Humanaty's Blight

CHAPTER ONE

“Tell me why I shouldn’t just shoot you right now,” the young woman said. She was holding a rifle pointed at my chest. Her tone was emotionless.

After a few seconds of self-recrimination for allowing myself to be ambushed so easily, I told her the truth. “The fact is, you should. If you want to survive, pull the trigger and hope no one nearby hears the shot and comes to investigate. That makes the most sense, but I suspect you already know that.”

I wouldn’t beg. I refused to. Besides, it wouldn’t do any good.

Two weeks earlier, when the mysterious new strain of a (H1-N1) mutated flu first struck and people started falling ill and swiftly dying by the hundreds, and then by the thousands, I was tucked safely away inside the basement of my parent’s home sitting in front of my computer and TV where I’d pretty much spent the last couple of years.

Home was located on the edge of Arlington, a sleepy little town at the foot of the Cascades in northwestern Washington State. On the first day, I had huddled down there in the dark basement, windows closed, even the furnace turned off to prevent it from taking in contaminated air from outside. Scared. Alone. My fingers had flown over the keyboard to glean any new information about the flu pandemic the media called a human blight, like a cancerous disease on stalks of wheat.

The news became increasingly worse as the flu spread by the hour. Animated maps on television initially showed contamination in small isolated pockets on the east coast, mostly in the major cities.

Later that same day, those “isolated pockets” had spread far larger areas, and there were colored blotches showing up in other parts of the country. By midnight, the first red pockets of new outbreaks appeared in the west. By then, the east coast was almost completely blanketed in that short time. The breakouts were also hitting the mid-west cities. All aircraft in America were grounded, and other travel was suspended to prevent further spread.

The dire news degenerated by the hour. The blight was everywhere and affected everything. Food riots broke out as grocery stores closed for lack of deliveries of new stock. Employees failed to show up to sell what little remained. It didn’t matter. People broke down the doors and emptied the shelves of the meager contents.

Within a few days, over a million deaths were estimated. There were no social services, police, schools, or ambulances to transport people to overcrowded hospitals. Bodies were left where they fell. There was nobody to collect and bury them. Runs on sporting goods stores with weapons had emptied the shelves there too.

Almost all businesses had closed in major cities by day three. Local travel was restricted. Martial law was declared for the nation on the evening of day three, but few of those in the military or national guard responded to enforce it because those still alive were either down with the flu or caring for family members or friends who were infected or dying.

Eastern cities had turned into warzones by day four, followed quickly by major cities in the west. The highways were empty except for a few abandoned cars and trucks that had attempted fleeing the cities. The president called for civil order and martial law a day before he died. The vice president died two days earlier. Nobody could seem to find a judge in authority who could swear in the Speaker of the House—and then she died, and I heard no more about other successors.

The Internet and television also died about then, too. And radio. My cell phone lasted two more days as I jumped into our family car and drove like a scared puppy running from a neighborhood bulldog—straight to the nearest snow-covered mountain. I avoided contact with everyone along the way. My route was entirely on obscure backroads and a trip of only about twenty miles. The only things I took with me were those few already in my basement. I didn’t trust anything else upstairs in our house to not be infected. There were few belongings that would benefit me besides my old twenty-two pistol, a good pair of hiking boots, my heaviest coat, and a few changes of clothes.

Fleeing and surviving the next few days were simple choices based on nothing more than luck and common sense. With so many dying so fast, it seemed reasonable that a biological weapon had struck the world. According to reports, the CDC had barely managed to define it. There had been no time to develop a vaccine. The mutated strain struck humanity like no other. It only took two days to bring the entire country almost to a stop, and two more to a standstill.

I didn’t know what else to do but run and hide. My limited knowledge coupled with the hysterical posts on social media by people I’m certain wouldn’t lie or spread crazy rumors, suggested altitude and a cold climate limited the spread of biological diseases. Avoiding people does the same. Where I headed met all three goals… and it was an hour away. It was fairly high in altitude, very cold, and isolated.

That decision had been made over a week ago and all had been fine since then, if you consider the lack of current news and being scared all the time I would fall ill and die within two days, fine. I was lonely, sure. Terrified, yes. However, I faced a laundry list of unknowns, so the fear was mostly composed of vague boogeymen waiting to pounce. If one thing didn’t kill me, another would.

Speaking of killing me, the dirty-faced little female who only stood about five feet tall, her features hidden under a fur hat with felt ear-flaps like the loggers used to wear a century ago still faced me. The rifle trained on me was all that mattered.

“Who are you?” I asked.

“Shut up.”

