Inside each case was the body of a small child, no more than three or four years old. They were balled up tightly in a fetal position and bound that way from head to toe in duct tape. The tall man leaned over and examined them as they lay motionless, and then poked them each in turn. They both twisted and struggled for a moment before they became quiet again.
“Ah, they have both survived the flight. I had my doubts,” said the sheikh.
Small children seldom became undead Infected. Most of them never survived their first contact with a carrier of the parasite, dying quickly from blood loss or trauma after a bite. Even among those who did survive, as well as those who contracted via the spores in the atmosphere, most of them died while the disease took over their bodies, before they had a chance to turn. No one knew why this was, but very young Infected were very rare. It had taken a large number of attempts to produce these two and the other four who were bound for Chicago and Las Vegas.
The following morning, vehicles began arriving early at Fazid Importers, each carrying two or three men. Other businesses in the area, when interviewed later, said they noticed nothing unusual except perhaps a somewhat larger than customary number of cars in the lot. When everyone had arrived there were over two dozen people there, all men and all Middle Eastern. They stood in clusters and talked quietly among themselves. All of them were freshly showered and shaved.
The tall sheikh held up his hands and the crowd went silent. “Brothers!” he said. “We are here to strike an historic blow against the Great Satan! Thanks to your sacrifice, no longer will they be able to feel safe, even in the hearts of their greatest cities!”
There were cries of “Allahu Akbar!” from the group.
“You have all cleansed yourself, I hope, in preparation for your ordeal, and performed the necessary prayers?” There were murmurs of assent. “Please, those of you who have been Chosen, step forward and receive your Blessing.”
The cases lay open and the two Infected toddlers lay on the table, with the tape unwrapped from their heads. The men who had been selected to die formed two lines, and when their turns came, each of them stuck a hand or a forearm against the things’ mouths and were bitten. Khalid and Hamad stood by and wrapped each wound in gauze and spoke quiet words of encouragement to each man. When they were all bitten, the Sheikh picked up a hatchet and beheaded both children.
“Now, my friends, you will spend the rest of your time here in prayer and contemplation, until Allah guides your souls to Heaven. Follow me.” He led them to an area in the back of the warehouse where there were two dozen cots set up. On each cot lay a copy of the Koran. “And now,” he said, “We wait.”
Three nights later, a few minutes after 10:00 in the evening, the Sheikh, Khalid, Hamad and two other men stood near two large panel trucks parked in the warehouse. Both of them had lettering on the sides. One read “Jezry Florists,” and the other read “Farouk’s Catering.” Both had ramps built next to them, allowing access to their roofs. Both roofs had open trapdoors. Inside one truck was twelve Infected, and inside the other were ten. The entire warehouse reeked so badly of Infected, the men’s eyes were watering and they held handkerchiefs to their noses.
“We can’t wait any longer. Everyone else is ready.” Two men still sat in the back room on their cots. They were brothers, from Yemen. Both of them had been bitten on the hand. Both their hands had become inflamed, and then the inflammation had slowly gone away. Now they appeared to be perfectly healthy, although in need of a shower and shave. One of them looked dejected, but the other one tried hard not to show his relief.
“What shall we do with them?” Khalid asked. “We can’t leave them here.”
Hamad said, “I think we should kill them.”
The sheikh sighed and shook his head. “No,” he said. “Allah has chosen not to take their lives. Perhaps they aren’t of pure enough spirit, but perhaps He is simply saving them for another purpose. Bring them to me.”
When the men stood before him, he addressed them. “Allah has seen fit that you do not die today. Here.” He pulled out his wallet and handed them some money. “Take this. Disappear. Allah be with you.”
Twenty-five minutes later, both trucks sat at stoplights in Midtown Manhattan, one at 47th at the north end of Times Square, and the other at 42nd, opposite Bryant Park. On this warm Saturday night, both locations were packed with people.
