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

by Harrison, William Hale

  Jack heard more firing coming from up the street, and looked over to see the rear doors of the armored truck standing open, and several men in SWAT uniforms making their way inside the row of cars parked along the curb. Caught between the SWAT troopers and the rest of them, the last few gangbangers cleared out, running off with their heads low between their shoulders as they sought the safety of the neighborhood.

  Jack got to his knees and looked back toward Anita. She was lying on her back, staring at the sky. Blood soaked her blouse below her collarbone, a deep scarlet stain. He grabbed her hand, and turned her face toward him so he could look into her eyes. They were glassy and unfocused. “Baby!” Jack yelled. “Baby, can you hear me?” She didn’t respond. Frantic, Jack looked around. There were already five ambulances and a couple firetrucks on the scene, waiting for the shootout down the street to end. The EMTs and several firefighters were working on the other wounded. Jack yelled, “Medic! I need help!” and one of the EMTs came trotting over, her bag in hand.

  She jerked Anita’s blouse open and more blood came pouring out. “Damn!” she swore. She reached into her bag and pulled out something that looked like a tampon and stuck it into the wound, and then laid a thick cloth like a baby’s diaper over it. “I need you to press on this, hard. Can you do that?” Jack nodded. She ran over to another EMT who was bandaging an older woman’s arm. A huge man with red hair, a big red walrus mustache and tattoos covering both arms, his uniform shirt stretched tight across his massive shoulders. She tapped him on the arm, and a moment later they were wheeling a gurney over to where Anita lay.

  The next thing Jack knew, they were speeding down the street in an ambulance, siren blaring. The female EMT had rigged a bag of clear liquid on an intravenous drip, while the big guy had jumped behind the wheel and stomped on the gas. “I’m Sandy. That’s Griz,” she said. “Let me look at that.”

  “At what?”

  She nodded at Jack’s right shoulder. Jack craned his neck and saw that his torn sleeve, and blood soaking the fabric. He remembered the sting he’d felt when he pulled Anita down to avoid the gunfire. “It doesn’t hurt,” he told her.

  “That’s the adrenaline. When it wears off, it’ll sting like a bitch. Keep that pressure on her wound while I put a dressing on your arm.” She tore open his shirt, revealing a bleeding groove across his skin. She squirted it with something, dried it, peeled the backing off a dressing and slapped it on the wound. “Bullet grazed you, nothing serious. Not deep enough to stitch.” She looked down at Anita.

  She bent next to Jack and said, “Move your hand.” The cloth was totally soaked with Anita’s blood. She pulled a fresh cloth out of a drawer under the seat and slapped it onto the wound. “More pressure,” she said. She turned to the driver. “I think she nicked the VC.”

  “What’s a VC?” Jack demanded.

  “Vena Cava. In this case, the superior vena cava. It’s a big blood vessel that collects the blood from your head and upper body and pumps it back to the heart. If she nicked it, she’s losing a lot of blood internally. Oh damn!” Anita’s body started to convulse, her heels tapping on the gurney. “She’s bleeding out internally!” the woman yelled. “How much time?”

  “We should be at U of I in three minutes… oh shit!” The ambulance swung around the corner and the street ahead was blocked. A semi-truck was jackknifed across the road and dozens of people were looting its contents. Griz swung the ambulance up onto the sidewalk, his siren blaring, and laid on his horn. The sound was deafening. Most people scattered like chickens, except for three girls who looked about 16. They strolled down the middle of the sidewalk, deliberately blocking it. Griz rolled up behind them and hit his horn again.

  One of the girls raised her middle finger in the air, and the three kept strolling, ostentatiously taking their sweet time. Griz opened his window, leaned out and yelled, “God damn it, move your asses! We got a woman dying in here!” One of the girls turned and let loose an invective-laden tirade that would have made a sailor blush. Griz turned the steering wheel and made for a small gap between the girls and a parked car. They leapt out of his way, barely avoiding getting hit, and shrieked curses at him as the ambulance passed.

