A Mother's Love by - (top business books of all time txt) 📕

overpower those weaker than them, so there should be no surprises here.  She couldn't deny the concern that welled in her that there were only females in the evacuating crowd.

“Women and children first,” was all well and good, but where were the boys?  Even when they were being collected from their homes, they had been segregated by sex.  If she had possessed a boy child, such separation would have torn her apart.  Liz could feel the nightmare of that in the people around her.

“Will we be safe now, mummy?”  Liz looked down at the innocent and frightened face of her daughter, the voice barely registering over the scared hum of the masses.  What could she say to that?  Truth was, she didn't think anyone could be safe, not now and not in the world that was rapidly hurtling toward human extinction.  The child needed hope, something that Liz was in short supply of herself.  All Liz could do was deflect and try and hide her own fear.

As a mother, she couldn't give her child much except for her unconditional love and any strength that she had left.

“I hope so, Ruby.”  That didn't seem to help the child, and the tears began to leak out of the corners of her eyes once more.  There had been a lot of that the last few days, her daughter both fearful and confused.  Now there were no audible sobs, just a yawning pit of desolation that tore Liz's heart in two.  “It will be okay. The soldiers will protect you.”  Ruby didn't seem convinced and who could blame her?  The soldiers weren't so much acting as protectors now.  They seemed more like jailers, herding their captives to a fate only they could understand.

When they had been forced to board the bus, finally abandoning the family home, Liz had seen what happened to those who defied the will of the soldiers.  These hardened men, with their faces hidden by the mandatory respirators, would accept no compromise in the order they demanded.  The butts of their guns were used as improvised clubs; skulls cracked as a reward for any sign of rebellion.

They never hit the women though. Only the remaining men who had been too young, too old or too sick to join the fight against the Virals.

“Keep moving,” demanded a soldier with a megaphone.  He stood out of the top of an army Humvee, his face obscured by apparatus.  The instruction wasn't needed; nobody in the crowd around Liz wanted to be here.  This city, Liz's home since her birth, would soon be overrun by the horrors surging toward its boundaries.  They had been told that the Virals were mere hours away.  Their only hope was the trains they were now all being ferried to.

“Keep moving so you can board the trains.  The trains will take you to safety.”  Liz wanted to believe that; she really did.  So why didn't she?  She felt she was being steamrollered, with no opportunity to question what was happening.

The doubts probably surfaced because the men were acting so distant and cold.  There should have been some compassion in their hearts, if not for the women then at least for the children.  All Liz could detect was determination and veins filled with ice.  What had these men seen to make them this way?  Their harshness defied the humanity that should have been there.

Liz felt an elbow strike her arm as she was buffeted by the festering panic that surged through the crush of people.  She pulled her child in front of her, wary of how vulnerable the young girl was.

“Keep hold of my hand, honey,” Liz warned the child.  “Keep close to the fence.”

“Okay.” The terrified response drifted to her.  If her husband was still alive, things might have been different, but John had died early on, fighting on the front line.  That was what they had told her at least, the letter pushed silently through her door the only notice she was given.  Nobody came to deliver the news in person.  That would have been impractical with the numbers dying in a war that would very shortly have an end.

She still felt anger and guilt about how he had been forced to do his duty to country rather than be here now to care for the ones who really mattered.  How could she be expected to raise a child in this world alone?  It wasn’t fair, and the crowd pulsed with its own resentment mingled with the hope that salvation awaited them on the trains.  For many, this was the last chance to keep their sanity. 

***

The first change had occurred just under a month ago, with the news media barely even realising the nightmare that was growing.  The government knew though, as had governments all across the planet because it wasn't just America that saw an outbreak.  Every major country began reporting the rise of the Virals--an unstoppable tsunami of death washing across the planet.  When the truth about the virus finally couldn't be suppressed any longer, it was already too late.

That was when the cities began to fall, the virus spreading across the land, driven by the relentless hordes that had been created.  Military might couldn't stop it, and neither could science.  Washington fell before the nukes could be deployed quickly enough.  By the time New York and Boston had become smoking, radioactive ruins, the plague had spread too far to be suppressed by such weapons of mass destruction.  If anything, the resulting radiation seemed to strengthen the Virals.  Those caught outside the blast zone quickly recovered from their injuries, their skin thickening as if to counteract the future use of such weapons.  As amazing as it seemed to the soldiers fighting on the ground, the monsters they faced became even tougher.  In some cases, the skin became impervious to anything except armour piercing rounds.

