Phil sighed in frustration.
"Just . . . give me eighteen aspirin," he huffed bitterly.
"I'll buy the golf cart for five hundred dollars right now," said Watson.
Phil quickly and hopefully shifted gears.
"Are you kidding? I won't take a penny under three thousand!"
Five minutes of intense haggling later, he finally sold the golf cart to Sergeant Emery Watson for one thousand dollars even. Then he bought that pound of coffee plus a bottle of 100 aspirin with the original seal intact, leaving $686.50 in his account. Watson pulled the doctor's account sheet and his own out of their plastic sheaves and, comparing the two, carefully made the changes with an ink pen.
"I certify that these alterations are true upon pain of death, so help me God." he said, and signed his name next to the entry.
"I witness that these alterations are true upon pain of death, so help me God," said Private Mason, and signed his name as well.
Having made the alterations, Watson slipped the account sheets back into their designated plastic sheaves.
"Big Wheels!" he cried upon closing the binder.
"Big Wheels!" echoed every other soldier at the gate, in unison.
Watson handed the binder to his subordinate.
"Call it into Supply," he commanded.
Mason nodded and picked up an old Vietnam War era TA-312 crank-operated field phone attached to a black wire that stretched all the way back to headquarters.
But Phil did not pause to hear the report. Rather, he collected his goods and rejoined his mother. As chairman of the Civilian Affairs Board, he had an Open Pass, which he showed to the Gate Guard, and he brought his mother in as a Guest. They'd barely started the walk for Minor's HQ before Phil sighed wearily.
"Are you tired already?" his mother asked.
"Mom, all I've done since daybreak is wheel and deal, and it's not even noon."
"Well, I can't believe you sold our golf cart."
"Don't worry, Mom," Dr. Phil said confidently. "One day, Sergeant Watson or someone close to him will get really sick or hurt. Then I'll get the golf cart back."
Death Is Not the Worst Thing
Tom Barlow
Editor: Sometimes courage is not living.
When John Stanley Knickerbocker III woke that morning for his 3:00 a.m. piss, he realized he had finally had his fill of the Appalachian Mountains’ beauty, his stultifying companions, the emergency rations, and, most especially, the fucking birds—exotic or commonplace, water or woods dwellers, songbirds or mutes, bright or dull plumage. He couldn’t care less. The birding workshop that had brought him to this West Virginia lodge on the week the Gray Plague exploded on the U.S. like an all-out nuclear attack was something he would regret for the rest of his life. He should have been home in Ohio dying alongside his son and daughter-in-law. Instead, he had cowered here for the past five months, detached from the world, especially after the phone lines and electricity went dead in the throes of a summer storm.
He returned to his room and dug out the well-worn last letter he'd received from his granddaughter, Trish, two weeks after the plague hit, before the post office quit delivering mail. It contained a newspaper clipping listing the dead of his hometown of Newark, Ohio: virtually everyone in the paper's circulation area over age sixty and many over fifty. All his friends appeared on that list, along with most of his former customers. He gazed for a long moment at the family snapshot she'd sent with the list—Trish, her husband, Glen, and their two kids, Ben the soccer nut, and autistic Oliver.
Knowing that sleep would elude him for the rest of the night, Knick went downstairs to the kitchen, made a cup of instant coffee, and took it out onto the patio. The forest around him was stirring in the dark with a persistent western breeze that suggested rain.
By 4:00 a.m. the anger that had been brooding in him for months, the suspicion that his caution was really just a form of cowardice, finally reached a breaking point. He'd just been coming to terms with the loss of his wife to cancer that spring when he signed up for the week-long workshop. The grief had never really left him, and the other blue-hairs he was stranded with weren't providing support so much as belaboring their own misery.
There was always the chance that he was immune, he reasoned; otherwise, at seventy-two he was sure to contract the age-specific disease as soon as he mixed with the general population. It was a gamble he was finally willing to take.
