Remedy Z: Solo Read Free Page B

prescribed “pill popping”. Pharmaceutical companies, in a powerful cartel with doctors and governments, thought they had hit the jackpot. The money was rolling in and all were fat and happy. What they hadn’t realised is that their testing had not been outside lab conditions and that mutation would occur. These fools, in their greed, would act as the delivery mechanism for the most devastating weaponised biological agent that man had ever made and may have meant the End of Days for us all.
    Perhaps it was the last laugh at humanity as it perfected the dark control of capitalism and consumerism? It was something we had worked to achieve for so long: our own destruction. But the virus was initially a happy participant in its role as slaver. It soon wanted more.
    Divine was a new generation of drug. Once made, it would multiply; a genetically engineered virus or perhaps nanotechnology. Pharmacies grew “certified Divine” while quantities of it were gathered up in home labs and grown much like a yoghurt culture or home-brewed beer. Whether it was mutation in these homes and backyard labs or otherwise, Divine mutated. It didn’t take long for it to achieve a mind of its own as a colony: a virus working together for its survival, spread and supremacy. It was an accident, a mistake. It had to have been. I had convinced myself that no-one could have been so diabolical to have intended the worldwide disaster that had followed the introduction of Divine into the market. I would never know the complete answer. The mutated Divine had a distinct, sweet candy-apple smell; it would soon be melded with the smell of death on an epic scale. Somewhere in the world, someone was infected by the mutated virus amid that candy-apple smell. Some lone individual infected many others, and so it began. The zombies followed their noses and ate everything and everyone in their path. The destruction of man would be the way the Divine virus would spread and flourish. People had been infected and got on planes and trains; the pandemic was pervasive and unstoppable. No-one seemed safe, anywhere in the world.
    Weaponised or mutated Divine manifested symptoms in users or those infected that spanned months in some and as little as weeks and days and seconds in others.  Like me, some were immune. Unlike most, I didn’t like the smell, wasn’t drawn to it and if I had something with Divine in it, the virus would have no effect. As the virus grew in those infected, the symptoms would degenerate human consciousness to a point that sex-drive, the want or need for clothing or shelter and other less essential needs to that of food and water (blood was preferred) were ignored. The last thing left was a never-ending hunger that was all about base food consumption: just enough to sustain the virus and pass Divine on to another host. The closest meat was the order of the day; the ultimate in laziness and selfishness which epitomised the drug culture that started the mess in the first place. People turned on each other and cannibalised one another horrifically and Divine spread like wildfire. But not to me: I was immune.
    I was one of the few who had something in his genes that meant Divine was ineffective or perhaps I had fought it off early in some way and had anti-bodies. I was not a biologist or scientist with the requisite skills to study and determine diagnoses and fact. I had observations and theories, though. One of these was family background and personal traits. No history of family chemical dependencies, a naturally good immune system from my mother and a versatile and well-balanced mind may have all played a part. I’m not perfect but I believed that I had something special in the combination of upbringing, genes and way of life that kept me from the fate worse than death that others faced. I was a survivor like those who had lived on and persisted through plague, famine and war since the dawn of man. The Great Change was the black plague of my