18006 words (72 minute read)

Irene Carlson Woodland Hills, CA


Adrian-Robert Abarca Land of the Infected


My name is Irene Carlson, I am seventeen-years-old and I am from Woodland Hills, California in the West San Fernando Valley and I am the sole remaining survivor in my family of the great world plague. It has been two years since the reports of the infection started and I feel it is my responsibility to document for whomever may survive this horrible world nightmare for they to know what happened and how we few, we unlucky few, have survived this hell on earth. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia feared the worst. At first they thought it might be a mutant form of the avian flu spreading on a pandemic level through human carriers via international air travel. Later we learned that is was not just avian flu, but something else, something unexplainable.

The last report citizens received before the television stations went off the air was that half of the Chinese population had already died due to poor sanitation and a lack of medicines. Efforts of an international consortium of doctors and scientific researchers were left impotent to this plague. There were global mass suicides. Evangelic preachers riled their parishioners telling them the great plague was foretold in the bible, a sign from God of man’s insolence towards him, and to cleanse their souls they would have to rid themselves of their earthly vessels. Many followed these men to their deaths, shooting themselves and their families. I compile these stories in an effort to allow others to learn from what we survivors have endured, so a global event like this may never again occur. Where we may have succeeded, where we failed and went wrong. These are the compiled stories of those survivors. Ut humanitas vivendum.

[Dr. Malcolm Dowell, Sherman Oaks, CA]

My name is Dr. Malcolm Dowell. I am thirty-six years old. I was born in Tacoma, Washington. I graduated from the University of Washington where I met my wife, Earleen. I received my Ph.D. and M.D. from Johns Hopkins University. I taught at UCLA for three years then took a position as the head of the night shift at the local Encino hospital as my wife and daughter’s condition worsened. The first case of the plague I saw was six months before the reports were announced that a pandemic was in full force. A man came into our hospital at UCLA and was complaining of high fever and chest pain. He was immediately hospitalized and put to bed given liquids to bring down his fever that rose hourly. We thought it was the flu, some sort of Asiatic flu since he was a businessman and had just come from a trip to Hong Kong. We immediately alerted the airline and the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, Georgia that we believed that we had a case of the bird flu, but then suddenly, his temperature ceased and the man began to cough and defecate blood. That was not strange in Ebola cases, but could this man have contracted Ebola in Hong Kong? No one knew what to suspect. Then two more patients came in a husband and wife that had been on the same airline. Like the businessman, they had the same symptoms and died within forty-eight hours of one another. Dallas and Miami began reporting cases of patients coming in with strange flu like symptoms, and the Centers for Disease Control was contacted. By then it was spreading like wild fire. The CDC said they believed it was the bird flu, but my other colleagues and I thought otherwise. We later learned that is was not bird flu at all, but a strange mutant form of the Bubonic Plague, like the one that wiped out most of Europe throwing civilization into the dark ages. This aggressive form of the plague was so severe it attacked the white blood cells of the human body and like the HIV/AIDS virus attached itself the protein inhibitor later overtaking the white blood cells and then destroying the human immune system. Some people like yourself have somehow through a genetic anomaly have developed a resistant inhibitor to the airborne virus and cannot get sick. You have received a Delta-32 strain from each parent enabling you and probably your ancestors to survive the Great Plague, and that is the reason you are still alive.

I: “Can you tell me Dr. Malcolm, how is it that I am still alive and my parents and sister are dead?”

Clearly, your parents both received this inhibitor from their European ancestors; Delta-32 was only ever found in Western European families passed down from generation to generation as a genetic anomaly developed by the body’s natural immune system to first ward-off the multiple attacks of small pocks in one’s lifetime. That’s why we saw so early on the rapid decline in the African and Asiatic countries.

I: “If mom and dad both had this Delta-32, how come they are dead? And Pepper?”

Agh…here is the tricky part. To be fully immune to the disease, one must be homozygous, and have a strain from both parents. Unfortunately, your mother and father and sister only carried one strain while you fortunately have acquired two.”

I: “And you Dr. Malcolm do you carry the Delta—”

No dear, I am only waiting to die. My mother was Chinese and my father was Dutch, but I have only one inhibitor from his side obviously, as I stated before Asians have no Delta-32 inhibitors. How I have survived this long is a miracle even to me. I am…ple…please do not cry. I did not want to make you upset. I just wanted to help you with your journal project. I do not know for whom you are keeping this for, there is no one left to read it. Everyone is dead, except for the few hoodlums and looters.”

I: “I am keeping this journal for others who may survive this as well. If you and I are alive, there must be others.”

I told you, I am only waiting to die.

[Dr. Malcolm proceeded to cough into a handkerchief, showing me the blood afterwards]

But, hey, I could be wrong. That is only one theory. No one knows for sure what it is. I have a neighbor who was of East Indian descent and he and his whole family, all six kids were still alive before I moved here with my daughter—Thalia, and they went to escape with others to the mountains. Maybe I should have gone with them?

I: “Why didn’t you?”

My wife was an animator for Disney. They had a small animation department here in the Galleria. My daughter wanted to somehow be close to her mother and wanted to stay in the mall, in case she returned. I tried to convince her that her mother was dead, but Thalia would not hear of it. She cried often, and when she got sick, it was harder to bear. I mean, as a doctor, you see all sorts of morbid things. Car wrecks, mutilations, decapitations, working with cadavers, but nothing, I mean nothing can prepare you for the sight of watching your daughter cough up her lungs. Watch her insides turn to mush…it was all too much for me. I eventually suffocated her in her sleep. Put a pillow over her face. I watched as she clawed up at me, and I knew, I mean I knew that the fear and the pain that she felt at that moment was nothing compared to the fear and pain she was going to feel later on as she started to bleed out of every orifice in her body. I could not bear to watch her die like my wife did.

I: “Did Thalia watch her mother die, too?”

No. Earleen did not want her to see her after a certain period. I had to take my wife out of the hospital and keep her at home because there were too many sick people there and even the doctors and nurses were eventually getting sick and dying. On her deathbed, Earleen promised me to keep her alive and safe as long as possible, but if she were to ever get too sick, to please end her life. My wife stopped responding to her medication about a month ago and went full-blown with fever and the sickness quickly overtook her. She died in a matter of hours. When Thalia got sick, I prayed for a cure, anything, but knew it was fruitless. I would sit here, in this theater and run movies on the projector for her. Stuff she was never allowed to see before. And we watched horror movies, because I figured there was nothing on the screen that could possibly be any worse than what she had seen out there, and I read her ‘Winnie the Poo’ and I cherished the little moments that she had still to laugh about.

[Dr. Malcolm began to cry and we briefly stopped the interview]

I read her poetry and books and held her in my arms until she could no longer recognize my voice. And when she started to convulse, and her head was snapping back, so hard I thought her body would split in two, and the blood poured from her mouth, I knew I could no longer allow her to suffer anymore. Please stop the interview now.

I: “Sure doctor.”

I enjoyed those final few weeks Dr. Malcolm and I had together. We sat in the theater day and night and watched movies. He said that I could call him papa, and that I could pretend to be his daughter, and him my father and that we could do all the things that parents did together. He was getting weaker daily, and I knew that I would have to leave Dr. Malcolm soon, but I did not want to. I liked the idea of having a father again. When I was frightened at the scary part of a movie I would curl up next to him and he’d hold me like my father would, or like Justin when he made me see all those stupid teen slasher movies. And he read me bedtime stories, and we even rode the bicycles that were left locked up in the parking garage below starting from the top of the parking structure and going all the way down, trying not to use any brakes if at all possible. Dr. Malcolm smiled a lot and one day, the day before he died; he took me to the hospital in Encino and checked my blood to confirm my Delta-32 status. He was right, that I did carry both inhibitors. Dr. Malcolm began to cough violently and I gave him an injection of I don’t know what he filled in a syringe and then I helped him back to the movie theater where I found an old print of ‘Bambi’ he had rigged up to the 35mm projector that he played every night for Thalia. He wanted to watch the movie and as he did, he fell into a deeper sleep. I began to weep, because at that moment, watching Bambi and Thumper on screen he felt no more pain as he reached out and tried to touch the screen. Dr. Malcolm had given himself enough of a dose to die. He took one last breath and died in my arms. I later buried the body in the back of the mall where an open trench was left at a half-finished construction site. I no longer had the heart to burn the body of another person I cared for. Once again I am alone. I think it must be more of a curse for those of us who have this Delta-32 mutation. To live, while you watch all of your loved ones die around you.

I packed up the truck I found, keys still inside, with the few remaining supplies I could find. I am convinced that if I am alive, there must be others. Others who have the same mutation that I do, and if there are, where the hell have they been? What experiences have they gone through? Are there still governments? Is the President still in charge? Is money any good? Where is the military, and why haven’t they stopped the looting and hoodlums? Has the world been plunged into total chaos and if so, what is the point of living if it is only ‘waiting to die’ like Dr. Malcolm?

I have driven over the hill taking Sepulveda Boulevard to the 405 freeway heading South. The homes are desolate and the freeway is empty. I am the only car on the road as I drive past the Getty Center. It is eerie. There is not a soul in sight. The once bustling metropolis is all but dead. It is like someone has forgotten to wake the sleeping giant.

