The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart

by Harrison, William Hale

  In his late thirties, he’d been seeing this beautiful woman named Audrey, with green eyes and long chestnut hair that spilled down her back in ringlets and waves. She was sweet and intelligent, with a great sense of humor. He tried to keep her at arm’s length, but he found himself thinking about her all the time. They’d been dating about three months when she leaned over in bed and kissed him and said, “I think I’m falling in love with you.”

  He’d given her a half smile and said, “That’s probably not a good idea.”

  “Not a good idea? I tell you I’m falling in love with you and you tell me it’s not a good idea?” She got out of bed, stepped to the window and rested her forehead on the cool glass. Outside, the moon was just rising over the Bitterroot Mountains. Her nude body looked lovely in the pale moonlight. After a minute she walked over to where her clothes were scattered on the floor and got dressed.

  “You know, they wrote a song about you. A group named Cowboy Junkies. It’s called ‘Misguided Angel.’ It goes, ‘I’ve got a misguided angel hanging over me. Heart like a Gabriel, pure and white as ivory. Soul like a Lucifer, black and cold like a piece of lead.’” She turned to face him. “But they got it wrong. Your soul is pure. It’s your heart that’s dark and cold. And there’s no place in it for me.” She walked out and closed the door behind her.

  “’Misguided angel,’” he sang softly. “’I’ll love you ‘til I’m dead.’”

  City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt

  May 22

  Before the parasite struck, the city of Cairo and its surrounding communities were the home of almost twenty million people, making it one of the largest urban centers in the world. Fully sixty percent of the population lived in what were circumspectly referred to as “unplanned” developments. These areas often had no plumbing, little electricity, no sanitation, few schools and fewer medical facilities. In short, they were slums.

  One of the worst of these was the huge City of the Dead, which stood across the Nile River from the famed pyramids. Inside its surrounding walls were five vast ancient cemeteries, including tens of thousands of structures, the oldest dating back to the seventh century. Arab sultans, Mameluke emirs and Ottoman pashas were all buried within the above-ground tombs, along with hundreds of thousands of their subjects. When Napoleon conquered Cairo in 1808 many of the tombs were looted of valuables, and the mummified human remains within were shipped back to France where, in a grotesque fad, they were often used in the homes of the wealthy as firewood.

  As the population of Egypt burgeoned in the twentieth century, many people came to Cairo in search of work. Because of disastrous government policies and the overall poverty of the once rich country, there was nowhere to house most of the immigrants. And so the slums grew.

  Some of the tombs were still locked and sealed tight, but many hung open and empty. Squatters moved into the City of the Dead and occupied many of the tombs, and when these were full they built whatever structures they could out of materials at hand. “Streets” inside the walls were often no more than two or three feet wide. Families of six and eight crowded into structures where there was barely enough room for them to lay down at night on the dirt floors. Almost all food and water had to be brought in from outside. Since there was little plumbing or sanitation, the narrow lanes were filled with feces and urine, and flies and rats were everywhere. Over five million people lived there. These slums were said to be some of the worst in the entire world. Disease ran rampant, and lives here tended to be, in the words of Thomas Hobbes, nasty, brutish and short.

  A man and a woman walked together down one of the wider lanes. The woman was in her fifties, thickly built and wearing a modest long-sleeved dress, her hair covered by a bright yellow scarf. The man, who was somewhat younger, was dressed in a white Ralph Lauren shirt, blue Hermes shorts and handmade Moreschi loafers, and picked his way carefully to avoid the piles of human waste that littered their path. It was 10:00 a.m. and the temperature already hovered above 90 degrees. They both wore face masks over their noses and mouths. The man was sweating. The woman was not.

  Ahead of them walked a pair of khaki-clad policemen with automatic rifles slung over their shoulders. The pathetic hovels on either side of them were empty. A hundred yards behind them a police cordon, manned by two dozen or more officers, held back a crowd of hundreds of people, many of them clutching armloads of meager belongings. Angry chatter filled the air. Behind the crowd stood a pair of large bulldozers with backhoe arms. A few feet farther sat a white SUV with a green logo and the words “A Place for Everyone” in both English and Arabic script.

