Pox

by P X Duke

  POX

  It can happen here

  By Peter Duke

  Copyright 2014 P X Duke

  All Rights Reserved

  ISBN 978-0-9919980-6-7

  Distributed by Smashwords

  When Russell finally accepts that he has escaped the purging of humanity from the city, he hunkers down in an abandoned house in a suburb far from the city’s center. In the mess left behind, managing for his day-to-day needs occupies every waking hour. When he encounters another human being doing the same, he sets out to discover who it is that is trapped in a situation not dissimilar to his own.

  Disclaimer

  What follows is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental. Places mentioned by name are entirely fictitious and purely products of the author’s imagination, and are not meant to bear resemblance to actual places or locations.

  POX

  It can happen here

  Contents

  ONE - Russell

  TWO - Russell

  THREE - Russell

  FOUR - Caitrin

  FIVE - Russell

  SIX - Russell & Caitrin

  SEVEN - Russell & Caitrin

  EIGHT - A team of two

  NINE - Still a team

  More by P X Duke

  About the Author

  POX

  It can happen here

  ONE

  Russell

  No one ever noticed my spying.

  I liked to sit in a chair at a corner of the large, south-facing window in the front of the house. I’d crack the bottom corner of the curtain just a bit and look out over the expanse of neighborhood. I enjoyed observing the sun on its early-morning climb, bringing light into the dark corners of the yards in the cul-de-sac surrounding my new home.

  Sometimes, in the evening before sundown, I’d do the same thing. I’d take up the chair and wait for the sun to set; for the daylight to darken; for the same neighborhood to go black. When that happened, I’d let the curtain drop to its rightful place.

  I don’t know why I bothered keeping watch. Perhaps it was from some perverse sense of responsibility, knowing as I did that I was the only one left to guard the knowledge of what had happened. Or perhaps I hoped beyond hope that one day, I’d look out and there would be someone in my world just like me.

  Open and welcoming as I thought I would be to the prospect of another human being entering the world I inhabited, there was still the chance that whoever showed up might not be in the same frame of mind.

  I took precautions, just in case.

  Under no circumstance did I want even a single ray of light to make its way beyond the blackout curtains to illuminate any part of the night. I couldn’t have anyone walking up to a window wondering why there was light coming from the house. It became part of my routine to go to each window, checking and re-checking the curtains for leaks.

  When I relocated, I had gone around the cul-de-sac and pulled the curtains in almost all of the abandoned homes. I wanted all the houses to look normal from the outside. I wanted everything to look normal. I had to convince myself that there was nothing that appeared abnormal in my surroundings.

  Only then would I permit myself to fire up the generator.

  I had light. I had heat. I had food storage. I had hot and cold running water.

  I didn’t care about anything or anyone else, as long as I felt safe.

  I didn’t care if I ever saw another human being again.

  Lie though that was, I truly might not have cared, but for the loneliness.

  I’m not sure when the craziness began. I’m not even sure what started it all.

  The best I could come up with on my own was that it began with a report that meteor showers would occur over a couple of days. The media encouraged everyone to get outside and have a look at the spectacle as it unfolded. Plainly visible through night and day, the exploding bright flashes were accompanied by smoky, dusty trails extending behind for miles.

  Plenty of television and radio coverage at the beginning of the two-day extravaganza turned into rabid fever when experts couldn’t, didn’t, or wouldn’t explain why the meteor showers continued for two weeks past the forecasted end date. That the broadcasters then turned to amateurs espousing all sorts of religious hokum and fakery came as no surprise. After all, the quacks and shysters made for colorful visuals and exciting sound bites.

  Not a one of them, be they expert, quack or bible-thumper, had any reasonable or believable explanation for why the sky had been turned into a never-ending light show that had gone on for weeks on end. What had been billed as a one-time explosion of meteoroids suitable for viewing by both adult and child alike turned into a side-show event.

  Only the ticket booths were missing.

  At the end of the first month, a fresh batch of news and television reports were pushed out by bored commentators when the six-tailed asteroid was discovered. In keeping with initial reports of a two-day meteor shower that lasted for thirty, none of the supposed experts that the government called on knew anything about six-tailed asteroids.

  A spectacle such as that was brand-new to them, too.

  At least the asteroids could only be witnessed by those designated to peer through huge telescopes squatted atop mountain observatories. Every once in a while, television news would coax some university egghead to venture forth from his hole, like the fabled, eager groundhog anxious to see if the sun might be shining.

  The poor fool would position himself in front of a bookshelf, hoping to look erudite and impressive, and fumble with a mess of papers scattered randomly across a monstrous desk occupying most of his office. Mumbled, incomprehensible jargon would follow. No one could understand a word the purported scientist said.

