by J. B. Beatty
Contagion on the World
J.B. Beatty
Book 2 of The World Itself series
CONTAGION ON THE WORLD
©2017 J.B. Beatty
BISAC: Fiction / Dystopian
Cover design: Erik Reichenbach
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons living or dead, actual events or actual large boats is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved. This book may not be reproduced in any form, in whole or part (beyond that copying permitted by U.S. Copyright Law, Section 107, “fair use” in teaching or research, Section 108, certain library copying, or in published media by reviewer in limited excerpts), without written permission from the publisher.
“But that the undiscovered country from whose bourne no traveler returns,
Breathes forth contagion on the world,
And thus the native hue of resolution, like the poor cat i' the adage,
Is sicklied o'er with care,
And all the clouds that lowered o'er our housetops,
With this regard their currents turn awry,
And lose the name of action.”
Mark Twain
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
1→WE ALL HAS TO HAVE OUR TROUBLES
Some mornings blow and I’d rather die than wake up.
The problem could be that our home gets no sunshine. There is something called “Seasonal Affective Disorder,” where if you don’t get enough sunshine you get depressed. That’s me now. And maybe that’s why a part of me wants to die. About 46% of me, to be exact.
But the problem could also be that someone fired missiles at our house and turned it into a random arrangement of steaming rubble. Or that I barely survived hand-to-hand combat with a crazed cannibalistic flu victim. Or that one of my good friends, an amazing guy named RIP, got killed.
That was all yesterday.
Or the problem could even have earlier roots and be the lingering effects of my family getting killed by the Zombie Flu not even two months ago.
I don’t know. Maybe a little bit of all of that is what has me feeling blue.
I remember a technique my therapist told me to use when I feel this way. (I’m not much of a therapy guy, but my mom made me go because she thought I had issues that I could overcome with professional help. This was back before my sister ate her. She had hoped that I could turn my chronic depression around. As it turns out, Mom’s optimism was well-founded and I did feel much more positive and focused after most of America devoured itself.)
The technique is simple. List my problems in single words, and next to them, write solutions in two words. So here goes:
1. Sunshine – I’m fucked
2. Zombies—kill more
3. Missiles—avoid/die
4. Girls—hopeless situation
5. Friends—keep alive
6. Revenge—when/how?
Now, a more detailed analysis to bring you up to speed.
1. Sunshine is not really a problem. It’s lack of sunshine, as I’ve explained before. But I had to stick to one word. We live in a secure underground bunker which has, not surprisingly, no windows. We are safe here, but sometimes I’m sad. Still, we’re going to stay, because of 2 and 3.
2. Zombies. Technically not zombies, but flu victims who have lost their minds and gained a taste for human cuisine… or humans as cuisine. Again, I am limited by one word. Their numbers are declining, at least around here, and the population may drop even more now that winter is here. However, we are starting to see a Darwinian effect, where the ones who have survived this long are smarter, faster, and much better at hunting. This is not a happy development.
3. Missiles. One word. To sum it up in 42 more: We’re not only being hunted by zombie-types, but by a mysterious security force that is heavily armed and seems intent on killing any survivors of the flu who have gathered together in numbers big enough to stage a modest card game. They have 50-caliber machine guns, missiles, RPGs, helicopters and, like a psychopath with a meat cleaver, aren’t afraid to use them without making conversation first.
4. Girls. More of a worry in my pre-apocalyptic life, where I had time to be concerned with such things and my options were severely limited by my notable inability to attract and make any coherent conversation with the opposite sex. Now I am limited mainly by the fact that I only know of two other women on earth who are in my age range. Both are suffering from serious diseases and, while friendly, neither seems to be particularly interested in me.
5. Friends. Our little family of survivors is my prime concern. Only four of us remain. Maggie Bindenmuller was a classmate of mine. Beautiful, rough around the edges, great with guns, and trying to fight off leukemia in a world without doctors. Justin Rodgers is a nurse, older than us, handsome, strong and intelligent. And gay, which really disappointed Maggie when she found out. He’s dealing with HIV, but it’s under control at this point. And then there is Carrie Barnhart. We only met her two days ago, when we found her in the smoldering ruins of her old group’s place. She was a bartender in her past life. A bartender with Lupus. So, I guess you can say that all of us have our challenges.
6. Revenge. See number 3.
2→KIND OF STRANGE AND UNREGULAR
About our underground bunker: plenty of storage space, great kitchen, bathrooms, dormitory style bedrooms, and a control room for what we think is the former nuclear silo that it’s all attached to. We’re pretty sure about the nuclear silo part. It’s the “former” part that we are engaged in speculation about.
We’ve got Internet here. It’s pretty fast but we are starting to discover odd limitations with the web itself, the little things that we didn’t foresee when our civilization imploded. The social media sites are all out there still, but it’s become impossible for us to interact with them. You can Facebook-stalk till the cows come home, but when you try to like something or type in a comment, nothing happens. Granted, who really cares? We no longer have any need to tell that insecure girl from our calculus class that she looks SO pretty, or talk trash about the Detroit Lions.
