Omega Plague: Collapse

by P. R. Principe

  Bruno twisted the door handles while the sea gulls called in the distance. First one door, then the other. Locked, both of them. Decorative wrought ironwork, painted green to match the doors, covered the street-level windows. Bruno looked up. Reaching the windows on the top floor was out of the question, unless he wanted to try something truly stupid. For a moment, Bruno allowed some self-pity. Never the easy way.

  Bruno walked past the green doors to the far side of the building and found an alley separating his target from another building. Adjusting his backpack, he made his way down the alley, picking his way around two motorini lying on their sides. The alley ended in a concrete wall about the height of a person, connecting the two buildings. But to his left, just before the alley ended, Bruno saw four stairs leading up to a metal gate. Beyond the bars of the gate, Bruno could see outdoor furniture, tables and chairs. Glancing behind him, he tried the latch on the gate and to his surprise, the gate swung open inward. He found himself on a stone terrace littered with metal tables and chairs, the flower patterns on their cushions faded and weathered. A waist-high metal railing ran around the square terrace. From here he could see out across the Bay of Naples and down towards the Marina Grande. The terrace of these dwellings lay on the roof of the building behind and below them, so Bruno was not far above the street that ran behind this building. Bruno could see that the two dwellings shared the outdoor area, as there were two sliding glass doors leading from the terrace into the dwellings. Which was the right one?

  He glanced up towards the roof and followed the wires and cable down. They penetrated the wall at the base of the glass door closest to the gate. Bruno placed his backpack on the ground, removed his crowbar, and approached the glass door. Curtains blocked any view inside.

  As Bruno expected, the glass door did not slide open when he pulled the handle. He used his crowbar to pry the door open, hoping that the sound would not carry as far as the crash of breaking glass. Once the latch broke he removed his sunglasses, un-holstered his pistol, and pulled the curtain slightly as he slid the door. He peeked inside.

  The musty air laced with a hint of dry meat almost made him gag. He breathed through his mouth. In the gloom he could see a bed to his right, its head against the wall, and a desk with a chair to his left, close to the glass door. The small bed jutted into the middle of the room. Bruno’s eyes adjusted to the gloom and he noticed an armchair in the far corner on the other side of the bed. There was a figure sitting shrouded in the shadows.

  “Hands up!” shouted Bruno.

  But the figure did not move or make a sound. Bruno threw open the door and curtains. Light flooded into the room, and he saw the desiccated body of a man in the armchair, his head lolled back against the wall. It was not the first corpse Bruno had come across in his scavenging, but somehow his revulsion never diminished.

  He exhaled loudly. To be sure no other occupants lurked in the shadows, he walked up the short staircase leading to the ground floor. He checked each room, but found no one, dead or alive.

  Returning to the small room off the terrace, Bruno retrieved his respirator from his backpack. He had no idea if he could get the Omega Plague from someone who’d been dead this long, so he wore his respirator, hoping it would provide some protection. Maybe the respirator wasn’t worth a shit, but it made him feel safer, and that was at least something.

  Bruno spent the next hour in nasty work, wrapping the body in a sheet and dragging it onto the far corner of the terrace. The desiccated corpse didn’t weigh as much as Bruno thought it might. He didn’t really know where to put the body, but for now the far corner of the terrace would have to suffice. Then he turned his attention to the armchair. It was stained from the body’s decomposition, and Bruno hoped that once he removed it the odor, too, would fade from the room.

  Once Bruno completed his tasks, he turned his attention to the small room’s contents. Black boxes with various buttons and knobs sat on a wooden desk arranged along the wall. A shelf ran along the wall above the desk, with binders and books neatly arrayed along its length. On the floor just to the left of the entrance, Bruno saw six batteries wired together sitting in the corner between the desk and the door. He studied the gear. Mounted on the wall were a charge controller to keep the batteries from overcharging and an inverter to change the direct current from the batteries into appliance-friendly alternating current.

