Lilith's Necklace

By TJ Seitz

Short story about a young woman who lives in a post apocalyptic world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: TJ Seitz
• Release date: Oct 3, 2015
• ISBN: 9781310817779

TJ Seitz

On the surface Mr. Seitz appears to be a quintessential middle aged male. TJ is married to his HS sweetheart and lives with his family in a suburban split level house located on the outskirts of Rochester, NY. Seitz has spend the majority of his professional career working as an information technology specialist in the fields of education, criminal justice/law enforcement and procurement. While working full time, TJ also attended college part time (and sometimes full time). To keep himself (relatively speaking) sane he majored and minored in non-technology subjects, earning a BA in English with a writing concentration from Saint John Fisher College and a MA in Social Policy from Empire State College. As an undergraduate student TJ attended writing classes taught by George Saunders and Judith Kitchen (though neither teacher would probably remember him). Distractions like kicking virtual wasp’s nests on BITNET Listservs (predecessors to social networking sites like Facebook), soliciting donations for a Panty Alter fund and hanging out with a heavily medicated professional drummer named Dirtbag interfered with TJ’s ability to write anything particularly noteworthy for either class. He also attended a workshop at the Omega Institute mentored by Marge Piercy and Ira Wood. In reality the stable full time jobs have been serving as functional fronts for TJ’s secret life as a writer. They provided him with money to pay his bills and experiential material to write about. The down side of working and going to college was that he did not have a lot of time to devote to writing and publishing. Adding a problematic first marriage, babies, a divorce, a few bouts with unemployment and colon cancer to the mix did not help much either. TJ is currently working on several writing projects/ideas and recently took a graduate writing class proctored by James Whorton. Mr. Seitz's essays and letters have been printed in both local and national publications. His poetry has been published both in the United States and England.

Book preview

Prologue

The Council of Elders banned most fiction books soon after they officially proclaimed that The Plague had ended.

Everyone is taught that The Plague began in February of 2017. It was initiated by a Middle East terrorist group called ISIS a few months after they captured the country of Israel and gained access to some of that country’s top secret research.

A scientist associated with the extremist organization hastily manufactured genetically-mutated germs in one of their hidden laboratories. Many of those parasites were resistant to all antibiotics and could live on surfaces or airborne for extended periods, until a suitable host was found.

One in particular caused nearly every human who came into contact with it to lose all body fluid. The bacterium behaved like a microscopic sponge that rapidly reproduced and literally sucked the life from its victims.

The biologist and his sponsors were not the sharpest tools in the shed. They obviously didn’t put a whole lot of thought into what might happen after the specimen was removed from their lab.

I wonder if the leaders of ISIS believed that the tactic would result in a quicker victory, in the lines of when America dropped a-bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan during World War II.

Instead they killed off seventy-five percent of the world’s adult population over thirty and around fifty percent of those under thirty years old within the first eighteen months of the catastrophic event.

The microbes were especially fatal to males who were vaccinated for chickenpox or never endured the disease as children. Having high cholesterol, diabetes or being malnourished was also a death sentence. Oddly, most women of Native American origins who were menstruating or pregnant were not affected by the organism. Their children (both boys and girls) who nursed for at least the first year of their lives were also resistant to the infection.

I find it ironic how the same group of people who were nearly annihilated by common illnesses, such as the flu, when Europeans started living in the Americas fared much better than the rest of the world. The Plague was a form of celestial karma for my ancestors.

Terri

Before getting too far ahead of myself I should probably take the time to stop and introduce myself.

My birth name is Teresa Rider. Most of my friends and remaining family members back on Earth called me Terri. However, here on Mars everyone thinks my name is Lilith.

I was born twenty six-years ago but am only considered around twenty-three because of all the time I spent in stasis on a transport ship.

There’s nothing outwardly exceptional about me.

I’m five foot, six inches tall and weighed one hundred and thirty-two pounds (on Earth). I have short brown hair, brown eyes and recently started wearing glasses.

I’m not good at math or building stuff and don’t really have much to say. Crowds make me feel anxious.

My memory and tendency to over-analyze things are probably my most apparent traits. I’d consider those two qualities both a strength and weakness.

I like to observe and help people.

I was raised on a small family farm (if you could even call it that) inside the Creole Quadrant of Louisiana by my maternal grandmother Abigail.

Abby McKay was a stubborn, independent old woman who spoke with a thick Cajun accent. She was born and raised around the bayou.

Granny was half French-Creole (She claimed to be more Ishak or Atakapa than French though.) and half Scotch-Irish (Which was probably an oversimplification on her part because her mother’s family was actually one-hundred percent Cherokee. They adopted the family name of McKay at some point before leaving the reservation in Oklahoma for better job opportunities in Lafayette, Louisiana. ).

She complained a lot and rarely said anything nice about men. Both of her common law husbands left her for other women long before I was born.

The lady was just four feet nine inches tall and fat. She waddled around with a limp because her hip needed replacing but she refused to do the surgery because, "She wanted to leave this world with all the parts she came into