I drive up and down Hollywood Boulevard and find only trash and litter in the streets. No one is around, and if they are they’re hiding, and for good reason. Someone has set the Hollywood sign on fire, and I know I am not alone. It burns as the smoke rises higher in the sky. I look over at the passenger’s seat and know that as long as I have Mr. Jenkins rifle, I am safe, for the moment. I count the boxes of shells. Thirty-six shots left. I have already used up twelve. I drive up Wilshire Boulevard, most of the windows in the stores have been shot out, and stores in Beverly Hills looted. The homes ransacked, the beauty and the mystique that was once is no more. I drive out of Los Angeles. I try to gas up just outside of Long Beach, but there is no gas there. I am heading to Camp Pendleton military base. Perhaps there are still survivors there; military personnel and they will be able to help me. It hurt me to leave everything I knew behind. I am scared, but I have to move on. I only hope there is someone there when I arrive and that I have enough gas to make it.

[Marine Corps, Camp Pendleton, CA]

I was detained earlier today when I tried to cross a barrier built by the few remaining Marines left in Southern California dressed in bio-hazard suits. Most from what I have been told were deployed overseas in the early days of the great plague. Some were sent back east where the infection is believed to have originated. Others went to Africa, ‘deep in the heart of the madness’ one soldier told me. Others to Europe and Asia, and still the men here are all survivors, from war, and the plague. Most watched their comrades die horrible deaths, fighting an invisible foe in a losing battle. I am not alone here. There are many other survivors—the majority of the sick have been dumped into a big ravine and the bodies are burned daily to stop the spread of infection.

As I tried to cross the border into Southern California I was met at a checkpoint where there were literally hundreds of persons who were either infected in the early stages of the plague, blood and sores on their faces, or were starting to show signs of the sickness. Armed Marines pointing their sub-machine guns at the infected patrolled the barbed wire fences. Others like myself who were among the huddled masses were selected to cross the barrier and as I was lifted out by a Marine an infected woman grabbed my right ankle and tried to piggy back with me over the concrete barrier. She began coughing and once the Marine saw that she had spit up blood onto his suit fired and hit her in the head. The crowd hit the floor and the Marines dashed to get a few others who were not infected and began to fire into the crowd of unarmed civilians sending them scurrying for cover. Marines stood firing for what seemed like ages until there was no one left standing, killing both infected the uninfected alike. The few other civilians and I were immediately strip searched, decontaminated, hosed down, then cleansed and given new clothes. We have all been shipped here in large armory trucks where Marines and the remaining healthy civilians live in a makeshift tent city. These are their stories.

[PFC. Daniel Laruso]

I was stationed at Coronado and was part of Team Delta, operation ‘clean sweep’. I served in the last days of the war in Iraq. Once the plague spread, my unit was recalled and sent to Africa, when they thought at first it was a minor outbreak, and the local military militia could not contain the contamination. Well, the whole village had to be burned and even the wild monkeys that once roamed into the village had to be captured and their little bodies burned. Some guys thought that the…you’ve heard the rumor that the HIV/AIDS virus spread because some guy was caught buggering a monkey in the jungle, right?

I: “I had not heard that. I only got up to biology in high school.”

Oh, well, that’s what some of the fellas were saying anyway. That some guy was buggering a monkey and got the flu from it and contracted some form of Ebola and it mutated and then we had to burn the village. Anyway, by the time we got there it was all FUBAR…

I: “FUBAR”?

Ugh, f$$$ up beyond all recognition. Yeah, it was because you had people with sores and boils exploding on their necks and faces like in them horror movies. Made me sick at first and yeah, I was glad when we got the hell out of there.

I: “Does anyone know how it really happened, how the virus, whatever it is got spread overseas, and why only certain people have gotten sick?”

You’d have to ask the General that, I can’t really talk too much about that. Just that I had this cousin of mine in Denver, and he was telling me that his whole family was killed in a matter of days, but he did not get sick at all. He was killed in the evacuation of Denver, did you hear about that?

I: “No, this is the first real communication I’ve had in over two years, aside from a friend I buried in Sherman Oaks.”

Two years, man you must not know anything!

I: “With all the looting and the hooligans, it was not safe to leave my home, plus I was caring for an elderly man. Once he passed, there seemed no sense for me to stay, so I left and here I am.”

Did you get to see L.A.?

I: “Ghost town.”

Man, too bad. I used to love going into L.A. to party when I was on leave. Boy…speaking strictly off the record then, all I can tell you is that the word is that some kind of germ warfare was being developed and tested on the poor in Africa. Some here think it might have been CIA or MI6 related. Others think it was the French or Russians. Me, I think it was the bio-pharmaceutical companies.

[PFC. Laruso paused glaring at me with angry eyes as I chuckled lightly]

Think that is funny? Well tell me then, how do you explain the fact that there were so many killed in the African countries in the early months of the plague?

I: “Poor sanitation systems, economic poverty, lack of health and hygiene education?”

Then I guess you don’t know that the three major world bio-pharmaceutical companies were hoarding stocks of flu vaccines and not putting them on the market because they were concerned that they were contaminated, only after the outbreak became too big to control, they released them anyway.

I: “Are you saying that the bio-pharmaceutical companies were purposely infecting patients in Africa while supposedly administering flu vaccinations?”

[PFC. Laruso looked around and quickly nodded. Not more than thirty seconds later PFC. Laruso was escorted away and given a court martial. My notes were taken away and my laptop confiscated. I have since bribed one PFC. Tellings who has allowed me to retrieve my computer.]

[General George Lemond, Marine Corps]

I was stationed in Berlin when it happened. My unit was sent to guard the eastern border next to the former Soviet Union. Many in the city were already becoming sick; the elderly were dying daily by the thousands. It was a full-blown plague that was devastating Europe in one of her coldest winters. Bodies of the infected were being burned in some villages just to keep them warm. No one could figure out how an African disease could spread all the way to the remote regions of Eastern Europe and Russia. But it had. The cities were on lock down when they came charging over the hills, hoards of infected human beings, coughing and gaggling, spitting up blood. Holding their hands out, begging for us to help them. What could we do? None of my men wanted to get sick, and I could not allow an outbreak in my regiment. So I gave the order to lay down suppressed fire to drive the infected civilians back into the woods, so they could die, away from those of us in the cities and the US military bases that were still healthy. The only problem with that was the farmers and the persons living in the woods were beating each other to death; suspecting anyone who even had a slight cold, not even the infection; anyone who even remotely was sick was considered banished, beaten to death and even in some villages worse, burned at the stake. We came across one village in the Bavarian Alps, that shall remain nameless to hide their shame, that had three girls burning on a giant stake, all three tied to it, on fire, flesh melting off their bodies as we rolled in. The girls were crying out ‘we’re not infected, we’re healthy, God help us!’ in German. I took a rifle off of an infantryman and shot the girls myself. When I asked the mayor why they had done it, he told me they believed the girls were witches and had brought the plague to the village and caused the livestock to die. I had the whole village burned. That is only one of the many instances I saw when I was stationed over in Europe. There were hundreds of instances like that in a week and over the next several months as the plague spread overseas, my unit was recalled to protect the eastern seaboard of the US, but by that time, with air travel and illegal immigration, there was no stopping it. Some would live and some would die. No one knew who would get it. Soldiers never exposed to the infected were dying in their bio-hazard suits, while others like myself, who were exposed to the infected daily, could not get sick no matter how much they were around them. Still others like my former predecessor, General Rawlings, he too thought he was invincible, unable to get sick, walked around without his bio-hazard suit among the infected, trying to treat them, letting the women and children who were infected through the barrier for medical attention, he too got sick, and we later had to kill him and the others.

I: “Is that legal, to kill a—”

Survival little girl; I could not compromise the safety of this base. We are composed of what remains of every Marine Corps Unit in the Western United States. There are less than four hundred and fifty of us left. There become more and more infected every day, risking the lives of the healthy men, and the safety of what is left of our country’s borders. If I were to allow the infected on this base, not knowing who will and will not be infected I would be playing Russian roulette with the lives of my men. I can’t have that. Anyone that is seen to be sick or comes down with any symptoms is quarantined and then if the condition worsens they are given the choice to either leave the base and take their chances out there with the infected or to be exterminated.

I: “Killed?”

That is correct, ma’am, sounds harsh, but the realities of the situation today dictate a strict no nonsense protocol and we make no exceptions. That is the soldier’s way.

I: “But, many of the people here are not soldiers, they’re civilians.”

They are allowed to stay here as long as they follow protocol. No one is forced to stay; all remain here because they choose to. All who wish to leave, including you, are free to do so at anytime.

[A soldier called the General over and they left to the perimeter where infected civilians trying to breach the borders were weakening it. They were all slaughtered and the bodies burned as many lay against the barbed wire fences, flesh and meat melting away from their bodies.]

