48 Moons

By Gary Williamson

This story is the recollections of a small town lawyer, who survives a viral plague. The plague kills over eighty percent of the World's population, it arrives in New England in 2018 and moves West. The infrastructure of the country collapses, the Government is mostly dead, there is no power, food or water, looting and violence become a way of life. This is how they adapt as the world slowly adapts and begins to function again. It contains dark humour and episodes of violence.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Gary Williamson
• Release date: Nov 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781311846921

Gary Williamson

Gary D. WilliamsonA Short BiographyBorn London’s East End in January 1954, I have worked in London as a Laboratory Scientist in the field of Bacteriology for more than forty years, first with the Ministry of Defence in the Scientific Civil Service and subsequently for the National Health Service. More than twenty years were spent in the Microbiology Laboratory of the world famous St. Mary’s Hospital in Paddington. I have lived in London and the surrounding suburbs for over forty years.Karen and I married in 1985 and have two children.Since I was about ten I have had a desire to write. My wife told me I’d write when I retired and I plan to do so. My first idea for a novel came in the early nineties, and I formulated it in my mind whilst training for marathons. I wrote over half of it. It now needs a major overall but the plot and characters are all there. That project was shelved, but will be resurrected and it is my intention to publish it as a third or fourth novel.I have run nineteen full marathons including the London Marathon eight times, once in fancy dress, raising around eight thousand pounds for various charities over eight years. I attained a World ranking (around 230th) in the 1995 World Trail Running Championships by completing the 80-mile run across England’s South Downs. I completed the “Tough Guy” challenge three times. I was forced to retire from running in 2002, due to a long-standing knee injury.Currently when not writing I go fishing and also study Iaido, the ancient Japanese martial art of drawing the sword. I attained my 2nd Dan in 2012 and am working towards achieving my 3rd Dan whilst attempting to learn sufficient Japanese to help with these studies.My other interests include photography, music and cinema.I travelled around Western Europe during the early 1980s by motorcycle and wrote articles for “Motorcycle Weekly”.I have visited the Kruger National Park in South Africa, Israel, Turkey, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Mauritius, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Sumatra, Morocco, Thailand, Belize, Guatemala, Rajasthan in India, Myanmar (Burma) and most recently Hong Kong and TaiwanAs a child I lived for three years in Menlo Park, California as my father worked for Ampex in Redwood City, we came back to England in 1960. I have returned to the States visiting Virginia, which ignited an interest in the American Civil War to the point where I wanted to study an aspect of it but my thesis proposal on the social impact if the Confederates had won at Gettysburg and there had been a negotiated end to the war was rejected. I also went to Florida in 1997 on a family vacation.As for this novel the idea came to me in the late summer of 2011, I have now written over two thirds of it. People ask what is it about and I respond by telling them that I have now killed eighty five per cent of the World’s population. The story has no plot, no defined beginning middle and but has an end, though it does follow a time line. It is the journal of a survivor, their thoughts, actions and memories, set in a future post apocalyptic America. I get ideas and scrawl a few lines then blend them into the story, creating it as I go. Sometimes a simple idea or a fact discovered will lead the central character into a new area. I do know where it ends as I have written the final chapter; I just have to get there.The second novel is roughly planned and will be a turbulent, erotic and violent love triangle.An idea for a third concerns the aftermath of a drone attack going wrong, and the subsequent story of revenge. It should keep me busy for the next decade.Recently I had the idea for a fifth novel, which I may attempt to write as a play, and also I invented a character that I need to flesh out.My photograph was taken by Stuart Franklin, former President of Magnum Photos, and world renown for his photograph of the “Tank Man in Tianamen Square”, which has been listed in the top forty of the most powerful photographs ever taken. He is a friend and fellow Leonard Cohen fan. His work can be seen at www.stuartfranklin.com

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Prologue

This is the journal of one person as they wrote and revised it in a Post Apocalyptic American future. Any reference made to real persons living or dead in the context of this work of fiction is entirely coincidental. Any references to real characters both living and dead are a reflection of the thoughts of the central character and therefore fictitious. The quotes used in the Presidential speeches were taken from My Fellow Americans.

Red and Black Publishers from the Library of Congress and I am grateful to the unsung speechwriters for their skills, which far exceed my own. I should also like to acknowledge Wikipedia, and the various Departments of the United States Government from where, I gleaned a lot of statistical information, and historical facts, disastercenter.com and numerous tourist information sites from whom I derived pleasure in researching and writing this book. I should also like to acknowledge Insight guides and Michelin for the traditional maps I used.

