After the End: Survival (3 page)

The Change began shortly after the first reports of a deadly virus in Uganda, central east Africa. Larry followed the story the way any professional would. Early information was sketchy. Small villages near Lake Victoria were essentially wiped out. Victims all shared the same symptoms. One minute they'd be fine, working, or sharing a meal with family, joking with friends. The next minute, an excruciating headache, weakness, soaking in sweat. Over the next three days the affliction caused joint swelling and stiffness of such magnitude it was laborious just managing a comfortable position. The throat became so dry and swollen that even swallowing became difficult, and eating impossible.

Then on the fourth or fifth day, the bleeding began.

The victim would bleed from the gums, vomit blood, urinate blood, and defecate blood. Death would soon follow. The Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta, Georgia quickly flew three epidemiologists to the area to conduct autopsies. The trio landed at the airport at Kampala late on a Tuesday evening. By six-thirty the following morning, a makeshift morgue had been set up in an old hangar. A little after eight AM, an ancient Mercedes dump truck noisily backed up to the sheet metal building, stopping, and then raising the hydraulic bed. Seven bodies slid out the back, falling in a tangled heap on the ground. Spewing blue smoke, the truck lowered its bed, and sped off. Wearing bright orange Racal rubber "space suits," with a battery powered positive pressure system, the three systematically autopsied the swollen corpses. Cause of death was due to either massive blood loss or pulmonary edema, with leaking veins flooding the lungs with fluid, effectively drowning the individual. A virus was causing the veins to dissolve, leaking as though they were made of a thin fabric.

Although not immediately confirmed, it was believed the virus could be transmitted by air. This assumption was verified sixteen days later when one of the three medical investigators died while in quarantine at the Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases at Fort Detrick, Maryland. Exposure probably occurred when the man had removed his breather in the sweltering building for several minutes when he was some sixty feet from the autopsy site.

By this time, trying to contain the virus was like trying to plug a broken levee. Roads connecting all cities and villages along the northern shore of Lake Victoria were sealed off by the military. However, guards were easily bribed and the mortality rate among units sent to cordon off the area was close to ninety percent. A single infected person on an airplane could contaminate three out of four of his fellow passengers, who in turn would pass the virus on to most of those they came near. Frantic efforts by various world governments proved futile. Even the most draconian efforts merely delayed the inevitable. In the space of six months more than ninety-five percent of the world's population was dead. Roughly twenty percent of the survivors died in the months that followed because basic systems began to fail, systems everyone took for granted. There was no electricity to provide clean drinking water and space heating. Natural gas, used by millions to heat and cook could no longer be distributed as it relied upon electricity to run the pumps for refining and distribution. The world's petroleum industry came to a standstill, but not before the deadly virus had been spread across the entire world. In the more developed countries dysentery, cholera, and even simple exposure took its toll on the survivors. Depression and suicide accounted for more. Those in Third World countries fared a little better since they did not rely on electricity as part of their day-to- day living.

News reports became increasingly sketchy as the virus spread. First, newspapers and magazines stopped publishing, then television and finally radio services were suspended. Larry remembered the day the Xcel Energy cut power to the area, giving a one day notice ("Due to circumstances beyond our control...") by phone and fax to the broadcasting media still on the air. Four area radio stations were still broadcasting using auxiliary generators, but the lack of available fuel forced these stations to limit broadcasting to just a few hours a day. The last to run out of fuel was a little AM station running two hundred-fifty watts, its power derived from a small propane powered generator.

It took a few months for a balding, pot-bellied radio engineer to remember the origin of all FM radio signals came from a little transmitter called an exciter. It used only fifty watts of power and could be powered by direct current like that from a car battery. He wondered if maybe he could rig up a little radio station that was battery powered. He found out he could, and he did.

A man named Gary Blakely learned of the engineer's success, and helped him obtain everything necessary to build a fully functional radio station, including a wind generator liberated from nearby Canyon's West Texas A. & M. University and solar panels from the huge array at the V.A. Hospital to keep the batteries charged.