[LT. (Dr.) Leslie Warren, Marine Corps]

I was stationed in Shanghai, China when the first case of the infected crossed the border from Tibet. I was then called back to Hong Kong to join a team of doctors that never made it. Their helicopter crashed somewhere over the Gobi desert. Their pilot was believed to have had the infection and lost consciousness at the controls. When they found what was left of the remains of a few doctors, they were all infected and the pestilence was so great even the vultures would not feed on their remains...as to your question, where did this all start? That is a good question. Some say in the Congo, I believe it was in China, in the remote mountains. My theory…? Well, there are already so many, why not. The plague spread the same way any airborne virus is spread through human-to-human contact. This plague, like the one that swept through Europe was no different. Except, nowadays we have air travel and instead of a boat from China to Italy it was airliners traveling the globe. Non-stop flights day in and day out twenty-four hours a day to every destination in the world; the poor bastards had no idea they were sick until they started coughing up a lung or they watched a loved one convulsing on the floor, blood streaming from their eyes, ears, nose and mouth—puss dripping from the anus and vagina or penis. Graphic—I just described for you how I watched my son and daughter die in front of my face and as a doctor, you have no idea how helpless that makes me feel to see my babies dying, while I can’t even get a fever. I would have traded places with them in a heartbeat, but I couldn’t even if I wanted to. Like you I am a Delta-32 carrier, and whatever it was that allowed my ancestors in Belgium to survive ‘The Black Death’ several hundred years ago and the bombardment of the small pox over the course of several thousands of years, it was not passed on to my husband or my kids either. My husband’s family is originally from Haiti. They do not carrier the CCR 5 gene and he died first. My kids lasted a few days later; it was almost unbearable to watch—my neighbors, other men and women on the base. The city of Shanghai was on full alert. People began to panic like in all the cities, mass suicides, children literally abandoned by their families—infected mothers begging U.S. soldiers to take their babies with them to the U.S., literally crawling over the wall and trying to force them into the arms of fleeing U.S. soldiers, reminiscent of the flight from Hanoi at the end of the Vietnam War.

[LT. Warren stopped and opened a foot locker, taking out a bottle of rum. She took a swig unapologetically, laughing as she looked around the camp]

We’re all going to die.

[Whispers]

He will not let us leave. No one can.

I: “The General said anyone can come and go freely”.

You really believe that they brought you here, me here from China, because they want to rescue you from the plague that is ravishing the rest of the world right now? Think with your brain and not your tits.

[LT. Warren paused and put down the bottle of rum]

That was totally uncalled for and I apologize. I have no idea what has come over me. You did not deserve that, dear. If you are here it is because you have lost people close to you too.

[Whispers]

You are here, as am I, to see what makes us able to breathe the air amongst the infected. They try to have us intermingle among the infected outside of the perimeter to see how long we can last before we die. Some last quite a while and then General Lemond ends up having them killed, even though they are not infected—he does not want to take the chance of having them carry the germs back with them into the camp and infect his precious troops.

[LT. Warren points to the gate as Marines in bio-hazard suits force several healthy men and women outside of the perimeter among the infected. They are left to wander along the fence. Some are quickly mobbed and beaten to death while in some instances others are left completely alone. All the while General Lemond watches from atop a pile of sand bags twenty feet high through binoculars studying to see if they get sick]

I have been here almost a year. And every day it’s the same. I treat the wounded men sent out daily to try and stave off the infected trying to breach the perimeter walls yet still the infected grow in size as some die, and bodies are burned, but more come from all over: from Wyoming, Texas, Nevada, Arizona, Northern and Southern California—even as far away as Oaxaca, Mexico. They all hear this is the place where the infected get cured. A tent city where the uninfected live—where the government will take care of them; so daily infected and uninfected alike show up. And daily both are slaughtered by each other or General Lemond. You know sometimes he does not let the uninfected in. Last week a whole family from San Francisco showed up in a Winnebago and he let them sit outside as the father honked for over six hours. The infected rocked that Winnebago right over and stripped everything out of there that was not nailed down, including the family. A healthy family ripped to pieces by an enraged mob of scared and sick human beings who have to look in daily at the healthy who in turn have to watch the infected die at their front door not being able to do a damn thing about it. And the sad part is he is right. Say we let all the infected in, and we give them the little medicine we have and a vaccination that does not work, and treat them for how little long they have to live until they die in a matter of days or weeks—there will always be more to replace them. They never stop coming. It has been two years since this plague hit and people are still dying.

I: “How is that possible?”

A virus comes in waves, changing, mutating every time it is on the brink of extinction. That is how it survives by changing and adapting. Once the human body builds an immunity to the virus, it somehow adapts, changes, and then the virus we were building our immunities to has now become something else and our bodies are still vulnerable to this new form of the virus and every time it circumnavigates the globe it mutates and gets stronger.

I: “So, the people that it misses the first time around, it gets when it comes around again?”

Right.

I: “What is the time table for the virus to circumnavigate the globe?”

You are brighter than I thought? How old are you?

I: “Seventeen.”

Poor thing. Six months. Give or take, it is usually about six months, four passes by now and still going.

I: “Will it ever stop growing—changing I mean?”

It can change and adapt as many times as it needs to, or until our bodies build up an immunity to it—or shall I say, those prone to infection like the General who is not a CCR5 Delta-32 carrier. Eventually, these walls will have to fall and if the virus or disease or whatever this thing is does not get him on this pass, it will, eventually. Supplies and medicine will run out shortly. You can only hide from it for so long.

I: “That why he does it, send people out to die, because he is afraid he’ll get sick, too?”

He’s become like Howard Hughes. A germaphobe. Notice how he wouldn’t shake your hand, even though you are immune to the plague? Sad.

I: “Is anyone working on a cure, I mean, does anyone really know what it is for sure. A virus, a plague?”

Kid, it hit us so fast, no one knew it was coming. Everyone at first thought it was a bad flu, and like the Middle Ages, all the best minds were killed off and only a handful to fend for the dead. Like now, all the top minds not infected or immune like you and I are all being safe guarded in Washington, D.C. and every major capital in the world until they develop a cure for the infected. But that could be more than a year off I hear. But what does that matter we can’t get sick right?

I: “Unless it changes and mutates into something else, something stronger than what we are immune to—like say I dunno, some other airborne pathogen our ancestors were not exposed to. I mean, I heard this rumor that all the deforestation in Africa and South America is unleashing into the atmosphere all these airborne pathogens and germs that man was not meant to be exposed to, and the reason we are getting sicker is because we went into territory we were not supposed to be in the first place. I dunno, some hippie told me that once.”

Possible, not probable, but who knows. If you would have told me three years ago that I would be half drunk right now telling you how I have been a prisoner in a facility where the healthy are trying to keep the sick out and that some killer disease that has wiped out half the world’s population is threatening the extinction of mankind, I would have laughed, but hey, maybe we should have listened to the tree huggers after all.

[She continued to drink more]

But they may have been right. And if it does mutate into something that we are not immune to, regardless of our CCR5 Delta-32 inhibitor it does not make us superhuman, just lucky. But, hey you only have to be unlucky once in life, right?

[LT. (Dr.) Warren passed out on the ground, drunk. Soldiers carried her away]

[Camp Pendleton, Day 3]

General Lemond is slowly beginning to lose his touch with reality. He will no longer allow his men into his tent unless they themselves are wearing biohazard equipment. General Lemond has however allowed me into his tent several times to observe me. He has had his men feed me water and food to test the integrity of its safety. I cannot say for sure what they will do to me, but the more the infected are outside of the walls the more the men die—fifty more just today and growing. Men who have been immune for the past two years are now growing weak and ill, and still General Lemond makes them work and drill and march and the lack of enthusiasm and sheer will to want to keep going fades from the men.

I see soldiers perched up on the watch towers guns aimed at the growing mass below; firing into the crowd picking off the dying as they get too close to the fence. One woman’s body was left to dangle in the barbed wire as she bled from the neck and eyes. They later took a blowtorch to her and knocked the body off of the wire with a stick as it burned on the ground. The infected pelted the soldiers with rocks and bottles and even shot at them with their own rifles. General Lemond reacted quickly and with vengeance. He will no longer take the healthy into the compound. He forces them to intermingle amongst the infected where they are for the most part accosted and assaulted by the angry infected. I feel a bit like I am going mad. I miss the garden back home. Mom and dad and Pepper, Kobi my dog—it has been so long I feel I can barely remember their faces, and if I try hard enough, I can still picture them all together, sitting as a family down to dinner. Now I eat military rations on a cot alone, watching the healthy hide behind barbed wire and concrete blocks from the infected. The other healthy persons in the camp held prisoner like me are getting together and talking about an escape. About a place out east, where old Las Vegas used to be, where we can go to escape the infected and live well and be free, nearer to the old Hoover Dam.

[Claire Damm, Camp Pendleton, Day 3]

I was born in Boston and went to university there as well. I was at the L Tavern bar when I first heard about the plague. I was doing my dissertation on Chaucer and the ‘Canterbury Tales’ so I like many other graduate students I would go to a local pub in the winter to unwind, talk about our arrogant worthless provost mentors, how overworked we were and all that jazz. Then the reports stared coming in about the sick in the overflowing hospitals and Boston Memorial and the private Mercy Hospital downtown. I was stunned because the majority of the people were from a flight into Boston from London. My boyfriend Matt and I were in London not more than three weeks prior and had spent a lot of time in and around London, Sheffield and Manchester. I rushed home because I then realized that Matt, my boyfriend, was sick. I thought like many others that it was the flu, being winter season and Boston is a cold city. I tried to give him tea and medicine to make him feel better, but he could not shake it. Plus, Matt worked for the Metro system, as a T driver on the Red Line.

I: “I’m sorry, Red Line?”

