He also arranged for a delivery the next day of twenty sheets of 4’x8’ plywood, way more than he figured he’d need, but what the hell.
When he wasn’t shopping, he spent his days unpacking and arranging. He also made frequent visits to the gun shop’s shooting range, getting the feel of a few of the Sigs, and brushing up his skills on the .45. He spent his evenings cruising the news sites. A plane crash in Korea. A bloody church massacre in Kazakhstan, laid at the feet of Muslim rebels. A subway full of corpses in Japan supposedly the result of a terrorist gas attack, but with no civilians allowed near. Crazy naked marauders in Jakarta blamed on a bad batch of crystal meth. There were more riots, more blackouts, and now the rumors were starting to fly. Governments around the world seemed like they were trying to keep a lid on things, but the lid was coming off.
And then the world saw Lagos.
Lagos, Nigeria
April 3rd
Jack Booth adjusted his big Sony X400 ENG camcorder on his shoulder and tried not to breathe through his nose. The whole place stunk of human feces, rotting garbage, and that ineluctable stench of despair he so often encountered in the third world. In front of him, Trevor, the on-air talent, straightened his tie, his teeth shiny white and his hair perfectly in place. Jack had worked with him a couple of times before and didn’t like him. He clearly thought himself God’s gift to women, broadcasting, and the world in general, a not unusual attitude among on-air reporters, who all believed themselves to be the next Edward R. Murrow. But Trevor drank heavily and frequently became abusive when drunk, especially to people in service jobs like waiters and barmen. There were a lot of things Jack could forgive in this world, but berating a teenage girl into tears because your steak came out overdone wasn’t one of them. But the brass at Reuters thought Trevor shit solid gold, so Jack stayed professional and tried his best not to punch the guy in the face.
Jack, to his parents’ chagrin, had dropped out after only two years of college. He’d majored in filmmaking at Ithaca College in upstate New York, which he’d chosen partly because of its excellent program but also because the Finger Lakes region offered some great opportunities to hunt and fish.
He found he liked his time behind the camera more than his classes, and he seemed to have a knack for framing and lighting that brought out the drama in whatever he shot. Others noticed it too. At the end of his sophomore year he volunteered to join a crew on its way to Bolivia over the summer to shoot a short documentary on the water shortages there. It was a student project with a shoestring budget and they couldn’t afford to pay him, but he called his parents and they told him not to worry about it. They transferred $5,000 into his account and he was off and running.
They filmed for two weeks and then flew back to Ithaca and started editing. Teachers and advisors came by to look, and everyone made comments about the great camera work. Next thing he knew he’d been invited by one of the professors to join him and his crew on a six-month project in Burundi. The pay was lousy but the experience would be priceless, so he formally dropped out of school and took the job. On the first of the following month his phone alerted him to a $10,000 deposit in his account, and they’d been coming ever since. His mom said, “We think it’s important that you should follow your dreams, honey, and now you can.”
He’d spent years hopping from one remote location to another, camera on his shoulder, covering wars and natural disasters. When he decided to buy a place to hang his hat whenever he traveled back to Chicago, they’d insisted on purchasing him a luxurious condo loft in Printer’s Row. “It’s a good investment,” his dad had said.
Standing behind Jack stood his producer Rudy, a thickset man with a heavy black beard, his hand raised in the air, his other hand clutching a headphone to one ear. He raised his chin and counted down with his fingers—three, two, one—mouthing the words. At zero, he jabbed his index finger at the reporter, who began to speak.
“I’m standing here in Lagos, Nigeria, at what has become an epicenter of the fight for human rights versus naked corporate greed.” He drew out the long e, making it sound like “greeeed.” “Lagos is a city of 21,000,000 people, one of the largest in the world. It is a city of extremes; extreme wealth and extreme poverty, living side by side. Nowhere is this more evident than here in the slum they call Makoko.” The camera panned to his right, revealing a jumbled mess of shanties and hovels. “Here, in this slum at the water’s edge, over 300,000 people try to eke out a living.