  The man looked around, trying not to breathe in the stench. Even through his mask, which he’d dashed liberally with cologne back in his hotel suite, the overwhelming smell almost made him sick. “So, Jomana, this is where my money is going, eh?”

  “Yes, David,” she answered. “We’re going to build the three-story structures here that will have solar panels on the roofs for electricity, and rainwater collectors that will feed into cisterns to supply some of their water. Each unit will have a small kitchen, with gas piped in from a community propane tank. When it’s finished next spring, it will house over twelve hundred people. We hope it will be the first of many such,” she said brightly.

  “How much of this area are we talking about?”

  “This row and the next two over, and from the lane back there,” she gestured toward the police cordon, “All the way to that building.” She pointed to a low ancient-looking brick structure. Crude shanties were built up against its side, except for one space near the end. The letters فجر الموتى were splashed across the wall in gleaming white paint. It looked fresh.

  “What’s that say?” he asked.

  “Ah,” she said. “That says ‘Fajr Al’Amwat.’ It means ‘the Dead’s Dawn,’ or ‘Dawn of the Dead.’”

  “Hmph. Like the movie?”

  “I’m afraid I’m not familiar with that one, David. In this case it refers to a religious sect that has arisen here recently. They are preaching that those who are Infected have become empty vessels into which the dead can return. You know, the Cult of the Dead held sway here for thousands of years and many of the simple people still cling to a form of ancestor worship. “

  “This cult… Are they dangerous?”

  She smiled. “No, not at all. When a person here starts showing symptoms of an infection, the families reach out, and their followers come and take the person away. They say they are here to help them transition back to the spirit world.”

  “So where do they do this ‘transitioning’?”

  “I’m not sure, David. I’ve never inquired. But we should go back now, and let the crew do its job.”

  Minutes later the cordon opened and the equipment operators fired up their big diesel engines and went to work. They dug into the shacks with their backhoes, tearing them to pieces in the process. Then they swung around on their heavy treads, lowered their blades, and pushed the debris into long rows. Wails and angry shouts rose from the watching crowd. Women and children cried, and sullen men glared at the operation. A few times small groups of men tried to break through the police cordon, but these attempts quickly broke down into angry scrums with baton wielding officers, leaving protesters bloody and beaten.

  By the time the crew had nearly finished, David and Jomana were already back in the A Place for Everyone Foundation’s headquarters, to their great good fortune.

  One of the big crawlers reached the end of its row, and swiveled on its treads to bring its backhoe arm to bear on the row of shanties built against the brick building. From a hidden vantage point in a dilapidated shack nearby, an old man watched him carefully. He saw the operator reach the arm above a tall shack that stuck up above the building’s roofline, and extend the scoop. He sprang out of his hiding place and ran toward the machine, screaming and waving his arms. But the operator wore headphones to cancel the noise
of the big engine and failed to hear him in time.

  Unseen by the operator, the teeth of the bucket bit on the edge of the building, and as he flexed the boom, the wall began to bulge and then collapsed in a shower of bricks, creating a large hole. The operator swore and struck his knee with his fist, and then looked around to see who might have noticed the mistake. He caught a glimpse of someone running away. When he looked back, a flood of naked Infected poured out of the hole.

  He screamed and swung his seat back around and tried to slip the big machine into gear, but he was too late. A dozen Infected swarmed up the sides of his bulldozer and he fell to the ground and was inundated immediately, lost from sight. More and more Infected came pouring out like hornets whose nest had been disturbed. They spotted the crowds at the other end of the lane and charged.

  It took the people there a brief moment to comprehend what they were seeing, and then everyone started screaming “Infected!” and scrambling away in terror. Mothers snatched up children. Old people were knocked to the ground and disappeared under foot. The policemen, to their credit, formed a line at their lieutenant’s order and started firing at the oncoming horde with their weird inhuman gait. “Head shots! Head shots!” their lieutenant shouted, firing his pistol. Some of the Infected fell to the ground but there were many more behind them to take their place. At twenty yards the police began to break and run, and then it was a full-scale rout. The few who tried to stand their ground were overwhelmed and fell under the weight of dozens of Infected. The rest of the police ran, with the naked bloody mob hard on their heels.