Gary D Williamson

2013

Chapter One

Zombies do not exist, perhaps I should repeat that, Zombies do not exist, the dead do not walk the Earth, never have, never will. George A. Romeo cannibalised the myth of this Haitian folklore more than his zombies cannibalised the All American crisis group. The film was about racism anyway, that’s my interpretation of it. But that film was along time ago. What walk the Earth now are the survivors of a new super plague. Poor bastards are shuffling brain dead viral cultures moving based on their autonomic functions alone. They do not have to be killed by burning or decapitation, despite what every so-called Zombie Survival Manual states. They are more or less dead already and this function will cease once the system fails, once the heart stops, oxygen stops going to the organs and the system shuts down. Removing what was the brain with a tire iron will do the job, so will running them down with a Peterbilt or a Kenwood. But gas and diesel are limited; they’ll die anyhow so why go looking for them? Maybe the tire iron is the better option and it’s environmentally friendly, if not zombie friendly, but arguing over green issues is a redundant concept now.

The Rule of Three applies as much to these hulks as it does to anyone else. There are always exceptions in the rest of the mammals. Three minutes without air, and yes, pearl divers and other freaks can hold their breath for longer, if there any of these people left. So can marine mammals, but that complicates the tale. Three days without water, the victims of the plague have an unquenchable thirst for any kind of liquid, and thirty days without food. No wonder they bite people. The Rule of Three is an average. The average time a victim will survive without food of some kind puts a limit on the existence they have. Then they keel over, die and rot. That could be considered a blessing.

Where did it start? No one knows for sure. Once the outbreak started and until the Internet and for that matter every other utility stopped the theories abounded. Was it a bioterrorism weapon unleashed by a radical Islamic faction? Or a biological weapon once ensconced in a secret US facility, which escaped or was accidently released in the wrong place or deliberately in the right place? Or was it from another global superpower. Chinese, Indians what was there to be gained? The Koreans are more interested in explosive weapons of mass destruction than biological ones and the assorted Kims have more problems with a starving population. One of the last recorded outbreaks of smallpox was in England when there was an accident in a research facility. What kind of madman stores a potential global catastrophe in a freezer? When AIDS started to reach epidemic proportions in the 1980s the same type of conspiracy theory questions were being asked. Was it a weapon? Did it mutate from a monkey in the Belgian Congo, or Zaire or Congo or whatever the hell it’s called now? Does it matter? No one is going to write another book.

They once said that after a nuclear war the next one would be fought with spears. They did not predict this. I’m writing this in a series of old school exercise books I found, part in Biro and when I run out of those then pencil. I’ve got a lot of pencils. Henri Charrière wrote Papillon like that. Pencils are simple technology.

When NASA went to the moon the Fisher Space Pen was developed. We all got one as a gift at some point, they cost around twenty dollars each and if you read the history that comes with in the box, it cost around fourteen million dollars to develop a pen that had a gas propelled ink system to write in a weightless environment. Technology was what the USA did best. Give us problem we throw dollars at it until we solve it. Millions of dollars for a ballpoint, and that was when it was a hell of lot of money. Not as much as the forty four million it cost to make Cleopatra in ’63. But getting Elizabeth Taylor out of bed and in front of a movie camera was always going to cost more than making a ballpoint. The Americans did technology best, the Russians used pencils. They work in a weightless environment and you get truckloads of them for that amount of money.

The world no longer has computers, pads, and word-processors. Well it does, but none of them work, as the world no longer has power. We don’t have Fisher Space pens or the ability to make gas driven ink. There are some left, lying in desk or cupboard or attic someplace. They could come in handy if someone has figured a way off this dying planet or they could just take pencils. And when we embraced the wondrous new technology we dumped all the Olivetti’s and IBM’s in the trash. The managers wrote their own correspondence, shorthand became as alien as Klingon, and probably more people were conversant in Klingon than shorthand. The only thing they had in common was that someone invented both of them. Typewriters went to museums. We forgot that the QWERTY keyboard we used everyday dated back to 1871, we were impressed that when Ian Fleming’s old Imperial typewriter was replaced it was with a gold-plated one from the Royal Typewriter Company in New York. I’d love one of the old ones rather than this ballpoint, back to a world of ink stained fingers from adjusting ribbons and the innovation of correction fluid. I recall my Dad telling me that one the Monkee’s Moms invented correction fluid and made a fortune when she sold it. The Royal Typewriter Company has gone now, but then so has New York. It is there but who is left in it? Is there going to be anyone alive to read this or is a cathartic exercise on my part?

