Plaguesville, USA

by Jim LaVigne

  Plaguesville, USA

  Title Page

  Prologue:

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Chapter Six

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  Chapter Thirty-One

  Chapter Thirty-Two

  Chapter Thirty-Three

  Chapter Thirty-Four

  Chapter Thirty-Five

  Chapter Thirty-Six

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  Chapter Thirty-Eight

  Chapter Thirty-Nine

  Chapter Forty

  Chapter Forty-One

  Chapter Forty-Two

  Chapter Forty-Three

  Chapter Forty-Four

  Chapter Forty-Five

  Chapter Forty-Six

  Chapter Forty-Seven

  Chapter Forty-Eight

  Chapter Forty-Nine

  Chapter Fifty

  Chapter Fifty-One

  Chapter Fifty-Two

  Chapter Fifty-Three

  Chapter Fifty-Four

  Chapter Fifty-Five

  Chapter Fifty-Six

  Chapter Fifty-Seven

  Epilogue:

  Plaguesville, USA

  Jim LaVigne

  Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

  Copyright 2011, 2012 Jim LaVigne

  www.PermutedPress.com

  Acknowledgements

  Dedicated to:

  Kevin, for the spirit

  Jane, for the undying support

  Ellie, for the spark

  And most of all, to Katy, without whom this would not be possible, for Everything Else

  Prologue:

  From Baron Zero’s New History of America

  Q. How many survivors does it take to screw in a light bulb?

  A. Doesn’t matter; there’s no electricity and no more bulbs.

  —popular joke, circa 2075

  Most survivors would later mark August 3rd, 2064 as the final day of the United States of America. On that date, Harold Thomas Ortega, our 53rd President, gave the last address to issue from the White House. Anyone left who was lucky enough to still have electricity, a functioning TV, and the luxury of anything like safety, heard the following brief, poignant message. It would later be generally be referred to as the “We Endure” speech and, while hailed as brave by some, was mostly the object of derision and bitterness among the typically cynical, hard-hearted survivors.

  “My fellow Americans. I come to you today with a heavy heart and a spirit much subdued by the monumental challenges we face, but also to offer hope. As you all know, we face the greatest crisis ever known to man. The global spread of the New Plague has devastated not only this great nation of ours but indeed, the entire human population. Sadly, our best estimate is that at least 8 of every 10 human beings on the planet has succumbed to the disease. Now, I know that this is a shocking statistic and that loss of life on this scale is difficult to comprehend. Never before in the annals of human existence has such a disaster claimed the lives of so many, and the difficulties faced by those of us who are left are myriad and frankly grave. Truly, we face trying times.”

  “But I speak to you today to let you know that the government of the United States of America endures. Yes, we are forced to function at a greatly reduced level, and with far less effectiveness than in earlier times, but nonetheless, we endure. Through pain and strife, we endure. Through disease and chaos, we endure. And through this crisis, my fellow citizens, we shall also endure. Your government has not forgotten you. We are still here, we are still striving to persevere, and we will never cease to do our duty as long as we draw breath. We will endure.”

  “And so, my friends, in the coming days, let us remember the great strength and amazing adaptability of our great nation and work, each of us, to maintain this great land, this great nation for which so many have struggled and fought. Let us reach out to our fellow man, to help those who cannot help themselves, and to insure that this mighty nation endures. With your help, we will ride out this grave situation and emerge an even stronger, greater country. We will endure. Thank you, good night, and God Bless the United States of America.”

  Even at the time, clinging to any scrap of hope, most survivors who saw or heard the final address knew that it was a complete load of bullshit. For one thing, the man delivering the speech had been sealed in a special, germ-free, state-of-the-art hazmat suit for the last two years; what did he know about disease or suffering? What was all this “we” talk?

  Mainly though, all a survivor had to do was to look around to see that the man was full of crap, because no matter where they were, from Alaska to Florida, Maine to California, they were surrounded by death. Like a great, mindless colossus, the plague had stomped across the country, killing everyone it could and (metaphorically) shaking the infrastructure of society so violently that things simply fell apart. With hundreds of thousands of bodies in the streets, no one was left to endure. No one was left to run the power plants or to man police forces, nor monitor and man the infrastructure. There was no sewer, water, electricity, or phone service, and each person was more concerned with the simple demands of feeding themselves than anything else. Needless to say, they didn’t feel much like the citizens of a great nation.

  Not that it had been altogether sudden; anyone who survived had seen the same sad, dreary descent into collapse. In the fall of 2058, there had been reports of an outbreak of some plague-like disease in India, in which a few thousand people had perished. Inured to such outbreaks in the Third World, no one had taken much notice until the disease had spread, first to China, then Africa, and people had started dying in alarming numbers. Within a week, mortality statistics began to overwhelm every agency tasked with compiling them and the news networks were afire with grisly scenes of hospitals and UN clinics overwhelmed with victims.

