Restoration
Page 7
Russell had already put together his own little convoy of four trucks based on what he had gleaned through the local grapevine that Ari’s group was doing. While not an actual mechanic, Russell proudly informed Ari and Gwen that if he could see a schematic of a motor, practically any motor, he could figure out how to operate and maintain it. Homs might have been a ruined city, but there were still plenty of supplies there for the remaining survivors.
Before taking the southeast turn off that would lead to Baghdad, the group spent another night at their camp. They decided that the best course of action was to send out teams of scouts to check out each leg of their route. It would take longer, but with so many vulnerable children and totally untrained or undertrained volunteer defenders in their midst, they decided to err on the side of caution. While the scouts were out on patrol the next day, Joao, Emilio and several others spent the day increasing everyone’s familiarity in weapons use and simple safety precautions. Everything helped. Over the course of their trip, it would become routine for every able bodied survivor, including women and younger teens, to spend part of the ‘scouting’ day training and practicing for potential attack by terrorists.
Their next camp came at the junction of the southeasterly highway from Homs with the direct route to Baghdad. The scouts had already reported that they would be joined by another fairly large cohort of expats and locals from Damascus. Damascus was slowly getting itself organized with well over a thousand identified survivors. Along with five expats, the Damascenes were made up of almost fifty seculars, Christians of various faiths, Yazidis, Kurds, Druze, and Zoroastrians along with a few Muslims from some of the smaller sects. Word had gotten out that Ari’s group was accepting of survivors from any and all faith and cultural backgrounds, so they were primarily attracting people of the same mind set.
Ari expected such a volatile mix of ethnicities and faiths would eventually explode, but so far everyone seemed to be very tolerant of each other’s differences. His best barometer of the group’s feelings was with his daily meeting with his home grown militia. Samir remained a leader, primarily because of his connection with Ari, but other, more experienced men, and a couple women, had stepped forward, and despite their different nationalities and religious backgrounds, they were having no trouble putting group priorities first on their agendas.
Ari, with his nominal adherence to his parent’s religion and his long American background had no trouble with the wild diversity of the expanding community of refugee survivors and he was grateful that that seemed to be the order of the day for almost everyone.
Two of the Damascus survivors had worked in the embassies located in Damascus, one Japanese and one South African. Both survivors had been lower level career diplomats and knew nothing about the virus or about the condition of their own governments. Ari’s group was now pushing past the 300 member mark. At least 30 of them were foreign nationals just wanting to get home, or at least to their homelands. To a person, they were very worried about their friends and families, most having heard little or nothing of their loved ones.
A few days later they stopped shy of Baghdad by several miles. Like Damascus they were greeted by a large band of survivors hoping to join their ranks. As before, they included a number of expats as well as large numbers of ethnic and religious minorities. Due to Baghdad’s greater population, numbers were substantially larger, but many of those waiting to join the group were only interested in going from Baghdad south to the Sunni areas of Arabia. Others wanted to join so they could get to Kuwait or Qatar or Dubai. Few actually wanted to leave the region, they just wanted to relocate to an area where they could live with ethnically similar people.
Also, despite Ari’s expectations, Baghdad was coming together as a community. Years of living on the edge of battles and general havoc had taught the residents well how to reconnect following adversity. The general overview of the new Baghdad community was trending toward democracy conjoined with the Shiite religion. They sent emissaries to Ari’s group to appeal to the Arab Shiite members to join them in Baghdad. The visit with Baghdad’s representatives was cordial, but they made it clear that, even though they would treat non-Shiites well, the government would be Shiite in nature. Some, but not all, of the Arab Shiites, accepted Baghdad’s offer of hospitality and welcome and left the group, mostly those who had recently joined the group.
The Baghdadis that wanted to actually join with Ari and leave the region entirely were mainly seculars, Yazidis, and Christians. There were also, for the first time, five Bahai’s joining the group. None of them knew of the existence of the others until they presented themselves to Magda, Leila, and Gwen for their introduction interviews. After getting their individual permissions to disclose their religions, Magda brought them together for their first meeting with fellow Bahais.
There were also a handful of Zoroastrians, some lifelong and some secret acolytes. All told and not counting the temporary sojourners and expats in their group, the traveling community of misfits, outcasts, outsiders, and dissidents was now over three hundred sixty members, many very young teenagers or even younger. Ari was beginning to despair that even California wouldn’t take in such a large and varied group.
The morning the group was preparing to leave for their final leg south to Kuwait, Ari called the leadership team together again. Tariq, the computer nerd, had been helping Gwen and now Russell, particularly in gathering information from local radio operators and had finally heard from Kuwait. Kuwait was waiting expectantly for their arrival having finally developed an organization of sorts centered around the American military base there.
