Pox
It can happen here
By Peter Duke
Copyright 2014 P X Duke
All Rights Reserved
ISBN 978-0-9919980-6-7
Distributed by Smashwords
When Russell finally accepts that he has
escaped the purging of humanity from the city, he hunkers down in
an abandoned house in a suburb far from the city’s center. In the
mess left behind, managing for his day-to-day needs occupies every
waking hour. When he encounters another human being doing the same,
he sets out to discover who it is that is trapped in a situation
not dissimilar to his own.
Disclaimer
What follows is a work of fiction. Any
resemblance to persons living or dead is purely coincidental.
Places mentioned by name are entirely fictitious and purely
products of the author’s imagination, and are not meant to bear
resemblance to actual places or locations.
POX
It can happen here
Contents
POX
It can happen here
Russell
No one ever noticed my spying.
I liked to sit in a chair at a corner of the large,
south-facing window in the front of the house. I’d crack the bottom
corner of the curtain just a bit and look out over the expanse of
neighborhood. I enjoyed observing the sun on its early-morning
climb, bringing light into the dark corners of the yards in the
cul-de-sac surrounding my new home.
Sometimes, in the evening before sundown, I’d do the
same thing. I’d take up the chair and wait for the sun to set; for
the daylight to darken; for the same neighborhood to go black. When
that happened, I’d let the curtain drop to its rightful place.
I don’t know why I bothered keeping watch. Perhaps it
was from some perverse sense of responsibility, knowing as I did
that I was the only one left to guard the knowledge of what had
happened. Or perhaps I hoped beyond hope that one day, I’d look out
and there would be someone in my world just like me.
Open and welcoming as I thought I would be to the
prospect of another human being entering the world I inhabited,
there was still the chance that whoever showed up might not be in
the same frame of mind.
I took precautions, just in case.
Under no circumstance did I want even a single ray of
light to make its way beyond the blackout curtains to illuminate
any part of the night. I couldn’t have anyone walking up to a
window wondering why there was light coming from the house. It
became part of my routine to go to each window, checking and
re-checking the curtains for leaks.
When I relocated, I had gone around the cul-de-sac
and pulled the curtains in almost all of the abandoned homes. I
wanted all the houses to look normal from the outside. I wanted
everything to look normal. I had to convince myself that there was
nothing that appeared abnormal in my surroundings.
Only then would I permit myself to fire up the
generator.
I had light. I had heat. I had food storage. I had
hot and cold running water.
I didn’t care about anything or anyone else, as long
as I felt safe.
I didn’t care if I ever saw another human being
again.
Lie though that was, I truly might not have cared,
but for the loneliness.
I’m not sure when the craziness began. I’m not even
sure what started it all.
The best I could come up with on my own was that it
began with a report that meteor showers would occur over a couple
of days. The media encouraged everyone to get outside and have a
look at the spectacle as it unfolded. Plainly visible through night
and day, the exploding bright flashes were accompanied by smoky,
dusty trails extending behind for miles.
Plenty of television and radio coverage at the
beginning of the two-day extravaganza turned into rabid fever when
experts couldn’t, didn’t, or wouldn’t explain why the meteor
showers continued for two weeks past the forecasted end date. That
the broadcasters then turned to amateurs espousing all sorts of
religious hokum and fakery came as no surprise. After all, the
quacks and shysters made for colorful visuals and exciting sound
bites.
Not a one of them, be they expert, quack or
bible-thumper, had any reasonable or believable explanation for why
the sky had been turned into a never-ending light show that had
gone on for weeks on end. What had been billed as a one-time
explosion of meteoroids suitable for viewing by both adult and
child alike turned into a side-show event.
Only the ticket booths were missing.
At the end of the first month, a fresh batch of news
and television reports were pushed out by bored commentators when
the six-tailed asteroid was discovered. In keeping with initial
reports of a two-day meteor shower that lasted for thirty, none of
the supposed experts that the government called on knew anything
about six-tailed asteroids.
A spectacle such as that was brand-new to them,
too.
At least the asteroids could only be witnessed by
those designated to peer through huge telescopes squatted atop
mountain observatories. Every once in a while, television news
would coax some university egghead to venture forth from his hole,
like the fabled, eager groundhog anxious to see if the sun might be
shining.
The poor fool would position himself in front of a
bookshelf, hoping to look erudite and impressive, and fumble with a
mess of papers scattered randomly across a monstrous desk occupying
most of his office. Mumbled, incomprehensible jargon would follow.
No one could understand a word the purported scientist said.
When the interview concluded, a network team of
reporters would make an attempt at repeating and interpreting what
had been said. Ignorant as the rest of us, the media ass-hats made
even less sense than the egghead. Instead, they preened in their
three-thousand-dollar suits and began interviewing each other.
None of it made for good television.
