Stranger

Five

There was a Valdiva in the theater the night Abraham Lincoln got shot. My grandparents tell the story that Morton Valdiva helped carry the blood-soaked president out of the theater box. It seems Morton Valdiva had served as a ship’s surgeon. So he tears off a great chunk of his own shirt as a dressing and tries to stop the president bleeding out there and then onto the theater rug. But Lincoln’s people didn’t know old Mort Valdiva and dragged him away, thinking this stranger might cause Lincoln more harm. My grandparents insist that my ancestor could have saved Lincoln’s life if only they’d let him do his job.

OK, so it’s a family legend. But once, a long time ago, I was shown a cotton shirt that had been framed like a picture under glass. If it had once been white it had now turned deep gray. Sure enough, there’s a strip torn out that Morton Valdiva had planned to use to plug the bullet wound and maybe save the great man’s life. What’s more, there’s a stain down the shirtfront that Grandpa said (in the awed tones of a believer showing me a piece of the True Cross) was the blood of Lincoln.

Every family has its own legends. You’ll have your own. That your ancestors were on the Mayflower, that they’re blood descendants of Pocahontas or that they shook Neil Armstrong by the hand the day before he blasted off into space, or that they were dancing in the streets of Berlin the night the Wall came down.

To bring the Valdiva story more up-to-date, my mother and father met at college. He neglected his studies in favor of DJ-ing on student radio. He got good at it, too. A local station hired him for the late-night slot, playing soft rock ballads. But he made that show his own. Like a prospector he panned the import bins at local record stores, or made on-air pleas for kids to send in tapes of their own music. Soon he was what they called a cult figure. Soft rock oldies went out the window. Within weeks he had the raunchiest, most cutting edge music show in the state. Teenagers stayed home just to hear him play this great new music. A bigger station poached him. He married my mom. A year later MTV called. Great things awaited my dad. But then he died. I’d have been eighteen months old.

You know, nature can play tricks. For no real reason people are born with harelips, or a finger short of the regulation ten pack, or with birthmarks like a strawberry on their chin. Nature monkeyed around with the electrical signals that regulated the rhythm of my father’s heart. One evening my father went to bed, a healthy twenty-four-year-old man. Sometime in the night a blob of neurons sent a message to the nerves that control the heartbeat. OK, guys, time to pull the plug on this one.

As simple as that. His heart stopped. He never woke up in the morning. This may sound cold on my part, but I can’t get sentimental about my dad. He sounded like a great guy and all. Only I never knew him. Later, when I was around eight or so, I started thinking about him a lot. I couldn’t remember a face or the sound of his voice. I was a baby when he died, for Chrissakes. If I did try hard to remember him I heard music in my head; a powerful music that went soaring upward; in my imagination I’d see a shadow that sort of filled the room. For a while I’d imagine this was my father returning as my guardian angel.

Well, things moved on. My mother went on to enjoy other relationships with men, but nothing lasting. One of these resulted in the birth of my sister. I never associated her as the daughter of another man. He’d moved on, never to be seen again. Nor did I kid myself that this was a virgin birth.

Chelle was noisy as hell. I have to say that. For a long time I wasn’t bowled over with sharing a house with a sister. But within a few years we learnt to get on well together. And so we grew up-Mom, Chelle and me in a small house in a small New Jersey town. Mom worked long, loooong hours for a marketing company. Cash tended to be on the scant side. The cars we owned always had a nice rust bloom running ’round the wheel arches. Life ran to normal enough schedules-school, vacations, Christmas, birthdays. Nothing earthquaking. Apart from the Chunk episode that I mentioned a while back.

In fact the whole world ran to its normal schedule. Of course it wasn’t a fairy tale of peace and prosperity. Worldwide there were the usual wars, famines, floods, hurricanes, droughts, stock market implosions, political assassinations, revolutions, treaty signings-you name it. You’ve seen all that stuff on TV. It wasn’t pretty, but for Planet Earth and humankind it was business as usual.

