Survival_Book 1_And Tomorrow

by Ralph F. Halse

  A concerned teenager, one queue over, took in the look of raw hatred on Kitch’s face. She looked genuinely shocked. She turned her head away quickly and pulled her hoodie across her cheeks when Kitch’s anger-filled eyes met hers. Another misinterpretation of his personality to be spread about him. Great, he thought as he shut his eyes briefly in an effort to wrench back control of his rebellious body.

  If it weren’t for his dad dosing him up prior to leaving home with what precious little medicine they had left, Kitch had little doubt he would be twitching, jerking, and shrieking uncontrollably. Attracting the wrong attention never ended well for TS suffers. It was why he lived the life of a recluse. Three sniggering football jocks further up the queue had turned to give him sly, knowing looks. One queue over, he noted with some embarrassment two smirking teens elbowing each other out the corner of his eye, nodding in his direction.

  He vaguely recognized them as brothers, tormentors from the few mall trips he’d had to make for medications. Grinning expectantly, they positioned themselves as they waited for the inevitable arm-raising, head-jerking, and unintelligible screeching that followed the moments of high anxiety TS sufferers were sure to react to.

  Kitch’s eyebrows knit and his brow furrowed as he worked doubly hard at shutting Tourette’s down under very dangerous circumstances. His dad used to say, “Come hell or high water use what you got in you, son. Don’t provide the spectacle the ignorant assholes want to see.” If he didn’t control his body, he knew how it would end—in the way it always did. The moment would pass—well, only a moment to Kitch. He would open his eyes and focus. His hearing would return to normal, and he would be greeted by mocking laughter accompanied by finger pointing and jeering. There followed the jokes and bad TS imitations. Soft and low at first, in whispers and from hands held to cover mouths they would come. But later and louder when the hands had dropped and the grins faded to bemused laughter followed by raucous comments. Eventually, the teenagers would get bored, ignore him and wander off in search of some other form of entertainment.

  Kitch had to then run the gauntlet of self-pitying parental expressions that followed until he and his dad climbed into a public car headed for home, with him panting and sometimes crying his way back to normality. What distressed Kitch more than the episode, more than the mocking laughter, more than the pitying stares, was the distress his father took on. The pain in his father’s eyes was too much to bear at times. Kitch had wept for the love he felt for his generous, caring dad on numerous occasions, but he wasn’t here right now.

  Kitch suppressed his thoughts and looked along the queue. It was far less trouble to remain indoors and let his dad do the shopping. Kitch had dreaded visits to the doctor. He generally got so worked up at the prospect that he had to be medicated, like now.

  Shuffling forward, Kitch stared warily at local and state police walking a slow patrol along a razor wire entry the bus had arrived at before passing through a heavily fortified, sandbagged machine-gun post. By the way a couple of young cops nervously fingered their weapons, Kitch figured if his TS went into overdrive, the cops would probably shoot first on the basis he was infected and apologize to his mourning dad later.

  As the bus pulled away toward Calhoun Street in a sequel of metal on metal to collect another load of teenagers, Kitch shuffled a pace or two forward, wishing—and not for the first time—that the hospital provided shade from the blistering South Carolina sun. Less than ten minutes after the soaking sun-shower passed, most of Kitch’s clothes were all but dry. Where was the breeze that always accompanied these rain showers?

  Chain wire enclosures erected within the hospital grounds came into view as the queue slowly snaked along an entry road littered with discarded medical equipment and spent brass cartridges that were lying in pools of sticky blood replete with flies, stalks of grass and gritty boot prints. On each enclosure, someone had scrawled badly in white paint on three-ply the words: Triage, Quarantine and Infected—Stay Out. Armed hospital security officers wearing face filters patrolled the perimeters watching internees with wary eyes.

  Inside the first two enclosures, hundreds milled or talked quietly in small groups as they cast nervous glances toward the hospital. Most internees looked normal but decidedly frightened and pale-faced. A table under a flappy, blue plastic tarp was set up in front of a one-way barbed wire tunnel leading into the quarantine enclosure. Medical staff in the triage compound were shadowed by vigilant security officers armed with clubs, baseball bats, and long metal poles. Gloved, masked, and gowned doctors diligently assessed suspected patients. Kitch watched as a doctor penned a large black X to a woman’s forehead before the patient was escorted, sobbing and reluctantly, into the quarantine enclosure by a not-too-friendly orderly.

