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The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart
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Contents
Prologue
Suva, Fiji
February 28th
South Elgin, Illinois
March 3rd
Kandul, Chattisgarh State, India
March 16th
South Elgin, Illinois
March 18th
Raipur, India
March 18th
Democratic Republic of Congo
March 19th
Heathrow Airport
March 20th
Labangka, East Kalimantan, Indonesia
March 25th
Cruise Ship Reine des Mers, Somewhere in the Indian Ocean
March 30th
South Elgin, Illinois
April 1st
Lagos, Nigeria
April 3rd
Chicago, Illinois
April 4th
Cuyo Island, Philippines
April 13th
Fort Detrick, Maryland
April 14th
NIID Headquarters, Tokyo
April 17th
Yenisei, Russia
April 20th
White House
April 21st
Draethen, Wales
April 21st
White House
April 22nd
Pasteur Institute, Paris, France
April 25th
Wheaton, Illinois
April 28th
Talnakh, Siberia
April 29th
CIA Headquarters, Langley, Virginia
May 4th
McGuire Air Force Base, New Jersey
May 9th
Chicago, Illinois
May 12th
Eighty Mile Beach, Australia
May 14th
Yaizu, Japan
May 17th
South Elgin, Illinois
May 18th
Quang Tri Province, South Vietnam
March 30th, 1972
City of the Dead, Cairo, Egypt
May 22
LaGuardia Airport, Queens, New York
May 26th
South Elgin, Illinois
June 7th
Yaizu, Japan
June 15th
Sawtooth National Forest, Idaho
June 19th
Inverness, Illinois
June 27th
Talnakh, Siberia
July 1st
White House
July 5th
Inverness, Illinois
July 12th
Chicago, Illinois
July 15th
Pike County, Illinois
July 18th
Andover, England
July 24th
San Francisco, California
July 27th
South Elgin, Illinois
August 9th
Epilogue
South Elgin, Illinois
September 9th
To too many veterans of too many wars,
who traded their lives for our freedom.
The Old Man
and the
End of the World
By
William Hale Harrison
Book One:
Things Fall Apart
The Old Man and the End of the World
Book One: Things Fall Apart
Copyright © 2021 by William Hale Harrison
All rights reserved.
This is a work of fiction. Any similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not intended by the author.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior written permission of the publisher and copyright owner.
Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and tho’
We are not now that strength which in old days
Moved earth and heaven, that which we are, we are;
One equal temper of heroic hearts,
Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will
To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.
Ulysses. Alfred, Lord Tennyson
Prologue
Suva, Fiji
February 28th
Adi Toganivalu sat at the nurse’s station at the center of the Happy Heart Nursing Home on the edge of Suva, the second largest city in Fiji. The one-story yellow brick building sat on a high spot, and had a picturesque view of Laucala Bay, a quarter mile away. A large garden, crisscrossed with paths and dotted with benches, offered a serene spot for residents to relax and enjoy the outdoors. A few minutes after 8:00 in the evening, across the city to the west the sky arched a rich deep blue, fading into black overhead.
The home was small and exclusive, catering to well-heeled Western clients. Quiet reigned inside the facility. A few of the residents sat in the lounge watching TV in wheelchairs, or on the brightly patterned couches. Most of the others had already gone to sleep. Old people seemed to fall into two distinct patterns when it came to sleep; either they needed a whole lot, or very little.
Three linoleum-tiled corridors radiated out at right angles from the nurse’s station, making it easier to watch the whole facility from one location. Adi had a small TV on the desk at her elbow, tuned to one of her favorite shows, Keeping Up with the Kardashians. She absolutely adored Kylie and dreamed of meeting her someday. Maybe she would come to Fiji on vacation some time, and they would meet on the beach, and Kylie would notice how cool she was, and… she looked up to see a three hundred pound woman, stark naked, plod into the room across the hall from her own. “The Whale is mating again,” she told Tina. “Looks like tonight it’s Mr. LaClaire.”
People, she thought, would be shocked if they knew how much sex went on in nursing homes. Many of the residents suffered from various levels of dementia, and one of the first things lost in dementia patients was a sense of restraint. They often said the most outrageous things, without any filter, simply because they popped into their head. They often did the most outrageous things too, including for some, having sex wherever they could find it. When Adi first started working here, such behavior repelled her. She had no idea old people even had sex, and she found the idea totally gross. But the other nurses assured her it was absolutely normal behavior in a nursing home. Let them have their fun, they told her. They are grownups, and it isn’t like someone’s going to get pregnant.
Mrs. Wallace, who the staff had nicknamed “The Whale,” was one of the most incorrigible. She made absolutely no effort to hide her philandering, not even bothering to wear any clothing as she waltzed out of her own room and into the rooms of male residents.
