Partholon

by D Krauss

  They watched, instead, for more airplanes falling out of the sky or gasoline trucks exploding on bridges or maybe that fabled dirty bomb, not a few more letters leaking powder or a couple more apocryphal crop-dusting operations.

  They smugly watched Al-Qaeda being ground to hamburger in Afghanistan and it was victory, victory, sweet Pyrrhic victory.

  The first actual deaths from the Al-Qaeda Flu happened so sporadically no one really noticed. Old people, the kind of disheveled society-fringed derelicts you expect to die from something easy, like a cold or pneumonia. Because they went to the fringe emergency rooms dedicated to disposing of such wastes of human space, they didn’t get the best of medical observation and were, in fact, written off as nothing more than the pneumonia victims they appeared to be.

  Bill told John that one or two apparently halfway competent doctors at those meat shops actually raised some concerns because the morphology did not quite follow pneumonia. They were ignored.

  John thought it would make a good Movie of the Week – heroic young iconoclastic doctors defying a system that, ultimately, lets them down.

  “Hmm,” Bill considered, “you’re right. Good drama. Maybe I’ll write it.”

  “Okay,” John said, “but give this one a happier ending.”

  Neither of them laughed.

  And then there was Baltimore.

  Talk about caught with your pants down. In one week, almost a thousand people dead. Stunning. It seemed to radiate from downtown Baltimore to the Loops, jumping randomly from neighborhood to neighborhood. Given the origin, most doctors assumed it was some kind of new venereal disease, some virulent AIDS-type virus that the VD Capital of America had managed to incubate.

  Sexual politics then interfered. The always-complaining gay organizations started screaming that this was a completely unjustified scapegoating of their lifestyle. People were keeling over right and left, no one had any idea what was going on, and the gay guys were crying about their rights. Unbelievable.

  And tragic, because the ever-sensitive CDC slowed to a snail-like response. Not that any immediate quarantine would have stopped the inevitable, but maybe, just maybe, a few more would have lived.

  They had their meeting at the campus and John was smug and then came the next wave, or waves, and all politics and social justice and progressive thought and attempts to be cooler-than-thou went right out the window in favor of mere survival.

  A hammer-like series of sudden outbreaks quickly overwhelmed whole towns while John spent his three days walking the campus. It seemed like everyone between Baltimore and DC got sick and died, hundreds of thousands.

  Hundreds of thousands of others outside the Beltway fled, packing kids and dogs and spouses and all they thought important into vans and Beetles and Amtrak cars and rushing out to New York and Delaware and New England. Going home, back to the parents and grandparents and hometowns they had left, starry-eyed, years before to make their political or corporate or legal fortunes at the center of American power, leaving a cloud of death behind them and trailing an even bigger cloud of it along.

  And still, no one knew what was going on.

  The Al-Qaeda Flu started out small, barely noticeable, a cough that usually became a full-blown wheeze, then the eventual drowning in one’s own mucus. All of this in three days, max. Some people went in just hours, others lasted a few weeks, but the average was three days.

  What it did to the medical community. Hospitals took in the first victims on the first day of their local wave and, by the end of the week, everyone in the hospital and the surrounding neighborhood was dead. What it did to the whole Northeast. The fleeing families piled gratefully into grandma’s front room and clucked at each other and started hacking and, by the end of the week, everyone in grandma’s neighborhood was dead. Except, of course, for the two or three who, coughing a bit, packed up their own vans or Beetles and headed out towards Maine and upper New York and Ohio or wherever they could get to, the cloud trailing behind them.

  The CDC stood around looking helpless. They had lots of press conferences on just about every channel at just about every hour of the day and the sum total of all their words: we don’t know.

  They played the game perfectly, of course, showing white-coated white-haired grave-eyed experts, weary and disheveled, outside some medical facility droning on about tests and epidemiologies and progressions and then wisely speculating in their best deathbed manners.

