While not a cure, Flegtide was seen as a breakthrough on every level. The two men, Johan Deanschneider from an Austrian development and Christopher Hass from a development near Hamburg, were monitored very closely following the test. In the meantime, this latest version of Flegtide was placed into bottles while awaiting the CA’s final call to ship it directly to our cabins. What followed was and still is up for debate.
Johan and Christopher were given no more doses of the drug. Instead, they were given machines with instructions on how to use them as they were publically watched from their cabins. They were told to detail their symptoms, if any, over the next six months. Christopher complained of minor headaches that eventually grew more powerful, but not overwhelming. Johan, though, instantly became bogged down by severe migraine headaches, all while eating very healthy, avoiding alcohol—yes, we still had alcohol, thankfully—and taking normal, pre-Ire medicine for upkeep.
It was only after three months when Johan began slurring badly. He would also go off on tangents, similar to the actions of an autistic person. He was given basic math tests each week and failed each one subsequently worse than the last. He would speak in German, and the translation came out as ‘Mine this is, to the year, to the year, mine, I break mine, you year, this break’. By the start of the fourth month he was hardly able to hold a pencil in his hand. He looked at it as a foreign invader and snapped it.
While Johan faded into a mindless husk, Christopher Hass remained relatively untouched by the after-effects of Flegtide. His blood pressure raised slightly and the headaches continued, but nothing got worse. There was obviously something different about him that made him able to stand Flegtide. But finding that something was next to impossible without more tests.
It was decided in October 2044 to do the unthinkable and take Johan, now drooling, unable to control his wastes, and barely able to breathe on his own, to what they called a ‘sympathy chair’ in Bern to have him euthanized through lethal injection. The only other option was to let him suffer possibly for years until they could find a cure or at least a way to keep his brain from decreasing functionality even more. Their choice, although barbaric to some, was the right one.
The relevance of all this is that after nearly fifteen years of isolation, myself and all others choosing to keep going had some grain of hope for the future. The Centralized Authority knew we needed that small hope. Morale, for once, was not completely shot to hell. And with the birthing initiative a rousing debacle—the planet had only welcomed a recorded 945 new children since the Ire began—it was now the only chance of the species’ survival.
And still, after hope finally came calling with a faint whisper, I refused to allow another person in. Over and over, I received requests for conversations through both my cell and textnet, some from around the world but most from my development. After the successful Flegtide announcement I received a much heavier volume of requests, in fact. But no. I didn’t want them. I didn’t need another Haydon taken from me.
One person in particular, somebody calling themselves del Gregory, was most persistent. He sent one request a week from 2042 to 2044, then two or three a week following the Flegtide announcement. His information was brief: Gene del Gregory, White Male from St. Cloud, Minnesota, 40 Years Old. Hello fellow survivor. I hope to be acquainted to you soon.
Simple and direct, no oddities detected. Nonetheless, I ignored him. For all I knew he was a boring idiot and I knew, just knew, that he would never have anything on my dear Haydon. Nobody would.
I think it may have been complacency, the expectations of expecting nothing, that made me carry on through the years without depression. True, I was sad that I didn’t have anybody, but when you know almost as a fact that you’ll never be in the presence of another person your mind protects itself through other avenues. My routines, of course, helped, but so did my memories. I would often remember life before the Ire. I liked those memories, and I felt comfortable in them. I was complacent, satisfied.
But time, as it seems, brought about changes of the mental kind. A mentality change, if you will. Involuntary, to be sure. Flegtide could actually work. If it gained better traction, possibly allowing us to truly interact for more than a few minutes, we would be able to have relationships of all kinds again. If that were the case, being alone from the start could hurt. It would be a fresh start, but it could also be a lonely start. With each passing day, I feared more and more I would fall into that pit of loneliness, this while I had been unreservedly alone for nearly two decades.
~~~~
Chapter 6
The Choices We Make
In January, 2048, at the wise age of forty, I broke out of my silent chains. I asked Haydon’s ghost, if I had believed in such a thing, to forgive me. I answered one of Gene’s now-daily requests. I called him on the new cell shipped to me the previous week, this one shinier, cleaner, bigger, and longer-lasting than all others.
“Is this Gene?” I asked.
I expected a jerk asking me why I’m just now getting back with him. He was going to grill me with rules on why I should have responded back to him years ago. And what I got was no answer. I tried three times the first day with nothing. Three the next, then four the next, five or maybe six the following days. This went on for about a week. Indeed I was right. The man was punishing me after too many years of nothingness. I probably deserved it.
Then came the beginning of the second week. A simple request through the cell again brought about the man. He was very large, likely 300 pounds, with a full gray beard, no hair on his head, and eyes that had been beaten by society, sunken in and dark. He was real. And even in his ragged appearance, he presented me with a smile. I liked it.
“So you’re the Wall?” he said.
“Yes. I am he.” I tried to smile but I was simply too embarrassed, and quite nervous.
“Hey, Wallace. Sorry for my lack of response, I had a big issue with my cell and I’ve been waiting over a week for the CA to ship me a new one. I see based on the marker on the screen that you got the new one also.”
“I did. Nice and big.”
“Excellent!”
