The Dying Time (Book 1): Impact Read online

  *

  Michael Whitebear poked his head around the corner of the house and pulled back quickly. Still there, four men and three women in front of the entrance, burning trash and broken furniture in a smoke-blackened fifty-gallon barrel to keep warm. They wore sidearms, but weren’t openly hostile to the other folks he’d seen going in and out of the hospital. Children played broom hockey in the parking lot by the side entrance, their laughter ringing cheer into a depressing reality.

  It started snowing again and Michael undid his snowshoes and leaned them against the siding. The bear paw-style snowshoes had many miles on them but still managed to look new against cracked and peeling white paint. The snow was so wind-packed and crusted he hadn’t really needed them since he landed the Pegasus in Memorial Park, but he’d worn them anyhow. They left less of a trail than boots, and even though the few people who’d seen him hadn’t appeared hostile he was wary.

  Trust was the first victim of hard times.

  He had peeked into several ruined houses between the park and hospital. Many held the mangled or burned, partly decayed, partly mummified corpses of those who died during the Impact. But several held fresher bodies, covered with lesions. He’d marked those houses, knowing they should be burned. He suppressed a shudder. He never got used to a world full of dead. They crept into his dreams and slimed them with horror, but maybe, since the plague had passed through here, those inside the hospital would know how to treat it.

  He glanced up at the snow drifting gently down and for the first time in ages was thankful for it. Falling snow softened the broken edges of buildings and kindly covered rusting autos. Snow hadn’t lost its magic to make the world look new.

  Michael slipped numbed hands back into gray wool gloves and stepped out. They noticed him immediately, but didn’t get excited. He in turn noticed their coats were as frayed as his own, their hands also in coat pockets and he wondered if they, like himself, gripped pistols in their pockets.

  “Haven’t seen you around before.” The voice was matter-of-fact, not threatening. It came from a big man with a face full of red hair. His hunters-orange parka stood in stark contrast to Michael’s mottled woolen clothing.

  “Came down from the hills,” Michael answered. “There a doctor inside?” They drew back slightly.

  “You sick?” The fear-tinged question came from a thin-necked man with a Barney Fife voice and a scraggly blonde beard. Almost all men wore full beards now.

  “No,” Michael assured the man. “Just got some stuff a doctor might want to swap for.”

  Red beard spoke again. “See Doc Lewis. He’ll be somewhere on the second floor.”

  “Thanks.” Michael nodded to the man and walked through the outer door, wiped his feet carefully on the carpet scrap provided for that purpose, and stepped inside. He stopped, stunned. The place was clean right down to that disinfectant smell that goes with hospitals. The lights were on, and it was almost warm. He hadn’t noticed the absence of built-up snow on the building from outside and the boarded up windows hid the lights. They must have their own generator, he thought.

  As he walked down a hallway to the stairwell he saw hospital rooms kept tidy, though many looked lived-in. A few held bed-bound patients, swaddled in blankets. Each room had a small electric space heater. The whole place literally hummed with them.

  He peeled off his gloves and threw back his hood. He was almost to the stairs when a stern-faced, gray-haired matron in an RN’s uniform appeared from one of the rooms.

  “May I help you?” Her tone implied she’d rather eat worms. She actually sniffed.

  Michael had seen her type before. Officious, but petty. He stepped close, invading her space and said, “Take me to Dr. Lewis.”

  It was an order, not a request. She stepped back, flustered, and the voice of caution whispered to her before she could bluster. He might be dirty, she thought, but he sounds important. She’d made a career of not offending people who sounded important.

  “He wants to see me,” Michael added.

  “Oh, I do, do I?”

  Michael looked up and saw the white-haired black man in the white doctors coat rounding the landing and heading down the flight of stairs. He was clean-shaven, definitely not the rule in these times. “Mr.?”

  “Whitebear,” Michael grinned. “Michael Whitebear, from the Freeholds. You must be Dr. Lewis.” Michael offered his right hand and added, “and you definitely want to see me.”