As all that stuff happened I quit school, flipped a finger at college and found work at the local airport (yes, brothers and sisters, I was the guy who tossed your suitcases onto the conveyor belt that fed the carousels). As movie stars partied on Oscar night, as farmers worked their land, as politicians cut their deals and as people like me and you ordered pizza in time for our favorite medical drama, or shopped, or ground away at homework or at our day jobs, or slept in our beds, something unusual was happening. Something so unusual, something so out of the ordinary, nobody noticed at the time. Or at least if they did they shut it out of their minds.

My job here in Sullivan is to make sure everyone’s got enough firewood for the cooking stoves they’ve now got sitting out in their backyards. Part of that job is to collect all the old newspapers I can find, so they can light their fires in the first place. During the winter nights I found myself reading them. At first it was just something to do; then for no real reason I started hunting down news stories that described the early stages of… hell! Let’s make no bones about it, the disaster. And I should spell the word in great, menacing black letters: DISASTER

So I clipped reports from newspapers as blizzards turned the world white outside.

I’ve only started putting them into some kind of order. At the time they didn’t point to any kind of global disaster or apocalypse (yeah, apocalypse is a good word). They were the kind of thing you glanced at, thought, “Well that’s pretty strange,” then turned to the TV pages and forgot all about them. But it’s there, all right. Like the little drops of blood in your handkerchief. That’s nothing, you tell yourself. A few drops of blood. I only blew my goddam nose too hard, didn’t I? But if only it was true. Those few specks of red in your tissue are the start of something BIG. A something that could be a freshly budding tumor in your lungs that will eat you alive.

These clippings were whispers of events just around the corner. As the man said: “Coming events cast their shadows before.”

Take this one. It has a nice, cheesy title: GENESIS OF CALAMITY. Another Bible-sounding title could have been HERE COMES THE FLOOD. There are plenty like this that hint at what was on its way.

I’ll copy out here in full: Miguel Santarrez followed the well-worn path down the mountain to the little Colombian town of Carallaya. The young man had made this journey on foot every month since he was a boy when his family brought the sheep down to market. He knew every switchback turn, where to ford the river now in flood from the spring rains. Always he’d made the journey by day, only now he followed the dangerous path at night in the teeth of a gale that howled with pitiless savagery along the ravine. In his arms he carried his infant son. The fever that wracked the little body had reduced the baby’s cries to a whimper. Miguel knew the only chance for the boy’s survival lay with the doctor in town. Two hours later Miguel walked along the windswept streets of Carallaya. He passed through the deserted market square by shuttered stores and cantinas. With the time long past midnight he no longer expected to find the doctor awake, but the sight that met his eyes was enough to stop him dead in the street. A house lay with its front door swinging back and forth in the storm. Lights still burned, but there was no one home. Miguel saw it was the same with the neighboring house, and the next, and the next. The once bustling town of twenty thousand lay deserted. Not a living soul remained. And when the desperate Miguel Santarrez telephoned the city hospital in Barranquilla, his call went unanswered. When he switched on a radio in an abandoned home all he heard was static…

Get the picture? The article tells it like a mystery story, or a weird piece of Forteana-an abandoned town hidden in the mountains of South America. All exotic-sounding, all faraway and, when all’s said and done, not a blind thing to do with us.

Only it started to get closer to home. Creeping north through South America men and women began to abandon their towns and cities. Nation governments down there worked like fury to contain the news and stop the panic. But it was a case of “Here comes the Flood.” Once it started there was no way of turning back the flow.

You’ll know about rabies. You know dogs, bats, even people foam at the mouth and die. But did you know a symptom of the disease is hydrophobia? A victim of rabies becomes terrified of water. There’s no way you can sit the person down and say, “Look, this is only a glass of water. It can’t harm you.” No, show a rabid man a glass of water and he’ll go crazy with fear. He’d jump through a tenth-story window rather than have that glass near him. Throw the glass of water in his face and pure fear would kill him stone dead.