Larry approached the two with an offer to manage the facility. It turned out to be a ground-floor opportunity.

All-in-all, Larry mused, as he turned the controls over to his relief disc jockey ("Big Ed"), things could be a lot worse. He could be dead, and that sure had a way of putting things into perspective. He wondered again why his presence was so urgently needed at the Sheriffs Office.

In his dream, Pete was standing next to his wife. They were under a huge elm tree, watching their two grandchildren ride bicycles. Tan colored dust came in puffs behind the tires as the bicycles turned lazy circles on the open ground. Then the boy straightened his course and headed out across a brown prairie. The granddaughter followed, her red hair shimmering in the bright light. Feeling uneasy, Pete turned to his wife. She was gone. Panic. His eyes jerked open. The brightness remained and Pete squinted into the morning light streaming through the window.

"Shit."

It had been the first time in a while he had dreamed of family and he considered that a mixed blessing. On the one hand, he enjoyed reliving their life together, seeing their faces, hearing their voices, even feeling his wife's touch. But waking up was painful and the resulting gloom could last for days.

He closed his eyes, trying to grasp the remnants of the fading dream. If he was tired enough he could reenter the illusion, changing its course and prevent the images from fading. He gave up as his MURS radio crackled with the voice of the sheriff's dispatcher, Patty White.

"Doc Wilson, this is Amarillo Sheriff. Do you copy, Pete."

Reaching over to the microphone, Pete squeezed the transmit switch.

"Hello, Patty. Pete here."

"Hi, Pete. It's not an emergency, but could you come over to the S.O. as soon as possible?"

Pete hesitated a few seconds to gauge time and distance.

"Sure. Can you give me twenty minutes?”

"That'll be fine. S.O. clear."

Pete had been up till almost 3 A.M. delivering a baby. It was nine now. Still tired, he was grateful for the distraction work would bring. He got dressed, rinsed his mouth and brushed his hair and beard. Driving his county owned SUV to the Sheriffs Office, with its governmental allocation of natural gas, he wondered why the dispatcher had not gone into more detail.

Walking into the familiar building, Pete waved to Patty as he walked through the doors. She flashed him a quick smile and pointed to the door of Sheriff Robert ("Call me Rob.") Westlake. Pete walked into the office.

"Pete, good to see you." Rob Westlake rose from his chair and extended a beefy hand, practically engulfing Pete's as they shook.

“Hey, Rob."

“Pull up a chair." Rob Westlake was in his late forties. Six foot three, two hundred thirty pounds with not much gone to fat. He moved like the high school running back he used to be, slightly bowlegged with a loose, light step. His face was round and a little doughy, topped with a crew cut from another era. His dark eyes never left the face of anyone he was speaking with. Pete considered him a tough, intelligent man and liked him but also understood the political nature of the job. Trust but verify.

"Have you been keeping out of trouble? I know you've been busy. They sure do appreciate you over at Woflin. Judge Coleman was telling me just yesterday what all you'd done for them over there." The sheriff gave his head an ain't-life-a-bitch shake, paused, his eyes never leaving the smaller man's face.

"Yeah, I imagine it'll be a while before they feel like eating BBQ again."

"That's for sure." The sheriff laughed. "That's for damn sure."

OK Rob. Time to cut to the chase.

"Pete, we've got a problem. We found a little girl's body yesterday along Palo Duro Lake just northeast of the city of Canyon. She'd been beat up pretty bad and her belly slit open. She hadn't been dead long. There was a campfire made close by. The coals were cold but they were fresh. A couple of kids from Canyon discovered the body. Just dumb luck they found her before the critters did.

"We have nothing to go on yet," the sheriff continued, "we found her clothes, but that's about it. Maybe some foot prints, but it's been dry lately, and there weren't many places you could find a foot print, and with all the people tromping around there, you know, the two boys, their families, their friends..."

"Their friends?"

"It's a small town," said the sheriff, with a single shrug of his shoulders and an outward turning of his hands. "People don't always think to call the law first thing anymore." He sounded a little miffed.