Where do I begin? Most stories have a beginning, middle, and a conclusion, not necessarily in that order and they also have a plot. This is more an observational record of the last few years and will end with my demise. It is the Fall now, time in terms of weeks and days are no longer important, I revert to the old ways, I wake with the sun and sleep when it’s dark.

Seasons, are measured by the trees, when they sprout leaves it’s Spring, the fruits come in Summer, the leaves change color and drop in Fall, the branches lay bare in Winter. As for the months, I think it is now late October, approaching Halloween, the leaves have dropped, though it may be later. I do not think it’s Thanksgiving yet. There will not be turkey and pumpkin pie this year, there has not been for several years. There are no family gatherings as there are no families not that I am aware of anyhow. I measure the months by the moon in the way of the Native Americans and probably all indigenous peoples throughout the world did for centuries.

It began around forty moons ago, that’s around three and a bit years ago. It was summer when the news broadcast spoke of a disease that had infected a few people, I forget where, but think it was the East Coast somewhere. It was a hot summer, the news escalated to hourly broadcasts of the pandemic sweeping the nation. The government mobilized the military and the National Guard. Cities were imposing quarantine areas. The airports shut down. The country slowly but surely started to die and the world followed. Where was Bono when you needed him? Probably dead.

I live, correction, I now survive in the house my parents raised me in. My father had been an MD, and was well respected. One day over a decade ago he died, no symptoms, no warnings, no lingering, no waiting for a drug or prying for a cure. No decision to turn off the life support. At least he did that for us.

They did the autopsy and could not determine the cause of death all the organs appeared healthy apart from the fact they were now detached from their owner and in a series of pails. They ran screens for every conceivable drug, toxin and poison they could detect Zeptogram of. Who knew what a Zeptogram was? We lived in a world of quarter pounders. We learnt from the Medical Examiner that a Zeptogram was 10-²¹ of a Gram. That’s a nought, a point and twenty more noughts then a number. Add a dollar sign; show it in the mirror it looks like Bill Gates paycheck. Dad would have poured a bourbon and asked what was the point of being able to measure something that weighed less than a fart?

They wanted to know if he drank? Only bourbon, wine from California, and six-pack of Milwaukee’s finest watching the double header. Did he have headaches? Ask him, he’s the MD, only you can’t because he’s dead, and you don’t know why. Maybe it was bourbon, wine from California or the six pack of Milwaukee’s finest watching the double header. The cops made us all write statements. Mom took it worse than anyone, and that signaled the beginning of her demise. She did not really want to know what he died of. She just wanted to bury him, put up a stone, mourn him and perhaps get the answer as to why he was taken from her. She was denied. They did another autopsy, took so many samples there was not enough meat left for a pot roast. Eventually they released the body. Mom buried a casket, which contained only the fragments of a long and happy marriage. The cause of death was recorded as unknown. Samples were kept, numbered in a freezer, I suppose in case they find a new disease and retrospectively discover that’s what killed him. That won’t happen now, the reason he died has been buried with what was left of him, no one will ever know, maybe he knew, in the last seconds before he stepped into eternity. I get a sort of reassurance that perhaps he did know. He would have poured a bourbon and told everyone that a new disease or syndrome was going to be named after him Ballard’s Syndrome, a unique disease where you die and no expert knows why, and he would be immortal in the annals of medical history. Then years later someone would discover why and the New England Journal of Medicine would publish a paper explaining the causes of Ballard’s Syndrome, and it would be an official cause of death. Except a Henry Ballard had already given his name to a rare syndrome of enlarged liver and spleen forty or so years ago in the New England Journal and may have intellectual copyright. He would have to call his condition something else.

Mom went downhill, and my career had destroyed my marriage. I studied law, worked all the hours to pay to further my career, and made partner in a law firm, but lost a partner to long hours, ingratitude and not recognizing that my own drive to succeed corroded the sustainability of my own marriage. The one saving grace was that there were no kids. To this day I’m grateful as the world falls apart. I moved back to the family home and transferred to an associated law firm. The sign still reads Attorney at Law like Ransom Stoddard, but I was never going to go into politics then and there are no politics now nor will there be again not as I knew it, no primaries, no TV debates. There was a Government of sorts but that’s another story.

The house was just outside a small town in the South West. West of the Bible belt, it had grown with small, gated communities for those who had retired and wanted to spend their golden years playing golf all year round in warm dry conditions, then relax with a Martini in the hot tub with either the wife of many years, or the new statuesque trophy wife, bleach blonde with tits that owe more to medicine and engineering than genetics and came courtesy of American Express, and legs that went on further than a Freeway, but both of which had a Toll booth. The leg length was also equivalent to the IQ in a lot of these airheads and I mean inches not centimeters.

