by J. F. Krause
About three blocks from the intersection of La Paz and Southview, Anna could see that traffic was so clogged that it would be better if she just walked the rest of the way to the hospital. Anna carefully parked her car so she could return home without too much trouble. Her spirits picked up when she heard a siren start up. She could see the flashing lights of one of the emergency vehicles parked at the emergency entrance and also what appeared to be an ambulance driver walking toward what she knew from past visits to Hillcrest was the actual front entrance. Even better, she saw a woman heading in the same direction. With all the cars parked around the hospital, it must be packed inside. With a rising tide of excitement, she maneuvered her way to the hospital entrance.
She saw both the man and woman enter the front entrance a few seconds apart. As she got nearer she could dimly see through the tinted windows that they were awkwardly embracing each other. She also saw to her disappointment no one else in the large general-purpose waiting room. Nevertheless, she knew there were other people and ran the last few steps to the doorway.
Both of them looked up startled by the entrance doors sliding open for her. The baby in the chest sling the man was wearing explained the mangled hug the two had shared. Both of them immediately smiled at her to her relief, and she exhaled the breath she had been holding. They drew her into an even more awkward group hug.
Before she had time to react, she found herself sobbing for the umpteenth time since this all began. They were all crying together and she realized that nothing could prepare you for the end of the world and the waves of grief and sadness that comes with it. After a few minutes they sat and introduced themselves to each other.
My name is Robert Caldwell, Bobby to my friends and family. I’m writing this because someone has to take responsibility for recording the history of what happened after everyone died, and I’ve always been a very responsible person. Like almost all the survivors, I’ve aged a lot because of this. You’ll notice I didn’t say I grew up, because, technically, I was an adult already, if only barely. No, I matured. My hair didn’t fall out; I didn’t gain weight; I didn’t get wrinkles. I matured.
And let’s establish that whoever survived was lucky. I suppose there are some who didn’t and still don’t feel lucky. After all, almost all of us lost everyone we knew and loved during the sickness. But not feeling lucky doesn’t mean we’re unlucky.
We call it The Sickness, but I remember people who, just before they died, called it a pandemic. According to the news broadcasts the night before it really hit us, it started in South Asia. If you can read this, you probably know where South Asia is. And you can thank all of us who survived for that. You’re very welcome. You were on our minds a lot for a few years. We worried about you.
I remember reading something about how a lot of sicknesses and diseases started in Asia and then spread around the world making people miserable. This one was different, though. This disease was man made. One day we were hearing about this strange flu in Asia that was killing people, and then, it was here. The government closed airports and everything else, but, of course, by then it was too late.
Some of the first responders who survived had been briefed a little better than the rest of us. According to them, and they all had pretty much the same information, someone in one of the countries in south Asia developed a killer virus that accidently got loose. Knowing it was already out in the environment, they deliberately helped spread it around. It seems they hadn’t created an effective antidote when it accidently got away from them, and they didn’t want to be the only people to have to deal with the consequences of their actions. In the end, given how it was designed, it would have killed practically everyone anyway. Evidently, the incubation period was pretty short with no symptoms until the last grotesque moments. Most people started with a bit of dizziness, and then a pounding headache followed by really bad bloody vomiting and diarrhea. Next came unconsciousness and death. It could be over in less than ten minutes. I can attest to that myself. Most of us can. While they were unconscious, they usually bled from their mouths. They didn’t get back up and attack people either. The survival rate seems to be about one in four or five thousand. That wasn’t part of anyone’s briefing. We figured it out ourselves based on how many of us there are now. There also wasn’t a superior race. Everyone suffered pretty much the same.
Tuesday
At first, I did what everyone else I knew did: Nothing. I had a good teaching job at an elementary school right down the street from my condo. It had nice kids and it was sort of an affluent neighborhood in an affluent town. I liked it. I grew up in Georgia and when the district’s recruiters arrived at my college from California, I jumped at the chance to move across the country to Southern California. The salaries were incredible compared to Georgia. Of course, they didn’t mention that the cost of living was also sort of incredible compared to Georgia, too. But hey, nothing bad could happen to me; I was starting to finally have a life. Regardless of expenses, California is a great place to live, and even after all that’s happened, I can’t complain. We all suffered the same way. Besides, cost of living doesn’t have the same meaning anymore. It’s all about the quality of your life, and that’s pretty dependent on you, at least if you survived the dying.