The Red Line is one of the many color-coded subway systems that was in the city of old Boston. Today, they no longer run, the city is mostly a ghost of its former metropolis, but Matt loved to drive it. He always wanted to be a train conductor ever since he was a little boy. In fact, for Christmas that year, I bought him a train set off of E-Bay, one of those really nice old steel sets they used to sell at the turn of the century. It was the last in a set, what he needed to complete his collection.

[Claire paused to wipe the tears in her eyes. We share a tissue]

Not more than a day or two after we had gotten back from my research trip to London, Matt started to feel ill. We went to the doctor and saw that it was packed with people—old, young, kids, families all complaining of flu like systems. No one had died up to this point so no one really knew what it was. I knew I should have listened to my gut and made Matt stay. He hated hospitals. So we left. Matt’s older sister, Margie, she was a doctor in Odessa, Texas and she spoke to Matt on the phone and told him that it probably was the flu and that she was starting to see a lot of patients that had gone over seas for the Christmas holiday and then returned with flu like symptoms, so that is probably what he caught—some new aggressive form of the European Flu is what they were calling it, remember?

I: “I do. In fact, my biology teacher Mr. Ralph, nice guy, he got real sick after he and his wife went to Australia.”

Australia? Man, I thought that was one of the few places that had avoided it. They are so far removed.

I: “I dunno if he got it there, but he was real sick, and one of the first cases of plague related deaths in my city.”

So, Margie prescribed some antibiotics for Matt and that was that. Except, he was not getting better, but worse, and I feel guilty as hell for it now, but I had asked him to move to the couch in order for me to get more rest. See I was real close to finishing my dissertation, and I was working real hard on my doctorate thesis and Matt’s coughing and shaking in bed was keeping me up, and so Matt thought it best for him to move to the living room too, until he got better. But, I’d hear Matt at night coughing and shaking on the couch and I’d beg him to go to the hospital and he would always say that he knew more than some teenage linen pressed Irish from Peabody they promoted to being doctor that week. He knew his body more than anyone else he said, and having been a former body builder, Matt knew a lot about fitness and nutrition. He was always trying some new herb and eating healthy. But still he got worse. And then one night, about two weeks into the sickness, Matt began coughing up a lung. There was a pool of blood on the floor in front of him. I quickly got Matt into my little Hyundai hatchback so he could lie down as I rushed him to the hospital. But as I got to University and Main, the streets were now flooded with cars and ambulances. The snow was coming down hard and Matt was shaking in the back. I did not know—how could any of us have known the full extent of what could happen. As I drove through stopped traffic frantically, I saw a man at a cross light coughing up blood into the white snow and pass out in his own pool of blood. I looked back into the rear-view-mirror and saw that Matt was no longer moving or breathing. He had gone into a coma. I quickly pulled the car over and performed CPR for Matt I learned the year before in a P.E. class on campus. I was unable to revive him for quite a long time. I cried and shook my fist up at God and pounded on Matt’s chest and wept, falling to my knees in the snow and then, I heard a gurgle and then a flow of blood and slime and bile came from his mouth and Matt’s eyes rolled back in his head. He whispered to me, ‘I think I’d like to see the linen Irish now, please’. Matt smiled and kissed me with bloody lips on my shirt collar. By the time I got him to the hospital it looked like one of those M*A*S*H type surgical units. Tents were set up out in the parking lot. The local malls and Fenway Park were being used to house the overflow of sick and dying patients. The Centers for Disease Control had just arrived in town and wanted to study Matt, since he was already pretty far gone, and they thought his case might be able to narrow down where in Europe the plague spread. But while we waited in Fenway Park, all Matt wanted to talk about was the Red Sox and NoMar, and the World Series and he started to have hallucinations about us being outside of the stadium in the late great October when the Red Sox shattered the curse of the Bambino. Do you know who that is?

I: “No. I don’t follow sports, but I heard my dad make reference to him once and again.”

[Claire began to cry, tears flowing from her eyes]

He was a pretty important figure in baseball, especially for Boston. Matt spoke about catching a fly ball and how he’d feel if they won the series, breaking the curse of the Bambino. He gripped my hand and I held it as long as I could. We were swarmed with doctors running frantically around dozens of patients entering the stadium every few minutes. Some were starting to be turned away by security and a few fights broke out. The police and fire department had to be called in. Matt had come to and realized where he was. He wanted to go home and before the doctors from the CDC could return, I took Matt off of the cot and back to my Hyundai. I took the side streets and alleyways home. Once there, Matt was in and out of consciousness. He wanted me to leave him alone, but I couldn’t. I stayed by his bedside holding his hand. He stopped coughing and his eyes were blood shot and his skin turned a yellow tint. I felt Matt’s belly and his once hard abs turning to mush inside him and I knew he did not have long. Matt feared I would get sick but I knew at that point that we’d been living together intimately and if I was not showing any signs of being ill, well then, what would kill me? And to tell you the truth, watching the man who was to be my husband, father of our children, my best friend die in front of me; his lungs collapsing and his fingers twitch as he struggled for air, I did not bother to try and help him. I only wanted him to die quickly, and as painless as possible. I felt the life go out of his body as the pain built up in mine. I had no one left to cry for. No one left to live for. And so now I am here. I am a shell of a person. I could care less whether I live or die. I just go through the motions of being a human being daily. I get up, and go to the bathroom. Give the soldiers samples of my stool and urine and blood for them to test. I do nothing all day except sit and watch all the poor bastards trying to climb over the wall, thinking this is some sort of Eden, when it is far much worse in here than out there. And still to this day, I cannot figure out why Matt and others have died, while I, I remain alive. I know what you are going to tell me, that I am a CCR5 Delta-32 something or another, right? Because my European ancestors were once exposed so much to the small pox, I’m supposedly immune—but somehow, I don’t buy that.

I: “What do you think it the real reason?”

I think we are all being tested by some higher power. God or the Devil or whatever you want to call it. I have a hard time believing that one simple set of inhibitors could allow so few to live while the rest of humanity suffers. Only a higher being could create this much destruction. Did you hear that they finally came out with an anti-virus?

I: “I hadn’t heard that.”

True, it doesn’t work.

[Claire fell on her butt laughing]

Just as they got a handle on what the thought the plague was, some form of the Ebola virus, or Black Plague or yeast based airborne virus, something like that, I don’t know, I stopped caring a long time ago. Anyway, it mutated on them and now all the medicine they made for that one strain is no longer good because a new and stronger form of the virus is now starting to spread around the globe again. Two years after it started it will not go away. Getting our butts kicked by something we can’t even see.

I: “What do you think we can do about it?”

Nothing, what can we do? Except maybe burn all the cities and villages in the world where the virus/plague whatever is spreading first and move all the people out. Like they did in the African countries; isolate the infected into camps, like the ones they had in Germany. Burn the villages with napalm and kill the virus.

I: “I heard from a few soldiers that tried to do that but were unsuccessful. Many of the humanitarian workers and soldiers ended up taking the disease with them out of Africa and that is how is started spreading globally. Signs of infection do not appear for at least a week so you do not know if you are sick until you start to cough and show signs of fever. They spread the plague as their units were assigned around the world.”

Right, it went from Africa to Asia and then to Europe working its way both east and west until Los Angeles was the last to report full blown cases and then pretty soon Portland and Seattle were reporting infected too. By that time I was headed west trying to get to Denver and the mountains. I heard there was a hippie colony up there and they had reported zero cases of illness and no infected. Unfortunately, I was picked up by the Marine Unit Tango and told I would be treated well and taken to a safe place where people like me could live without the fear of being amongst the contaminated. I believed them. They took away the shirt Matt kissed before he died. Said because it carried contaminated blood matter it could pose a potential health risk. I’ve been here nearly a year and feel I am no better off than before. I could have killed myself—Matt kept a .45 Colt under the bed. I thought about using it on myself, but figured I owed it to humanity to keep going especially if I was given this like ‘free pass’, hell I didn’t know it was going to be this bad and besides, I still am not sure that I am totally immune at all. What if this virus morphs into something else, like the ‘perfect storm’ of viruses and becomes one super virus that plagues the world forever, destroying everything in its path.

I: “I think it already has.”

Cute kid, real cute, but you may be right.