  When the interview concluded, a network team of reporters would make an attempt at repeating and interpreting what had been said. Ignorant as the rest of us, the media ass-hats made even less sense than the egghead. Instead, they preened in their three-thousand-dollar suits and began interviewing each other.

  None of it made for good television.

  The egghead who was the cause of it all ended up scurrying back to academe, never to be heard from again.

  The radio broadcasts fared no better. None were capable of creating a verbal picture of the chaos. There was no one to interview that could make sense of what was happening. Instead, charlatans and fools ended up being commissioned to do the bulk of the radio spots. Eventually, television caught on and moved to use the same uninformed experts to turn the sky’s unfolding events into religious and voodoo scams and shams.

  The final insult to anyone with a modicum of intelligence occurred when someone randomly mentioned the sun’s magnetic poles were about to reverse. Never mind that this had been happening every ten or twelve years on a regular basis. Radio and television evangelists ran with it as another sign of the coming apocalypse.

  The hoarding began slowly, just as it had under other false religious prophets in other years and decades. At first, it was only a trickle, and went unnoticed. It wasn’t long before the trickle became a flood, and everyone began trying to catch up to everyone else.

  It seemed as though anyone who was capable of thinking for themselves became a risk to others. If you didn’t jump on the prophecy bandwagon, you had to be silenced.

  Towards the end of the third month, news reports of measles outbreaks in South America and to the north in Canada began to surface. That, coupled with reports of the deadly Ebola virus growing out of control in West Africa, pretty much guaranteed that panic, enforced by the Western news media’s fevered reporting, would ensue.

  It wasn’t long before street-corner encounters started. The gatherings began with a small-town atmosphere in the rural outback of the state. Then cities large and
small caught on to the idea. Four and five people to begin with, growing by dozens and then hundreds as word of the rallies got out, ensured that the wave would be impossible to stop.

  Distrust of the media grew daily.

  Many, if not all, of the gatherings were encouraged and pushed by religious zealots and fundamentalists in churches and basements, in the past infamous only for their predictions of world disaster that never occurred.

  People who wanted to believe in the end of the world listened anew. The same tired explanations came straight out of bible scripture, interpreted and preached with a religious zealotry unknown in the past.

  It wasn’t obvious at first. Then, stores couldn’t keep their shelves filled. They began to run out of everything. First water. Then canned goods. Flour. Rice. It all disappeared, a little bit at a time.

  Eventually, it became too late to halt the panic, particularly when media caught wind of it and started their version of panic and despair fueled by hourly updates and breaking news headlines plastered across television screens.

  The more populous states called out the National Guard first. Those with smaller, more isolated populations were the last to call out the Guard. By then, it was too late.

  No one knew it at the time.

  TWO

  Russell

  I wasn’t the first to make the connection, nor would I be the last. I had been a little slow on the uptake, though. When I finally pulled my head out and took a look around, I knew trouble was definitely afoot. I was pretty sure I wasn’t alone with that diagnosis, but since I had just moved to the city, I had no friends to confer with or to ask for advice.

  I would have moved back to where I came from, but by then it was impossible. Commercial flights and ground transportation were closed down but for inbound international flights. It had become impossible to go or move anywhere, ever since the governments had gotten together and declared a state of emergency. Last to that waltz were the federal leaders.

  It made for good television, and that meeting of the so-called minds was broadcast live. I sat, transfixed, watching the mindless politicians listen to the military chiefs-of-staffs explain what needed to be done. When it was over, martial law had been declared and all roads and interstates had been shut down and travel restricted.

  Six months in, no one was permitted to go anywhere, not even to visit dying relatives.

  Airports were next. Air travel anywhere was terminated. Domestic air travel was limited to flights within each state. All small, private aircraft were grounded. Attempts were made by some to commandeer private aircraft, although it was never determined where these people would go, since every airport in the country was closed to all but government air traffic.

  Agents were dispatched to local airports and flying schools to gather up the names and addresses of pilots.

  That made for good television, too, and news conglomerates friendly to the government’s talking points were embedded and dispatched to film the raids during which the miscreants were rounded up.

  SWAT teams descended in haste from black vans. Residences were surrounded. Doors were broken down. Pets that made a sound were shot. Entire families were loaded into vans and hauled away, in plain view, day and night.

  No one seemed to know where the people were being taken.

  No one seemed to care.

  By then, television and radio spots were being broadcast twenty-four hours a day. Stay inside. Don’t go out after dark. If you’re caught, you’ll be shot on sight.

  Grocery stores turned into relief centers where one family member was permitted to go and collect a daily ration, no more than that. If the line was too long and you weren’t able to get to the front, too bad. You turned around and went home empty-handed.

  All while walking or riding a bicycle. Because by then, there was no gasoline. What there was had to be reserved for official business - and that was more like official funny business, it seemed.

