Just a fun bit of fluff I started years ago. For some reason, it seemed to be time to finish it.
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This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
This is the way the world ends,
Not with a bang but a whimper.
-T.S. Eliot,
The Hollow Men
.
It had started, most improbably, in Mecca.
It could have been anywhere, but Mecca it was.
Victims were not instantly turned into classic Hollywood's mindless shuffling zombies. Instead, the Bug - for so it came to be called - turned its victims into a reasonably good simulation of what urban mythology had termed 'rabid'. Symptoms included a general, searing anger and an unfocused, homicidal hostility.
Oh, and foaming at the mouth and death within a few days. Yeah, that too.
Victims did not just target other people. Virtually any movement would spark insane rage and an immediate attack. Indeed, few large mirrors or plate glass windows survived for long as victims shattered them in an attempt to kill their own reflection.
A victim's ferocity increased swiftly as the virus seething within their brains stoked white-hot aggression, but then dropped off steadily as the body itself started to break down. Towards the end, a victim would indeed appear as a shambling almost mindless near-corpse. The aggression didn't go away, just the victim's ability to move effectively.
And yes, it was incredibly contagious.
But,
But,
Mecca, that holy city...
The internet showed itself at its worst that week, with conspiracy theories growing exponentially. The Bug was Jehovah's revenge on Islam, sent by Him to save His own (posted by very brittle Christians, of course). The Bug was a Zionist plot to destroy the Faithful (equally brittle Muslims). The Bug was a CIA plot to take over the world's oil by killing off its present owners (idiots of all flavours). The Bug was a deliberate biowar strike by the New World Order. The Bug was Gaia's revenge on Her now-disowned parasitic humanity. The Bug...
No theory, no claim, no proposition was too silly to find supporters.
That the Haj had finished days before the Mecca index case appeared was almost certainly a coincidence. That an estimated million-and-a-half pilgrims had left Mecca to return home to over 100 countries could not however be denied. Nor could the fact that the Bug burst into full flower a week or so later in Muslim communities around the world. While destroying them (something usually overlooked by bigots and the tin foil hat crowd), it rapidly spread to their neighbours. Quarantines and countermeasures proved ineffective, too little, too late.
It was the Iranian government which had first openly accepted the Zionist Plot claim. Tehran was not prepared for a nuclear war, but, with the country falling to pieces around it, its Revolutionary Guard found a way to smuggle a carefully-hoarded ex-Soviet nuke into Tel Aviv. The last President of the Islamic Republic went on the air to announce his government's revenge before the mushroom cloud had had time to collapse. His defiant speech was interrupted by a frothing station cameraman tearing out the President's throat with his teeth. The station went off the air, 'temporarily' the screen announcement said. It never returned.
With plague sweeping the nation and the Israeli president and cabinet radioactive cinders, it should have surprised nobody that surviving Israeli generals found a way to circumvent complex presidential failsafe controls over that state's small but well-contrived nuclear arsenal. A spasm of launches targeted not only Tehran, but all surrounding states which
might
conceivably pose a post-plague threat to
Eretz Yisrael.
Warheads from those targeted nations were soon arching back on reciprocal flight paths.
Nobody knows whose warhead it was that detonated over Jerusalem. By then, few were in a position to do much of an analysis.
Any possibility that the carnage might be contained in the region died when an Israeli cruise missile coincidentally overflew first elements of the US Navy's 6th Fleet off the coast of Lebanon and then, a minute later, a shadowing Russian Navy flotilla. The latter, not detecting the missile until it was already over the US ships and with both forces at maximal alert, interpreted the missile as a pre-emptive US attack and, in accordance with its standing rules of engagement, spasm-launched its own weapons in reprisal. Word of the engagement received in capitals around the world only fed an already desperate situation. In the last
use-'em-or-lose-'em
miscalculation the species would ever make, the world spiralled into its third - and final - global conflict.
It could have been much worse, of course. Calmer heads, system failures and already-dead hands holding launch keys prevented the launching of enough ICBMs to plunge the world into a full-blown nuclear winter. Still, enough warheads went off to decapitate governments, shatter critical communication, transportation, food and power systems and isolate surviving populations. The launching of the less-spoken-of but omnipresent chemical, radiological and 'conventional' biological weapons didn't help matters.
With all of that evaporated any hope of finding a cure or vaccine for the Bug. By that time, some would have said it didn't really matter anyway.