[Claire breached the perimeter last night, cutting a hole in the wall for the infected to get in. She and all the infected that were let in were shot to death. An hour later as uprising was lead by a few of the healthy prisoners. The makeshift village was burned to the ground. The infected overtook the base in a matter of minutes. General Lemond and his men were executed by the infected still healthy enough to fire a weapon. I escaped in a truck with others headed towards Las Vegas. Others like me, the healthy, were not so lucky. I heard the cries of healthy women being accosted and men being beaten to death as we sped off into the darkness]

[ATF Special Agent Donovan Morton, road to Las Vegas]

I was living in Montreal, Canada at the time. Originally I was born in Fort Worth and raised in Dallas. I attended Texas A&M and graduated with a degree in Criminal Science. I joined the ATF out of college and we were tracking a ring of French drug smugglers trying to run contraband out of Montreal and across the Northern U.S. frontier borders, and we were in a year long investigation on this crew, a real Mission Impossible type group, tight nit, very cautious and dangerous. Willing to rock and roll in a heart beat so we found it strange that when they were supposed to make a drop at Lake Ontario they did not show. I was more than perplexed. We had begun to admire this crew a bit for their professionalism: no women, no children, and they were branching out into other types of activity, such as taking down big scores so we were sharing Intel with the FBI as well. Their ringleader did not show at the drop and a fifteen million dollar buy went south, after a year of long hard work, yeah, you’re going to be pissed, real pissed. We thought that maybe we spooked them, then we remembered we were working with the FBI and some of those guys, back then, could be real cowboys and so we thought that maybe they f***** up the whole investigation. Three weeks went by and no word from any of the assailants. No trace, no buys, no Intel communication. We couldn’t even find these guys on radar. It was as if they were completely off of the map and we were getting nervous that our boss Captain Trunket would pull the plug on the entire investigation. Without results the U.S. government would not pay for a sixteen man crew to sit in a hotel in Montreal, with its expensive surveillance toys waiting for a major drug smuggling crime to maybe happen…so yeah, we were all getting a little bit anxious. Washington D.C. wanted answers and we all were beginning to look like a bunch of first year rookies at this point. Not exactly a career building assignment up to now. Then we got the word that something was going to go down and that they were moving a shipment of trucks to the U.S. border. When we got there, waiting by Lake Michigan, sitting with the FBI and my ATF crew all I could think about was that we wanted the collar and I would be goddamned if I was going to let the FBI or local badges take this and put the stiff on us. Then the truck pulled up and the men got out, coughing, and falling over themselves. We thought at first that they had been ambushed and that the men were shot and bleeding from all of the blood, but no, I remember looking very vividly through my binoculars and seeing several, men, very well dressed, who if one did not know the situation better, would have appeared to have been very toasted that evening. But knowing the circumstances and the professionalism of this crew, we all knew better and hauled ass down the bank of the river to intercept them. When we got there I am still disturbed by what I saw. Men, bodies, distorted, oozing with black bile, bodies all turned around; their insides coming out of their mouths and anus’. No one knew what the hell was going on, and we sure as hell had no word of the plague at this point, we all figured it was some sort of ‘hit’ by a rival gang—local mafia no doubt, letting the ‘frogs’ know not to play on their side of the pond. Within a matter of hours the CDC from Atlanta, Georgia was up there and had the whole northern side of the lake bordering with Canada sealed off. Hours later one of my men and the local Canadian troopers began to get sick. The HAZMAT teams tried their best to treat them, not telling us what the hell was going on, just swooping the Canadian troopers and my guy off, taking them into some makeshift quarantine tent they built on the lakeside shore and ran test after test on them. Agent Sterling Dawes had a slight heart murmur that even she knew nothing about, or if she did, had not informed the ATF agency, perhaps out of fear for being turned down as a candidate for hire. She was an excellent agent and always strived to do her best work and push you to do yours as well. She died within six hours; massive heart failure and then the doctors from the CDC took us aside and informed us of what was happening. That the French crew had brought with them a deadly strain of a virus of unknown origin and at that point they had no cure for it, no real way to contain it, and had no idea how it spread or how to protect anyone from getting infected. They were smuggling in from the Canary Islands a shipment of guns and the crew that they had contracted were pirates and gunrunners from the Ivory Coast. None of that was unfamiliar to Interpol, but apparently the villages surrounding the Ivory Coast were infested with the plague and before the boat crew docked in the Canary Islands they made a trip to the local brothels in Abidjan and the scientists believed it was the Ivorian prostitutes that were spreading more than cheer to the sailors in port. The men left and by the time they reached the Canary Islands and took possession of the guns, they had already been infected for more than a week and were spreading the virus in every local whorehouse and bar in the Canaries. The French must’ve gotten spooked when the boat arrived and found most of the crew dead. We had assumed that they pulled out of the pick-up, but when they saw what had happened to their couriers, they must have thought the same thing about the African boat crew as we thought when we first saw them on the lake shore. That their enemies were not so subtle about telling them it was time to find a new line of work. So the French crew, being professional, stood back and hung low and waited to see if anyone would come and try to claim the guns from the boat. They camped out on the docks and they were so disciplined did not even communicate with one another over cell or wireless communication. That is why we assumed they were gone, because up to that point they were fairly active in their daily communications with one another on all aspects of daily activity and then nothing. We had not seen the African crew simply because there was no one to de-board, all were dead or dying in the ship’s hull. And we could not move in to see for fear we would further spook the French crew. But, the French crew grew impatient and so did their American counter parts eagerly awaiting the guns in the U.S. and a Toronto based drug lord needing more ‘White China’ for the street market then falling low as we were later told by the Canadian Bureau of Narcotics Investigations. The French crew moved in and saw the mess we later documented in our report that was subsequently submitted to the United Nations as part of the World Health Report on the pandemic investigation.

I: “How did you feel once you realized it was a plague, I mean, did you have any family you were worried about back in Dallas?”

Family and friends mostly, no wife or children, although I regret that now because I wish I would have done more than just chase bad guys and promotions. Although I fully supported what I was doing and still believe in it today, but still, looking back, most of my memories were stakeouts in cheap hotels in U.S. cities or abroad waiting and writing reports on what I saw. So I guess you and I have something in common, we both had to detail horrible things for other people to read.

I: “Where were you when you knew, really knew, it was more than just a series of isolated sickness?”

Still in Montreal—we were wrapping up our investigation when Agent Chen fell ill. He was rushed to the hospital and was diagnosed with an unknown virus that was determined to be the flesh eating kind. His face was almost completely gone in a matter of days. They quarantined us all, and even some of the FBI guys. We were all pretty scared now that I think about it when we thought about Agents Dawes and Chen. And our families back home: hell, we’re used to being the ones locking people up and examining their every move. It is humbling to have all of your authority taken away and told that you cannot leave a quarantined facility for fear you might spread a disease that may kill you or your loved ones. While I was in the quarantine facility I could only watch, as my other colleagues died one by one after being tested and examined and prodded and probed. Daily blood samples were drawn and still the doctors and scientists were no closer to finding any answers to what this thing was, but more importantly, how to stop it and still everyday more and more of us would die, and yet, I was still unaffected. I started to feel guilty, like I was different, and yet the same. I would sit with the dying members of my crew and talk with them about what we were going to do when we got back to the States. Hell, I have to admit; we had all bonded a bit in the year we were assembled to take down the French crew. Although we were all pulled from different units and specialties around the U.S. justice forces we all became a solid cohesive unit and after some time became like a sort of family. You have got to be when you are spending eighteen to twenty hours a day with certain people…Agent Dawes...

[He looked away teary eyed]

You grow to understand the loneliness of others, and become sympathetic to their needs and …I should not be talking to you about this.

I: “I’m seventeen and I have seen my whole family die from a horrible disease there is no cure for. The world may never recover and humanity may die out; I think I can manage hearing about a little sex.”

[Special Agent Morton laughed]

Special Agent Dawes and I grew very close. We had formed an intimate relationship and had even talked about requesting to be reassigned together once we returned home. When she died first, I don’t know, I just shut down inside. So when one of my crew sat dying, sores bleeding, blood shot eyes, looking into my healthy eyes and asking why them? I had no answers. I had not heard yet of CCR5 and was not sure I was even a recipient, or even if I was, did I have both strains? And for a person such as myself, so used to being in control and not having the answers or the right words to tell the people you have just spent a better part of a year of your life with, that hurt me a lot as a man. I don’t know why I am even telling you this?

I: “Because you can and you need to tell someone, why not tell someone who will listen?”

Good point; I guess the big thing for me was how humbling it all was. When the city gave way to chaos and the mass hysteria overran Canada, and the U.S. borders were flooded and miscommunication on both ends sent Americans fleeing into Canada, and Canadians into the U.S. It got so no one could get in or out. Lines of migration went for tens of miles, as human beings fearing the resurgence of the Black Death literally walked to their death in the middle of the Canadian winter. Some fearing that safety lie beyond the Canadian border tried to cross the Michigan and Ontario lakes. Their vessels were sunk by the U.S. armed forces. Canada in retaliation did the same killing some more than twenty infected civilians trying to enter the Canadian borders. Alaska all but shut itself off from the rest of the world and it was said that the Eskimos, fearing the plague, would kill any white man they saw, no questions asked, on the spot and not even feed his carcass to the polar bears that shunned the infected corpses. Eskimos burned the bodies immediately. The tension between the U.S. and Canada is still alive today, neither side willing to admit its error blaming the other for the deaths. The bodies of the thousands that tried to make the trip on both ends of the borders were burned and it looked like the forest burned in the white night, all the thousands of bodies incinerating at the same time—I wept, and I am not an emotional person. I never in my life thought I’d have to experience anything even remotely that horrible. They train you to deal with a lot as a field agent, but nothing, I mean nothing can prepare you for something on this scale. Who do you get angry at? The government for being ill prepared, but which one? And who is to say we are not as much to blame as the Africans for allowing this horrible disease to fester and build in their country, caring only when it is our own citizens who are now dying, when they have been living with pestilence and plagues for decades while we have sat back and done nothing to help. Or do we shake our fists at the Chinese government for not being better prepared and allowing the virus to spread amongst its farming communities in the mountains, failing to isolate the livestock and the families and not burning the villages sooner? I don’t know. But I think everyone shares a little bit of the blame. And there sure is enough of it to go around.

