Out of the Shadow
It was a bad season for colds everyone agreed. Almost everyone had gotten a cold during the winter, one that seemed to last for weeks. Nobody thought anything about it, it's not uncommon after all to get a cold in the winter. Then the dying began. Within weeks of the start of spring people started dying from all sorts of strange diseases. By mid-April the mass die-offs began. By the time they stopped only one in two hundred people in the United States still lived. Other places where AIDS or a lack of medical services were widespread suffered worse. In parts of Africa and Asia only one in three thousand survived. Finally the disease ran its course and the survivors crawled out of their hiding places.
Most people had thought that after the dying from the disease had finished there would be plenty left for the survivors to live on. They had forgotten about the tendency of humans without hope to destroy things. Humans, not many but enough, had reacted to death by indulging in an orgy of destruction, destroying everything that remained of the civilization that allowed them to die. Fire was the favorite means of their revenge and many people, who would have otherwise lived, died when their homes burned around them in the night. Only scattered houses and remote towns remained standing after the firestorms. Many of these fell when the starving survivors fought among themselves for food and shelter from the elements.
Finally civilization of a sort reemerged from the ashes. Strong men began to appear who stopped the carnage by any means necessary. They established new groups. Some were based on slavery for the majority with a small elite class that lived on their labor. Others were based on more of a religious model where the mass of people supported a small religious caste. Most however were based on a clan structure where everyone was related to the leader. Out of the shadow of the dying a new world is emerging.
