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

by Harrison, William Hale

  Evan and Owen returned to the house, and went inside. It had been stripped of anything of survival value. All the food, the guns, the gear… everything was gone. In the living room, there were empty photo albums scattered everywhere. In the fireplace, they found the remains of a recent fire. The squatters had built up a big roaring bonfire and then fed the contents of all of Evan’s photo albums into it, all the remains of his marriage to Julie.

  He collapsed on the floor by the fireplace and sobbed.

  His brother knelt next to him. “Geez, that’s tough,” he said. “Bunch of real assholes.” He put his arm around his brother’s shoulders.

  “I think we need to give up on this place though. Everyone who left here is going to romanticize this as some kind of paradise they were unjustly kicked out of, and sooner or later they’ll show up with a gang intent on taking it back.”

  Andover, England

  July 24th

  ARE YOU INFECTED? The British Army is seeking volunteers among active service and retired members who are showing signs of infection. Subjects are needed for testing to discover the abilities and limitations of those who have Succumbed. We are not offering a cure. Must be in otherwise good health. Please click on the link…

  Captain Jeremy Whitman, MD, sat forward in his chair, the monitor turned so the two other men in the room, Major John Deevers, MD and Colonel Liam Finnie, MD could see it. On the speaker phone was Nigel Fortier, Home Secretary.

  “Yes, we have the application here, Mister Secretary. ‘Captain Harry Potter.’ Retired RAF helicopter pilot. I assume this is some kind of joke.”

  “It’s not, I’m afraid,” the Secretary said solemnly. “The last name is an alias, of course. It should read ‘Wales.’ ‘Captain Harry Wales.’”

  Deevers and Finnie sat up straight, startled, their eyes wide. Doctor Whitman started to say, “Then who… Oh my God! Harry Wales? You mean Prince Harry?”

  “Yes, I’m very sorry to say. This morning he woke with symptoms. He’s discussed it with his wife and the Family, and they’ve reluctantly agreed to his participation. Doing his bit, eh? Long history of that in the Royal Family. Why should this be different, he says.” It did not sound like the Home Secretary agreed with the decision.

  “Well, if he wants to...” He looked at the other two men, and they shrugged and nodded. “All right. You can tell his Royal Highness that we gratefully accept his generous offer of participation. Um… Normally we ask the volunteers to come here to Andover straightaway. Would that be convenient for him, do you think?”

  “The Prince has said he will accede to whatever protocols you insist on, but he would rather spend his last hours with his family at Broadlands, the Royal’s estate in Hampshire. It’s just a short drive from your facility, I believe.”

  “Aye, that it is,” said Finnie. “We’d be happy to have a team there to monitor him, unobtrusively of course, and fetch him here when the time gets close.”

  After they hung up, Finnie sighed. “I know him, actually. Good fellow. Played an important role in getting us everything we needed during the Ebola outbreak. A shame...”

  Two days later, a limousine bearing the prince pulled up at the front door. The entire team of doctors, nurses and orderlies were there to greet him, lined up as though they were domestic staff. He walked with some difficulty up the front stairs, his arm around his wife, who supported him on her shoulder. At the door he stopped and kissed her, and whispered to her, pointing back at the limo. She hugged to him and wept, protesting, the tears streaming down her face.

  “No!” they heard him say. “This is the, the, the way I want to be ‘membered. Not th-th-thrashing ‘round and turning. Horridal. Horrible.” He made a great effort to speak intelligibly. “Doing my.... duty. Off doing my duty.”

  She sobbed harder and clung tighter, whispering something.

  “P-p-please. If you love m-m-m-me. Let me h-have this,” he begged.

  She grabbed his face in her hands, looked deeply into his eyes for a moment, and kissed him hard on the mouth. They could see her mouth form the words “I love you.” She turned to go back to the waiting limousine and her knees buckled. An aide grabbed her elbow and helped her to the curb.

