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

by Harrison, William Hale

  “Seriously? They think the United States government might actually launch a worldwide plague? Don’t they know how loony that is?”

  “Black folks have seen a lot go down in this country that white people never noticed. Remember the Tuskegee experiments with syphilis? And there are still plenty of people who believe that crack cocaine was invented by white folks as a way of keeping down poor black people. And there’s this constant drumbeat on CNN and MSNBC. I was listening to a call-in show on WVON yesterday and you wouldn’t believe some of the crazy stuff people were saying. Alien attacks, government plots. Some people were absolutely sure that any white people who had the disease were being taken away to be cured, and then hidden in giant underground compounds in Idaho and Wyoming so that no one would see them.”

  “What about you, Dare? What do you think? Is there a secret cure?”

  “Honestly, I doubt it, but I’m not willing to shut that door entirely. The United States leads the world in genetic research. It’s the one country in the world that might be able to pull something like this off, except maybe China, and they’re one of the worst hit.” He popped a few peanuts in his mouth and took a swig of beer. “I don’t know. Maybe they are behind it. Maybe they’re sitting on a cure or a vaccine, which they’ll announce they’ve ‘discovered’ when the rest of the world is too far gone to matter.”

  “But why? Why would we possibly do that? This country’s economy is based on trade. What could we possibly gain from killing off all our trading partners?”

  “What would they gain? An entire world! An empty world full of natural resources, an end of most pollution, no challenge whatsoever to American supremacy. These zombie things can’t live forever, and once they’re gone, the US would have the whole world to itself. Make Africa into one giant game preserve. Turn Cuba into a floating resort. Have enough oil to last forever with no fear of climate change. Remember, we’re talking about a country that gave Indians blankets that were infected with smallpox.”

  “Wow! And people really believe we would do that?”

  “Watch the news. America has always liked to see itself as the good guy, but to a lot of countries we’re the neighborhood bully. Personally, I think we are the good guys most of the time, but with every tinhorn dictator out there screaming that it’s an American plot, a lot of people in a lot of countries are buying it hook, line and sinker.”

  From the kitchen, they heard a flurry of noise and laughter, and comments of “You look so beautiful!” and “Go show Daddy!” Six-year-olds Lainey and Keisha, with three-year-old Hannah in tow, came sashaying in, all dressed as Disney princesses, incongruously wearing cowboy hats. Little Darnell, Darius and Jamaica’s two-year-old, trailed behind them in a tiger costume with a stuffed tail and a hood with tiger ears. His father picked him up and swung him into the air and laughed. “Who’s Daddy’s big tiger man?”

  He hugged the little boy, who nestled into his father’s warm grasp. “Daddy,” he murmured, “I don’ feel good.”

  Talnakh, Siberia

  July 1st

  Boris Golovatyj swatted a mosquito and cursed. The devilish things were thick now that the brief summer had arrived. It was almost worth your life to be outside near dawn or dusk when clouds of the hungry little demons descended in vast whining hordes. More than one resident had been shot or beheaded by someone who thought their fierce scratching was the result of an impending turning, rather than a reaction to dozens of nasty bites. Even here inside the building, they were now a constant aggravation. This far north, no one bothered to include air conditioners in any but the most important buildings, and if the residents didn’t want to roast during the short summers, they had to open their windows. Unfortunately, the buildings were old and the screens fit poorly, if there were any at all.

  It had taken them four weeks of hard fighting to finally gain control of the city, and it was still a touch and go situation. Buildings Two and Three of the New Dawn complex were smoldering ruins, and parts of Four were uninhabitable. Happy Worker complex had been abandoned, with all the bottom floor exits on all four buildings sealed. Each one resembled a giant anthill of Infected. There were some upper floor units with balconies that were open to the elements. Every so often one or more Infected would wander into those apartments, see the people below, and their insatiable hunger would cause them to throw themselves off. The same held true with the windows. Infected would see movement on the ground level, and bang and bang at the windows with their heads until the glass broke, and then fling themselves out and plummet to the ground. Security forces patrolled the areas below, to make sure that none of them survived after the fall. Order had been restored, for now, but the casualties were enormous. The police force was especially hard hit. Of the forty cops on the force when the plague had struck, there were only nine left. Groups like his had been formed to keep the Infected in check.