“There are few schools here, no police patrols, no hospitals, almost no health care of any kind. Existence is hand-to-mouth. Disease and malnutrition are rampant. There is almost nothing of value here, nothing anyone would want… except one thing.”
Trevor began to walk to his left, and Jack’s camera followed him, revealing a backdrop of huge shiny high-rises. “Land. These people have it and those people,” he pointed toward the high-rises, “will do almost anything to get it. For this is waterfront property in front of some of the richest real estate in Africa.”
He started walking again, this time back in front of the slums. Behind him, some people watched, but most went about their business. White men with cameras were nothing new to them. “They’ve tried bulldozing, they’ve tried brutality, they’ve even set fire to people’s homes, but the—” A piercing scream sliced through the fetid air. Rudy yelled, “Cut!” and the reporter threw down his microphone in disgust.
“Shit!” Trevor yelled, and stomped off. Rudy caught up with him and put a hand on his shoulder. “That was going really well, Trevor. Let’s wait for things to calm down and start again, eh?”
Trevor spun around and glared at the producer. “I hate this place! It’s dirty, it stinks, and the people are… oh bollocks, what now?” A woman staggered toward them, a wound on her shoulder, brown blood crusting on her threadbare dress. She pointed behind her, babbling in a language neither understood, having obvious difficulty forming her words. She scratched at her arms and face, and she seemed unsteady, almost delirious. Jack couldn’t tell if she was pleading for help or warning them, but her eyes were wide with fear. The reporter darted behind Rudy. “Keep her away from me!” he shouted angrily. “She’s a damn mess!”
From behind her they heard more screams and shouting, and then a naked man burst out between two shanties and came charging straight at them, with several machete-wielding men in hot pursuit. There were huge open slashes across the man’s chest and shoulder, but he seemed not to notice. He raced right past the woman as she collapsed to her knees and headed for the news team. The reporter shrieked, but the producer, who had played a good bit of rugby in his youth, neatly sidestepped the man and drove a foot into his solar plexus. The man went down hard, but immediately started to get back up, a snarl on his lips. However, that moment was all it took for the men with machetes to reach him, and they slashed at him as he scrambled, trying to regain his footing, until one stepped up and brought a machete down on his neck. The man’s head rolled away as his body collapsed.
“Damn!” yelled the reporter. “Damn damn damn damn damn! Hey… Bloody hell, will you look at that!” He pointed. The severed head snapped its teeth, his eyes darting around. It was clearly very much alive. Rudy stood with is mouth open. Jack dropped to one knee and zoomed in on the head. The movement caught its attention and it looked straight into the camera. One of the men grabbed a concrete block, lifted it high in the air and brought it down, smashing the grotesque thing. Lumps of blue-gray gore squirted out from under the block.
The producer looked over at Jack, kneeling with his camera still raised and nodded his approval. Suddenly Trevor screamed, “No! No! Help me!” The producer spun around in time to see the woman, now quite naked, knock the reporter to the ground, pounce on him and lock her teeth on his throat. She jerked her head back and a huge gout of blood sprayed into the air. Rudy ran toward the fallen reporter but the men with machetes beat him there and the biggest one brought his blade down
on the woman’s head. Her body collapsed on top of the reporter. Blood squirted out of Trevor’s neck like a fountain. He clutched at his throat, his eyes wide with fear. To the producer’s shock, the machete arced down again and beheaded him, too. One of the men turned to Rudy and pointed at the reporter’s body with his bloody machete and said something in the local dialect. He turned and strode back into the slum, followed by the rest of the group.
As the men passed, an old woman nodded at them. “Good,” she said. “They finally killed a white man. Maybe now we’ll get some help.”
Rudy stood bent over, with his hands on his knees, and said “Wow! Intense, mate!” and then turned his head to look at Jack. “Did you get all that?”
