Authors: J.A. Crowley
I’d stocked up on ammunition for our motley collection of guns. I’d had a good week and received a referral check for a personal injury case. I’d finally splurged on a Sig Sauer .45 1911 target model and a bunch of rounds for it.
My birthday was coming, and I figured I could give the .45 to myself as my present. That way, I could give my Sig-Sauer 9mm to Kate and my .Marlin .30 .30 to my oldest son, Mike. I bought ammo for both, extra magazines and a holster for the 9, and nice scope and sling for the .30 .30. The younger kids—Bobbie and Sean—could each “get” their own .22 rifle since we had a stack of them. That would make my purchase more of a family celebration than a personal indulgence.
I also bought a few 500 round bricks of .22 long rifle ammo, because we had a bunch of .22s and the kids loved to shoot with us at the local gun club. We weren’t big hunters but we did love plinking and target shooting. We were all decent shots, and Kate and Mike were really good shots. Bobbie, our thirteen year old daughter, had talent but was more interested in cell phones and boys. Sean, the eleven year old, could shoot well for a few minutes but then would drift off to play his beloved video games.
That day, the local radio stations in Western Massachusetts were full of bad news. The “flu epidemic” had spread to New England and hospitals and medical centers were way over capacity. Lots of people were even dying, even at the local hospital. The talking heads yammered about the flu "affecting" (they meant killing) as much as one or two percent of the population, mostly the young, elderly and ill. There were so many talking heads, talking about so much bad news, that we all tuned them out.
Everyone was appalled. It was disgusting to see the politicians play the blame game and try to avoid taking responsibility. Why would they have any responsibility for a virus, you might ask? Because they always took credit for everything that happened—so I guess their own twisted logic dictated that they had to take the blame as well. Believe me, no one misses the politicians.
The current wisdom was that the flu epidemic would not be as bad as the Spanish flu epidemic in 1918 due to improvements in medical treatment. Pneumonia was what usually killed flu patients, and we could treat that much better now. Reading between the lines, this flu was actually worse, but treatment was better, so they expected fewer deaths.
Some of the alarmists compared what was coming to the Black Plague, which had wiped out between thirty and sixty percent of Europe in the mid-1300’s. A few of the really alarmed alarmists claimed bubonic plague had somehow “combined” with the flu. Who knows?
Flu shots were useless against what they started calling “SuperFlu.” I guess that made it sexier for the media, who regurgitated the same old stories with their own spin and hype to jack the ratings. At least most of them looked good while they did it. When was the last time you saw a weather girl without a boob job? We don’t miss the media much, either. Pretty much no one with a boob job made it, so that's too bad.
The consensus among the survivors is that SuperFlu may have weakened us but that something else actually caused the “Incident.” SuperFlu just set the stage.
The conspiracy theorists blame the United States Army, which, they claim, was actively trying to combine plague and flu to create a new weapon. There was plenty of precedent. Before World War II, a Japanese scientist, Shiro Ishii, actually bombed areas of China with fleas carrying bubonic plague. It caused thousands of deaths.
Ishii was never prosecuted for his crimes, and ultimately moved to the United States, where he continued to develop biological weapons. Talk about hypocrisy; killing the Chinese with plague-infected fleas didn’t rank with the post war government as a war crime—if the guy helped us develop new war crimes of our own.
In any event, there are probably no scientists left with the ability to figure it all out. We still have plenty of conspiracy theorists, though.
SuperFlu was unusual, and similar to Spanish flu, in that young, healthy adults in their prime actually suffered more than children and the elderly, the typical victims of most diseases. Like the Spanish flu, SuperFlu caused your own immune system to attack you, so a stronger immune system actually made it worse. The conspiracy nuts claimed that the disease was intended to decimate enemy military forces and leave the enemy populace relatively healthy and undefended. Maybe it was.