We were on the outskirts, had some land, which was covered in trees. Dad had the place architect designed and built, it was a pity he had so few years to enjoy it. The great thing about the place was the basement. It had four large rooms, the first of which was the home entertainment suite. Dad, who it must be said had some degree of obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD), classified everything; all the DVDs were alphabetical according to the genre. The genres started with action and went through comedy, horror, musical, war and westerns and everything in-between with subsections. So a film like James Stewart’s Shenandoah would be in western but would be crossed referenced in the catalogue, which was both printed and electronic, into War, subsection American Civil War. Mom and I spent hours on Amazon trying to buy him movies, which fell into as many categories as possible, just for the hell of it. Then complain if he got the reference wrong, so he’d spend the next hour cutting and pasting his spreadsheets, reprinting, refilling while Mom and I sat around laughing. One of the best was the DVD version of Little Shop of Horrors a musical romantic comedy horror. We got the original, which was one of Jack Nicolson’s earliest films, the Broadway stage version and the Steve Martin remake. As we knew he had a Jack Nicolson subsection it kept him amused for hours while Mom and I ate cookies and sipped Chablis, laughing ourselves to point of the tears.

We then got him the soundtracks on CD for his equally obsessive catalogued music collection. By then he’d seen through the joke. In their own ways I miss them both.

He was equally organized in his workshop, which had the manuals for everything we owned (or for that matter had ever owned including the waffle maker they had as a wedding gift and had been thrown out years ago) and all the tools, and the one place we never went as kids was the gun locker.

Though an MD and dedicated to saving life he believed in the Second Amendment and the right to bear arms, and no liberal thinking bureaucrat was going to take that from him. He had known the horrors of war and had served in Vietnam, towards the end, drafted in as a Medic he knew what injuries could be inflicted and often went with the evacuation teams knowing the so called ‘golden hour’ often resulted in more of the wounded coming home alive. He often talked to my brother and me about that era, He wondered sometimes if it would have been better to let some of them die. Deep down I knew that he probably had. He witnessed the suffering. He knew what they would have to endure when they returned home minus limbs, spending all day in the veteran’s hospitals and he loathed the antiwar sentiment, which spread through the country. He saw the use of drugs, and the spread of the social diseases caught from the whores in Saigon and read the reports and studies that came later. The impact it had on the country and for what? He would get philosophical and come up with some fact or other about warfare.

But he was never a pacifist or some dippy hippy hair shirted lentil-eating do-gooder. He maintained as many others before and after said guns don’t kill people, people kill people. He was also aware that many men, women and children in this country died as the result of gun ownership. They got shot hunting, shot themselves while cleaning the gun, usually when drunk, had a domestic row and shot their partner or their partners new partner. Tragic though that may be, the thing that worried him most was if the kids played with the guns. Many kids died that way. In 1999 nine children a day died as a result of a gunshot wound. Nearly three thousand were 15 to 19 years old, but what worried him was the fact that seventy-three of them were five years old or less.

Chapter Two

He was as paranoid about gun safety as he was about organizing things. Mom could not believe it when he spent two thousand dollars on a Liberty Franklin gun cabinet.

It weighed more than six hundred pounds and could store more than thirty guns. He response was always How much does it cost to bury a kid, and I’m not talking dollars, put a price on the tears of stupidity and the years of grief?

Dad would remind us that the gun which killed Kennedy came mail order, he could recite statistics about the Cologne massacre in 1964, the Texas Clock Tower killing two years later when Whitman killed fifteen and injured another thirty or so before doing the world a favor and killing himself. That incident took a little over an hour and a half. He told us, often over dinner that his decision to buy the gun cabinet was vindicated by Dunblane, a place in Scotland, where one man killed sixteen children. That action led to the British Government banning handguns. Our right to bear arms was enshrined in the Second Amendment from 1791. Few realize that it came from the English Bill of Rights, which was almost a hundred years older and signed by King William, it allowed Protestants to bear arms, presumably against the Catholics. The actions following Dunblane incident struck at this.

Why did these people kill kids? Dad often asked this question. This had not been some sacked mailman who went back to their former or sometimes current place of work and blew holes in their manager and colleagues. There had been so many of these since the mid nineteen eighties the term Going Postal entered the language as a euphemism for losing control and blowing the living shit out of your manager. In some cases I can see why, some managers deserve it.