"Anyway, Pete, look at the body and see if you can determine cause of death. Doc Flood's forty miles north of town at Fritch, tending to some old boy who got thrown off a horse and's probably paralyzed. Besides, he's not real keen on doing anything like autopsies anyway. ‘Rather spend my energy on the living,’ he'll tell me. Pete, we really need your help on this one. And I'll tell you something else. This little girl may not be the first."

Pete drove the sixteen miles to the Canyon hospital at a sedate thirty miles per hour. Only the southbound side of I-27 was still negotiable by car; the two northbound lanes narrowed with high weeds and small trees. He waved to the twenty-five or thirty people he passed, who were either walking, bicycling, or on horseback. His waves were returned, folks recognizing his SUV even if they didn't know him personally. After the Change, gasoline was easily obtained. Survivors were able to siphon gas from abandoned vehicles and pump it from buried fuel tanks at service stations. After just a few months, though, the gasoline began going stale. Cars quit running. The Mayor located existing cars and trucks that had been converted to natural gas and hired a mechanic to keep them running. Natural gas flowed under pressure from gas wells north of town. A couple of petroleum engineers became wealthy operating the wells. Separating impurities from the gas was not difficult.

Located two blocks east of the campus of West Texas A&M University, Palo Duro Hospital was now a combination clinic, church and community hall. It had an intermittent source of electricity: one functioning wind generator from the nearby "windmill farm" formerly operated by the university. The other six wind machines had been spirited away from the site by the self proclaimed mayor of Amarillo, Gary Blakely.

At the hospital, Pete was met by the Canyon constable, David Rodriguez. Short and stocky, David had grown up in nearby Umbarger. The lawman's nose had been broken several times, leaving him with an almost concave face and a low, nasal voice. First time meeting him some folks thought David was a little slow. They always changed their minds. Pete considered him intelligent, methodical, and probably the most independent law enforcement man in the area.

The two men shook hands at the hospital entrance.

"She's in the lab. It’s a little cooler in there. Trying to slow decomposition. Been about twenty-four hours since we found her." David spoke with a slow Texas drawl.

The body was in a room on the north side of the building laying on a metal gurney. She was covered with a single white sheet. A screened window provided some air circulation. David walked over to the gurney and pulled off the sheet. He carefully folded it and put it on a shelf. He walked to a chair and sat down, folding his arms across his chest.

"Let me know when you need to turn her."

Pete walked to the girl's side. Looking first at her face, he was drawn to the fixed stare, blue lips parted with a gray protruding tongue, dried blood from both nostrils. Her face was swollen and misshapen. A huge incision had been made, running from the sternum to below the navel. Taking a deep breath, he began taking notes.

"Subject is female, Caucasian, about thirteen years of age...”

Finishing his assessment, he turned to the constable.

"Death was probably due to strangulation. I think the abdominal cut was made after death. She's been raped and sodomized. That's about all I can tell you.

"OK. Here's all we found at the scene." David opened a plastic bag and removed a pair of jeans and a light blue cotton shirt. "This was it. No shoes, no socks, no underwear. Pete, if it's all right with you, I'll get a preacher and a few other folks and we'll bury her this afternoon."

"No problem."

They walked outside into the sunshine. David handed Pete a manila folder. Inside was a penciled drawing of the girl's face, her dark eyes calm, her long hair to one side as though blown by the wind.

"David, this is incredible. She looks like she's getting ready to talk. Where'd you get it?"

"A tenured professor of art. He lives here in town. I thought you could use it."

"It's perfect. David, I'd like to visit with the two boys who found her. And maybe have you take me to the place so I can look it over."

"Sure. The sheriff said you might want to do that. Those boys are neighbors and it's dinnertime. I figure they'll be putting on the feed bag about now. If you're up to it, we might do the same. Yolanda makes a pretty good stew."

Pete nodded. "That'll work. I'd be much obliged for the meal."

Pete followed the red pickup truck for the short drive to David's home. They stopped along the way, David going to the door of two adjoining houses to let the boys’ parents know they'd be back "in a little bit" to question the youngsters.