by Lorch, Jeff
DECIMATION
Book One: Contagion
January 2019
Jeff Lorch
DECIMATION
Book One: Contagion
Author: Jeff Lorch
First edition, January 2019
ISBN: 9781794259744
Independently published
Text and story Copyright © Jeff Lorch, 2019
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or are used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or to actual events is either purely coincidental or is meant as parody.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced, including Internet usage, without written permission from the author. Publications are exempt in the case of brief quotations in critical reviews or articles.
© Jeff Lorch
www.jefflorch.ca
For my beautiful wife Jennifer, for always having my back… and my front... and the whole rest of me too.
INTRODUCTION &
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Okay, first of all, I have to admit that I’m a bit late getting into the writing game.
Maybe make that a lot late.
I’ve always enjoyed writing, and back in the day (before I grew up and joined the ‘real world’) I wrote quite a bit; you know, just for the fun of it. After high school I majored in English at the University of Regina thinking that writing was something I could just maybe be able to do as a career.
But what happened instead was, well… life. I met the love of my life and got my degree. I got a job to pay the bills, got married, and did my part in helping her make two wonderful sons (some assembly required).
Unfortunately, along the way the writing thing just fell off the map.
Fast-forward twenty-plus years, and I’ve had a great life; literally zero regrets. I have a wonderful family and had a career I enjoyed for a very long time (running our family business, a boat dealership).
Recently, however, it became clear to me that it was time for a change; since my wife has made it abundantly clear that I’m not allowed to get rid of her, and since my kids are now too old for me to get anything by selling them on eBay (or Etsy, since they’re homemade), that left the job.
It had to go.
So now in my late-40s, I closed my eyes, pinched my nose, and jumped off a cliff.
We sold the business and, for the first time in a very long time, I sat down at a computer with a story in my head that I wanted to put to paper (okay, put to screen at first, and eventually, you know, to paper… don’t nitpick, you know what I mean).
I was very pleasantly surprised to see how much the book business had changed in the last twenty-plus years. Back then you had to go through a ton of effort to find a literary agent willing to take a chance on a new writer, and then be lucky enough to find a publisher who was willing to take the same risk. Remember, back in the early ‘90s there really wasn’t much happening with that new-fangled Internet thing.
Today, you can just do the whole thing yourself! Amazingly, I was able to go through the whole process start to finish while sitting at my kitchen table.
Who says the Internet is just for porn…
Another revolution? Google Earth. The ability to actually “go” somewhere and see it without leaving home is priceless; people familiar with the regions and areas I’m writing about here will (hopefully) find some of my descriptions very accurate. That turnoff outside the Cabela’s in Barrie, Ontario where the group hides behind the bushes? It’s there, and it’s just like I tried to describe it. There are other places where I’ve obviously taken liberties and let my imagination take over, but I have tried to keep many of the locations as accurate as possible.
The other big thing the Internet has made possible is discovering the history of stuff like Operation Large Scale Coverage (that shit really happened, just like I laid it out in the story). The Rumsfeld thing, I’m not sure, but I wouldn’t put much past the shady crews we have running the ships today. Besides, it’s on the Internet, so it must be true. What I do know for sure is I’ve spent too many late nights worming my way down the rabbit hole on YouTube.
Sometimes the tinfoil-hat crew isn’t wrong: just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t actually out to get you.
So, I sat down at my computer. Then sat down some more. And more after that. Somehow over the period of a few months, I wrote a book, and in the process, I rediscovered something I had forgotten: writing is fun.
I’d like to thank a few people for helping me make this happen:
- my friends Brent and Rob for their time in proofreading my first draft
- my parents Wayne and Kathleen for instilling in me from an early age a lifelong love of books and reading;
- my in-laws Everett and Ruth for supporting my life change and for making such a wonderful daughter (see below)
- but most of all I want to thank my lovely wife Jennifer who has always supported me in every way I can imagine, and some that I can’t; love you forever babyluv!
I truly hope you enjoy reading this as much as I enjoyed writing it. (I also truly hope the ‘you’ in that statement is more than just my immediate circle of friends and family).
I think there are at least one or two more parts of this story to be told, plus maybe a collection of short stories about some of the people we’re going to meet along the way.
If you’d like to drop me a line with your thoughts on the book, comments, criticism, how you found it, where you found it (hopefully not in the trash), etc., you can always try to hit me up online via Facebook (Jeff Lorch Author) or via my website at www.jefflorch.ca.
Also, if you’re one of my friends from south of the border who wants to point out ‘errors’ in spelling with words like ‘centre’ and ‘kilometre’, and the extraneous use of the letter ‘u’ throughout in words like ‘colour’, ‘neighbour’, ‘honour’, etc. – I spelled them right, you just spell them wrong on a daily basis. Deal with it.
So that’s it. Enough rambling. Here’s the book. I’m just gonna go get back to it; as I write this, I’m part of the way into Book Two already.
