I struggled to consciousness and tried to remember where I was, and at first even who I was--and then it started coming back: I was 18-year old Jim Bridger. It was night, and I could see fairly clearly from the shining street lights outside. I was lying naked on a thickly carpeted floor next to a nude woman with generous breasts. She was on her side facing me, asleep, and was about the age of my mother--my late mother.

Then the rest of it came back as if in a swirling nightmare--the new pandemic from the genetically-engineered virus causing mass deaths, the side effects for those who survived, the escalating...