It Falls Apart Series | Book 1 | It Falls Apart

by Napier, Barry

  “What about you?” she asked. “You’re out there and it looks like you’ve been through hell. Are you sick?”

  “Remarkably, no.”

  “Has it…has it taken out the entire city?”

  “I don’t know. I hear people shouting and screaming every now and then. But I haven’t seen another living person for at least fifteen minutes—besides you.”

  Her eyes skirted over to one of the dead bodies on the sidewalk. It was less than ten feet from her front door. Thankfully, the face was turned away from the window.

  “This thing…it’s fast, huh?” she asked. “I saw a video where a doctor was saying it—”

  “You know what?” he said, offering her a weary smile. “Maybe you don’t even think about it. You’re safe in there. So you stay in there. Don’t come to this lobby again unless it’s absolutely necessary.”

  She nodded and asked. “Can you come by again sometime? I think we’re okay for a while but still…just to know…”

  “I’d be happy to. There are a few other things I need to check on but then I’ll come back. Is there some other way we can communicate? Some other way so that you don’t have to come out here and see all of this?”

  “Yes. The back door. There’s an employee entrance. We won’t be able to see each other, but we can talk through the door, I suppose.”

  “Let’s do that. I’ll knock on it. Four knocks, all back to back. Do you need anything? Do you have plenty of food and water?”

  “Goldfish and juice boxes,” she said. She was trying to inject humor into the situation but it fell terribly flat.

  “Okay. I’ll be back. I don’t know when, but I will.” He started to walk away but then hesitated and turned back to her, looking through the glass. She felt for him; it seemed he yearned to be inside with her away from the death and eerie stillness of what had once been a bustling city. “What’s your name, by the way?” he asked.

  “Olivia Foster.”

  “Olivia, I’m Paul Gault. It’s good to meet you. I just wish it hadn’t been under these circumstances.”

  “Same to you,” she said.

  They looked at one another for a moment and Olivia felt a sense of desperation as he started to walk away. She hated to think such a thing, but there was a part of her that wondered if this brief encounter with Paul Gault might be the last time she saw another living human being. Aside from Joyce, of course.

  Thinking of Joyce, Olivia turned away from the glass, not allowing herself to take in the miserable sights out there. She closed and locked the lobby door once again and headed back to look over the one remaining child left in her care—a little girl she might be taking care of for a very long time.

  Chapter 8

  Terrence Crowder was filling one of several bookbags with canned soup while the news blared behind him. His feeds from New York stations had either gone blank or were replaced with emergency broadcast graphics, and that was what had really spooked him. Somehow, an unstoppable virus seemed almost tolerable, like something the human race would be able to handle and eventually overcome. But when television—the trusted fallback of human information and laziness—was affected by such a virus, things were suddenly illuminated in a new and much more dangerous light.

  So Terrence had been packing bags and boxes for the past half an hour. He’d been preparing for something like this for years, so he already had several boxes and bins packed up and ready to go. Still, he moved through his small log cabin with speed and efficiency, a man on a mission. He’d imagined this scenario thousands of times over the last eight years and now that it was here, he was surprised to find just how calm he was about it.

  He was so calm, in fact, that he took a moment to stop in front of the television after carrying the last backpack to the front door. The system was hooked into two different laptops, which he’d take down right before leaving. Currently, it showed five different news feeds from around the United States. The two that were coming out of New York City were dead. The other three, though, showed a pretty clear picture of what had occurred in New York over the last eight hours.

  New York was essentially nothing but a graveyard—one big open tomb where the bodies were just scattered in the streets. Terrence had been watching it all unfold since 6:45 this morning. He’d heard about the explosion just off the coast, and he’d listened to the Coast Guard denying that anything of national significance had occurred during that event. He’d continued to watch as hundreds upon hundreds, and then thousands upon thousands of New Yorkers had gotten sick and died. The news footage had naturally been somewhat sanitized; you couldn’t have dead bodies and vomit all over the morning news. So while he’d listened to the official channels through the television, he’d gotten a more realistic narrative online. He’d scouted Facebook, Twitter, and Reddit to get a better picture. It gave the same details as the news, but in grislier detail.

  One Reddit user detailed her mother’s fight with the bizarre sickness that had wiped out New York. Her mother had reported the first symptoms—dizziness and slight nausea—at 8:11 a.m. By 8:24, she had a temperature of 102.8. She vomited for the first and second time at 8:27. At 8:36, when they were stalled in traffic on the way to the hospital, the mother’s temperature had reached 105.2 and she complained of an unbearable headache. There were a few more bouts of throwing up, but that was all. The Reddit user’s fifty-seven year-old mother died of the sickness at 8:46—exactly thirty-five minutes after the first symptoms.

  There were more stories, too, mostly in live feeds on Facebook. Terrence had seen car accidents and rioting. He’d seen people getting sick in the streets and then collapsing, only to die in traffic. He had never seen so many dead bodies in one place, aside from gruesome photos he’d seen of World War II atrocities in college. And the worst part was that there seemed to be no end in sight. From what he could tell the hospitals had been overwhelmed and had no clue how to stop it. The sickness was just too fast to study properly. One article he’d read stated that by the time any doctors had a chance to get even the slightest understanding of the illness, they would come down with it and be dead an hour later.