That was the other thing about the Virals.  Their DNA was so enhanced that their bodies adapted to the threats hurled against them.

The doctors called it the HV13N5 virus.  Everyone else called it the Nosferatu plague because that was effectively what it turned people into.  Vampires, vamps, blood suckers and leeches. Virals.  A dozen names arrived to mark the ambassadors of the apocalypse.  Only sunlight didn't kill them, and garlic had no adverse effects.  Religious symbols were about as useful as a fly swatter against a hurricane.  Most of the folk lore had been wrong about vampires; made up stories about a creature that, until now, had never actually existed.  The vampires of today existed to suck the blood from the living and consume the flesh to nourish themselves.  Then there was their secondary purpose which appeared to be to spread the virus that demanded to control the world.

Before the soldiers had come for them, Liz had been woken by the sound of the city’s disaster sirens.  That could only mean one thing—the city she lived in was close to being overrun.  That noise would forever fill her with dread.  Just the memory of it sent fear coursing through her nervous system.

Liz would come to fear a lot of things as the days progressed.

***

Everyone remembered the first time they heard about the virus.  For Liz, she had been outside the school gates waiting for her child to be discharged from the private school she and John paid too much money for.  It was worth it to keep their darling out of the public school system, but it was a severe stretch on their finances.  There were no stereotypical metal detectors or armed police roaming the halls of this school, so they figured it was worth it.  Every child who marched out of the main doors was dressed in the regimental school uniform, the height of order and decorum, and the education about as good as money could buy.

“Did you hear about what happened in New York?” The question came from one of the mothers standing next to Liz.  Liz didn't mind the woman, despite the Botox and the designer clothes she had squeezed herself into.  Liz couldn't let herself enjoy such ostentatious displays of wealth.  They could afford to send Ruby here, but that meant sacrifices which both she and John agreed would be worthwhile.  They were both getting by, but only just.  Their lives were not blessed by the wealth that she witnessed every day she brought Ruby to school.  Some of the cars she saw were worth more than the mortgage on her house.

She worked as a personal trainer in the local gym.  John was a firefighter who was greatly overdue a pay rise.   That was what parents did, though. They put their own lives aside to raise the children they brought into the world.  Whilst she couldn't vouch for John's inner dialogue, not once had Liz ever regretted giving birth to the girl who meant everything to her.  Even in the early days of the broken nights and the tantrums, there had never been the briefest instance of selfishness on Liz's part.  Ruby was her everything, and she would give her all to protect the child from the harshness of the world.

“No, I don't keep up with the news much.”  Liz had learnt that trick early on.  Better to keep that bad juju out of her head.  Knowing that a recession was imminent or that terrorists had committed some atrocity in a faraway land did little for her mental well-being.  Safer for her overall mental health to just shut as much of that out as possible.

“I heard about it,” another of the waiting mothers had said.  “Riots all across the city.  Isn't it awful?  But that's what happens when you let people get fat on welfare.”

“So true,” the first mother had said.  Liz didn't bother correcting them.  Unlike most of the women that had stood there that day, Liz had not been born into money.  She had worked her way through high school and college, finding and loving a man who was equally devoid of rich relatives or business acumen.  She would have liked to have told those present that everyone deserved a decent start in life, but she'd known those words would have fallen on deaf ears.

Of course, it hadn't been rioting, not of the kind most people expected.  It had been a swarm of vampires overpowering the streets and the subways to spread their viral seed all across the city.

Within two days, the school had closed its doors, insisting that all children stay at home due to the growing national emergency.  By then, all the supermarkets had been stripped clean, and there were soldiers on the streets.  That was when John had insisted they pack some bags and head into the hills away from the city.  Being a firefighter, he had a sense of how things were on the streets of Portland.  He knew bad things were coming, despite the platitudes and the reassurances on the TV that Liz now paid ample attention to.

Liz hadn't listened to his pleadings, and this was a shame that constantly threatened to overpower her.  If Liz had taken heed of what John had said, maybe he would still be alive.  Maybe she and her daughter wouldn't be here being marched to the illusion of some sanctuary somewhere along with hundreds of other women.

“Give it another day,” Liz had said, frightened of what abandoning the relative normality of their lives would mean.  Reluctantly, John had agreed to her wishes, only for her husband to be conscripted the next day.  The men came in the early hours, brandishing the Presidential Executive Order, and enough force of arms to stop any kind of meaningful resistance.  John was marched off with the rest of the husbands and fathers on her street.  They even took all the boys over sixteen as well, so desperate was