[When the truck stopped to pick up some traveling uninfected Special Agent Morton got off and headed west walking carrying only a knapsack and a .38 tucked deep in the back of his waistband toward the mountains. No one tried to stop him because we needed to room]

[Johnny Chen, Las Vegas, Nevada]

Yeah, hell yeah I’m glad to be alive. Before the plague I was a nobody but now I’m top dog. I got enough supplies here to last me a few life times over.

[Johnny points to the casino he used to work in on the Las Vegas strip as we sit at a roulette table in a casino]

And what I don’t use, I can barter or trade, know what I’m saying? Jeah! Jeah! I mean—you can practically get anything you want in the new Las Vegas. ‘Course, you wouldn’t know that ‘cause you’re only a kid, but back in the day, man this place was crazy. The lights, the girls, the money…the girls...

[Johnny laughs, sporting a pair of cheesy Elvis sunglasses]

Man let me tell you, you gonna put everything I say in your report? Man, Johnny Chen was a pimp when it came to the ladies, got so much…

I: “Could you just please stick to the...what happened to the people after the plague?”

A’ight, no need to playa hate, jeah! Well, I used to work here as a valet associate, parked the rides for all the important people. Wayne, Siegfried and Roy; you name ‘em I parked ‘em. It was a pretty cool gig, I was at UNLV back then and I was a real dork. I studied computer science all the time—

I: “I thought you were the man?”

Yeah, after—yo, is this Johnny’s story or what, babe? You wanna go back outside where I found you wandering the streets of North Las Vegas?

I: “No, you’re right, continue.”

Like I was sayin’, I used to valet and I would get all the fat cats and fly honies, and would take care of getting anything they needed. Some dude coming in from Dallas needed to be taken care of, no problem, Johnny get you set up real nice with a little late night entertainment. Lady needs to bump up her appointment at the salon; Johnny got your back. A wife wants to check on her old man, spy on his room, see he is really in town for the ‘ industrial’ lubrication convention, bingo, Johnny get you set up right next door—hole and camera already mounted in the wall and everything. And for all of that, Johnny’d get taken care of too. You take care of daddy; daddy’ll take care of you. So the night the plague hit Las Vegas, we got in to the hotel a plane full of Japanese tourists, and some were coughing and gagging and carrying on, and others, man they were video recording everything that wasn’t nailed down. One lady, sweet old thing, had a camera in my face speaking all that Kung-Fu stuff to me and I was like ‘dang,’ yo, hollering at me like I understand. I’m Chinese. Japan is a whole other country—‘sides, I don’t speak Chinese any better than I do English.

[True, Johnny went on for about a full half of an hour and began to try and pantomime his favorite Bruce Lee movie for me, “Game of Death”]

I: “So you’re telling me that the plague originated in Japan?”

Nagh not necessarily; dang girl, why you wanna talk about the plague so much, we should be talkin’ ‘bout you and me getting busy—

I: “Later! Please…I need to know this, it might be important, for later.”

A’ight. But it isn’t going to matter none anyhow. No one going to be around to read it and if they is ain’t nothin’ they can do about it.

[Johnny paused, looked around at the empty casino, as if remembering something beautiful]

Man, I remember this place when it used to be something. When it was humming, in full swing, at ‘round midnight on a Saturday night and I’d come in on my break and hit the black jack tables and you’d be elbow to elbow with some movie actor and his old lady in town for the weekend and your money would be right on the table next to his and you were all hoping for the same thing—hell yeah, know what I’m talking ‘bout?

[Johnny claps his hands together making a mega phone]

BLACK JACK! And if you got it, high-fives all around and a lady in a skimpy cocktail outfit would bring you a drink and then you felt like you was a somebody, even though you are broke six days a week, parking cars you’ll never be able to afford to drive, in a town that only breaks more hearts than it mends, and in fifteen minutes you’ll be out there wishing you could stay in here for just one more flop, or turn, or river or craps!

[Johnny yawns, trying to pretend that he is not crying, but it’s too late, the tears start to flow, and he quickly puts on his gangsta’ beanie—it really says GANGSTA in big orange letters across the front and has a hip-hop rat on the back; kinda cute]

Why’d it have to get so messed up? So, you wanna know about that night, a’ight. Well, from what I remember, it was kinda crazy. These Japanese tourist came in from—no wait, dang girl, you almost caught me slippin’, I almost forgot, they was in from Germany—that’s right, this whole crew bounced in from Germany, but they was a whole bunch of Japanese in town for the big anime expo, and they was really excited. They had a bunch of Japanese anime art and comic book art they was passing around and they had these really tough looking girls in tight tops and bottoms—anyway, they had come in from Berlin and were going on to Los Angeles next, and I know this because this one old lady, the one with the camera in my face the whole time kept asking me about Tom Jones or something and how she couldn’t wait to see him at the Staples Center in Los Angeles, next week. Then, man, I don’t even know, she started like…

I: “What?”

Coughing into her handkerchief and people had to help her to her seat. And I was like, man I hope she don’t give me the flu, because it was January I think—yeah, it was ‘cause I know that, ‘cause I had just hollered up a broad I was up wit’ on top of the MGM roof on New Years, hey! Jeah! Anyway, she was trying not to bring everyone down because they seemed to all be in good spirits, and she seemed like a real fire cracker, especially for an old lady. But then when she tried to get up her handkerchief was full of blood. The others their noses were runny and puffy eyes, and they looked more run down than tired, and then I dunno I just grabbed Sparky, he was the white kid just in from Kentucky who I trained the week before and I told him to go and call security and to get an ambulance. Sparky stood there for a second and watched as the blood dripped from her nose and it startled me too, to see a nice old lady like that bleeding and all.

[Johnny takes off his Gangsta’ beanie and tosses it on the dusty craps table]

And then she fell to the floor and blood started to come out of her ears and I was on top of it man, boom! Real James Bond stuff, I had my coat under her head, and then she started to spit up blood on me and then the others started to look sick and I was so overwhelmed and then a bunch of people staying at the hotel were yelling at me to do something and I was like, ‘man, I am doing something, why don’t you get off of your ass and call a doctor!’ And no body helped me man, except for this one dude, a black guy, he never said he was in the military or anything, but he had this thing about him, like he had seen some real heavy stuff. He was riding up to the hotel on a real badass chopper and rushed over when he seen me with the lady. He was like boom, do this, and boom, get me that, and before I knew it he had performed a tracheotomy on this old lady and said she was choking on her own blood and it felt like her insides were melting or something, because she felt like Jell-O inside. And I felt her belly and I dunno what an old lady is supposed to feel like but I hugged my grandma before, and she was like a hundred, no lie. Chinese, man we live to be like a hundred and fifteen—I think it is all the green tea. Could be the Tai Chi, but whatever, this lady did not even feel anything like that. Then when I looked up this black dude was helping other people keeled over on the floor in pain, and was yelling orders at me to get him all sorts of stuff. As I was looking around at all these sick and bleeding people there was a growing crowd of hotel guests that were all getting sick in the bushes and a little girl with her mom started to wail and all I kept thinking was man, I only park cars for a living. I wanted to design web pages for video game companies and maybe meet Jenna Jameson. I didn’t sign up for this. I thought I was in some goddamn Clint Eastwood war movie. I was really scared. Then thank God, the ambulance showed up and then the fire truck and then another and the cops and the dude who helped me, I dunno where he went but he was gone when I awoke.

I: “Excuse me, awoke?”

Yeah, I kinda passed out for a little incy-wincy bit. And when I awoke the dude was gone and the lady was already dead. They put a sheet on her and waited for a HAZMAT team to arrive. I thought that was weird. They tried to keep me quarantined with a bunch of the other people outside watching and I heard they started to get sick. I snuck out and was watching from a titty bar I sometimes go to after work—no scratch that, say I was in church, then I was watching the news and a priest, named, ugh, Destiny, she ugh, slid down over and told me to watch the news, that my hotel was all over the place that it was being quarantined and no one could get in or out. I watched as the news reported flight attendants and pilots were getting sick and that even one of the ticket agents at the boarding gates of Las Vegas Airport died on the spot. The city was in a panic. I dunno what happened to the dude who helped me with the old lady. Maybe he lived and maybe he died. Destiny said she was going home early to get her kid. ‘Splitting for Reno’ she said, up in the mountains where she had a sister who rented boats and jet skis to tourist in the spring and summer and that I should split, too. I hauled ass out of there faster than I could get my singles back into my wallet. By the time I got home, I had gotten all of these messages from someone at the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia. Said she got my name from Sparky just before he passed out. Passed out, I thought, hell no was I calling her back. I got a few things in a duffle bag, a wad of cash and my .38 pistol and an extra case of shells and I was gone. By the time I got to my Camaro downstairs, the fire trucks and cops were blaring sirens all over the strip and you could see dead silence in Las Vegas for the first time. People were frozen, and not from watching the water show in front of the Bellagio, but the giant monitors in front of the hotels that were displaying messages that Las Vegas was under quarantine by orders of the U.S. military and that everyone in the whole city of Las Vegas was to be tested for some virus that was sweeping the world and that we were in the middle of a pandemic. What the hell is a pandemic, I thought to myself? Man, I couldn’t even spell the word right let alone know what it meant. I split but by that time people were going crazy. Looting and rioting and I mean all sorts of weird stuff. Showgirls were taking stuff from stores still dressed in their outfits. I saw a hooker running out of a Wallgreens on the Las Vegas strip with a wad of cash and a first-aid-kit, weird I thought. I would’ve taken the register and maybe a pack of Ho-Hos. But, anyway, when I couldn’t make it out of the city and the cops started firing into the crowd after a few were beaten to death by an insane mob, I figured I better hide in the one place I knew every inch of, voila!