  At first, those same relief centers were good for catching up on rumors and gossip. It was presented as fact that certain parts of the city were first to be emptied. No one knew why, or how or where the people had been relocated or shipped.

  Early on, I made the decision to move from my walk-up apartment in the center of the city to the now empty outskirts. I told myself these areas had been abandoned. I knew differently.

  Getting there involved dodging cars and trucks and piles of empty pallets and tins. Some of the major routes had been cleared by bulldozers that had pushed the abandoned vehicles off the roads like so many children’s toys.

  It was more difficult to avoid the stench of garbage stacked on lawns or left piled in the streets.

  In my travels I had acquired a battery-powered motorcycle. I scrounged two solar panels to sling on either side of the rear wheel, and a third to strap to my backpack. At the time, my biggest problem was to keep the bike from being stolen when I went to pick up my ration.

  I solved that one by moving again into one the hundreds of houses close-by that had been deserted and left empty. By then, the owners had been run off, or, more likely, rounded up and shipped to the camps. When the dwindling population dictated that the ration centers close, I began a search for a new place. I found one a lot farther out in the ‘burbs.

  The isolation suited me. Surprised by that, I made my fourth and final move even farther out into deserted suburbia.

  So far, I’d been lucky. I managed to avoid being spotted and picked up during the daily sweeps performed by National Guard troops. The huge, noisy diesel patrol trucks were easy to avoid when they made the only noise. The sound of their coming gave me plenty of time to get the bike into the back yard, out of sight of anyone but the most nosy neighbors.

  The trouble with that was, nine months into the purge, there appeared to be no neighbors. No one. Nobody to be nosy. I had given up on ever coming across another human being. I was beginning to feel like a rat abandoned in a maze of my own choosing.

  And I was still lonely.

  I moved, move number five, one final time.

  It seemed like it took forever to find my current home, but it took only a week. I tramped through neighborhoods for days on end, sunup to sundown. I dodged patrols; hid out in dumpsters; climbed onto roofs to get my bearings. When I lost my place on the maps, I used the sun to get me back to someplace familiar and I started all over again.

  I opened doors, inspected, followed stairs down to basements. When at last I found a house with a built-in water reservoir, I made my decision in an instant. The collectors and piping directed rainwater into below-ground storage tanks. That the tanks were indoors made it even more secure.

  I knew it would take time to turn the place into something I could use to survive. I scoured abandoned hardware stores for electrical wiring, outlets, switches, tubing - anything that could be used to hard-wire a gasoline generator. In two days, I had the generator working, muffled and safely exhausted into the back yard through a window in a spare bedroom.

  The generator had enough output to run a fridge and a stove and a microwave on a part-time basis. I even found a small instant hot water heater that ran on 110. I loaded up with extras for spares.

  It took another day to run wiring from a small fuse panel into the kitchen and the bathroom. I installed the heaters into the house’s existing water lines under sinks. Each heater in turn could be shut down since I didn’t need everything working at the same time.

  It took time to make my new home livable and secure. To guarantee electricity, I had to stock up on gasoline. Forty-five gallon drums and a hand pump would do for that. They were rolled into the garage.

  There was plenty of gasoline remaining in the abandoned automobiles. To collect it, I used smaller containers that I hauled in a wagon behind my motorcycle. A small electric pump with an intake line that could be fed into gas tanks allowed me to suck each of them dry.

  I took simple pleasure in the task of setting the clock on the microwave each time I powered it up.


  Eventually, I got over that.

  I never got over the loneliness. Or the silence.

  The blackout curtains I hung pretty much guaranteed that.

  I was comfortable in my new surroundings. Comfortable and safe. I knew from my daily patrols and excursions in search of consumables to stockpile that there was no one left. I was on my own, comfortable in the knowledge that no one would disturb my life of quiet solitude.

  Even so, there were still occasional patrols to avoid.

  THREE

  Russell

  In my excitement, the first time I spied the person passing though the cul-de-sac - my cul-de-sac - I almost yelled and rapped on the window. How dare that person invade what I now considered to be my space, my property?

  With shoulders hunched against an oversize hoodie, the walker’s face and head were hidden from view. I couldn’t tell if the person was male or female. A baseball cap pulled low guarded the person’s face from the front. In the time it took to collect my wits, whoever it was had passed by, ignorant of my presence.

  This trespasser caused me to feel like a home-owner who had spotted a dog crapping on his lawn while the dog’s owner did nothing to prevent it.

  I was scared.

  I dropped the corner of the curtain like a pot handle too hot to hang onto.

  Now I knew. There were others.

  Excited by the prospect, I couldn’t stop pacing. Prior to this, I had no idea. I’d encountered no one on my travels other than the roaming military patrols. That was obvious testament to the thoroughness of the evacuation plan. Or the purge, if that was in fact what it was.