  Talnakh had been home to about 30,000 people before the outbreak, mostly housed in four complexes of four ugly buildings each. The town served as housing for the people who ran the vast Talnakh Concentrator, where millions of tons of ore was crushed, sluiced, pounded, slurried and smelted to produce thousands of tons of the metals which brought in so much hard currency. There were shops, restaurants, bars and even a movie theater to help take the edge off the hard life here at the Arctic Circle.

  Fifteen miles away lay Norilsk, where another 150,000 people had lived. In 2005, the governments of the two cities had been combined, but to long-term residents, Talnakh was Talnakh and Norilsk was Norilsk, whatever the bureaucrats might say.

  Now there were fewer than 9,000 people left in Talnakh. For reasons no one understood, the plague here was much worse than in nearby Norilsk. Many of the inhabitants had developed symptoms of the parasite and were euthanized, whether willingly or not. Many more had turned and had to be hunted down and killed, or isolated in the big complexes. Thousands had trudged down the road to Norilsk, where the situation seemed slightly better, and some had simply walked off into the vastness of the Siberian tundra. Hundreds of others had killed themselves, mostly by leaping off the top of their apartment building, often hand in hand with a lover or even an entire family. Some showed symptoms, and others had simply given up.

  Some people had argued that the rooftops should be locked to prevent access. In Golovatyj’s opinion, those losers meant fewer mouths to feed.

  The Russian government, like most governments around the world, declared this a temporary situation for which a solution would be found. The government forbade anyone employed by Talnakh Mining to leave the city so that production could recommence as soon as a cure or a vaccine was found. All the top officials and their families remained in their enclave outside Norilsk as a show of good faith. However, every ship and plane that made it into the area had departed stuffed with as many non-employee residents as it could carry.

  They were still receiving electrical power from the plant in Norilsk, where the company kept a supply of fuel sufficient to run the entire factory complex for six months, in case bad weather made resupply impossible. Since the plants weren’t running, there was no shortage in sight, but still, non-critical functions had been shut down to make what they had stretch as far as possible.

  Food was less of an issue. In the early summer, barges filled with shelf-stable food like canned goods, rice and flour, and tons of frozen beef, poultry, pork and mutton sailed up the huge Yenisei River from the city of Krasnoyarsk, where it was gathered by rail from across the country. As an important source of foreign currency, supplying food to Norilsk was always a high priority. Shipments of fresh food, like fruit and vegetables, however, had quickly tapered off as the country descended into chaos. A huge greenhouse complex outside Norilsk did take up some of the slack, but it couldn’t produce enough to keep the whole population supplied.

  Food, however much they had on hand, would not last indefinitely. It’s almost a race, he thought, to see if the food wo
uld be gone before all the people were dead.

  His team now consisted of eleven fighters, plus himself as the leader. He still had Dmitri with him, plus Natalya and a handful of others from those first days. Irina turned a few days after they had fought their way out of the complex. Pavlo had died in a drunken knife fight over a woman.

  Their responsibility was Midnight Sun Building #1, a squat insult to architectural aesthetics painted a weathered aquamarine, and one of only two residential buildings that were still fully occupied. The mandatory daily physical inspection had just finished in the lobby, and anyone who hadn’t reported in had to be located and checked. People showing signs of infection were either escorted to the holding area in the sluice plant, or destroyed if they had already turned.

