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

by Harrison, William Hale

  “The people must fight to live, or the nation will be destroyed,” he declared. “Who else will teach them to fight? Teach them, that they may survive. No task bears more importance than this.”

  Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho

  June 19th

  Travis Cenarrusa and his younger brother Cody stood by their campsite in the foothills and watched a golden eagle soaring above them. It was a beautiful bird, but one not adverse to plucking a lamb out of the flock and flying off with it.

  The campsite offered a great view of the surrounding countryside and the 2,000 head of sheep that roamed the hillsides around them. Under a few trees nearby, their horses and pack animals stood in the shade, lazily chewing the sparse grass.

  On the other side of the flock, which is known to sheep men as a “band,” Travis watched the two big white dogs, Commodore and Cruiser, amble along, stopping occasionally to sniff the air. They were Great Pyrenees, a breed that came from the mountains between France and Spain. They were born sheepdogs—not the kind that drove sheep and herded them through bites and intimidation like a border collie, but the kind that lived placidly among the sheep and guarded them from predators. Cruiser was Commodore’s offspring, one of many in the area. Commodore was widely known for his intelligence and his fearlessness, traits which put him in high demand as a stud dog. He was older now, and he’d lost a step or two, but he was still the best sheep dog in the county.

  As they watched, Cruiser stopped and lifted his head, and then turned his body toward the forest of pines and scrub oaks down the hill.

  “Looks like Cruiser smells something,” Travis said to his brother. “Something’s got the sheep nervous too.” Some of the sheep down that way had begun milling around and bleating softly.

  “Probably a coyote,” Cody replied. Coyotes had gotten worse in the last few years. A growing wolf population in the high country drove the coyotes lower, down where men grazed their sheep. In spite of the dogs, they’d already lost four lambs this year in this band alone.

  Their grandfather Rick, who now ran the family ranch, had seven other bands like this totaling about 16,000 sheep. Every late winter thousands of lambs were born at the ranch in heated birthing sheds, and soon they and their mothers began the long slow drive across the desert plains and up into the foothills, where they grazed on white top, arrowleaf and cheat grass. In order to avoid overgrazing, the sheep had to be moved almost daily, until mid-August when they were rounded up and sheared, and the now mature lambs were sold to meat packers. Then it was a slow drive back to the ranch near Montour, where the ewes would give birth again next winter.

  Every young Cenarrusa male, and now a good number of the young women too, did their time with the flocks if they had any interest in staying in the family business, and often when they didn’t. It was considered a rite of passage in the Cenarrusa family, and had been so for a hundred years. This was Cody’s first year, and Travis’s third. He had found he really loved the life, the clean air, the open spaces, and life on a horse.

  It was looking like it might be a tough year financially. The price of lamb was taking a nosedive as export markets dried up and fewer people dined out. But the family had been doing this for 130 years or more, and they’d weathered plenty of other tough times.

  “Commodore has picked it up too,” his brother pointed. The older dog trotted quickly over to where Cruiser stood, nose in the air. Both dogs were now squared off in the direction of the woods. Even from a hundred yards off, you could clearly see their hackles were raised. He saw movement inside the treeline, and then three zombies burst out of the underbrush and charged up the hill toward the flock.

  “Infected!” Travis hollered, and they both grabbed their rifles leaning against a nearby log and began pelting down the slopes through the frightened sheep.

  They watched as the two big dogs raced down the hill to intercept the attackers, Commodore in the lead. The huge dog leapt at the first Infected and latched his teeth into its shoulder, and the two of them went rolling down the hill in a frenzy of teeth and fur. To their surprise, the second Infected changed direction and ran after, and when they came to a stop it leapt into the pile mouth first and bit deeply into the dog’s leg. Commodore emitted a piercing yelp that sounded almost like a human scream, and then started tearing into the Infected’s face and neck, trying to dislodge it. Travis brought his Winchester up and fired twice, hitting the thing soundly in the torso and hips, but it hung on. The other Infected regained its footing and launched itself at the dog, tearing away a big patch of skin and fur off his back.

