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 Duke Maples woke up on Friday with a rash all over his body.  It felt like fire and the itching drove him crazy.  He told his wife Mabel to call his office and let them know that he was going to urgent care.

Speed Urgent Care was full of men with similar rashes which looked like rust covering all of their visible skin.  No women with rashes, just men.

The first patient came out of the doctor’s cubicle followed by the doctor.  The doctor swept the room with his eyes and said “I don’t have an answer.  Nobody has ever seen anything like this before.  All I can tell you is to try a moisturizer and a cold bath.”

The men left, but the only woman in the room visited the doctor to see about a sprained foot.

When he got home Mabel told him what was now called “Rust” because of its appearance was affecting men around the world and neither a cause nor cure was known.

Duke considered his options.  Because he knew Rust only affected men, he wondered if it was related to hormones.  In desperation he took a handful of his wife’s estrogen replacement pills.  Within hours, he felt better and the rash diminished.  By 10PM Rust was gone and he felt fine.

Friday night was one of Mabel and Duke’s three designated weekly romance nights for the thirty year long married couple, but Duke failed to deliver.  They thought it was a onetime thing caused by the trauma he had been through.

The Saturday television news and social media confirmed what Duke had guessed.  Female hormones were a cure for Rust, and nothing else had worked.  The giant drug companies pledged to look for an alternate cure.

A year later, no alternate cure had been found.  Men who had been strong and muscular had become weak and puffy.  The female hormone required to kill Rust was twice the normal female level.  Male – female sex was extinct and women had to look elsewhere for satisfaction, and were quite creative.  Some researchers gave up on an alternate cure for Rust and began working on ways to extract sperm to see if it could be used for artificial insemination.

Hallmark movie viewership doubled.  Because no males after the estrogen treatment were as attractive as those in old movies, the network used reruns.

Sports teams have been integrated for several months.  All of the big major leagues – baseball, football, basketball, and soccer are at least thirty percent women.  More than half of the New York Yankees are female.  It isn’t that females are better, but the strength and speed of males has been equalized by the overload of estrogen to combat men’s Rust.

Man as breadwinner, something waning for a long time, has changed.  As Mable Maples put it “Duke is just not the go-getter company man that he was.  The woman, Geena Green, who worked for him is now his boss.  She had always been more qualified, but Duke isn’t as motivated anymore.  Now he wants to quit early and spend more time with the kids.”

Without successful viable sperm harvesting or an alternate cure, time is running out for humans.

Appears in Dark Dossier #73 and Halloween Issue 2022