  He wore a peculiar-looking outfit. He still had on his fireman’s canvas pants and long coat, but to these had been added reinforcing legs and sleeves made of an extra layer of heavy canvas, as well as a heavy strip over his shoulders and across his back. His hands were covered in heavy gauntlets made from welder’s gloves with thin metal strips sewn onto the backs. On his head he wore a canvas hood with a drawstring that closed it tight around his face. Over that he wore a full-face tin mask, plus a lightweight metal collar fitted loosely around his neck. Natalya was his woman now, and had proved to be a genius with a needle and thread. He couldn’t count how many times this get-up had saved his life.

  Several of the people on his team wore actual suits of lightweight armor made of aluminum and sheet metal. The machine shop turned these out as fast as they could, but he preferred the canvas armor Natalya had created for him, even though it was hotter than the metal armor, because he had been wearing much of it since the first day that things had gone to hell, and he was very superstitious.

  On his left arm he carried a thin shield made of lightweight steel, with a strap to fit his arm through and a handle to grab. It wasn’t much bigger than a large garbage can lid, light enough to bring to bear quickly to block a bite from an Infected, but heavy enough to stun one if he swung it into its head. He found someone in the building who had some artistic talent and had her paint a grinning red demon on the front. The same demon was painted on the back of his coat, and on the coats and armor of the rest of his team. They were known around the settlement as “Golovatyj’s Demons.” In his right hand he held a sword patterned on the Roman gladius, another machine shop product about two feet long with a wide blade that tapered to a sharp point. This one was heavier than the Romans’ swords, though, and kept razor sharp, enabling him to lop off an Infected’s head in a single powerful swipe.

  Midnight Sun Building #1 still housed about three thousand people, and there were 31 no-shows on his list. Some of them had turned out to be sleeping in, or just uninterested in being inspected. Golovatyj had demonstrated the importance of their daily inspection with a few hard slaps to the head, which, coming from his massive arm and leather-gloved hand, were enough to leave them with bruises that would take days to fade. No-shows made him angry. “Zhri govno i zdohni!” he said to one of them, a man who was clearly drunk and staring up at him blearily from the floor. “You think I want to waste my time coming up here to look for you? Tomorrow you’d better be downstairs when you’re supposed to, or I’ll take you up to the roof and throw you off myself.”

  They were about three quarters of the way through the names. They had found eleven people with symptoms who were now being escorted away by four members of his team, and one apparent murder suicide. They stopped at apartment 638, which was supposed to contain a husband and wife and their one child. None of them had shown up downstairs. His team all sweated badly now, and the day clearly wore on them. He banged on the door and yelled, “Building security!” and waited. No answer. He nodded to Dmitri. Kicking in doors was one of the perks of the job, and it was Dmitri’s turn.

  The door smashed open under Dmitri’s heavy boot and a wild-eyed naked Infected launched itself at his face. He brought his sword up in a smooth motion and impaled it under its chin, his blade slashing through its brain stem and out the back of the skull. He used its own momentum to hurl it into the wall behind him, where it collapsed in a heap.

  There were high fives from the other crew members and muffled calls of “Nicely done!” Then a bedroom door opened and a man with a gun stepped out and shot Dmitri in the face. The rest of the team dodged out of the line of fire. “You bastard!” the man screamed. “That’s my wife!”

  Golovatyj gave a nod to one of his crew, who unlimbered a shotgun strapped over his shoulder, stepped into the doorway and fired both barrels. He quickly opened the breech and shoved in two more shells, then snapped it closed and entered the room.

  Golovatyj moved in behind him. The husband was lying on his back staring at the ceiling, his chest shredded, his eyes rolling up into his head. He picked up the gun lying next to the man, an old Vostok .22, and slipped it into his pocket. He turned back to the hallway where Dmitri sprawled, a hand to his bloody face, and swearing a blue streak.

  Golovatyj kneeled next to him and said, “That looks like it hurts.”

  “Yob tvoyu mat, it hurts!”

  Golovatyj gently pulled Dmitri’s hand away from his face. A small round hole punctured his right cheek, below the cheekbone. He grabbed Dmitri’s chin in his large hand and turned his head. There was an exit wound on his jaw near his ear. He probed the cheekbone lightly with his thumb. Dmitri winced but lay still.

