by K. M. Fawkes
When Houston’s main hospital’s MRI machine broke down, people panicked. The news that night focused on the fire that had broken out and the loss of life it had caused, while the newscasters gravely reminded people to stay calm. It would have been easier to fix the machine than to get everyone in need of a scan out of Houston. Everyone in the hospital had been infected in the chaos.
“We know that the situation seems dire, but the most important thing you can do is remain calm,” a male newscaster said. “There is plenty of time and equipment.”
That wasn’t even remotely true. More people died every day. So many that the reporters had given up on speaking with the families of the deceased.
The story was always the same. A town without an MRI machine, or a person who’d been convinced that they were fine because they didn’t know anyone rich enough to afford a nanobot.
A somber list of submitted names of the dead played at the top of every hour, until the names became so many that the list scrolled too fast to read.
By summer, people had given up on trusting the news. The faces behind the desks had changed so often. The virus had spread so far and so fast that the people the channels could wrangle up to get in front of a camera weren’t exactly professional or well-informed, anyway. People kept the broadcasts on in the background, but no one expected a release from the unrelenting fear because of them.
One night, there was someone different onscreen: a tall man in crisp army green who looked out at the public and informed them that they were now under martial law. A treatment plan was in place and people would be gathered and bussed to treatment centers, beginning immediately. He warned them not to resist.
People resisted. It was too late for them to trust the authorities, now.
Some of the remaining went into hiding, spreading the disease further, re-infecting those that had already been treated successfully. Others, driven insane by loss and fear, threw themselves at the military personnel who came to their houses, hitting and kicking, screaming and spitting recriminations. They couldn’t get to the scientists who’d brought this curse down on them, but they could lash out at those in front of them.
They were shot where they stood. Sometimes the soldiers didn’t even bother stepping over the bodies as they searched for others who might be infected. They kicked the fresh corpses to the side instead, and dragged the living out to the treatment centers.
More orders came over the television screen, telling people that treatment wasn’t optional. The public was informed that the military didn’t want to hurt them, but that they were authorized to do so. The definition of martial law now played at the top of every hour.
One night, a very different video played. The news anchor said that the video came from a small town in Louisiana. A year ago, they wouldn’t have shown the shaky cellphone video on the six o’clock broadcast. They would have blurred the gore and issued a strong warning before showing a brief clip on the eleven o’clock show.
Now, however, they showed the whole thing, uncensored. In a sense, everyone had seen something like it before. A group of people in the town had captured the soldiers sent to bring them in for treatment and infected them. Then, they videoed the men coughing up blood as they died.
The infection had taken them at night and the people of the neighborhood had built a big fire for the occasion. It threw shadows and red light over the ground in a hellish tableau, the soldiers’ bodies twisting as they struggled for oxygen.
“We know what you were doing!” a woman shrieked as she watched them die. “We know why you were here!”
“You want to take us off to your death camps?” the man with the camera yelled, putting himself into the center of the frame. His eyes seemed to glow red in the light and his lips were drawn back from his teeth in a wild grin of triumph and fear. “Come and get us! See what happens to you!”
The military didn’t leave anyone in that town alive.
“It is believed that 75% of the American public have perished,” a somber man said over the news one night in July. “Another 15% are estimated to be infected at this point. Ninety percent of the population is surely lost.” He didn’t speak again; he only lowered his face into his hands and hunched over the desk. The camera didn’t cut away until he began to cough.
Two weeks after the declaration of martial law, those who had somehow managed to escape infection heard the blasts.
At first, they thought that it might be thunder, but it was too regular for that. Then, they saw their televisions go blank. They watched as their computers grew dark. When they grabbed for their cellphones, they realized that they, too, had become unresponsive. With nothing else to do, they waited to be collected.
All they’d wanted was immortality. And now, they barely had a life.
Chapter 1
Brad wasn’t sure what had awakened him, and he was too tired to be very worried about it. It was still dark outside and he wanted as many hours of unconsciousness as he could get. Then, there was a brief rustle and something stabbed into his chest, needle-sharp and rhythmic. He raised his hand sleepily and swatted, expecting the sensations to be part of a lingering dream. They weren’t.
His hand encountered something furry and heavy. Something that resisted his push.
His eyes flew open and met the beady black gaze of the rat that was perched on his chest. The stabbing pain had been its long, sharp nails piercing through the thin fabric of his shirt.
“Holy—” He cut the exclamation off and slapped at the creature more forcefully.
It squeaked at him indignantly before it hustled away and Brad sat up with a shudder. He didn’t mind rats. He knew that they were intelligent and mostly gentle creatures, and he’d worked on more than a few in his veterinary practice—they’d become more and more common as housing got smaller housing and people had fewer hours in the day to take care of a pet. But that didn’t mean he wanted one scampering over him while he slept.
The room was still dark, but he knew there was no chance of going back to sleep now. His skin was still crawling and his whole body felt itchy and dirty. What else had walked over him as he slept? Who knew what kinds of insects or snakes would see the long grass growing around the apartment as an invitation? He pushed the thought away; if anything else had made him a playground in the night, he didn’t want to know about it.