Only a portion of the girl’s face and eyes was uncovered, and around her neck and chin was one of those elastic scarf things people sometimes wear when they rob convenience stores or work in the garden. The image was an impossibly wide smile with teeth a half-inch tall on a white skull. It covered the nose and below. The felt flap on the hat covered her forehead and ears. The rest of the woman was dressed for the knee-deep snow we stood in. About all I could see were her dark smoldering eyes.

The barrel of the weapon hadn’t wavered while I stood and thought, but it had not been all that long. My thoughts were racing so despite the number, not a lot of time had passed. She should have listened to me and shot me a long time ago. It was the right thing to do under the circumstance. She should also have fired her military-style rifle at me back then when we had stood five steps apart because we now faced each other from a distance of only a few feet. I had edged closer and closer while talking gently to her. My limp hands hung loosely at my sides, never threatening. Yet, they could easily reach the end of the rifle barrel and slap it aside before she could fire. No problem. Little risk. Before she recovered, I’d be on her. It would happen soon.

Only one item held me back. She could have shot anytime in the last three minutes when we’d first encountered each other—and hadn’t. When my eyes lowered to the rifle again, an ugly black thing that screamed military, her trigger finger tightened in response. So, she was not as stupid as I had believed, and she was willing to shoot me if I flinched.

But she was still stupid.

“I asked you a question.” Her tone had grown a little sharper, more impatient. “Why not kill you right now?”

“I answered you.” The calmness in my voice surprised me. There was no trembling or fear despite my inward feelings. “Shoot me, if you want. I’m tired of living like this, anyhow.”

She was scared, it was easy to see. Almost as scared as me. And people don’t shoot others from a few steps away—at least, not in the world we’d occupied—until the last two weeks. It had come to an impasse. She looked at me. I looked at her. I waited for my chance.

Behind her, in the forest, another tree limb cracked from the cold. It sounded like a gunshot and the branch rattled down past others as it made its way to the ground, breaking other brittle and frozen branches along the way. At the first hint of the sound, she had spun and dropped to her knees, rifle raised to her shoulder, ready to fire at whatever danger came her way.

Good reactions. Bad timing. My fist struck the back of her head, her rifle fell from limp fingers to the snow. Then I had a new set of choices to make, the first included shooting her or not—in our reversed circumstances.

My little twenty-two semi-automatic pistol had found its way into my hand, the barrel pointed at the back of her motionless head. She didn’t move or attempt to fight. I hesitated. She’d been hit hard, and the soreness in my knuckles attested to that.

Like her, I should have pulled the trigger right then. It made sense to do so. She might be a carrier of the flu. She might wake up and kill me later when she had another chance. My finger never touched the trigger. Perhaps neither of us was as callous as the new world demanded.

She finally moaned.

As she rolled over, I reached for her rifle, finding it both lightweight and hefty at the same time. Rugged is maybe a better description. The magazine ejected at the touch of my gloved thumb. I tossed it aside. A single shell flew off into the snow when I pulled back the cocking lever, or whatever the official name of the lever was. The rifle posed no more danger unless she retrieved it from the snow and used it as a club. I asked in a voice ruder than intended, although to be honest, she had aimed a loaded rifle at me, and I had a right to speak in any tone I wanted. “Any more guns?”

She shook her head and her eyes rolled to the back of her head from the action. Probably dizzy from the blow by my fist to her head. Another man, in an earlier time, might have accepted her answer. I patted her heavy coat, felt around the waist of her snow-pants, and generally searched her from head to foot in ways that would have sent me to prison for touching a woman I didn’t know in that fashion a few weeks ago. But under her heavy winter clothing, there are a dozen places to hide another weapon and I didn’t want to take a chance.

I knew that people hid them for a fact. I had hideout weapons on me; a belt buckle with a razor-sharp edge when exposed, a tiny flat jackknife blade inside the toe of my left boot under the sole insert, and a wire-saw coiled within a “secret” pocket inside my coat. And at the bottom of the square outside pocket of my coat was a nail, a big one, old, rusty, and sharpened to a needle point on a stone only a day ago. One jab would cause a lot of pain, and it might be overlooked as a weapon in a brief search.

She didn’t object to my intensive search. It wouldn’t have done any good and both of us knew it. I said as I wagged the barrel of my pistol to indicate my desire, “Up.”

The girl struggled to get a wobbly knee under herself.

She looked at me as if silently asking for help. It was the same helpless expression that a girl would wear if trying to draw me closer before attacking. I stepped back out of her grasp and waited. No hurry.

Once on her feet, her eyes went to the rifle in the snow as if promising herself she would have the opportunity to use it on me.

“Leave it,” I told her.