I was halfway through my second year of teaching when we got the notice that, due to the sickness, schools were closing for the time being. Like closing today, right now, about an hour and a half after the starting bell. My class was half full and there was a tension in the air I’d never felt before. Some of the teachers called in sick, and we were all covering more than one classroom since only a couple of subs were available. The school intercom came on suddenly to announce that this was a Code Max! Theoretically, the staff all knew that was really serious, but we barely had ever discussed it. Parents were notified over the special texting system that their kids were to be picked up immediately. Many parents probably barely got home from dropping their kids off at school before they were getting the message to return to the school to pick them up. This was unprecedented since we had never done anything like it in anyone’s memory. The school day had gotten off to a rough start, what with so any kids and adults absent, and then, suddenly Code Max! Parents and neighbors began streaming in to pick up their kids while some of the older kids just left. No one was going to chase them down. The parking lot was a mess and some of us teachers were sent outside to help with traffic while others were handing off kids to their parents and caregivers. The school office kept announcing that this was a government declared Code Max, which added to the atmosphere of fear. We’d never actually prepared for a Code Max, not like we do for fire drills and earthquakes. I mean, how do you practice for a Code Max. You can’t really get the parents to come to the school parking lot and panic, and you can’t get the kids to run around crying because their parents aren’t there yet. There was no preparing for this sort of chaos.
My cell phone kept broadcasting little news alerts about traffic jams and people dropping dead at work and on the freeways. It was very hard to concentrate on crazy drivers and nearly hysterical parents as I did my best to keep children from being run down by their own parents. All public venues and nonessential offices were ordered closed, so as soon as the kids could be off-loaded, we were closing the building and going home ourselves.
I didn’t have any family in California and lived only about a half a mile from Grandview Elementary so I expected to stay at school with the principal to the bitter end. We didn’t have any bus students so walking was actually the norm for most of the kids. As the kids left, some teachers were allowed to go home according to the emergency plan that said single parent teachers left first, then the married teachers with younger children and so on. As the only single male teacher on staff with no children, I was dead last on the list to be excused. No matter how bad the traffic was, it eventually cleared out and I went into the school office for my next assignment. The principal was clearly wanting to leave to be with her own kid
s and husband so I agreed to hang out with the last three kids waiting for their parents. Mrs. Banks, the principal, said she’d come back as soon as she checked on her kids who were both high schoolers. Her house was over in the next city (all the cities around here run together and it wasn’t far) so it shouldn’t normally take too long to get there and back.
The three remaining kids’ parents all worked in LA. Traffic must have been stunningly bad because, even though it was well after 4 PM, I was still there with these three little girls, none of whom were my own classroom students. Mrs. Banks had left at 3 PM and wasn’t back yet. As usual, when I didn’t know what to do, I called my mom. She didn’t answer. So I sat in the office waiting area with the three little girls. They read books, and we all ate cookies from one of the secretaries’ desks.
I would have been there all night if the youngest child, a little kindergarten girl named Zoe hadn’t suddenly started complaining of a headache. A few minutes later, she started vomiting. One minute, she was sobbing from the headache, and I was debating giving her an aspirin (something we aren’t allowed to do at school without a doctor’s note), and the next, she was projectile vomiting a foot in front of herself. No warning at all. I was watching the parking lot from the school office and listening to the radio I had tuned into the emergency station so I missed seeing the first couple of seconds. The other two children, a couple of first grade girls, were silent for a second and then started crying as their prelude to screaming.
I’m pretty calm by nature even when I’m panicking inside, so I just grabbed a couple of paper towels by the sink and started to mop up her face. She was turning very red and had what looked like a seizure. I’d never actually seen a seizure, but we watched a film about them at college, and this certainly looked like one to me.
I laid her down on the carpet and put something under her head. As I was checking on the other two girls, I calmly called 911. It didn’t even ring so I did it again. Little Zoe sort of coughed, vomited some more and just lay there moaning. I sent the other two girls to the opposite corner of the room from where Zoe and I were so they wouldn’t be hit by any of her bodily fluids or see how bad it was. I called 911 again with the same results. By now, vomit wasn’t the only thing coming out of Zoe. How could such a little thing be at the center of such a wild mess? And then she just went limp! Oh my God! She wasn’t breathing! I did know something about First Aid because we take that in education classes, but the last thing I wanted to do was give mouth-to-mouth to Zoe! I grabbed the damp paper towels and cleared her airways just like I’d been trained and started going through the steps. To be clear about this, I expected any minute to get a mouth full of her vomit as my reward for my efforts. I absolutely wasn’t thinking she would die. I’d never actually seen death up close and certainly not a child. But after a few seconds, it began to dawn on me that Zoe wasn’t responding at all! I just stared at her. I gave my phone to one of the other girls and told her to keep calling 911 until someone answered. Then I went back to the mouth-to-mouth for Zoe.
I don’t know how long I did that, but after awhile I realized I was just leaning over her looking down at her. Meanwhile, the other little girls were right behind me doing a combination of crying, screaming, and 911 calling. Even though they were standing right behind me, and probably had been for several seconds I hadn’t even heard them. I decided right then that we were leaving. I took a marker and wrote a quick note saying I had taken the girls, Teri and Megan, to my house. I wrote my address and cell phone and drew a map for them. After using the copier to make several notes, I put two notes up on the outside of the window and one on the inside so that if the first parents grabbed the first one, there would be a second one for the next parent and a final more permanent one inside just in case it was needed.