Nor did the inevitable but foredoomed military campaigns by state armies, religious extremists and nationalist militias. While they solved nothing, achieved nothing, gained nothing, they proved remarkably effective at destroying what little else might otherwise have been left.
With most homes around the world having but a few days of food, survivors were soon forced to leave their shelter to forage and compete for sustenance. As supplies dwindled, each day an ever-increasing proportion lost out in that competition - and died.
Uncaring of events around it, like fog flowing over the scene of an earthquake, the Bug continued to spread.
The four horsemen found much trade that year.
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Ransom paused before entering the gorge. Colorful, striated cliffs rose several hundred feet on either side, leaving a flat valley perhaps a quarter mile wide. A shallow stream bed, now quite dry, meandered through the canyon.
He could see a small cluster of buildings inside the defile. A faded Chevron sign leaned towards a rust-spotted pair of pumps in front of a rambling one-story building, obviously once some form of store or restaurant. Next door was a simple, six-unit motel, its parking lot deserted but for lazy tumbleweed. Across the road were the charred and blackened foundations of half a dozen small houses and what might have once been a church. Behind the store was a tall array of solar panels of some sort. A dozen still-turning three-bladed turbines took advantage of the constant wind funnelled through the pass. A trailer sign in front simply said, 'WaTER."
Looking carefully at the store through his binoculars, he could see that the spaces where plate glass windows had once provided light for its customers had been filled in with something, probably locally-made mud brick. Such conversions were hardly uncommon in the area.
Donnie stirred by his side. Without taking his eyes off the valley, Ransom reached down and scratched behind the big dog's ears. He could hear the dog yawn beside him.
Dogs had reinvented their relationship with humans. Or, rather, the two had reverted to their original arrangement. Small pets were no longer useful in any real sense and such breeds were practically-extinct garbage-hunters now. As hunting companions, sentinels, defence partners and working animals, larger dogs survived. Seemingly immune to the Bug, they also provided advance warning of potential threats. Instead of cave lions, the threat was generally another human, of course.
The man was no longer young, but still well shy of old. Any fat which had ever been on him had long since melted away and he could now best be described as 'stringy'. His hair was long and held behind his head in a rough grey ponytail tied with a scrap of thong. His full beard was untrimmed beyond having been periodically chopped down with a knife. In his world, barbers were extinct, scissors scarce and razor blades precious trade items.
He was dressed in mismatched scraps of clothing - ragged blue jeans, a sleeveless flannel shirt and a much-abused felt hat which might once have boasted of some second-cousin relationship to a Stetson. Its brim was torn on one side; a hawk feather was stuck in the hatband on the other. His worn boots matched, but wouldn't for much longer; the sole of one was held in place solely by multiple turns of salvaged power line. A ragged scrap of stained cloth made do for a bandana. A carefully-preserved pair of aviator sunglasses completed his outfit.
It had been a long walk since the last stream. His clothing was dust-covered, sun-bleached and stiff in places with dried perspiration. Tattered and mended, in another year or two it would clearly disintegrate beyond repair. He'd not yet learned to sew or tan hides and kept pushing those looming problems aside.
Ransom carried a large and much-mended pack; in the post-Bug world, it was 'raider or trader' and he respected himself too much to become the former. His trading stock filled most of the pack, leaving little enough space for personal items. A belt around his waist held a small hunting knife on one side and a long-barrelled revolver on the other. Convenient at hand, lashed to the pack, was a quiver of arrows. A heavy-bladed machete was sheathed on his pack.
One hand carried a salvaged recurve bow. While Ransom still was learning to use it with skill, it was silent and had the signal virtue that arrows could be reused, even manufactured if necessary. He'd discarded his rifle a year ago after firing off the last of his ammunition. He carried 11 carefully-hoarded rounds of ammunition for his pistol; when they were gone, that implement too would be cached until When and If....
The sound of a distant shot rolled gently to the man's ears, then another. Instinctively dropping lower and checking to ensure he could not be seen, Ransom began scanning the terrain systematically, looking for places of cover. It seemed logical, at least as an initial guess, to assume that somebody was shooting either from or at the buildings.
Eventually, his eyes were drawn to movement. Two figures could be seen behind a large boulder slightly above ground level, medium rifle-shot from the buildings. They were too far away for Ransom to make out details. Noting their location, he settled in patiently to check for others.
The glint of sunlight off glass - a telescopic sight? binoculars? - revealed another gunman several hundred yards past the first pair. Half an hour of further watching disclosed no others.
