While I normally put in a lot of internal links to previous, related posts here, I won’t be doing that for what I hope will be this year’s thirty NaNoWriMo posts. If you have jumped into or stumbled onto this story in mid-adventure, there are plenty of other ways to navigate around the site to find previous installments. Actually doing so is left as an exercise to the student.
Sooooooooo sleepy. Good thing that a keyboard isn’t considered “heavy equipment,” if you know what I mean.
CHAPTER THREE
Over the next week the news reports and images coming from Earth got progressively worse. The march of the Airborne Hemorrhagic Fever through humanity’s ranks continued unabated, the geometric increase in casualties surging past anyone’s ability to keep count. What AHF didn’t kill, desperate, panicked survivors did.
In the industrialized world, overnight transportation from anywhere to anywhere led to the spread of the virus to every major city on the planet in less than three months. The governments couldn’t get ahead of the crisis. When they shut down air travel, the virus was spread by refugees traveling in cars. When they declared martial law and shut down the highways, people fled infected areas on foot across the countryside, with nothing but the clothes on their backs and what they could carry.
The systems that held society together began collapsing. When global transport was shut down, companies started to fail. Unemployment reached historical highs. When interstate travel was shut down, the food stopped flowing to the cities.
Hospitals, police, and fire departments found themselves to be the first decimated. They were the first exposed en masse to AHF, the first to discover the 80% fatality rate of the disease, and the first to realize how hopeless this battle might be.
Even those with jobs stopped going to work. The millions to be made in the stock market weren’t worth the risk of being exposed to a four-in-five chance of death, which would almost certainly doom your family as well. Schools closed, stores closed, factories closed. Everyone was shocked by how quickly the only people on the street were the military and the looters.
Martial law was declared worldwide, with varying degrees of enforcement success. In some regions it was ignored and the military itself disintegrated as nearly everyone went home to their families in a frantic scramble to find some place safe. In other countries, the situation actually stabilized, the military being able to restore order, set up basic systems for distributing food and aid, and conscripting those it needed as necessary to maintain the ranks.
In underdeveloped countries, where there was little to no global travel to bring infections in, there was a delay before the first AHF cases were seen in some locales. Everyone shut their borders and hunkered down. But it only took one or two infected carriers to accidentally break the quarantine.
Once quarantine was broken, the crowded and impoverished conditions in many third world cities were like gasoline-soaked tinder, waiting for the spark from the first AHF carrier. With a more densely packed population with fewer opportunities to flee or hide, the death rates soared to astronomical heights.
A few places were able to isolate themselves thoroughly enough and wipe out the few existing outbreaks so aggressively that they got on top of the crisis, and then tried to stay there. Living on an island was an advantage, which the Wellington and Reykjavik governments leveraged, mercilessly enforcing their isolationism with extreme and immediate force. Basic principles of human rights were abandoned in favor of survival at all costs. It was totalitarian to the extreme, but the “New Zealand strategy” worked better than anything else did.
Researchers around the world worked ceaselessly to try to find a vaccine or a cure for AHF. They were hampered by the way the virus could mutate quickly, retaining its virulence while dodging all attempts to find a weak spot that could stop it. More nimble than the flu virus in branching into dozens of different strains, more deadly than the previous century’s Ebola virus had ever become, AHF was not playing by the old rules.
Those who survived the battle with AHF were both treasured by researchers and feared by the public. Even though they had recovered, were they still contagious? Could they be re-infected by a new strain of AHF, or did they now have immunity? What about people who had clearly been exposed, often repeatedly, but had never come down with the disease? Was there a common link between those naturally immune, and could it be utilized and passed on to others?
The unusual and unique nature of the AHF virus and the speed at which it had initially spread led to an endless stream of unsubstantiated rumors. The most common was some variation on the idea that AHF was an engineered virus, created in a secret lab by terrorists and deliberately spread to kill as many as possible. The problem with the rumor was that no group had ever taken credit for such a horrific act, and there was no biological evidence to support the theory.
Others were convinced that aliens, monsters, or God had decided to wipe out Mankind. Prayer didn’t prove to be any protection against AHF, nor did Ouija boards
With the entire world cracking at the seams, the Pakistan-India war could have been a knockout blow. But because the whole world was already locked into isolationist hysteria, the immediate effects were not felt worldwide. The invasion of infected refugees from Pakistan into India shattered the fragile equilibrium which the Indian government had fought so hard to maintain. The casualties skyrocketed on the subcontinent, but it made little difference to the rest of the world. They all had their hands full with their own crises.
We Love The Stars Too Fondly 