The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart

by Harrison, William Hale

  “Shit!” the reporter said, and stumbled backwards, her eyes open wide. The cameraman turned off his camera and they both scurried off to their news van across the street.

  Owen closed the door and laughed. “Man! That was the most fun I’ve had in weeks.”

  Terry smiled. “You’re terrible.”

  They turned on the TV and surfed the news channels for a while. The plague was getting almost wall to wall coverage. Videos were now pouring in from all over the world. An outbreak killed dozens at a soccer match in Hanoi. There was a massive fire at a big industrial complex in Siberia. Drone footage captured a group of Infected chasing several people in coveralls through the smoke and flames. There was rioting in Cairo, Mumbai and a number of other large cities. Huge fires swept through the slums in Nairobi. Governments all over the world were declaring martial law.

  Since the Makoko video, some governments were now coming clean about outbreaks. Death tolls from the parasite were estimated at between a hundred- and a hundred and fifty thousand worldwide.

  In France thousands of people demonstrated at the Arc de Triomphe. Signs, which Dan noted were in English as well as French, said “Stop the Killing!” and “Infected Are People Too!”

  “What’s that about?” he asked.

  Owen answered, “Bleeding hearts. They’re protesting the killing of Infected, even though that’s the only way to stop them. They think they should be captured and hospitalized or something until a cure can be found.”

  “Don’t they realize those people are already dead? No heartbeat, brain all shriveled up, organs devoured? What, are they expecting a miracle?”

  “Since when have people like that ever let facts get in the way of a good protest? It’s not just in France, either. It’s going on here too. New York, San Francisco, LA, wherever there’s a big bunch of social justice warriors, they’re out in the streets over this. Idiots.”

  Dan was fairly non-political himself, though his views ran pretty much to the right. You couldn’t do his job without seeing enough to give you a pretty cynical view of people’s natures.

  He changed the channel again. This time the chyron at the bottom of the screen identified the speaker as a spokesman for the CDC. It was apparently from a press conference earlier in the day. He wore a surgical-type face mask hanging around his neck.

  “Unfortunately, no,” he was saying. “At this time we’ve been unable to develop a reliable test for the presence of the parasite. Normally with any type of infection like this, the standard technique would be to take a blood draw and then culture it to see what’s there. But in this case all our efforts to grow it outside the human body have failed. It won’t seem to grow anywhere else, in any other medium.

  “The spores are too small to be seen with an ordinary medical lab microscope. By the time we’re able to detect the structures the parasite creates in the body, other signs, such as the bluing of the fingertips and sclera, are already visible or will be quickly enough that the test doesn’t matter. The only reliable early test that works is a fluid draw from the base of the brain, which can reveal the presence of advancing infection. Unfortunately, this procedure is terrifically invasive and can only be done in a fully equipped hospital setting. And even if there’s a negative result, there’s no guarantee that the patient won’t become infected a few days later.

  “The initial symptoms seem to be a slight fever and a headache, and unfortunately those are symptoms of a hundred other common ailments.”

  The camera cut to a reporter asking a question. “Doctor Hunt, is it true that the time between the transmission of the parasite through a bite and the person ‘turning’ is growing shorter?”

  “There’s evidence of that in some cases, yes. We believe that those individuals may have already been infected by spores and the parasite already created an extensive architecture in the victim’s nervous system. The bite seems to accelerate the process. We’ve had anecdotal evidence of apparently asymptomatic victims going from bite to full transformation in as few as seven minutes.”

  “Doctor, is it true this came from space aliens?”

  The doctor frowned. “I see no reason to believe that. We’ve identified a number of sections of DNA and they all come from organisms on Earth.”

  “But who put it together?”

  “That’s really not a question I can answer, but I know the FBI and the CIA and practically every other investigative agency in the world are looking into it.”

  There were shouts of “Doctor! Doctor!” from around the room as reporters tried to make themselves heard. Finally the camera focused on one man, who stood up and asked, “Doctor Hunt, is there any sign of a vaccine or a cure?”

