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had thought of the fact that warfare could also be a civilian pursuit.

Coleen curled herself into a tight ball and for the first time in twenty years sucked her thumb. Another shriek had begun, this one closer still. Something about those shrieks reached inside of her and grasped the small girl she used to be in an iron grip of terror. The shriek ended just as suddenly as the previous ones had, she thought she heard a splash of something on stone. Again her mind went to the past for refuge.

The Collapse became known as the war without wounded. That was an accurate description, there had been no wounded at all only the dead. Three fifths of the human race died out in under a year. A fundamentalist group had somehow developed a viral weapon. No-one knew if the group had been Christian or Muslim, no-one knew if they had even been religious based or had in fact been politically fundamentalist. In the end it didn't matter who they had been only their results had mattered.

Coleen had been six when the dying started and sixty when the dying ended a year later. Her childhood vanished in a year of dead family, neighbours and friends. Gone in a year of swollen corpses and the stench of rotting flesh that came with more dead than could be handled by the authorities. But through it all her family had been untouched and untainted. Untouched until the very last days of the plague.

This time she was sure she heard something splattering onto the floor. The shriek was much closer, she thought she could even hear something buzzing like an angry hornet. As the shrieking again ended she heard the muffled sound of someone else whimpering from the same direction as those horrifying sounds, a man she was almost certain. She wanted, wished she had the courage to call out, reassure him even be reassured by him. But he was closer to those horrible sounds, she feared any noise would bring them to her quicker. Better to be unnoticed.

Her father had been her superhero, tall and powerful. Her black superman. When she was hurt or scared he made everything alright. She'd had to watch him rot from the tips of his limbs to the very core of his great, strong heart. That was how the plague killed. Galloping gangrene the media had called it, ignoring the medical professions repeated admonishments that it was not gangrene.

Regardless of what you chose to call it one day you woke with maybe a tiny black spot on a finger, a toe, your nose some extremity and by nightfall the limb was dead if you had been

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