The frown was instantaneous. Her voice was soft, “Hey, the army uses those.”

I shrugged and didn’t ask how she’d come to be in possession of it.

“Are you going to just leave it there? That gun will shoot three-shot bursts at a time, or fully automatic. Or one shot. The scope is amazingly accurate.” Her eyes went to my little twenty-two with the six-inch-long PVC pipe duct-taped to the barrel. Her expression was one of serious disdain. It looked like a broken toy. She didn’t even try to conceal her feelings or her contempt for me.

My finger wagged for her attention and finally pointed off to our side in the direction I wanted her to move. She walked ahead. I followed, always ten steps behind, close enough to shoot her if she ran, but far enough behind, that I wouldn’t be surprised by a quick move. More snow was falling; small brittle flakes that felt like they had sharp edges when they touched my cheeks, more ice than snow.

We trudged a step at a time. The depth of the snow sapped our energy. Each step took ten times the effort of a normal one. As we moved laterally around the side of the mountain, my mind reviewed how she had probably watched me with the scope on her rifle and positioned herself in front of me and behind that log then waited for me to approach. Let me walk right into her trap. But she hadn’t shot when she could have. Should have. That meant something.

Until she had stood up from behind a log and pointed her rifle at me, I had no direct knowledge of anyone else on the mountain. The simple fact was that she’d outsmarted me. If she had wished to kill me, she could have done so a dozen times over.

Somewhere in the depths of my mind, that fact bothered me on several levels. I’d believed myself to be smarter than almost everyone. My flight to the mountains, avoiding the outbreak of the blight and locating an old mining tunnel to live in substantiated that idea. Hadn’t I survived when almost all others died? How had the small woman I faced managed to do the same and to trick me so easily?

The rifle. It might be a clue. She could be a soldier and have specialized training. I rejected that idea because while I hadn’t yet seen her full face, she had seemed too young. Again, I rejected my own conclusions.

It was another mistake on my part, another assumption without facts to support it. That sort of thing will get you killed. The woman might be thirty and have ten years of military combat training since all I had seen were her eyes. I let her get a few more steps ahead of me for safety and reconsidered shooting her.

“Where are we going?” she asked.

The voice sounded young and scared. An act? A trick? I was wary. “Keep walking. At that stand of evergreens, turn left and go up the side of the hill.”

A lone man trying to keep a prisoner is worse than stupid. I’d have to feed her. Provide her shelter, and the first time I made a mistake, she would kill me. A knife left in her reach, a rock with a rough edge to saw through the ropes binding her hands, a hundred other mistakes on my part, could be my last. Sleeping would be impossible.

Letting her go meant she would return with friends, find and kill me. Taking that option meant that if I released her, I’d have to relocate. I had nowhere else to go.

She abruptly sat in the snow.

Instead of rushing up to her and yanking her to her feet, an action that might allow her to use army training to defeat me, I pulled to a stop and waited. She turned and faced me. “I’m not going any farther. Kill me here if you want, but I’m not making it easy for you to take me to some isolated place and do anything you want to me.”

She acted like she was reading my mind.

She drew in a deep breath and waited for me to speak. I didn’t. She scowled and said in a softer tone, “You look like a good man, a reasonable man. Can you shoot a fourteen-year-old girl?”

Fourteen? That could be a lie. Probably was. I waited.

“Well?”

“I can’t afford to keep a prisoner.”

She was not crying. Her lower lip may have trembled slightly under the facemask, but that was all.

I said, “Can you prove your age?”

She slowly shook her head as if I had asked a silly question. “It’s not like I have a driver’s license or anything. I’m only fourteen so they don’t give them to us.”

“Remove your hat.”

The girl hesitated. Then, in a single motion, snatched it from her head and pulled the elastic mask down from her nose to expose the bottom half of her face. Dark brown braids hung on each side of her face. Red rubber bands held them in place. Her skin was dark. She was Hispanic or something.

My initial reaction was that she might have been less than fourteen. Not older. My secondary reaction was that baby rattlesnakes kill. The thought came unbidden to mind—and I decided to ignore it for the moment. The stinging snow fell harder and a glance behind showed our tracks were already filled in, so others wouldn’t follow them. “Stand up and walk. We’re almost to my cave.”

“Cave?”

“Just do it. We can talk where it’s warm.”

The mention of the cave as a shelter apparently convinced her to move. The stinging snow and cold penetrated right through my winter clothing and I assumed did the same to her. She pulled on the fur hat again and stood. Ten minutes later, we arrived at the base of a granite cliff where an abundance of shrubs flourished, mostly small pine trees only a few feet tall, and many of them carefully planted there by me within the last few days. I’d also dragged brambles and spread them at the base. They concealed the entrance to a mining tunnel dug into the solid stone cliff a hundred or more years ago.