  “No, not yet. We’re pursuing a number of avenues, but there’s been very little progress so far.” The shouting began again.

  “Look,” he said, “let me leave you with something positive. There are early indications that not everyone is susceptible to this parasite. There is evidence that some people might be immune, and that this immunity may run in families. So far we have no idea why, or how, but we’re working very hard to find the answers.”

  “Oh God, let’s hope so,” Terry said.

  Talnakh, Siberia

  April 29th

  “We have to go through them. Remember, not a sound.”

  Boris Golovatyj looked at the faces around him. “Ready?” he whispered. He raised the hammer in his hand and charged out of the doorway. Behind him nine men and women, makeshift weapons in hand, followed on his heels. Ahead of them were at least thirty naked Infected. Once they were men and women, people to work with or have a drink with. But those people were gone now, transformed into these relentless ravening monsters. As one, all the Infected turned and lumbered toward them, mouths open and teeth bared. Many of them were covered in dried blood and all were marked with telltale ugly blueish gray streaks.

  Golovatyj reached them first. Like the rest he was dressed head to toe in canvas firefighting gear. He held a five-pound sledgehammer in his big gloved hand, the handle cut down to eighteen inches, with a rough-cut leather strap looped around his wrist. Golovatyj, whose last name fittingly meant “big head,” was a huge man with shoulders as wide as a door. He was a Cossack, whose ancestors had fought all over Siberia, first against the invading Russians and later for them, as elite troops whose ferocity was legendary. His big nose looked like a potato, and his skin was pock-marked skin from adolescent acne. His head was shaved, he had bushy black eyebrows and he wore a huge black handlebar mustache streaked with gray One cheek and the side of his jaw carried a heavy slab of scar tissue from where he’d been badly burned by a gas line explosion. It was the kind of face, his friends teased him, that gave nightmares to small children.

  Behind him, his comrades wielded a variety of odd weapons. A few carried fire axes, and another one a six-foot steel pry bar he had taken from a machine shop. His friend Pavlo had found himself an old woodsman’s ax with a twelve-inch blade leaning in the corner of a shed. What it was used for he had no idea; there wasn’t a tree for miles. But someone had kept it razor sharp. Others toted hammers or crowbars. Several also carried trash can lids as shields. It reminded Golovatyj of playing knights as a boy, with his trash can lid shield and a wooden sword made from a fence picket. All of them were dressed, like Golovatyj, in canvass firefighting gear.

  The two lines met, with Golovatyj at the center. He swung his hammer sidearm across his body at the first one, instantly crushing its skull, and then brought it down on the head of another, driving it down almost to the thing’s jaw. He brought his hammer up under the chin of the next one with a wide arcing uppercut like a windmill. It smashed through the jaw and up into its face exiting above the eye in a spray of bone and gristle. He aimed for the side of the next one’s head but missed, striking in the shoulder instead and sending it sprawling. It immediately started to rise. He stepped close and brought the ha
mmer down on top of its head, smashing it like an over-ripe melon hitting a concrete sidewalk. Another one leapt at him and he punched it in the side of its jaw, and then brought his hammer down on top of its head.

  He heard someone call for help, and saw Irina on the ground with two of the things on top of her. Irina was a short grumpy woman who was built like a bulldog with a face to match. She was also one of Golovatyj’s best friends. She had her hand around one’s neck, trying to keep its teeth from reaching her face. The other had her canvas sleeve clutched in its jaws, shaking its head like a terrier with a rat and trying bite through it. With a broad sideways swing he crushed the skull of the one biting her coat. He grabbed the other by its long hair, yanked it off and threw it to the ground. Before it could resume the attack, Pavlo swung his woodsman’s ax and beheaded it. He looked around him and found that the only ones left standing were his crew.

  “Get on the truck,” he hissed, “And let’s get out of here!”

