The Island - Part 1
Title Page
Part 1
Prologue
Chapter I - Breaking Points
Chapter II - Little Things
Chapter III - Elsie and Angel
Chapter IV - The Ride
Chapter V - Portsmouth
The Island
Part 1
Michael Stark
SMASHWORDS EDITION
PUBLISHED BY: Michael Stark on Smashwords
The Island - Part 1
Copyright © 2012 by Michael Stark
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced without the author’s written permission, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, brands, media, and incidents are either the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously.
A few notes and apologies:
This is the first installment of The Island. Parts of this story have been in my mind for years. Bits of it rose during story time, which at my house, was bedtime with kids in pajamas and Dad trying to figure out what the night’s adventure would be. Usually that path took us somewhere with dragons, flowers, and tried to end on a positive note so they could go to sleep understanding why even ugly flowers need attention. The rest has been up there banging around for a long time, some of it inspired by an old TV show I used to watch as a kid. I’m dating myself somewhat here, but The Land of the Giants provided not only inspiration for some elements, but fueled a lifelong blend of mind walks.
When it came time to sit down and write it, the overall waffling point proved not to be the story itself, but the beginning. I didn’t like starting in fantasy land. We all venture off into fantasy at times, but I needed a connection to reality. For me, that connection is a rock. Upon it are carved mysterious symbols no one has yet been able to translate. Legend holds that embedded in the lines and figures are directions for opening the Gates to the Underworld. I’ve seen the rock, visited it a time or two. You will too if you make it far enough in the series.
I also need to make some apologies in advance. The island depicted in this book is real. The descriptions in terms of basic geography are accurate enough. I haven’t been since the hurricanes went through a few years ago, so I don’t know what havoc the storms may have wreaked. The ghost town at the northern end does exist. The fishing shacks at the southern end exist. In between are miles of open beach, great fishing and absolutely wonderful camping. If you go, take everything you need. There are no stores, no real roads, no houses, and no electricity. The rule to obey is simple. If you don’t take it, you don’t have it.
The more detailed descriptions, especially of the town, well, they’re not so accurate. In fact, the only claim to accuracy is that the buildings exist. Beyond that, I invented most of it. Don’t rely on the story to provide a detailed tour of the old village. It doesn’t. To those folks who have been there and feel offended, my apologies.
And now to dedications:
To Samantha, Ashley, Emily, Aleah and Kaleigh - the angels who gave me reason to tell stories at bedtime.
And to Julie who patiently suffers through questions posed by an idiot.
MS
Prologue
I’m not a doctor. All I can relate is what I heard, saw, and felt in the final days. Some of it came from verifiable news sources, some from rumor, some second hand. My intent is not to create the defining document that traces the course of a disease, of a nation, even a world falling apart. I am simply telling my part in it.
The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta marked the month of December as the point where the disease mutated and crossed the threshold of human infection. At a time when people were scurrying through wintry streets farther north, toting packages and planning holiday dinners, the combination of a spring-like climate and dreadful living conditions in Central Mexico had been busy giving birth to a monster. The warm weather conceived the beast. The millions strolling through the streets gave it life.
It came to my attention in the middle of March, in a story that garnered maybe ten seconds on the radio I kept in the back of my shop. The day the story broke was cold and blustery. Dark clouds raced overhead, driven by an icy wind that whipped down out of the mountains to the north. Rain and sleet took turns spattering against the tin roof, the first in a gentle tick-tock that would have been soothing if it hadn’t been for the wind rattling the windows in their frames. When the ice came to play though, the sound turned hard and brittle, like marbles spilled across a tile floor.
The announcer seemed more interested in the fact that authorities had first believed the death to be a homicide as the corpse was so bloodied and swollen it appeared the man had been beaten to death. After a dramatic pause, he continued with a "Not So!" and relayed that a medical examiner, whose name I cannot remember, had indicated he believed the cause of death to be a type of hemorrhagic fever - potentially a form of Hantavirus.
Case closed.
Hantavirus, we knew. The disease had been exposed to western science during the Korean War. It had proven itself dangerous at times, deadly at others, but containable. I and the rest of the world moved on, focusing on things closer and more important, like a global economy that still faltered and only seemed to make progress in fitful steps, like the deal of the day on QVC, like which silly celebrity had shown the world her panties again or which had been indicted on a drug charge. To put it bluntly, not many noticed, and even fewer cared.
Over the next six weeks, the disease popped up in the news again and again, claiming victim after victim. By May, no one ignored it. The stories hit the headlines with increasing frequency, with newscasts ticking off names of the dead on a daily basis. The CDC put together a team and shuttled it down at the request of the Mexican government in hopes of containing an infection that still had no official name. A newspaper in Mexico City had coined the term La Fiebre, which in English translated simply as The Fever.
