Pandemic Reboot: Survivors

by Krause, J. F.

  Anyway, we got up a few floors before we started finding people. It’s a big hotel and most of it was empty. I think I heard there were sixteen floors, and we must have been up around eight or so before we saw any more of his men or any of the women and girls. The first room we came to that had people in it, the man was hung over and in bed passed out. There was a girl in bed with him but she was wide awake and as soon as she saw Marco, he put his finger up to his lips and she stayed quiet and slowly got out. One of the women soldiers called her over and wrapped a sheet around her. She went out the room and over to one of the Indiana women who she took her down the stairs. Then Marco shoved his gun under the sleeping guys chin and woke him up. I hope he messed the bed when he saw Marco and the soldiers. Of course I was outside but Kevin told me about it as we went on to the next room. It was empty, but the one after that had people, same as the first one. They just cleared them out room by room and floor by floor. It wasn’t until we got to the next to the top floor that we ran into a guard walking up and down the hallway. They put him down, and I think he was dead before he knew what happened. I’d heard some suppressed shots from the other groups, but our group hadn’t had to shoot anyone but the one guard yet.

  The guard our group shot was walking the hall when we came out of the service stairs. He was so surprised he just had time to raise his rifle and bam, he was gone. After Marco and his soldiers came out of the service stairway and saw the guard, Marco went ahead and sent a few of his people up to secure the entrance to the top floor. They met a couple of guards, but no one caused any problems except the guards just outside Hawkins’ room. There were two of them, one in front of each door. One of them got off a shot and the other one surrendered. The one that got off a shot got shot himself. That was when the nurse got shot. He was leaning down taking his pulse, and the son-of-a-gun shot him. Kevin didn’t even have a gun and that piss ant shot him. Anyway, one of the soldiers stomped on the shooters hand and that stopped him. I was there looking after Kevin and couldn’t care less if this guy lived or died. While I’m leaning over Kevin, the wounded guard is being dragged away and manages to kick me in the ear. I swear, he almost tore it off. He’ll probably live. I think he was the one that beat that girl up so bad, the one I took to the dental clinic.

  Anyway, I was sitting with my head against the hallway wall holding my ear, and I could just see inside the penthouse. Hawkins had these poor girls in bed with him. They were sisters. As soon as the soldiers walked in, Hawkins grabbed a knife and tried to hold it against the neck of one of the girls. But the other girl, who was under his arm sort of in a choke hold, just took a big bite out of Hawkins’ lower upper arm where it’s real sensitive. Hawkins yells like he’s being slaughtered. Both little girls push themselves away from Hawkins and Hawkins bleeds like a stuck pig. That’s how the soldiers arrested him. He was naked as a jay bird and bleeding like a pig. The little girl had to spit out a mouthful of arm fat, but she sure put some pain on that jerk.

  After that, we heard bullhorns announcing that Hawkins was a prisoner and for his men to put down their guns. I heard that Kevin was going to be okay, but it just makes you want to throw up. These pukes do all these bad things and when someone tries to help them they try to kill ‘em. That dirt bag knew Kevin was trying to help him, too, but he tried to kill him anyway.”

  Seconds later, Marco came back on camera and asked if that filled in the missing pages for me. Indeed it had. I thanked him and wished him a safe trip home. I also asked him to look after Kevin. He said everyone was looking after him, and he’d done himself proud. I could get back to work now.

  So far, I’d been able to keep on top of things, but mostly because I spent my time asking questions, and the real adults in the room got things done. I could always come up with questions. I just couldn’t help wondering how long asking questions would be enough. Then again, that’s all I’d told them I’d do.

  I’d read about ‘mission creep’, and my own situation seemed like a classic example. My job just kept getting bigger and bigger, but I could take comfort in knowing it would be over in six months.

  On the dot, the legal folks came to my office with Irma at the front of the pack. Coming into my office, it looked like there were a lot of them. I don’t dislike lawyers, but when you get a group of them in a room, it can get a little close. I had included Carl in the group when I asked Irma to set it up so, with Jane, Lydia, and myself, there were twelve of us, a bit too large for my office to comfortably hold. We moved across the hall to the conference room where the council met.

  “Thank you for coming today. The council asked me to put together some plans for a workable government for our community. We need to present it to them as soon as we can, and you are part of that effort. I appreciate your willingness to help. Just so you know, I’ll present your plan even if I don’t agree with it. I’ll also tell the council why I disagree with it if I do. So let’s get to work, shall we?”

  Seeing that they all seemed to be in agreement, I decided to lay out my concerns and get them out in the open. “First, as you might be aware, I don’t believe we can do anything without the consent of the community members. We don’t have the ability to impose on them since they can all just move to the next town over, and there won’t be anything we can do about it. In fact, if the Indianapolis group hadn’t started hurting it’s own members and threatening others, we would never have gotten involved in that situation because all the Indianapolis survivors had to do was move to another community. So we need to keep that in mind all the time: if we do something people don’t like, they’ll leave. Next, we need to keep in mind that we will be dealing with other communities who will be cooperating with us. We can’t make them cooperate and we can’t stop them from not cooperating if that is what they want to do. Finally, we need to come up with rules of behavior anyway.

