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Happy to be home.

Late in September there was a report of a few deaths in Kenya from an unknown disease. An international team of ten doctors was sent, but it was near the border of Kenya and The Democratic Republic of Congo (in no way democratic or even a republic), a constant conflict zone, and they were delayed almost a week. There were all sorts of hemorrhagic fevers in that area and the rest of the world paid no attention. We were all in a positive glow. The nine month long lull now had silenced the doomsayers.

But central Africa was always a mystery, with so many people in remote regions, towns and villages with no roads that little reporting went on. It was too dangerous for journalists and the government issued passes meant nothing to the rebel groups, the ADF and Jihadists all fighting each other. That area had never been vaccinated. When boy soldiers swept through towns the fever deaths were thrown into the same communal pits as those shot. And viruses thrived there like rats in the trenches of World War One.

By the time they did manage to arrive, most of the villagers in this one local were at least mildly sick. And the doctors' tests did reveal it was linked to COVID and reported back to the WHO in mid-October. One of them also brought it back with him. It had a four-week long latency period, and all our old swabs failed to notice it. But this was kept under wraps as he lay in a hospital tent in Geneva, with the closest monitoring, a circle of experts around him constantly, while his fever grew worse and his brain swelled.

Four of the staff caught it next and a small cluster in India and Portugal seemed to have something similar. But this only appeared in a few side columns of medical journals through late-December. It seemed to incubate many weeks before the first symptoms appeared. Everyone had a very celebratory Christmas. So did we.

In January the first reports began to appear. People around the globe started catching this fever of encephalitis and in fifty percent of the cases it proved fatal. The mutation was radical, and no one who had the previous vaccines or the mild version seemed immune. The doctors all went to work on a new vaccine. But a new panic grew slowly, like the epidemic.

By the end of January there were only a thousand cases worldwide, spread evenly across the globe. By late February there were ten thousand cases, half of them recovering with standard drugs and a week of hospital care.

We were watching the news again, each evening, for a full report. With news of the first few cases in New York, we decided to act quickly, to triple our stocks of everything, food, wine, beer and at Bill's request, twenty cases of Bourbon, sending Rick alone. He made ten trips, one a day and went as far as Watertown for extra pumps and parts for our electrical system. We and bought another satellite dish and four more computers in case one broke. There were still no reported cases in these parts (it was early March) and we felt safe. After that we hunkered down.

In April the bad news grew seriously alarming. Hospitals were full again. No vaccine was ready and with the latency undetectable, some doctors guessed the numbers reported only reflected one tenth of the actual spread. Governors began to panic. Masks and stay at home orders were issued. Then shops and restaurants shut down once again. And it only got worse each day.

Nancy and the others planted a much larger garden now, with the extra hands. We had stockpiles of seeds, and she told me a larger stock of cattle was in order. There was another farmer some twenty miles away with a large farm, who sold us more pigs, chickens and ten more cows. He thought we were crazy offering to pay five times the standard price for them. Little did he know money would soon be worthless. But we pulled this off just a few weeks before that thought sunk into his skull.

I mostly paced the floor, with the T.V. blaring, a news addict, switching back to cigarettes again, (which I had Rick buy me in one truckload), plying my brain once again to figure where all this was going. I listened for every detail, rolled it around in my head, combined each with every other fact for new scenarios, wrote them down on pads and every night talked with Nancy of all my ideas, pad in hand, in front of the fire.

I was out in the yard talking to Bill one morning and he mentioned something I'd overlooked. If the working population declined past a certain point, it wouldn't be the necessities of life but the transportation system that would be first to fail. I realized he was right and the more heads the better for thinking this through. From that evening on we all ate together, in the large, unused dining room behind the kitchen. It could easily sit eight.

Jane and Nancy started cooking together, Rick and Bill and I would sit at the kitchen table, in front of the screen, Bill with his Bourbon and ice, me with a glass of wine and Rick with a beer, to discuss the latest news, while the children romped through the rooms, alive at play.

I don't know exactly what family had lived here long ago but Nancy found a small leather handle one morning in the back ceiling of her closet, behind her full rack of clothes. When she pulled on it, down came a neatly hidden panel and a fold down ladder which led to a dusty attic, full of boxes and old, mostly broken furniture. She called me upstairs and with a flashlight we explored. It stretched the length of the house with a little light from two small, round windows at each end. But the ceiling was the sloped roof, only six feet high in the center and sloping down to nothing at each side, so it could never have been used as a room, except perhaps by children. It was packed almost full of things, only a center aisle left clear. There were dowels of fancy dresses from that Victorian period, boxes of clothes and hats, but others that contained books and pictures, even jewelry, beautiful items, the books mostly female oriented. It must have been a woman's collection and though dusty, in perfect shape and finely bound in leather, with golden-edged pages. There were magazines too over a hundred years old, some of which I brought downstairs to add to our collection.

