He wandered the empty concession store, filling his shopping-cart. He piled it high with all the luxuries that made his days bearable, Bollinger champagne, and Beluga caviar, not that he could not normally afford it, he ate and drank it most days, but it would taste even more delicious now due to the fact that he had stolen it.
He heard a noise and he went for his pistol tucked in the front of his pants, he froze, listening for more sounds, he knew instinctively that it wasn’t an army patrol. So it must be one of the plague carriers, he withdrew his pistol, he’d have no hesitation in shooting them dead if he had to, carrier or not, he wasn’t going to take a chance. It’s not as if he hadn’t ever killed anyone before. He’d lost count of how many ‘hits’ he’d done during his professional career. He’d killed for the first time at thirteen. A pretty girl, who lived on his block and had befriended him, wanting someone to call a friend. They spent most of that summer together, until one day he’d misread the signs and had inexpertly groped her. She screeched like a banshee, and in an effort to stop the sound he had covered her mouth, but her panic had gotten worse until he had dragged her screaming over to a water-filled barrel, and pushed her face into it. Her thrashing around had aroused him, especially as she went limp, he knew she was dead and that he had killed her. He had covered his tracks, gone home, and played the innocent when questioned, even helpfully joined in the hunt for her. He felt nothing for her. He displayed no emotion, yet he wasn’t a sociopath, because once retelling the story to a psychiatrist he went on to say that, he’d cried when a hit-and-run driver killed his beloved dog. Therefore, proving he was capable of feelings. Strong feelings as it turned out, of hatred in particular, as he’d tracked down the driver and ran him over. In the driver’s own car, no less - a nice touch of poetic justice, he thought. This action had made him one of the family’s youngest ever foot soldiers.
No, he managed to square away a ‘hit’ as another business deal and not think about his catholic upbringing and the commandment, ‘thou shall not kill’. He still believed in God, and supposed he would have to answer for his misdeeds when he reached the pearly gates, but that would not be happening for a long time. He planned to repent before the end, for the church loved a sinner, and boy, had he sinned. No, he’d make it right, before his time was up. He chose not to think about it too much, as his demise was a long way off, unlike this motherfucker creeping up on him, either to attack him, or at the very least suck in his clean air and replace it with his polluted contagious breath.
He abandoned his shopping-cart, he could make another trip later and crept to the store doorway, he could see his private elevator a few yards away. Tantalizingly close but blocked by a crowd of plague carrying victims. He held his pocket-handkerchief to his nose, wondering how far the germs could carry on the air. He had to get to the elevator and fast, but the man, woman and two children, seemed in no hurry to leave the foyer, no doubt hiding from the troops. The woman caught his eye, and smiled gently, “Oh, Hi,” she realized she had startled him, and smiled reassuringly. “Sir, can you please help us?”
He calmly raised his pistol and shot her between the eyes, she fell back into the man’s arms. The kids screamed and he shot them too, but the man knocked the gun from his hand. Alvin Borelli rushed to his elevator, where he fumbled with the key. The man lunged at him with hate-filled eyes. Alvin neatly sidestepped the man, sending him crashing into the wall, Alvin karate-chopped him across the throat, and the man slid down the wall choking with a broken larynx. Alvin picked up his pistol, when more people poured in through the broken doors attracted by the commotion of the gunshots and screaming.
He fired into the crowd hitting two or three, he heard the private elevator doors swish smoothly open behind him and he neatly stepped back into the comfort of his private sanctum, when the choking man on the floor grabbed his legs. He quickly shot him in the arm and the limb withdrew. But as the doors closed again a multitude of hands held them open. He fired rapidly until finally, thankfully, the doors hissed closed, and he breathed the biggest sigh of relief he could remember.
He wondered about the Bubonic Plague carriers and suspected that some germs had probably gotten into the elevator with him so he held his breath. It was only a minute to his destination he could manage that. No problem, he thought, when the elevator juddered to a halt and the lights dimmed and then finally, terrifyingly, went out.
CHAPTER 20
03:45 AM
Luke could only wonder about the effect that no power and total darkness would have. He wasn’t concerned for the half-crazed and dying; but for the healthy who’d decided to wait out the pandemic in the modicum of comfort that their own homes provided. If they had enough food, then there was no reason to venture outside, where looters might attack them, or make contact with the plague carriers unnecessarily. If they sat it out for a week, it would’ve passed over and by which time the government would have arranged for their evacuation.
Now their food would spoil and the air conditioning units would be inoperable, and the present heat wave would surely drive them outside. And that, of course, Luke realized, was the reason, to draw the survivors outside, where they'd be rounded-up and transported to the refugee camps, or now, more likely executed on the street.
He shuddered and thought of the infirm and elderly fumbling their way around their homes disorientated by the darkness, making their own homes potential death traps.
He watched the power grids extinguishing block-by-block towards them, and then pass behind them blinking out into the horizon leaving South Florida in total darkness.
He and Sophie agreed that the Government was not going to rescue them and were more likely to destroy them. Sophie said, “They told me at the President's compound that they were sending up spy-planes and drones, and were re-positioning our satellites.
