I know that I am posting this a bit late, but I didn’t want to miss out on this week’s fiction friday. I am currently writing a book, and I just wanted to post the first 1,000 words here in the hopes of getting an unbiased opinion. It is my intention to add another 1,000 words of the book every Friday, Saturday, and Sunday to the blog. Comments and constructive criticism is welcome and highly appreciated.

**The below contains adult language and situations. It is not intended for children.**

Chapter One:

Eleven days after Charles Frenchman, a promising young lawyer, and his new bride, Emilie, a business student at Columbia University, had returned to New York City from their honeymoon in Africa, Charlies awoke with a dull, throbbing headache. Again. Shrugging it off as only the beginning of another one of the stressed induced migraines he often suffered, he rolled over in bed and began to caress his bride’s inner thigh. His erection poked her in the small area of her back above her firm buttocks. She groaned expectantly as he began to stroke her in the sensitive place between her legs.

“Don’t tease,” she sighed groggily.

“I’m not teasing,” he said nibbling on her earlobe.

“Don’t you have to go into work early this morning?” she groaned throatily.

“Yes, but I have time for this,” he said rolling her over onto her back and getting on top of her.

“Aren’t you going to put on a condom?” Emilie asked incredulously.

“I forgot to buy more. Anyway, I thought you wanted kids?”

“Yeah…but not right now. I want to graduate from business school first.”

“There aren’t any condoms anywhere in this apartment?”

“Not that I know of,” Emilie lied. There were plenty of condoms stashed away in a secret place that she reserved for outings with her lover, but she wasn’t going to tell her husband that.

Charlies began to lose patience, and his erection. “So, are we doing this or not?”

Emilie sighed rather unenthusiastically, but relented to her husband’s wishes. “Just don’t forget to pull out in time.”

In some macabre sense of symmetry, at the very same moment that the virus inside Charles was thrusting itself into his cells, Charles pushed himself inside Emilie’s warm and moist opening. If the virus was alive, it too would have groaned in pleasure as it began to release nucleic acid into the cell, prepping the cell for the virus’ genome replication. As the newly weds made love for the first time since returning from their honeymoon, the virus was turning Charles’ cells into virus factories. As Charles’ pleasure reached a fever pitch, he didn’t know, and wouldn’t have imagined, not even in his darkest nightmares, that one of the most dangerous predators on Earth had stowed away inside his body from Africa, and was slowly, but surely, replicating. Although his immune system was making a valiant effort to fend off the foreign invaders, Charles’ white blood cells were losing ground. The virus was advancing quickly. Unfortunately for Emilie, the virus had reached Charles’ testicles ahead of their unprotected love-making, and it wouldn’t only be sperm ejaculating into her unprepared body.

When his climax came, Charles intentionally did not pull out, more out of spite than any true desire to have children. The couple had been arguing again. It seemed that they were always arguing now, and Charles hadn’t had any relief in over a week. Emilie could always take Plan B. No harm, no foul. Or, at least that is what he thought. Little did he know that the virus inside him was reprogramming the cells of his sperm. Instead of making babies, his sperm had only one mission now, and that was to make more virus. Soon this same mission would be taken up in earnest in Emilie’s body as well. But for now, Charles was too exhausted to think of anything. He nestled his face between Emilie’s head and shoulder. His breathing was labored more from the pain in his head then from the exertion.

Emilie, on the other hand was less than satisfied, and she was pissed. “What the fuck, Charles?”

“Sorry,” Charles mumbled into Emilie’s shoulder. “I’m not feeling so well. Can you finish yourself today?”

“I was talking about not pulling out, Dumbass.”

“It just came on all of a sudden. I didn’t have time.”

“That’s no excuse! Do you know how busy I am today? I don’t exactly have time either, especially not to make a detour trip to the pharmacy.”

Charles winced. “Can you please not yell in my ear? I have a really bad migraine.”

“Sorry. I’m just frustrated. That was a really shitty thing you just did.”

Charles sighed. “I’ll go after work, okay?”

Without so much as a cursory glance at his wife, and with an obligatory peck on her forehead, Neil got out of bed and shuffled to the bathroom. He looked at himself in the mirror of the medicine cabinet. He looked like shit warmed over. His headache was worse than ever, and there were dark circles under his blood-shot eyes. Maybe the morning sex had been a bad idea after all. Still thinking that it was only a run-of-the-mill migraine, Charles opened the medicine cabinet, took the bottle of migraine medicine from the shelf, and popped a few tablets into his mouth.

As he was swallowing the pills, Emilie followed came into the bathroom. She was still naked. “We weren’t finished talking.”

“Give it a rest, Emilie. I said I was sorry, what more do you want?”

“I want some God damn fucking respect, that’s what I want. Is that really so much to ask for?”

“Then put some clothes on and stop walking around the apartment giving the neighbors a free show like some cheap whore.”

“The cheap whore you married,” she retorted.

“Don’t remind me.”

Emilie scoffed and turned her back on her husband. “What a total bag of dicks,” she thought. As Emilie walked back into the bedroom to put on sweatpants and a t-shirt, she wondered, and not for the first time, why she had married Charles in the first place. All the warning signs of a bad relationship were there. If Emilie were being honest with herself, the warning signs had been there for quite some time before they were married, years even. They fought all the time and disagreed over everything.