  This was quite the setup. Solar powered. Bruno hadn’t seen this much radio equipment since his time at the provincial command HQ in Naples. There was certainly enough equipment for this to have been the source of the pirate radio broadcasts.

  He examined the spines of the black binders for any clues as to what they contained. He pulled the one labeled “Documenti Importanti” off the shelf and opened it with care. A certificate issued by the Ministry of Communications, stamped in bold capital letters, caught Bruno’s eye. The name on the certificate read “PALLADINO, Filippo.” Immediately below the name, Bruno noted Filippo’s call sign: IC8CQX. Bruno studied the color picture of Filippo attached to the certificate. If this guy had indeed been the pirate radio broadcaster, Cristian couldn’t have been more wrong about the way he looked. Filippo appeared in his mid-forties, dark hair shaggy and a bit rakish, with a greying goatee. A hint of a smile played around the man’s lips, and Bruno swore he could see a touch of mischief in the man’s eyes.

  Bruno looked up again at the radio equipment before him. Of course, even before he had found the license, Bruno surmised the equipment belonged to a ham radio operator. But even more important than the equipment itself, Bruno realized, were the solar panels on the roof and batteries on the terrace. He looked at the charge controller. It still had power, as he could see some numbers and a green LED light flashing. He didn’t know what the numbers meant, but he knew one thing: this equipment might still be operational. He flipped to the next page and saw a picture of Filippo with a woman and a young boy on a beach, all smiling. Bruno wondered what happened to what must have been Filippo’s wife and son, and why they weren’t with him when the end came, but he knew the answer would always be a mystery.

  Bruno continued to look around, but found no documents or other evidence that pointed to Filippo being the rogue broadcaster. Bruno’s hopes of finding hidden weapons or other useful equipment were dashed. But he supposed that if the guy was as paranoid as he sounded, he would certainly have been careful enough not to leave any documentary evidence of his activities. And he was probably smart enough to hide any other, possibly illegal items, where no one, including Bruno, would find them. Still, Filippo may have left him gifts of incalculable value: power and communications. Grazie, Filippo, you crazy bastard, thought Bruno with affection for this man he had never known in life.

  Before he tested the equipment, Bruno wanted to be sure that the batteries still worked. While he could have plugged in some random kitchen appliance, he wanted to try something else. But he needed to go back to his old apartment to find it, and that might take a while. He knew he wasn’t behaving rationally, but he wanted to bring back something of the old world, the world before the infection. And he would need to bring back enough food and water to last a little while. Of course, Bruno had nothing now but time, so why he cared about wasting it was a mystery even to himself.

  By the time he made it back to Filippo’s place, the sun rode low in the western sky. He had thought his trip back to his apartment was going to be in vain but at last, he had found it, lying at the bottom of his closet. How his phone had ended up there he had no recollection, since it had been so long since he had used it. Now he plugged its charger into the power strip, and hoped.

  When he saw the long-dead phone battery light blink he let out a shout. He turned the phone on. Of course, there was no cellular signal, and he didn’t expect one. But he scrolled through its menus, finally finding what he sought. He touched the screen again. Most people his age had stored their music in the Cloud, but not Bruno. The constant ratcheting up of storage fees every year pisse
d him off, so he had kept all his music on his phone. At the time, he never would have imagined how well his cheapness would serve him once the world ended. Out of the small speaker a melody soared into the air. The light, cheesy pop tune filled the room. Now and again he sang out loud to the music.

  While the music played, Bruno sat at the desk, flipping through each of the documents contained in plastic sleeves. The well-organized documents consisted mostly of long manuals for operating the equipment and other ham radio materials. A goldmine, though some were in English, and that would slow him down a bit. Without them, Bruno might have spent days, at least, trying to figure out how to operate this equipment by trial and error. Now at least he could start listening and scanning the bands right away. But he wouldn’t transmit. Not for a while. Bruno knew full well that it wouldn’t take much equipment to triangulate a radio signal. Who was out there and what might they do if they could find him? Maybe there was no one left who would care.