“We’ve had some interesting news from Kuwait. Kuwait has become a community of expats, some of whom want to join us in leaving the area, and some of whom want to invite us to join them. Evidently, the same is true of Qatar. So far we outnumber them and they are a little skittish about how this will effect their newly formed amiable relationships between their different constituencies. Again, the same appears to be true of Qatar. To make a long story short, they don’t really want us to join them, or at least not all of us. We outnumber both communities so far, so that probably is understandable. That’s the bad news. The good news is they have a cruise ship waiting for us that they will fully equip right down to providing sailors and a navigator from among their expats wanting to get home. All we have to do is agree to take almost a thousand of their expat survivors with us to Australia along with everyone that shows up between now and our departure date. We’ll be gathering them up from all the different expat communities around the area. What do you say?”
There was a rather prolonged silence as the group processed all this information in their sometimes rudimentary English, the language they were in the habit of using for larger group meetings.
Finally, Gwen gave him a big smile and said, “Well Captain, when do we leave?”
For the first time since he could remember, Ari actually laughed. Certainly, relief was part of his elevated mood since finally there appeared to be light at the end of the tunnel. But he couldn’t quite ignore the nagging fear that no one would want this group of courageous men, women, and children whose bond had grown and strengthened over the last several weeks of anxiety coupled with hope.
Summary
Just a little over five months ago, when the pandemic struck, I was comfortably settling into my second year of teaching fifth graders at an elementary school in Orange County, California. Even though I was 23 at the time, I was still new to California, having just moved there after I graduated from college in Georgia, so I didn’t actually see my family die in front of me. It was all sort of theoretical to me, at least at first. Maybe that was why I could hold it together enough to help my fellow survivors find each other and then plan a group exit strategy from the Los Angeles Metro area that was rapidly becoming uninhabitable due to the millions of victims of The Sickness. By the way, my name is Robert Caldwell, Bobby to my friends which, I guess, is pretty much everyone lately since almost eve
rybody calls me that.
About 3,200 of us moved to San Luis Obispo (SLO) where we set up our settlement. Thanks to a bunch of computer savvy teenagers, we’ve been able to maintain ties with a lot of communities around the country and the world. I’m told by people who are better at math and statistics than I am, that overall there are about 1,500,000 people left in organized communities of one kind or another, and about half a million others are probably out there but that we’ve lost contact with. That amounts to about 1 survivor for every 4,000 to 5,000 deaths. In California, we now have about twenty organized communities and around 9,000 survivors. There are settlements in every state and Canadian province, some of which are very small. Together, we have about 90,000 people in what was once the United States and Canada. Worldwide, there are about half a million people in around 500 communities that have agreed to participate in a loosely formed Coalition. The Coalition is held together by very little other than necessity, but we’ve got a plan to help us stabilize and get better organized. By working together, we’ve been able to maintain basic utilities in each of our Coalition Communities even though we average less than 1,000 residents per community. We’re still getting new member communities, but most of the newer communities have only around 100 or so residents, and many times, as soon as they join the Coalition, they disband, and their residents move on to larger communities. We suspect that in the coming months some of our other smaller communities will also merge together or get absorbed by larger ones, voluntarily of course. We don’t force people to do anything, except maybe to stop killing and hurting each other, and then only in the Coalition Communities. We just don’t have the population to do much more than that.
Our LA Metro survivors mostly relocated to San Luis Obispo and moved to quickly get settled in. After we got a handle on keeping the electricity and water running here in SLO, we helped some of the survivor groups around us do the same thing. Now, even though it’s only been a little less than half a year, we’ve got all sorts of things going on. Collectively, we restarted a Coalition medical school, and a fairly decent higher education system, complete with a few universities, colleges, community colleges, and vocational training schools, all with small student bodies on big fancy campuses. There are elementary, middle, and high schools set up in most communities, and almost everyone now has electricity, water, mail, and phone service, including cell phones. We’re reinventing a transportation and food distribution system to take care of our widely spread out populations. The communities pooled their talent and resources and were soon busy training and retraining people to be productive in a new world where money meant nothing, and everybody was a virtual millionaire, at least as far as possessions were concerned. Retraining adults is really necessary now that so many former professions are obsolete. Who needs real estate sales people when over 99% of housing is empty? And now that money is worthless, why have banks? So lots of people are back in school learning how to do new things.
More and more, I’m coming to think of the Coalition as just a medium sized city that has neighborhoods all over the world.
As for the pandemic, based on the information the government got out to us before everyone died and what we’ve been able to learn on our own, someone, possibly in south Asia, developed and accidentally, at least at first, released a human modified virus that was virtually 100% lethal. Once in the air, it was spread by both intentional and inadvertent human and animal contact. No quarantine measures were effective and within a week or so, everyone, everywhere, was dead; everyone, that is, except for the very few naturally immune survivors. Most of the survivors had limited, if any, symptoms. Some of us remember having headaches, but who wouldn’t have a headache in the midst of everything that was going on around us. Some of us were sick to our stomachs, but, again, who wouldn’t have a queasy stomach given the circumstances.