I guessed from what I'd heard of the old recluse that this must have been his wife's treasures and that she must have died years earlier and he packed up all her belongings and hid them there. The sight of them must have bothered him.

But other boxes held old Victorian era toys, dolls and puzzles, dollhouses, wooden trains with tracks and wheels. They must have belonged to the children who'd grown up here and these too he had some handyman stash in boxes. There were so many the children were thoroughly spoiled. I brought a few of these down to the living room, two at a time, which kept the children delighted, so we could talk undisturbed. A quick glance at them every fifteen minutes was all the watching they needed, so occupied with their new toys.

I became their year-round Santa Claus, on condition of their good behavior, which they always agreed to with a solemn nod. Then I would hand her a fancy doll and the boy a handful of painted tin soldiers from behind my back. Pretty soon they were sitting on my lap more often than the women, which I didn't mind. I was beginning to like them and tell them bedtime stories after dinner.

But the matter at hand was our concern. It meant our lives our fate, and every night at dinner that was all that the five of us discussed. We even set up a small table and chairs in the kitchen for the children so they wouldn't interrupt.

At first we decided to see how the pandemic played out, going nowhere and seeing no one. Bill suggested we should have some guns ready at hand in case of intruders. He mentioned we might need a castle more than a farm. So we built a heavy wooden gate a hundred yards in front of the house, the one access, crossing the road at a narrow point in the woods, thick with trees, and kept it locked day and night. I even helped construct it, putting my jeans and boots on once again. Several shotguns and rifles, fully loaded, were set up on racks above our three entrances, where the children couldn't get at them, but ready for us to reach up and grab.

By May everything seemed to be melting down. Doctors and Politicians were at a loss, losing face on their T.V. conferences when questions were asked, and losing their heads. The lock-downs didn't work. I started watching all this on every news station, switching stations every half-hour. It was just like the months I wrote my second book, pacing the floor. The others went about their chores by day. But by four they were right beside me in our kitchen, the women starting dinner while listening, the children in the other room playing, and we with a drink in hand silently staring in disbelief.

23.May.2024 - General view of UFABC field hospital, in Santo Andre, almost 100% full. covid-o2.jpg

That Summer inflation skyrocketed and markets crashed. My bank accounts became nearly worthless. The banks themselves fell one by one as the economy tanked. I didn't mind that loss. I was used to living on the cheap. But here we had plenty, luxury even. We were some of the lucky few who exchanged it for all the goods before this crash. But as companies couldn't maintain their work forces, they closed and the vital flow of supplies began to falter. Medical experts were at a loss.

This disease, unlike the earlier waves, had a knack of killing off its victims within a few months, covering one's body with small, black sores, boils that oozed a puss, just like the accounts I'd read of the Black Plague, dispatching its victims with fevers and headaches of maddening intensity. It had spread around the world in weeks and infected over half the world's population before we knew it. Your contagion didn't appear right away, it creeped through the body slowly, like AIDS, before revealing itself.

The cities were the worst hit. The old and the young disappeared, and the survivors were left to wear themselves away, tending to the invalids, until their own constitutions broke down enough to give access to it. The swiftness of this final wave put most of our best laboratories researching the disease out of commission before they discovered anything. Hospitals were closed when they had no staff left, as doctors and nurses were in the front line of those catching it. Gloves and gowns and masks, and all the precautions they took before proved of little use. To be next to someone sick was to catch it.

At first, like every disease, it assailed those who had survived the last waves, the old, the weak, and the very young.  It was an airborne virus and highly contagious. Through our children it spread and raged like a fire through a field of dry grass. The mortality rate among infants that summer was above ninety-five percent. For those under five it was eighty percent, and just as deadly among the old, the weak and the world's malnourished, in whatever mansion or mud hut they lay. There was no news out of Africa.

With the healthiest it took a more diabolical course. The thing came on in waves, like a malaria. For most adults the first onslaught was no worse than a bad case of the flu, though it left its signature in one or more black marks on the skin, usually on the chest or torso, but also on the face or neck. And when you saw someone with one of these marks in the street, you were told to give them a wide berth, avoid them like the plague.

The disease was insidious in its recurrences, striking each victim repeatedly, each time harder than the last, soon leaving not sores, but permanent debility.

It announced itself, I was told, by a mild ringing in the ears. Within a few days there would be a noticeable swelling in the neck, discomfort swallowing and a lack of appetite. Then fevers would begin, alternating with cold chills, while the body's defenses struggled against it. Depending on the severity of the attack. Then the patient would be bedridden for days or weeks and often seem to grow well again, with only a few new marks left to show its passing.

