The Old Man & the End of the World | Book 1 | Things Fall Apart Read online

  The car alarm out front stopped, and he could hear Denise exclaim “Oh my Gawd!” He stepped around the corner of his garage and found her standing next to her car, staring in disbelief at the crushed roof and shattered windshield. A sandhill crane can weigh ten pounds or more. Falling from a height of two miles, it really does a number on a Toyota Corolla.

  Kandul, Chattisgarh State, India

  March 16th

  Dr Evan Booth, the old man’s brother, leaned back at his desk and rubbed the bridge of his nose. At 68, his eyesight was still good for distances, but age had forced reading glasses on him. He had picked these up in a drugstore in Raipur after his prescription pair had broken; he really needed to take some time off and find a good optometrist in the city to get a decent replacement, but time always seemed in short supply at the clinic.

  Like his brother Owen, he had been born in the suburbs of Chicago. He had been short for his age in grade school, but continued growing right into college, and by the end of his junior year he topped 6’ 3”. Unlike Owen, who had joined the Marines straight out of high school to fight in Vietnam, Evan had stayed in school, graduated with honors and a degree in biology from the University of Illinois, and gone on to medical school at Johns Hopkins. He did his residency at Chicago’s famed Rush Presbyterian Hospital in internal medicine, and after residency he bought a practice in Bloomington, Indiana from a doc who wanted to retire. There he met a lovely nurse named Julia, with blonde hair and a laugh that reminded him of silver bells.

  They were an odd pair; him, tall and quiet, with thick black hair and a Welshman’s tendency toward melancholy, and her, small and fair, who laughed often and loved him deeply. A year after they met they married. The marriage was a good one. They had two sons, Jack and Dan, who both moved to Chicago to find their fortunes.

  He invented some important treatments and techniques, had articles published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, and won some prestigious awards. The clinic became two, then five, and then fifteen. Eventually he found himself doing lots of managing and almost no medicine. He decided to sell the business and retire at 65, so he could devote full time to his wife and family, to travel the world and do all the things they’d been putting off. He entered into negotiations with a corporation that owned a large chain of clinics across the Midwest. The people that owned it were good people, and he felt comfortable handing over his life’s work to them. Two months later he walked away with a check for $42 million. They found a beautiful property down in Pike County, Illinois, a few hours southwest of Chicago. It had a log home straight out of a magazine on 220 acres, with woods full of huge whitetail deer and three lakes brimming with largemouth bass.

  The day came when they closed on their place in Indiana and officially moved to the Illinois home. Their first evening there, as they sat at dinner, happy and excited, full of plans for upcoming travel, Julia suddenly looked at him and quietly said, “Oh dear…” Her hand moved up toward her head, and then stopped. He watched her eyes lose focus, and then she slumped over sideways and fell to the floor.

  She’d suffered a massive stroke.

  At first it looked bad, very bad. A small blood vessel in her brain had ruptured and bled into the brain, causing an aneurysm. It scrambled her speech; she slurred and couldn’t remember words or form sentences. The stroke affected her entire right side. She had trouble moving her arm and leg, and that side of her face drooped. He had her transferred to Rush Presby so their sons could be close to her. A major stroke is often followed by one that kills, and the thought terrified him. He couldn’t stand being apart from her for a moment, so he had a cot moved into her room and spent almost every minute by her side.

  Bit by bit she came back. Her speech grew clearer, she struggled for words less. Her muscles began responding to therapy. At her urging he reluctantly gave up the cot and started spending the night at Jack’s place, in his spare bedroom. After eight weeks, she started walking again with help, and they were preparing to release her to a therapy center. And he dared to hope.

  Then at 5:00 a.m. his cell phone rang. The nurse doing her rounds found his wife “unresponsive,” they said, and he needed to come right away. He sped to the hospital, and when he turned the corner into her room he expected to find a team working on her. Instead he found a room empty of people. His wife lay motionless, a sheet pulled up to her chest, the color gone from her cheeks and her soul gone from her body.