Something like that got into the air or water system in South America. No one knows exactly how it was transmitted. But that bug moved fast. From what they could tell it began with symptoms like gastric flu, triggering bouts of stomachache, diarrhea and low-grade fever. Nothing life-threatening. At least not what they thought was dangerous. But scientists reckon the virus… if it was a virus.. . moved into the brain after the initial bout of the craps. Like hydrophobia in rabies or aversion to light in meningitis, people developed a morbid fear of illness. And I mean real fear. A fear so large and so overwhelming and so God almighty powerful that people were terrified to visit a relative in the hospital in case they inhaled bacteria and became sick themselves. There’s footage of sufferers being carried into hospitals for treatment, but they’re so terrified they hold their breath to stop inhaling disease bugs and just pass out right on the floor. Some stopped breathing altogether. Terror jerked their throat muscles into spasm, sealing the airway, and good-bye, Earth.

You can read later news reports, when medical experts started to understand this plague. It seemed there was something like a 90 percent infection rate. And those patients completely recovered from the physical effects of stomachache and diarrhea (exploding underpants syndrome was how Bart described it in a “Simpsons” episode that spoofed the whole epidemic). The colony of bugs in the brain was the real problem. I mean, you only have to think it through. A town is hit by the plague (called Gantose Syndrome after the smug asshole that first identified it-if you saw his photograph you’d know why I used those words); as people recover from the physical illness they’re gripped by the phobia. Your neighbors are still going down with it. They have fevers; they’re clutching their bellies. And in the meantime you are going out of your mind with fear. Like the man with hydrophobia killing himself to escape the glass of water, you can’t just tell yourself, “OK, my terror of illness is all in the mind. I’ll just ignore it.” You can’t. What’s more, all your family are the same. So your fear feeds their fear. So you tell yourself, “I’m getting the hell out of here. I’m going where I’ll be safe.” But where will you be safe? Go north, your instincts tell you. “America will help me. They’ve got the best medicines. The best health care. Go north.”

And did they go north?

You bet.

What must have been three quarters of the fucking entire South American continent walked out of their houses and headed north. You can imagine millions choking roads in cars, buses and tractors as they drive northward. Jesus, just look through your mind’s eye. People who are desperate with terror get hungry and thirsty and tired. Cars break down. They beg lifts. They steal cars. They kill the people in the next car for a bag of apples because they’re so hungry. Highways turn into stinking mortuaries with thousands of corpses rotting at the roadside. Flies swarm so thick in the air they become a black fog through which car lights can’t penetrate.

Flies. Shit-filled ditches. Corpses going rotten in the sun. What does that spread?

Disease.

What do the people infected with Gantose fear?

Disease!

So in terror they move faster. They infect country after country as these refugees pour north.

As I said earlier, Nature likes to play tricks. Remember years ago, when there was that panic about a flesh eating tropical disease? And how scientists said it would rampage across the world? Then (red faces all around) they realized it couldn’t spread naturally outside the tropics. Well, the Gantose bug wound up being cut from the same cloth.

The plague ran northward like a tidal wave. Then north of the Panama Canal when you hit the drier territories of Mexico suddenly there were no new cases. OK, so a few people came down with it, but these had contracted the disease in places like Brazil and Peru. They’d incubated the disease as they’d grabbed a flight north. What’s more, they didn’t infect Mexicans. Those South Americans who reached the States, even though they went down with the screaming meanies whenever they saw a hospital or an ambulance, didn’t pass the bug on to a single American.

There was a race issue here. One prominent medical expert announced that it was all a question of blood. That most of the South American population had a little native Indian blood in them; maybe a dash of Inca or Aztec, I don’t know. This professor guy was frozen out of his university post pretty quickly. But there were many who believed him. They used it as an excuse to exclude anyone with a Hispanic face from restaurants and bars. Even those whose grandparents were born here.