  The last numbers Terrence had seen on Twitter estimated three thousand doctors had died from the illness. As for a total of New York residents, there was no number posted. Based on what Terrence was seeing on the news, there were few survivors. Whatever this illness was, it had decimated the entire city of New York in under seven hours. There was some news footage also capturing the spread of the illness in the areas outside of New York, but these reports were scant. It was almost as if the media did not want the public to know the face of the monster that was about to devour them.

  But Terrence thought he might know the face of this particular monster. He’d been expecting it for the better part of eight years. And whether the media wanted to fully report it or not, the monster was on the move. Currently, just eight hours after the first deaths in New York had been reported, there were reports of the illness in northern Pennsylvania.

  Too close to home, Terrence thought. He lived in the very small town of Bent Rock, Maryland, just over an hour away from Baltimore. The place was just rural enough to stay hidden, but just close enough to the thrum of Baltimore and the nearby hub of DC to stay well-informed.

  “Yeah, too close to home,” he said to the empty cabin.

  He unhooked the laptops from the TV and slipped them into their respective cases. He then threw the cases over his arms and picked up a few well-packed boxes. Carrying these outside into his small and slightly overgrown front yard, it was hard to think that the world was coming unraveled less than three and a half hours away.

  Terrence’s cabin was tucked away three miles down an unmarked back road, the little plot of land mostly hidden by a thick blanket of elms, spruces, and oaks. His closest neighbor was nearly a full mile away, in a similar cabin, on similar land. He breathed in the crisp early summer air, realizing that in a few weeks, New York City was going to be overcome with a wretched
smell as all of those bodies started to cook under the summer sun. Sure, hotter summer temperatures for that area wouldn’t come around for another month or so, but so many bodies and no one to remove them…

  Terrence pushed the thought from his head as he slid the few boxes into the back of his ’92 Chevy pickup. He then returned to the house and came back out moments later carrying three bookbags and a single plastic bin packed with an assortment of electrical equipment. He slid all of this into the back of the truck as well, slammed the tailgate, and got behind the wheel.

  He wasn’t much for sentiment, so he didn’t waste time looking back at the cabin even though he was pretty sure he’d never see it again. But it wasn’t like he was going very far; if he did need to come back, it would be easy, he supposed.

  As he cranked the truck and pulled out into his dirt driveway, he thought of those emergency broadcast screens in New York. He thought of those dead bodies, perfectly healthy one moment and then absolutely wrecked forty minutes later.

  This is it, isn’t it? He brooded as he guided the Chevy down his driveway, kicking up little clouds of dust. This is what I’ve been waiting for…what I tried to warn them about…

  ***

  The dirt driveway would eventually take him to a small patch of gravel road that then spit out onto a thin unmarked road. That no-named stretch of asphalt eventually led to Highway 41, which led to a straight shot to the interstates and highways. But Terrence had no interest in any of that. Before he reached the stretch of gravel, he turned left off of the dirt driveway. The road he turned on wasn’t a road at all, but more of a well-worn track. Wheel ruts worn into the overgrown weeds and grass were the only indication that there was passage to be made. Those ruts and meager tracks had been placed there by the very same truck Terrence currently drove as he made trip after trip deeper into the woods in preparation for this day.

  He hadn’t been to his bunker in six months, but he found himself almost aching for it as the Chevy bounced along the sorry excuse for a road. Trees rose to every side, some hanging so low that the branches scraped the top of his truck. He eased the Chevy down a hill and then over a mostly dried-up creek bed before the little expanse of cleared off land came into view.

  There were the ruins of what he assumed had once been a barn of some kind in the clearing. Shattered boards and rusted steel struts stuck up like eager skeletal remains. Back when he had first moved out here, Terrence had cleaned most of the debris away but decided to leave some just for the sake of appearances. The dilapidated ruins of an old shed or barn wouldn’t draw anyone’s attention, after all. Also, they made an excellent hiding spot for the solar panels he’d installed there not too long ago.

  He parked along the right edge of the structure’s remains and got out, grabbing one of the laptop bags from the back. Walking into the center of the ruins, he couldn’t help but look around. He knew he was alone here—that there wasn’t another set of eyes for at least another mile—but he always felt paranoid before opening the bunker.

  He dropped down to his knees, found the latch hidden beneath several well-placed fallen boards, and pulled. The hatch door came up with a groan. When the seal was broken, Terrence got to his feet in a squatting position and pulled it the rest of the way up. The hatch door weighed about one hundred pounds, so opening it was quite a workout. It had been a chore to get it open eight years ago at the age of thirty-nine; opening it at forty-seven felt like a monumental feat.

  He reached his hand in, felt along the rim of the hatch, and found the latch to release the ladder. It came down in something of a clatter, though remaining installed into the roof. Terrence climbed down the ladder for what he guessed might be the hundredth or so time. He knew the layout well enough to find the primary light switch in the darkness. He flipped it on and the bunker’s central area was illuminated by dim fluorescents. Hands on his hips, he looked the place over, rather proud of his work.