  Bruno paused and looked up from the documents. He stared out the glass door, his gaze falling over the island and out to the sea. He had no idea who was left, eking out an existence among the detritus of the West or anywhere else. But the more Bruno thought, the more certain he became that there had to be others out there. And not just the ones who had become psychopaths. Just as a matter of sheer statistics, some people would escape exposure, maybe people living above the Arctic Circle, where the cold would keep most people and all mosquitoes out. Some percentage of the population, miniscule though it might be, had to have not just the capacity to survive the infection and be forever changed, but actual immunity. Could any disease, bioweapon or no, be absolutely, one hundred percent infectious? Bruno even remembered reading that some tiny fraction of people simply couldn’t be infected by the original AIDS virus. That might be true for the Omega Plague as well. Yet, even if people were out there, scrapping and surviving, what were the chances anyone would be broadcasting? What were the chances they had equipment and power? What were the chances they could avoid being killed by others who had survived infection? Bruno returned to the documents on his lap. Survivors or not, scanning for a signal might be a fool’s quest.

  Bruno laughed. “Then again, it’s not like I have anything better to do.”

  He removed the radio operating license and propped it up on the shelf over the equipment. Filippo’s picture smiled down on him.

  “Well, Filippo, what do you think? I guess it’s time to get to work.”

  ***

  After some hours reading manuals and testing equipment, Bruno set the radio to scan up and down the bands, stopping only when it found a strong signal. All that night, Bruno sat in the desk chair, his hopes raised every time it lingered on a single frequency, the frequency blinking instantly. But each time it stopped, Bruno could hear only powerful bursts of static, maybe caused by a faraway thunderstorm or atmospheric fluctuations, fooling the radio into stopping. Bruno heard no voices or music, no digital tones, not even the simple “dit-dah” of Morse code, used by ham radio diehards. Only static and silence.

  The hours crept by, and Bruno’s head lolled in a half-sleep while the radio continued its scanning. As Bruno’s mind wandered in the grey area between sleep and wakefulness, in the depths of night, he heard a sound, just at the edge of his hearing. In his half-dream, he thought he heard a flute. Then he came awake with a start.

  Bruno looked around, still in a daze. The dim yellow light on the radio panel provided the only illumination in the room as it blinked, stopped on some frequency. The sounds came not from Bruno’s mind, but wafted up from the small speaker in the radio, filling the room. The high-pitched tones came in rapid succession, with a steady knocking sound setting an underlying beat. After a few seconds, the radio went silent. Then the tones started again.

  In the dark of night, the tones sent chills down Bruno’s spine, their plaintive, lonely quality spooking him as he listened. But it wasn’t just the sounds that made him tremble, as he realized what they meant.

  Someone is out there—someone wants to make contact.

  Chapter 15

  July 25

  Bruno, frozen in place, listened. He thought he heard something on the wind. He stood on the lower section of La Scala Fenicia, the Phoenician Steps, in the last stretch before reaching the environs of the Marina Grande. The sun loomed high, and its rays drilled into him. Bruno glanced up at the sky, wiping sweat off his forehead with the back of his hand. He would have to be careful about being caught out at dawn and dusk, fearing the warm summer meant mosquitoes. Bruno wondered if they could survive on the island with no humans or other large mammals, sucking the blood of birds and lizards. Whether or not they still carried the disease remained an open question in Bruno’s mind. But he didn’t want to find out the hard way, spending his last days bleeding out his eyeballs and puking blood.

  Bruno rested his left hand on the low stone wall that served as a railing running the length of the ancient stairway. He glanced back up over his right shoulder. The narrow grey ribbon of stone meandered up the side of Monte Solaro, back up to Anacapri. No one behind him. He squeezed his eyes shut. He’d been hearing things that weren’t there for the last few weeks, the solitude eating away at him. Voices, mostly, just outside of earshot, lost in the sound of the wind. But when Bruno turned, no one was ever there.