Brad sat up and leaned against the wall behind him, pushing his hands through his hair to try to flatten it down. He slept restlessly these days, even when rats weren’t running all over him. His hair tended to show every toss and turn.
He still was shaking slightly and he needed to get that under control before anyone else who might be awake noticed. He’d never done well when he’d been jolted awake, and the current situation certainly hadn’t changed that. And he didn’t need anyone thinking that he was sick.
As he sat there in the darkness, breathing quietly and evenly and trying to trick his body into believing that he was relaxed, he realized that at least one person in the apartment was awake with him. He could hear quiet sobs and occasionally the rustle of sheets as the woman wiped her face. Jessica Pilgrim was crying again.
She and her two boys slept in the far corner of the room and she tended to cry through the night, after they were asleep. It had kept him awake for several nights when it had started, but Brad was ashamed to realize that he barely noticed anymore.
Her husband had disappeared two weeks after they’d been moved into the safe house. Brad watched her force herself to keep it together during the day, telling the kids that their dad was probably just helping the soldiers. She only crumbled once they were tucked into the king-sized air mattress they all shared, comforted by what every adult in the complex knew was a lie.
There were only two things that could have happened to Mark Pilgrim. The guy might have ditched out on his family. And honestly, that was probably what Jessica was hoping for. Because the other option—the more likely option—was that he’d gone looting and met up with s
omeone on the wrong side of what was left of society. She’d probably rather think of him as a jerk than a corpse.
He’d been a take-action kind of guy, so the looting was way more feasible. Obviously, he should have stuck around. The soldiers had warned them about leaving the safe house. Then again, the soldiers had said a lot of things.
As the woman’s sobs began to abate, Brad noticed that the man who occupied the mattress to his left was actually sleeping this morning. Most of the time when Adam was in bed, he tossed and turned. And he usually woke up yelling, calling for someone named Jason.
He wouldn’t tell anyone who Jason was. A few people had guesses going. A husband. A lover. A brother. A son. Brad had suggested that Jason might have been Adam’s dog.
It hadn’t endeared him to anyone. In fact, some people had called him heartless for what they’d felt like was a tasteless joke. Brad had managed to defend himself by reminding his fellow survivors that he had been a veterinarian before everything had gone to shit. Eventually, his faux pas had blown over—being caught giving part of his ration to a passing pack of dogs had probably helped. He’d been able to see the creatures’ ribs.
If he was honest with himself, though, it hadn’t been any particular animal-loving sensibilities that had prompted the guess. It had been sheer boredom.
It had been six weeks. Six weeks in this cramped apartment building meant to house half the number of people that were currently inside. There were eleven other units, which meant that around fifty survivors from Bangor and the surrounding areas were currently sharing twelve one-bedroom apartments.
The place had been nice when they’d moved in. It had actually been nicer than Brad’s own apartment, which had been a cramped studio over his veterinary practice. But fifty people, especially fifty people who couldn’t get as clean as they were accustomed to, tended to dirty up a place pretty quickly.
Dirt had been ground down into the beige carpets. Fingerprints marred the windows. The kitchen was getting close to being truly filthy, even though they’d been vigilant about taking the trash as far from the apartment as they could.
Brad had been the one to point out the need to do that. No one else seemed to think that sanitation mattered—which was probably why they had rats, now. He couldn’t police the whole complex every night. He wasn’t the damn garbage man.
The army hadn’t answered when they were asked why the survivors couldn’t spread out a little more. They’d just divided them into groups of four and told them sternly to stay put.
They were over the four-person limit per room, but they had been from the beginning because Jessica and Mark weren’t going to break up their family over two different apartments, and for some reason, the soldiers hadn’t wanted a single family to have a whole apartment to themselves. When Mark had disappeared, the upstairs neighbors had taken advantage of the empty space in Brad’s apartment and sent Adam down—the guy got passed around a lot because of the way he woke up screaming.
Not that it seemed to matter who slept where. It wasn’t like the army had been back to check to see if they were following the rules.
The last time any of them had seen a soldier was when the army had stopped by the day after the blasts, finding a shell-shocked group of people desperate for information. There hadn’t been a lot. Or at least, not a lot that the soldiers were willing to share. It was hard to tell, now…what was a secret and what was simple lack of knowledge?
“At last count, we’ve lost 90% of the population,” the soldier who had brought Brad to the apartment had said. “Stay here where it’s safe.”
“Are you leaving?” Brad had asked.
The idea of Corporal Metzger not being around had scared him more than he wanted to admit. The guy was pretty nice. He hadn’t hit Brad when he’d brought him in. In fact, Brad hadn’t seen him be rough with anyone, which was more than he could say for most of the soldiers on patrol. Hell, one of them had knocked a seventy-year-old man to his knees on move-in day because the man was taking too long to get out of the truck.
