Tara walked to the front door to get the mail, trying not to panic. It was September 1st and still nice out, although the evenings were cooler now. She had hoped to surprise Lee tonight with a fire out back in the chiminea and maybe a cookout, taking full advantage of the last of Indian summer. But now, she began to think in terms of exposure to whatever germ was over at the neighbor’s house. Too late, I worked out there in the garden all week. All of a sudden, Tara felt as though she couldn’t breathe.
Distracted by her thoughts, she reached into the mailbox. She noticed the woman who lived across their busy street gathering her mail as well. Tara knew her as Mary, a widow with a small notary business in her home, the income supplementing her social security. She and Lee had used her once when they sold their old car, but Tara didn’t even know her last name. The street they lived on wasn’t real conducive to making friends, since it was heavily trafficked.
Although she and Lee usually kept to themselves, today was an exception. Frightened by the hazmat suits next door, she needed some reassurance, maybe even some human companionship.
“Hey, Mary!” Tara called to her.
The older woman heard, gave a wave and walked down her front steps to the curb. Tara did the same as traffic flew by on the street between them.
“Have you heard anything about Marla and Frank?” Tara yelled again, motioning back toward their house. A semi rolled past and Mary cupped one hand around her ear, not understanding. She looked both ways, waiting for the traffic to thin and then jogged across as soon as it did, her short white hair blowing. She was tall for a woman, taller than Tara, wiry almost, but she had an open, friendly face. Tara met her on the grassy curb strip.
“My God, there are people in hazmat suits next door!” Tara cried, pointing at the big dark house next to hers. “Have you heard anything about them? The hospital won’t give me any info.” She suddenly realized she was running her words together in panic, and poor Mary couldn’t even get a peep out. But she couldn’t help herself. When she got nervous, she talked a blue streak. “Marla’s eyes were bloody last time I saw her. I didn’t even put it all together until the next day at the grocery store when I heard something on the local news!” Tara forced herself to shut up and wait for Mary’s reply.
“My daughter Julie is a nurse over at the hospital. She followed in my footsteps,” Mary joked. Tara had forgotten Mary was a retired nurse. She had only talked to her once or twice before. Mary lowered her voice, even though the sound of traffic drowned out any possibility of being overheard.
“The hospital staff were all exposed. No one there knew any better, and there was no warning. But they transferred your neighbors out, up north somewhere. Their tests came back positive for Ebola.” At Tara’s sharp intake of breath, Mary paused. “I’m really sorry to have to tell you this, but Marla died two days ago, and Frank died today.”
“Oh, dear God.” Tara backed up a little, her long hair blowing across her face. She was partially in shock, and partly afraid of standing too close. Mary noticed.
“It’s okay. I haven’t seen my daughter, only talked to her on the phone. She doesn’t want to come anywhere near me. She’s afraid of exposing me.”
“Oh, Mary, how awful,” Tara replied.
Mary nodded and sighed. “I told her I didn’t care, but she insisted she was staying away for 21 days. All the nurses on that shift are on leave.” Mary paused for a moment as Tara stared at her, speechless. The older woman looked around at Marla and Frank’s house. “I’m really glad they’re decontaminating the place though, for your sake.”
Tara’s vision swam for a moment and she thought she might pass out. Mary saw her struggling and came closer to hug her, then stopped. “I guess we’d better not get too touchy-feely. If I were you, I’d turn off my AC, especially if it’s on that side of your house. You don’t want to bring in any outside air from around their home.”
“Oh, my God, I didn’t even think of that, Mary!” Her breath came in shallow little gulps. Fear seized her and an icy cold certainty that they were all going to die horribly took hold. Her thoughts raced. My AC unit is on the other side. Still. She felt the color draining from her face as Mary watched her.
“It’s okay, Tara, supposedly it’s hard to catch. Let’s hope it doesn’t go airborne as most viruses do when they mutate. Just use precautions. And my advice is—get ready. My daughter says there are an awful lot of confidentiality forms being forced on them. For whatever reason, the powers that be do not want us to know what’s going on. Maybe so we don’t panic. To me that means get ready. They know something we don’t.”