  The following year was the worst in his life. He tried to fish and hunt, but the joy had gone out of it for him. He spent days going through all the scores of photo albums Julia had created of their life together and cried a lot. He felt empty, useless and full of self-pity, an emotion he hated but couldn’t shake. His sons, Jack and Dan, and his brother, Owen, visited when they could. Dan brought Terry, his lovely and thoughtful wife, and their daughters, Lainey and baby Hannah, who loved the woods and waters and their Papa, as Lainey called him, and for a little while the place, and his life, would brighten up. But both his sons had their own lives to live.

  Then one day he got a phone call from the group that had purchased his company, which now owned over eighty clinics across the Midwest. They were sponsoring a gala in Chicago, a fundraiser for Doctors Without Borders, and they urged him to come. They were persistent and unrelenting, until finally he gave in and decided to attend. It was a long time before it occurred to him that Terry might have had a hand in that invitation, but if she did, it worked.

  There he met a team from DWB operating in Raipur, India, a city of a million people that Evan had never even heard of. The situation was dire, they said. Hepatitis C and tuberculosis were at epidemic levels. Pediatric respiratory infections were killing thousands of children unnecessarily. They sat late into the night, long after the gala had ended, and talked while crews cleaned around them. The team had recently opened a small string of clinics around the south end of Raipur, and within weeks they were overwhelmed by the demand. With his great reputation as an internist and director of many successful clinics, they begged him to come and look at their operation and give advice.

  He didn’t want to go, but the idea of returning to that empty house saddened him. At least he could be useful, even if just for a little while. Ten days later, with his arm still aching from a series of required inoculations, he stepped off the plane into the steamy air of Raipur.

  And now, two years later, he sat behind the desk in the clinic he ran, with five more nearby that he oversaw with weekly visits. He’d been using part of the considerable sum he’d made when he sold his clinics to finance various upgrades and additions to the existing facilities, and he had three more under construction. The stress was constant, the need was urgent, and he loved every minute of it.

  The door opened and one of his aides stepped in and laid a folder on his desk. “There is a call for you on line one, sir,” he said. He turned to leave and staggered a bit before he caught himself.

  “Ramesh, are you all right? You don’t look well. Are you taking your anti-malarials?” Like many of the locals, Ramesh had contracted malaria at an early age. The plains around Raipur were known as the Rice Bowl of India, but the paddies and marshes were ideal breeding grounds for mosquitoes, and malaria had been endemic to the area long before the oldest histories were written. Many of the residents, like Ramesh, suffered recurring attacks of the disease throughout their lives.

  “Perhaps I have forgotten a bit lately, sir. They are being so expensive.”

  He stood up and stepped around his desk and put his hand on the small man’s forehead, the deep rich brown of Indian rosewood. A mild fever, nothing serious. He really liked the man. Ramesh, he knew, was the father of four children, whom he adored. He had come to Raipur from the countryside to seek employment in the burgeoning auto parts industry but had been unable to find work. The salary in the factories ran as much as $500 per week, a princely sum by Indian standards, but there were many more job s
eekers from among the rural poor than there were jobs, and Raipur’s slums had grown like cancer. Booth insisted on paying all his local workers a similarly high wage, which he supplemented out of his own pocket, and the people they hired were generally like Ramesh: decent, hardworking people who were grateful to have the job.

  “You’re supposed to be taking chloroquine phosphate, right? Come with me.”

  They walked down the hallway to the locked closet where they kept their pharmaceuticals and other supplies. He grabbed a clipboard, made a note and signed it, and then handed a large pill bottle to Ramesh. “This is a 90-day supply of the chloro. See me when that’s gone, and we’ll keep you supplied. You’re too good a man to lose. Now take today and tomorrow off. Longer if you need it.”

  “Thank you so very much, sir. Oh my goodness, sir! Your phone call!”

  He strode quickly back to his office and saw that the light on the phone was still blinking. He picked up the receiver. “Dr Booth,” he said.