[Johnny points to his casino, Caesar’s Palace]

I’ve been here, hiding out for the better part of two years. The freezer is still full of tons of food that was never eaten. The majority of electricity still works so when everyone left and they closed this place down, well that just left little old me.

[Johnny slides over a microwaveable pizza pocket that he cooked up for him and me]

Now the only real question I have for you is root beer or diet?

[Johnny goes out of his way to try and act like a garcon in a fancy restaurant and sets up two candles on the card table and lights them, then pours me a can of root beer and waits until I nod and then he places the can in front of me; cute]

I: “Doesn’t it get lonely down here?”

Sure, but I’m not alone anymore. You’re here.

I: “I’m not staying, just passing through, trying to get to Washington D.C., maybe give them my notes, for whatever it’s worth, find more answers, see where this thing really started, and see how, if at all, we can beat it.”

Sound pretty certain.

[I nod yes and Johnny blows out the candles]

Yeah, I get lonesome, mostly at night. I miss my folks, and my dog, and my strippers—I mean my priest. But it’s funny; I worked here so many years, I never once thought about them until they were gone. I actually miss the stinking people. For all of their bitchin’ and whining and complaining about pillows not fluffed enough and mints on the sheets, and towels in the rack and change missing from ashtrays, and peeling out in a candy apple red ’62 Corvette in the parking lot, I miss the people who came here—they were the ones who made this hotel a, well, second home. I miss hearing the slot machines run again. And I miss the sound of the roulette table spin, and the laughter and the sighs when a big game or fight was on the jumbo monitor in the sports betting den and the roar and cheer of the crowd rooting or booing one side and I especially miss the fat cat tips and the swagger of the fly honies all decked out for clubbing on a Saturday night and me parking a Ferrari and feeling like a somebody for even a moment. Funny, it’s the small little things—huh? When they’re gone.

I: “Yeah, me too.”

[I got up to leave and noticed Johnny was in a fever state; forehead sweaty, skin pale]

I: “And you never got sick?”

Me? Nagh, Johnny got a gut like a tank. I’ve been hiding in here so long, only been out once in two years—to get you; damn thing’s never going to get me. I’m just hot, got like a heater in my stomach, always hot, all the time—feels like the damn cities on fire; someone ought to burn it all down.

[I got up to leave, and stopped as Johnny shivered in the corner by himself, coughing lightly. Then I knew, I had contaminated him, brought the virus on me somehow, when he came out to get me Johnny had seen that group of men down the alleyway was chasing me. I didn’t know it then, but I should have. He was a ‘somebody’—a superhero if you will. Sometimes they are even parking valets and don’t even know it themselves. I gave him a kiss on the lips, knowing I was immune and that he did not have long left to live. I offered to stay with him, but Johnny told me to leave. He confessed that he never really kissed a girl before and that I might be considered by some to be his first. He blushed, and so did I, I think. I dunno, I’ve never really been anyone’s first anything before. Made me feel sad knowing I would be his last. As I left he plugged in a slot machine and the power came on. He was popping coin after coin into the slot machine as it buzzed and chimed with every pull of the hammer handle. He was cute]

[Cole Grady Foster, Yellowstone, Wyoming]

I grew up on this farm. Right back there in the barn, I was born fourteen years ago.

[Cole points to a big red barn on a sprawling three hundred acre ranch]

So were my sister, Caitlin and our cow Sissy. After all the adults started dying, we just all started to gravitate towards the barn. Been living there ever since because the house—it just doesn’t seem right anymore since mom and dad are gone. Houses are for families—we’re more like orphans, I guess.

I: “How’d the infection get out to a remote place like this?”

People go into cities. We traveled to Riverton before mom and dad got sick, I mean we get lots of tourists out here in Yellowstone, but where I really think it started was in Salt Lake City. We were there for the rodeo. Mom and Caitlin were entered in the rodeo, roping and two-person horsemanship contest, and dad and I were there to look at a new bull to sire the cows. Also, Sissy was entered in a beauty contest; don’t ask me, it was Caitlin’s thing.

I: “Where are all of the animals?”

Dead. That’s how it started, with the animals. Like in England, mad cow disease. Sissy didn’t start to show signs until we were on the road and she started to bang against the sides of the trailer and dad had to pull over and check on her. She started to fall all over herself and dad walked her for a bit. We never suspected mad cow disease because there were no reported cases in Yellowstone, and up until that point we had never heard of CJDnv [Creutzfeldt—Jakob disease, new virus]. And by the time we got to Salt Lake City, Sissy seemed fine, but mom started coughing and Caitlin was feeling ill. But, both went on and the Reagans, our neighbors were there and we all went to most of the rodeo events together in Denver, Reno and Bozeman, but Mr. Reagan began complaining of having a high fever and went to his room to lie down. When dad went to wake him, he would not get up. Dad called the ambulance and they took him to Salt Lake Memorial Hospital. We all went to the hospital with the Reagans and there they did a check-up on mom and Caitlin, and mom was checked out and released, given some antibiotics the doctor said she had a mild case of the flu, but it was nothing serious and we could go home, but that Mr. Reagan had mad cow disease and that the livestock at the rodeo had to all be checked. Sissy was one of the cows they had to put to sleep and Mr. Reagan never did regain consciousness. Sorry, I don’t feel much like talking about this anymore. You can talk to my sister if you like. I got to go and check on all the rest of the children.

I: “Excuse me; did you say the rest of the children?”

Yeah, all the kids who live around the surrounding ranches here in Yellowstone all live here together on this ranch. We all pull our resources and try to live as best we can under the circumstances.

I: “Are you telling me that all of the adults are dead?”

`Fraid so ma’am. Now if you’ll ‘scuse me, I have to be going.

[Cole placed his cowboy hat on his head and walked across the green rich farmland pasture headed in the direction of the imposing Rocky Mountain Range and the red barn]

[Caitlin Foster, Yellowstone, Wyoming]

Yeah, it happened just like my brother, Cole, said.

[Caitlin was busy canning jar preserves: apples, pears, and peaches for the winter months ahead as they can be harsh in Wyoming. Dozens of teens, like a hippie colony, except with young Christian WASPs, helped out]

Except he does not like to talk about how it really happened, how the adults all got sick from the CJDnv, the human form of the mad cow disease, and then died.

I: “I did not know there was a human form of the mad cow disease?”

Yeah, either did any of us until everyone in town started to get it. But it was weird, only a few dozen of the kids got it too, the rest of us, for some weird reason lived. The elderly, and the old ranch hands, they went first. When the hospital overflowed and Mr. Reagan died of CJDnv in his sleep and the rest of the Reagans came back to town and little Bobby Reagan he keeled over in class, blood running out of his ears and old Mrs. Wilker, she was sixty-one, died of a massive heart attack at the sight of Bobby dying at his desk. And then the rest of the kids got it from being so close to Bobby and his sister Darlene and Mrs. Reagan, she spread it to the adults who did not go to the rodeo, at church, on account of her being in the choir and the choir spread it to the rest of the community through the bake sale and the book club spread it to the librarian who has a sister who was in from out of town—Florida, and she was pretty old because they said she died a week later in her home in Boca Raton, and that’s how it spread to and from Yellowstone.

I: “So this town was infected with the CJDnv, not the plague?”

No, you’re not listening—you’re not very good at this are you?

I: “Hey, I’m new at this. I’m not a doctor; I never even finished high school.”

No one here has. Although Cole said we have to keep on studying and reading and doing math—ugh! I hate long division and decimals and percentages. I don’t see the point, but Cole says we have to on account of him being the oldest and most experienced.

I: “Your brother is only fourteen years old; how can Cole lead all of you?”

I asked him the same thing and you know what he told me? ‘Who was it that got all the kids to hide in the cellars and barn lofts when all of the adults got sick and started to cough up all the blood? And when them doctors came and tried to take us all away and some of them got sick and they tried to immune…immuniz—keep themselves from being sick with medicine they brought with them to fight some world wide virus, and it did not work and they ended up getting sick, who kept the children safe? And who kept everyone warm in the winters, and fed, and chased off the packs of rabid wolves and wild bears, and worse looters from other states and the city?’ And I said ‘you did,’ and he said, ‘you’re Goddamn right’, and that was the last time he ever took the Lord’s name in vain, and that is why no one questions him, even though he is fourteen and was being groomed to take over daddy’s ranch business.

I: “Do you remember how it all happened? When all the adults started to get sick and why all you kids are still healthy and alive? I only ask because I am trying to find answers as to why I am still here, seeing whether there is really any truth to this CCR5 thing or if we are all lucky?” Perhaps our families are somehow related to the families who survived the Black Plague, or better yet related further down to people pre-disposed to ward off infection, disease, pestilence and…

[I can see by this point that I have pushed too hard with Caitlin, she turns red and can only respond by shrugging her shoulders as she continues to preserve fruit in jars. While Caitlin thinks of her dead mother and father and the rest of the parents in Yellowstone who have passed and I wonder, what will become of this valley of the children?]

