At eight in the morning, after an hour long drive and an interminable wait going through security, Brittany Rivers boarded her flight to New York. Sarah watched the plane takeoff and stared without blinking until it was only a tiny spec in the sky and then, feeling empty, turned around and walked back to her car.
She was a mess. Sarah feared flying and she doubly feared it when Brittany flew, and she triply feared it when Brit flew alone, which happened from time to time. And had she heard about the ongoing rat attacks in the New York City subway system her fear would've been enough for her to turn the car around right there on the highway. Unfortunately for her the rat attack story had been buried by worse news: Miami, Jacksonville, and New Orleans were under an actual quarantine. A situation that Sarah couldn't ever remember happening in her lifetime or even her mother's lifetime.
It was unreal. The army wasn't letting anyone in or out of the cities and that included journalists.
Because of this, the newspapers and the twenty-four hour cable shows were all over the place, reporting on hearsay and guesses as if they were actual facts. First they said it was Bubonic plague, and people in the Gulf coast region went into a panic and shuttered their doors and windows as if a hurricane was approaching. And then it was suggested that it was influenza, but when that was explained as only the flu it wasn't deemed a creditable enough threat and the reporting on that only lasted a day.
The President had given a speech the night before and told the American public that it was an outbreak of Legionnaire's disease, the same as was being reported in London and Cairo and along the Italian coasts. He went on in a calm voice to tell us that everything that could be done was being done. The speech was supposed to be reassuring, but Sarah hadn't been reassured in the least.
In her gut she knew a slow approaching anxiety, which had only been added to by the fact that her daughter's teenage rebellion couldn't have come at a worse time. Thankfully Sarah's Ex didn't live in the actual city. If he had, Sarah would've put her foot down for real; though in truth she didn't know what that would look like. Her discipline took the form of gentle and sometimes circuitous nagging, coupled with a light sprinkling of guilt.
Her Ex, Stewart Rivers, lived on Long Island with his new and much younger wife. Sarah's lips disappeared whenever she thought of the new wife and they did so again. “I'm hungry,” she said, deciding to push the thought of Miss New Boobs out of her mind. At that point Sarah was halfway back home to Danville and took an exit to somewhere called Waynetown. She had never heard of it, but McDonald's had and that was good enough for her.
Another thing that was good enough for her was the price of gas in the little burg. All over the country, prices had surged in the last week and a gallon of gas was now over six dollars on average, and so when she saw that it was just over the five-dollar mark there in Waynetown she slipped into the line behind a honking big SUV.
That was another thing the outbreak of whatever it was had caused: lines. She really wasn't used to them. Waiting ten minutes to checkout at the Food Lion was about all she could handle. Anything more and she would grow impatient. Now the gas lines lengthened with each passing day. The last time she filled up, two days before, it was a twenty-five minute wait. And even there in Nowhere'sville, Indiana, she sat idling behind the Ford Expedition listening to song after song on the radio and turning the channel whenever the station went to news.
The people in the Expedition weren't just after gas. The driver, whom Sarah assumed was the father of the family, directed his two sons to a grocery store that sat just a few blocks away, while he walked away up the line of cars. When he came back laden down with bags, Sarah barely noticed, but when the two teenage boys arrived with a shopping cart full of canned goods, she watched them load the cans with an unsettling idea growing in her.
Should she be stocking up as well? She frowned at the idea. It almost seemed un-American. Sarah had never known a day of true want in her whole life. In her America, McDonald's could never run out of hamburgers; everyone knew they had an endless supply of them. And gas pumps couldn't possibly run dry—they hadn't ever before. And there would always be Stouffer's Pizzas in the freezer section of every grocery store, and every mall had a Macy's filled with clothes, and Hollywood was always releasing a new block-buster hit, filmed in ear-splitting surround sound. That was the America she was used to.
Still she watched the family piling their groceries into the SUV and she begun to worry. When she finally got to the pumps she went into the convenience store as she fueled and was shocked at how empty the shelves were.
And what was left was being marked up in price even then by a frumpy looking lady in a housecoat and slippers. Sarah glanced at the new price tag on a bag of Cheetos and her eyes went wide.
“Eight dollars!” she gasped. “That's…that's gouging. Isn't price gouging illegal?” It was a strange world she lived in: her daughter could throw a fit and fly half-way across the country and Sarah could barely muster the temerity to say more than a few dribbling words, but charge her eight dollars for a bag of chips and watch her outrage come out.
“And what about the morality of it? I should call the police!” she added.
“Be my guest,” the lady in the housecoat said with a laugh. “I'm sure they're going to drop everything and rush right over.”
The man behind the counter, though also looking tired, was at least in normal street clothes. He smiled somewhat embarrassed and said, “We're not gouging. Not really. First we charge only what the market bears and second, if we don't raise our prices we'll be out of business. Do you understand about replacement costs?”
“Of course she doesn't,” the woman said. “If she did she wouldn't be all in a tizzy.”
“What are replacement costs?” Sarah asked, trying to be civil and eyeing the Oreos that were next to be up-charged.