Adi went back to her show. About fifteen minutes later she looked up and saw Mrs. Wallace’s broad back and droopy butt waddling further down the hall and into another room, her bare feet slapping on the tile floor. “Wow, Mr. Zumwalt too. Big night!”
She glanced back at her show, but she stopped and leaned forward. Something about the sound of Mrs. Wallace’s footsteps wasn’t right. In the dimmed evening lighting she could see dark blotches on the tile floor where Mrs. Wallace had just walked. She stood to get a better look. “I think the Whale’s bleeding. It looks bad!” She turned to her friend. “Call the hospital and have them send an ambulance!”
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nbsp; She rushed down the corridor and as she got closer, she could see bloody footprints and huge droplets of red. She glanced into Mr. LaClaire’s room and saw a ragged bloody smear on the curtain around his bed, and blood pooling on the floor.
“Oh God no!” she whispered and clutched at the crucifix that hung around her neck. She crept quietly to Mr. Zumwalt’s door and peeked in. The Whale straddled him in an obscene parody of coitus, her teeth yanking at a piece of tendon in the old man’s neck. A gaping hole in his throat jetted arcs of blood, squirting across her face. Blood covered the huge woman in a ghastly crimson sheen, her head and stringy gray hair soaked in it, and gobbets of flesh clung to her. Blood dripped off her enormous pendulous breasts and Adi could see it running in rivulets down her rolls of fat.
Oh my God, Oh my God, Oh my God! She felt a wave of pure horror pass through her as she stood in the doorway, her entire body frozen with terror. The door! she thought to herself. I have to close the door! Her eyes riveted on the obscene thing just a few feet away, she slowly slid her foot forward and leaned toward the handle. In that terrible instant, the thing swiveled its head toward her. Adi whimpered, transfixed, as she stared into the thing’s bloody, awful face with its empty, lifeless eyes, and then it bared its blood-stained teeth and threw itself off the bed. It thudded to the floor with a wet slap and scrambled to get a purchase on the blood-slickened tile, its eyes never leaving Adi’s.
Adi shrieked as the thing flopped wetly toward her. She grabbed the handle of the door and yanked it, but the door smacked into the thing’s gory head. Its eyes went to her hand and it heaved itself up and lunged, its teeth missing her by a fraction of an inch. Adi grabbed the door frame with her other hand and yanked on the door in terror and frustration. The thing thrust itself at her, but its shoulder caught on the edge of the door. She screamed and kicked it in the face as hard as she could and the door squeegeed across its face and popped free, slamming shut.
She backed away trembling, then ran for the nursing station. “Call the police!” she screamed. “Call Security! She’s Infected!”
South Elgin, Illinois
March 3rd
The old man cracked his eye open and peered at the clock on his nightstand. 7:30 a.m. He decided against trying for another hour of sleep, rolled onto his back, and began a series of stretches with his legs, ankles, and knees. Both legs were laced with a spiderweb of old scars. Some were ragged cuts or surgical scars which had been neatly stitched and were faint now, including a long scar at his left hip and several around his left knee. Others, deep shrapnel wounds, had taken divots out of his legs and were hard for people to look at.
He sat up on the edge of the bed and started on his upper body: his back, his broad shoulders, and finally his thick neck. Both his shoulders carried faded tattoos, one of the Marine Corps emblem, the other a custom job, a shield that read BADGER ONE with a pair of crossed .45s. Other tats ran down his arms and marked his chest. Like his legs, irregular scars covered the rest of his body including half a dozen round puckered marks from old bullet wounds. He gritted his teeth as he bent his torso deeply to one side and then the other. As he rolled his neck he heard several loud pops, one of which sent an electric jolt of pain down his left arm to his fingertips.
He’d been wounded twenty-six times, mostly shrapnel but some AK-47, and it was a wonder he was alive at all. After “The Day I Got Shot to Shit,” as he thought of it, he had died and been revived three times, twice at the field hospital in Quang Tri and once at the US Naval Hospital in Yokosuka, Japan, when sepsis had set in. After that there were seventeen operations and fourteen months of rehab and therapy, plus a half dozen more surgeries over the years as his body kept breaking down.
He flexed his “bad” left hand several times. Surgeons had wired the carpal bones into place so they would heal properly, and for a while he hadn’t had much trouble with it. But now, at 70, arthritis had set in and the hand perpetually ached.
He pulled on his jeans and a denim shirt and stepped into his shoes, made his bed, and then reached for the eye patch on his nightstand and settled it into place. He stopped in the bathroom, where he pissed and brushed his teeth. He had long since ceased to notice the jagged scar that ran from up above his hair line, through the place where his left eye had been, and down past the corner of his mouth. Or the other one, mostly hidden by his beard that ran along his jaw, where a piece of shrapnel had shattered three teeth, broken his jawbone, and sliced off the bottom third of his ear. Now, when he looked at himself at all he mostly saw that his beard shone white like snow and what had been a full head of black hair was now thinning and pale gray.