[Ryan and Scott Seaman, Yellowstone, Wyoming]

Our father was a preacher in town—

[Ryan speaks]

So naturally we spent a lot of time in the church. Since we are paternal twins, people would have a hard time telling us apart and we used it to our advantage. We would pretend to show up to school as one another or go to each other’s class and take exams; but where we really had fun was with the substitutes. We’d drive them bonkers always pretending to be one person; we sent Mrs. Riley to the hospital, on account of her nerves and a toad in her purse.

[Both boys laugh. Ryan seems to be the more outgoing of the twins, while Scott seems to be quite, but not in a shy way, as if he is scared by loneliness, something I am all too familiar with]

When did we first notice a change in our family…probably the night papa came home from the Reagan ranch. He was all shook up on account of how sick Mrs. Reagan was and no one was sure what to do about her. Dr. Brown was over there and he said he thought it might be some bacterial infection but was not sure. She had a high fever and a swelling around her throat and was sweating like the devil.

[Scott speaks]

A lot of folks thought that they might have gotten in with the devil, even though no one wanted to outright admit it, they were all talking behind the Reagan’s back: on the school playground, at the FFA farm grounds, in church and at the lumber yard, everyone was getting angry that they brought the devil to Yellowstone.

[Ryan speaks]

About a week later, when the people came from Atlanta, Georgia and they took Mrs. Reagan and her family away and they had to put down Sissy, Cole and Caitlin’s cow and all the other livestock in town and the folks started to get sick that is when we noticed that papa was not feeling too well. He was afraid now that I think back...

[Scott interjects]

He was not afraid for himself, he was afraid for us. He’d seen what happened to the Reagans and did not want to leave mama alone with us with all that was going on.

[Ryan speaks]

Right, I think he knew he contracted CJDnv before the doctors had even informed him, and since he knew that he and mama was in bed together every night with one another and at the breakfast table with Scott and me, and mama being pregnant and all, he was afraid for us, not himself. And his parishioners, as they started to get sick, he was worried for them. Who would be there to comfort them and their families? And when Cole’s father was one of the first to go and then others in the church and the community started to show signs of being infected with a virus or plague, or whatever the hell it was, certain households like the Jacobs, the people who had a farm at the end of the road down a mile from here, no one got sick. Not the mother or father, nor Tommy or Samantha, not a sniffle or a nose bleed, but yet all around them the Fosters and the O’Neill’s and the Flints and our family they were getting sick and the town became quarantined. And then people started to look at the Jacobs funny, and anyone else in town that was not sick, as if they were somehow wrong for not being infected. The CDC quarantined the town and that is when Cole started to take the kids whose parents had died, like Scott and me and began to hide them in the different barns and lofts. He overheard the doctors when they were at his home taking his father’s body away. They said they were going to cremate it, and not have a proper Christian burial. How was God going to be able to find him, take him to heaven? Cole did not want that for the rest of us kids in case we got sick. He heard them saying they were going to take us back to some military base and study us, take blood and use us like lab rats. Then that night, the night Cole took all the children into hiding was a good night to hide. The infected in town, led by Meinke Carter, Yellowstone’s resident dickhead and former bull riding champion, led a tirade against the Jacob family. Went over to their ranch while the CDC was fixing to get them on an Apache helicopter and take them out of town.

[Scott interjects again]

You forgot to tell her about the families that tried to escape, the ones that were killed by the military before the Jacob family slaughter.

[Ryan thinks back]

Oh yeah…guess I got ahead of myself. Well, like my brother said, there was a bunch of folks got together and since our pa was dead now, we had no spiritual guidance in the church and ma was fading fast and people suspected that our town might be cursed. They figured that anyone who was not sick must be in cahoots with the devil. So Scott and I and a bunch of the other kids faked being sick for a while until we were found out to be lying on account of us not wanting to be burned at the stake and what not.

I: “Did they burn the Jacobs at the stake?”

Yes.

[Ryan speaks]

First what happened was that Meinke wanted to get his pregnant wife out of Yellowstone; get her to Salt Lake City where she could have the baby, and maybe a cure for the virus. Well at this time no one in town knew that it was a world wide thing, we just thought that we was living in the epicenter of hell and that we was the only ones cursed. But when the military would not let anyone leave Yellowstone and they locked the town down, put us on a curfew, Meinke tried to get his wife and others out. They rammed the barricade with a flaming tractor and a carload of people got out. The military sent its helicopters out to get them and when they would not turn back, they shot at them and killed everyone in every car except Meinke and a few others. They were brought back to the town and forced to stay in quarantine. Cole made all the kids stay in the barn because he knew the adults didn’t know any better without anyone to lead them and Cole knew that Meinke was crazy in general and now that his wife was dead he’d be out for blood. And so later that night when they called the meeting at our father’s parish Scott and I overhead them all getting riled up on the scripture and quoting the Letters of Paul to the Corinthians and speaking in tongues and they were talking on the Jacobs and Mrs. Pearl, the seamstress whose son and husband had just passed, heard that the CDC was taking the Jacobs and some of the kids out of town to study them and that it was not right that they get to leave and we all had to stay waiting to die and that something ought to be done about it. And that is all it took. The mob got itself all riled up on scripture and booze and Meinke and a few others got a hold of some military soldiers on a break and beat them to death with rocks and took their weapons and a hummer and all the parishioners went out to the Jacobs ranch and they killed everyone. The doctors and the soldiers and the helicopter pilots, they shot it down and dragged the Jacob family out of their home as they were getting ready to board the apache for the military base, and then built a bon fire and read scripture as they watched them burn.

[Scott interjects again]

‘Course we weren’t there, Cole had taken about forty of us uninfected kids down to the barn where he had built some sort of a shelter underneath it, digging daily, as he anticipated something horrible would go wrong. And then the parents came back to town and stood their ground with the military but they were no match for their firepower and all the parents and adults were cut down in a matter of minutes. The military declared Yellowstone a hot zone and fire bombed our ranches and the small town around it. Burnt everything; napalm probably and from the shelter we could hear everything burn and luckily we were dug in so deep, or we’d be dead too.

I: “If you were in hiding, how do you know about what happened to the Jacobs and the adults?”

[Scott speaks]

A soldier wounded in the battle for Yellowstone straggled into the barn and we found him on the floor. Some of the kids wanted to leave him to die above in the barn, but he kept banging on the hatch door; they were afraid to bring him down below with us, because he might bring the infection with him. Cole said we had to, that to let him die when we could at least help was not very Christian and it was like we were killing him ourselves. He did have the sickness but none of us got infected. His name was Corporal Hicks, and he told us of the pandemic and that ours was only one town in one state going through this madness, and that in India and China and Mexico and in Africa and other countries where they were poor, it was much, much worse and that there were mass killings, looting and uproars by the hundreds of thousands. He told us that the military thought our town to be abandoned, after they firebombed it, and that the area would be quarantined and that we would be safer here by ourselves trying to wait out the pandemic than to go to Salt Lake City and risk exposure. Hicks did not live very long, and we were sad to see him go. He would read to us when he was strong, and taught us how to survive on the land, and told us to replant the fields when the grass grew back and the earth was fertile again. And so ever since then, the last two years, after the earth became green again and the seeds took to the earth we’ve been living here alone and trying to get by, not another soul in sight except us kids, until we found you wandering on the road.

[Both the twins get up and without hesitation go back to planting the earth just as they did before I approached them with Zen like focus and a strict military discipline about them. I have come to admire these young kids who much like myself were thrust into adulthood too soon.

I walk among the fields. I run my hands over the tall grass and sit watching Cole as he gives orders in a way a father would a child as the younger children learn to can food and plant vegetables. What a burden it must be to take on the responsibility of the lives of some forty children whose parents are all dead. Yet, Cole takes it in stride, never waivers in the face of self-doubt or fear. They are all like little adults and I have to shake my head when asked to do a chore and remember that these are little eight, nine, and ten year olds asking me to help them work the land or bale hay or preserve fruits and vegetables for the winter months ahead. If only my mother could see me now. I miss them so much, and the longer I am here I can see more clear that the true victims of this plague are not the ones who die necessarily, but their loved ones left behind and the orphans left to mimic their parents, and I wonder how long it will be until a baby is born here, and who will care for it if its parents get sick? They are all pretty sure as am I that they are immune to this strain of the plague virus, but who is to say tomorrow that is will not mutate, get stronger and turn into something else. So I sit and watch the sun set behind the snow capped Rocky Mountains and I think of my friends at El Camino High School back in Woodland Hills, CA who have died and my parents and sister Pepper and even my dog Kobi and I wonder when I’ll see them all again if ever; probably not. I am so very tired of moving, day to day, not knowing if I will eat from one day to the next, watching sick people die around me. I was prepared to kill myself, throw myself off the side of the cliff if I did not encounter anyone within a day or so. I was tired and dehydrated and the walk from Salt Lake City was arduous. It took me weeks and before I stumbled on this town of children I all but lost my will to want to go on. But being here, I dunno, it has somehow given me hope, that if these kids, orphans of something terrible can somehow rebuild a small society and find a reason to keep going so can I]