He choked down a quick breakfast of oatmeal and walnuts from the year's-worth of provender the survivalist lodge owner had in storage before the disaster, then returned to his room. He carefully packed his belongings into his backpack, pausing a moment before deciding to include the Nikon Monarch birding binoculars his wife had bought for him as a retirement present. While he never wanted to look at a bird again, maybe Trish or the kids could use them.
Unfortunately, his son had dropped him off those many months before at what he'd playfully called "Dad's summer camp," so Knick was without wheels. But he'd hitchhiked across the country as a young man, so the thought of a little thumbing didn't worry him. He laced up his boots and, without a glance back, set off down the lane, bound for Ohio and his home two hundred miles to the north.
By the time he'd picked his way around the dry stone wall they'd built at the end of the drive to keep out possibly infectious strangers, descended the mountain, and hiked five miles out the county road to U.S. 219, the sky had lightened to a pearly pink.
He trudged north, waiting for the morning's procession of cars heading toward Beckley to work, or to school. The first dozen to approach slowed slightly in response to his thumb, pulled into the other lane, and passed, eyes diverted. He was getting discouraged when a woman in a middle-aged truck pulled over just ahead of him.
He opened the passenger door and stepped up onto the bench seat.
"Thanks," he said, smiling at the driver. "I'm Knick."
She was attractive, perhaps in her thirties, with big hair the color of vanilla pudding. In the rearview mirror he saw the rooster tail of gravel she threw up as she tore off the shoulder. "Hannah. You're lucky I'm a biology teacher. Most of the people around here are still afraid they can get the virus if they stand too close to a geezer. You could be hitchhiking until Christmas."
"I've been off the grid for a few months. Any news about a cure?"
She kept her eyes forward, casually swinging the truck through the relentless curves of the mountainside road. "They were supposedly able to save some woman in Moscow with a med derived from castor beans, but nobody's been able to duplicate it. Now they think it was all a hoax. So, no."
"What's the body count?"
"Man, you're a downer as a conversationalist," she said. "Around sixty-five million in this country, give or take. Almost all people over sixty, around 40 percent of those between fifty and sixty. How old are you?"
"Seventy-two," he said.
"So why are you still alive?"
"That's the question. My son and his wife both passed early on, and they were only fifty-one. I've been hiding up in the mountains, so maybe that's it. Or maybe I'm one of the immune."
"That reminds me," she said, "I'm legally obligated to deliver you to the hospital. There's a federal law that anyone over sixty who's still alive has to give some blood in hopes of finding antibodies."
"No problem," he said, figuring that it might be easier to hitch a ride from the hospital, in the middle of town.
They chatted the rest of the way, her mostly about her adventures in teaching fourth- grade math, him about his former life as an insurance salesman.
"Hope you didn't sell policies for Zeta American; they went bankrupt last month."
"I hadn't even thought about that," he said. He'd sold hundreds of universal life policies to people his own age, and even carried half a million on himself. Young people must be swimming in coin, if the companies were able to cover their policies.
She dropped him off at the door of St. Mark's Hospital in downtown
Beckley. "Take care of yourself," she said. "I hope you make it." Knick wrote off her failure to make eye contact as she spoke to the normal human discomfort around the condemned.
He thanked her and walked into the lobby. At the counter a young black woman in mint-green hospital scrubs was intent on her computer and didn't notice him at first.
"I understand you want some of my blood," he said.
She looked up and her eyes grew wide. "Holy shit," she said. "Where'd you come from?" She fished around under the counter and produced a mask, which she stretched across her mouth.
"What's with the mask?" he said. "It's not like I can infect anyone under fifty."
"I'll be fifty someday, I hope," she said. "It's standard hospital protocol. You need to come with me. And don't touch anything."
She walked out from behind the counter and led him down a long hallway to their right, lined with windows facing the parking lot. The fifth door was fronted with heavy overlapping plastic strips hanging down like a bead curtain. She wedged them apart, opened the door and slipped inside. He followed.