  The prince watched the car pull away, turned toward the building and nearly fell. Doctor Finnie stepped forward quickly and wrapped an arm around him. “Your Royal Highness,” he said. “We are most grateful for your participation.”

  The Prince turned his head. “F-F-F-Finn! It’s g-good t’ see you ‘gain. Dnn’t realize ‘is yer show. An’ iss jus’ Harry, here. Capt’n. Not prince.” He turned to the others. “D-Doctrsss. Evr’buddy. Thanks.” Finnie helped him walk down the row of sad faces.

  “Would you like to see where you’ll be?” Finnie said, in a low voice. The prince nodded.

  Finnie steered him down the hall and through one of a dozen identical doors into a small room. A metal armature hung from the ceiling, and ended in a harness. On the floor below it stood a manual treadmill. “Basically, it’s just an endless belt stretched over a bed of rollers,” Finnie explained. “We’ll strap you up here and see how far you can walk, how fast, etc., before needing to rest. There’s a scale attached to the treadmill so we can monitor weight loss during the process.”

  The prince looked around and said, “Why?”

  “Why monitor you? To gain--”

  The prince shook his head vigorously, as if shaking water out of his hair. “N-no, Why me. W-w-w-walk?”

  “Oh, you mean your motivation? Ah, yes, we’ve provided for that.” He nodded at Deevers, who stepped outside. A moment later he returned with a large cardboard cutout that he set up in front of the treadmill. It was a life-sized photo of a gorgeous blonde woman in a red one-piece suit, with a whistle around her neck. Some kind of flotation device was tucked under her arm.

  The prince stood for a few seconds, his head wobbling, and he turned to Finnie and smiled drunkenly. “P-P-P-Pam ‘Nderson? Thas’ all righ’, mate!”

  IT IS WITH GREAT SADNESS THAT THE QUEEN ANNOUNCES THE DEATH OF HER GRANDSON, PRINCE HENRY CHARLES ALBERT DAVID MOUNTBATTEN-WINDSOR, known and loved by all as Prince Harry. The Prince succumbed today at 2:17p.m. to the Tawada-Soseki parasite. Before his death, the Prince arranged to have his body donated to scientists at the British Army Medical Corps Center for Infection Studies in Andover. His wife Meghan accompanied him there. His last words, as related by an aide to the family, were “My darling, I go now to do my duty for my country. This is the way I wish to remain forever in your precious memory. God bless you and the children, God bless the Queen, and may God save England.”

  San Francisco, California

  July 27th

  The horde first sprang out of the homeless camp on Isis under the Highway 101 overpass. The camp had swollen to over 3,000 people by the end of July, creating a miasma of flies, human waste, needles and garbage. Many of the homeless were mentally ill or drug addicts or both, so monitoring their fellows for early signs of infection was not, unfortunately, a priority for most of them. Police and social services did frequent sweeps, but it was easy to miss a bundle of rags in a corner that was actually a human being in the throes of the parasite. Once a person turned, there were plenty of ready victims in the grip of schizophrenic madness or drug-induced fantasies, and few sane and sober people around to sound the alarm.

  The last sweep of the area occurred at 9:00 p.m. on the 26th. By 8:00 a.m. on the 27th, when the first officers arrived on the scene, there were sixty Infected running amok in the camp, and over two hundred bite victims. Despite six casualties from among the authorities, by noon there were over a thousand Infected bursting from the camp and racing down San Francisco’s busy streets. Crackheads and heroin addicts who had overrun the once beautiful city nodded in doorways and on curbs, easy prey for the Infected. By now, their sinuses full of spores and many of them with the parasite’s infrastructure alread
y building in their systems, their conversions often took no more than a few minutes and then they too joined the silent, bloody army.

  The police made a valiant effort to contain and combat the spreading horde, but by the time the sun set there were 6,000 Infected roaming the streets. A dozen fires had broken out and fire companies were unable to respond due to fears for their own safety. Until that point the governor had steadfastly refused to call out the National Guard on the theory that the crisis was actually the result of the “corrupt” administration in Washington, DC, and making any attempt to control the parasite would only lengthen the time before the administration finally admitted their “guilt” and released the “cure.” But when the rising sun on July 28th revealed hordes of thousands of Infecteds in almost every part of the city and a score of major fires raging out of control, asking for help seemed the only sane thing to do.