Luke nodded. “We know that the roads, ports and coastlines are being watched for outward movement, maybe are chances are better if we head inland and go up the middle.”
“Speed is essential,” she said. “Before they swamp the area.”
“There’s a small landing strip nearby, I saw it before the lights went out. If we fly central and low, we might just make it.”
“What about radar?” Sophie said.
“That’s the beauty of it; I did a news story once about drug running, if you stay low and away from major airports, you can fly undetected.”
Sophie brightened considerably. “You can fly?” she asked.
“Well, I landed a jumbo jet earlier,” he smirked at his recent escapades involving the Boeing 777.
On any other day she would have laughed out loud, thinking it was some sort of cheesy pick-up line, pretending to be a glamorous airline pilot, but tonight she took him at his word. “That’s good -” but she noticed by his expression that it was not. “What’s the problem?”
“I landed one - I’ve never taken off or flown one. But, hey, how hard can it be?”
She eyed him suspiciously, and then laughed. “What the hell!”
“Come on,” Luke said. “We need to keep moving.”
__________
Luke and Sophie clattered down the unlit internal staircase. It would take a long time to make the descent. Sophie said. “Diseases have wiped out civilizations before you know? You must remember that from school?”
“Remind me,” he said.
“When Cortes and the Spanish invaders landed on the shores of Mexico in 1519 it was the heart of the Aztec Empire. An Empire numbering between five and ten million people. Within the year the Aztecs rose up in rebellion and the heavily outnumbered Spanish fled, leaving the bodies of their dead behind – along with smallpox.”
They descended two more flights of stairs, the heat sapping their strength.
“During Cortes’s absence,” she continued. “The smallpox virus decimated the Aztec population and when he returned in 1521 he found the Aztec army in ruins, the remaining soldiers were too weak to fight and were easily defeated. It
was claimed that the Spaniards could not walk through the streets without stepping on the bodies of smallpox victims.”
“And I don’t have to tell you what happened to the Incas.” She smiled.
“Remind me. . . .”
She looked at him sideways. “Well, suffice to say, the Inca Empire with a population of between six and twelve million suffered an even more devastating ending where smallpox annihilated up to ninety percent of their society.”
Luke’s shirt stuck to him with sweat, he tugged at it to no avail.
“And I don’t need to tell you about the Native Americans,” she said.
He scrunched his face, and then made a carry on gesture with his hands. She stared at him incredulously.
“Remind me,” he said flatly.
She stopped dead, and regarded him balefully. “Didn’t you go to school?”
“Sometimes.”
She sighed heavily, and descended the stairs. “The combined Native-American nations were thought to be around ten million strong when the Europeans arrived from the Old World. The Native-Americans’ only needed to see the white man before succumbing to the disease. It's believed that a virus from the Old World had decimated ninety to ninety-five percent of the New World. Smallpox had been single-handedly responsible for killing nearly all the native inhabitants of the Americas.”
“Maaan, I didn’t know – I mean, I forgot.” He quickly corrected.
“The invading Europeans realized what had happened and decided to speed up their demise; the Natives gave them food and the settlers traded smallpox-infected blankets.”
“Not our finest hour,” Luke agreed.
“It was possibly the world’s first attempt at ethnic cleansing.”
“And germ warfare.”
“That’s precisely what happened next - the Native-Americans figured out that the white man had deliberately given them this awful contagion and decided to repay the betrayal. They would creep into town under the cover of darkness, and wipe their saliva around door-handles, they even put infected bodies into the town’s water supply.”
As they neared the bottom of the building their pace quickened. “During the 20th century it was estimated that smallpox was responsible for between three to five hundred million deaths.”
“Man, this is incredible. I could do a news item on -” He stopped as he remembered that there would be no item as there was no longer a news station.
Sophie noticed and continued her story hoping to distract him. “As recent as 1967 the World Health Organization calculated fifteen million people contracted the disease and over two million died in that one year alone.”
“But there’s a cure now, right?”
“Yes, after a succession of successful vaccination campaigns the WHO certified the eradication of smallpox in December 1979. To this day smallpox is the only human infectious disease to have been completely eradicated.”
“So, why ain’t the government learned from history and prepared for this?”
“Beats me. I guess they leave it to the Center for Disease Control to handle. They can deal with the odd local pocket of exotic disease; but nothing on this scale.”
“Do you think the government has grasped the enormity of the problem?”
“Doesn’t look that way. But only a complete fool would treat the plague lightly.”
__________
Hamilton Parker stretched out on the luxurious king-sized bed in his opulent White House bedroom. He rolled onto his side and stared down at the cute young, blonde lying next to him. She was cute all right - and young. Too young and in all probability could land him in jail.
Pity Washington wasn’t in Alabama then she’d have been eligible to have been married five years ago. They only had to be twelve or was it fourteen to marry in Alabama, or did they have to be cousins? He could never get his head around the South and their peculiar notions and as for the way they clung onto the past. ‘The South would rise again’ they liked to toot. The hell it will, that way of life ended with the conclusion of the civil war. A war that’d ended a hundred and fifty years ago. For Christ’s sake, get over it.