“Well, if I buy these chips for a dollar and sell them for two, I make a profit. But what happens if the next bag costs four dollars for me to buy? I wouldn't be able to afford them and thus I couldn't sell them to you. It's why gas prices are so fluid. Sure the gas in the pumps cost me three-fifty a gallon, but the next truck in will cost me over five.”
“I guess I see,” Sarah said. “What about that grocery store? Are they raising their prices too?” She had a sudden desire to purchase as much food as she could afford before she couldn't afford any.
“Yes, though not as much,” the man said with a shrug. “They have greater purchasing power than I do.”
“Oh, ok. Thanks and sorry about getting so angry. I'm a little stressed out.” Sarah left without buying anything except the gas and drove to the grocery store down the block and was amazed to see the parking lot was nearly full as if it were a Saturday and not a Wednesday morning. The crowd wasn't overwhelming; after all this was a part of the country where root cellars were still common and where some people still actually jarred their own preserves and canned peaches and other fruits.
Still the shelves could best be described as thin, especially in the Medicine/Pain Reliever aisle, and barren in the fresh produce aisle. Sarah hurried to the canned goods and went among a dozen other women and for once in her life she shopped like a man.
She looked beyond specials or prices, while the list of ingredients on the side might as well have been written in Greek for all she paid attention. The shelves were emptying fast and so she began filling her cart as quickly as she could without starting a panic.
This was a real worry. The women in the aisle were strained in appearance and had nervous quick eyes. One even said to another, “That's enough. Leave some for everyone else.” This was ignored and a shoving match broke out.
Sarah, who had thirty or so cans of soup and stew and corn, left as quickly as she could. She went for rice, but the store was out and she settled for eight boxes of dried mashed potatoes, an item she would never have touched only the week before.
And then she moved onto the biggest shock yet. The store was out of toilet
paper! For some reason this hit her nerves more than anything else, and feeling jittery, she grabbed the last three bundles of paper towel thinking she was crazy for doing so. Surely her Food Lion back in Danville would have more toilet paper and plenty of fresh produce. And everything else. Surely it would.
It had never run out of anything, before.
Chapter 7
Eric
Washington D.C.
As Sarah Rivers waited in another, even longer line at the Country Market in Waynestown, Indiana, Eric Reidy stood in the White House situation room, feeling sweat spreading from his armpits in an ever widening circle. When he breathed it came out as a shaky sigh. He was normally good at public speaking, however he had never spoken before the Joint Chiefs of Staff or the Secretary of State, or the Secretary of Defense, or the Secretary of This or That. All these important people stared at him, which was bad enough, yet when the President came storming into the room in a fury, Eric feared he would have a new stain to deal with.
“You've got ten minutes,” the President said brusquely. “And let me be clear, I don't want your briefing done with any scientific mumbo-jumbo. The guy who was in here yesterday couldn't spit out a word unless it was twenty syllables long and all he did was confuse the issue.”
The “Guy” had been the Director of the Center for Disease Control, Thomas Villar and his double PhD status hadn't impressed the President a lick. Eric, despite only possessing a master's degree in microbiology, had been chosen to do the follow up with the President because he was more in tune with public relations than actual laboratory work. The truth was, viruses gave him the heebie-jeebies, but the pay at the CDC was phenomenal and the expectations low. His kind of work, until now.
“Yes sir,” Eric answered. How on earth was he supposed to cover everything in ten minutes? Quickly he turned on the projector showing the continental United States. “Uh…first, the red shaded areas are where the known outbreaks of the uh…” Eric paused. He had been about to spit out the scientific name of the virus, which was a good thirty-two letters long, instead he swallowed audibly and said, “The virus. As you can see southern Florida and Louisiana are hardest hit, but we now can confirm that Mobile, Houston, Norfolk, New York and Providence…really all of Rhode Island has seen some activity.”
“What about the orange circles?” the president asked, pointing, as behind him his Yes-Men all nodded sagely in agreement.
Their bobbing heads were a distraction and Eric had to force his eyes back to the projection. “The orange represents areas where we can't confirm the virus has traveled to, but we strongly suspect that it has. This is mainly due to reports of…yes sir? Did you want to say something?”
The President sat glaring at Eric as if the map was his fault. “That's the entire eastern sea board and the gulf coast. And Denver? And Seattle? Are you sure?”
Eric shook his head. “I'm not in a position to confirm that any area in the orange zones has viral activity. However the Director has asked me to reiterate that if martial law is not called today it will be for certain that the virus will spread into these areas. Mathematical probabilities render it an absolute fact. I have a brief concerning the statistics behind the rendered…”
“Ahem,” a general said clearing his throat and standing. The man's chest was so covered in commendations, medals and ribbons that it seemed almost to be a joke. He didn't wait for the President to acknowledge him. “This was suggested three days ago by the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and I want it on record that if you hesitate any longer, Mr. President, then containment will be flat out impossible.”
“Will it?” the President asked, and it was a moment before Eric realized that he was being addressed.