As he finished, he heard a snuffling and whining at the bedroom door. When he opened it his two dogs, Tank and Sonny, who he referred to as the Boys, whined and wiggled with pleasure at the sight of him, and tried to muscle each other out of the way to get the lion’s share of his affections.
They were beautiful animals, boxers, with white legs and chest and a reverse brindle coat that looked like tiger stripes. They were brothers, litter mates. He’d flown to Germany to buy one from a breeder of champions, and when he arrived, there were only these two left, the one he had reserved and its brother. His puppy already weighed a healthy ten pounds, while the other, smaller pup only weighed slightly over seven. Someone else had reserved that one, but when they showed up to get it they had rejected it because it was much smaller than its brother.
The two, the breeder explained, had been nearly inseparable since birth, and offered him a reduced price on the little one. Owen took them both. He named the big one Tank, and the small one Sonny, and together they became the Boys. Surprisingly, Sonny experienced a growth spurt in the next few months and caught up with his brother. Now they were both just over four years old, identical in size; athletic-looking dogs with handsome heads and deep chests.
He went down the stairs carefully, holding onto the railing to take some pressure off his bad leg, with its rebuilt knee and hip. At the front door, he snapped leashes on the boys, pulled on his leather jacket and his scuffed Marine Corps Vietnam Veteran hat, and stepped outside into the chill March air.
He let them lead him partway down the short sidewalk to their favorite bush where they both lifted their legs and then sniffed along the flower bed to catch up on the comings and goings of the various creatures which crept around at night.
He stayed, for now, in a modest townhome in the suburbs of Chicago, fifty yards off the Fox River, one of several homes he owned. He’d bought the end unit closest to the river, the best location in the small subdivision. The old man (for that is how he thought of himself) paused for a moment, as he always did, to scan the river and the small wetland around him. The builders had created the wetland as a water runoff catch basin, and it wrapped around the two sides of his home that had windows. Between the wetland and the river to the east lay a patch of meadow with a few scrub trees.
The trees and shrubs were full of birds. He maintained seven or eight feeders, including an oriole feeder, just a little orange roof and a small bowl which he kept full of grape jelly. Raccoons prowled at night, along with opossums, skunks and the occasional coyote. Over on the river a hundred yards away were all manner of geese, ducks and wading birds, and a mile downstream a pair of bald eagles maintained a huge nest in an old dead tree. He regarded it all with a nature lover’s delight and an artist’s appreciative eye.
His artwork had made him a wealthy man. Not rich, but money enough to do pretty much whatever he wanted, whenever he wanted to do it, and that fit his definition of wealthy. The Wildlife Art of Owen Booth, the first of many collections of his artwork, had been published over thirty-five years ago, and you could still find it on Amazon. His main home and studio were in Telluride. He also owned a log home in Jackson Hole and an apartment in Beaver Creek Colorado near his main gallery. He’d bought this place six years ago when his brother’s son Dan and his wife Terry had their first child.
He wanted a place he could come and stay for extended visits without being a burden, but he found himself drawn here more and more. It reminded him of his childhood growing up at the edge of the Chicago suburbs, of the woods and creek where he had spent his summers as a boy.
He heard a quacking and watched as the resident pair of mallards, which he named Gertrude and Heathcliff, glided in for a landing on the little pond.
Suddenly a loud hollow thunk sounded from around the front of his building, followed immediately by the bleating of a car alarm. He thought maybe the Patinka kid across the street had backed into his mom’s car again and started that way. Another thwack from right above him made him flinch, and a huge mass of feathers and legs and neck tumbled off his garage roof and flopped onto the ground at his feet, barely missing him. His heart leapt into his throat for a moment and even his fearless dogs jumped back, startled and alert.
He just had time to yell, “Boys, stay!” when another bird plowed into the cattails a few yards away with a crash of dried reeds. As he watched, more birds fell into the wetlands, the meadow and then the river like an advancing artillery barrage. With a glance at the bird at his feet he could tell they were sandhill cranes, the tallest bird in North America. Dozens of sandhills were falling from the sky.
High up he could see a hundred or more, a good two miles above him in the cloudless blue. They were agitated, their normally neat vee formation splintered and scattered. As he watched, they began to form back up, their odd trilling cries carrying faintly to where he stood. He scanned the skies for aircraft. A bird strike? One of the landing approaches to O’Hare went almost straight over his place, but there were no planes in sight. He had no idea how long it would take a dead sandhill crane to fall two miles to the Earth, but maybe it was enough time for a jet to disappear behind the low ridge across the river.
He knelt to inspect the bird in front him. The enormous crane was busted open and bloody, whether from a collision in the sky or the sudden contact with his garage roof, he couldn’t tell. The boys were whining… he could see they wanted a closer look too, so he told them, “At ease,” and they hurried over to sniff and prod the carcass.