He patted his camera and nodded. “Every bit of it,” he said. Trevor’s death was unfortunate, sure, but this was once-in-lifetime footage.
What rapidly came to be known as the Makoko Video spread around the world at the speed of light thanks to social media. Facebook banned it and YouTube took it down after forty-five minutes, but anyone with computer savvy could find the unedited footage all over the dark web. Edited versions made it to the evening news and it caused a sensation worldwide. Memes with the severed head started popping up everywhere, and Twitter largely took it as a huge, if macabre, joke. But down deep it scared a lot of people. Most news organizations stopped cooperating with governments (because of course they had been, at the highest levels) and began digging. Suddenly people were recalling the news of the last few weeks and saying hey, what about this riot and what about that terrorist attack? What really happened?
The existence of the parasite and its rapid proliferation could no longer be denied. Governments everywhere assured people that it was a local problem, but a sudden flood of videos and still shots on Twitter and Instagram brought the reality home to people around the world that there was something going on, something strange and threatening.
Chicago, Illinois
April 4th
Dan Booth sat in his Range Rover and sighed, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel. Traffic into O’Hare airport was backed up and barely creeping along, and patience had never been one of his virtues. Since the video hit, the airports were jammed. Everyone seemed to have some place they needed to get to, or get back from, and rampant speculation had it that the government might shut down air travel altogether. Already flights from India, where the infection seemed rampant, were banned, and other countries were being added to the list almost hourly.
The line finally moved him to the United terminal and he picked out his father among the crowd. What he saw shocked him. The man looked like he’d aged a decade since he’d seen him a year ago, when he and Terry had flown to India for a visit. His shoulders slumped and even his face seemed to sag. He brightened when he saw Dan, and when they embraced in a big bear hug, he could still feel the old power in the man’s grasp.
“Thanks for picking me up, son.” He leaned back into his seat and sighed.
“So, Dad, have you seen the video? It’s all over the news here. Of course ABC and NBC blame the president. CBS and CNN blame Republicans. MSNBC went all in and blamed Republicans and the president.” He chuckled.
“Yes, I’ve seen it, and a lot worse. I’ve been at Fort Detrick since I got back, talking to the people at AMRIID. And the Makoko thing pales next to some of the footage they have.” AMRIID stood for the US Army’s Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, and some of the finest doctors in the world worked there.
“I thought you were at the State Department.”
“That’s what I was supposed to say, but that’s not where I was.” He stared out the window for a few moments. “Look, I’m not supposed to tell you guys any of this, but you need to hear it. But let’s wait until tonight when we get the whole family together.”
Twenty minutes’ drive put them in the tony suburb of Inverness. They came around a bend and turned into the driveway of a big red brick home, a classic Georgian with white windows and black shutters and three dormers on the roof. Everybody said it looked exactly like the house in Home Alone, another one of dad’s “good investments.”
They pulled up in front of the house. “Go on in,” Dan said. “I’ll get your bags.” Halfway up the sidewalk the front door burst open to shrieks of “Papa!” and two whirlwinds in pastel colors came charging at him. He scooped up both his granddaughters and smothered them in kisses and hugs.
He put them down and the older one, Lainey, looked up and asked him, “Papa, did you bring me anything.”
Damn, he thought. I should have stopped in the gift shop at the airport. He almost said no, when he saw Terry, standing in the doorway, nodding vigorously.
“Of course I did, sweetheart, but you’ll have to wait.”
That was so like Terry, he thought. She always thought ahead. Dan had lucked out when he found her. She was smart as a whip, tough, very well organized, but also a sweet, loving woman. And strikingly pretty. She’d been the second most beautiful bride he’d ever seen.
