Once it really started to happen in North America, it happened fast. Frantic reports about small towns and rural communities in chaos came over the radio, and then the city. The next few days were a blur as we waited for news on Mom, and then the lockdowns happened. It was different than COVID. This time, there were soldiers in gas masks around the streets of Toronto. My Dad was beside himself, already recovering from one heart attack, he was so stressed and worried that I was starting to think he was heading for coronary number two.
Mom had her phone with her, but they'd only let her call us once a day. Gil, my baby brother, would conference in because he couldn't get out of Ottawa. It was another pandemic, but this one seemed to come with the ten times the crazy.
The news in the world was worse. Somehow, someway, it had started hitting small communities first. The experts said that they expected it had been at least a month that FRDD1 was spreading in small towns before it jumped to suburbs and small cities. It made little sense, but nothing did anymore.
Riots broke out in large cities, we went from gas masked soldiers escorting doctors in moon suits to full-blown marital law in Toronto over a week, and all I could do was try to keep Dad safe, and hope my mom would get better. I was glad that I was home with Dad, at least. I couldn't imagine what would happen if he'd been on his own.
As it was, we basically just listened to the radio all day. I eventually insisted that we at least listen to the CBC so that we weren't getting filled up to the brim with idiotic conspiracy theories that the drive-time hosts on the sports station were bandying about. They were no better than the Qanon crowd.
Even the radio got difficult though, as the announcers started getting sick, we heard obituary after heartfelt obituary for broadcasters, producers, writers, and more. The crazy estimates that FREDDIE could wipe out thirty percent of the human population were starting to feel real, if not low.
I tried to call Allie a hundred times, but I could never get a hold of her. The one time she did answer, she sounded worried, but glad to hear my voice.
"Calvin? Are you alright," she'd asked. I thought back to her asking me to father a child with her. How far away that felt after a few weeks of terror.
"I'm okay, dad's not doing well. My mom is still in the hospital. I've been trying to call for days,"
It sounded like she was walking, and there were voices nearby.
"They came to the house, Calvin. They took us for testing north of the city. We're okay, we're not changing."
She sounded tired, breathless.
"What do you mean 'changing," I demanded, the phone line got scratchy, "Allie?" The line was consumed by static, and she was gone.
Days after that, the news was awash with theories and reports of people who'd been deathly ill leaping up like they were given an adrenaline injection, fighting anyone nearby. Stories of rape started circulating, the radio shock jocks lathered into a boil over it. Gangs of people were roaming downtown in packs, and the rumour was that the Freddie, as it was being called, did something to them. Changed them.
The rest were dying. Some estimates had it at thirty percent lethal, and the next fifty percent of that was people who got through it, but most ended up twisted and red-eyed, spoiling for a fight. Rumours of the changes were worsening too, but at a certain point I threw the radio out the window. Gil had called just before the phones went dead, told us that we needed to get out of the city, but dad refused to leave without mom.
Three days later, my mom passed in the hospital, we never got to see her. That night, my brother called, told me to get out, take dad to the island, and then the the raids started happening, and the phone lines went down, a couple of hours later, the main internet lines.
I knew goddamned well what was happening, the government was cracking down on the virus and that meant people had to be contained. At night, people were roaming the streets in packs, walking like zombies, flocking together in little wolf packs. They seemed normal at first, some of them mostly were, but they'd attack others on site. We watched the old aerial tv to see the coverage, warnings mostly, sanitized as they were, you could read between the lines urging healthy people to stay home, and sick people to call 911 to get help - the only phone number that would work.
There were people that I swear had never been sick, covered in red patches along their necks, larger sunkissed brown freckles up and done their arms. They wandered and moved in groups, and I watched through boarded windows, praying they wouldn't come to the house.
It had been a couple more days since mom had passed alone in the hospital, and Dad wasn't doing well. He was in physical pain from his grief, and I knew that if I didn't get him out asap, that we'd probably both die when the city burned... and judging by the smell and smoke wafting down from a few blocks north, that'd be soon.
I'd stared down the barrel of my rifle at enough monsters burning bodies in a hot zone to know the scent of a funeral pyre.
I was packing dad's things, planning to make a quick stop at my place on the way out of town in his old pickup when I heard a crash in the living room. We'd both been coughing, had low-grade fevers, I worried his heart could go any moment.
It was a coronary, a massive one. He was gone before he'd hit the floor.
I dug his grave in the back, as deep as I could manage in my mother's flower bed. It was a tight squeeze. I placed flagstones from the garden path over him to help discourage scavengers. By the time I was able to stop crying, I realized that I could hear screaming in the distance on top of the smoke. Most of the neighbourhood looked deserted. A couple of neighbours walked like ghosts in their back yards, one old man nodded sadly at me from up the block, watching me work over the fences. He was naked and working his cock madly. I took a pull on the large bottle of water I brought out with me, cramming it in lot my back pocket and inhaling deeply.
Dizziness washed over me and I fell to one knee, it felt like a fever had hit me, but it'd come on so fast, I went from tired and sweating to burning heat, my skin roasting on my skeleton. Dad and I had been coughing for a few days, just little tickles and jumps, but as I crawled to the back door, I coughed hard, and green spittle splattered the back steps as I slipped inside.
Flashing back to my training, and a particularly bad three weeks in the desert, I crawled down the basement steps and dragged myself past the piled paint cans and stepladders, pushing the panel under the stairs and crawling into the cupboard.
I was suddenly aware of sounds in the house, I didn't know how long it had been. There were footsteps right above me and a pair of voices, tinny like they were coming from a radio.
"Looks clear. Grave in the back."