  “We’ll probably hear about that one,” said Sandy.

  “Let ‘em bitch. We’ve got the whole thing on video.”

  Anita’s convulsions had subsided for a few moments, but they returned with greater force. Her heels hammered on the gurney. “We’re losing her!” Sandy yelled.

  Griz wheeled the wailing ambulance around a corner. “Almost there!” The hospital was a few blocks down. Traffic parted quickly in front of them, and they sped into the ambulance bay and hit the brakes. A nurse and two attendants raced for the back door of the ambulance and threw it open.

  Anita’s convulsions stopped and her body went limp. Sandy shook her head and said quietly, “Too late.”

  Two hours later, Jack sat across the street in a bar called The Mirage, nursing a double scotch. He knew the bar by reputation as a favorite of the staff at the University of Illinois Hospital, where Anita’s body now lay. They had rushed her into the ER, and in minutes had cracked her chest open and stitched up the vein, but despite their best efforts they couldn’t get her heart restarted. That was how they described it to Jack. “Despite our best efforts.” After forty-five minutes they had pronounced her dead.

  He had phoned her parents, who now lived in Nashville where they had three grandkids. Her parents seemed stunned. They’d already lost their daughter-in-law and one of the kids to the plague. They didn’t seem to comprehend what they were hearing, as though their other tragedies had filled them so much that they weren’t capable of absorbing any new ones. Jack hung up and figured he’d check back with them tomorrow.

  He’d waited around to be interviewed by the police, both about Anita’s shooting and his part in the gunfight. From the police he’d learned that the battle still raged, a running fight between various local gang groups and the police, and that it had spread to other areas in other neighborhoods. The gangs, it seemed, were making a play for their own undisputed control of their territories. That was the big story, but the other one was that the fires ignited during the ambush and subsequent gunfight were currently raging out of control.

  A few weeks earlier, Saturday Night Live had aired a skit where a family had a cousin show up out of the blue, Cousin Eddie, played by the evening’s guest host, James Franco. Cousin Eddie started showing symptoms, and the family drove him from transition center to center, looking for someone who could take him off their hands, and the usual comedy resulted. Finally they brought him back home and locked him in the spare bedroom. There, he turned. Franco then stripped off his clothes and in network television’s first incident of scripted full frontal male nudity, Franco turned to the camera and sang “Mister Lonely.” Cousin Eddie thereafter became the popular term for any Infected who was intentionally locked up in a building.

  The attack on the news vans and the waiting ambulances was bad enough, but the first crew in to put out the original fire had been attacked by a Cousin Eddie, and one firefighter was badly bitten. Three more Cousin Eddies were found in the next seven houses. Firefighters refused to go into the area until each house got checked out first by the police, and Jack couldn’t blame them. With the cops tied up battling the gangbangers, none could be spared to go house to house with the firefighters. The fire spread unchecked in the July heat, and the old houses lit up like piles of kindling. Already over twenty city blocks were engulfed, and the fire slowly spread southeast, pushed by the summer wind.

  He’d had the TV set nearest him at the bar tuned to the news. There was no mention yet of Anita’s death. Jack wondered if there ever would be, with so many people dying. The video showed armored humvees and personnel carriers driven by Illinois National Guard units heading into the neighborhoods. The Guard had been called out several weeks before, as clusters of undea
d kept popping up around the city, taxing the ability of the police to respond. Now they were being called into combat.

  Infection rates were estimated to have topped 25 percent of the population worldwide, overwhelming collection centers. During the first few weeks of the pandemic, the country had been able to keep up with the relatively tiny portion of the population that started showing symptoms. A million people sounds like a lot, but in a country of 325,000,000, it’s a small percentage. As the number of people with symptoms grew, a greater and greater percentage of the population was required to deal with them. Even though people who were symptomatic showed obvious physical signs two or three days before they turned, a certain percentage inevitably fell through the cracks in the most diligent areas.

