It's been some time since I posted a story here. Life got in the way. I have a few more in the pipeline. Hope you enjoy them.
Many of us have said it, but what if ...
Ragnarök
By Judogeezer
Desolation everywhere...but not what he expected. Every end-of-the-world movie he'd ever seen had the same scenes; deserted streets with dust and scraps of paper blowing about, highways jammed with disabled and abandoned vehicles. Still others had crowds of panicked refugees running hither and yon trying to evade the unavoidable foe. Then there were the hordes of flesh eating zombies multiplying exponentially. He saw none of that. At least in Sycamore, Illinois, population formerly 18,000, the world had ended with a whimper, not a bang.
Anders Larsson stood in the intersection of State and Main Streets facing west. Ahead of him lay the business district. To his right was the county courthouse. Over his right shoulder was the public library and over his left was the post office. There was not a pedestrian in sight. Two cars and the fire chief's red SUV were parked in front of city hall. All the other parking spaces were empty.
After more than a week of searching, he finally had to accept that he was the only one alive in the city, maybe on the whole planet.
The streets were deserted. No scraps of paper or dust devils were blowing around. There were no wrecked vehicles or corpses scattered about. Anders did a 360. Nope, no zombies either. Downtown looked more like six a.m. on a typical Sunday morning. The only clue that this wasn't an ordinary day in mid-America was the miasma of death, the stench of rotting flesh that still hung over the city.
Anders glanced at his watch. It was actually 12:48 on a Thursday afternoon in May. A steady stream of traffic should have been moving through the intersection where he stood. Most of the parking spaces should have been occupied. People should have been trickling back to the courthouse from P.J.'s grill. Either downtown should be bustling or he should be dead.
When he stood in the same spot nearly two weeks earlier, he still held out hope. The sky was blue. Birds were chirping. The traffic signals cycled green, yellow, red, green, yellow, red in mindless conformity to rules no one would ever follow again. In a panic, he'd run through town like a mad man, yelling, begging someone to answer him. His voice echoed off the buildings, mocking him.
He went through most of the commercial buildings in a four block area and randomly checked homes around the city. He even visited several farms on the city's outskirts although there was one in particular he avoided. There was no point in checking the hospital. Anders found more bodies than a convention of morticians see in a lifetime. What really scared him was that not all of them were human.
Whatever Angel of Death had passed over, it didn't seem to discriminate between humans and other mammals; cats, dogs, pigs, sheep, cattle – all dead. Chickens, goldfish and the God damned cockroaches seemed to be doing fine, thank yeew. Most people had time to go to ground. What they didn't have was time to figure out what was killing everyone.
After his wife left him two years earlier, Anders buried himself in his ham radio hobby. With no wife or family to spend his money on, he'd built an amateur radio station that rivalled NASA mission control. It allowed him to monitor everything from commercial broadcasts to international shortwave stations to emergency services communication. He also talked to other hams around the world until one by one they went silent. It gave him a pretty complete picture of the pandemic.
One ham in Atlanta worked for the CDC. According to her, epidemiologists had brought back tissue samples from the initial outbreaks in Miami and Seattle. Within 48 hours, everyone who had contact with their colleagues or the samples was dead. Whatever it was, state of the art containment failed. Someone broke in to the QSO to report the same thing had happened at USAMRID in Frederick, Maryland.
Like a tidal wave, the pathogen swept up from Florida, in from both coasts and out from Atlanta to engulf the Northern Hemisphere within five days. It hit fast and it hit hard. Anders had seen it at work more than once. Someone would be perfectly fine. Suddenly, they'd start to sweat profusely followed by chills. Within two hours they'd spike a fever over 106 degrees. Convulsions were followed by coma. Within 24 hours of onset they were dead. No exceptions.
The medical community was wiped out right away. After all, where do you go when you get deathly ill? Doctors, nurses, P.A.s, paramedics, orderlies, candy stripers all gone in two days and a night.
His folks had grown up during the Cold War. He remembered them debating whether it would be better to go in the first strike or try to survive. His generation had the same, if entirely facetious, debate about the zombie apocalypse.
God or Fate apparently decided for him.
The best Anders could figure was that he was a genetic anomaly. Before the Internet shut down, he'd spent hours researching infectious diseases and epidemics. It seems there are always some humans who are naturally immune. Typhoid Mary had come to mind. Individuals had been found carrying the Ebola virus and HIV who never got sick. Half of Europeans survived the Black Death. When Columbus' sailors, carriers of plague, typhus, small pox and many other European diseases arrived in the New World, ninety percent of the native population was wiped out. Still, ten percent survived.
Whatever this was, the death rate was unprecedented. Anders spent the better part of two weeks, shut up in his ham shack. Everything he heard led him to believe that death rates were near 100%.
Commercial power went out on Monday night. Tuesday, he noticed the ever-present plumes of water vapor over the cooling towers at the Byron nuclear power plant had disappeared. Even from thirty plus miles away, the twin plumes were visible most days. Three different high tension lines serviced the city. There should have been power from the wind turbines scattered around the county. Anders' guess was that when Byron shut down, it caused a cascade of tripped circuit breakers throughout the power grid much like the great northeastern blackout in 1965.
Since his hair wasn't falling out and he wasn't throwing up, he assumed it wasn't a meltdown. Running for nearly a month unattended, there was probably some maintenance issue that triggered an automatic scram. He even drove out to the plant, but the place was locked down tight. All he could see were two armed men in full military bio-hazard gear dead at their posts by the main gate.
Now, he was back where he started, in the middle of the street, numb and at a loss for what to do. The birds still chirped but the traffic signals were no longer pointlessly cycling. He still tried to make sense of it all as images of death kept intruding into his thoughts.
Remembering those bodies restarted his inner debate – nature or manmade? Was Mother Earth cleansing herself of an annoying parasite or had some fool bioengineered a weapon that got out of control? Then his overwrought mind settled on the Native Americans. Maybe this was a prelude to extraterrestrial colonization? Like the European settlers who deliberately gave Amerinds smallpox infested blankets, maybe ET was eliminating the competition.
His pointless ruminating was interrupted by an anomaly on the horizon.
It was moving.
Like a fly in amber, this unimaginable catastrophe had left his emotions frozen in limbo. Now a surge of fear shot through him peaking near panic levels. Hope had been crushed out of his soul and he was afraid to let it back in. Was there another survivor? His heart pounded. His breath labored like a steam engine until he felt faint. The dot finally resolved itself into a vehicle.
He must have been spotted because it surged forward, speeding down the center of State Street straight for him.
As the vehicle got closer, he could see it was a sports car; a red sports car; a red Mazda Miata convertible. No. It couldn't be. When it was a block away, Anders let loose a barrage of profanity that could have blistered paint off a battleship. He was still cursing God for letting him live when it pulled to a stop and a woman stepped cautiously out of the car - a car he had paid for.
"Andy?"