The egghead who was the cause of it all ended up
scurrying back to academe, never to be heard from again.
The radio broadcasts fared no better. None were
capable of creating a verbal picture of the chaos. There was no one
to interview that could make sense of what was happening. Instead,
charlatans and fools ended up being commissioned to do the bulk of
the radio spots. Eventually, television caught on and moved to use
the same uninformed experts to turn the sky’s unfolding events into
religious and voodoo scams and shams.
The final insult to anyone with a modicum of
intelligence occurred when someone randomly mentioned the sun’s
magnetic poles were about to reverse. Never mind that this had been
happening every ten or twelve years on a regular basis. Radio and
television evangelists ran with it as another sign of the coming
apocalypse.
The hoarding began slowly, just as it had under other
false religious prophets in other years and decades. At first, it
was only a trickle, and went unnoticed. It wasn’t long before the
trickle became a flood, and everyone began trying to catch up to
everyone else.
It seemed as though anyone who was capable of
thinking for themselves became a risk to others. If you didn’t jump
on the prophecy bandwagon, you had to be silenced.
Towards the end of the third month, news reports of
measles outbreaks in South America and to the north in Canada began
to surface. That, coupled with reports of the deadly Ebola virus
growing out of control in West Africa, pretty much guaranteed that
panic, enforced by the Western news media’s fevered reporting,
would ensue.
It wasn’t long before street-corner encounters
started. The gatherings began with a small-town atmosphere in the
rural outback of the state. Then cities large and small caught on
to the idea. Four and five people to begin with, growing by dozens
and then hundreds as word of the rallies got out, ensured that the
wave would be impossible to stop.
Distrust of the media grew daily.
Many, if not all, of the gatherings were encouraged
and pushed by religious zealots and fundamentalists in churches and
basements, in the past infamous only for their predictions of world
disaster that never occurred.
People who wanted to believe in the end of the world
listened anew. The same tired explanations came straight out of
bible scripture, interpreted and preached with a religious zealotry
unknown in the past.
It wasn’t obvious at first. Then, stores couldn’t
keep their shelves filled. They began to run out of everything.
First water. Then canned goods. Flour. Rice. It all disappeared, a
little bit at a time.
Eventually, it became too late to halt the panic,
particularly when media caught wind of it and started their version
of panic and despair fueled by hourly updates and breaking news
headlines plastered across television screens.
The more populous states called out the National
Guard first. Those with smaller, more isolated populations were the
last to call out the Guard. By then, it was too late.
No one knew it at the time.
Russell
I wasn’t the first to make the connection, nor would
I be the last. I had been a little slow on the uptake, though. When
I finally pulled my head out and took a look around, I knew trouble
was definitely afoot. I was pretty sure I wasn’t alone with that
diagnosis, but since I had just moved to the city, I had no friends
to confer with or to ask for advice.
I would have moved back to where I came from, but by
then it was impossible. Commercial flights and ground
transportation were closed down but for inbound international
flights. It had become impossible to go or move anywhere, ever
since the governments had gotten together and declared a state of
emergency. Last to that waltz were the federal leaders.
It made for good television, and that meeting of the
so-called minds was broadcast live. I sat, transfixed, watching the
mindless politicians listen to the military chiefs-of-staffs
explain what needed to be done. When it was over, martial law had
been declared and all roads and interstates had been shut down and
travel restricted.
Six months in, no one was permitted to go anywhere,
not even to visit dying relatives.
Airports were next. Air travel anywhere was
terminated. Domestic air travel was limited to flights within each
state. All small, private aircraft were grounded. Attempts were
made by some to commandeer private aircraft, although it was never
determined where these people would go, since every airport in the
country was closed to all but government air traffic.
Agents were dispatched to local airports and flying
schools to gather up the names and addresses of pilots.
That made for good television, too, and news
conglomerates friendly to the government’s talking points were
embedded and dispatched to film the raids during which the
miscreants were rounded up.
SWAT teams descended in haste from black vans.
Residences were surrounded. Doors were broken down. Pets that made
a sound were shot. Entire families were loaded into vans and hauled
away, in plain view, day and night.
No one seemed to know where the people were being
taken.
No one seemed to care.
By then, television and radio spots were being
broadcast twenty-four hours a day. Stay inside. Don’t go out after
dark. If you’re caught, you’ll be shot on sight.
Grocery stores turned into relief centers where one
family member was permitted to go and collect a daily ration, no
more than that. If the line was too long and you weren’t able to
get to the front, too bad. You turned around and went home
empty-handed.
All while walking or riding a bicycle. Because by
then, there was no gasoline. What there was had to be reserved for
official business - and that was more like official funny business,
it seemed.
At first, those same relief centers were good for
catching up on rumors and gossip. It was presented as fact that
certain parts of the city were first to be emptied. No one knew
why, or how or where the people had been relocated or shipped.