  Thousands more died. More press conferences, with more speculations and the reporters, those self-appointed intrepid protectors of the public weal, shouted stupid questions and tried to outsell each other’s airtime by stoking whatever rumors they could find about whatever this was. Everyone would have done better to keep their mouths shut. All the despair they created.

  They figured it out by sheer accident. A lab technician was working late down in Atlanta and had a sample from the Brentwood Post Office letters on a side table while he was checking blood from a Flu victim. Something clicked when he looked through the microscope so he grabbed the anthrax sample and started doing some comparisons. He smelled a rat, called a few of the scientists over and, after twelve heroic hours, the team unraveled it.

  Setup.

  It was a well-crafted attack, quite sophisticated, quite marvelous, really, coming as it did from a bunch of towel-headed fanatics.

  The anthrax was a precursor, a conditioner, that was the word most used. Camouflage, distracting the immune system and, therefore, weakening it. It made people more receptive to the real attack, a virus. Brilliant. The best experts were about 80% sure it was developed in Saudi and transported by the same Al-Qaeda group that ended up driving the planes. Which, of course, was the reason Mecca was now a glass parking lot.

  The anthrax letters were far more pervasive than anyone realized. They went everywhere throughout the Great Northeast, from Albany to Charlotte. The attacks on the Senate and the newspaper office were a clever distraction, offering up a particular MO to make everyone look for crudely written envelopes leaking lots of anthrax powder.

  The real anthrax letters only contained a whiff and were in professional mass mailings offering credit cards and vacations and rebates, the kind of stuff most people tossed but some would open. They banked on the openers, and those people released enough of a cloud of the anthrax to make most immune systems respond properly. The four or five who died from anthrax kept everyone from seeing the hundreds of thousands of others who caught a mild cold for a few days about the same time. Very smart.

  The crop-dusting stories were true. The virus was on the wind, carried from Ohio and Kentucky over an area bound north from Albany to Fredericksburg and west from Winchester to the New York border. Because the ragheads were not sure exactly where the aerosol would fall, they had blanketed a much larger area with the precursor anthrax, from southern New York through southern Florida. It found everyone primed and ready.

  John found Theresa on the third day, in bed, coughing the hard cough, obviously engulfed in the stage of the Flu that paralyzed you with the effort to get air. John had seen enough of the symptoms by then to know what was going on so he wrapped her in blankets, felt the raging fever on her brow, and forced brandy down her throat, all in an effort to raise her temperature even more.

  Fever was a friend because it burned viruses and he figured getting her up to 106 or 107 just might do what the CDC couldn’t. She didn’t fight him. She knew what he was trying to do, even though she was completely delirious. Two days of this before John felt the first tickle in the back of his own throat. John and Theresa were outside the various bell curves. He contracted the virus late, and she suffered longer than most.

  Three days later, John crawled into the same bed, racked with the cough and choking for air and feeling the burning behind his temples. She was already in a coma and John was glad she would go peacefully and he would, eventually, go at her side. At some point, John was in coma. At some other point, he woke up. And screamed.

  J
ohn watched the news shift to weather and the big topic of jet streams and currents, which was more important now than local thunderstorms or tornadoes. You just never knew what else the towelheads had.

  He turned it off. Enough. Enough.

  20

  Mood change. Needed one. The few times he’d called Collier in the middle of a black despair, he’d almost driven the poor kid to joining the Army right then. He pushed out of the chair and walked over to the stereo. Music, the best mood changer short of a pill.

  He thumbed through the albums. Yeah, albums, the pop of dust in vinyl tracks and the hum of the needle in the background. Screw those CDs. Overproduced, artificial and computer-enhanced bastardizations of real music, which had to have flaws and fades and even a skip or two, or it was just a lab experiment. Some rocker, drunk in the studio, missing a chord and the producer frowns but cocks a head and, after a moment, says, “We’ll go with that.”