The name stuck. While the medical examiner had initially leaned towards Hantavirus as the agent, rumors exploded not just whispering, but screaming more sinister names in that particular family of pathogens -- words like Marburg and Ebola. The reality, as the world would eventually discover, belonged in the box marked none of the above. The virus emerging from Mexico behaved like nothing science had ever seen, proving incredibly aggressive in the wild and mutating so rapidly in captivity that potential cures fell useless before they were ever refined. The disease promoted itself at first as a blood-borne agent. Somewhere along a relatively short timeline, however, the virus grew wings and learned to fly. Once airborne, infection rates soared as well, leaving streets eerily empty as residents fled the capital and hospitals rapidly filling with those who remained.
Even then, the rest of the world trundled on, paying bills, going to work, casting cautious gazes south, but mostly ignoring the situation. After all, the problem was in another country and most still saw that as separate and containable.
Everyone felt sorry for them. The charities picked up steam with people donating to relief efforts everywhere as if the global consciousness recognized the threat and needed to act. Since it couldn’t address the disease directly, the urge vented itself in the organizations that sent doctors, nurses, and medicines.
Oddly enough, tourism didn’t suffer much for a while. Mexico City had never been the greatest of vacation spots anyway. Aside from a couple of world class museums, the city lacked the pristine beaches of Cozumel and Cancun, the night life of Acapulco, or the sterile beauty and lazy villages of the western coastline. Abject poverty lingered a few streets away from glittering ric
hes in the capital as it did in many Mexican cities. The difference was a lack of insulation. Vacationers could spend their entire holiday in a city like Cozumel, playing in the narrow stretch of white sandy beaches and glittering streets filled with shops, restaurants, and hotels, without ever feeling the need to venture back into the poorer sections. Not so in the capital. With tourist destinations spread throughout the city, simply moving between them exposed visitors to poverty-stricken neighborhoods, horrible pollution, and one of the densest concentrations of humanity on the planet. Even tour guides recommended the capital be taken in small doses with vacation days partitioned between the city itself and outlying communities.
June dawned hot and sticky enough to make the thought of summer scary. Along with the heat came a rising cloud of voices calling for the closing of the border. Like many debates in the US, that one fell along political lines. Conservatives supported the idea, but their liberal minded critics pointed out the fact that, as yet, no one outside of Mexico had shown symptoms of the disease. The war of words escalated during the summer with the left crying racism and bigotry while those on the right rolled their eyes at people willing to risk the lives of millions simply because the disease had originated in another culture.
Still, the fight expressed itself mostly in words at that point. Even though the medical community had started talking in epidemic and pandemic terms, The Fever was still largely seen as a disease relegated to somewhere else.
By all accounts, the virus went global the last week of July. A Swedish national named Erika Jorgensen boarded a US Airways MD-88 on a return trip to Europe after a tour of Mexico. Newly married, Erika and her American husband, Chris Matheson, had booked a honeymoon that began on the Baja side at Ensenada and ended at the Mayan ruins on the Yucatan peninsula. They spent a month in the country, visiting a host of cities on a cross-country jaunt between their arrival and departure. Witnesses aboard the plane later described her as flushed and appearing feverish with a constant cough.
Jorgensen and Matheson changed planes in Atlanta and after a three hour layover, flew to New York City where they took a shuttle bus to a Marriot. They returned to the airport the following morning for a 7 a.m. flight to London where they again changed planes and flew to Stockholm to visit her parents. Two days later, Jorgensen checked into a local hospital. She died twenty-two hours later, her symptoms clinically identical to those suffering from The Fever in Mexico. Matheson never made it home to Kansas. Within a week, his fever had climbed to 105. He died the following day, nearly 8000 miles from the laid back mid-Western town where he had been raised.
News outlets played hard on the fact that Jorgensen hadn’t even had time to change her last name, highlighting the speed at which the disease could kill.
Officials played down the threat of infection at first. A tally of the flight rosters showed that on her flights alone, Jorgensen came in contact with more than eight hundred people. Even afterward, with hindsight applied in microscopic detail, no one attempted an official estimate on the total number the pair could have infected in their journey as the air terminals they used processed tens of thousands in the two day travel period.
The next few weeks saw the disease explode, both in Mexico and around the world. At the point where Jorgensen had left, fewer than five hundred had perished and all of them south of the US border. Over the next two months, nearly seven thousand more would die.
Mexico no longer bore the stigma of the infected on its own. Adding to the death toll were 938 people spread among fifteen different countries and four continents. Profiles of Jorgensen presented a pretty twenty-three-year-old blonde who spoke halting English in a soft and shy voice. Nothing about her gave clue to the fact that she would become a modern day version of Typhoid Mary. Nothing spotlighted the reality that Jorgensen would serve as the single vector linking not just countries, but continents, a vector through which more than two-thirds of the world’s population would eventually cease to exist.