  It was nothing special. He knew that there were preppers out there that had sunk millions into apocalypse bunkers, complete with memory foam mattresses and hydroponic vegetable gardens. Still, he’d made this bunker by hand, inch by inch. And with every steel beam inserted, with every hinge properly placed, with the concrete poured and set, he’d had this very day in mind.

  He knew he had to unload the truck, hauling the bins, boxes, and bags down the ladder, and it needed to be done as soon as possible. He wanted to get the truck back to his house, leaving no clues at all where the bunker was located. He was quite certain there were some in the government that knew where he lived; to assume he’d gone undetected all these years was foolish. So if people came calling in the coming days, assuming he might know something about what was happening in the country, he was fine if they saw his truck at his house. As long as the bunker was safe and secure, he didn’t care what happened to his home.

  He spent the next hour taking things out of the truck and carefully taking it all down the ladder into the bunker. When that was done, he drove the truck back to his house, parking where it had been this morning. He took no time for sentiment or double-checking when he locked the truck. He headed right back to the bunker, walking the mile and a half or so to the little piece of unflattering land.

  When he was back underground, the first real pang of nerves set in. The truck was back at his house and he was here, alone and isolated for at least several days. Maybe weeks, he wasn’t sure yet.

  Wanting some sort of answers and connection to the outside world, Terrence ignored the boxes, bins and stacks of random belongings and walked over to the thin desk he’d built into the far wall. There, he set about hooking the laptop up. He then set up the router and, though it was rather weak in strength, had the internet up and running three minutes later.

  When he logged into one of his many fake Gmail accounts, Terrence realized that his hands were shaking. The day was finally here…a day he had hoped the world would be able to avoid. A day he had tried his very best to warn the American public about. The day was here and he knew there was a very good chance he’d die right along with all of the corpses he’d seen on the news.

  When he was into the fake Gmail account, he went to his Drafts folder and saw a new one. It was not a draft he had written, but one he had been expecting. Leaving unsent drafts in email was the only surefire way he’d been able to stay in touch with certain people for the last few years. They’d shared the accounts, killing them on occasion and creating new ones just in case. And for mails that were never officially sent, there was no way to trace them.

  Terrence opened the draft and read the very brief message: Maybe they believe you now?

  Terrence let out a nervous chuckle. “Yeah, maybe,” he said, looking around the bunker. “But if there’s no one alive to believe me, what does it matter?”

  Chapter 9

  By 3:30 that afternoon, the usual busy bustle of New York City had been replaced by what to Paul, sounded like echoes from the forgotten halls of a mental asylum. The only thing that broke the eerie quiet among the streets were distant screams and the occasional burst of gunfire. At one point, as he was headed back to the precinct to try to get a better grasp of what had happened to the city and how he could help, he heard a small explosion not too far away.

  He hadn’t heard the staccato beats of passing helicopters in over two hours and there had been no reports of any kind over the open channel on the police radio for nearly an hour. That brief report had been from an officer named Wickline, who saw fit to tell everyone that he’d just gotten sick and would be killing himself shortly.

  Several minutes after the report, Paul thought he’d heard a single gunshot coming from several blocks away—but it might have just been his imagination.

  He’d made the decision to head back to the precinct shortly after his conversation with Olivia Foster of Little Learners Day Care. He knew he would have to walk because the streets were far too crowded with bodies and stalled traffic. As he made his way through the streets, doing his best n
ot to look at the faces of the dead, he wondered where the military was. He knew they were around somewhere because of all of the helicopters. He also knew the Coast Guard would have some sort of authority and could only assume the National Guard would have been called in. The convoys would have come in on the eastern side of the city, meaning he would not have seen them.

  Not that it matters, he thought as he stepped over a fallen woman, her now-useless cellphone still clutched in her hand. This thing—this sickness, or whatever it is—will take out the military the same way it took out the police and everyone else.

  The journey from Little Learners to the Seventeenth Precinct on East Fifty-First Street wasn’t too much of a hike. He’d likely be able to walk it in about fifteen minutes on any other day. But when there were wrecked cars on the streets and sidewalks and literal human debris every several steps, it was an entirely different experience.

  When he was six blocks away from the precinct, he saw where two cars had collided just off of a four-way intersection. The driver of one of the cars had come halfway through the windshield and had died in that position. There was glass in his hair and sticking into the side of his face. Some far-too-strong moral compass inside of Paul made him want to go to the body and give it some sort of rest—to maybe pull the body out and, at the very least, stretch it out on the street.

  He ignored the impulse, though. If he stopped to give every dead body some sort of respect or honor, he’d be here until he died…of either the sickness or old age.

  Just one block away from the Seventeenth Precinct, Paul saw the first military vehicle. There were two of them, actually, a run of the mill military Humvee and an open bed truck with a tight canvass shell covering the back. They were parked bumper to bumper and pulled up partially on the sidewalk.