Most of us woke up the day after everyone around us died and wondered why we hadn’t died along with our families and friends. Some of us took a few days to face the new world around us, but a few managed to pull themselves together faster than others. As I was coming to grips with my own survival, and the horrific events taking place around me, there was a knock at my front door. Expecting to find police or emergency responders, I opened the door to see two little brothers instead. Quickly realizing they were from my elementary school, I learned they had found me by using a map to my apartment that I’d left on the front door of the school office before I left for home where I expected to die like everyone else.
After we spent the morning exploring in my neighborhood, Jerry, Charlie and I decided to go to the hospital just down the hill from my condo. Kevin Turner, an ambulance driver who had spent the night there after having his ambulance blocked in at the emergency room receiving dock had the idea to start his siren to attract attention and, maybe, get some help. The boys and I had just parked my car up the street from the hospital when the siren started up. Over the next few hours, a few of us gathered at the hospital and came up with a plan. We used sirens and searchlights to get attention from scattered individuals all over the area, first in north Orange County, and soon, over the entire LA Metro area which had something like 10 or 15 million people. In the midst of our group doing whatever we could think of to get the attention of other survivors, Todd, our teenaged computer whiz used social media to make contacts all over the world to let them know what we were doing, and most of them found similar ways to get people in their areas together.
For us, electricity hung on for a few days, just long enough for our surviving electricians to find a way to keep it up and running in our new home in SLO. Local communities helped each other and soon most of the settlements had basic utilities. In many places the lights never went off at all. Being a very densely populated area, we were able to find over three thousand survivors in the Los Angeles Metro area. We soon discovered we had teachers, doctors, engineers, and lots of people willing to help us put everything together. It was just a case of finding each other. When people lose all the underpinnings of their own personal lives, they tend to be pull together to try new things, at least the do after the initial shock wears off. Anyway, that’s is my current theory. Contrary to what many of us were expecting, ordinary people possess a great deal of resilience and good will. They just needed a plan, and collectively we’re coming up with one. It’s still a work in progress, but now we have a lot of people helping flesh it out, and step-by-step, it’s starting to make sense.
In the beginning, I found myself the leader of our little group in Orange County, and soon, I became the leader in the LA Metro area. That wasn’t a universally acclaimed idea. I had a rather persistent detractor named George. Everything George did to make me look bad seemed to boomerang back on him, making me look even better. During a week of planning with communities from around the world, George had a really public meltdown, and he and a couple of his friends verbally attacked me in front of television cameras that we had just started using again. When I was shot by a sniper later that day, everyone sort of assumed it was George and his friends who had done it. Fortunately for him, he and his two supporters fled to the Oklahoma Panhandle. Panhandle was one of the organized communities that didn’t like the way we were doing things in the Coalition, as we now call our governing framework, so they didn’t join.
While I was unconscious from the bullet grazing my head, I was selected to be the Executive Director of the Coalition of Communities, our group of around 500 communities who have signed onto a list of Rights and Responsibilities for citizens and their communities. The old saw about not missing meetings evidently still applies. The Coalition Executive Director, my new title, is essentially the equivalent of ‘Valet to the World’. I run meetings, make recommendations, and make sure we follow up on getting things done. I was promised I wouldn’t have to travel or make many decisions. Hah!
I accepted with the proviso that I could do my work from SLO and that I didn’t have to travel, or, at least, not very much. It turns out that, right in
the middle of all the chaos and loss, I discovered that I really liked having my own family. Because there were lots of orphans, many of the adult survivors stepped up to be guardians for the children who survived. That’s how Jerry and Charlie, the brothers who attended the school where I taught, came to live with me. They found me after seeing the note I left at my school the day everyone died. They had been home when their parents died right in front of them, and the next morning after repeatedly calling 911 and knocking on neighbors’ doors, they did the only thing they could think to do: they got dressed and went to school. Of course, there was no one there, but they saw my note with a map to my apartment on the front door of the school office.
After I was shot, Kevin Turner, the guy who started us all off by turning on his ambulance siren, came to live with us at Calloway House on the university campus. Calloway House is a sort of small residential hotel where I was asked to live when I became the leader of SLO, and later, the Executive Director of the Coalition. Kevin had adopted a couple of kids himself. He was an ambulance-driving first responder and found a baby crawling around the parking lot at the small hospital soon after his ambulance was trapped. No one was ever able to discover where she came from which means we didn’t know her real name, so Kevin named her Dinah. Later, he found a seven-year old boy named Chad. Kevin was the first person Chad had seen since everyone died, and Chad didn’t want to leave his side, so Chad joined Kevin’s family. When Kevin moved in, we became a family of six. I love having a family. Growing up, most of the time it was just my mom and me.