“Jesus,” Diana said, her face a mixture of shock and horror. “That sounds absolutely horrific! The poor man.”
“Yeah, well, poor us. If they don’t get this thing under control soon, we could all be in a world of hurt,” Chris eyed the rest of the group.
“I know,” Paul agreed. “The last thing I want is to have to be looking over my shoulder every second of the day at the coffee shop. We get our fair share of oddballs as it is. I don’t need any ravenous man-eaters coming in attacking our customers…or worse yet, attacking us.”
“I wonder how this is going to affect business?” Diana pondered aloud. “We were hoping to retire in a few years. This could put a real kink in our works.”
“Let’s not get ahead of ourselves just yet,” Paul did his best to calm her concern.
“I’ve heard that people aren’t going downtown,” Wendell said. “They said that worry over these bite attacks is starting to affect holiday shopping sales. They’re worried about Black Friday numbers at brick and mortar stores. But I doubt people will stop buying their daily coffees because of all this, especially in Oak Park. Most of the attacks have been centered closer to downtown so far.”
“Are they doing anything different at your school?” Charla asked her husband.
He nodded. “When we had the PTA meeting a few days ago, a lot of the parents raised concerns about possibilities of one of these infected people getting inside the school or attacking kids on the playground. Thankfully, the cold weather means indoor recess for now. But the school has issued some new lockdown procedures for what to do if we see someone like this…don’t approach them, don’t talk to them, don’t try to detain them, and…”
“And definitely don’t bathe the kids in ketchup or teriyaki sauce before sending them to school, right?” Chris couldn’t help himself.
“Ha!” Charla laughed a little too loud and then covered her mouth with a hand.
“Uh…yeah,” Wendell nodded without a smile.
“That’s one of the good things about being in the tree trimming business in a situation like this,” Chris said. “I don’t have to deal with many people. And I’m always armed with either a chainsaw or some other sharp object with which to defend myself. Plus, I spend most of my day up in hard-to-reach places…rooftops, ladders, trees.”
“So why did they decide to call it the Carchar Syndrome?” Wendell asked Paul.
“Mmm…” Paul nodded, hurriedly swallowing his next bite of pie. “Good question. As I understand it, they took the name from the Carcharhiniformes order, the largest order of sharks. I suppose they found the name a fitting one due to the syndrome’s results…the teeth, the focus on consuming flesh. And I suppose that since they haven’t yet discovered the cause behind these symptoms, they settled on ‘syndrome’ as opposed to disease or virus. A syndrome is thus titled because its causes are largely unknown.”
“Interesting,” Wendell nodded. “I didn’t know that.”
“Does anyone mind if I check the score of the football game?” Chris asked, finished with his pie and coffee, and ready to move on to more important matters.
“I’m glad you mentioned that,” Paul nodded. “I’ve got twenty bucks on that game.”
“Too much pick-me-up conversation for you?” Diana laughed at Chris and her husband.
“Just not much that those of us around this table are going to do about stuff like that,” Chris shrugged. “I’m sure our fearless leaders, our masters of the universe, our titans of industry and technology aren’t going to let a little thing like some weird zombie virus slow down the march of modern civilization. We’ll be fine. And as much as I’d like to cure the Carquest Syndrome or whatever they’re calling it, I’d rather just forget my troubles with some good ‘ol fashioned football.”
“I wouldn’t mind checking the game myself,” Charla agreed, pushing her chair back from the table and standing. “Is it Detroit that’s on now or the Cowboys? I can never remember who plays the first game.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll take care of the dishes, hon’,” Wendell glared at her. “You sports nuts go check on your football.”
“Thanks,” Charla smiled sweetly, ignoring Wendell’s obvious displeasure at her wanting to view something as barbaric and unimportant as a game that involved a bunch of sweaty men violently slinging one another to the ground.
On the way to the living room, Charla took Chris by the arm and whispered in his ear, “You really think they’ll keep us safe from the Cark…Cork…” she shook her head and smiled, frustrated at the tied tongue her wine had left her with, “…the Carquest Syndrome?” she finally giggled.
“We’ll be fine,” Chris smiled his 1000-watt smile and patted her hand.
He said it so damn confidently that Charla couldn’t help but believe it.
Chapter 11
By the second week of December, Chicagoland’s number of Carchar Syndrome related attacks had soared. There had been over 400 such attacks, and it was believed far more had gone – and were continuing to go – unreported.
Isolation units in area hospitals had to be expanded to deal with the influx of patients. And with there still being no cure for the disease, the patient numbers continued to increase, stressing hospital resources and pushing their staffing levels to the max.
Worse yet, reported cases across the United States were beginning to grow. Cases in Indianapolis and Milwaukee had increased to over a dozen each. And now there had been similar style attacks in Seattle, Los Angeles, Atlanta, New York, St. Louis, Nashville, Houston, and Miami, although the sole attack in Miami was believed to be the copycat act of a mentally unstable man.
