No Future
Chapter 79: Sick and Sore

Copyright© 2012 by Bradley Stoke

Science Fiction Sex Story: Chapter 79: Sick and Sore - This is a future history of England over the Twenty-First Century and into the next. It is a multi-threaded narrative that travels from place-to-place, succeeds from year-to-year, and passes from one person to another. England's green and pleasant land is visited by famine, plague, war and pestilence. Governments come and go. The ocean levels inexorably rise. International relations worsen. And the English people stumble through the chaos as best they can. Who said there was No Future?

Caution: This Science Fiction Sex Story contains strong sexual content, including Ma/Fa   Ma/Ma   Lesbian   Swinging   Orgy   Interracial   Black Female   Oral Sex   Anal Sex   Prostitution  

Lindiwe

2069

Although this was by no means the first time in her life that Lindiwe had been ill, she'd never before felt as desperately sick as she was now. Her luck had run out. The Buffalo Pox that had spread across England as it had the rest of Europe, Africa and Asia had finally chased her down. The horrible boils of pus on her face and chest could never be symptoms of anything else. And here she was, still living in the same Redhill squat which had been her home for almost a year with only hard floorboards on which to sleep.

As a result of the fever and pain from which she suffered, all Lindiwe could do was shiver and sweat in the corner of the room swaddled in a blanket with her consciousness lapsing periodically into blessed oblivion. She needed food and drink, but didn't have the energy to leave the small spot in the room that she'd claimed as her own and venture out to beg on the mean streets of North Surrey. In any case, she wasn't sure she even had the ability to hold anything in her stomach once she'd let it slip down her throat.

It was obvious that Lindiwe was sick. She sat huddled against the mildewed wall displaying the typical symptoms of Buffalo Pox such as horrible festering sores and postulating boils. This was reason enough for anyone to keep their distance. Any contact with Lindiwe or with anything she touched could easily spread further a plague that had already claimed so many lives across the world

Lindiwe was sure that there had once been a time when pandemics of this kind were countered with an antidote that would later be released to the public. Such days were gone and these days many new strains of cholera, diphtheria, typhoid, hepatitis and leprosy had taken a fresh hold on those least well prepared to defend themselves against it. The limits to a pandemic's range wasn't determined only by the spread of poverty and access to medicine. It was spreading much further as scientific progress was no longer keeping ahead of the pathogens' rapid mutation. This was England's second great epidemic in just over ten years, but the first Lindiwe had known since she'd arrived in the Kingdom. It was ironic that although she'd managed to avoid the many truly horrible diseases that had ravaged Lesotho and neighbouring South Africa it was in England that Lindiwe was finally laid low.

The English had almost certainly learnt lessons from the last plague, still known as the White Death, but that knowledge was compromised by the fact that it had happened during the period of the Government of National Unity whose one redeeming feature was its natural instinct for prompt authoritarian action. The government could be congratulated for having put into place a truly radical response: in which England's borders were hermetically sealed, internal movement regulated and vast areas of Southern England, the Midlands and the Home Counties quarantined, but such praise was compromised by the fact that such policies were the knee-jerk response of an insular, almost racist, government very much in the pocket of big business. Nothing was considered more precious or sacrosanct than the welfare of those least likely to suffer, so the hundreds of thousands of deaths directly or indirectly attributable to Sheep Fever were overwhelmingly concentrated amongst the already poor and vulnerable. No loss, the government probably thought. Such people would never vote for them even if they had the opportunity to do so.

Buffalo Pox's spread across England followed a different pattern to that of the White Death. This may have been because the current coalition government of Labour, Green and other left-of-centre parties made a huge effort to differentiate itself from its discredited predecessor. Nevertheless, although the contagion was distributed more evenly across the socio-economic classes and ethnic groups, there were still many tens of thousands who'd died and many more who were likely to die in the future.

And Lindiwe was convinced that she would soon be one of them.

Like everyone else, Lindiwe had followed the disease's progress with alarm as it emerged from the recently re-opened Channel Tunnel and the southern ports; then spread through the counties of Sussex and Kent; and now to the very edge of London. Why was this contagion known as Buffalo Pox? Why not smallpox or even cowpox? Its flimsy connection with buffalos was more to do with Water Buffalo rather than the species of Bison locally known as Buffalo by the citizens of North America's fragmented nations. The disease's origin was more the kind of place where such buffalo wallowed rather than the animals themselves.

Such concerns were of little comfort to Lindiwe now; although her thoughts were so fragmentary and unconnected that anything so abstract was a kind of comfort to her. She was also sometimes aware of the presence of the two other African women who shared her bedroom and with whom, until she became ill, she'd huddle together for warmth and company under the threadbare blankets.

There was Uzoma: a large woman now unnaturally diminished by hunger and from whose bosom and buttocks protruded more bone than flesh. Her fluency of English was poor and her knowledge of any other language that Lindiwe understood was non-existent, so she mostly communicated by hand-signals and a severely limited repertoire of words. Lindiwe still didn't know from which African country Uzoma was a refugee.

 
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