  A familiar voice on the other end said, “Evan? Jeremy here. We have a bit of a situation and I think we need you here.” He first met Jeremy that night at the gala, and they quickly shared a fast friendship. He ran their clinic in Dunda, an impoverished suburb at the southern edge of Raipur. He specialized in infectious diseases and found himself truly in his element; India had diseases which hadn’t been named yet, much less studied. He seemed almost cartoonishly English, with a thin mustache, pale complexion and that clipped public school accent, and he talked like a character in some old drawing room drama. He loved calling people “old chap,” and saying “bloody,” and “I say!” No one actually said that anymore, did they? And understated to a fault. “A bit of a situation,” to Jeremy was “a dumpster fire” to most people.

  “Jeremy, what’s up?” Understated though Jeremy was, he could hear tension in the man’s voice.

  “One of our patients has attacked several of the others. It’s quite serious, I’m afraid. At least two dead, including the attacker, and several others injured.”

  “What was it, a knife attack?” The Indians were generally sweet and gentle people, but an undercurrent of mad violence ran not too far below the surface. Family feuds and perceived transgressions, especially those involving the complex caste system, occasionally resulted in deadly outbursts and vicious murder. If a feud had erupted, it wouldn’t be the first time angry families had spilled blood in the emergency room.

  “No, I’m afraid it’s something worse. It seems one of our patients tried to eat the others.”

  “What do you mean, eat? You mean he bit them?”

  “No, Evan. He tore off huge mouthfuls of flesh and swallowed them. He stripped off his clothes and went stark raving mad, attacking anyone near him. He grabbed a child that couldn’t have been more than three years old and savaged him, tore his throat open, then ripped his arm off and started gnawing on it. One of the carpenters doing the remodeling finally hit him in the head with a hammer. He’s dead, I’m afraid.”

  “Good Lord! Where is he now?”

  “We’ve got him in the morgue. The police have been notified, but there’s some kind of riot going on in the slums around Lalpur and they’re all tied up there for now.”

  “Who was he? Do we know?”

  “None of the staff could recall ever seeing him before. He appears to be another unfortunate living on the streets. He wore little more than rags. By the way, before he stripped, according to one of the nurses in the reception area, he scratched himself all over, quite frantically muttering about insects crawling on him. Formication, apparently.”

  “Sounds like a total psychotic break. Drugs, do you think?”

  “With this kind of behavior, I wouldn’t be surprised. With the formication and the highly aggressive acting out, I think we should also consider acute mercury poisoning. John said he’s seen something similar among gold miners in South Africa, where they use mercury as part of the extraction process, though not to this extreme.” The “John” in question was Doctor John Deevers, a retired SAS medical officer who found civilian life too tame and joined Doctors Without Borders. He’d been rotated into their practice about four months before and had been a godsend when it came to treating trauma cases.

  The chemical poisoning explanation didn’t sound unlikely. It wouldn’t be the only time chemicals had caused deaths in India. Third world regulations of such enterprises were often sketchy. In 1984, a pesticide plant in Bhopal had suffered a massive gas leak that killed thousands and permanently injured at least that many more.

  “All right. I have a couple patients to check on and then I’ll be right over.”

  An hour later, Dr Booth pulled up in a new Hyundai van in front of the low whitewashed building that housed their clinic in Dunda. As he approached the front door, it burst open and people came pouring out, their eyes wide with panic. Some were screaming or crying; a few were splashed with bright red blood. Several seemed to be clutching bloody wounds.

  Inside, two men wrestled on the floor with a naked man drenched in blood. Booth stopped short in shock, as the naked man pulled an arm free and whipped his head around. He lunged with his mouth open, teeth bared, toward the face of one of the men and tore off the man’s lower lip and most of the flesh on his chin. The man shrieked and rolled off, clutching his bloody face, and the naked man flipped the other man onto his back, fastened his teeth around his throat, and ripped.