But in a month or three months it would come again, in a mild or severe bout, and renew its attack against a weakened frame. The fevers were so intense that they always left some degree of nerve damage, finally rendering each patient crippled or blind and permanently bedridden. It also assailed the brain, and shattered minds in many cases even before it shattered bodies.

These sad particulars resulted in too large a burden on the whole fabric of society, for the healthy had to tend to the sick, and stand in for them at all critical posts. It was a trial for us to even watch these developments on the screen. But that too died as the T.V. stations started going off the air. My computer picked up hundreds of small channels from around the world and in the less affected areas, especially islands. They kept broadcasting.

But two of the main channels were kept running, to inform the masses, or redirect whole groups, whole trades of workers to new tasks. The first task was the burying of the dead. Road crews with bulldozers handled that. The police were re-assigned to move people. They had the guns for that mission. As the populations diminished small towns were abandoned and people were redirected to the coastal cities, where food could be delivered by huge cargo ships, the easiest transport system to maintain.

I thought this was an insane mistake, to crowd people together in the cities. But I guessed the diminishing number of politicians, still in control of things, wanted the people closely herded and under their control to maintain order. The police did whatever they were told and the national guard and finally the military assisted, all troops called home from overseas. But this herding and mingling of people only increased the spread.

When I thought about this mistake, I had Jane and Rick call all the friends they could reach on the internet in these nearby towns and tell them to head into the woods, camp out as long as they could, as distance from others was the only effective barrier. Maybe that way the thing would blow over in a year and they'd survive. And these types were survivors, country folk. Most knew some farming. They all had guns and many could hunt game. Only a few of them agreed and made that choice before the busses arrived.

Throughout the summer we were told by our politicians to keep up hope, bury our dead, and live on to the day when a vaccine and our own indomitable spirit would prevail. Then the president caught ill and died.

A much diminished Congress took over and set up a supposedly temporary system that operated without money.  Everyone who could was expected to work and all would be fed and supplied with whatever they needed at designated centers. Those with no family left would receive public care and shelter, mostly near city centers, where they could walk for all their needs.

There were no medicines to alleviate the symptoms, except aspirin and fentanyl, which was now freely distributed at stations to any and all. It was not uncommon to give lethal dosages to those in the final, raving stages of the disease. It was the humane thing to do. And their moans only disheartened those around them. According to our leaders, our greatest challenge was to keep up hope, all pure rhetoric to me.

We watched all these developments throughout the Summer, with a silent dread. But we went about our chores each day, ate our meals and kept busy to keep our minds off the matter. I started minding the children much of the day, being the most useless at farming. I quit the habit of constant news and pacing the floor when things got too ugly to watch. It was now mid-summer.

At first, we discussed the idea of forming a bigger clan. This was before Fairfield suffered a forced evacuation, where Rick and Bill still had many friends. When the town caught its first case Rick and Jane told their friends to pack up and disappear into the mountains, live in tents off food supplies and game. Facebook was still abuzz. But like I said, only a few families followed our pleas. Most, as people usually do, put off the decision until it was too late.

It was about two weeks later when the police showed up with buses and told everyone not ill to pack a bag and get in. This all happened in one day. The residents were told the electrical grid was going down in a few days and they had to leave. But they weren't even told a destination. Each person was tested for fever checked for sores and treated like cattle. But that test didn't catch half of those who were already contagious.

I don’t know by whose authority, but the news programs we watched each evening all of a sudden changed. They became an organ not for news, but for the most inane and rosy human-interest stories that could possibly be dredged up in a crumbling world. While families were dying in hordes and the government slowly disintegrating, with whole regions being deported and declared uninhabitable, the news skipped over such statistics to feature stories of people strangely reunited with their pets, or some builder in Idaho still putting up an addition on his house, or the ever-hopeful doctors shaking test-tubes in our faces, promising miracles that were already too late to happen.

The soap operas still captivated mass audiences, even more now, with the number of bedridden.  No hint of the disease ever muddied their plots, though the actors seemed to be replaced quite often.  The re-runs were the most popular, being impervious to the present gloom; untouched, untainted, never changing things, beyond the pale of death. Game shows were also popular and all the sporting events still able to be drummed up, with teams and leagues combining to make up for their missing players, anything to get our minds off the real disaster.

To turn on the television those days was a grand lesson in human denial. But one of the forces operating within it, which claimed not to deny, was that of the television evangelists. They still harped away on their old themes of the judgment hour, sin, repentance and divine wrath.  They gained many converts, but they lusted for even more, and their shows slowly spread, like the plague itself, across the prime-time hours.

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