His voice was deep, tender, authentic, true to hear. Something overly real about it that I will never honestly understand. I liked it. I explained why I never got back with him as best I could without sounding too much like an asshole. He completely understood, telling me he’d encountered such a thing by most others in the development, initially only mildly able to befriend one other person here and a nice lady in Oklahoma.
As for me, this changed everything. Not his voice, but the person himself. Gene was nothing like Haydon. While Haydon came across as brash, stubborn, incredibly confident, and charismatic, Gene was kind, soft-spoken, a listener, and somewhat unsure of himself in a refreshing way. Haydon showed his concern through coarse words, but Gene simply said it in actual words. The mere fact that he understood why I had kept to myself for six years told me a lot about him already. But there was more.
Gene was only two years my senior, so we already had that in common. Our looks, on the other hand, were night and day. I was the normal, mid-weight forty-year-old with a bit of a ponch, black beard scruff if I decided not shave, and a nice but thinning head of hair. Gene was large with a big silver beard, short, completely bald, and hands the size of catcher’s mitts. Starkly unalike in appearance, but we quickly discovered our many similarities.
He was from the most northern part of Minnesota, the Nation’s Ice Box, as it was often called. He was married to a man named Jack with a brand new baby boy when the Ire struck. He never heard from Jack, meaning he likely died. The sadness Gene experienced was apparently legendary. Being large and formidable, he allowed the Ire to overtake him in the months following. The rage consuming him, he used the Ire to kill all people he saw, knowing exactly what he did as he did it. He said it was a release. He killed around fifty people in two months by his own admission. Truly, his Ire was second to none.
But like me, Gene
wanted to live, to see what happened next and maybe to help. He owed it to his family. His two attempts at suicide in 2041 were grossly misguided and feeble, meaning he didn’t want to do it. So when he found himself alive with others, he decided to take the CA up on the cabin offer.
While killing fifty people served as therapy, he always knew it was not the right thing to do. So upon landing his cabin, he tried endlessly to befriend as many people as he could. He needed to make up for the deaths of his victims, and also to appease the spirits of his late husband and son. His atonement worked. He had somewhere in the order of twenty-five friends he chatted with regularly from many different developments. Gene used his astonishing likeability to procure such over-the-cell relationships. Came naturally.
Even after years of gathering friends through digital communication, Gene remained sad. He wanted Jack back, much in the same way I wanted Haydon back, but for completely different reasons. And after sending me requests without anything in return, his curiosity grew about me. He insisted I would crumble one day and answer, and he was right. His intelligence was remarkably similar to that of Haydon. But Gene had patience, a trait completely lost on Haydon.
I don’t know what I had been running from for six years. I enjoyed every word of every conversation with Gene. It was as though Haydon were still there, his soul entered into unity with the body of Gene. As our friendship blossomed, he focused more attention on me and less on the others, which in the long run I do feel slightly apologetic for, but we had a connection unlike the others. We had been talking for nine months and it felt like a lifetime.
“Thunderstorm coming,” I told him one April night in ’49. “Pressure’s fallen. Big one. Look at your screen.”
“Sure thing,” he said. He looked at the makeshift radar the CA pieced together a few years earlier to give us a better outlook on weather. “Must be bad, Wallace. The colors are green.”
“I love thunderstorms.” And I did. They were the best. Not anymore, but at the time I felt peaceful during a violent clash of weather.
“I’ve been meaning to ask you,” he said. “Under what circumstances would you finally crack down and ingest a Flegtide pill?”
“I don’t know, Gene. The pills are brand new, and I still don’t trust the injection kind. You know this.”
“But every test is more positive than the last. Hell, the test two weeks ago showed those three women stand beside each other for thirteen minutes, and none of them suffered from Eyefall.”
The term coined by a survivor in an Arizona development had long stuck as the event the first victim of Flegtide suffered when his eyes dangled painfully from their sockets. In the psyche of most, Eyefall was more terrifying than the Ire itself.
“Headaches and body aches, Gene. They all still got them. One had bad migraines. I just don’t know if it’s worth it.”
“Yet, Wallace. It may not be worth it yet. But I’m thinking in five years, if not sooner, we could see Flegtide almost eradicate the Ire altogether. Pipe dreams? Maybe. But at least I’m dreaming.”
“Why this sudden line of questioning?” I asked. “We’ve mostly veered away from the subject of the Ire.”
“There’s a reason, Wallace. It’s a big one. But not right now. I want to watch the storm.” He stopped the call and went outside I assume.
I didn’t argue with my friend. I followed in Gene’s metaphorical footsteps and sat on a chair on my front porch to watch the storm, its prevailing lightning and growing bellows of thunder and wildly soothing pockets of wind all slowly working its way from the west at night.
As I watched the storm I pondered to myself what exactly it would take to get Flegtide in my system. Rumor said they would start sending us bottles with ten pills in them the coming week. With the hope of conversing with somebody would also come an entire catalogue of new problems. The largest would be people being neglectful of the Ire and not paying attention while using Flegtide. A new wave of deadly assaults was approaching. I could feel it, not unlike what Haydon felt before his death. Another issue I saw coming was the idea that since Flegtide would be a commodity, it could become the new currency of the world, and things would revert back to a less-than-peaceful society.
