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  “If the reports we are receiving are correct the aggressive nature of this outbreak is-unprecedented in human history. There are no known agents, bacterial or viral, capable of causing the effects being reported within the population of India.”

  He took a long breath and it seemed for a moment he might stop speaking but continued.

  “The reports I’ve seen, though at this point they are unverified, say this entity, whatever it is, has a kill rate of between 70 and 80 percent within a few minutes of exposure. This is unknown in biology, nothing I know of can kill an adult human that quickly.”

  As he spoke his voice faltered and his words were tinged with disbelief, his face grew pale. It was as though the meaning of what he was saying was sinking in as he was saying the words.

  “Other reports indicate 15-18% of those infected but not killed outright fall victim to another effect which is again unknown to science. It is speculated that this virus attacks and destroys much of the victim’s prefrontal cortex. Degradation to this area of the brain results in the victim losing most if not all of their higher functions. It renders them, for want of a better word, into imbeciles. In this condition these individuals will almost certainly revert to a type of, “

  He paused rubbing his eyes, searching for the right words, as if there could ever be right words to describe this.

  ”-animal existence. There remains some hope in that 1 to 2% of the population appear to be unaffected by the outbreak but….”

  He stopped and looked directly into the camera with tears in his eyes.

  ”God help the poor bastards.”

  Jack turned off the television and disconnected the leads from the battery. He rigged his mom’s stationary exercise bike with a tiny DC generator which was designed to power a bicycle light not charge a car battery. The old technology of the television and video combination quickly gobbled up battery power and using the bike and tiny generator it took a long time to recharge the battery but lately it was worth the effort to hear a familiar voice.

  The candle guttered while he was watching TV and he sat in silence smelling the acrid smoke of the dead candle listening to the tick of cooling electronics. He needed to go into town and find food but he found it difficult to leave the house even in daylight. He knew from experience that not wanting to go outside was a bad sign; it meant he was depressed. He recognized the signs, some days he would not get out of bed until mid-afternoon. It was telling that he could have anything he wanted to eat from any store in town but he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted badly enough to venture outside.

  He recorded the newscast of his uncle five weeks earlier when his mom and sister Marion were still at home and things were almost normal. It was a few days after the recording that the rolling blackouts hit and soon then there was no internet or cable television. His mom tried to act cheerful for them, pretending nothing was wrong, but he knew it wasn’t true, there was plenty wrong. He wanted to go into town and see what was happening but she absolutely forbade him going, she would not let either of them leave the house or be out of her sight.

  Marion cried the whole time and their mom sat for hours with her arms around her rocking her like a baby. The last night they were all together he went to bed early; his mom promised him things would be better in the morning. He went to his room but couldn’t sleep and after a while gave up trying and played Evoked Potentials on his laptop until the battery died. When he woke it was late afternoon, he could tell by the angle of the sunlight coming through his bedroom window, and he went upstairs to see why his mom had not called him to get up. She was gone. They were both gone.

  At first he wasn’t too concerned; he thought she must have taken Marion somewhere. It was later when he looked outside and saw her car in the driveway and noticed her purse sitting where she always left it on the kitchen counter that he became concerned. He was still not really worried about them until later that evening when it got dark and they still had not come home and he discovered neither of them was wearing shoes. That was over a month ago. The first two weeks they were missing he spent every day searching the town and surrounding areas but he never found them. He saw lots of dead people, maybe hundreds, and he checked them all but he never found his mom or his sister.

  He checked all the neighbour’s houses sometimes stepping over the bodies of his friends and their parents and walked for miles in every direction checking houses and buildings, nothing. The stink of decaying bodies grew more sickening with each passing day but he kept searching. One morning he walked past the Eloy Seniors’ center and saw an old man standing in the flower bed outside the main building looking in through a window. The man was quite old, Jack could tell because his face was wrinkled, he was also naked. This was the first living person he’d seen but he was cautious because the man was acting strange. He stood well back from the guy before calling out to him.

  When the guy heard Jack’s voice he turned and ran towards him in an odd loose limbed lope, like a chimpanzee. Jack laughed but then figured out pretty quickly that, old or not, the man running towards him might be dangerous. He easily out-ran him but the encounter bothered him. The man did not try to speak to him; he was toothless and creepy and had a vacant look on his slack features, not quite ape-like but not quite human. He kept searching but after that incident he was cautious when he saw survivors. The few people he came across were disturbing to look at and he never approached or called out to any of them. They looked crazy and were always alone and standing in odd places like behind the Safeway Store or under the Highway 50 overpass. Some were completely naked some clothed in rags but all of them were covered in filth. He did not see any living children.

  The strange part about all this was he did not recognize any of the survivors he saw, he’d lived in Eloy all his life and he was certain he must have seen or met at least some of them but their faces, what he could see of them, had lost personality, humanness. They seemed like lost animals confused and running away at the sound of his car. He came across one large man that did not run away he stood his ground glaring aggressively when he drove past, he was scary but the dogs were worse.