My doctor was a client and drinking buddy of mine. We happened to be discussing a real estate deal that day and branched off into other topics. He told me he had no idea how the SuperFlu would play out. He’d heard reports of a really virulent strain with a high mortality rate down in Florida. Symptoms included open bleeding sores and high fever, among others.
Apparently, a raft full of Haitians had landed in the Everglades and scattered throughout Southern Florida. Some of the reports indicated that the Haitians might be cannibals and were starting an uprising in the Belle Glade area.
Doc only heard about it since some of the Haitians were captured and two had been flown to Boston for evaluation at Mass General by flu experts. Others had been flown to CDC in Atlanta. He thought one may have been flown to the UCLA Medical Center in LA and another to the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota. Doc thought it was stupid to spread them out like that, since inevitably someone would screw up and get infected.
Doc was dead nuts right. Who knows how much of the world could have been saved if the public health officials had reacted perfectly? But I bet we, the people, would never have stood for any violations of our privacy or limits on our freedom, so maybe it would never have worked anyway. Back then, anyway. Now, we’d stick you in quarantine so fast your head would spin—and you’d be glad for it. The option would be banishment, on a good day, or a bullet, on most days.
Doc only knew about it any of it because he’d been in Desert Storm I with one of the pilots and they’d kept in touch over the years. His buddy said that the Haitians had attacked and bitten one of EMTs on the flight and that he’d died. Doc thought the guy had said he saw the victim’s body bag moving, but their call broke up and Doc couldn’t get through again. Doc thought he was kidding.
Doc had no idea what was going on but suggested that anyone who could take a long weekend and hole up at home should do that, since it might help slow the spread of the flu. He was heading to his place in upstate New York.
Doc was a flaming liberal and a gun control nut, but he did agree to bring his father’s old twelve gauge with him after I pointed out that reasoned debate alone was unlikely to stop a looter or bring down a duck if he got hungry. I hope he made it.
It was the Friday before Labor Day, and Doc’s advice made sense, so I headed home early. There was no one around to talk to anyway. It was amazing how holidays had grown over the years. Everyone was gone by two on the Friday before long weekends. Thanksgiving was now a two-day holiday. One of the unions I was negotiating with had coined the term “Christmas Eve Eve” as part of their effort to get the afternoon before Christmas Eve off. It was gross. People now bought toys, not just candy, for their kids for Halloween and Easter. It never ended!
It was getting to be like France around here. Take a whole month off. Work thirty hour weeks. Depend on the government for everything. I guess in France, they must have had fewer people dragging on the system, but who knew. It didn’t work there and it wouldn’t work here.
Also, everyone also had to be “in touch” and “wired” 24/7. Cell phones, crackberries, internet, laptops, I phones, people walking around talking to themselves with devices dangling from their ears—it was crazy. I guess that’s why they needed all that extra time “off.” But even during those times, they stayed in constant communication. Voluntarily.
With the kids the thing was texting. A group of kids would sit silently, whacking away at their little tiny keyboards, not saying a word, occasionally exchanging a glance or a chuckle. Or maybe not. It was bizarre.
These were kids who couldn’t play a game without refs, uniforms, and minivan transport back and forth. If you tried to send them out to play, they were clueless. Put ten kids on a gym floor with a ball and they’d probably sit around and text each other until their rides came. Or maybe they’d bully one another until a team of social workers arrived. Whatever happened to a kick in the balls to “mediate” a bully?
Or how about “tweeting?” Whose bloated ego led them to believe that the world wanted or needed constant updates about their schedule, plans, thoughts, and location? I guess I was becoming kind of an old fart at 35.
In my family, the best way to express how much you hated something or someone was to estimate how much snow you’d lay in for how much time and at what temperature for a chance to do something. It would work like this. Brother Jim: “I fucking hate Governor Patrick.” Brother Jack: “Well, Jim, how much do you hate him?” Brother Jim: “I would lie naked in three feet of snow in 10 degree weather for four hours to whack him in the back of the neck with an iron rake.”