Inside, the tunnel twisted and turned, probably the result of miners following a vein of gold. The floor rose in elevation slightly as we moved, and water trickled down a track in the center. When I’d first built a fire, the smoke drifted deeper inside the tunnel, indicating a vent or another way inside. A search of the hillside above for two days hadn’t located it. I was scared to enter the tunnel further for fear of getting lost or falling down a shaft.

A pool of light from my small LED flashlight showed the way. As we moved, I either avoided or reset my traps and alarms as we passed by. Nobody was going to enter without me hearing rattling tin cans, the fall of rocks that had been precariously balanced, or one of two shotgun blasts when the thin tripwires pulled the triggers.

Video games had inspired most of my static defenses. I’d played them for probably ten years, even more so in the last few. When Dad and Mom died three years earlier, I was their only child and the house became mine along with the payouts from their insurance policies. The drunk driver of the other vehicle also had a good policy and it had paid me six figures for his drunken actions. That was the worth of my parents. Half the sum for each. With the house paid for, and if I was frugal, no need to work, I chose not to and rarely even went upstairs. The basement was my refuge.

We rounded another corner in the tunnel and came to where two shafts joined the main tunnel, creating a tiny room. I had a small firepit, a camp stove with extra fuel, a canvas tarp to sleep on and keep me dry from the persistent moisture seeping up from the ground, and about twenty cans of food. Soup, stew, pears, and even a single can of hated beets waited for my selection. The beets would be eaten just before I starved. All of the food had been raided from a cabin not far away.

I’d managed to bring two bags of Fritos, a few fruit and nut bars, three candy bars, and a case of lemon-flavored water. That inventory tells it all when looking back at how prepared I was. All that stuff would barely last a week.

The girl stood quietly and made a mental inventory as she looked around. I watched her approving eyes move from item to item and a slight smile twitched at the corners of her mouth. She liked what she saw. My chest swelled with pride.

“My name is Sue. Well, Susannah, officially. Teachers call me Susan, but I like Sue better.”

The statement held a wealth of information. At fourteen, she wanted to be taken as older, like all girls that age. The mention of teachers was something an older woman who was trying to lie to me wouldn’t have mentioned. I believed her given age was correct. “I’m William officially, Will, to some, but I prefer Bill.”

She giggled at my mocking of her introduction and I found myself smiling for the first time in many days.

I said, “Make yourself comfortable. We can warm a can of soup and you can tell me your story.”

She nodded, reached for a can with only a cursory glance at the label, and at the hunting knife I used to open cans. After I nodded, she drove the knife down, hit it with the heel of her palm, and worked the blade back and forth until she had an inch-wide jagged hole. She poured the gloppy soup into my only pot and went to work figuring out how to light my camp stove while I built a fire.

I gave her a few instructions and she eagerly watched the chicken-noodle soup with the small bubbles of delicious fat floating on the top. She turned to me. “Bill?”

“Yes.”

“You left my rifle back there in the snow. Why? Are you friggin crazy?”

“Where did you get it?” I asked.

“A dead soldier had it. I didn’t kill him, before you ask.”

That still didn’t sound good. Cautiously, I asked, “Flu? You went near a body that died of the flu?”

“I’m not so ignorant to go around any blight-dead and take a chance to catch it from them. He was already shot. There were others, too. Soldiers, I mean. I grabbed the rifle and ran. Then you went and left it in the snow, a perfectly good military rifle full of bullets. We could go back and get it before it rusts.”

Holding up my hand for her to slow down, I explained. “The shells in it were as big around and as long as my little finger. A single shot from it would echo around these mountains and travel miles in all directions. Anyone alive in these mountains would know a person is here and follow the sound back here to take your rifle and whatever else you have away after killing you.”

“What about your gun? Won’t the same thing happen?” Her eyes drifted to my hip.

I ejected the clip from the pistol and showed her the smaller shells, about the diameter of a pencil and a little over an inch long.

She shrugged and said, “That will do the same thing. Make too much noise, I mean.”

Smart girl. I said, “It will make half the noise. Probably a lot less.”

“That’s what the white plastic pipe taped on the end of the barrel is for, right?”

“Without the silencer, it will make half the noise of your rifle. With it, less. This,” I pointed at the PVC tube, “is something I made. I drilled holes all around and filled the whole thing with cotton balls to absorb the sound. The Internet told me how.”

“Will it work?” she asked with a skeptical frown.