In downtown Chicago, the annual Gospel Music Festival had just ended in Millennium Park. Tens of thousands of people were streaming west toward Michigan Avenue, and the buses and trains that would take them home.
In front of the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas, the sun was setting and the fountains erupted in a fantastic display. Hundreds of people crowded around to watch. Thousands more bustled up and down the broad sidewalks.
At exactly thirty minutes past the hour, in three cities, six drivers pressed six hidden buttons and six doors on panel trucks rolled up into the roofs, and a gang of Infected poured out of each truck. People screamed and ran, and were pulled down and savaged. Infected charged from one victim to the next as people tripped over each other trying to escape.
Police reacted immediately, rushing into the chaos with guns drawn, but the driver and passenger from each truck dismounted with machine guns in hand and began spraying the approaching cops and firing randomly at people around them. The carnage was horrific.
In Chicago, one Infected chased people down into the busy subway station at Monroe and State. The crowd panicked at the sight and in the subsequent pushing and shoving, a half a dozen people tumbled off the platform and into the path of an oncoming train. Many more were bitten and soon turned.
In Las Vegas, the shooters from the trucks had managed to kill most of the police on the scene, and several of the Infected charged into crowded casinos, wreaking havoc.
The death toll, including all those who were bitten and subsequently succumbed to the parasite, amounted to over twelve hundred. The lowest total was one hundred and twenty-seven in Chicago, where the crowd was mostly local and a relatively large number of them were carrying concealed firearms. Far fewer people in New York were armed, where the city still clung to its anti-gun laws, but there were more police on the streets. The worst total was in Las Vegas. Because almost all of the people on the Strip were tourists, hardly any of them were armed, and it was up to police and casino security people to deal with terrorists and Infected alike.
The Saudis traced the attacks to a group within the royal family itself. For two generations, certain members of the family had supported terrorists around the globe, funneling millions of petro dollars to Al Qaida and ISIS and other radical groups. They had been tolerated, as the Saudi family walked a delicate tightrope between the West and the fundamentalist Wahhabi Islam sect they funded. But this far exceed the limits of anyone’s tolerance, especially when the Secret Police discovered the camp where scores of children had been deliberately infected to produce the six that were used for the mission, Hundreds of arrests were made, and many gallons of royal blood were spilled in public beheadings.
However, in the US, the damage was done. The attacks were live-streamed in a dozen different media, and the public watched in horror as naked zombies ran down the streets covered in blood, and adults and even small children were torn apart in front of their eyes. The next day, a stunned silence seemed to settle over the country. Very few people left their homes. Major events were canceled and shopping malls, train stations and other public venues were shut down.
Then came the inevitable political backlash, as opportunists screeched out their demands. Resign or be impeached, they told the President. Purge the CIA and the Department of Health and Human Services, they shouted. Nervous demonstrators, warily eyeing the crowds around them, massed in front of the Army base at Fort Detrick and the CDC in Atlanta, demanding an immediate release of the secret “cure.”
And all the while, trillions o
f tiny spores swirled through the atmosphere.
South Elgin, Illinois
June 7th
The old man sat in a wrought iron chair on his front sidewalk, a bottle of beer on the table next to him, tiny rivulets of perspiration rolling down its side. He’d spent a long time at the gun range in Dundee today, and he could feel it in his forearms. He put in an hour or so there almost every day now, working to bring his shooting skills back to where they had been in his younger days, back when he shot competitively. He’d never been a consistent winner, but he usually placed in the top five. In his prime, he could put three rounds into a target the size of a playing card at twenty-five yards, and his double-tap was so fast it sounded like a single shot. Now that target would have to be the size of a man’s head, and his double-tap was two distinct reports, but still, he thought with some pride, not bad for a man who was looking at his seventieth birthday in the rear-view mirror.