  “Head shots!” his brother yelled. “Shoot him in the head!”

  “I know! I’m afraid I’ll hit Commie!”

  The dog yelped again and tore himself away from the Infected on his leg and skittered down the hill, his white coat streaked with blood. Then he reversed direction and charged straight back into the fray. They all three went down in a churning tangle behind a big clump of skeleton weed. Ain’t no quit in that dog, Travis thought.

  Cody got there first, fired three quick shots, and all movement ceased.

  Cruiser fared better. He had run in on the other Infected, sunk his teeth into its leg and dumped it off its feet. Now he danced just out of its reach as the thing crawled on all fours trying to catch him. Travis caught up with them and put a round through the back of the Infected’s head, which blew pieces of its skull onto the grass.

  Commodore came limping into sight. His left ear was mostly gone. A big flap of skin was hanging down off one leg, and his coat showed more red than white as blood seeped out of half a dozen deep wounds. Travis went down on one knee next to the dog and held him, and felt the big animal’s body wracked with shivers. He hurt bad, that was clear. He told Cody, “Run up and radio Grandpa, tell him we need a truck for Commie. Tell him I’m bringing him down on the old West Range trail, and I’ll meet him as soon as he can get here. And saddle up Cricket for me.”

  He picked up the huge hundred- and forty-pound dog and began plodding up the hill to the campsite as his brother sprinted ahead of him. By the time he got there, Cody had his Appaloosa saddled and ready, and was just signing off the radio. He went into his pack, pulled out a couple clean T-shirts and used his sheath knife to cut them into strips, and then bound up the dog’s wounds as best he could.

  “Grandpa said he’s on the way,” Cody told him. “He’ll bring help. Those sheep are scattered all over the place and we have to move them in case there are more of those things in the woods.”

  Travis handed off the dog to his brother, mounted up, and then lifted him onto his lap and draped his head over his shoulder. The dog’s head lolled limply. There was blood everywhere. Cruiser was there, whining softly. “I’ll do what I can for him, buddy,” he said.

  He started the horse down a game trail that headed downhill. He soon met up with a two-track jeep trail that could barely be called a road. Another half hour passed and he saw his grandfather’s old Ram pickup bouncing up the trail toward him. When it reached him, a burly Hispanic man jumped out of the passenger side and reached for the limp dog. “I’ll take Cricket back up to camp,” he said. “You ride down with Mister Rick.” He held the dog in his arms while Travis dismounted, and looked sadly at his bloody fur. “You’re a brave dog, Commodore,” he said.

  Travis jumped into the back seat of his grandfather’s truck and buckled himself in, and then took Commodore onto his lap. “Thanks, Chewie,” he said, and then his grandfather slammed the truck into gear and the took off.

  “So what the hell happened?” his grandfather yelled as the truck sluiced around a corner, spraying dirt and gravel.

  He related the events, and his grandfather shook his head. “Damn people are leaving off sick folks like they’re dumping an unwanted dog. I talked to the sheriff yesterday and he said they stopped a fella who had just dropped four people off along the road down near Hill City. All of ‘em
real sick, gettin’ ready to turn. They were walkin’ up the hill, headed for the ridgeline.” He shook his head angrily. “What the hell are people thinkin’? Nobody lives out here? We don’t have our own Infected, they have to bring us theirs?”

  The truck swerved onto blacktop, and accelerated. “I got Doc Larsen waiting for us at the clinic in Horseshoe Bend,” his grandfather said. “How’s he doin’?”

  Travis looked down at the bloody dog and then said sadly, “You can slow down, Grandpa. He’s gone.” He bent over and laid his head on the big dog’s chest. Commodore had been a fearless protector of his charges. He’d fended off attacks from coyotes, wolves and black bears. He’d been bitten by a rattlesnake, and even shot by some moron walking his dog off the leash around the flock, an act that was illegal as well as stupid. But he’d met his match this time.