Eric had to shrug. “I…uh, I don't know. I'm not sure what your containment strategies are or how effective they'll be.”
“Just give me your best guess, damn it!” the President thundered slamming his fist down onto the table. Behind him a dozen faces glared at Eric.
“A guess isn't really scientifically…” Eric bit his words off as the President's brown eyes bored into him. “Okay…if I had to guess, I would say that I'd agree with the general here. This virus has the potential of spreading exponentially. How it began, and how it spreads we don't know, but it has a firm hold on the rat population in the major cities in the red zones. What we've found is that the rats have for the most part, been attacking the homeless and the indigent: prostitutes, runaways, or maybe just kids getting high and unable to protect themselves. From there the virus is spreading to the first responders. Police departments are reporting large numbers of their officers are complaining of flu like symptoms…”
“Rats aren't the damned problem,” a man in a blue suit said. “It's the zombies that are the damned problem.” The word zombie had an odd affect on the men and women gathered, none so much as snickered, instead they glanced to the President who set his mouth but said nothing.
Eric bobbed his head and stammered, “Yes, well, in a sense you're right, however as it pertains to containment it is the rats that will be more of an issue than the altered persons. A wounded rat will crawl off to die, maybe in the back of a truck, or in the hold of a boat, or in a bag of potatoes destined for a grocery store five states away. And then when you think you have the zombies contained, that rodent will, uh re-animate for want of a better word and start the cycle up again hundreds of miles away.”
“So if we can stop the rats, we can stop the spread of this virus?” the President asked making it clear with how he said virus that he wasn't going to put up with the term zombie any longer. He tried glaring some more but then sagged, looking haggard; his dark black hair seemed to have gone grey overnight.
“And the red zones will have to be contained,” Eric said flipping back to the previous slide. “Completely contained. If that's even possible. Though it would help the CDC immensely if we knew the origin of the virus. There's been talk of terrorist attacks. If this is true we need to know the country of origin and…”
“We're looking into it,” an advisor of the president mentioned.
Once again the general stood and his face was livid. “Save the political correctness for the media. We all know the muslims were behind this. Every piece of intel that's come across my desk says so in the very clearest terms. Hell, we even have the Iranians confirming this.”
The President motioned for his general to sit before he said, “There may have been terrorist ties to this, but we can't know for certain and until we do I won't have Americans turning on one another. For now we will stick to the story that it's Legionnaires disease being spread by rats.”
“And the country of origin?” Eric asked.
“Like he said, we're looking into it,” the President answered vaguely. “In the mean time Mr. Reidy, I need an estimate on when we can expect a cure.”
Eric cleared his throat. “There won't be one. Viruses don't have cures. What we are working on is a vaccine, which is denatured version of the virus, meaning the pathogencity is removed and thus the body's...”
“We know what a vaccine is,” the President said coldly. “How long until one is available?”
“Months to years,” Eric replied. “Maybe never. I can't tell you for certain at this early stage, though it would help if we knew where this came from, what family it's in. Right now we have scientists working blindly and any information could trim weeks off the initial work.”
“When we have the information, you'll be the first to know,” the President allowed. He then covered his face with his long brown hands and rubbed his eyes. “Alright...alright, as of now I am declaring martial law. General Chaky, I am putting you in charge of enforcing the quarantine for all the red zones. It has to be air tight, until we can set up safe zones in the rear to move people into.”
“That won't be enough,” Eric said. “Those orange areas can't be ignored. They have to be policed as well and the people in them can't be allowed to leave either until it is known for an absolute certainty
that they are clean. That means the airports and the harbours and the roads, all have to be shut down completely.”
“See that it happens,” the President said. The general did not wait for further orders and led his group of uniformed personnel out of the room.
The Secretary of Health and Human Services stood and said, “We have to create and distribute vaccines to three-hundred and thirty million people, before it's too late. I'm going to need every scientist from every university in America brought down to the CDC in Atlanta.”
Eric sat down as the various cabinet members asked questions and made points, mostly concerning aspects under their purview. What escaped his notice, not until much later was that the Secretaries of Agriculture and Transportation were for the most part silent.
Unfortunately theirs were political positions, and each were usually concerned with renewable energies or climate solutions, or minority rights or the like.
All of which was fine under normal circumstances but the real issue facing America just then—besides a growing horde of zombies—was how they were going to feed three-hundred and thirty million people, none of who were allowed to travel legally, and those two men were utterly clueless.
Chapter 8
Ram
Los Angeles, California
Ram snuck a look around the edge of the building and gave a thumbs up to the two men behind him. The alley, a dirty stretch of weeds and trash behind the running warehouse was clear.
“Let's go,” he whispered, taking point with gun drawn. Shelton moved to his left and the Fed, in truth they were all feds now, went to the right, each moving with all the stealth they could. Their target was a ratty mobile home that sat on a little square of a lot just past the warehouse and Ram prayed to God that it wasn't booby trapped like the last one had been. There'd be no calling in a bomb squad, since as far as he knew everyone in the L.A. bomb squad was either dead or bitten.
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