  Nearby the old man stopped and leaned, breathless, against a shanty wall. He dug into his robes and withdrew a cellphone and quickly punched in a number. Someone answered and he shouted into the phone, “The wall has been breached! The vessels have been released! The time has arrived! It must be done now!” He waited a moment, listening, and answered, “Yes, yes. The time has come. We have no choice now. I know we hoped it would be longer, but we must act. You must send the signal to all the Faithful, my friend. Allah be with you.”

  He hung up and ran. A moment later his phone chimed an alert that it had received a text message. He didn’t need to read it to know what it said: “Release the vessels!”

  All around the City of the Dead men emerged from shacks and hovels and ran to nearby buildings, each of which were marked with the same graffiti: فجر الموتى. Dawn of the Dead. The similarity to George Romero’s classic 1978 zombie movie title was in fact not a coincidence, but a grim joke on the part of a member of the leadership of the movement, who had been born in Cairo and educated in the United States. This was truly the dawn of the dead.

  At over three hundred buildings across the City of the Dead, men opened padlocks, unlocked doors, pried away sheets of plywood, or climbed on roofs and kicked away sheets of corrugated metal that formed walls. And the dead came pouring out, scores or even hundreds from each structure.

  They swarmed through the slum like locusts, overwhelming the residents, tearing off big mouthfuls of flesh and then chasing after the next target. They were everywhere, coming from every direction. Terrified, the people fled, only to turn a corner and run directly into another pack. The people who had been bitten started turning, tearing off their own clothing and joining the hunt, until they numbered in the tens of thousands, with more turning every minute. Soon you could also hear the rattle of gunfire.

  A police sergeant, whose name tag identified him as Omar Saddaq, crouched in a dark corner of a shack and panted, listening to the phone he held to his ear. He had barely managed to escape the onslaught at the demolition site by hiding in a nearby hovel. “Jurisdiction? Jurisdiction?” he hissed into his phone. “I don’t give a damn who’s got jurisdiction! The dead are running through the streets here! You need to do something!” The phone went silent. On hold again! Frustrated, he shoved it back into his pocket. He had discarded his rifle when his ammo ran out. He checked the magazine of his pistol. He had five rounds left, he saw, and another full magazine on his belt. He swapped magazines to put the full one in his gun and peeked outside, and cautiously began making his way toward the nearest gate, the Red Lion Gate at the northeast corner of the City. He could hear firing coming from that direction.

  Hearing movement ahead, he ducked into a doorway and plastered himself along the wall. He glanced around him, and nearly jumped out of his skin when he realized he was standing almost on top of a young woman who huddled in the corner with three small children, a boy and two girls, the oldest of whom, the boy, couldn’t have been more than seven or eight. All three of them stared at him with fearful eyes.

  “Little mother,” he said quietly. “You must get your children out of here. If you stay here, you will all die.” Clearly frightened, she shook her head and shrunk back farther into the corner.

  He crouched down next to her. “What is your name?” he whispered.

  “Fatima,” she replied, in a voice so quiet he could hardly hear her.

  “Fatima is a fine name. Do you have a husband?”

  She shook her head. “Dead,” she whispered. “Last month.”

  He looked at the boy and said, “Little one, what’s your name?’

  “I’m Omar.”

  “Omar? Isn’t that something! My name is Omar too! See, it says so here on my name tag!” He smiled. “Well, little Omar. Can you run? I’ll bet you’re very fast!”

  The boy nodded and even smiled slightly.

  He looked at the woman and said, “Fatima, here’s what we’re going to do. You give me your daughter there, and you carry your little one, and we’ll all go together. The Red Lion Gate is just over there. You’ll be safe with me.” He fervently hoped that was so. He reached out and pulled her older daughter away from her. The child whimpered in protest, but then wrapped herself around him tightly.