When we and by that I mean those who drafted the Amendments to our Constitution gave us the right to bear arms and defend ourselves they had single shot muskets, in modern terms one of those muskets would have cost the equivalent of between two hundred and four hundred dollars. I suppose we can buy the equivalent now. The rifles of the time cost eight English pounds, which I think would be around fifteen hundred dollars now, which is a lot of money.

When I was at Penn I found the Pennsylvania Constitution of 1776, which stated that people had the right to bear arms to defend themselves and the State. When these people signed these bills they could never have envisaged the damage that a NATO round could do. They fired their cartridges one at a time, or reloaded with black powder via the muzzle. If they were good they could fire two or three rounds a minute. They could not have envisaged the destructive force that was invented by Eugene Stoner. Stoner worked for Armalite and developed the modern semi automatic rifle for what he described as the modern post nuclear battlefield.

This gun replaced the Garland M1 used by our troops in the Second World War, it evolved to the M16 and took the 7.62mm round. Combat troops needed a lightweight rifle, which was idiot proof for the troops that used it, capable of being abused and for which the ammunition was light and destructive. The NATO round was smaller at 5.56mm. Dad told me that these rounds, which were .223 caliber, were actually smaller than the shells used to shoot tin cans in Carny sideshows and to kill vermin. He’d seen first hand the damage they did and told me. It had been known since our Civil War that if a man dies in combat he is a body on the battlefield, wound him and it takes more men to evacuate him and destroys the morale of the enemy. The Armalite bullet was not as effective at long range as the M1, but in Vietnam beyond two hundred yards there was jungle and Charlie was hiding in it, or as we learnt later, in the tunnels under it. The difference was the bullet from the M1 went in preceded by a shock wave which then expanded blowing holes in people, the M15 bullet he told me, only went in about four inches then it turned side on and split into at least two pieces. It caused internal damage and those hit usually bled to death. We needed these weapons to fight in Iran, Somalia, Afghanistan and anywhere else where the bad guy armed with the Kalashnikov and a towel on his head tries to blow the hell out of you. We did not need them at home. Dad believed in the Second Amendment, but not domestic semi automatic weapons. It became apparent to the British that banning handguns was a knee jerk reaction and they ended up with more illegal handguns than they had before and the socially responsible gun owners who shot target guns had their guns taken, received compensation and then had to go to other countries to shoot or give up. Like any sport you have to practice regularly, driving a few miles to a gun club a couple of times a week is one thing, flying to Norway or someplace is not economically viable even for the most dedicated enthusiast.

Columbine made him question the Second Amendment, then when Seung Hui Cho killed thirty-two people at Virginia Tech he was shifted his opinion away from the stance of the NRA. I wondered in the period between his passing and the plague what he would have made of Sandy Hook? Two years after his death and twenty-two kids aged between five and eleven years old, were shot dead by Adam Lanza, who killed his mother, and six or seven more adults.

He had a Bushmaster assault rifle according to the TV and the papers. Who fires high velocity battlefield ordnance at children? Why? How unstable have you got to be? I remember the President shed tears and that should have been the beginning of the end of the ownership of assault rifles. People still had the right to own a rifle, to hunt, defend their loved ones or their property. After the Constitution was written people killed for the table or for fur and hides using single shot Hawkens, which was developed by two brothers from Missouri in 1815 and stayed in production until the First World War. It would not have been much use on the battlefields of France and Belgium. It was used on the plains of America to hunt buffalo. The buffalo have gone now, hunted to the point of extinction, their carcasses rotting on the plains. The Hawkens was then replaced by the Sharps carbine, a single shot breechloader, and whilst the modern assault rifles have grenade launchers and laser sights and so forth, the Sharps had a coffee mill in the stock. Not all models, but that is innovation, shoot someone or something for the table and then brew up a mug of freshly milled coffee. How do I remember all this seemingly pointless information? A didactic memory, which is professionally very useful, and helps with crossword puzzles and answering questions watching game shows on TV.