“Thank you,” breathed Tara, dazed and overwhelmed. “I’m going to prepare. Stay in touch, Mary, okay? Your daughter is in the loop way more than we are, and I’m grateful for any info you can pass on.”
Mary nodded and said goodbye, crossing back over and disappearing inside her small white bungalow on the corner. As Tara stood there in shock, still digesting the ramifications of all this, Mary reappeared at her door. She strode outside and grabbed the small Notary Public sign from her front yard, taking it with her as she disappeared back inside. This scared Tara even worse. She needs that money. But if Mary was worried enough to limit her exposure to strangers…
Tara walked back to her front door fast, not even glancing over at the hazmat operation. She really didn’t want to know. Back inside, she frantically dialed Lee and he answered on the third ring, chewing.
“What? I’m eating,” he laughed. Tara told him what had happened in a hushed voice, detailing all Mary said. Lee was quiet for a moment.
“Well, two guys who work side by side here on the production line are home sick today,” Lee told her. He paused for a moment, “and both their wives are nurses. They work together at the hospital. Let’s hope this isn’t as bad as it sounds.”
Tara’s mind was on high alert now, running options through her head at a speed hitherto unknown to her. Could Lee leave work? Can we make it on what money we have for a while? Wait, he’s got a month’s paid vacation!
“Lee, please, please, put in for your vacation! Take it now! That gives us four weeks to see what happens. We weren’t planning on going anywhere on vacation anyway. I mean, so far you’re isolated in the R & D lab there, but if it spreads, I don’t want you around all those people! Four weeks of us here together, staying away from everyone— by that time, we should know if anything bad is going to develop.”
Lee pooh-poohed her fears, but she begged him, explaining her bad feeling. Before he got off the phone, he promised Tara he would call the office and schedule it. Not for Ebola, he laughed, but because he was tired and ready for a vacation. Since it was Friday, he’d be off for four weeks starting later today. Tara didn’t care how much he made fun of her, he was coming home and together they could handle anything that developed.
Before he hung up, she made him promise to go wash his hands and stay away from everyone. Lee’s boss was the only one who worked in the lab with him, and she was a younger woman living alone, not much of a high-risk exposure there.
Tara looked at her watch, feeling slightly better. Only four more hours. She knew if she didn’t get out of there, she’d spend the rest of her afternoon staring through the slats at the kitchen window, trying to see what the hazmat suits were doing. There was still time to get food and supplies, maybe take some money from the bank too. Time to prepare a little. I’d rather be ready than not.
Uneasily, Tara opened the checkbook and glanced at her balance. She knew she had two thousand dollars in savings. I’m going to buy some extra stuff, just to be on the safe side. I’m not even gonna tell Lee. At least, she wouldn’t tell him yet. If this really is the beginning of an outbreak, money will be useless. Food and water will be all that matters. Lee might want to throttle me for it, but I’m buying it.
~
Tara ran through the bank and withdrew $1,500. She wanted a thousand to stash at home, and five hundred to get supplies. She ticked off a list in her he
ad of what worst-case scenario items they might need. A major revelation struck her as she drove to the dollar store for cheap canned food. We’re going to need ammunition for our gun. A gun was sometimes the only thing that stood between safety and danger.
She had owned a little purse-size Beretta .25 semi-automatic pistol for years. It lay beside the bed on the nightstand with a Kleenex draped over it. Probably clogged with dust by now. We sure haven’t fired it for years.
Tara turned the car around and went first to the small firearms shop in their town. She told the man there what kind of gun she had and he went in the back to get what she needed. She bought fifty bucks worth of ammo, and drove back to the dollar store.
Normally fairly frugal, she decided she would only buy cans of food they usually used. No sense in going berserk and buying out the store. Plus if a pandemic never materialized, she’d feel pretty dumb with enough red beans and rice to feed Louisiana and no money in the bank as a safety net.