  The Doctor shook Michael’s weather-cracked hand with a firm grip and an answering smile. Anyone who could bluff Nurse Hawkins was worth some time.

  “So, what is it I want to see you about?”

  “Obstetrics, now. Refuge, later. We have an OBGYN at the Freeholds who has offered to exchange his services for certain vaccines and antibiotics we lack. From what I’ve seen, there isn’t a pharmacy in town you haven’t picked over.”

  The doctor nodded agreement.

  “As for refuge, there’s a mob up in Denver who are enslaving, killing, or eating anyone who doesn’t see things their way. After they digest Metro Denver, Colorado Springs will probably be next on the menu.”

  Doctor Lewis nodded again. He’d heard about Denver. He ran his right hand up his forehead and back through his hair. “You lay your cards right out on the table, don’t you son?”

  Michael shrugged. “Being straightforward saves time and minutes could mean lives.”

  The Doctor’s gaze sharpened. “You have plague up there?”

  “We don’t know what it is, Doctor, just that it’s fast, fatal, and ugly. And don’t worry; the incubation period is 48 hours. I spent four days in isolation to be sure I didn’t have it before I came--”

  “Symptoms!” Doc Lewis barked.

  “Phlegmy cough, high fever, a rash that turns into skin lesions, then pustules. The victim slips into a coma and dies. Start to finish in four to six days. The young ones go faster.”

  The Doctor sighed and shook his head. “It sounds like the stuff that went through here two months ago. You been getting refugees from here?”

  Michael just nodded and the Doctor laid a hand on his shoulder and said, “I’m really sorry, son. But nothing we have here will touch it. It acts like some sort of Ebola/pneumonia mixture with a side of anthrax, but I can’t be sure. What I am sure of is it’s spread by air and contact, killed almost half of us before everyone got so scared they stayed by themselves. No one around here even scavenges in houses anymore for fear they’ll contact it off a corpse.”

  Michael’s eyes shifted away and instantly the doctor pounced. “You been in any of those houses?”

  “Just far enough to see what killed them,” Michael admitted.

  “How many people have you contacted?”

  “Just you and your nurse and I spoke to those four outside by the barrel.

  “Nurse Hawkins!”

  She poked her head out of a room, “Yes, Doctor?”

  “Kindly inform Mr. Barker and the others gathered around the heater they will be spending the next few days in the isolation ward.

  Michael’s alarm showed.

  “It’s just precautionary,” Doc Lewis said. “This disease is highly contagious. You should join them too.”

  “I can’t do that, Doc. I have to get back to the Freeholds with a treatment.”

  It was the Doctor’s turn to look away.

  “Surely there’s something?” Desperation tinged Michael’s voice.

  “I’m sorry,” the Doctor apologized. “I thought I’d made it clear.”

  Michael looked deep into Doc Lewis’s eyes, read the sorrow and concern there, and asked, “Then what do we do?”

  The Doctor’s shoulders slumped and his voice sank to a mere whisper. “Isolate yourselves from anyone who comes down with it. Have no, I repeat, no contact with any victim whatsoever.” He saw the horrified look on Michael’s face.

  “I know, son. It isn’t easy to abandon them. But if they catch it, they die, or at least everyone here did
. Far as I can see that means mortality is virtually 100 percent, so by tending to them you just spread the death around. All you can do is let it run its course and thank God not everyone catches it.”

  Michael took a deep breath and lowered his head. This was not the news he’d hoped to take back.

  *

  “I don’t like it, Ellen, but that’s what he said.” Michael’s report was going about like he’d expected. “Tend the sick and spread the death were his exact words. What do you want me to do? Lie?”

  “Of course not,” Ellen snapped. She pushed away from the kitchen table and paced the room.

  “Then quit shooting the messenger,” he said.

  She never stopped her agitated pacing. “But quarantine! Abandoning sick people to die alone. This could break us, Michael. Through every trial this community held itself together by helping each other. We can’t turn our backs on each other now! It would destroy the Freeholds.”