Ditto on Twitter. Unlimited browsing, but “tweet” is no longer a verb that’s available to us. Same deal with virtually any site we can think of. Reddit, for instance. We’re not seeing new posts from anyone, and we can’t post anything ourselves. What’s more, you’d think there’d at least be early threads about the flu virus that ended our world, some way to analyze the progression of this apparent pandemic, but we can find nothing. Posts that I recall seeing the day after the flu hit are impossible to find now. It’s as if it has been scrubbed clean.
My theory is that the people who seem to be in charge now—we call them “GAC” for lack of a more accurate name, and sometimes they are just the “Men in Black” but I worry about writing that in case any copyright lawyers are still alive—are powerful enough to shut off any way groups like ours may have to communicate with each other. Though at this point I don’t know if there are any other groups like ours.
The world has changed. RIP—our friend who died in the attack on our place—insisted that the real changes started with the election. The years following that were brutal on families and friendships, as everyone took sides. And when the truth became clear, that the country had been the victim of a colossal practical joke by the Russians, the resulting violence scarred us all—even the people like me who buried their heads in the sand and tried steadfastly to ignore all politics.
Then we thought it all was better after our brief Civil War 2.0 wrapped up. We got back on the path to making America normal again. That Fall everyone I kn
ew seemed happy, as if a weight had been lifted off all of us. Hayrides, apple cider, football games—I mean, I actually loved that stuff again, instead of just pretending to like I did most autumns. We were okay, again, America. The divisions had faded away. It was like we got to the end of a scary movie and the good guys were going to be fine after all.
Then came what we call the Zombie Flu. It moved fast, affecting nearly everyone of child-bearing age. Our families, our loved ones became beasts, monsters, raging weapons of hunger. And that’s when our world—as we knew it—ended. Since then we have just been trying to stay alive.
In our bunker, we have decent stores of food that we have scavenged from houses and stores. Surprisingly, food seems to be fairly plentiful still—such was the speed of the epidemic that laid waste to our world. That has been a mixed blessing, because we put off serious food gathering for too long. It seemed so easy we didn’t need to worry about it. Now that we have been attacked and are hiding underground, running out to the store for mac & cheese and waffles is suddenly a discouraging exercise in risk management.
We gather in Maggie’s room. All day we’ve been gathered, it seems. No one wants to be alone after yesterday.
Maggie is in bed with her mattress propped up so she’s not lying flat. Her long, dark hair is pulled back and starting to look thin. The tanned skin she always seemed to have has gone pale. She’s still beautiful, though. A face that might have been a model’s even if her body was too strong and curved to get passing marks on the runways of New York City.
She’s got her tubes all plugged in—Justin has been administering chemotherapy for her. He’s not any sort of expert but he watched some videos on YouTube.
He sits next to her, playing with the IV bag. Despite not working our any more, his muscular arms still make me feel like a 98-pound weakling. Carrie sits on the bed across the room, her finger nervously twirling what she describes as her dishpan blonde hair. I pace.
“Sit down, Arvy,” Justin says. “You’re just going to aggravate your stitches.” I have a fresh stab wound in my thigh, accidentally self-inflicted. And uncomfortably fresh stitches from a zombie bite out of my neck.
“Yeah, you’re making me dizzy,” says Maggie.
“Everything makes you dizzy.”
“Can I help it if chemo makes me want to puke every single fucking minute of the day?” she says. “I came here for a good time. Don’t make me decide to get up and leave.”
I pull out a chair and sit backwards on it. “So, what are we going to do about food? We don’t quite have enough to get through the winter.”
“Not comfortably,” says Justin. “But I did some research and some math. We need about 1500 calories a day to survive. A little less for women. Your individual mileage may vary. But that only gives you the energy to watch TV….
Carrie stirs: “You have TV?”
“Netflix…. A smarter number is 2000-3000 calories. Anything under 2000 is dangerous considering that we all have health issues…” He pauses and looks at me. “Based on my math, we might have enough food to make it till April if we try to cut it close. Not quite starvation rations.”
“Starvation rations?” I say. “Didn’t the Nazis…”
“They did something like 1300 calories a day for inmates. I found that when I was researching Most stayed alive for 3-4 months—but they were doing hard labor at the time. They tried 800 calories too, but that went a lot faster.
“Bottom line, if we’re going to stay here, we’re going to need to get out and get some food.”
“And then there’s the fuckers with the missiles,” Maggie says slowly, yawning as she goes.
“Yeah,” I say. “But maybe we’re okay now. They probably think we’re all dead.”
Carrie speaks up. “If it happened the way it did when they attacked my group’s camp, after they shot the missiles, they came in Humvees and SUVs and swept the area to make sure everything was dead.”
“But why?” I ask.
