Sugar Scars Blog Tour – Travis Norwood
Brilliant scientists struggled to make the first insulin. What hope does a high school dropout have?
I don’t mean to sound so callous, but I had no one who I really cared about to mourn. I had been on my own for a little more than a year after the foster system was promptly done with me on my
eighteenth birthday. My most recent foster parents had occasionally checked in on me. They were good people and wanted to make sure I was okay, but I had lived with them for only about six months.
In some ways, I was the perfect person to be left alive like this. The idea of a world with barely any other people didn’t scare me. In fact, it sounded sort of nice. I didn’t want everybody dead. But I
could handle it now that it had happened. But in another way, a very important way, I was the exact wrong person to survive. On TV and the Internet, everyone had speculated on how people would survive in the depopulated world. They worried about having enough food.
Virtually everywhere in the United States had stores on every street, each teeming with food. There was more food than we could possibly eat in our lifetimes. I was sure of it because I did the math. The canned and dry goods would last years. When those ran out, there were vast fields of crops left and slow, meaty farm animals that would now reproduce unrestricted. The bigger problem would be avoiding being overrun by cows, chickens and pigs.
On the Internet sites I checked, people filled pages with their endless worries of how they would survive the first winter. They made plans to stockpile firewood. Why wouldn’t they simply get in their cars and drive to Florida for the winter? Our winters, if they can even be called that, are easily survivable.
Everything people could need would be available in endless supply. Survivors had their pick of cars, and there was enough gas left in the gas station tanks to keep us all driving for more than a century. I’ve run the numbers on that too. I had a glamorous job at a convenience store, and I knew just how many gallons the huge underground gas tanks held.
We were left in a world of no responsibilities and virtually unlimited resources. Everything a normal person could want sat waiting on unwatched store shelves. But I’m not a normal person.
Food. Water. Air.
That’s all an ordinary body requires. From these it produces everything else it needs. Not mine. On that first day, when I stepped out of my house realizing I was one of the few immune, my thoughts were for one thing.
Insulin.