  Last night they’d been called to a fire at the west end of the complex, by the old rail depot. It used to be the place where metal ore from the mines was loaded onto rail cars for shipment out of the area. Since the huge processing center had been built a couple miles to the west with its massive cranes and rail terminal, this one wasn’t used much. Some of the buildings had been converted into machine shops and repair sheds. At the far end of the loading area stood an old warehouse. To the north, south, and east of the warehouse, there was nothing but the vast Siberian night and the open-pit nickel mines. Watchmen had spotted a fire there in the late hours of the evening and called it in, and Golovatyj’s crew at Firehouse #2 caught the call. When they arrived the old building was almost fully engulfed, flames reaching high into the night sky, sending a spiral of sparks soaring into the air where they mixed with the stars. The building itself was beyond saving. Their task now was to prevent the blaze from spreading to the other old structures nearby. It clearly was a job for more than one engine, so Golovatyj, as crew chief, put out a call for two more crews. His crew had just finished laying out hoses when two more engines, from Firehouses #1 and #4 joined the fight, each engine carrying half a dozen firefighters.

  Two of the crews trained water on the fire and the third sprayed a heavy mist on the surrounding buildings to keep them from igniting. The fire was nearly out when a shockingly naked woman ran out of the darkness to the south of them, knocked one of the men to the ground and bit him on the face. A security guard ran over and shot her, but two more Infected jumped him and he went down too. Suddenly they were everywhere, charging out of the night. Firefighters were going down left and right under packs of Infected, screaming and flailing. Some of the firefighters grabbed axes and crowbars off the trucks and stepped into the fray, but most held back, terrified. Golovatyj grabbed a hose and directed the stream into the oncoming horde and blasted Infected after Infected off their feet and back out into the darkness. A few of them hit hard on the concrete pavement and didn’t get up again, but too many scrambled to their feet and came running back.

  He kept shifting the hose to wherever they were advancing, but there were too many to contain. He noticed a movement out of the corner of his eye and turned his head to see a huge Infected, its beard glistening with bright red blood by the light of the fire, almost on top of him. He had barely time enough to raise an elbow to fend it off, when a stream of silvery white water from his left side hit it like a fist and blew it across the wet pavement. Another stream joined in from his right, clearing away a dozen or more.

  He risked a glance around him. His friend Pavlo manned one hose and a man named Dmitri, the crew chief from #4, was on the other. Both men acknowledged him with a nod. For a while they kept the Infected at bay, but then a fresh mob came running in from along the tracks to the north and swarmed around the trucks. He turned to the firefighters who had managed to gather behind him and yelled “Run! We’ll hold them back as long as we can!” The crowd hesitated. Pavlo yelled, “Run damn you!!” and they took off. Thirty seconds later the three of them threw down their hoses and raced down the lane between the buildings with a swarm of Infected close behind them.

  A hundred yards into the complex, Golovatyj cast a glance over his shoulder. He saw that they were easily outdistancing the undead, even wearing their cumbersome rubber boots. The front wave of the horde was just passing under a streetlight. The sight was macabre. The Infected were all naked, mostly men, but some women among them. Many of them were smeared with blood, some of it dried and brown, and some bright red. And the way they ran was bizarre—mouths agape, arms hanging loosely, knees and feet flapping, spread wide as if to keep them from falling over. Their upper bodies hardly moved at all while their knees pumped vigorously and their feet slapped at the gravel road. If only one of them ran this way, it would have been almost humorous. But the sight of a hundred or more zombies, making no sound other than their footfalls on the gravel, all of them staring straight at him, was nightmarish.

  They rounded a corner and Golovatyj heard a voice call his name and saw a canvas-clad arm beckoning to him. They found an open door waiting, the side entrance to a machine shop. Irina hid there and a half dozen others. “Get down,” she hissed. A row of windows looked out onto the roadway. They all plastered themselves along the wall under the windows and waited, holding their breaths. Seconds later the Infected arrived, crashing into the door and making the thin walls shake. They could see dozens of shadows cast through the windows by the moonlight. In eerie silence they milled around, obviously confused by the sudden disappearance of their meal. They suddenly took off running again and were gone.