The bottom line was that all those months ago the disease appeared to have run out of gas. Those infected with Gantose even stopped going into a mindless panic when someone sneezed across the street. But you can’t dum p hell knows how many million people into Mexico without the place exploding at the seams. Massive global aid programs worked for a while, but there were still too many people to feed. Distribution networks collapsed. Even though grain piled mountain high at ports it didn’t reach the refugees deeper inland. Hunger drove them farther north, as far as the U.S. border with its walls and fences to keep illegal immigrants out. There, as the saying goes, the irresistible force met the immovable object.

Here’s another cutting. It contains an interview with one of the American patrol guards on the Mexican border the day of the Breakout. “It’s all gone to hell. But how can you stop them? There must have been a million men, women and children. And there were kids holding babies in their arms.” The harrowing memories were enough to render the man’sface ugly, and he’d just lit his third cigarette in the ten minutes I’d been speaking with him. “They tore the border fence apart with their bare hands… I mean, what am I supposed to do? Shoot them? Shoot kids and babies, for Chrissakes. All we could do was climb on top of our cruiser as they came by. They weren’t people; they were a whole flood. So we just hung on to the roof light and watched them pour by.”

The flood that engulfed America began that dry-asa-bone May morning. “Refugees sometimes turn into invading armies,” prophesied one commentator, but millions of Americans contributed food parcels and volunteered to help avert a humanitarian disaster. We, as a nation, labored to do the right thing.

Soon every state accepted a given number of refugees. And that flood kept coming. Empty hostels, hotels, army camps, redundant cruise liners were crammed to capacity. You could visit your local supermarket one day, everything normal. The next day you drove into the parking lot and there’d be five hundred Brazilians living in a shanty town of cardboard boxes. It got like that in the city parks. Tents made of sticks and carrier bags became home to millions nationwide. Of course they were all hungry. They all needed clean water. Medicines. Clothes. Shoes. And, goddam, we did do the right thing. We did our best to feed them. But there were too many. These half-starved bastards-and I don’t mean that in an insulting way, believe me-filled the streets begging for food. They weren’t violent or intimidating or anything. Of course, hardly any spoke English, and it seemed the only word they did learn was bread. So you’d walk downtown and there would be beautiful young Brazilian women or Mexican women (helluva lot of Mexicans seemed to get carried with the northward flow) and they’re all holding out their hands; they’ve got beautiful brown eyes that overflow with pleading, and they’re all saying one word as you pass:

“Bread.”

“Bread.”

“Bread.”

You might give them every penny in your pocket and still know you hadn’t done enough. Because between you and Blockbuster, or Barnes amp; Noble, or McDonald’s, or wherever the fuck you were going, is another ten thousand people all saying this one stupid word as you pass. Bread, bread, bread, bread…

And you find you start getting angry with them, because deep down you’re angry with yourself. It’s human nature to help a person who comes to you for help. Only you can’t do it. You can’t help them all. And this one word comes in a soft pulsing chant as you walk on by.

Bread

Bread

Bread

Bread-bread-bread-bread-bread-bread…

As one refugee stops saying it the next starts. Bread, bread, bread…

Shit. After that you couldn’t swallow a piece of bread without it sticking in your throat like a stone.

It wasn’t long before the people from South of the Border who became our sudden guests got a new name. Forget refugees. Or the “displaced.” Or even “victims.” They became bread bandits. I don’t think the name started on TV or radio. It was probably some word-of-mouth thing. A kid called a refugee a “bread bandit” one day. Within a week or so the name had spread. It wasn’t intended to be cruel, but it seemed apt. So it stuck. We still use it today. I’ve killed bread bandits.

Diseases often develop in cycles. Good old syphilis is the classic example. It takes years to run its course. Mostly it might disappear for ten years or more and the infected person has no symptoms, nothing. Then back it comes out of the great blue yonder. The sufferer suddenly finds pus squirting from his ears. His hair falls out. His skin gets all blistered and a dirty great crust of scabs forms on his face. Madness gathers up his wits and hurls them from the window.