There had also been an unverified report of an attack in Beijing, although Chinese media outlets were doing their best to confuse, muddy, and cover up the details of the incident.
Maybe worst of all, the American holiday sales numbers were being affected. As reports of new attacks seemed to arrive daily, people were growing increasingly afraid to go out and do their holiday shopping. Black Friday numbers had come in well below estimates for retailers. While online sales numbers had gone up, they’d been expected to increase anyway, and they hadn’t increased enough to compensate for the diminished brick-and-mortar sales. Added to this, businesses were losing out as companies began to cancel or downsize holiday party plans, and families decided against holiday travel, choosing instead to remain in the relative safety of their own homes.
Meanwhile, government agencies, led by the CDC, were finding it difficult to take a new and unfamiliar stance with this deadly outbreak that threatened to become a nationwide pandemic were it not controlled soon. Usually they could preach their standard line with things like the flu or similar sicknesses –
“Wash your hands frequently. Don’t touch your face.
Stay out of public places when possible. And if you
become sick, seek immediate medical attention.”
But with the Carchar Syndrome, such precautions, other than the portion regarding keeping away from public places, were useless.
The Carchar Syndrome appeared to be spread mainly, if not solely, by bites from someone who was already infected. Therefore, with transmission having nothing to do with germs passed from one person to another, things like hand washing, refraining from face touching, using hand sanitizer, and similar precautions against the spread of germs were completely ineffective. And with still no cure, and little doctors could do once people were infected other than keeping them isolated and restrained, the “seek immediate medical attention” aspect of the standard warning was of little use.
The issue that hospitals were encountering more than a month after the first few Carchar cases had made their way to emergency rooms was how to handle current syndrome patients. Physicians felt obligated to do all they could to keep these people alive. The question was, in their current state, were they still people? Or were they simply human bodies now inhabited by something that had become far from human?
It was an
unanswerable question that the mainstream media, medical experts, and political pundits debated ad nauseum. In the meantime, hospitals were left to restrain and sustain these animal-like creatures, their wild tendencies to try to attack others heightened by the refusal of hospital administrators to nourish them with the fresh flesh they so craved. Refusing all other food, the patients were sustained through nutrients injected intravenously. While this method kept them alive, it made them increasingly ravenous for fresh meat.
In one horrific instance, a nurse who had unwisely gone into a patient’s room alone found out just how far a Carchar Syndrome carrier was willing to go to satisfy this voracious appetite. While the nurse was busy exchanging intravenous bags, the patient was able to utilize his razor sharp teeth to gnaw through the straps restraining him in his bed. Once freed, it took him mere seconds to get to the nurse. In a flash, he’d tackled her and banged her head against the hard hospital floor. With the nurse unconscious, the patient used his knife-like teeth to rip into her jugular vein before setting to work feasting on her flesh.
By the time other hospital employees arrived on the scene, the patient had consumed a large portion of the nurse’s midsection. And before they could properly restrain him again, the patient had bitten and infected two more attendants.
It wasn’t like most zombie movies. Those carrying the Carchar Syndrome weren’t slow moving, fumbling, bumbling, crumbling corpses. These people – if they could be considered such – while mentally incapacitated, were still flesh and blood. And they moved just as any normal human would move. They could still walk, run, push, pull, bend, lift, punch, and in rare instances, even jump and climb.
But their physical capabilities and the appearance of their physical form – minus the adaptation of their teeth, which often protruded awkwardly from the front of their mouths – were the last remnants tying the Carchar carriers to the rest of the human race. Otherwise, carriers lost all resemblance to their former selves. Patients illustrated no sentimental ties or affection toward former friends or family members. They showed no signs of recognizing or recalling prior places of residency or employment or even their own names. The diminished mental status of the infected meant that they no longer grasped the normal rules of society. Nor did they exhibit the ability to handle complex devices such as vehicles or weapons. They even struggled with basic tasks such as opening and closing doors or turning on a faucet.
In the first few days post-infection, the patient could still communicate verbally, they still ate a relatively normal diet, and they exhibited most of the basic qualities one would expect to find in a civilized human being. But as they reached the end of the first week or start of the second week post-infection, a noticeable degradation in these characteristics typically became apparent. Patients began soiling themselves rather than using the toilet. They began requesting foods that were undercooked. They became less talkative, seemed to respond less to instructions and environmental cues, and were quick to become agitated.
From this point forward, the change in their abilities to function normally moved from a gradual decline to a more precipitous falloff. Toward the end of the second post-infection week, the patient tended to decline any food that was cooked and most that wasn’t pure meat. They also became far more agitated, viewing their hospital rooms more as cages than as sanctuaries. This phase was also when patients began to view other people as their captors rather than resources to help them. It was also when the patient’s teeth hit the peak in their evolution – or devolution depending on the outlook. Several days past this point was when the patient lost all sense of his or her former self and began viewing their hospital personnel not as captors but instead as food sources.