She and Dan had met at a bar up by Northwestern University, where Dan was in his final year of law school. Jack happened to be back in the States and had been there with him that night. When they saw her walk in, Dan took one look at her shapely athletic body and her beautiful face, leaned over to his brother and said, “See that girl? I’m going to…”
When they got married two years later, Jack, while recounting the story in his Best Man’s speech, said, “I can’t tell you what he actually said, so let’s just say it was, ‘See that girl? She sure looks smart!’” That got the biggest laugh of the evening.
Ribeyes sizzled on the grill. Evan, after two years of Indian food, looked at the pink flesh still dripping with bloody juice and felt slightly repulsed, but when he took his first bite he remembered how much he loved a good steak. After dinner they kept the conversation light until the girls were put to bed. They moved to the sprawling living room where Dan poured drinks and Terry started a fire going in the big antique brick fireplace.
Evan looked around him and for the first time in days felt truly at peace.
That ended when Owen leaned forward and said, “Okay, let’s hear it.” That was Owen, Evan thought. Let’s get to the bad news.
“All right, first of all this is all top secret stuff. You can’t tell anybody. Too many people would panic if all this gets out.”
They all nodded, except Owen. But that was Owen.
So Evan recounted the events in India, his guilt at sending the van load of patients to his clinic, and his banishment from the country. “So after I landed at Dulles, they took me to the US Army’s biological warfare place at Fort Detrick in Maryland, and I’ve spent the last couple days going over what I saw and helping to evaluate the videos that were coming in.” He winced as he remembered some of those terrible bloody videos. He’d seen a good many horror movies, but violence and gore disturbed him far more than anything Hollywood could produce.
“Videos? From where?” Dan asked.
“Asia mostly. Japan, Indonesia, the Philippines. China’s been hit pretty hard but they’re still denying it, and so has India. Pakistan’s getting it, and Bangladesh. It’s really bad there, with all the slums. Russia too, in their East. Australia and New Zealand are getting hammered. It’s in Africa now and it’s starting to crop up in Europe. You heard about that thing in Vladivostok, the huge fire? That was it too. It’s showing up in places where there’s large populations, which is what you’d expect, but it’s also popping up in remote areas. A lot of governments haven’t been at all forthcoming about it, but the US has eyes everywhere.”
“You mean like the CIA?”
“Partly. They’re getting information out about the big cities, but it’s mostly the Green Berets.”
“The Green Berets? Are they still around, Dad? I thought the SEAL teams did all that stuff.”
“Yeah, so did I. Turns out
there’s like 75,000 Green Berets out there. In the Army they call them Special Forces, and they’re in over a hundred countries around the world. Outfits like the SEALs and the Army Rangers, they’re who you send in if you want to kill people and break things, and they’re really good at it. They’re in, boom, and they’re out. But you know how the Kurds have been doing almost all the fighting against ISIS? That’s the Green Berets. They go in and stay, learn the language and train the locals to fight so we don’t have to.
“All around the world, in every backwater you can name and a lot you’ve never heard of, there are terrorists groups forming. A lot of them are Muslim extremists groups with ties to ISIS or Al Qaida, but there are still a lot of communists groups too, like Jack’s friends on Luzon. And that’s how we’re fighting them. The Green Berets find local tribal groups, that kind of thing, and arm them and train them as a counter force. It means we don’t have to be there fighting ourselves, and it also buys a lot of good will on the grass roots level. And a lot of these guys go on to be leaders in their own countries too.
“Just like the Montagnards in Vietnam,” Owen said.
“Mountain yards?” asked Terry.
“Mon-tan-yiards,” Owen pronounced it carefully. “It’s French for mountain people. They were the original indigenous people of Vietnam; they got pushed into the mountains eons ago when people immigrated from South China into Nam and became the Vietnamese. They were hardly more than stone age people. Didn’t like the Vietnamese and flat hated the Commies, or anyone else who tried to push them around. The Green Berets armed them and trained them and turned them loose on the VC. Ferocious fighters. Remember when I had that gallery opening in Austin? I took you guys to that restaurant, the White Pearl?”
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 7