  Then he heard it again. He dropped his pack to the ground and removed his binoculars from a side pocket. No hallucination could last this long. Scanning the water towards the Marina Grande, Bruno heard the low buzzing grow louder before he spotted it. A small motorboat bobbed on the water, gunning towards the island. Bruno lowered his binoculars. He raised them again almost as soon as he lowered them.

  He shoved his binoculars into his pack and scooped it up. As he bounded down, the Steps became less rough-hewn stone and more regular brick. Then without any transition to speak of, the Steps simply ended as they met the asphalt of the Via Marina Grande, the road to the principal marina.

  Bruno looked around, then jogged through the street towards the Marina Grande. Who were they? How many? His thoughts took a dark turn as he considered why they had come. Scavenging, of course. They would consider Bruno a threat. But he considered them an even greater threat, and they no doubt outnumbered him.

  He saw the open sea before him, the street now running fifteen or so meters above the waterline. He had been so lost in thought that the road’s arrival by the water took him by surprise. He looked to his right. About half a kilometer further down the road sloped gently downward, heading toward a wide cobblestone area between the water and piers on the left, and what remained of stores and shops on the right. Though he looked straight down the road, he needed to get closer. A jumble of hedges, trees, and low buildings running along the edge of the water obscured most of his view of the pier and the area in front of it. He could see a few boats bobbing, moored to the pier, but couldn’t tell if anyone lingered on board.

  Quickly, Bruno picked his way from doorway to doorway and from car to car, finding shadows where he could, until he crouched at the final bend in the road before it turned 180 degrees, becoming a ramp as it merged into the cobblestone of the waterfront. A concrete pad in the corner of the bend had a bench and a staircase leading directly down to the waterfront. A low wall ran from the concrete pad around the outer end of the bend, following the ramp down. Bruno crouched in front of the wall near the bench, hoping to spot them. He slung his backpack off his shoulder and looked around, peeking just above the wall.

  Three men in t-shirts and jeans, with rags tied around their faces, jogged from storefront to storefront, laughing and breaking windows as they went. Bruno noticed that one carried a rifle, but a small one. Looked like a .22, but Bruno couldn’t be sure. They reminded Bruno of hooligans on a tear after their home team lost.

  Bruno watched as all three of them went into the remnants of a pharmacy, its green neon cross hanging dark over the short granite stairway leading inside. For a moment, the lapping of th
e water and wind against the island and concrete piers was all he could hear. Then, there was more shouting as the men emerged again, pulling a lanky figure along with them. They stumbled down the stairs as two of them almost lost their footing. From this distance, Bruno could see the wispy white hair of the older man as they dropped him onto the cobblestones. The one with the rifle was a Juventus supporter, a Juventino, judging by the black-and-white striped jersey he wore. The Juventino gave the old man a kick in the gut and he cried out. Another one of the thugs only had one ear, the scar tissue leaving a noticeable lump on the side of the man’s head.

  All this time, that old man had been here on the island with him, out of sight, tucked away in his own little spider hole down by the sea. Bruno had been down to the Marina, fishing, scavenging, yet had never seen him. He wondered if the old man had been watching him. Now, the old man lay curled up, trembling, as the others shouted and cursed, asking if he had food, fresh water, medicine, and who else was there. But the old man just lay there, trembling in the sun, the wisps of his white hair making a halo around his head.

  Bruno knew the smartest thing would be to turn his back on the scene before him and leave the old man to his fate. Instead, he sat down and turned to his backpack. He pulled out his respirator and secured it to his face. He double checked the pistol on his hip and hefted his crowbar in his right hand. Then he returned to a low crouch, his eyes fixed on the men below. Bruno’s anger outweighed his fear. He thought the cop in him had long ago perished, leaving only the bones of a survivor behind. Now he realized he was wrong. In this world, no one remained to provide justice. So, Bruno would deal out vengeance instead.