At the dollar store, she pushed the cart slowly through the aisles, trying to imagine what they might need in a worst-case situation. She bought lots of pasta in bags, long dated at least two years, and bottled spaghetti sauce to go with it. Round cans of chicken soon nestled among trapezoidal tins of corned beef. Tuna, Chili, soups of all kinds, as long dated as she could find, began to stack up. Rice, lots of flour, dried beans, salt, bags of sugar, even cookie mix and cans of Crisco were added to the stash.
She still had some of her mom’s old supplies, inherited after her folks passed away, and Tara remembered they’d had a couple of personal water filters they’d bought after 9/11. They were guaranteed to purify even water from a mud puddle, so Tara felt a little more secure about a water supply with those. But since they’d lain untouched all these years on her shelf, they’d need checking. I better go down and see if they’re still good.
Passing a sale on bleach, she hesitated, and then grabbed six jugs, just in case. That should do it. She’d read somewhere that you could use a few drops of bleach to purify water too, as well as disinfect any surface. A sudden vision of her and Lee lying dead with their half empty glasses of “purified” water in front of them flashed in her head, and she laughed out loud. An old woman pushing a cart past gave her a funny look.
Tara nodded and smiled, embarrassed, but her morbid sense of humor, coupled with her lack of even basic prepper knowledge, pushed her fear away and tickled her funny bone. Sure, maybe the internet could get her up to speed on a few things, but she truly hoped she would never have to know exactly how to purify water. As it was, Lee razzed her enough about her other germaphobic habits. But Tara knew what Lee nicknamed her “Howard Hughes” phobias kept her healthy, so they might just help with whatever came their way now. And that was that.
Tara didn’t want to appear any stranger than she had to, so she decided to buy this batch of stuff, then hit up another area store for paper products and whatever else they had that was different from what she’d already bought. Tara fielded a few questions from the clerk by saying she was restocking the pantry for the winter, since they didn’t like to drive in the snow. The total came to almost two hundred dollars. She paid in cash, and then loaded it into her SUV.
Next, she drove to the other store in town and bought two carts full of paper towels and toilet paper, along with jugs of water and quite a few more cans.
Tara drove past Marla’s house on the corner on the way into her rear driveway. There were no vehicles or people in suits anywhere. A wave of sadness at Frank and Marla’s deaths and a sense of unreality washed over her. This feels like a bad dream. She looked at her watch and it saw was almost time for Lee. Thank God.
Tara pulled in and sat in her car for a moment, thinking about the breeze that had blown her hair back each of the days she had worked outside in the garden. Before the hazmat suits decontaminated the house, before they’d cleaned up the puke she’d heard Marla splatter onto her back patio. A cold chill ran through her. I don’t want to give it to Lee if I’ve got it.
Suddenly, she remembered a dream she’d had just before this all started. She dreamed “it” was everywhere. In the great lakes the fish were bleeding, the animals were dying, bleeding from every opening. And in the dream, it was like a judgment from God, the feeling she’d had, like it was all going to come true.
Tara had awakened in a pool of sweat, gasping at the realism of it. The shock of recognition now hit her full force along with the memory. Bleeding, Ebola. Why did I forget that dream? Because it was too scary? Because it didn’t make sense then? God help us all.
Tara’s Diary
Dec 10th 2015
Looking back on the beginning of it now, I remember how sorry I was for those people in Africa, way across the world in some muggy, jungle area I knew nothing about. But here in my middle-class, white bread American world, it didn’t stick.
The first American case was an African man who arrived in Texas and was promptly diagnosed with Ebola. He died and then his nurses caught it. The government botched all aspects of the case, hid it from the public, allowed one sick nurse to fly on a major airline potentially infecting hundreds. And still they would not shut down the airlines, although that’s what most people wanted.
Over the next several weeks, the budding epidemic reared its ugly, infectious head. First, it was only a mention here and there on the news. The cases kept growing, spreading, in every state, big cities and little towns. And that’s about when my next door neighbors died. But it was kept quiet, secret. Not many knew.