  He stood, one arm wrapped around the girl and the other hand clutching his pistol, and was relieved when the woman stood up and moved next to him. He looked at her and then down at the boy.

  “Keep up with me,” he said, “and try to be quiet.”

  He stepped out into the lane and a huge Infected, its face and chest smeared with blood, came barreling around a corner not six feet away. Saddaq shot it in the face and it collapsed in a heap at his feet. Saddaq grimaced. “So much for being quiet,” he said to himself. The boy stood in front of him, staring wide-eyed at the bloody Infected. He gave the boy a shove and said, “Move!” and they set off in the direction of the gate.

  Two more times he had to shoot attackers, but otherwise the area around them seemed largely deserted. Most people had apparently fled already, probably with the dead in hot pursuit. When they were almost to the gate, he signaled the other two to stop. He dropped to one knee and peered around the corner. Police squad cars blocked the gate. Dozens of uniformed men crouched behind them, both police and military. He recognized a couple of officers from his own precinct. Behind the cars he could see a pair of military assault vehicles, with men behind their big .50 calibers, which were pointed at the gate. In front of the gate lay hundreds of bodies, most naked, but some not. From deeper in the slums behind him, he could hear the sound of gunfire.

  “Hello, the gate!” he called. “Coming out!”

  Someone yelled, “Remain where you are! No one is allowed in or out!”

  He swore under his breath. “I’m a cop!” he shouted. “Sergeant Saddaq!”

  After a moment of silence, another voice yelled, “Okay. Come on.”

  He grabbed the woman by the hand and ran toward the gate, the boy right behind him. He ushered them through a gap between two police cars and squeezed through himself. He set the girl on the ground. She immediately grabbed her mother’s skirt and pressed her face into it.

  A large man in uniform with a fierce-looking mustache stepped up to him. “Saddaq! Who are these people? No one is to leave this area!”

 
“Captain Khouri!” He stood straight and saluted. “This is my wife Fatima, and these are my children!” The woman shot him a quick look, but said nothing.

  The captain frowned. “I thought you were a bachelor, Saddaq.”

  “No sir! This is my son.” He pushed him forward. “Tell the captain what your name is, boy.”

  The boy looked up defiantly. “Omar,” he said. “Like my father.”

  The captain looked at him for a moment and then looked at the woman and the other children. “All right. Go on.”

  “Captain, why aren’t they letting people out?”

  “The army has teams in there killing the Infected, but the government doesn’t want anyone to leave. They’re afraid the infection will spread.”

  He picked up the little girl again, and said, “Let’s go.”

  As soon as they were out of earshot of the barricade, the woman looked up at him and said, “Well, ‘husband,’ what now?” and smiled at him.

  Saddaq felt her smile spread through him like warm honey. He suddenly became aware of the child he held, of her little body clinging tightly to him for protection, and he made a decision. “We need to get out of the area. Do you trust me?”

  She held his gaze for a long moment, and then looked at the face of her daughter, pressed against Saddaq’s neck. She nodded. “I do.”

  “Let’s go,” he said.

  The streets were empty at first. Buildings were shuttered, the sidewalks were empty and no cars traveled on the road. Even the ubiquitous taxis had disappeared. Apparently word had spread of the Infected uprising. As they walked, he and Fatima talked about themselves and their lives. She had married her husband at age fifteen, a common thing in Muslim countries. He had been very good to her and the children, and they had loved each other. Omar thought it was easy to see why. She was pretty, with a quick wit and a mischievous smile. Her husband had owned his own taxicab which provided a decent if meager living for them all. They rented a one room apartment with a small kitchen and a bathroom right down the hall. He drove the cab twelve hours a day, six days a week. When he wasn’t driving, he rented the cab to one of his cousins, a man Fatima had never liked. A year ago the cousin had been drinking and smashed it into a telephone pole. He was killed and the cab was totaled, and their livelihood was gone.