President Obama refused to accept the NRA stance that to prevent bad guys with guns you need good guys with guns and they proposed armed guards in schools. What happened to the innocence of childhood? What if the deranged nutjob shoots the armed guard first? The only people who would profit are the gun retailers. Quis custodiet ipsos custodes? Who guards the guardians? No one knows who came up with the phrase, Plato, or his elder brother Glaucon or the poet Juvenal, but it still holds meaning two millennia later. Dad quoted it at pieces of various legislation passed by the Senate. He used expanding bullets when he hunted, his logic was that when he shot something he did not want to spend the rest of the day tracking it until it died, and despite the hunter orange he wore risk being shot at and possibly killed by some other gun happy redneck. The nearer it dropped the nearer the meat was to the car. The British, in a place called the Dum Dum Arsenal in India, invented expanding bullets and that is where they got their name. Used to quell the unruly natives who resisted British Colonial rule, they expanded on impact. Trouble was the British used them in warfare and the Germans complained they were inhumane and Dum Dum bullets were subsequently outlawed from use in warfare, by the Hague Convention, at the end of the eighteenth century. Typical of the Germans, who started to two wars, killed millions, and then decided to rule Europe by imposing financial shackles on its neighbors. Wasn’t that the reason they started the Second World War, racial supremacy, and the thousand year Reich just came as justification? The Germans complained, but they were the first to use mustard gas and Zyclon B, hadn’t they heard the phrase He that is without sin among you, let him cast the first stone."

This was when they fired one shot at a time. Now we use full metal jacket, hollow point and anything else that shreds an enemy at a rate of eight hundred rounds a minute. If you want a Dum Dum bullet, just put an X in the top with a hacksaw. Obama fought the NRA, defied their bizarre logic and wanted to make it Federal law that private citizens could no longer own semi automatic assault rifles. Anyone wanting one had to justify it. All that meant was that before the law was passed onto the statutes every crazy ordered an assault rifle and hid it in their yard or someplace, despite the threat of a felony conviction and serious jail time. If the government has a deterrent policy in that they have weapons of mass destruction to prevent that kind of weapon being used against them, why can’t the guy from Idaho have an assault rifle in case someone decides to use an assault rifle against him? Except for the fact by the time he has dug it up from under the woodshed, he has been blown to pieces by the next-door neighbor because his dog crapped on the lawn. Only in America. Trouble was the politicians knew that such legislation would cause a backlash from the NRA and the Senators voted against it, and kept their jobs, it was a pity they saw that as better than a bunch of innocent school kids keeping their lives.

Dad would hunt occasionally, usually venison for the table, sometimes duck and pheasant and one time he killed a bar. That phrase came back to haunt us. It was worse than the freezer full of Yogi burgers. A 300-pound bear makes a lot of Yogi burgers and even the most creative culinary expert runs out of innovative ways of serving them. After we started to refuse the chili and avocado version with optional toppings Mom saw the light and shared the remainder out to the neighbors, who fed them to their dogs. The cabinet is no longer locked, it still houses enough firepower to start a small riot, the ammunition is starting to run low, but there is some black powder. The problem is I never learnt to make my own shotgun shells and being one of the few people maybe the only one left I have no real desire to have an accident with a self-load.

The skin of that bear is dusty now and still remains as a throw on the couch in the study. What they used to say was true; it looked better on the bear.

I’ve spent a lot of hours sat next to that sad dusty old bearskin, reading Dad’s medical books, journals and whilst it was still in existence, surfing the Internet. One advantage of have a mind trained in law is the capacity to read and retain minute detail. This was the third room in the basement. The fourth was a guest bedroom. Painted neutral magnolia and with an ensuite bathroom, and king sized bed this is where I sleep. There used to be a print of the Sun Goddess by Frank Frazetta, above the bed, a half naked maiden worshiping the sun accompanied by some large sabre toothed cat, a lion I think, We got rid of it after he died.

This is not a journal, those a written one day at a time, like a diary, I’m trying to recall what happened, what I learnt and how I coped, it will ramble, sidetrack and it does not have a plot.

When the news started to break of a new plague there was the inevitable hysterical media meltdown, they called it a plague because to extent when it started that what it was. Not a plague like they taught us in Sunday school when Moses called upon God to bring plagues of frogs, locusts and kill the first born, though this did a good job of the latter, more like a plague from Revelation covering people with sores and causing them to gnaw upon their tongues. I liked Revelation, always managed to find some comfort in the thought of this vision of Hell. The fourth horseman of the Apocalypse had bought death and famine to America. This was not a short-term disaster, which we could rebuild like the aftermath of Katrina. Nor was it sitting in front of the TV with a meal on our lap watching the reports from Sudan, or Ethiopia or Somalia, it was always someplace round that part of east Africa, where a bunch of Starvin’ Marvins died while we ate Betty Crocker. Compassion fatigue would set in once in a while when the reporter and the images would get to us and we’d pledge twenty-five bucks on a credit card to buy some medical aid and blankets. This was only to ease our own conscience as we helped ourselves to another chicken wing. What we were really thinking was What are we saving these kids for so they die in the next civil war? The next famine when the crops fail again? Or get some diarrhoeal disease, shit themselves inside out and die in a tent in a refugee camp, either next week or next month, but before the money got through. If they survive what happens? Starvin’ Marvin comes over here and enters a life a crime because that is all he’s known. But we can’t send him back because his life might be at risk. What dumb liberals thought that up? Probably the French.