  Still, few in the West were overly concerned; they had all kinds of plans in place to deal with just this sort of thing. The U.S. CDC, the UN World Health Organization, all of the hundreds of national governments and health watchdogs, all assured people that they had it under control, that there was no need for panic. They had a plan and it would take care of everything.

  But it didn’t. The disease, a new, air-born variant on the venerable Yersinia pestis, more commonly known as pneumonic plague, defied all efforts to confine—or even slow—its spread. The small stock of vaccine on hand was both insufficient and ineffective, and production of new vaccine painfully slow and haphazardly distributed. Before the experts knew what was happening, and despite every contingency plan and worst-case scenario fallback scheme, the plague colossus stomped right over them.

  Emergency plans and severe restrictions on travel proved ineffective and modern transportation meant that the disease spread quickly to Europe and the Western Hemisphere. Soon enough, within a year of its outbreak, it had reached U.S. soil and people began to die. From either coast and from the squalid reaches of the Me
xican Narco-Union, it spread like a wildfire in a high wind. It is estimated that, by 2063, it had spread to every corner of the continent.

  In the news and on TV, all the average U.S. citizen saw for the next two years was one piece of crushingly bad news after another. Oh, the Powers That Be, such as did not die and stayed at their posts, kept right on saying that they were doing everything they could, that a vaccine was in the works and not to panic or take the law into their own hands, to stay in their homes and remain calm, but when the lights went out and the plumbing stopped working, when their neighbor died and lay unburied on his lawn until dogs ate him, when a roving gang came down the street, kicking in doors and ransacking homes for food, they knew that the end couldn’t be far off. And when the TV went into 24-7 Emergency Broadcast Channel mode, even if they still had power they generally just quit watching.

  In most of the country, anarchy came gradually but inexorably. First the local police and fire services had failed as the men and women who comprised them either died or simply took off their uniforms and fled. Similarly, the various state National Guard forces faded and then disappeared as their numbers plummeted and the less dedicated of them simply gave up and went their own way. Armed citizens and vigilantes held sway in some places, defending what was left of their properties and possessions, but the plague, like an inexorable wave, swept through their numbers as quickly as anyone else and, by about 2065, those survivors not in some sort of enclave were faced with the ultimate expression of Every Man for Himself.

  Agencies like FEMA and the Red Cross were overwhelmed within the first year and ceased to be a factor before ever really getting started. Health services nationwide, hospitals and clinics and all of the emergency facilities set up in the first year were overwhelmed within months and there were many reports of armed guards, awash in desperate, angry victims, resorting to lethal (and, to some, highly ironic) force to defend the houses of healing.

  As to the source of all this misery, the plague itself, little was ultimately learned. The great university labs and the Federal Government, in the form of the CDC, doing the best they could with severely limited facilities and personnel and nearly buried alive by panicky victims, burned through a whole set of letter and number combinations. At last count, they had settled on YP46. But putting a name to the disease did nothing toward preventing its spread. The last anyone heard from the monolithic labs in New Atlanta was that they were still at work on the problem, but with the collapse of basic services and the onset of lawlessness, it is thought that they were, like all other Federal agencies, more or less wiped out.

  The disease’s origins were, perhaps inevitably, the source of much conjecture and speculation. The more conspiracy-minded held that it was some sort of experiment gone awry, some secret germ warfare program or, more likely, a terrorist attack, but no evidence of such was ever unearthed, though not for lack of trying; indeed, in the final days, many people seemed more obsessed with the plague’s origin than its effects. In the end, though, no blame could be squarely laid, and the disease was thought to be of a wholly mundane nature. Mother Nature simply served up an organism the human race could not master.

  And in its physical manifestation, the organism was cruel. Victims first felt fatigue and a persistent cough, followed quickly by a general systemic breakdown and, finally, a gruesome, bloody death as they choked to death on their own fluids. Mortality was swift; most victims died within three days of infection.

  Among survivors, madness was not an uncommon response. From the very religious, wailing of the End Times, to the New Agers praying for alien intervention, from the average guy who just snapped when he was forced to dig another grave for another dead family member, to the clinic worker who’d seen one too many people choke to death on their own blood, quite a number of folks just plain lost it. For those not driven out of their minds outright, scenes of depravity, sexual perversity, violence, and unreasoning destruction became all too common and served perniciously to swell the ranks of the mad and the dead.

  Indeed, one of the great tragedies of the event was the loss of life not from plague but from the depredations of those who, panicked by a looming apocalypse, reverted to a “might-is-right” mentality and fought with each other over goods and places which would swiftly be, devoid of a human presence, essentially useless.