  Kitch noted that A and P-marked patients passed into the hospital for further investigation. The infected enclosure was closest to Kitch. He shuddered when he looked in and wished he hadn’t. His strained bladder begged for attention, as drooling, vacant-eyed plague victims pressed deadpan faces against the wire, straining it dangerously outward. Guards moved on them immediately. Taking up long poles, they pushed and prodded the infected vigorously off the wire.

  The infected formed a sluggish, silent cluster. Milk-white eyes stared in the direction of the teenage queues, sniffing the odors coming off the wet bodies, much like a hunting dog would scent blood from a wounded deer. The only movement the internees made was to sway rhythmically to some unheard tune. The infected had yet to develop that eerie, blood-curdling moan that could make the strongest man sprint as if all the devils in Hades pursued him to hide quivering with fear, waiting for the infected to move on.

  A military convoy carrying medical supplies crept forward to the direction of a beckoning military policeman in a blood-stained uniform. Slowly, olive drab trucks rumbled out the hospital gate under independent traction. Gathering speed, the trucks passed Kitch, exposing the hospital grounds to his full view for the first time. Hundreds of yellow, black, and blue zipped body-bags were aligned in ragged rows on a hospital lawn once green, but now a burned orange by the sun and bleaching chemicals. Fresh corpses, covered by bloody hospital sheets and stacked two high were lined up to face four overworked incinerators. Squatting hospital staff in protective coveralls and face masks hosed blood across the grass into red-flowing gutters from a concrete slab upon which the incinerators rested.

  Beside a battered door marked in large, white script—Mortuary—Kitch observed four makeshift furnaces operated by exhausted Med-Techs. Chugging ominously, cherry-red smoke stacks pumped a sickening pall of foul-smelling black smoke across the queues. Kitch gagged more than once in the shifting wind. Grateful when the wind swung east, he uncovered his nose and mouth with his forearm.

  Sluggish medical and military personnel wearing surgical masks and gloves unceremoniously tipped bodies onto cremation piles from blood-soaked stretchers. These they hadn’t bothered to cover. The dead lay there, staring up at the hot sun with unblinking, milk-white eyes. Each had a bullet hole between their eyes. The stretcher bearers walked slowly back into the hospital.

  Kitch lifted smoke-red eyes from the grotesque scene. Heart hammering, he stared through a hastily erected chain wire fence out onto the surrounding suburbs. Beyond the hospital grounds, people hurried. Strain and fear on every passing face was obvious. Chaos, pandemonium, panic, terror, and fear were the new norm. All of which Kitch’s father had shielded him from, until today.

  Dragging frightened eyes back to the shortening queue, Kitch focused on nurses in military tents mechanically swabbing and then injecting anxious nineteen-year-olds.

  One incinerator’s door popped open with a sudden howl, and an ear-splitting shriek of heated metal scraping on metal rent out. A disgusting stink permeated the air as tongues of wickedly hot heat flared. To Kitch’s horror, he noted two corpses stacked one atop the other burning fiercely inside. A female voice cursed. Kitch jumped at that. God only knows why, he thought.

 
An involuntary squeak escaped his lips. Someone nearby giggled. A Med-Tech poked the door shut with a wooden handled pole. It clanged home with a dull boom. As the additional heat dissipated, he ignored low laughter as a loud, intrusive male voice drew his watering eyes to a series of outdoor vid-screens fixed above the hospital’s curved portico.

  Kitch was grateful for the visual diversion because his mind needed to be anywhere but this place right now. He looked up to a source of voices. Two giant vid-screens provided looping newscasts, depicting flash-news stories of the outbreak spreading across the globe. One screen played looping feeds consisting of safety procedures. The fourth blasted out a series of evacuation warnings, directions to safe zones, and the locations of medical facilities. As Kitch shuffled forward in the queue, increasingly nervous teens found themselves facing two outdoor vid-screens pitched downward to address the queues. Spell-bound, they watched Channel Six’s gritty, veteran reporter prepare to sum the pandemic up.