The news reports featured doctor after doctor, official after official. Some guessed at contagion rates as high as eighty percent, others as low as forty. Estimated mortality rates swung widely as well. In more developed countries with good hospitals and trained staffs, the death rate fell to as low as twenty-six percent. Where the quality of care suffered, so did the patients. A mortality rate of eighty percent was reported from East Africa. As it had in Mexico, the disease once freed, ran rampant. Unlike Mexico, it had found a host of billions. What no one understood was that we would all soon have the same basic quality of care regardless of the country we called home.
Emergency rooms, hospitals, and doctor’s offices could only render effective care when the bulk of the population remained healthy. Once the beds filled, the halls filled, and when they were full, patients were lined outside, first on portable cots and finally turned away and sent home. Care became, at best, triage.
I finally gave up on the radio. The voices offered only gloom and doom. I wanted something that fit the mood of a few weeks sailing from port to port and camping on deserted islands. I wanted music with the feel-good flair of Jimmy Buffet bumming around the Bahamas in his flowered shirt and mirrored sunglasses, something that made me think of rum and fruit blended together in a tall, icy glass with a little umbrella sticking out of the top. The voices were clamoring for me to take notice when all I really wanted was to escape.
I knew people were scared. What I didn’t know was that, by then, it was too late. The worst was yet to come and the disease only the beginning.
Chapter I - Breaking Points
My name is William Hill. I’m forty-two. Like most people, I have a middle name. I’ve never cared for it though. My father insisted on William as it’s something of a family name. Look back along my line and for as many generations as there are records, you’ll find a William tucked away somewhere. When it comes to the moniker sitting in the middle, well, he liked history and folk heroes. The day might come when I’ll shoot an apple off my son’s head and live up to the legend. I doubt it though, seeing as how I’m about as accurate with a bow and arrow as a politician is with the truth.
This is the part of the story where you get to suffer. It’s not that I want you grimacing while you work your way through. The fact is though, what follows couldn’t have happened without the background. So that’s where we’re going.
I have no brothers or sisters, a fact I attribute to my father having celebrated his thirty-eighth birthday three days before I came into the world. He, of course, laid the blame at my feet for the lack of siblings, joking that after two years with me, he and Mom both swore off ever having another. I believed the story for a while, up to the point where I could put thirty-eight and eighteen together and realized how old he’d be at graduation.
At some point along the line, came the understanding that I hadn’t exactly been planned either. All joking aside, I guess one accident proved enough for both of them.
My Dad could do anything. That’s not stretching the truth, nor is it a son’s blind adoration. Put anything broken in front of him, he could fix it. Need a new roof? He could lay the shingles as good as the handyman in the phone book. He’d never attended college and didn’t even make it out of high school. Yet the man could quote Shakespeare and work differential equations. He carried a legendary status in the neighborhood. People brought him everything from personal problems to busted TV’s and somehow, everyone went home with a smile. He fixed things for everyone. Everyone that is, except me.
I can’t remember when he started helping rather than doing. That’s how far back he insisted I think on the problem and work at it before he’d step in. Most of the time, I felt like a dolt, like God had put something in his head that he’d mistakenly left out of mine.
Sometimes, I actually hated him for it. I could go to any other kid’s house, see him slip a chain on his bike or break some toy, and watch his father waddle out to fix it for him. My Dad would hand me a wrench or a screwdriver or whatever tool he th
ought would do the job and then leave me standing while he headed off to his own projects. I learned quickly to at least attempt the fix myself before tracking him down. He never resisted or said anything when I did, but watching him work so easily through what had kept me baffled, left me feeling low enough on the intelligence ladder that it seemed I had to look up to see double digits.
Then came the Saturdays and weekends, the summers that he decided I could help him on his projects. I can’t remember more miserable days. They lasted from breakfast to dinner, endlessly long days when other kids played, swam, watched TV, and generally acted their age. Instead, I mixed concrete or tore down a starter motor to change the bushings or framed in walls for a new addition on someone’s house. The laundry list of projects had no end. When he checked one off, he started another and took his favorite assistant along for the ride. I didn’t realize at the time that the work boiled down to Dad’s way of teaching me to be a man. Even if I had, I’m sure the days would have sucked just as bad.
I also didn’t understand the time involved a higher concept, one that skirted his disdain for most social structures. John Walker Hill loved people, but carried a deep and undying dislike not so much of society, but how it functioned. He saw most people as encircled by technology and products they were taught to use, rather than understand. More than once I heard him express the idea that generation by generation we were being dumbed down to a level where we existed like vultures, feeding off a few bright minds without ever learning to exercise our own. The value of that lesson didn’t make itself apparent until much later in life. When I finally understood what he had given me in those years, what had been passed from father to son, I should have thanked him. I never had the chance. By then, we stood at odds on another subject, one too emotional to ignore.
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