For the Love of Super Soldiers

Natural Selection

Author's Note:

First things first...I hope you all are keeping as safe and healthy as you possibly can right now.

These are interesting times. FLOSS is a story about diseases, pandemics, and, yes..."zombies." But it's also about survivability and bearing witness to the different types of compassion and ingenuity that human beings can demonstrate – in both "good" and "bad" ways. Let's keep our aim towards the good.

When I started drafting this chapter (I'm slow, y'all), the re-illumination of the struggles that Black people—MY PEOPLE— face had not yet ensued. I feel the anger, frustration, and, most of all, the sadness and grief that comes with the countless number of Black lives derailed and lost to racist and white supremacist regimes. These rightful expressions of rage are long overdue. They always have been.

I yearn for the day that all of this – not only 2020 but back to our earliest ancestors who experienced pain, fear, and loss instead of comfort, love, and respect – is not a simple memory but a tangible reminder of how and why Black people are the strongest and most ethereal beings to traverse the earth. It is exhausting to live in and contribute to a world that constantly demonstrates its lack of regard for your existence. And yet we do. Equality and equity don't even begin to describe what I wish for us to have. What I wish for the world to do.

This story highlights the the power, strength, grace, and absolute eminence that black women, in particular, have within us. We love and live and guide and grow and battle and build...and the world knows it. Please, take care of yourselves, and fight in whatever way you'd like.

Do your best to stay healthy! Let's get into it.

💛

Chapter 22: Natural Selection

Victorian and I had lead excursions from the hotel throughout the month, picking through our surroundings for anything useful. Actually, the longer we were there, the more it felt like an inn than a hotel. It was more modern than what one would expect of a B&B, but still, it had felt like someone's...something. We had been back and forth to the auto graveyard several times, picking through the lot and gathering leftovers of riders past.

It seemed that the trio had snagged one of the nicer vehicles in the lot but no one had missed the ones that were rusted out and aged engine parts that littered the space. I imagined that the yard must have served as some sort of rest stop at a point in time. Now that I had made multiple visits, I had designated it as more of a junkyard of circumstance; there were cars in varying states of decay, some parked in alignment, clearly expected to be driven again, others left as though the drivers couldn't have gotten out fast enough.

Maybe they hadn't.

Before long, the sun was beginning to set and another day's work was done. The drive back was quieter than earlier in the week, likely a mix of exhaustion and the gravity we all felt. The trips were certainly fruitful and we'd found more and more supplies amidst the cars...but I was sure there would be no pushback in deeming the next day (or three) as one of rest, with no guns or running required.

Unless Victorian had anything to say about it.

Hmm.

While he had plans to head east and cure the world, my investigation into the library of files in the basement was taking precedence. I was going to figure out as much as I could before we went anywhere.

The duffel bag slid off my shoulder and I rubbed a knot I felt forming in my neck. Super soldier or not, what I needed was a shower. Or yoga.

My scalp tingled.