The chill in the small room matched its austere decor, with one chair, a rolling stool and a dusty examination table. "Someone will be with you eventually. Fill this out while you're waiting." She handed him a tablet with an intake form on the screen.
After she left, he filled it out, glad that he had Medicare instead of some private insurance that might have collapsed with the plague.
After a few minutes the plastic parted again and a doctor entered wearing a hazmat suit. Through the clear plastic face panel Knick could see his face, which didn't look all that youthful.
The doctor took the tablet from Knick and gave it a glance. "How are we today?" he said.
"We're still alive," Knick said.
"That's saying something, these days. How have you managed to beat the plague?"
Knick told him where he'd been for the past five months.
"Remarkable." The doctor turned to a small table against the wall, opened the drawer, and withdrew a needle and a blood collection tube.
"So did they ever figure out where it came from?" Knick said.
As the doctor carefully found a vein in the crook of Knick's arm and began to draw a blood sample, he said, "You didn't hear? It was man-made, specifically to wipe out the elderly. An Italian researcher synthesized it; the Italians had a worse problem than we did with a huge elderly population and not enough young people to support them. The feds still haven't figured out how it spread so fast in the U.S.; the public is convinced it was an organized effort by a group who were against raising taxes to save Social Security. Most died in the first month."
"What happened to the inventor?"
"Nothing. He was sixty-one. He was the first to die of it. The church ruled it a suicide, so he couldn't be buried on consecrated ground."
"And no cure in sight?"
"The whole world's working on it, but nothing yet. Lilly has developed a vaccine that seems to work on some people, but making enough doses is the challenge. If you're asking what I can do for you today, the answer is nothing."
"Nothing?"
"That’s not the worst news, though." As he spoke, another person stepped into the room, a deputy dressed in black, a pistol strapped to his waist. He was masked and gloved.
The doctor removed the needle and applied a bandage. "Everyone over sixty is quarantined until the vaccine is available. There have been several instances recently where the virus mutated and began to attack the young. The CDC was able to contain those outbreaks, fortunately, but nobody wants to take a chance on it happening again. We have a ward on the third floor where you'll be kept comfortable until you can be transported to the nearest internment camp. For us, that would be Fort Lejeune."
"I'm a prisoner?"
The cop stepped between Knick and the doctor. "Quarantined," he said. "Not arrested."
"I can't leave, I can't return home. What's the difference?"
The cop shrugged. "Nurses?"
* * *
Knick was even more depressed to discover that he was the sum total of all the oldsters in quarantine. According to the head nurse, there had been three others, but they all eventually succumbed.
Knick turned to the television to appease his boredom. The youth of those he saw struck him. None of the news anchors, actors, pitch men, seemed older than forty. The only mature people were on reruns, and there didn't seem to be many of those. Perhaps the broadcasters were sensitive to public grief.
His first day, the hands of the Quarantine Unit head nurse’s hands trembled every time she brought or retrieved a tray, or checked his vitals. She wouldn't stay by the bed long enough to chat with him. Knick finally resorted to talking to her through the nurse call phone. She chatted willingly with him as long as she didn't have to be in the same room.
"You seem a little tentative about your job here," he observed. He watched the parking lot below, which was busier than he expected for a small-town hospital.
"I lost a lot of family already," she said. "Who wouldn't be afraid?"
"They why take the gig?"
"There's federal money behind it, so it pays better."
"You were here when the other three passed?" Knick asked.
"Yeah. Each was here for three days before they got sick."
"So they had it before they were admitted."
"Don't worry. We bleached the living hell out of your room afterward."
Knick lay back on the bed, the head elevated 45 degrees. "Today's Monday? So I'll be lucky to be alive on Friday. Unless I'm immune."
"I hope that's the case. No promises."
"Plato said, 'Death is not the worst thing that can happen to men.’"
"I guess Mister Plato didn't know everything," she said. "I wonder what he'd say now that he's been dead for such a long time."