  Before, John used to crank the speakers to earthquake level, driving Snuffy outside, Theresa to the Mall, and the neighbors to move. Now he used headphones because even volume level ‘3’ traveled well in this morgue-ish atmosphere. Dangerous, because the Laws of Unfortunate Timing guaranteed his alarms would sound at the very moment he was air-guitaring “Won’t Get Fooled Again,” so he had to keep an eye on Snuffy or pop one ’phone off and listen which, of course, ruined it. Damn towelheads.

  He flipped through AC/DC, Floyd, Clash, and His Royal Majesty and God of All Music, Springsteen. He stopped. “Boss” didn’t quite express his importance. Springsteen had managed to capture, in one song or another, every single moment of teenager John’s rampage through New Jersey. Bruce was more than music; he was chronicle. John wondered if he Survived. If so, he’s probably putting together the best material of his life. Not that it’d ever get airplay, unless he managed to hook up with a pirate somewhere and blast it out for a couple of hours before Sam zeroed in and missiled the transmitter.

  The junta didn’t like competition. Their radio stations were horrible, a continuous Public Service Announcement interspersed with the Archies or Perry Como, and their DJs were the smarmiest bunch of self-righteous goody-goodies ever collected under a broadcast tower, worse than a Christian station.

  That’s what happens when generals run the government, they play only what they like and this particular group had either forgotten the power of rock and roll or were suspicious of it, probably listening to Brahms back in the ’70s while John was Lou Reed-ing it. Buncha nerds.

  Rock and roll was America reduced to three or four electrified chords, the individual, the person, the rage against the machine. Didn’t force Noriega out of that embassy by blasting Dean Martin at him, did we?

  John really missed radio, good radio. Before, there was 94.7, the DC Classic Rock station, and John would tune in there for about twenty minutes of nostalgia. But how many times can you hear “My Best Friend’s Girlfriend” before it drives you crazy? So he’d switch over to Baltimore’s 98 Rock, the best station in America, bar none. They knew how to mix it up, a classic or two and then segue into the new stuff and John had to admit a lot of that was better than a lot of the old. Purists would have a stroke but, hey, things move, and rock moved. You have to move, too. You don’t prefer Milton Berle over Eddie Murphy, unless you’re stuck.

  Granted, after the ’70s, it looked like rock was dead and the purists were justified. The ’80s were dreadful, with a few exceptions like the Cure and, of course, Springsteen. The early ’90s was a rock graveyard and John only listened to his albums, putting on Traffic and early Genesis (never that late Phil Collins junk). But, about 1995, rock took off. Aerosmith returned, Metallica was going crazy, Limp Bizkit, and that utterly amazing Creed... rock was back, man. Then the Event. Then everything died.

  John turned Collier on to rock. After the kid got over his Raffi/Sesame Street stage, John sat him down in front of the turntable and put on some Hendrix, looked at him and said, “Any questions?”

  Collier never went back. John took him to see Alice Cooper, J. Geils, the Scorpions and the Offspring. He even let Collier go with a group of friends to the last OzFest. That was Collier’s coming-out party. He fell in love with the guitar and John was more than happy to pay for all the lessons.

  Collier, and John, thought music would be his life. He would go to school for a while, then roam the country doing backups, living off waiter tips and whatever gigs he could manage. Become a rich and famous rock star? Nah, that rarely happened. But live the life, surround himself with music and musical people and the attendant creativity and instability and craziness, sure.

  What, was he nuts? What kind of trailer-trash parents encouraged such a gypsy lifestyle? Well, trailer-trash parents like John and Theresa, who both grew up hard, under cruel and violent circumstances. Life was not opportunity. It was struggle.

  Early ’70’s, they were both nineteen. John was painting roads and she was working at a sewing factory. He was living in the back of a gas station with a buddy and she was sharing an apartment with a junkie friend of hers. They met at Gino’s Hamburgers on 38 and fell in love and moved in together, two against the world. Their families hated them and their friends said they were crazy and they had no money, no prospects, no future.

  So John did the only thing a low-class white boy living at the time could do, married her and joined the USAF, a real loser move in the ’70s, proof you had reached bottom. But he had, so what else was there? Turned out a good move, because he made a career and a life for both of them out of it. It wasn’t his dream, but John hadn’t really defined that. The need to survive trumps dreams.