And while medical professionals had attempted a variety of treatments to halt or at least slow, if not reverse the syndrome’s trend, everything they’d tried to this point had been unsuccessful. But even though the effects of the Carchar Syndrome on its hosts were horrific to say the least, it was more the government’s inability to control or even contain its spread that began having the greatest effect on the public.
This harsh reality was particularly terrifying to the wealthy and elite. Shots, vaccines, cleaning agents, and the ability to work, live and shop in environments that were safer and cleaner than the other 99 percent of the public, offered no additional sense of security among the masters of the universe. They could no longer buy their immunity. And should they become infected, the best treatments from the best physicians at the best hospitals were of no value. While gated communities and door attendants at high-rise condominiums offered some level of protection, outside these zones of security, the elite were now exposed to a new and terrifying world.
While the majority of early bite attacks in Chicago had been localized in and around downtown, they eventually began to trickle out toward the suburbs. One such attack occurred in the suburb of Westchester. It resulted in the infection of a woman working at a grocery store when she was bitten by a customer. The customer had fled and managed to escape authorities. The woman he’d bitten was transported to a nearby hospital where she was promptly put into isolation. There she was kept for the next five days, under close observation.
As it eventually became apparent that, just as with every other bite victim so far, this woman was also infected with the Carchar Syndrome, the hospital had been forced to place her under restraints. But on the evening of day six, as it became glaringly obvious to her that her situation was hopeless, the woman escaped from her restraints and fled her third-floor hospital room. But she didn’t attack any hospital personnel. Instead, she found one of the patient-accessible, open-air balconies. There, she flung herself over the railing, dashing herself to death on the pavement below.
While it was a sad ending for the patient, in many people’s eyes, it was probably the best outcome for her. Compared to her counterparts at other area hospitals, languishing in their agitated states with no apparent end in sight, death might have seemed the best result.
And while life in many Chicago suburbs continued largely as it had before the arrival of the Carchar Syndrome, those in downtown Chicago, where the majority of the bite attacks were taking place, were finding themselves centering their lives on the attacks sweeping the city. People were growing wary of leaving their homes. Some people weren’t going to work or sending their kids to school. And once the first report of a child being bitten while outside at recess hit the airwaves, many area schools began seeing absences en masse. People were talking about an early holiday break for city schools, with the extra days off being added to the start of summer vacation.
As everyone from students and teachers to business owners and their employees debated the pros and cons of venturing out into a Carchar Syndrome threatened world, some people were taking steps to prepare for what they feared might be coming.
* * *
Saturday morning broke gray and chilly. A bitterly biting wind whipped through Brookfield, gusting flurried flakes of snow through the steely morning light.
The Justak family lay in Josh and Julia’s king-size bed. Justin had joined them about an hour earlier and was watching cartoons while his parents slowly worked to rouse themselves for the day.
On the nightstand, Josh’s phone beeped with an incoming text message.
“Ugh,” he groaned, reaching for the device.
“Who is it at this hour?” Julia mumbled, still dozing.
Josh rubbed his eyes and took a few seconds to focus on the screen.
“Michael,” he yawned and then stretched, his phone still in hand. “Looks like he wants to load up on a few more supplies.”
“Boy, he’s really taking this seriously.”
“What else does he have to do?” Josh typed a few words into his phone and then set it back on the nightstand. “His kid is grown, he’s retired, and he has a decent retirement income. So why not? He views us as his extended family. And he views himself as the patriarch of that family. He wants to look out for our best int
erests, and I think he likes staying busy. It’s a win-win for everyone.”
“What time does he want to go?”
“Around ten.”
“Where?”
“He didn’t say. Just that he was inviting me, Juan, Manny, and Monte.”
“Monte’s going?”
“No. Michael said in the message Monte couldn’t make it.”
“Figures. He’s probably out of town.” Julia rolled over and moved so that she could talk behind Justin’s back. Justin was sitting halfway down the bed, enthralled by a SpongeBob SquarePants episode. “You really think he’s on business all the time or do you think he has a little something going on the side?” she whispered with a devilish grin.
“No, his job takes him all over the place. I think it’s work related. Of course, I guess, you never know. But Monte doesn’t seem the sort.”
“You know the sort?” Julia eyed her husband inquisitively.
He shrugged. “I’ve known a couple guys like that. They usually let something slip over drinks. They may not come right out and say they’re having an affair, but they let little things slide that other guys might pick up on.”
“Like what,” Julia asked, interested now.
Josh shrugged, not really having been prepared for being called out on his statement. “I don’t know. Just stuff. Stuff like they don’t want their wives to see their phone or their emails or that they need to make sure they’re around to get their credit card bills before the wife sees what’s on them. Stuff like that.”
“Mmm,” Julia considered. “I’ll have to take a closer look at the credit card statement the next time it comes.”
“Please don’t!” Josh held up a hand in an exaggerated display of stopping her. “I mean, uh, well, I…I have some gifts I bought…for you on there…” he did his best to fumble, playing the husband caught in the act. “And those hotel room charges on there are a mistake! They were billed in error!”
The Last Bastion (Book 1): The Last Bastion Page 12