  As far as government is concerned, we still need a government I suppose, but what we had before may not work for our situation now. I believe we need to be transparent, fair, pragmatic, and uncomplicated. We need to find a way to guarantee personal rights, but at the same time, we need to protect all of us from some of us, and some of us from all of us.”

  I could tell from their demeanor that they were taking it very seriously. I took special care to ask Todd to record everything we said and to broadcast it on the radio after dinner. They had already broadcast my conversations with Marco and the dentist earlier. It would be replayed after dinner as well. I understand these broadcasts are a hit not only here but countrywide and even worldwide. George is famous, albeit not in the way he wanted to be. The old catch phrase “Let George do it’ had taken on a completely knew meaning.

  I don’t want to become the decision maker for our own community by itself, and certainly not for other communities. So, I left the lawyers to their meeting with the request that they send me a report about what they are thinking when they finished today’s session. Since we weren’t in my office, I was able get away from everyone and just spend some time getting some balance in my life. Kevin’s injury had taken a toll on my equanimity. I read and studied until I felt I could focus on the tasks at hand.

  Todd patched me through to Kevin who was now doing fine. I made sure our conversation was not recorded. “Kevin, I’m so glad you’re doing okay. You’ll never know how it felt to hear ‘Kevin’s been shot!’ I suppose it’s better to hear about being shot than to be shot, but I’m not sure how much. I was up in front of all the team leaders reading a report about Indianapolis when Todd handed me another report so I just kept on reading. When I heard myself read about you being shot, I almost lost it.”

  “Oh, don’t make me laugh! It hurts almost as much to laugh as it did getting shot!”

  “Ok, then let’s talk about how it happened. Were you really bending over him trying to help him when he shot you?”

  “Yeah. I was following Marco and the others, and they had just taken this guy down who was in the hallway just outside Hawkins’ entryway door on the
top floor of the Sandoval Hotel. It looked like we weren’t going to actually have to fire our weapons until we had to shoot this guard. He was dead before he hit the floor, but a few seconds later this other guy tries to get a shot off, but one of Marco’s men gets one off first. He was in one of the alcoves outside the penthouse rooms on the top floor when I got to him. I should have waited for one of the marines to clear him of weapons, but I wasn’t thinking and figured he was so badly injured it wouldn’t matter. So I stopped and went down to one knee to get his vitals, and next thing I know he’s shooting me. I was with a group of California people and one of our people came over and stepped on his hand before he could do it again. I was pretty sure it was just an in and out, but boy did it hurt once the initial surprise wore off. The guy had an arsenal strapped to his legs, a couple of knives and another revolver. He had all that plus his rifle and the revolver that got me. It was Patrick Halloran from the Fresno group that stepped on his hand for me. I’m pretty sure he broke some of the guy’s fingers. He wasn’t some kid either, and he should have known it was over for him. Oh, well. I’m glad it wasn’t worse.” We chatted like this for the next few minutes. He wanted to know about Dinah and Chad and then Jerry and Charlie. It was an amazing relief that not only was the Indiana project mostly over, we had survived with a minimum number of casualties.

  Jane arrived with a report from the work group leaders. They seemed to have a pretty good grasp on what our problems were right now. We had, even with our limited numbers, too many people with backgrounds in some fields that might not be needed anymore and not enough with backgrounds in the ones we did need right now. We didn’t really have much need for all the real estate and retail sales people. Training our young people and retraining some of the older folks who now had useless skills was going to be a major concern. We would really have to husband our human resources if we wanted everyone to be productive. We also wanted all of our people to feel valued while it was happening. If we were to succeed beyond this generation we had to train ourselves to do all manner of jobs, many of which we didn’t really have before.

  We’d also have to preserve equipment and machinery that simply couldn’t be recreated for quite awhile. We needed to keep airplanes in the air and cannibalizing parts was the only way we could do that since manufacturing on a large scale wasn’t on the horizon. The same was true of so much we needed but could no longer build from scratch. We had to plan very carefully what skills and knowledge the next generation would need in order to preserve our current way of life. Trade was going to be a major component that had to be reconsidered. Education was also a serious concern. We had enough doctors and nurses for now, but how would we train future doctors? Could our medical personnel practice their profession while simultaneously teaching the next generations? We might need college professors to congregate in one place for one field and in another place for another field. Would they be willing to do that?

  I was already forming the questions we had to ask for the meetings with the west coast people next week. I needed to talk to Jane and Lydia about those meetings soon. I also realized that we needed to talk to the military people, too. I would need to spend hours alone just trying to think of little details that needed to be addressed by some group or other.