Since I lived so close to the school I usually walked to work. I explained to the girls that we were going to my house to wait for their parents. I’m not at all comfortable with having students at my house, and especially little girls so I sort of expected them to be leery about it too. Surprisingly they were ready to go, like right then. But it didn’t matter. Megan stopped totally still and had these really big eyes looking at me. Then it all started again! She said “Dizzy”, then she started crying with a headache., and a few minutes later, she vomited and collapsed on the sidewalk right there in front of the school office. While she was down she vomited some more and stopped breathing. I carried her back inside followed closely by a sobbing Teri. I laid her on the office carpet and started CPR just as before. I sent Teri to get a wet paper towel from the office sink to clean her face and airways. It was no use. In the meantime we uselessly called 911 not even getting a busy signal. She was gone.
It sank in on me that we were all going to die in the office just like this. We weren’t going to make it to my place. This was the reason the schools were closed. This was what ‘pandemic’ meant, and we were going to die of whatever this thing was. I reached for Teri and pulled her to me. She was crying and trembling. She knew too. What a horrible thing for a child to have to experience. She spoke quietly to me then. “I don’t want to be alone.” She was afraid I would die and leave her alone. What do you say to a child who has just seen two other children die? I’m a second year teacher! What do I know about dying? I was 23! So I held her. I don’t know how long we were there together before I decided maybe we should try to make it to my house again. When I started to move, she held me like a vise. I decided we would just move into the principal’s office that was adjacent to the outer office. It still had a view of the parking lot so I could tell if anyone came. It was getting dark outside so I turned out the lights except for one of the desk lamps. It was now 5:33 PM according to the clock on the principal’s wall. Despite all we had gone through, or maybe because of all we had gone through, Teri fell asleep in my lap so I sat there and held her. About 6 PM, Teri stirred and went through all the familiar death steps. I doubt she even woke up. I was alone.
I’d just watched three little girls I barely knew die. I taught fifth grade and had hardly even noticed any of these girls until today. I wondered if they even knew my name, and I certainly didn’t know their names before then and yet, I was the last person to see them alive and the last person to touch them and to say their names. Shallow, naïve, shortsighted, Mr. Caldwell. Robert Caldwell. Bobby Caldwell, soon to be deceased.
By now I realized that I was probably very soon about to join my little friends. Part of me didn’t want to leave them, but part of me wanted to get home and die in my own place. I decided to leave and die on the way if that was what was going to happen. It’s strange what you think about as you make that type of decision. I wondered if the coyotes would eat my body before anyone found me. I wondered if there would be anyone left to find me. The walk was a dream but like most of my dreams, I wouldn’t remember it. I remember getting to my door and punching in the door code so I could enter. As soon as I got in the door I called my mother. I got the circuit busy signal. Then I called 911 again with the same result. I went to my bedroom and fell asleep.
Wednesday
I cried during the night because my pillow was wet the next morning. But I don’t remember what I dreamed while I wept. My alarm went off as usual, but waking was so routine that I was halfway to my bathroom before I remembered what had happened at the school the night before. I briefly thought it was a dream, and that that was what must have caused me to cry into my pillow. As I stood over the toilet relieving myself the realization of what had transpired the evening before hit me. It was real. I instinctively cut the flow of my piss stream and dropped to my knees in front of the bowl to hurl my guts into the yellow pool of water and piss.
This wasn’t the same thing the little girls had been through. I wasn’t sick; I was distraught! Slowly I dragged myself up and sat down on the toilet stool. The shock set in, and I stayed there for so long that my legs went to sleep. I waited thinking I would begin the dying process any minute until I became aware that nothing unu
sual was going on with my body. My piss stream began again as I sat on the stool so I finished and, on wobbly legs, stood up. Convinced that death was imminent, I slumped back to my bed, exhausted. I dialed 911. Nothing. I called Mom; the circuit busy tone was what I got.
A couple of hours later I was still alive and wide-awake, keyed up and exhausted at the same time. Upstairs I heard Martha, my landlady’s golden retriever puppy barking incessantly. Esther Lopez was a retired teacher who owned both my apartment and the upper apartment unit where she lived. She only had a balcony that covered most of my ground floor patio, while I had a small concrete covered yard, no grass at all though. I thought it made no sense for her to get a dog, let alone a bigger dog like Martha would become, since she didn’t have a yard, but who am I to tell other people how to live and who, or in this case, what, to love. Besides, Martha was adorable.
I decided that Esther might need help not realizing that she might also be dead. When the thought hit me, no matter how macabre, the picture of Esther lying just above my bed soaking in a pool of vomit and blood wouldn’t leave my imagination. Whereas just moments ago, I instinctively avoided thoughts of death, now I was starting to perseverate on it and bodies lying in pools of their own final waste. Since that wasn’t a good place to be in my head, I decided it was time to check on how things were with Esther and Martha just to be sure.