The Rabbit's Den

Prelude

The apocalypse wasn't entirely sudden, everyone knew the end was coming. Several organizations had their theories of how it would happen. It wasn't from climate change, an asteroid, alien invasions, Hollywood zombies, or even nuclear war. It was a virus; a quiet sneaky virus that cut us to our absolute innermost instincts. Of course there were ones who placed blame, but we will get to that later.

No one knew how it spread, or even where it came from. There wasn't a singular outbreak that spread across the globe, taking people in the night after weeks of misery. It was so silent that most didn't even know it had happen, now how could anyone possibly know how it started? It wasn't what we had feared it would be, nothing we had been prepared for or had experienced before. By the time they found it, it was already too late.

The global outlook for viruses and bacteria always seemed to center around those that took life, high mortality rates and horrific symptoms. But when something slipped in the back door with no sores, fevers, respiratory issues, or hemorrhagic diarrhea, it didn't raise many flags. No plague like this before, not the horror of black plague; jaundice of yellow fever; suffocation of SARS, or the show from Ebola. In the beginning to a few there was blood and tears.

What is it about blood that rocks us so? It's our lifeline, our essence of a source. Dracula stalks the night in search of young blood to satisfy his hunger. Elizabeth Bathory bathed in it to keep herself beautiful. Pathogens and death can be carried in it to others. If you lose too much you die, your white cells are too low you die, your platelets are off and you die. It carries oxygen and nutrients to cells and takes waste back away. To some it turns their stomachs to see, others cheer loudly at the match when it begins to fly. But to one selective group it means much more. To the thirty something woman in her third go around of in vetro, it means heartbreak. The twenty something trying to push through med school it means another bullet dodged.

When it began, there was blood and tears. As an unheard of amount of pregnant women around the world began to have miscarriages, organizations thought that there may be another issue much like Zika but uglier. Soon after it became hard to ignore as women poured into gynecologist offices and fertility clinics. For the majority that were not already carrying a child it was painless, with one single symptom; amenorrhea.

At first it was confused women taking pregnancy test after test, with negative results they headed to their doctors. Only to be told they were indeed not pregnant but not to worry because these things happen with stress, exercise and medications. No one knew it was the beginning of our end. Not taking these diagnoses lightly they pushed for more and more tests. When the first group of women found they had degeneration on their wombs, things changed.

And so the blame started. Everything from what the world was eating, to the over use of hormonal birth control. But location is everything, it practically happened overnight worldwide. Scientist discovered rather quickly that there was no way that any of these piss poor reasons would affect the entire planet. As the years went on worried parents dragged their teenage daughters in to offices of specialist when they hadn't begun their periods. That's when fear set in, it had also effected the new generation.

With is virus it wasn't the mortality rate, it was the infertility rate. The world had one common enemy, infertility. Once they realized it was beyond the point of preventing this silent virus, it was solution time. All hands on deck trying to figure out a solution to ravaged reproductive systems of the now hopeless population of women. But through the years that pipe dream faded to artificial wombs and the hope that few may be genetically tweaked to someday be able to repopulate the world. Time kept passing, and it was not our friend.

The elderly continued to grow old and pass away as nature has always intended. With the whole world of doctors and scientists chipping away at the problem at hand, childhood diseases ravaged the young. With the rise of anti-vaxers many unfortunate children didn't stand a chance. As panic rose, so did senseless violence, many were lost there. When the country collapsed, poverty increased. People were eventually simply dying of starvation. In first world countries mental health in women declined finding suicide as a solution to their now childless future. In third world countries where archaic religion was law many wives were put to death for their inability to produce children. This was the beginning of the end of the world.

Medical facilities solicited for the women that had slipped through unscathed, offering top dollars for use of surrogacy. Dollars that they couldn't resist, the economy had completely collapsed. From the start is seemed shady as the government had been turned upside down and these medical facilities basically were the law. When the few surrogates never returned home, flags where raised. People outside these cities withdrew, making their own encampments. The leading private organization in the fertility world was WOLF, the World Organization of Life and Fertility.

WOLF had control of the military, to protect their research and civilians. People who turned against WOLF; those who didn't want their wives, sisters, or daughters, used as guinea pigs hid. They hid as far from the control areas of WOLF as they could. Usually, small encampments in abandoned suburbia, USA. But WOLF came, and they hunted the remaining women of the USA. These areas were known as the Desolates.

Desolates had not been exactly sent back to the stone age, but life was rough. Homes abandoned without electricity or running water, WOLF's way of trying to offer homage to the distraught. Cars littered the streets stagnant, where they ran out of gas. The animal population had a slight boom, as the virus wasn't zoonotic.

It was estimated that from the beginning if the population stopped reproducing that within 120 years the human race would go extinct. WOLF was determined that would not happen.