The hospital intake manager paid Knick a visit the next morning. He looked to be fresh out of high school, but was all business. He held up his tablet, stared at it a minute, scowled. "Mr. Knickerbocker, I'm sorry to have to tell you that you're dead."
Knick poked the arm of his hazmat suit. "Do I feel dead?"
He turned the tablet toward Knick. "There's a national database that was created to track the victims, and your name is right here." He pointed to it. "You died four months ago."
"What does it take for someone to get on that list?"
"A copy of a death certificate. But you've got to realize, the feds were dealing with more than a million deaths a day for a while, so things got pretty crazy. Mistakes were made."
"Well, clearly I'm not dead, so why don't we just tell the database people so they can correct their records?" At great effort he kept his voice even, reminding himself that this civil servant wasn't responsible for the fuck-up.
"It's not that easy," the man replied. "The death certificate originator needs to ask for the retraction. Otherwise, you have to request a hearing in person, in the county of your residence, and that could take months; it's the federal government, and nothing happens fast."
"Who reported me dead?"
He glanced down at his tablet. "The certificate came from a funeral home in Clarksburg, but the form was submitted by a Thomas Keating Knickerbocker. A relative, I presume?"
Knick knew T.K. all right, his loser of a grandson. Knick's son, Brian, had just bailed T.K. out of jail for beating his girlfriend a week before Knick left on his birding trip. If he had convinced the court that Knick was dead, with his parents also deceased, then both of those estates would have been inherited by T.K. and his sister. He was surprised that his granddaughter, Trish, allowed her brother to report him dead without proof; Knick and Trish had a special bond that it would take more than money to break.
Over the next couple of days he picked up the hospital phone more than once to call Trish, but put it down before he made a connection. He feared that she would confront her brother, who must have forged the death certificate. Who knew what T.K. was capable of when c
ornered? Knick figured it was his job to deal with his grandson, and he wasn't afraid; he'd faced down bigger bullies.
* * *
Knick spent the rest of the week getting the hospital routine down. Meals at 7:00 a.m., noon, and 6:00 p.m. Two nurses on twelve-hour shifts, changing at 11:00 a.m. and 11:00 p.m. The night nurse had a station down the hall and spent most of the night completing the day's reports for her fellow nurses. The doctor stopped by at 8:00 a.m. each morning, appearing a bit surprised each time when Knick’s exam showed no signs of illness.
There was a guard on the ward door around the clock, usually a member of the Sheriff's Auxiliary, boys and girls who had probably been wearing Scout uniforms not too long ago. The one that most often drew night duty spent her time listening to music on her phone and napping, head pressed to the wall.
The hospital was near the railroad switching yard. As Knick stood over the toilet each morning at 3:00 a.m. he could hear the train couplings clunking as the northbound coal trains begin to stretch out, the locomotives slowly tugging them taut.
At 2:00 a.m. on Sunday morning, after examining himself to confirm that he still didn't feel the least bit sick, Knick carefully shaved the telltale gray hair from his head before dressing. Fortunately, they'd stored his clothes, belongings, and backpack in the room locker. He cracked the door and heard the steady breathing of the guard at her station.
He eased his way past her. She didn't stir. The quiet of his ward extended into the hallway outside.
He followed the stairs at the end of the hall to the cafeteria on the first floor. The only person in sight had her head in the refrigerator she was scrubbing and didn't turn around as he passed through and out the delivery dock doors.
Diesel from the rail yard scented the dark summer air. They were still building the train, the locomotives on the north end, which indicated it would head in the direction Knick needed to go. He waited behind a dilapidated shed until the railroad worker positioned at the end of the train returned to the triple locomotives up front. Knick found several unlocked, empty boxcars at the end of a long string of laden coal cars, pulled open the door of one and scrambled inside. The car was dark and smelled like piss and bearing grease. He closed the door and hid in a corner in case a railroad bull came looking for transients.
Enter the Rebirth (Enter the... Book 3) Page 15