  “Didn’t destroy Colorado Springs,” Michael shot back. Then he shifted tack, playing dirty. “Are you going to be the one to bring this bug home to our son? Am I?”

  She stopped pacing, flipped her long blonde hair back over her shoulder and glared at him, storm clouds roiling in her hazel eyes. How could he?

  “We’ll end up abandoning the sick anyway, Ellen. It’ll happen as soon as panic sends everyone fleeing to their own homes, afraid to poke their heads out. That’s what happened in the Springs and it’s the only thing that saved them.”

  She shook her head. Preserving their morality, their sense of community had gotten them through so far. What if Steven or Michael gets sick? Could she leave them to die alone? Hell, no!

  “Doctor Lewis says…” he began.

  “Doctor Lewis!” Ellen erupted. “Doctor Lewis said this. Doctor Lewis said that. Who do you think he is, Michael? God?”

  A lump the size of Pike’s Peak formed in Michael’s throat. He’d seen the doctor’s pain.

  “No, Ellen. He’s just an old country doctor who spent his life saving others, then watched people he’d known for forty years and a wife he’d grown up with sicken, rot and die because he could do nothing to save them.”

  His voice quivered as he pleaded with her. “The Freeholds will be a ghost town, Ellen. One hundred percent mortality! The only way we live is by not catching it in the first place! Sometimes doing the wrong thing is doing the right thing.” Tears blurred his vision. He rubbed his eyes. A sob caught in his throat.

  “Oh, damn,” he said softly and laid his head on the table.

  “Oh, Michael!” She knelt beside him, hugging him to her while his shoulders shook and pain she hadn’t known was in him poured out.

  He continued to shake and sob as raw emotion tore at him releasing visions of dead children he saw every day while searching for food, of half-rotted mummies he slept beside while seeking shelter in the ruins of their homes, of nightmares he buried inside, enduring for the sake of his family. And now this.

  Guilt ripped at his heart. To deliver the plague among his friends and family. He’d touched the corpse and hadn’t caught the disease, but maybe the bleach he poured over his gloves and clothes hadn’t disinfected them. Maybe he, along with Josh Adams and Jack Quist had been a carrier.

  He rocked back and forth, crying until he ran dry, and all the time Ellen held him. “It’ll be okay,” she whispered over and over. “It’ll be okay.” But inside she wondered how if this was the straw that would break The Freeholds back.

  *

  Pueblo

  “Stay in the house, Darla,” Emil Smolensky said.

  “But grandpa, I haven’t seen Michaella in weeks.”

  “I know, sweetie, but it’s just for a little while longer. I wouldn’t be going out myself if we didn’t need firewood.” He’d managed to keep them alive through the fires and rains and long cold months. This neighborhood had some good folks who’d pooled resources and helped each other.

  He shook his head. This latest horror was tearing at his community like a wolf pack on a downed elk. Half the men on the firewood detail hadn’t shown up yesterday for fear of the plague. He folded the buttstock on his M4 carbine, slung it over his shoulder and closed the door behind him.

  Enough light filtered through the murky sky today for him to see all the way down to the Arkansas River valley. He could even make out the colors of the graffiti art lining its broken concrete banks.

  He tugged a green bandanna up over his nose, like western movie outlaw, grabbed a two-wheeled hand cart he’d made and hauled it up the street. He glanced over his shoulder to check the house before he went around the corner, where he met two other men with wheelbarrows, axes and bowsaws. The firewood detail was down to three.

  *

  Back at the house, Darla waited. She tried to read, another chapter of “The Towers of Greed” by Lindsay White, but the problems of people who had running water, food and electricity just couldn’t hold her interest, even if they were fighting terrorists. When she figured she’d waited long enough she slipped on her coat and went looking for her friend.

  Michaella and her mother had been dead for days when she found them and Darla fled back home, stumbling along with tear filled eyes.

  Five days later, covered with the same open sores her friend Michaella had, she coughed out her life in Emil’s arms.