  And, on top of all this loss of life and misery, those lucky enough to not contract the plague still died, from a variety of other causes. The infirm and the aged, uncared-for and unable to care for themselves, perished from neglect or a simple lack of medical care. Formerly mundane afflictions like diabetes and common heart conditions, not to mention everyday diseases like influenza, became, in the absence of vital medications, modern sanitation, and proper care, as deadly as the plague itself. Common accidents became lethal; even a broken ankle could be life-threatening, and an inflamed appendix was tantamount to a death sentence. In addition, untold numbers of people, faced with the horrors to come, simply took their own lives; there are no figures available, but it is estimated that tens—if not hundreds—of thousands may have committed suicide.

  By necessity and nature, those who were survived and weren’t overtly insane tended to band together. There were, naturally, plenty of lone holdouts, survivalist types holed up in what they thought were impregnable fortresses, sometimes whole families, but most people hadn’t been so prescient or prepared. (Interestingly, there is no evidence to point to a lesser mortality rate for such isolationists; the plague knew no boundaries and could not be deterred by weapons and fortifications.) Most were just regular people, young and old, men and women and children who, for whatever reason, had not contracted the disease and now were faced with a daily struggle for mere survival. Sometimes in cities, sometimes in the country, sometimes with forethought, and sometimes slapdash and improvisational, they grouped together.

  Many of these bands devolved into rule by the strongest, a simple gang mentality that, while crude and sometimes brutal, often provided the best form of organization for the situation. After all, no one had to think about what to do next if somebody else did it for them, and only a few people had it in them to do the thinking. Still, such groups proved problematic; often it was only by violently preying on each other that they survived and, sadly, some resorted to cannibalism.

  Others bands were more “civilized”, better organized and more democratic, electing leaders and using basic rules of order and law, but these were few and far between, generally less aggressive and poorly armed and thus vulnerable, and most ended up being either wiped out or conglomerated into a few larger enclaves. These larger groups, staking out whatever land they deemed worth defending, like islands in a vast sea of wasteland, existed in relatively complete isolation of each other and bore makeshift names like the California Confederacy and the New Hampshire Free State.

  Naturally, global communication, land lines, cellular networks, satellites and computers, unmanned and without electrical power, quickly flickered and then went silent. The U.S. Emergency Broadcast Network, reduced to intermittent transmissions of useless advice, sent its last signal on June 6, 2066. Where once there’d been a clamor of human interaction, profound silence descended.

  As the months and years went by and neglect set in, the very landscape of America changed. Vegetation, be it tree or vine or simple grass, began to take over; pavements buckled from the weeds sprouting up and saplings germinated on the freeways. Great buildings—skyscrapers, stadiums, cathedrals—were left to the elements and the foliage and began to crumble.

  Animals, whether domesticated or wild, proliferated or died out, depending on their adaptability. Indeed, for some species the plague was a veritable boon; it was not uncommon for a survivor to encounter large packs of wild dogs, hordes of overfed rats, or great flocks of carrion-fatted birds. On the other hand, animals like cows and pigs and most poultry, unable to defend themselves or adapt, became much more scarce.

  The remains of civilization provided their own serio
us hazards as well. Railroad and semi tankers full of liquid chlorine and ammonia rusted through and released vast clouds of searing poison gas that sometimes covered a hundred square miles. Waterways, the complex system of locks and dams now untended, dried up in some places and in others overflowed their banks and flooded great stretches of low-lying America. Nuclear plants melted down, burst their containment structures, and lay radioactive waste to whole regions. Rusting, leaking refineries, derelict, chemical-filled industrial plants, weeping oil rigs, giant exploding fuel tanks and a host of other man-made ecological disasters pocked the countryside like gigantic carbuncles.

  All in all, it became a very hostile world in which to live, and one not for the weak; murder, rape, insanity, hunger, dread, and general, random lawlessness faced nearly each and every one, each and every day. More esoteric, leisure-oriented things like basic education, religion, science, entertainment and the arts, all waned sharply or took new and different forms as the older survivors died off and the upcoming generation, most of them half-feral orphans, developed their own crude, usually heavily nostalgic, cultures.

  By some mutual but tacit agreement, survivors tended to use the same stark, capital-letter terms when speaking of what happened: the decline and collapse of civilization was called the Fall, the years prior to it were known as Before, and the present day was known as After. The plague itself was commonly referred to simply as the Sick.

  As of this writing, in the summer of 2077, a mere dozen years since the “We Endure” address, the best estimate, from admittedly unreliable word of mouth communication, is that the U.S. population now stands at about 20,000, give or take a few thousand. This means that, of a population of about 325 million, more than 99.99 percent perished. If the effect was global—and there is no reason to believe it was not—this means that at least six and a half billion people (6,500,000,000) succumbed, and in less than five years. The numbers are staggering, to say the least, and difficult to fully countenance; there are no precedents in human history for such all-encompassing, sudden mortality. In fact, it is thought that dwelling too long on the statistics themselves is enough to engender madness.