After that, I watched with interest each story that leaked out, and even checked in with some of the conspiracy theory websites. There were some real nutbags on there, but every so often, some normal-sounding American told a story. Like the woman who took her elderly father into the ER just a county north of our small town. Only to find them handing out gloves and masks to everyone who entered, telling them a child was there being quarantined for Ebola.
The concern generated over that first handful of American cases increased panic and triggered stock market declines. Mostly because everyone could tell the few official press conferences were a clear contradiction to what was actually happening. The CDC thought we were so stupid, they thought they could spin it and tell us anything, and we’d buy it. Well, most people did buy it, because they didn’t want to be bothered. They wanted to be in denial. However, those who understood the ramifications, well, we knew better.
Then the internet began buzzing with rumors of people sick across America, of hundreds of thousands of FEMA coffins lined up in hastily assembled FEMA camps located around the country, empty as of then behind their barbed wired perimeters, but pregnantly awaiting “something.” We knew we were on our own. And that’s a bad feeling, when you fear your own government.
I researched a little bit, finding that dehydration leading to shock was the main cause of death from Ebola. I found the recipe for homemade Oral Rehydration Solution, the lifesaving liquid used to replenish lost fluids and possibly keep you alive: one-half teaspoon of salt, one-half teaspoon of baking soda, and four tablespoons of sugar to one liter of water. And you must drink four liters of this a day. To make a gallon, quadruple the recipe: two teaspoons of salt, two teaspoons of baking soda, and sixteen tablespoons of sugar. A gallon was just a little less than four liters, but drinking a gallon of ORS while vomiting incessantly was very hard to do. I measured out enough for ten gallons, storing it in baggies in the cupboard, just in case.
Not long after that, an “Ebola Czar” was appointed, and if there had been any doubt before, his first efforts made it clear that a media blackout was underway. They couldn’t let the big red, white, and blue money machine come screeching to a halt. The conspiracy websites were monitored, and everyone had to beware of posting very much. Certain words or phrases triggered an immediate response and the post was taken down. Was it NSA? CIA? CDC? No one knew. Rumors spread of much worse censoring. I became more paranoid.
Still, many went about their daily
business blindly. Only a small fraction of us seemed to know what was happening. I was one of them, and so was Mary. We called across the street to each other a couple times, and exchanged information.
I did some research. I ordered more supplies for Lee and me: a crank weather radio, N-100 masks, a couple of full Tyvek suits and hoods, a fire starter. I read of a military study where colloidal silver solution killed Ebola virus, so I bought a large bottle. I figured what the heck, might as well get it all. I had stocked up on cans of food early on, but not nearly enough. I still didn’t believe anything would really happen. I totally sympathized with those who didn’t prepare—because I didn’t want to believe it could happen either.
Chapter 3
Tara was just carrying the first bags from the dollar store to the door when Lee pulled in. There were so many others in her car, she asked him to help. So much for keeping it a secret. Nevertheless, just seeing Lee made her feel better. His handsome face and dark hair could still make her heart skip a beat even after all these years. He walked back behind the garage with her to where her SUV was parked.
“They’re all gone over there now,” Tara told him, gesturing toward the neighbor’s house. “I hope to God they disinfected everything. Marla puked on the patio that day—and I worked outside all week with the wind blowing it over my way!”
Lee put his arm around her waist reassuringly, and she pulled away slightly. “I don’t want to give it to you if I’ve got it.”
Lee laughed. “I wouldn’t worry about that. I doubt it catches that easy, and if you’ve got it, I’ve also got it by now. I’d rather we go out together, anyway.”
Tara instantly relaxed at Lee’s calm acceptance of things. It was just his way, and it was the perfect counter-balance to her usual high-strung anxiety. This is why I love him so much…Twenty-five years together filled with both ups and downs, and they’d grown very close. Time had shown them that nothing else much mattered except each other.
Red Death: A Post Apocalyptic Thriller Page 2