She cocked one hip and then sighed.
"It's a long story. You gonna keep me here starving while I tell you or can it wait until we get to where you live?"
When it happened, I was working weekends at fixing up an old house by a mountain stream in East Tennessee. I'd bought it and the fifty acres it sat on to use as a fishing and hunting camp for myself. It took five years of working as a carpenter to realize I needed someplace like the house beside the stream. I liked being a carpenter. I liked building things. What I didn't like was being told what to do, how to do it, and then half an hour later, being asked if I was done yet. My only respite was a weeklong fishing vacation to a mountain stream in the Smokies in the summer and a few days deer and turkey hunting there in the fall.
I'd learned to fish and hunt from my grandpa, a man who lived through the Great Depression and said he fed his family through those years by hunting and fishing when he wasn't running his farm. Grandpa also taught me where to find plants that were edible and taught me how to fix them. He said it wouldn't hurt me to know how to do all that if for no other reason than so somebody would have the knowledge, and someday it might come in handy. He couldn't have possibly known how prophetic that statement was.
Anyway, on one of my fishing trips, I happened to see a "For Sale" sign on one of the roads leading back to a stream I'd never fished so I drove back to look. What I found seemed like paradise.
According to the realtor's sign, the parcel of land was fifty acres with a house and a barn and the stream ran through the middle of it. The house wasn't very big, only two bedrooms, and it was in a pretty sad state of repair, but I was a carpenter, now wasn't I? There was no electrical service to the property, but I figured I could live without that for a week or two. I'd just buy some battery lanterns for light and carry water from the stream. My cell phone wouldn't work that far out in the boonies anyway, so I wouldn't need to charge it until I got back to my apartment in Knoxville.
The house had a fireplace and a wood stove for cooking, so all that would cost me was a few hours work cutting and splitting firewood. I'd miss a refrigerator, but I could survive for a week at a time with canned goods.
At the time, I figured I'd just use the place as a fishing and hunting camp instead of roughing it in a tent. On my way out of the town down the road, I stopped at the office of the real estate agent that had posted the sign and asked what the owners wanted for the place. The price the agent named was low enough I could afford a significant down payment, and my credit score was high enough he said I probably wouldn't have a problem with a loan. A month later, I wrote a check for half of my life savings, signed a thirty-year note, and took the keys from the owner.
The more time I spent at my new place, the more I wished I could live there all the time. It was really restful to drive up on Friday or Saturday night after work, fix something to eat, and sleep with only the sounds of the crickets and the occasional hooting of an owl instead of the sounds of city traffic. It was even better to wake up to the singing of the birds and spend the day making my place exactly how I wanted it to be or fishing if that's what I felt like doing. I'd been doing that every weekend for six months when, as the survival people say, the shit hit the fan.
When I drove home to Knoxville that Sunday night, all I could get on my car radio was news of another flu type illness that had originated somewhere in Asia. Nobody was sure where it started, but the WHO said it was extremely infectious and more fatal than the regular flu and everybody should stay home to minimize infections so the hospitals wouldn't be overrun with sick people. They had named the virus COVID-26.
Interspersed between repeated readings of the WHO statement were several analysts who had differing opinions.
Several commentators theorized the WHO was attempting to increase their funding since the US stopped giving them money because of their failure to correctly investigate and analyze the impacts of COVID-19 in 2020 and were again wrong about COVID-23 in 2023. The latest reports said there were a total of about two thousand cases and those were spread between Atlanta, Chicago, and New York City. A few people had died, but it appeared to cause only a little higher death rate than the normal seasonal flu.
The President even broadcast a message that nobody should be alarmed because the US was much better prepared for any virus than ever before, and that people should continue to live their lives as they always had.
I could understand the skepticism. I was in high school during COVID-19 pandemic and the world had basically stopped for almost three months only to find that crippling their economies really didn't do much except maybe for a few large cities. When the dust settled and all the data was sorted out, COVID-19 was worse than the normal flu, but not much worse than the worst year on record for normal flu. Most of those who were seriously affected or died were older people with pre-existing conditions. I didn't know anybody who'd caught it, much less than anybody who'd died from it.
I was out of trade school and working as a carpenter when the COVID-23 pandemic was supposed to be looming on the horizon. COVID-23 ended up being pretty much a dud though the WHO declared it a pandemic a week after the first reports. The pandemic never materialized.
It was later determined that COVID-23 was just a mutated strain of COVID-19. Most of the population already had some immunity or had been given the immunity via the COVID-19 vaccine developed in 2022 that finally got it under control. There were no at-home quarantines ordered except in a few states, and those were quickly lifted when only a few cases materialized. A few people did contract it and die, but the numbers were so low as to be just a blip on the normal death rate. Knoxville had a whole nine cases of COVID-23 and all recovered in about two weeks.
Now, it seemed as if the WHO was attempting to redeem its reputation by raising the threat of another pandemic, this time worse than anything since the Spanish Flu Epidemic of the WWI years. I guess they had nothing to lose. If the world reacted with another lockdown and the WHO was proven wrong, all that would be lost was several trillion dollars in the world GNP and the increase in anger of the countries already mad at them. If the world didn't react and the WHO was right, they could smile and say "We told you but you didn't listen. Now, give us more money."