  His grandfather banged his hand on the steering wheel. “Damn!”

  They sat around the table at dinner that night, his mom and dad, Joan and Ray, his great grandfather Paul, going on ninety-three but still active, and grandmother Holly, plus Uncle Frank and Aunt Becky, several other cousins and relations and their foreman, Hub Hollander. Conspicuously absent was Hub’s wife, Connie, and his three kids. Connie had succumbed to the parasite two weeks before. Hub’s kids were staying with her sister and her husband in Boise. You could see it weighed heavily on him.

  Mom and Grandma had put on their usual great spread: a big smoked ham from their smokehouse, potatoes, some early sweet corn and green beans from their garden, and homemade bread still warm from the oven.

  “I don’t see what we can do, Dad,” Uncle Frank said. “There’s millions of acres and hundreds of miles of road. It’s not like we can set up roadblocks. That’s not even close to being legal.”

  “Then we need to get a law passed! If we don’t, we’re going to get flooded with people from out of state! You know Phil Schieffer found about thirty people from California all camped out on his property on Arrowrock Reservoir? “

  “Yes, I heard that too, dear,” his grandmother said. “They were mostly families with little children. Phil said he didn’t have the heart to run them off. I don’t blame him. Are we going to start turning away mothers and babies?”

  “Grandpa, can I say something?” Madeline said from down the table, Travis’s third cousin whatever times removed. Madeline was whip-smart. At fifteen, she was preparing to enter her senior year of high school, two years ahead of schedule. She was a brilliant techie, the family’s IT expert.

  Her mom, Andrea, and Andrea’s husband Tom hadn’t been part of the family business. Tom was career military, a captain in the Army Rangers. When Madeline was three, Tom had been killed by a roadside bomb while serving in Afghanistan. Grandpa and Grandma had gone to the funeral in North Carolina, and had persuaded the devastated Andrea to come out to the ranch for a visit. She had stayed for two months, and only returned to the East Coast to sell her house and move everything back here. Grandpa had paid for her to go back to college at Boise State and she ended up with an MBA and now ran the family’s taxes and investments accounts.

  Madeline was a pretty girl with jet black hair, blue eyes and a generous smattering of freckles. She had always been a very serious, thoughtful child. Grandma had often said, “She’s the oldest little girl I ever met.”

  “I don’t think we’re seeing the full picture here,” she said. “The CDC has said that it seems like only around three percent of the population might have a natural immunity. Rates of infection keep climbing steadily everywhere in the world, and these spores have been found everywhere. There are probably some right here in this room. That means that sooner or later, everyone without a natural immunity will probably catch it.”

  “What are you saying, Maddy?” Grandma asked. “What does that mean for all of us?”

  “It means that all but nine people out of every hundred in this world are probably going to turn into flesh-eating zombies. More than likely in the next twelve months, the world as we know it is about to end.”

  “Oh no, child! I’m sure they’ll have a cure before that happens.”

  The other grownups around the table looked at each other knowingly. The End Of The World As We Know It. In the prepper community, this was known as TEOTWAWKI. They’d been preparing for this, or something like it, for years.

  Inverness, Illinois

  June 27th

  “I’m telling you, Don,” the angry woman on the TV said, “This plague is all a product of the CIA and the white racist American government! Who is dying? Black people! Brown people! Yellow people! Who isn’t dying? White people!”

  Dan Booth shut the TV off in disgust. “That woman should carry a plant around everywhere she goes, to make up for the oxygen she wastes by breathing. And what the hell is CNN thinking, airing crap like that?” He sat back in the big sofa and shook his head angrily. “‘White people not dying?’ There are tens of millions of dead in Russia, and millions more in Europe. This is dangerous stuff! It’s irresponsible, and it’s tearing this country apart!”