  Finally, I was starting to get hungry as I got another report. This time it was from Irma and Carl. Irma had been having dinner with me lately, so we would usually take care of her reports as we ate. When you eat dinner as early as 5 or 6 PM, life starts changing for you. The boys were really turning me into a morning person. We ate dinner fairly early, had conversations about our day, did puzzles and played games or read books after that, then they got ready for bed and right after that so did I, which meant I could get them up and to breakfast at 6:30 AM or so. I was usually in the office by 7:30, or at least that was the plan. I’d had work group meetings or other meetings almost all the time lately. Since I really wanted to spend a bit of time at their school, I would just have to build it into the schedule or it wouldn’t happen.

  We three, Carl, Irma, and I walked over to the school to pick up Kevin’s and my kids. The three boys ran ahead to wait for us at the dinner line, and Carl carried Dinah. I never stopped being entranced by her constantly happy mood. Are all babies like this? Then I remembered a few I’d babysat during high school and put that question to rest. Shortly, we were joined by Lydia, Jane, Anna, and Zach. Dinner was actually a milder form of work for me since I would be getting a report from each of them in the form of dinner conversation, but I actually looked forward to it every day. I hadn’t given a speech in a couple of days and that was fine with me. Right now, there was enough happening to keep the radios going for hours every evening with just news from the different groups across the country. Indiana was on everyone’s minds. It was turning out to be a bonding experience between our communities. While it would always be a nightmare to me, it was also something that built a sense of shared history for our survivor groups.

  Zach continued to fly his plane over our area. We were still getting new survivors here in SLO and across the country, although at a bit slower pace the last couple of days. USC/Los Angeles was growing at a steady clip. They found two more children, a brother and a sister, in Hermosa Beach. Since they had a teacher, they were keeping them with their group. Lots of people wanted to be guardians for surviving children and there was a waiting list. Something about finding children always buoyed our hopes. The Manhattan survivor community had actually found an entire intact family of five today as well. Aside from being statistically very unusual, it gave enormous support to the hope that our own future children would inherit our immunity. We know virtually all pregnancies in our group had ended in miscarriages the day everyone died, but now we had solid hope that we would be able to have births of healthy, immune babies. We were all waiting the birth in a couple of months of a baby that had not ended in a miscarriage when everyone died. There were a total of three pregnant women we were watching closely across the country.

  Zach’s fellow pilots would be covering the entire country over the course of this week. He reported seeing a car heading our way as he was coming in for the evening. He figured they would be hitting town any minute now. It was always exciting to me to talk about new survivors.

  Anna told me that the leaders of communities across the country wanted to meet when possible. They were asking me to set up a meeting! I can’t say I feel comfortable about that, but if it takes me to get it started, I’ll go ahead and arrange things. I figured week after next would have to do since next week was taken up with west coast community leaders and work group leaders.

  Lydia reported that the defense people would be coming home Saturday and Sunday with a couple of exceptions. Enrique was part of the group that would be staying for a while to help guard the prisoners, and another one of our reservists would be staying in Oklahoma City for the time being to help with the training of air traffic controllers as well as training airplane mechanics. She also said that the military types wanted to meet with me about developing a coordinated plan to support survivor communities across the country. There were still bad guys around and we needed a trained and equipped response in case things got out of hand. I asked Jane to squeeze that meeting in as soon as possible, but not before I had a chance to talk to Marco. What I don’t know about the military would fill their entire training book. That is if they have one.

  It was Jane who dropped the bombshell of the evening. Kevin’s and my boys, all three of them, wanted to take beginning band class. Thank goodness for normal sized problems!

  “I didn’t know we had a band teacher.”

  “We have two of them,” Jane smiled. “We also have a chorus teacher and several trained instrumentalists.”

  “Of course they can. What do they want to play? And isn’t Chad a little young?”

  “They start band in third grade so he has to wait until next year. I thought I could start him on the piano. Did you know he already plays piano? He�
�s remarkably good, too. He was happy about that. Jerry wants to play the trumpet, and Charlie wants to play the saxophone.” Jane was much more tuned into the school than I was evidently.

  “Okay. What do I have to do?”

  “You have to sign a commitment paper that they will practice for a minimum of 30 minutes every day. They can do that at the school after the curricular classes or in one of the offices at the new administration building or at you new residence. I can help you with it. They know you’re busy. Both Jerry and Charlie had piano lessons before, and they’ve asked if I would teach them, too. I’ll be happy to if you don’t mind. Your new private houses, both of them, each have a grand piano. We can arrange to put a couple more in different rooms at Calloway House, too, if you like.” I could already tell Jane was really happy about this development. I knew she was teaching her two middle school students, Kyle and Julie, so she must enjoy teaching piano. I suppose it beat drums. I was prepared to feel sorry for whoever the guardians of the future drummers were, at least I was until Anna piped up that Chanelle had signed up for drums. Then, for good measure, she threw in that Todd had played drums in his high school marching band and couldn’t wait to help her out. It takes all kinds of instruments to make a band. We were recovering. I hoped.