  The wiry-haired, hard-faced reporter commenced with a basic background overview. He pointed out that early newscasts had been highly speculative. The majority contained nothing more than filler for TV stations requiring content. Most reports were disconnected, serving only to create panic, confusion, and mistrust in unaffected suburbs. Newscasts depicted sensational stories of people behaving violently toward those suffering flu-like symptoms. Almost nothing was broadcast on treatment or research. The newsfeed morphed into hospital CCTV footage from across the State.

  Weary ambulance crews and paramedics struggled to assess and transport violent patients to hospitals, but the brave, dedicated souls did. Queues of patients watched their fate approaching through hospital doors with horrified gazes. By the end of week one, security personnel were as much a treatment tool as alcohol swabs. During the first week the plague showed itself, entire medical wings were declared no-go quarantine areas.

  Two weeks on, tent cities were born on hospital and school lawns. Another two weeks went by, and chain wire enclosures went up. Six weeks on, security guard’s arms advanced from clubs to sidearms and long-handled fireman’s axes.

  All flu-like presentations were treated as infectious. Hospital services across South Carolina rapidly declined in efficiency as staff fell victim to the plague in the hundreds daily. By that time, jumpy medical staff were accompanied by equally jumpy, zero-tolerant security guards.

  By the sixth-week, the infection had spread worldwide. Death and infection rates soared. Hospital staff employed stun guns in the mistaken belief the infected could be subdued, treated, and cured. Used on a full-blown infected, they were useless and caused more deaths and infections than they prevented. Sawed-off shotguns appeared in their place. Meanwhile, no treatment seemed to halt the infection clawing its way into innocent suburbs.

  The murder rate skyrocketed too. Federal government releases suggesting nothing more than the severe flu was at work became the stuff of public ridicule. Politicians calling for calm were mocked by public commentators and comedians across all media streams. In an information age, where every citizen was their own reporter, countless public news-feeds depicted the horrible truth.

  The hard-nosed investigative journalist backtracked the plague to a Charleston University laboratory. The camera was focusing on a lab door, as he prepared to reveal the true horror of what was unleashed upon the world. According to the ruddy-faced, bulbous-nosed reporter, the so-called influenza outbreak was directly attributable to poor laboratory security procedures. He revealed waving a bundle of red-stamped, black-lined, redacted papers obtained under the Freedom of Information Act that was an internal university medical investigation pinpointing the plague’s creation and outbreak to one medical technician, twenty-year-old Harold Carter.

  The reporter was thumbing papers until he found the one he was looking for, explained that Harold was the laziest Lab-Tech to have graduated from Charleston University. Pulling out employment application forms and university score sheets, he informed his audience, Harold was employed by C-Land United Laboratories, which was a university-owned research subsidiary company set up for taxation deviation purposes.

  The scowling reporter emphasized that if Harold’s uncle was not a major shareholder in C-Land, his technical duties would have been confined to servicing simple maintenance ‘bots in the mechanical workshop. The reporter added, with a half-sneer creasing thick lips, on the day Harold hosted the plague, his task was a simple and mundane one. Under the instruction and in a controlled environment, Harold mixed live Virii for more qualified staff to create a killer vaccine to treat existing flu strains. C-Land aimed to exploit and create a worldwide lucrative medical patent for the treatment of minor and deadly influenza strains.

  Harold became the planet’s first-time host for a deadly cross of the Hendra and Lyssa Virii due to his innate laziness.

  Harold’s personal profile, obtained under Freedom of Information provisions, flashed across vid-screens. It summarized an unnamed HR manager’s comments, the reporter read directly from a paper. He quoted dryly, “Harold’s normal state of existence is intellectually dull. He is sly, cunningly lazy and a pathological liar. Any supervisor dealing with Harold should be wary. Harold avoids responsibility, even for the simplest of errors, of which there are dozens.

