Pandemic Reboot: Survivors

by Krause, J. F.

  Pandemic Reboot: Survivors

  By J.F. Krause

  I want to thank my friends (and some family, too) for their kind encouragement and help. Particularly, I'd like to thank Toni for being my constant sounding board and motivator, Linda for her sisterly love and support, Keri for her editing skills, Deanna for believing in me, and Greg for being my Kevin.

  Copyright © 2018 J.F. Krause

  All rights reserved.

  Prologue

  Kevin Turner pulled his ambulance into the emergency entrance at the hospital not long after the government ordered all schools and public places closed, hospitals and police/fire stations excepted. Traffic on the regular surface streets had been busier than usual, but he’d still made good time. Regardless, by the time he got his ambulance to the hospital’s emergency entrance, his partner, who was also his patient this trip, was dead. He’d called ahead for help when he got to the hospital, but the attendant on duty was frozen at the hospital door, seemingly mesmerized by what was happening further up the street. Kevin had the passenger door open and was examining his ambulance mate, all the while checking to see what the emergency room attendant was doing. He watched with almost mechanical interest as the orderly grabbed his head and slowly sank to his knees, already oblivious to his surroundings. For a few seconds the orderly, whose name was Calvin, vomited uncontrollably as Kevin came to the astounding conclusion that Calvin was doing the exact same things his partner, Ted, had done just minutes before. Now, after just a few brief moments, the attendant was already approaching death. Moving to Calvin’s side, all Kevin could do was to try to give him some small amount of comfort.

  In the brief space of time it took for two of his friends to die, his vehicle was surrounded by cars being abandoned, some still moving. Seeing too late what was happening, he ran into the frenzy to get people to move out of the way, but his ambulance had come to its final parking spot along with the rest of the vehicles clogging the hospital entrances. The people driving their family members or friends to the emergency room weren’t concerned about where they stopped their cars, and they certainly weren’t wasting time looking for a parking space. They just left them on the driveway and in parking aisles as close to the emergency room entrance as they could get. Before he had time to react, it was already impossible for him to get his ambulance free of the congestion.

  In the midst of this rising tide of chaos, he saw other people drop to their knees in convulsions and die on the pavement, just short of their goal. Some of the cars contained whole families that barely opened their doors before falling to the disease’s blitzkrieg against humanity. As Kevin gave up on freeing his ambulance, he spotted a baby crawling through the logjam of bodies and automobiles. With no one paying any attention to the child, he scooped her up and took her to the emergency waiting area that was rapidly filling with more dead and dying. The room continued filling as people carried or dragged loved-ones to what would become their last resting place. As an EMT, Kevin would normally have helped out in some capacity, but the situation was deteriorating so quickly that the fewer and fewer unaffected staff were too busy to even ask for help. With the baby on his hip since it was impossible to put the baby down in all the turmoil, Kevin moved trancelike from one person caught in their death throes to the next offering useless assistance. Finally, Kevin stood in the middle of a room full of death and, finding a small, clear spot on a counter against one of the walls, busied himself with cleaning up the little girl who was now screaming her lungs out, her screams adding only slightly to the general bedlam of the area.

  Over the next hours, victims died and were replaced by their dying rescuers. Movement became limited to people collapsing to the floor. As movement came to a halt, the room grew almost silent with only the occasional death moan or resettling of a body providing any respite from the final silence.

  Kevin had taken the baby into one of the examination rooms deep in the interior to better clean both himself and the baby from their accumulation of excrement, blood, dirt, and puke. Like other survivors, he expected to die any minute and wondered what would become of the little girl when his time came. He studied her for signs of the sickness, but she remained just as alive as she had from the start. She was no longer crying but was clearly hungry.

  Kevin knew this particular hospital better than most, and he was familiar with the staff and layout from his hundreds of visits over the last couple years. He took the infant, whom he had taken to calling Baby Girl, to the part of the hospital where he knew he could find fresh diapers, baby food, and a crib for the night. It was now late afternoon and growing dark, but there was no movement on the street or in the halls of the hospital. There was no sound except for a few birds and dogs outside, and the occasional sound of one more holdout finally giving in to death.

  Once Baby Girl had been freshly diapered and fed, Kevin found a baby harness so he could carry her on his chest as he checked the hospital for other still ambulatory people. He wandered the halls calling for anyone before finally concluding that he and Baby Girl were alone. Finding a crib for Baby Girl, Kevin showered and settled in for the night.

  Alone in the quiet, Kevin broke down and cried for himself and the horrors he had witnessed all day. He cried for his family and his friends. He cried for the baby he was sure would die soon. He expected that sometime during the night, both he and Baby Girl would succumb, the same as everyone else at the hospital. It was only a little after eight PM and he slept like the dead all around him.

