Chapter 11

“So, we’re now entering Hagerstown, Maryland, the county seat of Washington County. I wonder if there is any kind of law and order here,” I commented as I pulled out of Diana’s twat, rather pleased at her enthusiasm for sex with me.

“I wouldn’t count on it,” Lewis snorted as he parked the flagship vehicle.

“I wonder how they will take our nudity,” Tara laughed as Wilbur slid out of her ass.

“That’s a rather nerve-wracking question indeed,” Anwyn observed while we began walking around, naked as jaybirds.

“Well, hello again,” Ariel announced himself as we walked along the streets.

“People don’t seem to mind that we’re naked. Any reason for why?” I asked him directly now.

“Well, yes. I told you that I’d protect you. That includes from law enforcement and judgmental prudes. Trust me. There is a reason for your nudity. You’re meant to spread your condition and to breed local women, to put it politely. You’re all meant to breed local women. But unlike in Hancock, they’re not meant to pull up stakes and follow you. Hagerstown’s people are to stay put and survive as a self-reliant community, at least for now, small as said community might be. I can’t get into why that is, just know that it is necessary,” Ariel convinced me, the sheer sincerity in his eyes being quite noteworthy.

“Hagerstown is an experiment of sorts, a laboratory, ground zero for the spread of Tara’s condition, isn’t it? Whereas Hancock’s people are meant to help us spread it across the country,” I surmised.

“Among other things, but yes, to an extent,” Ariel admitted what I realized intuitively.

“Fascinating, this little plan of yours. To think that I’m not just a leader of a band of survivors, but a cog in the celestial machine, the divine plan for a post-apocalyptic world. Is this because humanity lost its way and needed a course correction of sorts?” I continued to gather from what Ariel both told me ... and didn’t tell me.

“That’s one way of putting it, to be sure. In every evolutionary crisis, a bottleneck of sorts occurs. The herd is culled, as it were, certain genes die out, certain family trees as well. Look at the Ice Age, the trend toward climate change in more recent times, the Black Death, the Spanish Flu, both World Wars, etc. Now, of course, climate change has been drastically stalled or mitigated and that was one of a few silver linings to the dark cloud of Fireball Day. But it is, ultimately, a major bottleneck, the biggest one ever. You’ll come to understand things better in time. After all, you are a Prophet of Heaven,” Ariel sighed as he reminded me.

“So, in a nutshell, Man has gotten too big for his britches, has been knocked down a peg or two, and now must claw his way back to where he was before. Civilizing this brave new world will be a life’s work in and of itself. And I will have a large role in it for my part, as a Prophet,” I now concluded.

“That you are here, that life exists, and identity, that the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse,” Ariel quoted a very famous American poem.

“Walt Whitman does seem to fit the occasion. I’m not sure if I count as ‘O, Captain, My Captain,’ though. But I certainly feel like shouting my ‘barbaric yawp over the rooftops to the world’ at times. To think, I only got into Whitman because of Robin Williams and the Dead Poets Society years back,” I confessed.

“One of your best mortal poets, if you ask me. Him and Robert Frost. Both full of their own zeal in a way. For Americans, that’s both your national virtue and your national vice. Your zeal. Your commitment to something once you believe in it. That and your strange paradox of both so much individuality and so much community. It will be interesting to see how your national culture and consciousness evolve after this apocalypse.