  A phone hung on the wall and Dmitri grabbed it. “Dead!” he said, and swore. “We’re trapped!” He sat down unhappily, his back to the wall.

  “Where’s the night maintenance crew? Someone should have put out an alarm by now! When the first day shift gets in, maybe things will start to happen. Someone should notice our trucks are missing, at least.”

  Someone asked, “Do you think the security people at the fire called this in?”

  Golovatyj shook his head. “They went down too quickly. I should have grabbed one of their two-ways. Never even occurred to me.”

  He settled in and thought about sleep, when he heard the sound of a woman crying softly nearby. He moved down the wall, careful to keep his head down, and sat next to her. “You’re Natalya, right? From #4?” She nodded tearfully.

  “I’m sorry for crying. I feel stupid doing it. But I’m so afraid.” She sniffled and wiped her nose and her canvas sleeve.

  “Don’t you worry, my dear. We will get out safely. There are many of those things, but they are slower than we are, and stupid. Once it’s daylight, we’ll figure a way out.” He put his big hand on her shoulder and gently pulled a strand of hair from across her face.

  “It’s not that. It’s everything. This place, this world! It’s all going to end!” She rested her head on her knees, and her shoulders heaved with silent sobs.

  “Now listen to me, Natalya. During the Great War, when the Nazis invaded, we lost twenty million people. Half a million men died at Stalingrad alone, and most of the country was in ruins. Then we suffered under the Communists for another fifty years. But look at us now! This installation is one of the biggest in the world, worth billions of dollars, and we’re mining for ore above the Arctic Circle! You cannot keep us down. We’ll beat these things and we’ll rebuild, and we’ll be better than ever. You watch!”

  She smiled wanly, and leaned her head against his shoulder. She looked up at him and said, “Do you mind this?” He smiled back, and she closed her eyes. In a few minutes he heard her breathing become shallow and regular, and he knew she’d fallen asleep.

  Over the next few hours they heard occasional movements outside, but when they peeked out the window, it was always more Infected.

  “Where are these bastards coming from?” Pavlo growled.

  “It must be the
mines,” Irina said. “That’s the only thing to the east.”

  “I can’t believe it’s come to this,” another man said. “I know they were having some problems with this stuff in Norilsk, but I didn’t think it was here. Not like this.”

  Dmitri leaned over and whispered, “Not just Norilsk. I heard they were having trouble in New Dawn.”

  A woman whispered back, “I heard they had the whole thing cordoned off. No one in or out.”

  “When did this happen?”

  “Last night. They’ve been trying to keep it quiet. You know, ‘Go back to bed, comrades. Everything is under control.’”

  New Dawn huge housing project consisted of four ugly Soviet-style apartment buildings to the southwest of the new ore complex, one of several such projects in Talnakh. They were each ten stories tall and painted a faded pastel color. Most of them were also falling apart. They had been built in the 1960s when the first huge nickel ore processing plant was erected “for the glory of the Revolution.” They, and dozens more like them, had turned Talnakh and the nearby city of Norilsk, of which it was technically a part, from a small mining settlement into the second largest city in the world north of the Arctic Circle. Over a hundred and eighty thousand people lived and worked in the two cities, digging nickel, copper, and cobalt out of the earth, refining and converting it to ingots for shipment to the outside world. It had been a dying city at the end of the last century as the world’s appetite for metals slackened, until cell phone manufacturers sent the demand for palladium, a rare metal found here in relative abundance, through the roof.

  It was one of the most polluted sites on earth. The old Soviet government hadn’t given a damn about pollution. For generations, huge stacks had belched out clouds of smoke full of sulfur dioxide and heavy metals, which killed almost all the vegetation in an area the size of Rhode Island. Great mounds of slag and industrial waste, scrap metal, refuse, old cars and appliances, and rusting machinery littered the landscape.