Epilogue

Updated inventory: two men, twenty-nine women, two preteens, four very young girls, and four female infants.

Today is exactly one hundred years since the day I was infected with the COVID-20 virus. I remember, because it’s Chastity’s and my birthday. We’re sitting around the table after a huge dinner of paella, fritters, and sangria. Chastity is big on a heavy chocolate cake with fudge icing made from the recipe on the back of a Hershey’s chocolate can. That’s good, but give me hand-churned, homemade fresh peach ice cream. Fortunately, both are not only possible, they are coming out right now.

It’s also an anniversary of sorts, so the ladies had tried to put a hundred plus candles on a huge sheet cake. Luckily, they experimented a few days before and determined that it wasn’t possible to light all one hundred and fourteen candles before half had melted and coated the cake with wax. Out came fourteen cakes, each with one huge candle. There wasn’t a single favorite flavor that wasn’t catered to.

I have a churn full of peach ice cream all my own, but I’ll share.

Becky and Logan, sappy sweet as usual, sit feeding each other alternating bites of cake and ice cream. Married for over ninety years and still deeply in love – I guess it runs in the family. The rest of his wives are happily clustered around, but Becky has always been the ‘First Wife!’

We never did get to take Sarah’s ashes back to the ‘special place’, but Chastity, Rachel, Becky, and I found her a beautiful spot here. Then I had Sam send the ashes of the murdered mothers. We introduced them all to Logan, and I think they’re all happy here – rather be with family anyway.

It didn’t take long after our move that I began to see this crazy new virus was going to be my life, and I didn’t want to just react. One day, I put on my containment gear and sweated my way over to see Mallika Daswani in her lab. If her lab hadn’t been air conditioned, I’d have died from the heat. When I left, we both had a completely different picture of each other. She made several phone calls, and the next thing I knew, I was enrolled in Atlanta’s Emory University headed towards a PhD in Virology.

Emory was my ‘sponsor’ school, but I took virtual classes and seminars all over the country. Harvard, Yale, the Mayo Clinic, and more. I had time; money wasn’t an issue; and Daswani had a lab that would have been the envy of any campus. Plus, she was ‘credentialed’ and could supervise my studies and labs.

It wasn’t that much longer before Chastity, Rachel, and most of our companions were in school with me, studying for a variety of degrees in different disciplines, depending on their interests.

You know what PhD stands for? Piled higher and deeper. Daswani is gone, and the lab is now mine. I should say ours, as most of the staff are my ladies. We have a vested interest – physical and financial.

Along the way, our accumulated pay and subsequent investments mounted up. The hope of an immortality drug faded, and when some bright accountant proposed to close our ‘base’ as unnecessary, we ‘retired’ and bought it. From then on, all our research and discoveries were ours. Paydirt!

Occasionally, someone remembers, so our one additional major expense is for the former military we needed to hire as ‘contractors’ for our protection. Ruby Schaaft was ‘accidentally’ exposed to COVID-20 and now runs that operation from the inside.

Over the years, other scientists thought they could explain me and Logan, and I know they were/are partially correct. They just don’t take their theories far enough, and believe me, there have been a few folks crazy enough to try to duplicate the process. Still, they have no answer why, before and after me, Logan is the only other male to survive exposure to COVID-20. I’m convinced it’s love plus a secret that I’ll take to my grave.

Having Logan on line meant we could implement Rachel’s plan to bring down more dying orphans with incurable diseases – sometime with their mothers. No matter how much Daswani wanted, no one was willing to risk pregnancy, especially that could lead to a male child. Even with the arduous cure for COVID-20, some of our newer arrivals have nothing to return to, so they remain.

So here’s the deal. Unlike COVID-19, COVID-20 acts differently in women and men. In women, it bypasses the lungs and settles in the vagina’s mucous membranes. Girls whose bodies haven’t begun to develop sexually, don’t have the environment the COVID-20 virus needs to flourish, so they do not present with active symptoms. They don’t get unusually horny until a few months after menarche, but still carry the virus and could infect others. Unlike in men, their virus acting alone does not make changes in their DNA, but it is an aggressive virus and goes after whatever virus or bacteria that makes them ill or is killing them.

We have kids, just not of our own bodies. Maybe if the world changes and I dare risk an ‘immortality plague.’...

Sexual hormones also affect the COVID-20 virus’s ability to infect the male. Before puberty, the virus is inactive in the boy’s body. However, once enough testosterone is present in his body, the virus attacks in the male’s lungs – violently – and kills before it can alter the male’s DNA. Why was I spared? And why was Logan?