffin Dodgers Read Free Page A

the sites that talk about this stuff are written by crazies, conspiracy nuts or both.  
    Anyway. Are you sitting comfortably? Then I'll begin.

    Once upon a time, the world didn't suck. The whole climate change thing was a bit of a pisser, I'll give you that, but things carried on pretty much the same otherwise.  
    It was something of a golden age, if you ignored the weather. Medicine got better, people lived longer and everybody watched a lot of TV. Everything was just dandy.  
    And then women stopped having babies.  
    It wasn't that women stopped wanting babies, it was that they stopped having them.  
    At first, nobody thought there was anything wrong. Most people thought it was just them, that they'd offended God, or broken a mirror, or stepped on a crack, or done something else to bring bad luck. They changed their diets, cut back on the drinking, exercised more and kept on trying, and trying, and trying.
    It was only when the statistics people looked at the big picture and did things with calculators that they realised something bigger was happening. The number of babies born each year had been on a downward trend for a while, but then it just dropped off a cliff. I don't know the numbers, but it pretty much went from loads to hardly any in the space of three or four years.
    It was ironic, really. The papers had spent years banging on about men's falling sperm counts causing an infertility crisis, but in the end it wasn't men's fault. At least, it wasn't their fault directly.  
    They're still not sure about the "why" -- believe me, there's serious money being spent on research into this; whoever finds the problem and a way to fix it will be rich beyond their wildest dreams -- but the consensus seems to be that a food additive or something in food packaging or something in the water supply or death rays from the Planet Zog threw a great big spanner into women's reproductive systems. That spanner meant that women -- black women, white women, Asian women, rich women, poor women -- more or less stopped ovulating. Men's little soldiers could swim all they wanted, but while the lights were on, there was nobody home.
    Not all women were affected. A tiny minority was fine, and that tiny minority became very rich very quickly, selling eggs to the highest bidder. Doctors made a packet too, because the demand for fertility treatment went through the roof. They could charge as much as they wanted, and most of them did. That's your supply and demand right there.
    So, what do you get when nobody's having babies and everybody's living longer? If you answered "a world that sucks", you win the prize. This world is an old world. The elderly run the show, and the rest of us, the massively outnumbered rest of us, run after them.  
    It's not a generation gap. It's more of a Grand Canyon.

    I've been on shift for about an hour when Amy comes over.
    "If one more ugly --"
    "decrepit --"
    "shaky --"
    "rheumy --"
    "Rheumy? That’s a good one," Amy says.
    "Thanks. Where were we?"
    "Yellow --"
    "Not the Yellow Man again?"
    "Yep."
    The Yellow Man is one of the regulars. We call him the Yellow Man because he's yellow. That's not a euphemism, or a metaphor, or some other kind of nickname-related cleverness. He's a funny yellow colour. There's something seriously wrong with his kidneys, or his liver, or something like that.  
    Amy looks more serious than usual -- and she usually looks pretty serious. "You know he's always been creepy, right?"
    I nod.
    "I think he's been down to the Creepy Mart and ordered a special delivery of Captain Creepy with his Creep Card."
    I nod again. "That's pretty creepy."
    "It is."
    "So what's he done now?"
    "Well, you know he's always giving me the chat about how if he was thirty years younger, that kind of thing?"
    "Yep. I still think you should stab him with something."
    "Yeah. Tonight was different, though, it was worse. He told me that his 'ship' was 'gonna come in' any day now" -- yes, Amy's doing the