  “You got lucky. Came in your cheek and back out here. Might have chipped your cheek bone and maybe your jaw, but it could have been a lot worse. Good thing it was just a .22.” He reached into his pocket and pulled out the gun. “Here,” he said. “A souvenir. Get your ass to the clinic and have them take a look at your face.” He nodded at another figure bundled up in canvas and armor. “Katje, go with him. Make sure he gets there all right. Clinic first. Vodka after.” Katje was a striking blonde who had worked at the processor. She lost her boyfriend two months before, and lately it seemed like she and Dmitri were sweet on each other.

  “Hey boss, we have a survivor.” He looked into the bedroom door and saw a small pair of terrified eyes peeking over the far side of the bed.

  “Svetlana!” He called over his shoulder. “Got one for you, Grandma.”

  A short stocky figure stepped up next to him. She pulled off her face mask and pushed back her hood. Underneath she had the kindly face of a babushka, a 55-year-old grandmother of four with a gentle smile, and a look that totally belied her ferocity with the cut-down fire ax she carried at her side. She nodded and spoke softly to Golovatyj. “Find something to cover her parents,” she whispered, and then sat down on the bed near the little girl. “I’m Grandma Svetka. What’s your name, sweetheart?”

  They got through the rest of the building without casualties. Two more people had turned and three were symptomatic. When they were finished, Golovatyj dismissed his team and headed for the old building management office, which now acted as the command post for all of Talnakh. He turned in his report and then stepped into the open doorway of the old manager’s office, where a gray-haired man with glasses sat behind the big desk. Konstantin Bunin had been the Assistant Head of Logistics, before everything had come apart. He was among a group of a half-dozen former company officials now in charge of administering Talnakh. They were not considered desirable posts, since it meant they had to live here, and not in the swank subdivision built for the company elites outside Norilsk.

  He was an educated man from Moscow. He and Golovatyj had little in common, but they had formed a friendship in these troubled times. Photos of his wife and several of two smiling families, his sons and their wives and all his grandchildren, sat on the counter behind him. They reminded Golovatyj of happier days. He wondered how many of them were still alive. Bunin’s wife, he knew, had passed away a year before from a heart attack.

  “So what’s the count today, Boris?” he asked.

 
Golovatyj settled his big frame into a chair. “Between morning inspection and patrol, thirty-eight,” he said.

  The older man shook his head. “Thirty-eight today, thirty-two yesterday, forty the day before that. At this rate, by winter you and I will be the only ones left.”

  “Any word on supply of fresh food?”

  The ice had melted on the seas to their north, and right now they should have been receiving a steady stream of supplies for the stores and businesses in the area, and with them, crates of oranges, plums, lettuce and other perishables. Ships from Archangel and Murmansk would sail across the Barents Sea and down the Yenisei River as far as Dudinka, where ingots would be loaded and supplies offloaded and shipped by rail for the last 120 kilometers across the tundra. But the company that owned the whole operation including the city, Talnakh Nickel, was in chaos, just like the rest of the country.

  “Nothing. When I’m able to get through at all, they say they’re working on it. But right now we have no production and no one is in the market for metal even if we did. I don’t know when we’ll receive another shipment from them.”

  “Govno! Then we really are on our own!” He shook his head. “Well, one thing is obvious. If we stay here, we’ll all die.”

  White House

  July 5th

  “Mister President, I have Doctor Rush from AMRIID and Doctor Schooner from CDC on the line,” said the voice from the speakers around the room. The White House Conference Room was crowded with Congressional leaders, cabinet members and military and intelligence chiefs. The chairs at the long table were filled, but this time there were no aides sitting against the wall.

  “Thank you, uh… Donna.” There had been considerable turnover in the White House staff the last few weeks, and it was getting hard to remember all the names, something he’d always made a great effort to do. People always felt good when you remembered their names, as his father had taught him.