It was a mystery how many others out there in the surviving world considered the negative outcomes of the release of Flegtide. Many could see it and all would be mild, or few could see it and we might end up with a wretched new world void of much organization. Time would tell.
What would I do? What happened if I decided to shove the new drug down my throat for whatever reason, I became ill, and life went from tolerable to sheer agony? That was a feverish risk, and for that I always knew the answer. Until it was proven to be perfectly harmless in any other way, I would not take Flegtide, no matter how hard Gene pushed for it.
Some time went on as Gene and I grew closer. It was frightening how closely it resembled my relationship with Haydon. Nevertheless, I treated it differently and cherished it more, for I knew at any moment it could be gone. But I sensed Gene was hiding something, or maybe just too afraid to speak about something. Silence was broken a few months later in July, 2048.
“Ok,” I told Gene over the cell. “We’ve been dancing around this, my friend. You are holding something back. Tell me.”
“There’s nothing, Wallace.”
“There’s something. I know it in your voice. It’s getting increasingly trembly. Now tell me.”
Gene huffed and sighed, implying something far more serious than I had imagined. “This shouldn’t concern you.”
“But it does. You reached out to me thousands of times and I finally accepted. You’d better tell me, Gene.”
“As you wish.” Another sigh. “My sister lived down south when everybody was taken down by the Ire. She was my twin. Looked exactly like me, only with tits. We were inseparable, Wallace.”
“And you miss her,” I surmised.
“This is why I didn’t want to tell you.”
“No, Gene, I completely understand. Nothing to hide from.”
“No, you don’t understand, Wallace.”
“But I do.”
“My sister is alive!”
Such a revelation should have been met with a chorus of cheers. But Gene’s tone deemed it otherwise, a plea for sympathy and more understanding than I was ready for.
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“Her name is Pauline. She lives in a development in Oklahoma.”
“You mean, the lady in Oklahoma—“
“Her,” he finished.
“Again, Gene, I need to know why this is something you can’t tell me.”
“We’ve grown close, you and I. Am I wrong?”
“You’re not wrong, Gene.”
“Of all the friends I could have made number one, you are the one I chose. I can confide in you, but I can also hurt you, which I never want to do.”
“Still, Gene, what is the big deal?”
“We’ve grown very close, Wallace. Maybe too close, if approaching events are any indication.”
“Clarity,” I demanded.
“I am leaving Minnesota Number-5 development for Oklahoma soon.”
I was stunned, but not speechless. “You’re kidding. Gene?”
“There is no joke, Wallace.”
“What the hell are you thinking? This sort of asinine logic will get you nowhere, Gene! Why? What reason would you have to go see her? And what makes you think if you do find her that you’ll be able to keep the Ire in and not kill her? Tell me!” Clearly, I was foreseeing history repeat itself. I would lose Haydon all over again, hence my unappreciated wrath.
“If you’ll calm down, I will tell you.”
I was somehow able to muster a calmer demeanor, although I still fumed inside. “Okay. Wow me, Gene.”
“I need to know you’re still my friend and you will try to understand me.”
“Yes and yes, Gene. Now please, details.”
“I found her five years ago through
the Succinct Figures Chart. It was total chance that I found her name. You know how the chart makes it impossible to search by name. But I found her. Pauline del Gregory, once in a lifetime name. It had to be her. I reached out and we’ve been talking ever since. I kept it from you, Wallace, because I know the girl. Christ, we’re practically the same person. And the twin thing, sometimes I can feel her hurt.”
“I’m listening.” And I was listening. I was both intrigued and terrified.
“She’s not been well since the Ire, Wallace. She has killed, but most of all she has wanted to die. She’s tried suicide five times, once with a knife to her throat that left her mangled. I saw the scars over the cell and I wanted to cry. Truth is, I felt her ache as it happened back in 2037. I thought she had been long dead so I played it off as grief or residual pain.”
This was a completely new side of the man. Until now he’d been dead-set on hearing my stories, understanding my way, making me laugh. But now Gene was showing me the tragic side of his life, a side he liked to cover with a warm blanket.
“Pauline is a great person, Wallace. She’s great, but she’s lost. And now she is absolutely sure Flegtide will work and is determined to take the drug once it’s released. It’s why I asked you about the drug not long ago, if you would be willing to take it or not. I was gauging your thoughts to see if I worried too much. But the truth, Wallace, is that I don’t trust the drug even a little. I’ve screamed in my pleas with Pauline not to do it over and over. She isn’t listening. She will take it and she will die. And I can’t have her die on me. Not again. Losing her twice would be worse than myself dying. Much worse.”
I was humbled by the man’s candor and humility as he began to cry over the cell. No question remained as to whether or not he trusted me enough to say such private things. And this was a passionate admission.
“Gene,” I said, “I get your situation. I’m still you’re friend, and friends understand each other. If you have to go, then go. We have cells to communicate. And I can even help you with the maps I have here on my slate. You won’t be able to use the slate when traveling.” I hated the idea of losing him. I hid it well, I think.
The Populace Page 5