Enjoy!
Jeff Lorch
Regina, Sask.
January 2019
DECIMATION
Book One: Contagion
CHAPTER ONE
Kevin Hayes
Day 1
“Sir, would you like something else to drink?”
I glanced up from my laptop to look at the flight attendant in the aisle. Her stainless-steel serving cart was laden with a range of beverages, including of course a well-used coffee pot thermos. I knew somewhere in there were cans of nice cold beer as well as those lovely little bottles of booze that they would discreetly add to your orange juice or your Pepsi, for an exorbitant fee of course.
“No thank you,” I replied, rubbing my eyes, “any more coffee and I’ll jitter myself out of my seat.” She smiled warmly, but automatically, and went to move her cart further down the aisle. I reached out to grab her attention before she got away.
“Can you tell me how much longer until we land?” I asked.
We had been due to land in Toronto almost forty minutes ago but had been circling awaiting landing clearance due to complications on the ground, according to the pilot’s announcement.
“I’m sure it won’t be much longer, sir,” she replied with that same automatic smile, dismissed me and moved on to the next row.
I dismissed her just as quickly and leaned my head back against my headrest, rolling my shoulders as much as I could in my confined area. At leas
t I had an aisle seat so I could stretch my legs out a bit, but still I always felt cramped in airplane seats. I wasn’t a giant by any means, but at a couple inches over six feet and a dozen (okay fine, I was out of shape and maybe a it was more like a couple dozen) pounds over two hundred, I was big enough that airplanes always made me feel noticeably oversized.
I ran my fingers through my hair and turned my attention back to my computer. It was no use, I just couldn’t focus on my work. No big surprise there.
“Maybe I should have said no to the last two cups of coffee too,” I mumbled to myself.
“I’m sorry did you say something?” my neighbour asked me. I glanced over at him in that awkward way the confined seating of an airplane allows. It’s a unique situation, in-flight conversations; you sit in very intimate quarters with complete strangers, trying to converse by looking at each other without really looking at each other, and trying to balance that fine line of respecting each other’s personal space while still engaging them.
“No, sorry, just blathering,” I replied with a wan smile. My neighbour was a man in his sixties, by his looks, and thankfully he was a bit smaller than average which allowed me slightly more room to be comfortable. My always-active imagination told me he was an accountant. I always assumed anyone who looked like a slightly bland, nondescript professional was an accountant. I was often not wrong.
“Looks like you didn’t get much work done,” he stated, nodding towards my computer which I had been staring blankly at for most of the flight.
“Not particularly,” I replied, “but I wasn’t able to sleep. I’ve never been able to sleep well on flights. And the Internet quit working not long after take-off, so without that there’s not much work I could have gotten done anyways.”
With no Internet, a disappointing selection of in-flight movies, lots of turbulence and now our landing delayed by over forty minutes, this flight had been the crown jewel of crappy flights. It off an epic of a disaster-vacation, which I’m pretty sure culminated in the ending my marriage.
Things hadn’t been great at home for a while, so during a period of relative calm, I suggested to Stephanie that we finally take that vacation to Paris we had talked about for so long. I knew she had wanted to visit the City of Lights for as long as she could remember, but there were always reasons to put it off “for another year or two”. At first, she had dismissed the idea, saying there was no way she would be able to get time away from the office, but finally she had come around, and we booked the trip just over a month ago.
The month that followed was pretty good overall, and I had been thinking this had been a stroke of genius: step up, show a commitment to my marriage, put work aside and show her that we can reconnect and make things work.
We arranged for the kids to stay with my parents, and Steph put together the calendar and all the instructions Mom and Dad would need to keep the trains running on time and keep the kids on schedule. Steph’s parents had lived in Regina too, and used to love to watch the kids for us; sadly we lost both of them several years ago, her mom first to cancer, followed by her dad two years later to a massive heart attack.
Plus, to really start things off with a bang, since our flight to Paris left early and neither of us could sleep with excitement (and since the kids were safely deposited at my parents’ house across town), we had a fantastic bout of crazy wild loud swinging-from-the-chandelier sex before heading to the airport.
Yep, this trip was just what we needed. I was a genius.
Paris was beautiful; the early fall weather was crisp and clear sweater-weather in the mornings, then warming up enough during the day to be out in only shirtsleeves. We did all the tours like the Eiffel Tower and the Louvre. It wasn’t until the third day of our week-long stay in Paris that things fell apart. We were having late-morning espressos at a small cafe near our hotel; I was returning from the bathroom when I happened to catch her distracted and saw over her shoulder the text she was typing on her phone and things suddenly froze in awful clarity. “This city is so beautiful babe, I wish I could make this trip with you!”. Happy face emoji. Kiss emoji. Heart emoji.
What the fuck.