  He watched helplessly as a pack of dogs chased a woman across a soccer field. The attack was brutal and it haunted him still. By the time he figured out how to put the car into four-wheel drive and find a way around the concrete barrier the dogs had knocked her down and killed her. They ate her face; he could still see the de-fleshed bones of her cheeks and jaw vividly in his memory, it was the most horrifying thing he’d ever seen. He arrived and scared them off but he stayed in the car. He was too terrified to get out, and he sat and watched as a knob of meat, what remained of her nose, dangled by a single strand of bloody sinew from her ruined face.

  What made it worse in Jack’s mind was the knowledge that the dogs had once been beloved family pets. Later, in another part of town and from the safety of his car, he watched a tan and brown spaniel cough up a piece of the woman’s face, he knew it was part of her face because there was an eyebrow attached.

  After that, whenever Jack saw dogs roaming, he headed home. The night it happened he could not sleep, he became obsessed with the idea that the faceless woman was his mom and for weeks afterwards he had nightmares about the attack. The possibility played on his mind until one day he found himself in his kitchen punching the refrigerator. He screamed every obscenity he could think of as he kicked and flailed and all but destroyed the appliance. When he stopped, spent, he stumbled back and looked at the damage he’d done and he worried that his mom would be mad at him, and for a brief moment his mom was alive.

  He gave up the search after that, there was no point in continuing. His daily existence had become a dizzying blur of horrific images and he came to the realization he was not going to find his mom or his sister, they were not lost. He had to accept the fact they were dead. It was not hard to give up the search; the remaining unchecked bodies had become unrecognizable piles of fetid gore. The smell of decomposing human flesh wa
s something he would never forget. It was at that point he decided he needed a survival plan. No one was going to save him, his dad was probably dead, his uncle too. It felt like everyone on the planet was dead.

  He was sitting on his bed when his eyes fell upon one of the models he built when he was in grade five. It was the International Space Station. Seeing it gave him an idea. He could try to contact the ISS. If the astronauts had not used the Soyuz escape pod to return to earth, they must still be on board which means there could be up to thirty highly skilled scientists and engineers unaffected by the plague. Maybe they could help.

  Chapter Two

  Morning came and Jack opened one bleary eye and looked at his bedside clock. It was time to try and make contact again. His mind was fuzzy and he had trouble dragging himself out of bed; he slept fitfully and felt deeply fatigued. This was day number five of trying to make contact with the space station and he was feeling discouraged. He didn’t know if the laser would be visible in daylight but he was unwilling to risk going out at night. He was beginning to think the whole thing was a waste of time and he lay in bed wondering if he should bother to keep trying. He sighed; the truth was he had nothing else to do all day and trying to contact the ISS gave him hope. Without hope there was no reason to get out of bed at all. He pulled on a pair of sweat pants and munched a stale energy-bar as he climbed the stairs. He opened the skylight and climbed out into brilliant desert sunlight. Shielding his eyes he walked barefoot to the far end of the roof and, gazing at the empty town and distant mountains, urinated over the side.

  He sat down and pointed the telescope at the horizon and checked his watch but before he could start transmitting he saw a flash of light. He blinked and rubbed his eyes. Then there was another flash and then two more in quick succession. He wasn’t sure if he believed what he was seeing. Was ISS sending him a signal? While he was wondering if it were true there came anther quick sequence of flashes.

  “Yes, yes!” he shouted, recognizing the pattern. It was Morse code. His plan worked. He unfolded the energy-bar wrapper and used it to record the sequence of flashes that came over the next fourteen minutes. When ISS passed out of range he ran down to his bedroom to decipher the message. That is when the full impact hit him. The message he held was from the the International Space Station.

  “They’re alive!”

  Hot tears splashed his hands and the wrapper as strong emotion swept over him. He read the message again out loud.

  C

  B

  Radio

  Shack

  Antennae

  This was real. He hooped and yelled and danced around the room.

  “They’re alive,” he shouted.

  He fell backwards onto his bed clutching the wrapper to his chest overwhelmed with relief and more important, hope. He was elated that there were others alive, people who can think and talk. This meant he was no longer alone. He cried with relief as the unfamiliar sensation of hope washed over him. The news that the astronauts were alive revived his spirits and he understood, for the first time, exactly how lonely he had become and how desperate. The feeling of hope unleashed a wonderful reeling sensation of dizziness. He read the message over and over again his mind alive with questions. The message told him what he needed to get to speak to the crew onboard ISS. He did not know what the letters C and B stood for but he would figure that part out later. He wondered if he deciphered the message wrong and he checked it again. No it was right, the single letters C and B. He thought it must be a certain brand of radio or antennae. He recognized the part about Radio Shack and knew generally what an antenna was but then a horrifying realization struck him. There is no Radio Shack in Eloy and the nearest one is in Phoenix.

  The thought of traveling that far from home terrified him. It was one thing to drive around his hometown in his mom’s car with the doors locked and the windows up but it was another thing altogether to drive fifty miles to a city with millions of dead people and find God-knows-what waiting for him. It was not a question of whether he would go; if he wanted to talk to the astronauts he had to have a radio. He would check around Eloy first to see if he could find a radio but if he couldn’t he was going to Phoenix.