The cute blonde-haired teenager stirred, saw him and smiled. She gazed around the vast bedroom seeing it properly for the first time. “Whoa! Your bedroom’s bigger that my mom’s trailer.”
“Well, you won’t be going back there anytime soon, that’s for sure.”
“Does this make me the first lady?”
“You’re my first lady, baby.” He smiled at her. She’d been his mistress for a few months now, extremely hush-hush obviously. Ever since he saw her center-spread in April’s addition of Playboy, he was smitten. She had an air of innocence about her, a naivety that simply poured from the page. He had to have her, and what Hamilton wanted, Hamilton got. Their affair had to be discreet, very discreet, even more so since becoming President.
She giggled and slid her hand down his flat stomach and he felt himself stirring again. She did things to him the first lady wouldn’t, couldn’t, perhaps he even shouldn’t. Things he wouldn’t dream to suggest. No, Miss April had been the best thing that had happened to him. Talk about bad timing. Any when else he could have set her up in an apartment, she would have wanted for nothing, and no one would be the wiser, but now all eyes were upon him. Luckily, he had a gang of loyal friends from college days that would act as decoys, to throw the press off his trail.
She kissed around his neck, and then moved down his chest, “Thanks for getting me and mom out of Miami.”
“You’re welcome, honey.”
“I was so scared. I thought we would get the plague if we stayed much longer.”
“Think nothing of it. You’re safe now. Besides, what’s the point of being the President if you can’t pull a few strings?”
“You’re the best, Hammy,” she said and giggled as her hand slid further down his body followed by her head.
“Oh boy. . . .”
__________
Luke and Sophie eventually made it to the bottom of the thirty stories exhausted and panting for breath. Both glad to be out in the fresh air for what it was worth. It was still swelteringly hot, and they were drenched in sweat.
He heard an engine in the distance of a car travelling at great speed, he ushered Sophie back further into the foyer. Moments later a dark green Cadillac with a solitary passenger zoomed past, trying to put as much distance between him and the god-awful pestilence behind. They heard loud rock music blaring from his open window, and watched as the tail-lights disappeared down the street, followed by the softening of the drumbeat.
Luke stepped forward to continue their journey, but Sophie held him back. “Wait!” Luke craned his neck, and sure enough heard in the distance the rumbling of a military vehicle. They crouched back into the foyer as the heavily armed Humvee flashed past, and moments later they heard gunfire, the squeal of tires and subsequent crash.
CHAPTER 21
DAY THREE
SUNDAY JULY 3rd
06:45 AM
“Gentlemen,” President Hamilton Parker appeared on the screens in the war room via video-link. The gathered Chiefs of Staff looked surprised by the President’s disheveled appearance, he’d taken his jacket off and his tie hung loose. “We’re fighting a losing battle in Florida . . . I’m sure you’ve all got your own sources and know this to be true. As fast as we catch one darkie ten more take their place. We cannot let any get out, I cannot stress this enough, we’ve all seen the diagrams and have read the forecasted predictions, well, I can tell you that they were wildly underestimated,” The Chiefs of Staff absorbed this news with horror-stricken faces, before the President continued. “We have less than twenty four-hours to save ourselves.”
“What about Florida?” Quinn Martell asked.
“Florida’s gone,” the President replied as easily as if writing off a lost sock.
The Joint Chiefs of Staff gasped their disbelief.
“I know it sounds callous, but we now have to concentra
te on the rest of the country, and I can assure you at this moment in time OUR future is not certain.” He paused for the notion to sink in.
“My god . . .” exclaimed Vice Admiral Reed.
“It is time for bold action and I have a plan as a last resort. But if any of you can think of anything to stop the fugitives heading north let’s hear it now.” No one spoke. “This is the problem we face, we’re trying to police fifteen hundred miles of freeway, another ten thousand miles of highway, probably double that including the other streets, and tracks and what have you. The navy is trying to cope with seventeen hundred miles of coastline and on top of that in the middle there are two million acres of the Everglades, and don’t get me started on the interconnecting lakes, rivers and waterways.”
“So,” he said, taking a breath. “As you can see, the problem is enormous and frankly, nigh on impossible to solve.”
“But aren’t the victims dying off, won’t that be the end of the problem?” said the vice admiral.
“Sure, they’re dying in their hundreds of thousands, which causes another problem, all those bodies are infected and need disposing of. We’re burning the corpses as fast as we can, but it’ll take months to clear the back-log, and then we’ve got those goddamn rats, spreading the disease around further. The survivors will be minimal, but we still don’t know if they’re incubating the disease and will succumb later, or that they are carriers, and will infect the rest of us.”
Quinn said; “But they could be fine, healthy human beings?”
“Well, I for one, am not willing to find out.”
“What are you suggesting?”
The President smiled weakly. “You’re not going to like it . . .”
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