  “When confronted with the consequences of his actions, Harold’s fallback position was to deny, deny, deny. He will pretend to listen intently, but as soon as his admonisher is out of sight, he will call his uncle and invent lies about the supervisor harassing him. This generally includes alleged unsavory comments about the uncle’s business and medical competencies in running C-Land. Be warned! Following several sackings of supervisors and colleagues, Harold should be allowed to carry on his duties undisciplined, but closely monitored. Be further warned, Harold will be as belligerent and lazy as before.”

  The reporter looked up from the paper. He flipped it over. Staring into the camera meaningfully, he went on with a grimace as he continued to read aloud. “Harold’s slothfulness and unsanitary hygiene habits were hot laboratory gossip. When Harold was infected, and despite the medical training of C-Land’s staff, none of Harold’s colleagues picked up on his symptoms.” The reporter waved the bulging HR file. “Harold’s first infection occurred handling expensive racehorses infected by a colony of Hampton Park flying foxes.

  “Complaining bitterly about extra work, Harold was dispatched to a notable racing stable to assist four CDC Veterinarians tracking down the infection. Harold was to act as the team Gofer, stable cleaner, horse-minder and all-around dog’s body. Harold’s reputation was such, a nervous and wary lead veterinary CDC officer figured Harold could exercise and feed infected racehorses without too much trouble. As it turned out, he didn’t know Harold’s capabilities all that well,” the reporter mused.

  “Harold was not welcome in the house and rose at dawn after having slept in the stables overnight.” The reporter glanced up at the camera with a wry grin. “Harold’s prolific snores rattled windows and jarred nerves. Toxic wind emissions were known to cause vomiting, even several rooms away. It is alleged”—the reporter stated matter-of-factly—“on the morning he was first infected, Harold haltered several stamping racehorses and, ignoring strict instructions to avoid a particular horse pen, opened that gate. The dull-witted Harold chose a short, well-worn horse path, along which he would lead the magnificent racing animals to stand and rest beneath the gnarled limbs of an ancient oak tree. Understanding at least that horses required exercise, Harold led the race horses round and round trunk.

  “Despite explicit warnings to avoid that particular horse pen, Harold trudged around a path favored by generations of well-bred horses seeking respite from a brightly burning South Carolina sun. It seemed to the belligerent Harold, the chittering and squalling flying foxes roosting overhead took a perverse delight urinating on him at each pass. The scratched, yellow-headed boils and erupting pimples peppering his ruddy, fat face and thick neck were infected by the flying foxes within
minutes.

  “Harold never connected the dots as to why CDC Veterinarians were on the site to investigate the consequences of Virii passing from flying fox to horse to human. That particular medical riddle remained a mystery to him. As far as Harold was concerned, walking skittish racehorses was a task far beneath his superior lab skills. In passing days, Harold’s symptoms worsened into a raging fever beset with shivers, vomiting, high temperatures, memory loss, and impaired cognitive skills.

  “Out of sight and out of mind in the stables, the CDC officers cheerfully left the odorous Harold to his own devices. Even after vomiting blood while he shook and shivered throughout the night, Harold failed to inform the head Veterinarian he was feeling unwell, and so continued with his duties.”

  The reporter flipped the pages to wave a sheaf of documents stamped in large black letters—FOI. Then he went on with the story. “A week later, back in the laboratory, a somewhat feverish and slothful Harold was tasked with blending the H5N1 and H7N9 Virii or Bird Flus with a sample of Swine Flu—AH1N1 into a petri dish. A task was so simple”—the reporter grimaced—”one senior Lab-Tech bet a disbelieving twenty-year administrative assistant veteran, even Harold couldn’t get it wrong. But he had not counted on Harold’s innate laziness coupled with the fever dulling his feeble intellect even further.” The reporter played CCTV footage obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. The camera zoomed.

  “Observe. Watch me, Harold,” the tall, experienced-looking senior technician instructed as he was holding a petri dish in the palm of a gloved hand under Harold’s dripping, blackhead-encrusted nose.

  Harold nodded eagerly, but sitting opposite the pair on a lab stool, a female Lab-Tech displayed more bare leg and breast than Harold could evidently handle. Instead of paying attention to his instructions, Harold stared at her exposed flesh.