  ***

  Eloy was a bust, he could not find a CB radio anywhere. He was going to Phoenix. He got a sheet of paper and started planning his trip to the city. If he was to survive this adventure he needed to be prepared. He would need supplies for the trip, bottles of water, food and a map of the city. He had been to the mall where the Radio Shack was located many times but he wasn’t driving and never paid attention to how his mom got there.

  One positive thing about the trip was he saw fewer survivors lately. They were disappearing, probably dying off, he thought. He hoped this would be true of the survivors in Phoenix. No matter what the risks it was worth it to have the ability to talk to the ISS. He was afraid of what he might find in the city but he was more afraid of being alone. The survivors he saw in Eloy were creepy and disgusting but they were not like the zombies in movies. They acted more like deer and except for the naked old guy they did not try to chase him; that did not mean they wouldn’t if he gave them the opportunity but he wasn’t too worried, the majority of them were pretty feeble. Thinking about the old man made him remember the dead pharmacist and, shuddering at the implications, he added a gun to his list.

  His dad never owned a gun, at least not one that he knew about, and he did not think his mom would let him keep it in the house if he had. So where would he find a gun? He knew that lots of people owned hand guns but he did not want to spend time searching strangers houses. He considered going to the Sheriff’s Office but he remembered the time he got lost as a kid and had to wait for his mom to come and get him and he was still terrified of the place. One possibility, he thought, was Mr. Osterman. He coached the little league team and he was a policeman in Phoenix. He reasoned that if anyone was likely to have a gun it was him and he lived almost next door.

  The street was quiet but he was not taking any chances. He got in the car and drove the half block to the Osterman’s house and parked on the lawn as close to their front door as possible to limit his exposure. He was armed with a baseball bat and the paring knife. The Osterman’s were only a few doors down but it had been almost a week since he’d been outside and he was being cautious for good reason. The last time he went searching for food he came across the body of Mr. Murray the pharmacist, he was laying in the middle of Grant Street with his insides spilling onto the pavement. A bunch of birds, mostly crows, were fighting over who would eat his entrails. Recalling the scene made him feel queasy; it was not like something on television or in a movie, this was real. One crow was perched on something black poking out from the pharmacist’s chest. It took him a little while to figure out what he was seeing. A knife.

  Mr. Murray had been clean and dressed in proper clothes; he had been a survivor like him and someone killed him. The Osterman’s house was unlocked and there were no bodies inside, he knew because he was inside it a few weeks ago looking for his family. He reached for the doorknob to turn it but stopped and pressed his ear to the door listening, he heard nothing. He waited a bit longer before opening the door preparing himself for whatever he might find inside.

  The living room was undisturbed and as empty of life as the last time he was there. All the homes he checked, at least those without bodies, looked like the owners had momentarily stepped out and would return shortly. He went into the kitchen and opened cupboards and drawers searching for a gun. The kitchen and living room were a bust though he did find a tepid can of Coke amongst the rotting food in the fridge. He made his way down the hallway to the master bedroom sipping the warm soda and when he entered the room he jumped back in surprise spilling pop on his shirt.

  It looked for a moment like there was someone curled up on the bed but it was the way the blankets were heaped. He came in and sat on the end of the bed his heart pounding hard in his chest the room swirling. His head cleared and
he got up and started searching again. He found a drawer full of shirts with one cool one that had a Phoenix Police Department shoulder crests. He stripped off his wet tee shirt and put it on and checked himself out in the mirror, it was too big for him but he liked the way he looked wearing it. Inside their walk-in closet he found a small metal safe with a combination lock. He would not have known what was inside except for the helpful picture of a handgun engraved on the exterior. He laughed when he saw it. Its purpose was to keep the gun away from crazies but the picture kinda gave away the contents. There’s no way I’m going to get this thing open, he though but when he grabbed it by the handle to drag it from the closet for a closer look the lid popped open. Great security, it wasn’t even locked. He looked inside and saw a serious looking black handgun tucked into a bed of grey foam with yellow boxes of ammunition tucked around it. He picked it up, he’d never held a real gun before, it felt good, heavy but not too heavy. He examined it and discovered out how to release the magazine and discovered the gun was loaded and ready to use. He replaced it and pulled the slide back loading a round into the firing chamber.

  Slapping a serious “don’t mess with me” look on his face he swung the gun around in a wide arc squint sighting on the Chinese lamp sitting on a bedside table. The grin disappeared when the gun unexpectedly jerked in his hand and the lamp exploded in a cloud of glass shards. Holy shit I didn’t even touch the trigger, he thought. He realized, as the ringing in his ears subsided, he was going to have to be careful with it or he could shoot himself. ‘Geez talk about a hair trigger,’ he mumbled.

  He figured out where the safety was and clicked it on and then tested it by trying to shoot the mattress. The gun did not fire. Satisfied it was safe he tucked the weapon into the waistband of his jeans. He used a pillow case for the boxes of ammo and loaded it all into the car. He thought that it might take all day to find a gun. There was no reason not to leave for Phoenix right away. He felt the weapon pressing against his belly but even with this newly acquired firepower he was not looking forward to the trip.