The afternoon beer was something he allowed himself only rarely. He’d been quite the drinker in high school, partying with the rest of the football team, but he was a mean drunk. He’d get liquored up and all the rage and self-loathing he carried around every day would sometimes erupt, and he’d end up in a fistfight on the front lawn. One night a friend of the older brother of a teammate said something crude to a girl at a party, and Owen called him on it. The older guy was twenty, and refused to back down, so they ended up outside. Owen was three years younger and half a head shorter, but he was strong and tough as nails. When it became obvious the guy was clearly losing the fight, he pulled a knife and came at Owen. He responded by grabbing an empty beer bottle off the grass and beating hell out of the guy, putting him in the hospital with broken bones in his face, and a broken wrist where Owen had disarmed him.
There were plenty of witnesses who affirmed that the guy pulled the knife before Owen touched the bottle, and the Chief of Police, a man named “Weeb” Elliot was one of the men Owen’s dad played poker with every Wednesday at the VFW, so no charges were filed. But the next day, Weeb called him to the station and sat him down for a hard talk. He told Owen he’d seen many young men start out like him, full of anger and violence, who used liquor as an escape. Mostly they ended up dead or in jail, and did Owen want to do that to his mother? You think hard about that, son, he had said, and Owen did. Since then he’d allowed himself only a couple beers or glasses of wine, and avoided hard liquor entirely.
He watched a pair of orioles building their graceful marble-bag shaped nest in the small catalpa tree a dozen yards away. Red winged blackbirds chattered around the marsh, a wren sang somewhere nearby, and over on the river a couple Canada geese were honking. If only it could stay like this forever, he thought.
But the news lately had been nothing but bad. All the stock and commodity markets were closed indefinitely. The Fed was working hard to provide cash for banks to keep them solvent, but everyone was pulling their money out and financial institutions were teetering. The number of confirmed cases of the Tawada-Soseki parasite in the US had now topped 1,200,000 and was rapidly accelerating. Travel into the US had been banned from everywhere but Canada. Outbreaks in Mexico and Central America, including a huge one in Mexico City, had driven a flood of refugees toward the US. Millions of refugees were said to be massing at the Southern border. The Border Patrol teamed up with the Army, laying out thousands of miles of razor wire, and there was talk of minefields and orders to shoot on sight.
Overseas, things were a lot worse. The infection rates in Korea and Japan and the rest of East Asia were over 18 percent, and rising steadily. China had finally admitted they were also hard hit, and said they were approaching a hundred million casualties. North Korea had instituted a total media blackout, but rumors had it that its people had finally become disillusioned with their god-king and swaths of the country were in open revolt.
Vladivostok, Russia’s lone Pacific Ocean port, had been totally overrun. The entire city was burning. Satellite photos showed the smoke plume trailing two hundred miles out over the ocean.
It seemed that wherever there were the worst slums, there was the greatest number of Infected. Jakarta burned and police were barely in control in Manila. Calcutta was a war zone. Indian authorities were barely holding on in New Delhi and Mumbai. Pakistan, also hard hit, decided to take advantage of India’s woes by launching a major invasion of the Indian portion of Kashmir, which it had eyed hungrily for so many decades. India retaliated with masses of men and armor, and a full scale war raged, including conventional missile attacks on each other’s cities. The UN Secretary General flew back and forth between capitals, trying to keep the situation from degenerating into a nuclear war.
One of the worst places in the world was Cairo, a city of twenty million people where over half the population lived in slums. Some Doomsday cult had managed to hide tens of thousands of infected and then released them all at once. The southeast quarter of the city was virtually gone with fires burning unchecked. According to news reports, police had managed to seal off some place called the City of the Dead, and there were supposed to be as many as three million zombies locked up inside its walls. Millions of people were streaming west across the Nile, seeking safety and shelter. A tent city of more than a million people had sprung up at the feet of the pyramids, but food was said to be in short supply.
