It Was A Huge Mistake (a bit more of our continuing story)

A little like this one!

💀

They nearly killed everybody.

This is Jen again.  I figured that it was about time in this story to explain a little about how Lou and I ended up orphans. And we are certainly not the only ones. In fact, the world is mostly comprised of orphans now. Families are something we just remember or hear about.

It seems like maybe ten or fifteen percent of the population around here survived what happened, what they did to us.

When I was just a little kid and Lou was still a toddler, we lived with our parents obviously.  Our mom stayed home with us, our dad managed a marina store down on the waterfront. We had a nice time being normal boring kids with our normal boring parents.  Our house was nothing special.  Mom had a nice garden and liked flowers.  Our dad was a boat nut!  He had a little glass dinghy he was always messing with it out behind the house in a sort of garage with no car in it.  He never had a chance to finish it though.

Nobody ever admitted why or how, but there were swarms of big insects like grasshoppers all of a sudden.  They were not just a mess.  They bit.  They were dangerous.  They didn't eat your garden, they wanted to eat you! They could strip a body down to the bones if there were enough of them.  These things began to be called Piranha bugs.  They were sort of gunmetal blue and very shiny.  They were about three inches long! Also, you could hear them.  They made a sort of thrumming noise like a huge crowd of people talking or arguing.

They bred like crazy, and there were more and more of them all the time.  People began to panic. There were all kinds of ideas about how to kill them.  People tried burning them.  They tried all kinds of bug sprays on them.  It was hard because they moved fast, too fast to stick around and get killed.  Sure, if you caught one, you could smash it.  But that was just one!

The situation got so bad so fast that the old government in DC figured that they better do something.  It was a horrible bloody mess out here and the public began to blame Washington for not ending the invasion somehow.  The business of the country and the world in fact, was not getting done.  People were hiding from the Piranha bugs inside their houses.  

Some giant brain in Washington figured out that there was an airborn bacteria that these things were vulnerable to.  So they sent drones spraying this bacteria over all known areas of infestation.  It killed a lot of them, but not all of them.  Some were resistant.  Incredibly, it also destroyed people with type O positive blood.

That's what happened.  Some people died quickly.  Some hung on longer.  The bacteria seemed to like to infect the heart and blood vessels.  It changed the whole world.  Lou and I lived, our parents died.  The bacteria and the bugs both vanished when their host organisms died.

The country got divided into six big sections, they kind of got rid of the states.  That's how we ended up living in the PNW Section Authority, known as P-Sec to normal people.

The re-organization was miserable, but worked with so few people, kind of.

We began to dream about our own re-organisation. We were so thin on the ground.