Chapter Three

According to Dad’s books, CNN documentaries, and the web there were three flu pandemics in the last century, the worst was the one that started in 1918. Straight after the decimation caused by World War I the so-called Spanish flu started. The war caused the death of around nine million, but that was around almost insignificant to the flu, which claimed at least fifty million lives, a third of those in India. It may have killed up to a hundred million, this was at a time when the world’s population was less than two billion and one virus killed five per cent of them. It also infected up to half the population. It hit fast, usually within a week. This was a strain of influenza that was more likely to kill the 20 to 40 year old age group. A bit like AIDS seventy years later, when it wiped out generations, leaving grandparents too old to work, and grandchildren too young and also often with the AIDS infection, the spectre of death on their shoulders.

Spanish flu killed nearly three-quarters of a million Americans. Six hundred years or thereabouts before that, the Black Death was killing over seven thousand people a day. In fifty years it killed thirty-five million people in China alone. It is believed to have started in the Gobi desert. Genghis Khan conquered most of the world (and it is now believed most people are descended from him) a hundred years before, and from the lands of his birthplace a tide of infection caused more havoc than he did.

From my reading, nestled next to that old bearskin, I learnt that both the Black Death and the Great Plague of London in 1665, were caused by bacteria. The 17th century plague arose in Holland, and came ashore in the docks of London. Cramped conditions and overcrowding saw the disease spread and it killed twenty per cent of the population of London. The plague pits where the victims are buried are still there. The Great Fire purged it and led to the start of housing regulations. The author Daniel Defoe, responsible for my childhood excursions to Treasure Island was five years old at the time of the London plague, but wrote a fact and fiction book entitled Journal of the Plague in 1722. Perhaps I’m following in the footsteps of the literary master, the difference being his work was still read 300 years later, my journal will not be. That plague went through Europe causing an outbreak in Vienna in 1679, before moving on to North Africa like a malignant tourist.

I learnt the differences between bacterial plagues, epidemics, viruses and the pandemics for which they are responsible. There are good bacteria and bad bacteria, like A. A. Milne’s Good Bear and Bad Bear poem. Bad bacteria like cholera, which we learn about on TV as it adds more misery to the Starvin’ Marvins or population of whichever nation has been hit by civil war, famine, or flood. I learnt about dysentery, which kills in the refugee camps and has decimated every army since man invented conflict. Even Shakespeare made reference to it. But then he made noted a lot of diseases. Majoring in English makes you learn stuff that you never forget however insignificant. Humans, from grade school biology are basically tubes. The outside in covered with an assortment of bacteria, which acts as a defensive wall, and the inside is full of bacteria, which break down everything we eat so we can absorb it and without them we die. Even the TV encourages us to spend dollars on some microbiotic sludge, which apparently improves our wellbeing. Like man, the bacteria and viruses came out of the primordial soup the latter have remained unchanged for millions of years, merely adapting from species to species. The more I read in Dad’s books the more I became convinced there are no good viruses. They are like some form of Satanic K’nex, parasites, which invade a host, produce thousands more parts and reassemble them on an evil production line and repeat the process. The difference is their evolutionary process is short. For an animal to evolve or for man to change takes several generations one to two hundred years if the average generation is around thirty years. With a virus there can be a dozen generations in the course of infecting one host, be it man, animal or crop. Mathematically and this was not my subject, it stands to reason that when each set of chemical parts is reconstructed, a few of the new ones will be different. A minor slip in the nucleic acid and a new demon is created. This can make the thing either more dangerous or remove its ability to infect. Unlike man where it is obvious the next generation is taller or blond or suffers from a genetic condition the change in the virus is one or two molecules, by the time it has registered it has broken down and changed again.

Crocodiles, which are more or less unchanged and have been around two million years, are susceptible to viruses, and such viruses have co-evolved with every subsequent species. Birds came from reptiles, look at the scales on a chicken’s legs, they got fur, evolved and adapted. Sorry to disappoint my Sunday school teacher, but Genesis was wrong, if on the fifth day He created the creatures and the birds in the skies, why the fuck did he make viruses? Who was He pissed at? When Pandora’s curiosity got the better of her, like a kid looking for Christmas presents when Mom and Dad are out and Brad at Kindergarten told them Santa did not exist and your folks bought the presents and hid them, she unleashed the evils upon the world by opening the box. No one remembers the last bit of the story that when she looked into the box the last thing that remained was hope. I wish that were true now. When the new Millennium dawned one of the things they found was that crocodile blood had amazing properties. It aided the healing of injuries that would have killed any other creature and if the scientists could isolate these factors and find away of making a drug that would work in humans then infections would easily be treated. When your marriage dissolves you have a tendency to watch the Discovery Channel in the middle of the night. They would have found cures for AIDS and cancer. That was until a virus sparked a new pandemic.