“I don’t know. I think so. The sound will be muffled by the cotton balls and at least some of the sound will be deflected out the side-holes, so the overall result is less. At least, that’s my reasoning. If that doesn’t work, the shell is still so much smaller than one from your rifle, the sound won’t carry as far.”

“Keeping our presence unknown. I like your plan.” Sue removed the pot from the fire and looked around, puzzled. “Bowls?”

I sighed. I hadn’t missed her inclusion as she referred to our presence. “One spoon. Eat from the pot and leave me half.”

She reached for the spoon. It was a simple test of trust to let her eat first. Cans of soup filled the small pot to the second mark on the inside. When she had slurped her last, she handed me the pot. It was filled slightly above the first line, meaning she had eaten less than half. A good sign.

Still, it was my soup, pot, camp stove, and spoon. And I was larger and required more calories. I finished the soup without remorse or regret at taking the larger portion. She sat and waited.

“How long since you’ve eaten?” I asked.

“Two days.”

“Want more?”

“Yes. But, is that smart to eat more now?” She glanced meaningfully at the small pile of cans set to one side. “When will we have the opportunity to find more?”

I was beginning to like her. It was a good question and I had an answer, and I didn’t miss that she included herself in the we she mentioned. “In the morning. Early. Hopefully, the snow will still be falling to cover our tracks. If so, there’s a nearby cabin where I got the food and part of the supplies stored in here. We’ll make a trip there and back.”

“What if someone else has already taken it?”

“On my first trip, I thought of that, so carried most of it into the woods and hid it in three different places, along with some other stuff.”

She gave me a critical look and eventually managed a smile. She said, “What’d I do, find a survival genius to team up with?”

“Who said anything about teaming up?”

Sue flashed another smile as if she had already twisted her fourteen-year-old personality around my little finger like a tiny python. Now she would begin to constrict until I couldn’t resist her. The freckles across her nose made a sort of mustache and when she smiled, the ends raised. She was probably unaware of the effect she was having on a lonely man who hadn’t had a decent personal conversation in a couple of years, let along with someone of the opposite sex.

Not that I was physically attracted to her. Well, not her body. Her mind was drawing me in and demanding attention. Sue asked, “Where those shotguns back there in the tunnel entrance set to fire if anyone comes inside?”

“They are,” I agreed, expecting her to make a comment about shooting an innocent person, in which case I’d explain that an innocent person would remain outside and call to me. Once inside the tunnel, there were plenty of indicators someone lived inside.

Instead, she said, “Good. You dug the holes covered with cardboard and wood to hide the shotguns. And the can alarms to rattle and warn you. I feel safer than at any time since the flu killed so many.”

That brought up the next question. “Your family?”

“All dead.”

“Were you sick?”

“Nope. I stayed and took care of them, but they died at the very beginning, during the first wave. I buried them in our back yard and lit out.”

“How did you end up in the mountains?”

A tear leaked from one of her eyes. “My dad. Just before he died, he said to come here to the mountains and not to trust anybody.”

That statement was like cold water was thrown on our conversation. I said, “At the cabin where I got the food, there are more sleeping bags. We’ll get you one of those, too.”

She turned to look at the side of the tunnel where I had my sleeping bag on the tarp. The air in the tunnel constantly moved, creating a slight breeze and the nights were cold. I’d resisted building a fire large enough to warm the tunnel because it would be impossible and would take too much firewood in any case. Sue took it all in and looked back at me. “Are you thinking of giving me your sleeping bag while you sit out here and shiver all night long?”

“I’ll be fine.”

“Probably dead by morning in those damp clothes. Then you can’t show me to the cabin we’re going to rob. So, listen to me, Bill. We are going to share the sleeping bag.”

I shook my head. “Your parents wouldn’t approve, so we should respect that.”

“A good man wouldn’t take advantage of me in any situation.” Her voice had hardened.

I waited before answering. “With all that has happened in the past two weeks, I’m not sure I’m a good man. I used to be. But now I think I’m less than a good man in ways that matter.”

“You’ve killed?”

It was a flat statement. Not something to lie about. “I have.”

“Me too. What does that make me? Less than a good woman?”

Woman? Sue was a girl. Fourteen. That age means middle-school or freshman in high school. Yes, she was talking and acting like an adult older than myself, and she had just admitted she’d killed at least one person. It made little difference. With a heavy sigh, I admitted to myself that the world had changed drastically over the last two weeks and I hadn’t managed to keep up with it.

That idea made me wonder what the next two weeks would bring. I suspected sleep wouldn’t come easy and the nightmares that had begun two weeks ago would resurface when I closed my eyes.