“Are we a threat to them?” asks Justin.
“I can’t see how,” I say. “We don’t even know who or where they are.”
“The threat just might be that we’re alive,” says Carrie.
“How did they even know where we were?” I say. “Or that we existed at all?”
Carrie sits straight and brushes an errant hair off her face. “You got on their radar. Probably when you made that run up to Traverse City. That’s how my group got attacked, not long after we sent a patrol up that way to check things out.”
“Yeah, but knowing where we were staying nearly 90 miles away?”
“I’ve been thinking about that,” I say. “We weren’t followed. We would have noticed helicopters or planes. And definitely no one on the ground was following us. I can only think of two possibilities they might have used to track us:
“One, they could have attached a GPS tracking device to our truck while we were in the hospital clearing out the chemo drugs. That’s maybe the most likely.”
“What’s number two?” asks Justin.
“They might be high tech enough to be using satellite surveillance.”
“No way.”
“They’ve got planes, helicopters and missiles. They’ve got whatever they want. They even got a way to not get the Zombie Flu. I say if they want satellites, they’ve got satellites. Then again, it could be military grade drones. The kind that are a mile up, invisible to the naked eye.
“If it’s true that they have access to that kind of military information,” Justin says, “they probably also know that we have a missile silo here.”
“Maybe not. Not if it’s been decommissioned.”
“You hope.”
“You know what that means, guys?” says Carrie. “It means that while the tracking device is most likely, we still have to assume they have satellites or drones. Because we can’t afford to be wrong. One more attack like that, and we’re all dead. We’re safe underground here, but no one else can ever know we’re here. No one. Not the satellite people, not anyone in the neighborhood. Anyone we might try to make a relationship or alliance with is a risk to us if they get captured by the GAC. Just by letting them know we still exist, it’s a death warrant for us.”
She looks around the room with a deathly serious expression. “When we go out to get food, to get anything, we have to go out at night.”
Justin looks just as scared as I feel. Even Maggie, half-zoned out, looks totally alarmed. “Crap,” she says. “We’ll be midnight snacks for all the local zombies.”
3→WHAT’S THE GOOD OF A PLAN THAT AIN’T NO MORE TROUBLE THAN THAT?
Someone’s got to go out. We need food, we need drugs. Maggie’s too weak from the chemo to be doing any outings. And Justin needs to be with her during this process, as our medical person. Plus, Justin’s claustrophobia is so pronounced that he would have a very difficult time getting out the tunnel that is our only escape from the bunker.
That leaves me and Carrie.
And time is of the essence, because we realize that we would be unable to do any missions at all during the northern Michigan winter. If there is snow on the ground, we would lead the GAC—or anyone else who is curious—right to our otherwise secret hatch in the forest. At this point, we only have one way in and one way out. The main door that opened to the basement of the old radio station is blocked by rubble from the missile strike. The radio station itself has been obliterated. There would be no sense in unearthing that passage as it would be a clear signal to anyone looking that the bunker exists and is occupied.
We need to get enough food and medicine to last the winter. And right now, we don’t have a vehicle. And even if we did load one up, we wouldn’t be able to drive it anywhere near the hatch without giving our position away.
It shouldn’t be hard to get a truck—just walking 4-5 miles to the nearest subdivision would take care of that. Playing with Google Maps, I find a nearby auto repair garage to stash the truck that would leave us with about a ¾ mile
hike up through hilly forest to the hatch. However, carrying our supplies in backpacks would still leave us with about a million little trips on foot through total darkness in order to unload one truckload into our bunker.
Carrie looks at me. Her wispy hair often falls over her face. She pushes it to the side and blows out a puff of air. “This is the worst plan ever,” she says.
I lift my eyes from the paper on which I had been scratching down thoughts and doodling our grand plan.
“But I get it,” she adds. “I can’t think of anything else. And we have to have all of this done before…”
“Before the snow hits.”
“Which could be anytime…”
“It could be five minutes ago, for all I know.”
“And we can’t work on clear nights, in case they’ve got satellite surveillance going…”
“Right.”
“Can we check the weather without going outside?”
“Yeah, at least on a big scale. The National Weather Service website is still functioning. I don’t know how they managed that. I imagine it’s completely automated. And we still have a remote camera that I might be able to set up somewhere outside near the hatch. RIP got it for us and didn’t have time to install it. I need to give that a try—I mean, I’m not even sure it produces a signal strong enough for us to get it down here. It might be a total waste of time for all I know.”
“When do we go?” she asks.
I check the digital clock on the wall. “We’ve got an hour or so before it even gets dark. Let’s pack up what we need. I think we have time to get a truck, load it up with food from a few houses in that neighborhood, and find that shed.”
“It’s going to be a long night,” she grimaces.
Dark clothing is just the start. We bring mostly empty backpacks. We also have night-vision goggles, thanks to RIP. And body armor that he found at a police station. And we’re armed to the teeth.