According to CNN a few cases presented at a hospital in Massachusetts, they were feverish, some were having seizures, and they were put into quarantine. The Governor had declared a potential pandemic state of emergency. The death toll started to climb and the media started blaming a different group everyday. It seems we invented blame culture. The Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta, received samples and their spokesman was interviewed endlessly by a media circus. All he could say was this was a virus and as yet it had not been identified. The questions that filled the blogs, water cooler conversations, papers, TV and radio were not what was it, but where did it come from? And how do we avoid it? In the 1960s the US started investigating the use of Venezuelan Equine Encephalitis Virus as a biological weapon. This would wipe out livestock, but had a low mortality in humans. It was not as dangerous as the haemorrhagic fever viruses. But that was over half a century ago. A lot can change in five decades. Another possible thought was this was some sort of mutant Bird flu like the great flu of 1918, arising or engineered in China, whose economic growth required feeding with oil, food and raw materials. The last bird flu outbreak caused the State of Massachusetts to pass a law for disaster preparation. This was designated S2008 and meant that those who refused vaccination could be fined or jailed. This draconian piece of legislation sat in the House of Representatives as they figured out a way to fund it.

Someone suggested it was a Nimpah virus, which was the one cited in the movie Contagium Most believed it was either the US letting something from some secret Government funded project escape or it was a hostile act from the Middle East. The general consensus of opinion was that no Islamic radicals could have engineered it even if they wanted to. If, and that remains a major point, if this was engineered it required specialist facilities, millions of dollars worth of equipment and the recruitment of the best specialists in the world. Anyone building such a weapon would also build a vaccine for themselves and their allies. This would not or could not be done by handful of rag headed dune coons, working in a cave, lit by kerosene lamps, however fanatical, wealthy or fired by idealism they were.

Dad had articles on a kid called Kaptan Boonmanuch, a Thai who is recognised as arguably the world’s first human victim of bird flu. He was six years old when he died in 2003. The virus had moved from species and created a pandemic. Most of these outbreaks happened in countries with a high domestic bird population and often resulted in the sacrifice of millions of chickens at a cost of millions of dollars. Colonel Sanders would have cried. These pandemics were hyped by the media, panicked the population and usually resulted in a few deaths, usually in the weak, the young, the elderly and those whose immune system was compromised in some way. To an extent it became an agent of natural selection, proving Spencer’s theory of survival of the fittest. Unless man, in his infinite stupidity intervenes, Dad had some press cuttings from debates in the early part of 2008, it shows the Dutch had mutated the bird flu virus. Normally transmission was direct via some Asian chicken kisser, now these dumb clog wearing bastards had made a version, which was capable of airborne transmission. They created a weapon of bioterrorism and written a paper on it. Dad had annotated some of the clippings. This had made the TV News, so everyone with a grudge against Uncle Sam would be looking for this. Most of us regarded the Dutch as harmless, either dope smoking faggots in Amsterdam or the others who were God-fearing Protestants who spent their time setting fire to GATSO speed cameras, which they invented in the first place. Just another curse, set upon the world, this time, courtesy of the clog people. First a plague of speed cameras, now a viral Armageddon ready to be unleashed. The frightening part was it only took five mutations to create, and as one expert had stated virtually every avian population has its own version of bird flu, this cheerful soul informed the world there were at least fifty million different strains of bird flu and if the Dutch had not engineered it, either it would have happened naturally with no control or someone else would have done it. The technology was not that difficult. Why couldn’t the Dutch have stuck to smoking dope and burning speed cameras, rather than creating a precursor to the end of the world?

The number of severe cases started to escalate the hospitals and medical centers could not cope. All the high dependency beds were filled and the occupants were now starting to die before the accountants could bill their insurance company. Front line workers, the doctors, nurses, auxillaries started to become ill, then some died. The only positive thing was that the accountants were starting to die as well.

Then more people died.

They shut Logan International Airport first, and then the FAA took the decision to shut every airport in the States. No international flights, no internal flights. The decision was taken three weeks after the first case died. Logan handles around four million passengers a year or around eleven thousand a