  He built a funeral pyre in the living room and wailed at the emptiness inside as he lit it off. Then he took his disinfected gear and his homebuilt cart, since there was no fuel for his truck, and headed toward Fort Carson.

  *

  Utah/Deseret

  The plague came to Nephi, courtesy of a derelict sailing ship from California that some local fisherman salvaged along with the disease. From there, it spread to Provo and the surrounding areas. As they had in Colorado Springs and other cities the people cared for the ill and died for their efforts until fear enforced a merciless quarantine. The only good thing was that the disease acted so quickly the quarantine period only lasted for six days. The horror was that in a single month the population of Deseret was reduced by nearly two thirds.

  *

  The Amana Colonies

  Eric Metz pulled the maul from the chopping block and took a healthy swing at the chunk of oak. The healthy thwock of metal edge meeting and splitting the dense grained wood echoed across the woodlot. In many ways, he thought, as he set another piece on the block, his life and that of his neighbors hadn’t changed much. They still labored without electricity, still farmed as they always had, still worshipped as they always had.

  Yet many things were different. As he wiped sweat from his brow, for even on a cold day splitting oak was hard work, he scanned the tent city for signs of his wife, Hope.

  He spotted her red hair peeking from beneath her bonnet as she moved from tent to tent delivering bottles of milk to those who needed them.

  The refugees descended upon them even as the fires fell from the sky and burned their crops. They fought those fires side by side with Eric, saving many farms and before the ground even stopped its infernal shaking the Amish, unable and unwilling to drive neighbors away, had taken them in.

  It was a mixed blessing, he thought. So many extra mouths to feed had exhausted their robust stores of food and starvation claimed too many. But the outsiders also brought guns and a willingness to use them to defend the Amish from the depredations of predatory gangs. The more practical among Eric’s brethren accepted this as a necessary evil.

  He took an absentminded swing and the maul glanced off a knot, missed the chopping block and buried itself in the icy ground less than an inch from his foot. He stepped back, grimacing. He’d been chopping wood all his life and knew better than to do so when not focused. He shook his head and took a deep breath to clear his mind. He felt the pressure building in his chest and broke out into a coughing fit. His eldest son, Obadiah, was bedridden with an ague and claimed several of the newcomers were as well.

  He wiped his mouth with a handkerchief and igno
red the spots of blood it revealed. Oh well, he shrugged as he reached for the maul. This too would pass.

  Within two months the Amana Colonies were populated solely by ghosts.

  *

  Aqua Nova

  Buzz Mackenzie paled as the dome breach alarm howled through Deep City. He snatched his mini-lung and spared a glance at his gauges before hitting his closed circuit intercom and yelling, “Dani, report!”

  The lines on his face eased as she answered.

  “We’re here, boss,” Dani Jones said. “The crack is in the outermost shell of Aquaponics 3. We should have it sealed and pumped dry before end of shift.”

  “No interior damage?” Buzz asked.

  “Just some underwear needs changed,” Dani said, and he could hear the smile in her voice.

  “Roger that,” he said.

  So long as they didn’t get any more shocks like that last seaquake they’d be okay--until the next emergency. But he and his teams were getting pretty good at handling those. No major failures since the early days. He quickly knocked on the wood grain plastic desk. Maybe it wasn’t real wood but he figured it was the gesture that counted.

  He figured they had it good compared to what little he’d heard from their support fleet before contact was lost. Their fish farms and kelp beds supplied adequate, if somewhat monotonous food and their interior gardens were beginning to add much needed variety to their diet. Their fuel cells produced enough oxygen and fresh water, but waste disposal, and especially human waste disposal, was a growing problem. They couldn’t just keep dumping it outside the domes.

  He’d have to talk to Captain Swain about whether or not it was time to risk the Seawolf on another voyage to one of their pre-deployed resupply bases. Several of the underwater storage depots had been lost during the cataclysm and the last time Seawolf approached California she’d been fired upon by artillery.

  Chapter 25: Semper Persistence