Here is what I think is going to happen.

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The valleys and cities of USA will get hotter at the same time Covid is allowed to spread.  Soon there is death and disease dominating life, along with a climate becoming unlivable. Many institutions are broken down, including law enforcement.  So roving militias show up in places with no advance warning, heavily armed. Mass shootings and stabbings, including bloodbaths with bayonets and machetes, become almost ordinary events in the fright filled land. 

The disease they used to call Covid that started in 2019 mutates. Now it blows in the wind so for humans even being outside can be threatening. Swarms of the RNA strands of the virus, like tiny flocks of birds connected by webs, carry the disease across counties and states.

Many humans survive the illness, and walk the streets with broken and bent bodies from residual effects of the virus. Persons who are blind and deaf beg on the street dressed in rags.

I'll still be here, in my Tahoe mountain top home. The town was long ago closed off to visitors.  Border patrols check every car coming and going on the three highways that come up the mountain, tourist attractions have long ago closed and are either boarded up or transformed to flea markets where the locals sell each other their used and homemade items. 

Groceries still get to Tahoe as well as internet access, unlike many regions of USA now. Since mansions dot the region and many autocrats, kleptocrats, and entrepreneurs who've profited from our years of chaos live here, basic infrastructure gets maintained here. I use delivery services who I meet in the parking lot. No one outside the building knows for sure which apartment is mine.

Luckily you can't see my unit from the street. This old apartment structure used to house low income seniors now holds whoever has cash to move in. There is no longer any subsidized rent as HUD, the federal department of Housing and Urban Development, no longer exists. I'm lucky I got in here when I did and, through a series of serendipitous events, I had the buyout money to be able to stay after the building converted to condos owned by TrumpPutin. Everything is owned by TrumpPutin these days.

My daughter used to come up from L.A. and stay with me but last six months the patrols won't let her through, because even though she survived the disease, she keeps testing positive, it's like there is so much disease in Southern California, she keeps getting reinfected. So even though I'm her mother in my eighties living here alone, she can't visit.

So I'm here on my own in a crumbling building, hiding. I only go out in the early AM hours to throw away my trash before most the other residents are awake.  I exercise by walking round and round the apartment or putting on music and dancing alone.  I arrange the light in the rooms and shades on the glass so that no one can see in the window.

Most of the time I'm safe here, but occasionally bands of gang members, agile and bone thin snarling angry people who roam the nation, can be heard out on the streets.  So I have spent several nights crouched in fear hiding in shadows, listening to them prowling right outside my windows, peering inside as much as they can, smelling, shouting, spitting. It seems, for infected persons, spreading their disease by spitting on people has become a political statement.

Somehow, in my eighties, I managed to avoid the illness that surrounds me and the madness that seems to be accompanying it.  I stay in my rooms, I have a stockpile of supplies and I go through it sparingly. I stay entertained, I never get sick, not even a cold, and seem able to self medicate any minor injuries. As the weeks pass, I try not to draw attention to myself, and wait for the pandemic to finally be over.
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Kay Ebeling

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