by Rod Carstens
“Oh, sorry. It has been quite a day. Yes, Ben, I’m Brandon Rule. We were able to find the flaw in the program, and its predictions were very specific about this pandemic. It will start soon—no later than six months. There will be three waves of illness, each killing close to eighty percent of those who survived the previous wave. Eventually, everything in the City will collapse for lack of people to run things. I think that will probably happen during the second wave sometime. That is when those left in the City will begin to leave by foot or any other way they can manage. Can you block off the tunnel so you can isolate yourselves?”
“Yes, I have explosives set. We put them in place a long time ago so we could cut off contact with the City for a number of reasons. Looks like that planning’s going to come in handy. Will we be safe down here?” Ben asked.
“Yes, as long as you have no contact with anyone from the City. Any contact once it starts and you run the risk of bringing it back here. Can you last a year down here without contact with the outside world?”
“You might be surprised what we can do, Doctor. We’ve been planning on being self-sufficient for a long time now for just this type of emergency.”
Just then Cat came walking up, followed by Helen and Christine. Her arm was in a sling, and it had been freshly bandaged. Vin’s eyes met Cat’s. “You all right?”
“Yeah, Helen’s a real doctor and she sewed me up and gave me some pain meds and antibiotics. You should see their infirmary.”
“You’ve got quite an operation going here, Ben. I hate to be rude, but we have a ways to go and a settlement to move. Knowing what I know now, I’m not sure we could’ve pulled it off without your help. Christine was something up there.”
Ben smiled. “Yeah, my daughter takes after her old man. She likes to live on the edge of things.”
“You didn’t do half bad yourself, buster,” Christine said, walking to Vin.
“Seriously, I couldn’t have done it without you. And thanks for taking care of Cat. How did you get her down here through those crowds?”
“She played my girlfriend who was drunk. We were something of a spectacle. Hide in plain sight.”
“You’ve got a set of balls, I’ll give you that,” Vin said.
“Wrong sex, but I’ll take it as a compliment.”
“All right, guys, let’s get this show on the road,” Vin said. Blondie and Matos led and the others followed. Vin walked over to Ben and shook his and Helen’s hands. “Good luck. I think we’re all going to need it.”
Vin turned and had walked down the tunnel a few feet when Christine ran after him. She spun him around and kissed him.
“What was that for?”
“I was wondering if I would like it.”
“Did you?”
“Yep, I did. Look, buster, another place and another time, and I would give the woman in your life a run for her money. You take care of yourself.”
Vin smiled and leaned down and kissed her. “You know, I liked it too. Good luck, Christine.”
Then Vin turned and caught up with the others.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
“Yes, the rumors you’ve heard are true. The program is predicting a pandemic.”
Rule looked out over the crowd in front of him. What they had found out had naturally flown through the settlement’s rumor mill, but this was the first time it was official. There was a murmur at the announcement. Mothers held their children tighter, and husbands put their arms around their wives. Despite all they had faced, this was truly a frightening scenario.
“It is why we are leaving the Mall. We must get as far away from New York or any city-state as we can. That concentrated a population will be a real threat to us as the sickness burns through those millions of people. We have been planning for a move like this for some time, as you all know, and now we have a real threat that makes all that effort worthwhile. I’m going to let Danielle, our doctor, speak now about the pandemic.”
Rule, Danielle, and Vin were standing on the escalator so they could be seen and heard by everyone. It provided a perfect platform for these all-settlement meetings.
“A pandemic is usually caused by a new virus that is introduced into a population. No one has immunity against it, so if you are exposed, you will probably contract the disease. Generally, for a new illness to blossom into a pandemic it must be easily transmitted. In the recent pandemics we have seen, that means they are airborne. In other words, you can catch it simply by being near someone. It’s like the flu, only it will kill you. The accepted practice in public health is to quarantine an individual with the illness and a circle of people who have come into contact with them. The hope is that isolating the illness so it does not have more people to infect will cause it to die out.
“The problem with the strategy in the City is the density of the population and the difficulty in being able to isolate the exposed patients. Also, depending on the disease, there have been documented incidents of illnesses traveling in the air for some distance. For example, one of the last smallpox outbreaks was in Germany. The first patient was on the first floor, and another patient on the second floor who had not been exposed opened his window so he could smoke. Because of the way the air was circulating, he contracted smallpox without being directly exposed to the patient who had it. Smallpox can also survive outside the host, which is why linens used by a smallpox patient have to be destroyed. So depending on the bug, it can be even more dangerous by being able to survive on surfaces touched by the patient.
“Those who live in the City all breathe air that is recirculated throughout the buildings and touch surfaces that others have touched. So it is going to be almost impossible for them to isolate and contain the illness. That is why we who live out in the zones are less likely to be exposed if we take precautions. From this day forward, there will be no new people allowed to join the settlement. We must quarantine ourselves from the outside world until this pandemic is over. The first step is to move as far away as possible from the City. Remember, anyone outside of our community today has to be treated as someone carrying the illness and a threat to all of us.”
Danielle paused to let that sink in. Again there were murmurs, but no protests or questioning of the decision.
“I will be glad to speak with any of you individually anytime. So feel free to come to me to discuss this. I’m sure some of you have questions, but we need to move along to the evacuation plan. So I’m going to let Vin take the lead now.”