  But Collier could have dreams, so they taught him the premises. First and most important, money isn’t everything. You can always get money. There’s always a job out there and even the most unskilled of workers can make money, if they’re willing to put themselves out. It depends on what’s important to you.

  If your reason for living centers around a big house and a big car and vaulted ceilings and dinner parties for the coworkers, so they can look at your Bang and Olufsen stereo, your collection of original opera recordings, your Van Gogh pencils and gush about your elevated tastes, with a slight tone of envy in their voices, then, welcome to DC, where the majority of your type live, and more power to you, Coll.

  Second, gain control of your life, never beholden to but beholden by, create something for yourself that depends solely on you, not on boards or partners or corporate cultures. Stand on your own. Don’t be like us, Coll, spending too much of life at the whims of others, from horribly abusive parents to capricious bosses; wage peasants, always fearful, never sure when the axe would fall.

  An apartment over a garage is a palace if your guitar or paintbrush or typewriter pays for it, if you’re deciding what your daily schedule will be, if you take or leave a job based on your own standards. That’s freedom, that’s what you want, and that’s a real dream.

  So find it, Coll.

  Yeah. Find it...

  Ah, crap.

  John was holding Darkness at the Edge of Town. How appropriate. He put it back. No, no music. Let’s read, instead. He walked over to the lounger and fingered the books loosely piled there. Frazer’s Golden Bough, a compilation of all of Shakespeare’s works, a compilation of all of Milton’s works, the Inferno, T.S. Eliot, the Decameron, and, believe it or not, War and Peace. Those were his. Next to them were those from the library, some Heinlein and C.S. Forester and some Pre-Event popular things like Snow Falling on Cedars.

  John was reading all those books at the same time, two or three pages each, switching around until he got tired. He wasn’t a genius; he was just interested in too many things and wanted to keep the library books circulating as much as possible. In a separate pile were the how-tos, covering things like home wiring or fixing a foundation. John did whole chapters at a time in those. Not pleasure, study.

  John stared at the books a moment and then sighed and shook his head. Nope, didn’t want to read, either. Mayb
e he should watch a movie; one of his own or whatever he’d gotten from Blockbuster. It was about time to return those, anyway. Some other Loner appeared to be going in and out, treating the store the same way he did – return a movie, then take a movie. Didn’t want to deprive a fellow traveler.

  John had watched action movies at first but then turned to the classics and character studies, like Dark Victory and Barry Lyndon. He was getting all the real live action he could stand but little personal contact, so movies became his people simulator. He watched It’s a Wonderful Life quite a bit, even after Christmas, tearing up at “the richest man in town,” line until it dawned on him that George Bailey was a chump. His principled stand only got incremental improvements. Had he joined Potter, he could have taken over the old man’s operations within six months and made everyone’s lives an epoch better. And that premise, the “you’ve-never-been-born” angel thing, please. Were that true, none of those people would have mattered, none of those events would have registered, so who cared? Chump.

  No, no movies, either. Felt like artifice. Game, then? John looked over at the card table. He had Squad Leader set up over there, the “Hedgehog of Piepsk” scenario. John had always liked board games, especially the complicated Avalon Hill ones, before Hasbro swallowed them up. He had just about every decent AH title, collected long before the Event. He’d played quite a bit Before, but rarely against an opponent. Theresa hated those games and his coworkers barely could handle Monopoly, so he ended up being his own opponent.

  A thousand years or so ago, he and an Immigration agent up at Champlain, NY had played but the agent always kicked John’s ass, no matter the game, and started calling him the French. You can take just so many insults, so it was kinda relieving when John got orders and had to leave Patton behind.

  Playing solo now, it was like the French versus the Italians, but there was no one to criticize, so hey. Sending cardboard soldiers and tanks to their doom. War as hobby was so much more relaxing than war as a lifestyle.