  A Californian company actually manufactured the best anti-Infected armor, made of lightweight PVC and Tyvec mesh weave, and issued to police, army and National Guard units all over the country. But the luminaries running the California state government declined to provide any for their own state. In fact, they had spoken out against the company, and strongly encouraged demonstrations outside its facility. When state officials descended on the factory to seize all the suits on hand, they were unhappy to find it had been declared a Strategic Military Resource, one heavily guarded by a full Marine Corps rifle company backed by a detachment of Bradley Fighting Vehicles.

  Much screaming and shouting followed, but the Marines had their orders, and all the company’s current production was already spoken for. It took a bitter and humbling call from the governor to the President himself to get the production rerouted to the company’s home state, but of course by then it was too little, too late.

  Traffic snarled everywhere in the city by the Bay as its entire population tried to evacuate. Many people ran out of gas as they sat in traffic, trapped in their cars on gridlocked roads, with Infected running amok down the lines of stalled vehicles.

  There had long been anecdotal evidence that the presence of other Infected caused people who were harboring the parasite to turn, as if the parasite could somehow sense the proximity of its fellows. That seemed to be very much the case here. Car doors were flung open as one or more occupants started violently itching and ripping off their clothes, causing the other people in the car to take to the streets and seek safety. Safety was often hard to find, however, as everyone still in the city had locked their doors, cowering in fear.

  Then the smoke came, with fire crackling in its wake. People stuck in their cars now faced with the terrible choice of being cooked alive or fleeing into the jaws of swarms of Infected.

  On the afternoon of the third day, a horde of five thousand or more Infected swept over police barricades on the lower level of the Bay Bridge and poured into Oakland. In less than an hour they hit the huge homeless camp under the intersection of the 580 and the 980, and soon Oakland was almost a repeat of the disaster in San Francisco.

  The struggle was less one-sided there, however, as many blue-collar Oakland streets turned into battlegrounds between swarms of Infected and tough Oaklanders armed with guns, knives and makeshift weapons. There were a hundred different battles and a thousand unrecorded acts of valor, and eventually Oakland retook its streets and sealed off the Bay Bridge again, at least for a while, but not without horrific costs in dead and newly turned.

  San Francisco was ultimately lost in spite of the injection of heavily armed Army units and newly armored National Guard units. Courageous uniformed personnel went house to house and building to building to rescue any stragglers, but by then the waves of Infected had washed north as far as Petaluma and south as far as San Jose, everywhere feeding first on the homeless the way a brush fire feeds on dry grass.

  The government of California responded by attempting to round up the homeless everywhere else and get them under some kind of scrutiny, but they were fought at every turn by social activists and unfavorable court rulings. The governor finally responded by declaring martial law, and the following day 5,000 screaming demonstrators paraded in front of the governor’s mansion with placards calling him a fascist, some handcuffing themselves to homeless strangers in an effort to prevent their removal. More than one of protesters learned the folly of doing this the hard way, when the person they were chained to suddenly turned.

  By the end of August an estimated 25 percent of the country, or about eighty million people, had succumbed to the parasite. Most of them were caught in the initial stages of the infection and were segregated and euthanized, but as the numbers grew steadily and the percentage of healthy people left in the population shrank, more and more people turned without anyone being there to prevent it, and the numbers of Infected roaming loose were estimated to be well over ten million, plus half again that many locked up in homes, offices and cars on the street.

  Every city and town had teams of armed vigilantes who patrolled the streets in whatever armor they could find, with whatever weapons were available. It soon became clear that, for most people, guns were not effective weapons. Few shooters had the skill to reliably hit an Infected in the head even if it were standing still, and the use of a firearm in the middle of a melee was as apt to cause injury to the healthy as to the Infected.

