But.

It got worse. More victims. In every last town on the planet. Symptoms slowly spreading. A patient who couldn’t move her thumb today might lose all feeling in her little toe tomorrow: one muscle after another shutting down, turning to strengthless putty. It usually started at the extremities and worked gradually in, but there was one man who didn’t show a single symptom till all the muscles of his heart, slump, went slack. The night they reported his case on the news, the exodus began.

Ooloms and all other Divian subspecies have an instinct to isolate themselves when they’re sick. "Oooo," as my father put it angrily, "we’re feeling plumb poorly, better separate ourselves from the herd so we don’t infect others. The cack-headed idjits."

Dads hated that communal instinct. Because of it, infected Ooloms didn’t stay in cities or towns where they’d be close to medical facilities; they headed for the woods, the wilderness, to be on their own. Their species had no trouble living rough out there — they’d been specifically engineered to thrive on Demoth’s native greenery. Leaves and bark pulled from trees, seedpods hanging by the hundreds all year round… the Ooloms could eat, they could glide, they could wait, as the paralysis crept stealthily through their bodies.

They stayed out there, isolated and degenerating from disease, as summer surrendered to wistful fall. Then they began drifting back, when their muscles had frozen to the point that even such grand hunter-gatherers could no longer fend for themselves.

In my dreams I still see them floating in the night: paralyzed bodies black against the stars, gliding over Sallysweet River like kites cut free of their strings. They waited till they were inches near helpless… barely able to control their direction of flight. The ones we found often had branches lashed to their arms or legs with cord-vine, to give themselves a more rigid flying structure after major muscles failed. Most tied their mouths closed too; otherwise, their jaws fell open, and they swallowed insects during flight.