The record was created by my little sister, Jenny. She had a real problem with Doctor Phil, clearly the world’s biggest asshole. We all hated him but most of us, by completely avoiding his type of media for many years, coupled with intense psychotherapy, had managed to wipe his existence from our minds. Jenny was home with her young children, taking a year off from her job as an emergency room R.N., so she simply couldn’t avoid him on daytime TV.
She came out with this: “I would plummet through space from the moon, smash into a mountain headfirst, flip thousands of feet down that mountain ass over teakettle, get swept into an icy stream, buffeted in Class 4 rapids, thrown over a waterfall, and lay nude on a sheet of ice while covered with burning napalm for an entire long weekend for even a ten percent chance to slowly chew through Dr. Phil’s Achilles tendons while jamming a large and ravenous Norwegian wharf rat up his ass.”
That was a good one, although she got in trouble with Mom for not waiting until the kids were in bed to offer the opinion. The entire family was working on a scenario for Al Gore. We had determined that the goal had to be to get Superman to fly backwards around the earth and reverse time to the date of Gore’s birth, or better yet his conception, but we hadn’t gotten much further than that before we got bogged down in the complexity of removing all traces of his DNA permanently from the gene pool.
My mother was working on a scenario for Rush Limbaugh and my father was working on one for Barrack Obama. Like many couples, they didn’t agree on politics, but they got along great.
As I mentally calculated the depth, time, temperature and amount of suffering that I would tolerate to administer a quality Singapore caning to the asshole who invented Twitter, a fat broad in an SUV ran a stop sign and almost hit me. I drive defensively all of the time, mostly due to guilt over the way I used to drive as a teenager, so I’d had an eye on her and was able to avoid her.
She never removed her cell phone from her fat face. Her beady eyes widened a bit as I approached, reached in, grabbed her phone, dropped it on the ground, and crushed it. She started on me but I quickly stopped her.
“Listen to me, bitch. If I ever see you or hear of you driving while talking on the phone or if you get into an accident and I hear about it, I’m going to come to your house and kill everyone in it. Tell every single one of your friends that I’ll do the same to them as well. Now, would you like me to put you under citizen’s arrest for driving to endanger, or would you like to get home and finish that bottle of wine you’ve been working on? Here’s my card, have your husband call me on Tuesday and we can discuss a cash settlement for the pain and suffering you’ve caused me.”
I hadn’t noticed the two little fatties sitting in the back. They were drinking sodas, eating McDonald’s Happy Meals, and zoned out with their iPods or something. I wanted to slap their fat faces and throw their stuff out the window but I let them go. It just wasn’t worth it.
It struck me that my secretary may not have switched me over to decaf after lunch and I decided to ask her about it after the weekend.
That evening, we had a nice steak dinner and watched a few Netflix movies that the kids had ordered. Mike had ordered “Zombieland,” which got us talking about how good we’d be at killing zombies if they had the nerve to attack us. Bobbie and Sean thought it looked pretty easy.
“God, they’re so stupid,” Bobbie would intone in her teenage drawl as the slow-moving victims were torn apart. “Why don’t they just hide instead?”
Sean jumped in with his high pitched voice. “I’d just get a Tommy gun and shoot them all.” Sean was afraid of both zombies
and
clowns, so the stereotypical zombie clown really freaked him out. The rest of us loved zombies but hated clowns. Little did we know.
That night Kate and I watched the news before bed. Things were getting crazy in Florida but the reports were vague. I told her what Doc had told me about the Haitians. Channel 7 had a report about an incident at Mass General that I caught while flipping channels. Something might have clicked in Kate’s mind but we didn’t discuss it much. I clicked over to the Sox game and watched that until I fell asleep. There wasn’t much of a crowd at Fenway.
The next day was the annual neighborhood picnic. We live on Oakwood Street, consisting of 12 houses on decent size lots, and get along well with the neighbors. Each year, the party would take place in the cud de sac in front of our house.