  Swords and hatchets were among the preferred weapons. Some people took to carrying flat-bladed garden spades or sidewalk ice scrapers sharpened to a razor’s edge, a single well-placed thrust of which could easily decapitate an Infected. Others preferred heavy hammers or mallets. It was a struggle for existence, and many people lost, while the infection rate increased.

  South Elgin, Illinois

  August 9th

  The old man’s eyes popped open. He looked at the clock and it read 3:15 a.m. Nothing good ever happens at 3:15 a.m., he thought and wondered why he was awake. Some agitated snuffling and snorting next to him told the tale. Willow had always slept in their bed with Floyd and Marilyn, and when he first took her, he had given in to her whines and sad face and let her up on his bed too, and having done so he could hardly keep the boys out, so he had ended up sharing his bed with three big snoring, farting animals. He told himself it was only temporary, but as the days had turned to weeks everyone had gotten into the habit, so he just accepted it.

  All three dogs were standing on the bed now, facing the side of the room where the short sidewalk downstairs led to his front door. He quickly climbed out of bed and dressed when the doorbell rang. He stepped to the window and pulled it open a few inches. Because of the roof line, he couldn’t see his front stoop, but he could be heard easily enough. “Who’s there?” he said quietly.

  “Owen, it’s Manny. There’s trouble. I need your help.”

  “Be right down.” There were now several gun belts hanging on the wall next to his bed. One of them held a Sig P226 Legion. Another held a Sig with a mounted laser sight in a modified holster. He picked the one with his beloved .45 plus a holder for two extra magazines, and strapped it on.

  The plague had finally hit the neighborhood and hit it hard. After Susie had turned and Marilyn showed symptoms, there had only been a few cases, and they were all caught early. In the last few weeks, however, they’d had about twenty cases, half a dozen of whom had turned without anyone knowing. Several times they had been discovered by family or friends, sometimes with tragic results, and several more had broken through windows and had needed to be put down. The old man did most of them himself. Over half the forty-eight units were now empty.

  He opened the front door and Manny stood there with his 12 gauge in his hand and a Taurus G2 in his belt.

  “What’s up?”

  “It’s Cathy Rainier. She started calling for help a few minutes ago. She’s locked in her bedroom, says her house is full of zombies.” They took off together at a trot.

  Cathy, a divorcee, had two kids going to Northern Ill
inois University, about thirty miles away. They’d closed the school a few weeks ago after a major outbreak of Infecteds at a music concert had resulted in dozens of deaths through bites and from kids getting trampled in the mad panic that followed. The old man had seen a bunch of young people coming and going from the place recently. Someone had told him that Cathy had let a bunch of her kids’ friends from the college crash at her place while they decided what to do. Some had no family left to go home to.

  They arrived at her unit and called up to her window. “Cathy!” Manny yelled. “I’m back, and I brought Owen.”

  Cathy’s head appeared at the window. “Oh thank God!” she cried. “Oh Owen, I’m so glad to see you! I tried calling, but the phones aren’t working!” Phone service was getting increasingly spotty, as were most of the rest of the utilities, including cable and internet. Electrical service had actually been pretty reliable so far. Commonwealth Edison, the power company that served northern Illinois, had switched over to almost exclusively nuclear power plants, and they were remarkably free from outside disturbances caused by things like fuel shortages. Line maintenance was becoming a problem, but the Comm Ed crews had been amazingly diligent in persisting at their jobs, even as other elements of society were on the short bus to hell.

  “What’s going on, sweetheart?” he asked, trying to calm her.

  “Oh God! Oh my God! They’re all Infected! All of them! They’re biting and there’s blood everywhere and—”

  “Cathy, we’re going to go get a ladder and we’ll get you out of there. We’ll let them have the place. You’ll be okay.”

  “No!” she cried, tears streaming down her face. “My daughter! I saw her run into the bathroom! I think she’s okay, but she’s trapped down there with those things!”