June 1st, 2282

Saja Bashir had seen enough bodies for one lifetime, thank you very much. In fact, if you asked her, she would tell you she had seen enough bodies for several lifetimes, maybe even a hundred lifetimes! And that was more death than anyone should ever have to see, in her opinion.

Of course, no one ever did ask Saja her opinion, but that was just fine with her; the sixty-four year old was a lone scavenger, venturing into the community formerly known as Flanders, New Jersey only to stock up on seeds and other supplies she couldn't find or grow for herself. (Books of any kind were a particular guilty pleasure.) At the moment, she was making her way back to the lean-to she had constructed in a sheltered ditch just a mile or two outside of town, hidden from sight of the main road. When she had arrived in the area three years before, the people of Flanders had offered her a place to stay, but owing to the frequency for those who were afflicted with the septilence to pass through on their death march to York, she had declined.

Some days, Saja felt like the Angel of Death himself was looming over her weary shoulders as he hungered for one soul among the millions that had been collected in the past couple centuries. However, though she never thought of fleeing from him, she still wanted to die on her own terms, which meant she would stay as far away from infected travelers as she could.

The septimus pestilence, or more-commonly called 'septilence,' was named so due to its symptom period. Beginning with a mild cough and fever-like symptoms, the seven-day/seven-night virus gradually worsened in the span of a week, progressing to the point where those afflicted would vomit up blood and the lining of their stomachs, and culminating ninety-three percent of the time in a very painful death.

Based on the state of the survivors, many considered the dead to be the luckier ones.

These past few months had been the worse for breakouts as far as the news from travelers passing through the town was indicating. The population of the Eastern Seaboard, once 112 million strong, had dwindled to not even a tenth of its former size, and with reports of a resurgence of the disease, that number was sure to drop even lower.

Saja had been careful to only walk into town during the evening, when the sick were weaker and less likely to accost and infect her on the street. Already, she imagined little flecks of the virus, little malignant particles, floating in the tainted air, mobbing newcomers and gradually wearing down the inhabitants. That was why she wore a cloth over her nose and mouth, as well as her shayla.

It had been very warm the evening she had found three ragged and timeworn books in the rubble of a demolished house. Sweat had glistened on her forehead while she searched, the setting sun still heating her clothes to sweltering temperatures, when she had come across the sudden sight of three dusty covers. They were in need of some mending, and the thought filled her heart with joy at the challenge; Saja truly loved books. She believed that through the past, the future could be predicted, and that someday, looking to the first settlers would help in rebuilding society to what it had once been.

However, the books she had found were not quite so exceptional; two were poetry collections and one was a paperback romance novel, but Saja had no way of knowing that; though she spoke fluent English and had done so since childhood, she couldn't actually read the language. As well her parents had taught her the Arabic scriptures of their Holy Book by mouth, not by words on the page, and it was memorization that allowed her to recite certain passages perfectly, rather than comprehension.

But to Saja, a lonely woman getting on in her years and luckier than most to have lived for so long, books were her everything, and she opened one of the poetry collections to pretend she was reading it in the fading daylight as her feet directed her journey home.

That was where the bodies came in.

First was the stench, the raw putrid odour of decomposing flesh and rotting meat, so powerful it made eyes water and strong stomachs turn inside out and heave up their contents. The smell made Saja choke and clap a hand to her face even as the foul stench permeated her facemask to lie heavily in her mouth, coating her tongue in the sour reek of death.

Unknowingly, she had been walking past the burial grounds, not paying attention as the cement sidewalk under her feet turned to an asphalt path, leading her through the park where body burnings were held.

Trying to resist the urge to hold her breath even with her cloth filtering the air she breathed, Saja began to hurry along, overcome with nausea, when suddenly a strange noise reached her ears. A high-pitched, fluctuating sound almost like a screech was growing louder as she passed patches of scorched grass surrounding abyssal holes.

A baby? she wondered, becoming fearful at the thought. What was a mother doing bringing her baby to the burial grounds?

She didn't wonder for long.

As she picked up speed, still surprisingly quick in her old age, she could see a figure draped in a black cloak up ahead, stalking around the edges of what she assumed to be a fresh corpse pit, their dark outfit blending them in with the inky night sky.

The keening cries were grower louder, as was the pounding in Saja's ears, when the reaper-like figure tossed something to the ground over their shoulder, letting it roll away across the path. Once she got closer, she could see it was a jug and a different, equally putrid smell assaulted her nose: gasoline.

"Wait!" she screamed with sudden realization as the person in the black cloak lit something in their hand, most likely a piece of cloth, and let it fall into the corpse pit. Saja pushed the figure aside, the books and her purchases of the day falling limply from her hands.

The hole in the ground was full of the dead, limbs tangled and intertwined in horrific poses that made Saja's heart ache. Thank God it was night and shadows obscured the faces of the men, women, and children. Based on the size, she would have guessed a little less than two hundred corpses occupied the hastily-dug crater, most victims of the septilence, but others proof that their life was grim and that fate was not always kind.

But somewhere among the dead was a baby, now wailing and sobbing as though its life depended on it, which, as the flames from the cloth fragment began to spread on streams of gasoline, seemed to be the case.

"You idiot!" she yelled, taking a swipe at the man on the ground, his hood having fallen off. "What do you think you're doing?"

"Disposin' of the garbage," he said, an angry scowl visible on his face as the dancing tongues of fire stretched upwards.

"There's a child in there!"

"And the mother too. And who's gonna take care of it? Not me, that's for sure." The man got to his feet and backed away, lest Saja attempt to hit him again. "You care so much, you risk getting' infected."

Her blood boiled as the baby's howls grew louder and the fire raged, smoke beginning to rise into the night sky, blocking out the stars. Before the man could protest, she had ripped the cloak from his shoulders and was starting to clamour into the corpse pit.

"Hey, you crazy bitch! Gimme my coat back!"

But Saja ignored him as the heat swelled and sparks flew around her feet, which were sinking amid the bodies. Beating the fire out proved useless as the hungry beast began to consume the gasoline it had been offered. She stepped and stepped, her boots squishing with every step as the smoke and the smell threatened to make her faint.

Sure enough as she leaped through the center of the flames with a cry of pain, there was a teenage girl, not much older than sixteen by her guess, and at her chest was the shrieking infant, fire surging up around its mother's corpse, warming cold, dead flesh.

Saja reached for the child with the coat over her hands when a surge of flame knocked her backwards and she landed on top of a dead man's chest. The flames licked around the baby's squirming body and she lunged forward, pushing the coat beneath its naked form and wrapping it in the material.

The man from before watched in astonishment as Saja climbed from the pit, unthinkingly using a woman's head as a step-up, and collapsed on the ground, crawling away as the fire tried to burn her heels. She unraveled the coat and found a red-faced and screaming baby girl in its embrace, soot and blood staining her precious body.

That was the night June Flanders was born and Saja Bashir became a mother once again at the tender age of sixty-four.

(1551)