  He would have slept later into the next morning except Baby Girl was awake and ready to meet the day as soon as the sun came up. Baby Girl was a naturally cheerful sort, the kind of baby that wakes up cooing and laughing. Kevin had slept on a cot next to her and was pleasantly brought to consciousness by her happy baby sounds. Momentarily forgetting the horrors of the previous day and night, Kevin woke up wondering briefly where he was. Confused by his surroundings, he was dragged into this appalling new world as he realized he wasn’t home in his own bedroom. Looking at Baby Girl, he started the morning, first changing Baby Girl’s diaper and cleaning her up before dressing her in a hospital baby gown and taking her to get some food.

  Breakfast over, he noticed for the first time how dirty everything was. He was still in his undershorts and a tee-shirt from the night before, so he decided to get a clean uniform from his ambulance parked just outside the emergency entrance. Since it wasn’t uncommon for his partner and him to get soiled in the normal process of doing their jobs, they kept stored changes of clothing in their vehicle. Carrying Baby Girl around using the chest harness most of the previous day was becoming almost second nature by now. So, baby on board, Kevin went back into the death zone at the front of the hospital. Nothing had changed since the previous night. The smells were a little different, with a slight scent of rotting flesh just making an appearance, adding another unspeakably horrific smell to the putrid blend of feces, vomit, and blood. Kevin quickly took his fresh uniform back to his makeshift camp in the interior of the building where he knew he could take another shower and pull himself together in preparation for a day like no other in his experience.

  After he had dressed he felt calmly numb about the harrowing experience of seeing literally hundreds of strangers and acquaintances die within the span of half a day. He’d been closer to his duty partner, Ted, than anyone else at the hospital, but they hadn’t really bonded over the last couple of months or so that they had been working together. Kevin had been assigned to this territory for the last two years and Ted was his third partner. This part of Orange County was expensive to live in, and the commute could be annoying for anyone who needed more affordable housing. Ted was single like Kevin, but he lived with three roommates
in a rented house only about three miles away. Kevin still lived at home while attending Cal State University in Fullerton part-time. Now, at twenty-five, he’d just graduated with a nursing degree and was only waiting for the paperwork from the state to make it legal. His next step was to start a nursing job and decide what to do after that.

  The day before yesterday, Kevin had been part of a regional briefing for first responders via closed-circuit conferencing. That’s when they learned how lethal this particular threat was with a survival rate that amounted to near extinction for the human race. The government was sure it was an engineered virus not only because of its lethality but because of several of its attributes. It was airborne, had been designed to kill quickly, and had been positioned so that every part of the world would be exposed at virtually the same time. According to the briefing, the government believed whoever developed the virus may have been planning to extort the rest of the world for the antidote, but before they could perfect the antidote, it escaped the local control of its creators. Once that happened, they went ahead and deliberately released it everywhere.

  The government was preparing to go into complete lockdown closing airports, harbors, and border crossings. Since they didn’t know when exactly the die-off would begin, and since they had virtually no lead-time, closures would be carried out in a quick succession with schools, commercial centers, and businesses to follow before finally closing highways, freeways, and roads to all but essential traffic. The great unknown was how long the incubation period was.

  The briefing made clear that as drastic as these measures were, they were unlikely to succeed in halting the disease’s progress since it was now apparent that while it targeted and killed humans specifically, any living creature that came into even casual contact with it became a carrier of the virus. Of major concern, birds could become the most efficient vectors for spreading the sickness worldwide even if the lockdown of all human transportation succeeded. Eventually, everyone would be exposed to the virus, some sooner and some later. The briefing stressed that given enough time, researchers should be able to thwart the disease, but that no one was optimistic that there would be nearly enough time to find a vaccination let alone manufacture it on the scale it was needed. In the meantime, the recommended treatment was to keep the patient calm as the disease ran its inevitable course.

  Some of his colleagues had literally stood up and walked out of the conference room to return home abandoning their jobs. Shortly after the remaining personnel were dismissed from the meeting back to their designated service fields, Kevin heard on the radio that the closures of had already commenced. Nothing about how deadly this disease really was got mentioned. A few hours later, his first run of the day had led to the entrapment of his ambulance at the emergency entrance at Hillcrest.

  Now, after pondering his next move, Kevin decided against walking home since his parents were both visiting his brother in Houston to celebrate the birth of their first grandchild. Hillcrest Hospital seemed as good a place as any for a prolonged stay while he waited for help from someone, or maybe he would still die. Knowing what he knew about the disease, he was thinking that help probably wouldn’t be on the way. According to the briefing, the incubation period was probably six days or less. Authorities believed that every place in the country might already be infected and would be dead or dying within the next few days or so. Knowing he might never see them again he missed his mom and dad. He wondered if he could get a phone signal to them so he tried his mom’s cell number. With little or no competition for a connection, he heard her phone actually ring. Her recorded message came through telling him that his mother wasn’t available but that she would love to hear his message. With a sob he set to work clearing out the main entrance waiting room around the corner of the building from the emergency waiting room. It was bad, but not nearly as bad as the emergency room. There were fourteen bodies in the area so he began by removing them. Not knowing what to do with so many of them, he used a gurney to take them to a grassy area about a couple hundred feet from the entrance. Laying them out side by side, he quietly wished them a peaceful journey to wherever they may have gone. Kevin considered himself non-religious, but he wanted to show some respect for the humanity they had all once shared.