  Blood spurted everywhere, splashing across the clinic’s tiled floor, and then the attacker’s eyes locked with Booth’s, his face and chest covered in blood. He bared his teeth. Booth froze. He could see the bloody man gathering his feet under him, preparing to charge, but he couldn’t move; he stood stock-still, terror gripping him.

  The man flew at him, mouth open, his body bent nearly double and his arms dangling by his sides. Booth took a half step back and tripped, and the man leaped on top of him. He just had time to snap his forearm under the man’s chin and held his face away as the man squirmed and struggled to get his mouth on Booth’s throat. One part of him mentally shrieked in overwhelming fear and horror, but the diagnostic part of his brain began ticking off impressions. The man didn’t use his hands to pull Booth’s arm out of the way. He propped himself up on them, but did not use them offensively, as though he didn’t realize that was an option. The man’s breath smelled truly horrible, like an open sewer with a strong odor of vinegar. His skin looked strangely ashy, with blue-gray blotches around his eyes and nostrils, while his lips were almost purple and his sclera, the whites of his eyes, a mottled bluish gray.

  Suddenly Dr. Deevers appeared behind the man with a leather belt in his hands. He looped it over the man’s head and around his neck and yanked him off Booth, up into the air. The man’s eyes bulged and his feet pedaled awkwardly, looking for a purchase, but Deevers stood much taller and held him aloft. Deevers swung him around and smashed him face down on the tile, drove his knee into the man’s back and pinned him to the floor. The man’s hands and feet scrabbled ineffectually, like a crab turned upside down.

  “Restraints!” Deevers yelled. “Get some restraints! Something to tie him with.” Staff members scrambled and in moments came pounding back with ropes and straps. They quickly had him trussed up like a Christmas turkey. “Get a gurney and let’s get him strapped down! I want him face down so it’s harder for him to bite!”

  Booth sat up and looked around, aware once more of the chaos that surrounded him, and then got to his feet. He saw the man with the torn neck lying a few yards away and rushed to him, but his throat was an open hole and dark blood pooled on the floor. As he watched, the man convulsed weakly and then lay still.

  Booth stood and carefully approached the naked man. “My God, John! He’s killed him!” He paused and sniffed. “What’s that awful smell? He stinks like old turtle water and vinegar!”

  Deevers grabbed the man with the bite on his face, and half carried hi
m toward the doors leading to the exam rooms nearby. Booth could see the white gleam of his bloody jawbone in the dripping wound. He followed Deevers through the doors into the exam area. He glanced into the first exam room they passed and was shocked to see more splashes of blood on the walls and great pools of it on the floor. Three more bodies lay motionless, covered in blood and open wounds. One was a grown woman, the other two were small children. All three had their throats ripped open. One child was missing half the flesh off her arm and face. “They seem to have an affinity for throats,” Deevers said calmly from across the hall, as he applied a cloth to the man’s chin.

  “What the hell is going on here?” Booth shouted. “Where are the police? How did that man get loose? I thought you said he was dead!”

  “That’s not the same man I called you about.” Dr Whitman stepped into the room. “He’s still in the morgue. This man came in a couple hours ago with his wife and two small children. We’ve been treating him for Hep C for a couple months now, and he came here for a blood draw. He was one of the ones bitten by the lunatic. We triaged the victims; his bite seemed the least serious. We put him in Exam One a half hour ago and as I prepared to see him, one of the nurses stuck her head in and said an ambulance had arrived with an emergency victim.” He nodded at the bodies on the floor. “That’s his family, or what’s left of them. Apparently he attacked them right after I left.

  “The patient in the ambulance came from Lalpur and someone had hacked him up rather badly with a machete. We rushed him into surgery, but we lost him before anything much could be done.” Whitman shook his head, sadly. It still hurt to lose a patient, even after all his years in medicine.

  “Then I heard screaming and shouting and came back in time to see his naked buttocks charging into the waiting room, where you made his acquaintance soon after. His poor family was quite dead… as you can see he had apparently been feeding off them for several minutes.”