Vin looked at the faces he had come to know so well over the last months. They had been chosen to be part of the settlement, and the careful selection showed in their reactions. There was concern, but no panic. They had learned to work together and had faced a number of different crises—certainly not one like this, but the other challenges had toughened them and made them confident of the settlement’s ability to withstand anything.
“You have been preparing for this bugout since you got the word from Doctor Rule. Traveling in a convoy with all our belongings and everything we need to start up a new community is going to be a challenge. I never seen this many vehicles since the last time I was in the City. No one else in the zones will have either. It will make us a target for anyone needing anything we have. We will be seen as a moving scavenging target of opportunity by gangs and who knows who else. That's why we have the gun trucks and have armored up our buses. We don’t know what we'll be facing out there. I’ve never been more than twenty miles away from the City, even when I was in Resource Control. We’re going close to a hundred miles, so we are going into unknown territory. The city-states don’t care about areas that far away from them, so we will not know what we're going to face as we travel.”
“Where are we going? There've been a lot of rumors but nothing definitive,” Mike, a member of the security team, asked.
“Morgan used the computers in the City to find another old mall. It's ideal for all the reasons this one is—it's got a large parking lot that gives us defensible space arou
nd the building, plus it’s already broken up into stores that we can easily convert into individual family spaces and work areas. So it will be a reasonably simple matter of reorganizing in a similar area.”
“How are we going to get there? The roads around here are falling apart.”
“The best way to travel is by using the old interstates. They remain in reasonably good shape and they’re big enough and straight enough that we can keep the convoy together and defended. The three buses will hold the families and children, with gun trucks and motorcycles protecting them. Peter has modified one of the buses—it has a side ramp that drops down and a top that can be raised up. When we stop at night, we'll make this bus the center of our activities. He’s also designed a cooking stove that can be used to prepare community meals. The gun trucks will provide security.”
“How long will this trip take?” someone asked.
“That is an unknown. It could take only a few days if the roads are good and we don't run into any problems. But it could take much longer, all the vehicles will be loaded to the brim which will put a strain on them. As most of you know they are held together with spit and bailing wire now, the trip is going to push them hard. In addition, we don’t know about gangs or other types of communities out there, so we must prepare for the worst and hope for the best.”
“What if some of us would prefer to take our chances here?”
Vin hesitated for a moment. He had heard rumors that there were a few who did not want to leave a known, well-established community, and he could understand why, so he had decided not to try and convince them to go.
“You know the way we run this community. If you don’t want to stay, you are always welcome to leave. In this case, the opposite is true. If you don’t want to come, then you are welcome to stay. You can have your share of the food, water, and other supplies, but no more. We are taking most of the infrastructure for growing food and gathering rainwater, and all the other hacks that we have created. Those belong to the community. You would have to start from scratch for a lot of it.”
Vin waited to make sure no one had any more questions. There were murmurs, but no one spoke up.
“Good. We will leave the day after tomorrow at dawn. Should you want to stay, let me or one of the other leaders know your decision as soon as possible so we can make the proper arrangements. Unless there are other questions, you all know the work that is left to be done. Listen to the division heads and let’s get to it.”
The crowd broke up, going their separate ways. Vin looked at Rule and Danielle and said, “Well, what do you think? How’d I do?”
“You did fine. Some will stay, and I can’t say as I blame them. I do think it will put them at a much-higher risk of contracting the disease, but who knows, really? We’re making decisions without all the information,” Danielle said.
“We’ll never have all the information we need,” Vin said. “The biggest unknown to me is not the pandemic as much as what we'll run into on the road. This could be jumping out of the frying pan and into the fire. Doctor, you’re the one who predicts the future. What do you think?”
Rule gave him a wry smile. “You’ve got me by the ass.”
The three laughed out loud.
“That is not a very scholarly saying Doctor." Vin said. "Where did you learn that?”
“From you. I thought it was very appropriate, given our situation.”
“Well, with that bit of wisdom, I’ve got about a dozen things I have to take care of,” Vin said, and he bounded down the escalator.
Danielle looked at Rule and said, “Seriously, Brandon, what do you think?”
Rule hesitated, “At best it is a fifty-fifty gamble, but it could be worse. I just don’t know. I do believe if we stay here we will die, so I’ll take fifty-fifty odds. The real determining factor in the equation is Vin.”
Rule and Danielle looked down at him. He was surrounded by men and women asking him questions already.
“Without Vin's leadership, it wouldn’t be close to fifty-fifty,” Rule said.
***
A Resource Control sergeant was half-asleep when he saw a large number of vehicles leaving the old mall. In fact, he had never seen so many vehicles in a convoy in the zones. There were three buses and four gun trucks surrounding them. The buses had plants on top of them, secured with rope. The gun trucks were expertly up-armored with old street signs and other scavenged metal; rifles poked out of every vision slit. One truck had a man standing up in its bed with what appeared to be an automatic weapon. There were even men on motorcycles in front and back of the other vehicles. The convoy went straight to the interstate ramp and disappeared, heading west. He made a note in his mission log and would certainly include it in his situation report later. Idly, he wondered where they were going? Settlements with those kind of resources didn't just up and relocate for no reason. Wonder what they knew that he didn't.
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