Rough Boy
Prologue

I am Erotic Mind Control Positive.

It defines me in the new world circumstance, but I cannot sincerely wish otherwise. I am and have been other things: an ignored son, a decorated Special Operations soldier, a pawn during the greatest heist in history, a PTSD sufferer, a loner, an overbearing employee, a forceful lover, a husband, and a father.

They will tell you the world I was born into ended without a bang, specifically 'without a bang'. The sun did not explode. There was no Great Plant Die Off. God did not punish us with a flood for overwarming his Eden. No one knows what happened; the media settled on 'The Event'. The First World countries were the first to fall, but it didn't take long for the most remote corners of the world to be affected.

No one fucked anymore. No sex. No making love. No bang ... just the silence of empty cribs announcing the end of the human race!

The signs abounded long before the government took its boot off the newscasters' and media pundits' necks. Overnight every American soldier pulled out of combat zones, embassies, and non-disclosed missions. The most elite troops sent back out to places and missions which would have made no sense to anyone who didn't know the why--'babysitting' duties while US missionaries gutted orphanages around the world.

As one of the babysitters, I wasn't in the country when the news broke: a catastrophic drop in new pregnancies. Sterility and impotence were the rule and not the exception! I felt the effect of the world learning the truth though. We were in ass-end of a Central American forest raiding an orphanage. Their soldiers executed the children rather than let us take them. We walked into an ambush; seeing the bodies of dead children enraged us past caring about our own deaths. Later, I would remember the words of a female missionary as she died in my arms at the extraction site, "Tell the Department, you're one of them!"

I should have known what she meant, but I was done with it all. I took the blame for our group crucifying the enemy soldiers who didn't die right away. The military marched me out with no ceremony and no recriminations. I picked a random city, got an overnight-shift job, a girlfriend as happy as I was to ignore the world, and dug a fucking bunker nothing short of a nuke or God could penetrate.

I proved too competent at my job, chose the wrong girl, and brought a nuke into the bunker with me. Or maybe for the last one, God had already seen fit to make me a part of humanity's salvation and was only letting me sulk while he made other arrangements.

It took a three-years to find the person the end of the world made me. I can't say he's a better man than the boy who signed up to save the world, even if I have the power to actually do it this time around.

I am Erotic Mind Control Positive! I can fuck; I can have sex; I can make love. More importantly, I can make non-Positives bang to my tune. Without someone like me, babies aren't conceived.

Savior and Satan.

I was reborn in a conference room.