So yeah, you can likely imagine how things went after that. Screaming, tears, throwing things. Accusations, denials, admissions. Hurt words bashing and stabbing and cutting all around. Me booking a second hotel room a block away, since we couldn’t exchange our airline tickets for an earlier flight home and I sure as hell wasn’t sleeping on the couch sharing a hotel room with her.
And finally, me exchanging seats on the flights with random strangers so I wouldn’t be sitting anywhere near her as we flew back “home”. To top it all off, we still had another three-hour connecting flight we had to wait for before we were home in Regina.
“Was this a work trip for you?” my neighbour asked.
He and his wife had been on the same flight as us out of Paris to Zurich (you know how you get to short-term recognize people when you’re on the same flights, seeing the same faces milling about the airport terminal waiting to board).
“No,” I replied, “more of a vacation. Sort of.” I hoped my tone didn’t invite a follow-up question.
“Us too,” he stated with a smile. “Sort of a twentieth honeymoon. Michelle convinced me to close the office for a couple weeks and leave the ledgers and spreadsheets behind.” Bingo, accountant. Damn I was good. “Are you travelling alone?” he asked.
A voice from the window seat beside him saved me from having to come up with an answer that didn’t involve me trying not to cry.
“Did either of you two idiots think to ask the stew why we’re still in the air?” I leaned forward to see a woman, his wife Michelle I assumed, lifting an eye mask up and blinking owlishly in the light. She had slept most of the flight (after getting several of those overpriced hooch-laden orange juices from the flight attendant not long after takeoff).
I envied her. Maybe I should have been drinking those during the flight instead of coffees.
My new friend rolled his eyes and shrugged at me apologetically. I shrugged back, as if to say, “what are you going to do, right?”
Whatever he was about to say to his wife was cut off as the cabin speakers dinged, and the Captain’s voice came over the system advising the crew to prepare for landing. People throughout the cabin were cheering and high-fiving each other, glad to finally be landing.
“Finally,” Mrs. Accountant growled.
Her husband and I looked at each other. And shrugged, smiling. It turns out it was the last smile either of us would wear for quite some time.
♦ ♦ ♦
As soon as the flight landed, I did what most modern people do after almost ten hours in the air: I turned on my cell phone to check messages. I could see others around me doing the same.
As the plane slowed and began the long process of taxiing to the gate, you could hear around the cabin the dings and chirps of emails, texts and voicemails populating the passengers’ cell phones, mine included.
I’m self-employed, working out of home as a freelance editor for several different magazines. My contributors electronically share their copy with me, I would read, reread, make the required edits, suggestions and changes, and boom I’m done please pay me. I’ll never get rich doing it, but it pays the bills.
Since I had made alternate arrangements with all my clients during my absence, I didn’t expect much in the way of messages. I was surprised to hear my pocket chiming again and again as text messages and voicemail messages were loaded onto my phone. As I realized this, I slowly became aware of the same happening around me as phones all throughout the cabin were chiming like a discordant electronic symphony. I also became aware of a growing volume of murmuring as people were reading their messages.
I opened my phone to see eight text messages, all from my daughter’s cell phone, and four voicemails. My breath went out of me; this meant something was very wrong. My thoughts immediately went to something terrible happening to my kids or my pa
rents.
I turned and looked several rows behind me to where Stephanie was seated. She was staring at me with her phone in one hand, her other hand over her mouth in shock with a terrified expression on her face. Goosebumps broke out across my body. I looked back down at my phone.
“Dad help, please call us!”
“Dad we need you please call!”
“Daddy help!”
My daughter Karen was fourteen, three years older than her brother David, and she hadn’t called me Daddy in years. I guess she thought it was babyish. I was Dad, that was it. If she was feeling serious, she called me Father. Last year she had started trying to call her mother by her first name, and we squashed that immediately. But “Daddy”...
Around me there was a growing murmur from other people with concerned faces looking at their phones, but I was lost in the messages I was reading on mine. The cabin had become too loud for me to try to listen to my voicemails or to make a call, so I texted back with shaking hands.
“Sweetie what is it what’s wrong?? Our plane just landed please tell me what’s happened!”
I threw off my seatbelt and went to stand to go back to Steph’s seat, and found the aisle clogged with passengers. I suddenly realized that almost everyone was in a near state of panic, and those that weren’t were lost in confusion.
“What the hell?” I hear beside me.
I looked over to see my seat neighbour staring at his phone, opened to a US national news feed.
“PRESIDENT DECLARES NATIONAL EMERGENCY - MARTIAL LAW IMPLEMENTED” screamed the headline in big black letters.
I slowly sat back down in my seat and echoed my new friend’s statement. “What the hell?”
♦ ♦ ♦
“Ladies and gentlemen, if you’ll try to remain calm, and go back to your seats, I’ll tell you what we know and what happens next, but nothing is going to happen until you settle down.” The pilot was standing at the front of the plane addressing us over the PA system.
