Chapter 3

Recovery and Planning

The next two days were recovery and cleaning. I have a habit of cleaning everything as soon as I can when I am sick. I have some weird OCD thing that thinks if I clean and sterilize the house it will prevent me from getting sick. I know it sounds strange, because I am already sick, but no one is completely normal. I just chalk it up to getting rid of any lingering viruses or bacteria so no one who comes over get sick. I also checked up on my family. My daughter had also gotten sick, it sounded like she had the same thing as me, just a milder version. It must be nice to be younger with a better immune system. Everyone else in the family except my dad was ok. It seems the sickness had hit him hard and he was admitted to the hospital. I planned on visiting soon if he did not get better.

Tuesday night I got another all call saying that school was going to be cancelled for the rest of the week and it would start up again on Monday. While I understood why they were cancelling, I was a little upset. I hate missing school. Not because I want to be there every day, but because for every day we missed of school we would have to make it up. As it stood now, we would be going an extra week into June and that would cut into my summer vacation. Like most teachers, I live for my extended breaks. They help make up for the low pay we get.

I decided that with school canceled I should actually check the news to see if the situation had changed. I logged on to my laptop and started browsing the news sites. Epidemic and pandemic were being thrown around a lot. Even by respectable news sources. That is not good. I decided to go to the source and navigated over to the CDC website to see what they were saying. The statistics they were releasing were bad. Over 25% of people had contracted the flu. Death rates were skyrocketing, especially in poorer countries with limited healthcare and infrastructure. There was even an announcement to watch the news that night. The president was going to address the nation on the topic of this flu.

How bad is this thing if the president is getting involved? At 6:30 p.m. I logged onto a streaming news service that was going to have the president’s announcement. The screen was covered in sensational news about the violent flu victims. It seems that if you were bit by a violent flue victim you had a 100% chance of catching the flu if you were not already immune. It seems about 10% of people were immune completely and the rest were immune from already fighting the flu off. There were quite a few wack nuts out there screaming about the end of times, and the zombie apocalypse. I admit it was starting to look bad, but it always looked bad, especially when the news got involved.

I taught my students this at school. Sensation sells newspapers. I then usually had to explain what newspapers were to some of the younger ones, which made me feel old. However, the premise held. If a news service could sell 10,000 copies of a bad flu story, it could sell 50,000 copies of the same story with the world deadly in the title. I know I was a little cynical, but after living through the E-bola, swine flu, avian flu, SARS, and several other deadly diseases that the news told me I was going to die from and that would end the world I took their reporting with a grain of salt.

It was soon enough 7:00 p.m. and the president started his press conference. I was not paying as much attention as I probably should have until I heard the words shutdown. When the president shuts things down, stuff is going wrong. I focused intently on what was being said. Scrolling along the bottom of my screen was highlights which allowed me to catch up.

The stock market would be closed through the end of the week. All non-essential government offices will be closed until further notice. All national guard and military units are mobilized to help with this unprecedented disaster. Because of its sudden symptoms, for safety all air transportation was shut down until further notice. The president urged all members of the country to quarantine themselves and their loved ones if they showed signs of the flu for 72 hours. Due to being overwhelmed the public was asked not to go to local hospitals unless it was a true emergency or unless the flu victim turned violent. All wages and prices are frozen until further notice. There will be no price gouging. Please check in every 12 hours to either the CDC website or the Whitehouse website for further updates.

This was unbelievable. It sounded like this had blown up into a much bigger deal than I ever thought it could be. I need to contact my family and make sure they are prepared. I called everyone and told them it was a code yellow. Code yellow in my family meant to take all necessary precautions and to get ready to congregate in one area so we could support each other if necessary. The rally point could change based on the situation. A code yellow could be because of flooding or other natural disasters, or in case of terrorist attack or other man made disaster. Several of my family argued with me but I explained why I thought this was such a big deal and they soon agreed. We decided as a family that mom’s property would be the rally point.