  “Flying squads” of soldiers, police and even civilian volunteers were formed to deal with any local outbreak before it got out of hand. But as infection rates continued to rise, the country was faced with as many as half a million people per day showing symptoms, and that meant that government-run facilities were often completely overwhelmed, and more and more people were turning and becoming Infecteds outside of anyone’s notice.

  In response, neighborhoods and towns began opening their own ad hoc transition centers in churches and empty businesses. Electrocution, the accepted method for dispatching the Infected, became unreliable as the city began to experience more frequent power outages. Different means were used in different centers. In most places, the preferred method was to kill the victim before they turned and presented a real threat to their handlers. Victims were shot, stabbed, beheaded, strangled and even poisoned.

  Nice people who, just a few weeks before, drove trucks, sold insurance and answered phones now spent their days killing their neighbors. Jack wondered what kind of long-term effect it would have on them.

  Some people were appalled at these “death factories,” as the press labeled them. Many people were unwilling to turn over family members under these gruesome circumstances. Jack couldn’t imagine being the parent of a child, and having to walk their son or daughter up to a building and hand them over, knowing that in hours they would be, well, “euthanized” if you were feeling charitable, “murdered” if you weren’t. Lots of people were handling the situation by locking the symptomatics in a bedroom or closet and keeping them there, sometimes nailing a board over the door, and trying to pretend their loved one hadn’t just turned into a flesh-eating zombie. A Cousin Eddie.

  The Cousin Eddie solution worked with widely varying results. Ironically, in the highest crime-rate neighborhoods, it was often quite effective, because many of those homes had bars on the windows to prevent break-ins, which were just as effective in preventing break-outs. In areas with less crime, it was often just a stop-gap measure. Infecteds with access to a window would throw themselves at the outside the moment they saw movement, unaware and uncaring about a pane of glass in their way. Most people knew enough to nail boards over their windows before they enclosed someone in a room, but not always. People all over the country quickly associated the sound of a window shattering with another Infected loose on their streets.

  Even in homes where the confinement worked, however, it was very hard on the families. The Infected reacted to sounds, and could be heard on the other side of the door or wall scrabbling to get at the source of any noise they heard. Families either had to walk around literally on tip toes, or be tortured by the sound of someone that they loved who was now a mindless monster inches away on the other side of the door. Infected were also notoriously smelly, with a stench like old pond muck and vinegar, something that no amount of air fresheners could hide.

  In some neighborhoods, vacant houses were used as mini transition centers. People would wait until their loved ones became sufficiently addled and itchy that they were clearly near to turning, and then they’d be locked in an empty bedroom of a vacant house. When all the rooms were full, someone would spray paint an X across the front door, often with the initials “C.E.” to warn the unwary.

  A surprising number dealt with the problem simply by denying it, by disregarding what they were seeing with their own eyes while their family member’s hands and lips and eyes turned gray-blue, and their bodies became streaked like Roquefort cheese. These people often became Infected themselves, when they woke to a world of pain as their loved one sunk their teeth deep into their flesh and tore out mouthfuls of meat.

  “Hey, sorry to intrude. Mind if we join you?”

  Jack looked around. The two EMTs, Sandy and Griz, stood at the bar nearby.

  “Yeah, sure,” Jack said. “Let me buy you a drink.” Jack knocked back the rest of his scotch and ordered a round for the table. “I want to thank you two for everything you did today. I know you really tried.”

  Sandy grimaced. “Yeah, we heard she didn’t make it. That’s tough, losing someone like that.” She put her hand on his arm. “Were you two close?”

  Jack smiled sadly. “Yeah, we’d been seeing each other just for fun for a while, but in the last few weeks, it got pretty intense. Not love, exactly, but…”

  Griz nodded. “I know what you mean, brother.” He tapped a tattoo on his forearm of a skull on two crossed rifles. Above, it said, “US Army Rangers,” and below, “Rangers Lead The Way.” “When you spend time with people in combat, you get really tight.”

