The last cleansing thinned out anyone that was not responding to six months of cancer treatment. Cary didn't know anyone personally who was affected. He was a little worried about his dad each month though he was healthy as far as Cary knew.

His mother had been killed in an accident just three months before she would have been marked in an elimination of women over sixty. The lady who had lived across the hall from him for years was taken last year. She was only fifty-three but she had caught what she claimed was a flu bug.

"Da silly little fluey-bug, das all," she had told him on the rare occasion he'd seen her. But it seemed to hang on for a while. Cary suspected that because she was a Russian that might have tipped the scales.