  After checking on Baby Girl who he had left in a playpen behind the reception desk, he gathered cleaning supplies and started the long and tedious task of cleaning up the bodily fluids from the places contaminated by the dead. He worked continually taking breaks only to feed and change Baby Girl. Sensing that she needed some social time, he also interrupted his cleaning duties frequently to talk and play with her. As the morning became afternoon, it occurred to him that he might attract attention if he used his ambulance siren to make some noise. If he and Baby Girl survived, others must have too.

  Depositing Baby Girl in his chest harness, he went outside to start the engine of the ambulance. He turned on the emergency signals and cranked up the siren. After listening for a couple of minutes he wrote a note to put under the driver’s side wiper blade. Once he was sure he had done everything he knew how to do, he went into the main reception room to see if his call for attention would actually pay off.

  A few minutes later while waiting in the front reception/waiting room, he felt himself dozing off just as woman in her early thirties came into the reception room. Her arrival startled him and his jerking body woke Baby Girl setting off a round of tears.

  Lydia Baca had spent the last day and a half in a grief stricken daze. She’d been sent home from her job at the nearby Social Security office yesterday morning after only an hour. Everyone had been told that the government was trying to control the spread of a very contagious virus, and they should all go home and stay there. When she got home a little before 10 AM, her husband was already there. Moments later her cell phone signaled she had a text from her children’s schools and that she should pick up them up in front of their school sites. The older one’s were in middle school and had permission to walk home so she headed to the elementary school to pick up her youngest, Martin. As it was only three blocks away, she chose to walk knowing that traffic at the end of the school day was sometimes chaotic, and today, given the very unusual circumstance of a midday closure and being a practical woman, she decided that the car would be a hindrance rather than a convenience.

  When she got there, the teachers, principals, and several playground people were outside making sure that children were properly united with their parents or guardians. Surprisingly, they were skipping the formality of signing the kids out to their parents. If the children knew the person picking them up, they were sent on their way. Martin’s teacher was familiar with Lydia so after a brief harried moment, she was walking home with her son.

  As Lydia and Martin neared their home, a woman swerved her car toward the sidewalk just ahead of Lydia, stopping just in time for the driver to get out to regurgitate all over the street. Lydia froze in place as she and Martin watched the scene unfold before them. Two children were sitting wide-eyed in the backseat. Admonishing Martin to stay put on the sidewalk, Lydia cautiously approached the woman to see if there was anything she could do to assist her. The woman appeared to practically explode. As the woman sank first to her knees and then to her hands and knees and finally into a collapse on the street in her own vomit and blood, Lydia frantically called 911. All she got was a rapid circuit busy signal. The two little boys climbed out of the car and knelt at their mother’s side oblivious to the vile fluids spreading out around her body. They pleaded with Lydia to do something. Being only a block from her own home, Lydia sent Martin to their house to get her husband Mike telling Martin to bring lots of towels. Then she attempted to move the woman to the grass where she would be more comfortable. Fortunately, the day was pleasantly warm and sunny for January. The woman felt particularly heavy offering no assistance of her own as Lydia and the woman’s two boys struggled to move her. About the time Lydia and the boys had their mother lying down on the grass besid
e the street, Mike, Martin, and their two older children arrived with towels and wet face cloths. Cleaning the victim’s face with one of the damp cloths, Mike knew she was gone before Lydia did. Mike told his wife the woman was dead with a slight shake of his head.

  Knowing there was nothing to be done on the side of the street, they gathered the two boys up along with their own children and started walking for their house. When the boys balked at leaving their mother, Mike told them he would stay with her until help arrived. They reluctantly accompanied Lydia to her home. Of course, no help was coming.

  After about an hour, one of the boys began to rub his head and complain of dizziness. Lydia felt an ominous sense of dread creep up from her stomach. Next the boy clutched his mouth as great spasms erupted in his abdomen. His efforts to contain the regurgitation were useless. His mouth overflowed and then burst with everything in his stomach. Lydia rushed to his side as he sagged to the floor of her kitchen next to the table where he had been sitting. As she tried to support him in this very personal crisis, his brother started screaming with terror. His mother had done the very same thing and then had collapsed. By now she knew their names: Justin, the older boy lay dying at her knees; Jason, younger by a year, was screaming from the kitchen table. Her youngest, Martin, ran from the room wailing like a fire engine.

  Lydia needed Mike to be there. She needed her family around her as she realized fully why she and Mike had been sent home from work and why the schools had all closed. She went to the front porch to call for her husband, but he was already there carrying the still form of their daughter, Alicia. Alicia’s tee shirt was a mess, and her mouth was covered with blood. Lydia knew from looking at her that she was already gone. Collapsing to her knees in fear, anguish, and desperation Lydia tried to pray, but nothing coherent came to her. Her precious daughter was gone. The pain was beyond imagining. Her moment to grieve was short-lived, though.