  Jack looked at the two of them together. Griz was huge and weathered, probably around forty-five, with an enormous walrus mustache and flaming red hair already streaked with gray. You could tell he’d seen his share of trouble in life. Sandy, smaller and a lot younger, had long brunette hair and a good figure under her EMT blues. “How about you two?” he asked. “You a couple?”

  Sandy smiled and Griz laughed and shook his head. “No, man,” he said. “I’m married. However, I would gladly kill for this lady. She’s the absolute best.”

  Sandy blushed and then reached up and kissed him on the cheek. “You’re such a sweetie,” she said.

  Griz drained his glass. “Gotta run. I promised Bobbie we’d go out to dinner tonight, if we can find a place that’s still open.” He looked at Sandy. “You need a lift?”

  “No, I’m good,” she said. She turned to Jack. “You mind some company?”

  “I don’t think I’ll be much fun, but I wouldn’t mind having someone to talk to.”

  Pike County, Illinois

  July 18th

  Doctor Evan Booth pulled off the highway onto a county road in his Mercedes GLC. In the passenger seat sat Owen. It had been a long drive from the Chicago suburbs down to Pike County. He had left Dan and Terry’s place that morning after breakfast, swung by to pick up his brother on the way, and together they’d headed toward his log home downstate with some more supplies in the back that he’d managed to scrounge. The Interstate on the way down presented a microcosm of what was happening elsewhere in the country. In some stretches, the grass on either side of the highway appeared to have been mown within the last couple weeks. In other places it grew waist high.

  He’d felt lucky to find a gas station with fuel available. The Chicago area was in better shape in that regard than many other parts of the country. The enormous BP refinery and storage area over the state line in Whiting, Indiana, still pumped out both gas and diesel so shortages around Chicago were generally temporary. Other parts of the country were not so fortunate. Most of the nation’s gasoline was refined on the Louisiana and Texas coasts, and transporting that gas to all parts of the country had become increasingly difficult. Total infection numbers in the US had now topped an estimated 35,000,000, meaning more than one person in ten was either dead, dying, or undead. Some roads were blocked, some trucks had vanished, some drivers were dead or gone missing. The nation’s fuel supply was a reflection of almost every other industry; it still persevered, but the going got tougher by the day.

  Morale around the country was falling fast. Companies were closing their doors, often because
of a lack of goods to sell. Major retailers like Walmart had acres of empty shelves, as imports from China and the Far East dwindled to a trickle. Food imports were also way down as local governments world-wide were banning the export of anything edible. The agricultural industry at home was having a hard time harvesting, processing and transporting food to retail outlets. The government tried to coordinate their efforts, but as Ronald Reagan once said, “The nine scariest words in the English language are, ‘We’re from the government and we’re here to help.’” Still, they had managed to open the southern border a crack and allow in enough farm workers to help bring in the harvests, especially from the vast vegetable farms in the San Fernando Valley.

  The biggest problem, of course, was hoarding. It didn’t take a genius to see that everything was crashing, and that the extra case of baked beans you managed to snag today might keep your family alive for another week. Everyone did it. In many areas, when a family left their home or when the last family member succumbed to the parasite, neighbors would gather at their house and divvy up whatever they had. Sometimes the process was peaceful and other times not.

  The number of home invasions, where raiders killed the inhabitants and looted their supplies, was off the charts, especially in urban areas.

  People who still went to work every day left their homes each morning in fear that when they returned their house would have been looted, and everything they counted on for survival would be gone. Neighborhood watch groups formed everywhere. Armed men and women patrolled the streets, and road blocks were set up to deter anyone who didn’t have a right to be there from entering. Looters were often shot on sight. Police would be called, and they’d usually come out and scratch their heads and say, “Yep, he’s dead,” then get in their cars and leave.