In Europe, the situation was deteriorating fast. Infection rates were now at six percent and climbing. Modern civilization is a very complicated and interconnected machine, which takes an enormous amount of energy to keep running. Problems tend to cascade quickly. An outbreak in a city causes people to flee, tying up the roads. Because roads are clogged, food, fuel and goods can’t be delivered. Store shelves go empty. Factories shut down because they can’t get parts. All over Europe country after country declared martial law.
Social media had portrayed the holding areas where people waited out their infections as horrible, inhumane places. They were right, but the public perception caused many people to refuse to turn in family members, keeping them hidden at home, often with disastrous results. Hospices opened where people could wait in peace and dignity, but staff and family members were often unwilling or unable to handle people who had turned, and sometimes entire facilities became hives of Infected.
The United States was getting blamed for the outbreak by a surprising number of people. Local governments needed someone to pin their woes on. Because of the way the plague was spreading, from East to West, people saw their own countries being wracked by the parasite while cases in the US were comparatively insignificant. Added to that was the fact that mass outbreaks where Infected roamed the streets and hunted down victims, were, like every other kind of misfortune, more common in poor neighborhoods, which meant a disproportionate number of the victims were downtrodden citizens of the third world. Enemies of the US were quick to blame the whole thing as a plot of the CIA or white supremacists to conquer the entire planet.
Anti-US riots occurred across the globe. Embassies burned and American expatriates were murdered. American troops overseas were largely confined to their bases while defenses were hastily erected; embassies and consulates closed and officials posted travel advisories for much of the third world. Back in the US, social justice warriors screamed for blood reckoning, and craven members of Congress leapt to the front of the parade to demand investigations into the accusations of a deliberate plot.
Congress had been carefully and frequently briefed about the parasite’s progressive nature, and they all knew how ridiculous the charges were, but that didn’t stop some of them from pandering to the mob. Votes were still votes.
The old man was thinking about the fact that he had yet to see an Infected person in the flesh, or a “zeke” as the military called them, when the screaming started. His first thought was that it was probably the band of kids who were always playing on the quiet little street, but then a note of terror had him up and out of his chair. He ran around the corne
r of his garage and could see the naked form of an Infected crouched over a body sprawled down the concrete steps of a nearby building. He saw with a shock that the Infected was Susie, a pretty young red-headed mom of two little kids who lived at the top of those stairs with her husband, Jerry. The children and the few adults on the street were scattering like chickens under a diving hawk. The zeke’s head snapped up and it focused on them. It took an awkward step forward and tumbled down the stairs.
He shouted, “Boys, harass!” and the two big dogs took off at full gallop straight toward the bloody thing. He ran inside his front door, pulled open the drawer of a small antique desk, grabbed a gun and ran back out. He’d picked up the gun, an old Detonics .45, years before. It was a well-made gun, and one of the first .45s to be small enough for concealed carry. Don Johnson packed one on the Miami Vice television show as his ankle-gun and so for a while they were popular. But they were expensive, and after the show got canceled people quit buying them, so the company quit making them. There were better guns around, but he’d always liked keeping this one in that desk drawer, in case the wrong kind of company showed up at the front door.
The boys had reached the Infected and were, as commanded, harrying it, dancing around, feinting and withdrawing and keeping it distracted. Both the dogs were highly trained; it had been a hobby of his for decades. In addition to the regular Schutzhund commands, he had added a few of his own, including this one. They were keeping just out of the Infected’s reach, barking and snapping and generally making themselves more interesting than anyone who might be nearby and in danger. They were obviously enjoying themselves mightily. Both of their stubby tails vibrated at high speed.
The thing paid almost no attention to the old man as he approached. It leapt at Tank instead, teeth bared, missed, and fell to the ground. As it scrambled to get up, he shot it twice. The first round passed through its shoulder beside its neck. The second round hit it in the face and blew out of the back of its head, nearly decapitating it in the process. It reminded the old man of one of his favorite T-shirts. It had a picture of a .45 bullet, and the slogan “Short, Fat, and Slow Still Gets the Job Done.” Especially when it’s a hollow point, he thought.
The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Page 21