  Stories of riots and protests in the big cities flooded the news daily. Almost every city that had a large permanent population of poor people suffered from outbreaks, and the streets filled with angry people who believed that the government withheld a cure.

  Most of the big old manufacturing cities in the Northeast and Midwest had been hit hardest. Being in the eastern part of the country, the parasite had hit there first and their numbers were building fastest. Cleveland, Detroit, Boston, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Albany, even Washington, DC, blazed with nightly confrontations between police and rioters and looters, while Infected ran wild. New York had been fairly quiet so far other than a huge outbreak in Queens, but everyone there seemed to be holding their breath, waiting for the explosion. Chicago had some big riots on the South and West sides, and the whole city felt like a wildfire ready for a careless match.

  California was getting to be flat out crazy. LA was a seething mass of violence. The Democratically controlled government there was actually threatening to secede from the country unless the President distributed the supposed “cure” and resigned. Meanwhile, an angry mob in Sacramento had nearly succeeded in burning down the capital building.

  On the other side of the world, India had rolled back Pakistan’s invasion force, and launched a successful drive to take Pakistan’s portion of Kashmir. Indian troops had then crossed the border into Pakistan. Pakistan had responded by launching a nuclear attack on Ludhiana, an industrial city of almost two million people in Punjab. Defense systems had brought down both missiles. India lashed back by launching a pair of missiles at nearby Lahore. Both 30-megaton missiles found their mark, and Lahore had been destroyed. Causalities were expected to top five million in the near term. There were now reports of a coup in Islamabad, but by pro-war or anti-war forces, no one seemed to know.

  A day earlier, Iran had sent three army corps through Iraq with the obvious intention of attacking Israel, led by the Quds Force, the Iranian equivalent to the SS. They draped their tanks and armored personnel carriers with signs that read “Death to Israel” and “Death to the Jews” in Farsi. As they crossed the Syrian border, the Israeli prime minister held a live broadcast. Cameras cut away to an Israeli base “somewhere in the Negev,” as an ICBM erupted out of the ground and soared toward the southeast. The PM spoke quietly but firmly, in English, while an Arabic translation scrolled across the bottom of the screen. He related Israel’s attempts to find a peaceful resolution to the Middle East conflict and the resulting successes and failures of negotiations. Meanwhile behind him an enormous monitor tracked the progress of the missile on a giant map of the region.

  People in Riyadh and Mecca breathed a sigh of relief when they realized they were not the target. As the speech continued, the missile flew past the coast of Yemen, over the Gulf of Aden and out into the Arabian Sea. A television camera mounted on a dr
one picked it up live as it ended its flight. A speedboat had used bright red dye to create a circle about 100 feet in diameter in the open sea. The missile splashed into the exact center of the circle, a bullseye from 3500 kilometers.

  At that point, the Prime Minister looked steadily into the camera and announced that the Israeli nation possessed over three hundred nuclear warheads, plus the means to deliver them. When the first Iranian soldier set foot in Israel, or that of any proxy, or the first Iranian bomb or missile landed on Israeli soil, the government of Israel would institute the Samson Option, which would involve delivering a nuclear warhead to the capital of every Muslim country from Kazakhstan and Pakistan to Morocco and Mali, to every holy place in the Muslim religion, and every Muslim city with a population of half a million or more. Behind him the feed changed to an alphabetical scrolling of all the cities that were targeted. The names were printed in both English and Arabic. He then ended his address by saying, “There will be peace or there will be death,” in perfect Arabic.

  Much of the world’s press immediately responded by calling it an “outrageous threat,” or a “great crime against humanity.” Analysts noted, however, that the Iranians stopped in their tracks. Two days later a violent coup by the army in Iran toppled the government. A large number of mullahs and government officials were arrested, and the army was recalled home.

  Dan’s friend Darius Whitehall leaned forward and scooped up a handful of peanuts from the bowl on the coffee table. “I don’t know many people who actually believe this conspiracy stuff, but a lot of black folks are talking about it, wondering if it could be true.”