Mom and dad lived on 10 acres outside of Aiken, SC. They had a four bedroom house and several sheds and outbuildings from dad’s hobbies. It was the best place for everyone to meet. My sister and her family would be heading there immediately. My little brother and daughter both worked out at the Savannah Nuclear Power Plant so were deemed essential employees and still had to report into work. The plant and their apartments were only 30 minutes away from mom’s house though, so they were okay. My sister and her husband Roberto were both in education like myself so they were able to take their family to visit Grandma immediately. I was going to stay put for now. Unlike my sister who was 3 hours away I was only an hour and a half drive away from mom’s and did not have to worry about corralling 5 kids. This meant I could wait it out if necessary. There was no reason for me to go down early and add to the chaos unless it was necessary.

For the next two days I dutifully checked the news every 12 or so hours and the situation only seemed to deteriorate. The smaller local news outlet was not even running anymore. The larger Columbia South Carolina and Charlotte North Carolina news markets were still running stories. The violence shown by victims of this flu outbreak were astounding. It seemed like the high fever burned out or shutdown higher order thinking and reverted victims to aggressive responses to all types of stimuli. They would not stop attacking until the stimuli stopped.

People were already calling them zombies, but the experts were avoiding the zed word. I guess they acted like zombies, but were technically different. This virus was survivable and could be reversed in some situations. The problem seemed to be that if it was not treated immediately and with several high level antiviral drugs it would cause permanent brain damage. Since the brain damage was permanent officials had even stopped trying to help those who were past a certain stage of infection.

Some people seemed to be immune or recovered on their own. I did and so did my daughter. My dad however was not doing well. It did not look like he was going to make it. I think I am going to go ahead and load up Betsy and move down to Mom’s and visit dad. I will head off tomorrow in the morning and load up Betsy with the essentials tonight.

When I was doing my afternoon news check two new pieces of news caught my eye. First was that riots had started to break out in larger cities due to the lack of supplies in stores. The second was blanket pardon pushed through congress and signed by the President around noon. It seemed that government must know something I don’t. They have never pushed through a bill, voted, and signed it into law in under 72 hours before. They either had prior notice or this was a lot worse than I thought.

The blanket pardon law was just that. No one would be prosecuted for killing any person found to be stage three or later with the zombie flu. The law did not call it the zombie flu but the announcer did and everyone else was also. This was bad. How desperate must they be to put forth a free get out of jail card for killing other people. I mean I would do it to protect myself and others, but basically they just made it okay to murder someone as long as you could prove they had the disease. They never even mentioned who would oversee proof or when proof was needed. I think it is a last step effort to stop the spread or deal with the situation, but I think it is going to go horribly wrong.

This new piece of information scared me, and I immediately tried to call down to the family. Cell lines are out. It looks like basic services are starting to break down. I am going into full red alert mode and I will actually move my departure to mom’s house up to tonight. I need to get down with the rest of the family and we need to start moving quick. Red alert mode was the end of the world as we know it. Some things might survive, but basic law and order are predicted to go away. We as a family needed to get to someplace safe where we controlled the area and could limit our interaction with others or dictate to them from a place of power. Looting and societal breakdown should be just around the corner. However, which of my plans should we go with? There are several different ideas and each one is specific to different scenarios.

I think I will just have to have this discussion with the family when I get there and we can decide together. I am leaning towards the island isolation scenario though. I do not think waiting it out or a mountain fortress is going to work. This thing has spread so far and so fast that recovery may not be quick or easy. I am guessing that after the disruption to society we would be lucky to recover in 50 years. That is two generations. Definitely need to plan for the long term and make sure that the family comes out on top. Always look out for number one but help whenever possible. They may seem mutually exclusive and sometimes they are, but if I can help someone without putting myself or my family in danger I would. Speaking of which I better try and contact the neighbors and check in with them.