“We’ve been called to help another unit,” Metzger had said. “It’s south of here, so I don’t know when we’ll get back.”
Hell, this was Maine. Everything was south of there. Brad had bit his tongue on that comment, though; Metzger might be nicer than the average soldier was these days, but that didn’t mean that he was likely to put up with any sarcasm.
“Someone will be back soon,” Metzger had said simply.
Brad didn’t know if that had been a deliberate lie or if the corporal had meant what he’d said and simply been unable to deliver. Maybe Metzger was lying dead on the side of a road somewhere south of Bangor. Or maybe he just didn’t give a damn that there were people who’d been expecting him to come back.
Much like the fate of Mark Pilgrim, it didn’t really matter in the end. Gone was gone and they hadn’t seen a single soldier for the past four weeks. And, last night, they’d finally run completely out of food.
The whole building shared the supplies that the army had left in the office of the complex. The soldiers had left a helpful guide for how to make the food last as long as possible. Everyone in the complex had followed it at first, but as supplies dwindled, they’d had to be even stricter. That was probably what had driven Mark out the door that night.
Things had been getting seriously low for two weeks, now. Over their skimpy meals, some people had broached the topic of going out scavenging, but no one had wanted to step up to the plate, especially after Mark hadn’t come back.
Brad had tried to stay quiet in the discussions. He knew that he was the best choice. He was in good health and, more than that, he was in good shape. He ran marathons in his spare time and his physique showed it.
This didn’t stop him from being terrified at the thought of leaving the apartment and going back into the town he’d grown up in. For one thing, he didn’t know what he’d find there.
For another, they’d seen scavengers on the road in front of the apartment building in the past few weeks. They were lean people with desperate eyes and strong hands. So far, none of them had challenged the safe house, probably because they traveled alone, but who knew how long that would last? Desperate people would do anything to stay alive.
“People are your biggest threat. You can’t trust a hungry man.”
Brad pushed the voice away and allowed the worries to collide in his mind. Should he go and get supplies when he would possibly run into scavengers? Or should he stay here and possibly be looted by those same scavengers? Right now, of course, they wouldn’t find a damn thing even if they broke in and tore the place apart. Was it better or worse if a scavenger came up empty when they were looting you?
He had no idea. There really needed to be some kind of post-apocalyptic handbook that he could consult. Chapter One: Proper Etiquette When Dealing with Opportunists, Looters, and Other Desperate Souls. Someone had missed an opportunity.
He felt his mouth curve into a smile and he looked down, shaking his head at himself. The apocalypse had taken a lot of things from him—his work, his favorite foods, the sense of safety it had taken him half of his life to rebuild—but his sense of humor seemed to be staying intact. At least that was something.
The first rays of morning sunlight were spilling across the dirty floors. Brad pushed himself up from the air mattress he’d been given. Then, he leaned back down and grabbed the jacket that he’d been using as a pillow. They’d had to split a can of baked beans between four people last night. It was time for a supply run.
It was better to get it over and done with. There was no point in waiting around for the day to get any hotter. Time waits for no man. The early bird gets the worm. The motivational clichés didn’t do much for his morale, but he grabbed his backpack and crept across the room anyway.
Jessica sniffled and said, “Be careful out there, Brad.”
“Sure thing,” he said, trying to sound cheerful and carefree. “Let the others know I went out for food, okay?
I’ll be back soon.”
The words triggered another spate of tears as she choked out an affirmative answer. At first, Brad couldn’t figure out what he’d done, and then he realized that he’d inadvertently quoted her missing husband. Much like his sense of humor, his ability to say precisely the wrong thing to a woman seemed to be holding steady. He wasn’t quite as thrilled about that.
He tiptoed out of the apartment, closing the door softly behind him. Time to get this show on the road.
Chapter 2
Brad jogged down the steps and grabbed his bike from the underbrush he’d hidden it in. Whatever the scavengers might think about splitting a can of baked beans four ways, he was pretty sure that they would love to have transportation. After the electromagnetic pulse had taken everything out, the bicycle was pretty much the fastest and most reliable transportation that was left.
He swung a leg over the seat and coasted smoothly out of the parking lot, heading toward the road into town. He stopped at the edge of the parking lot and looked both ways out of habit. Then, he sighed. There hadn’t been a civilian car on the road in four weeks.
At least, not one that worked. There were plenty sitting on the highways, but they weren’t exactly going to hit him.
As he steered the bike out onto the road, he stood up on the pedals to really get some speed up. The fresh morning air finished waking him up pretty well, as he’d known it would. He’d taken morning rides before all of this, too, which was a pretty good thing in retrospect. It would make the miles he had to go to get to the heart of Bangor much easier. There were some things from his early childhood that he hadn’t forgotten.
“You’ve got to stay in good shape. You never know what’s going to happen. Don’t rely on other people helping you get things done. Learn to do them yourself.”
The ride wouldn’t be a challenge. At least, not fitness-wise. Which was another reason everyone had silently looked to him when the question of looting came up.