I wasn't worried anyway. I'd only driven back to Knoxville for a supply of groceries for my fishing trip. I'd decided to take a long vacation since I'd finished work on the last house and we weren't due to start framing the next one for another couple weeks. I made one trip to Walmart for groceries and to fill up my truck, stopped off at my apartment for some more clothes, and then headed back to the mountains. I did take along my radio that receives NOAA weather forecasts along with AM, FM, and several short wave frequencies. I didn't have my roof finished yet, and wanted to have some advance notification if a rainstorm was coming.
What a difference a week can make. I got busy with finishing up some of my repairs during the day and fishing during the evening and forgot about the radio until Friday night. It looked like it might rain that night, so I tuned in the nearest NOAA station on my radio. What I heard instead of an NOAA weather report was a recorded message from the CDC.
The large cities with international airports were in a shambles and most other cities were quickly becoming that way. Apparently COVID-26 was a lot more infectious and lethal than even the WHO had foreseen. In less than a week, the US had recorded over half a million cases and the number of cases was increasing by a multiple of ten every day. The currently estimated death rate was nearly fifty percent within ten days after infection. As if that wasn't shocking enough, the CDC had determined the virus was transmitted by all body fluids and the virus was active on any surface for about forty-eight hours.
It wasn't difficult to imagine how the number of infections could increase so quickly. About two and a half million people fly in and out of the major US airports every day. If, as the CDC said their initial studies indicated, the average traveler was in close contact with at least ten other people a day, within a couple of weeks, the entire population of the US would be infected. It would only take a few more weeks before most of the world had been infected by the virus.
The death rate was a different story altogether. I couldn't fathom a disease so insidious that it would kill you within ten days of being infected. Apparently that was the case though. According to the recorded message, all hospitals were over capacity and with no beds and no known treatment had resorted to only making infected people as comfortable as possible in tents pitched in the parking lots. The dead were piling up faster than they could be buried so most areas had resorted to mass graves with body bags instead of coffins in order to cope.
The last part of the message was an advisory. If you were in a place with no other people or at least with people you positively knew hadn't been anywhere for at least two weeks, you should stay there. The prediction was that the virus would have run its course in about a month because there would be very few people left to infect and any residual virus would have been rendered inactive.
On Saturday, I could get nothing on either the AM or FM bands or the weather frequency, so I tried the short wave bands. I found one guy transmitting from his home in a remote spot in Texas, and what he was saying wasn't good.
He was using a solar panel and batteries to operate his transmitter because the electrical grid was down all over the US. He said the AEC had shut down all the nuclear plants on Tuesday of the week before, and the coal and natural gas plants had shut down the following day because there was nobody left to safely operate them. Even the wind and solar generators weren't working because there no workers to operate the interfaces to the grid.
There were none of the riots for food and other staples that had been predicted before COVID-23. That was because the virus had spread so fast there weren't enough healthy people left to riot. He and his wife felt reasonably safe because they hadn't been anywhere for at least a month and had enough food and other supplies to tide them over for a year.
When he started repeating his report, I shut off the radio and sat down to think. It was pretty obvious I was on my own now for at least a month. I took stock of what food I had and decided if I rationed myself and caught some fish, I could last for at least a month. After that...
What to do after that was a problem I really didn't want to face, so I didn't. It's amazing how you can rationalize a bad situation into something not so bad so you don't have to think about it.
The CDC had said the virus would be gone in a month. I figured in a month I'd just go back to my apartment and get on with life as best I could. Knoxville was a big enough city that even with a fifty-percent death rate, there would still be a lot of people alive and doing the same. It would probably be a while before the economy started working and I could start building houses again, but I still had some savings that would tide me over until then.
I didn't think about it for the first two weeks. I worked on my house and fished. Once in a while, I tried the radio and got nothing, but I figured that was because the electric grid was still down and it would take a while to re-start the power plants and get it back up and working again.
It was the evening of the third Wednesday that the reality of the situation began to sink in. I'd tried to tune in NOAA, but all I got was static. It was then I realized that couldn't be right. It didn't make sense that NOAA wouldn't have generators to power their transmitters because even the smaller AM and FM radio stations did. Even when the tornado went through Knoxville in 2024 and knocked out all power for a week and a half, the radio and TV stations were still broadcasting. Lack of generators couldn't be the problem. Lack of people to operate the stations could be.
My supply of canned goods was almost gone, so I decided I had to go back to Knoxville. I'd restock my supplies and at the same time see just how bad things really were.
That Friday I drove back to Knoxville and realized things were much worse than I'd led myself to believe. There was no traffic, and I don't mean there were just a few cars on the road. I didn't see a car, truck, or even a bicycle on the way from the mountains to my apartment. Coming down from the mountains I did see a bear, but this wasn't the usual black bear I'd seen in the mountains before. This bear was brown and at least half again as big as a black bear. It had to be a grizzly bear, and there had never been grizzly bears in the mountains. I couldn't figure out how that could be.
I also saw packs of dogs roaming the streets in my neighborhood. They'd not been there before and most were wearing collars. I figured they'd either been turned loose by their owners or had escaped when there was nobody to feed them.
By the time I got to my apartment, the full impact of what had happened had hit me. Apparently, almost all the people in Knoxville were dead or had left for somewhere secluded. There wouldn't be any going back to work in another couple of weeks, if that ever happened. I had to get ready to fend for myself for a long, long time.