The funkily named Gantose Syndrome was something like that. When experts told us the condition had run its course what seemed to have happened was that the Gantose bug merely submerged itself into the bones and muscle tissues of the victims, where it mutated into something even more sinister. After the first real heat wave of the year that was enough to knock an elephant off its feet Gantose 2 flared up again.

Here’s another headline: tet! USA

This explains everything in the word. Like the surprise attack by the communists in Vietnam, in what were supposed to be safe cities hundreds of miles away from the front line, so America was torched. I mean literally torched. On Sunday, June 1, refugees ran amok in towns and cities across the whole of the U.S.

Afterward, there were all kinds of theories. That it had been a coordinated attack. That the bread bandits all had little radios with them, that the order was broadcast in code and WHAM! They rioted in their millions, turning over cars, looting stores, burning houses, killing American men, women and children with their bare hands.

It wasn’t quite like that. Everyone agrees now it was that bug in their blood. It burrowed into their brains and made them do that. Just like a man with rabies’ll jump from a window rather than permit a glass of water to come near him. But why did it all happen on that Sunday? The doctor here in Sullivan will tell you it was the heat wave that fired up the dormant bug, pushing it into its next phase of the condition.

Still things don’t add up. A mystery the size of Texas’s still hanging over our heads. Sure there were millions of bread bandits here. To carry on the disease image, they’d infiltrated and infected the entire body of our country from one end to the other. But there still weren’t enough of them to make the whole nation implode. But that’s what happened. Our society, which seemed solid as the rock you stand on, just disintegrated.

One problem was the lack of food. Huge, HUGE problem. Bread bandits looted everything down to the last candy bar from supermarkets. They torched cars on the highways. Roads blocked everywhere, and the image blazing in my mind right now is that big antique vase in a cartoon. The one that gets just a gentle tap and a little crack appears… that crack in the china leads to another one, then another, and another, until with a low crick-crack sound the vase becomes a mass of fractures before the whole thing collapses into dust. Our country was like that vase. Suddenly there was no food. Thousands of families were burned from their homes. Bread bandits torched food warehouses. Food couldn’t be delivered to where it was needed through gridlocked roads.

American citizens became refugees, too. Only they headed for cities that had no food either. What takes your breath away was the SPEED it all happened. I’m not talking weeks, but four, maybe five, days. Panic buying at service stations meant gasoline vanished. No new stocks could be brought in because roads were a mess of burnt-out trucks. The guys who were to clear the routes into town with bulldozers didn’t show up to man the vehicles because they were working their guts out to find food for their families. Can you blame them? Any more than you can blame the cops for choosing to guard their own homes, rather then standing guard at city hall to stop some bread bandit trashing the Xerox machine? It’s human instinct. Family first.

Freakish things happened. Marines protected an IRS office while bread bandits butchered kids in kindergarten half a mile away. One state governor fled to Hawaii, then flew back again and hanged himself in his office. Another died rescuing patients from a hospital. Bravery, cowardice, confusion, terror, panic-we saw a lifetime’s worth inside a week.

The other Freak Event was Sullivan. Somehow the wild flood that engulfed the nation missed this chunk of suburban life as it sat there on the lake. Life went on as normal. In fact, it became so normal it became a freakshow in its own right.

So there I sat as dusk fell. I wrote down everything I knew on this block of paper. I pushed myself so hard to explain what happened I stopped feeling the pain in my face. The water was still now after the breeze of the day. Bats dipped to take insects from just above the lake. Uphill, electricity still fed the town. People burned more lights than were necessary. But then, nighttime had taken on a more sinister edge of late.

It wasn’t quite dark when I saw the procession of people heading toward my cabin. There must have been twenty of them. I didn’t like what I saw. Because the first person I recognized was the guy who tried to break that log over my head earlier in the day. Crowther’s face wore a grim expression. Anger burned in his eyes.

There was nowhere to run. So I put down my paper and my pencil and went outside to see what they wanted from me.