Salvation City (5 page)

But Cole stayed up late that night, skimming more articles (including one called “Mother Nature Is the Worst Terrorist”), then lying in bed, listening to some music he’d downloaded before dinner. Though she wasn’t worried about the flu, his mother was worried enough about Cole’s hearing to nag him constantly about listening so much to his iPod. (His parents had given up their iPods as part of their new discipline but also out of anxiety about hearing loss.) Too bad it was Cole’s favorite thing to do. His parents didn’t believe him, but he actually studied better when he had music blasting in his ears. If he were allowed to take his tests like that, he was sure he’d get better grades. Anyway, he’d heard about surgeons blasting rock and roll in the OR, so obviously it couldn’t
hurt
your concentration.

He’d had the flu so far twice in his life. He remembered the worst headache he’d ever had, and throwing up and throwing up, and being too tired even to sit up in bed. No denying, the sickest he’d ever been—he could get a little nauseated just remembering it—but nothing like what he’d read about tonight.

His father was always warning him not to trust everything he read online. The Net was a mine of misinformation, he said. And in fact Cole was skeptical about some of these flu stories. People screaming from the pain, people bleeding from their noses and ears and even their eyes, people completely losing their minds—it was like one of those horror movies so over the top that instead of being scared the audience ends up laughing.

He remembered what his mother had said about having time to say good-bye. But here were stories about people being way too sick to know what was happening to them and people dying so fast, some even dropping dead in their tracks as if they’d been shot. But his mother was wrong anyway. It would be better to die in a big explosion, or in a plane or car crash, or falling off a mountain like the principal’s son last year, than to take
forever
like Cole’s grandparents. His mother knew all about how bad cancer was, but obviously she didn’t know the flu could be a pretty horrific way to die, too. And Cole wasn’t going to tell her. He wasn’t going to bring up the flu again with either of his parents.

But maybe his father was right. Maybe what had happened in 1918 could never happen again.

“U.S. Reveals Detailed Flu Disaster Plans.”

Cole decided to make this the topic for his research report. Plans for manufacturing and distributing vaccines and other medications. Plans to quarantine the sick and to call up extra doctors and nurses and to replace absent workers with retired workers so that businesses wouldn’t have to shut down. Plans to keep public transportation and electricity and telecommunications and other vital services operating and food and water and other necessities from running out. Plans to mobilize troops (for Cole this was the only exciting part) in the event of mass panic or violence.

One day he would ask Pastor Wyatt why, despite all these plans, everything had gone so wrong.

“Son, that is just the thing. That is what people did not—and still do not—get. There is no way you can count on the government, even if it’s a very good government. The government isn’t going to save you, it isn’t going to save anyone. There’s no way you can count on other people in a situation like we had. People afraid of losing their lives—or, Lord knows, even just their toys—they’ll panic. Even fine, decent Christian folk—you can never know for sure what they’ll do next. So I say, love your neighbor, help your fellow man all you can, but don’t ever count on any other human being. Count on God.”

What Cole didn’t know was that most of the plans he read about that night would have been sufficient only for an emergency lasting a few weeks.

His report was really just a cut-and-paste job from the Internet, but he knew it would pass. Ms. Mark never paid much attention to their homework. He didn’t bring up the subject with his parents again, but just before he went off to school Monday morning they brought it up. Was he still worried about an epidemic? And though he said no, they heard yes.

“We’re not going to die, pumpkin,” his mother said. “You really shouldn’t be wasting precious kid time worrying about that.”

“Precious kid time” was something his mother said a lot. She was always complaining that kids today were being forced to grow up way too fast and were being robbed of more and more precious kid time. But to Cole, who could not wait to be sprung from the trap of adolescence, this was totally wack.

He had his iPod with him and was inserting the ear buds when she said, “You want something to worry about? Let me tell you, Dad and I are already paying for the kind of music we listened to growing up. You want articles? I can show you articles, I can show you studies—” The rest of her words were lost. He was out the door, his iPod turned up max.

BY THE TIME THEY MOVED TO INDIANA, the first wave of the flu had come and gone. None of them had caught it. (“See?” said his mother. “We Vinings are made of sturdy stuff.”)

In Chicago there had been dozens of cases of infection but only one real horror story. In a nursing home on the South Side, all but two of the residents had died. But what did you expect? A filthy overcrowded place like that. Old people whose health had been so neglected for so long, they had no resistance to any germs.

Though the first wave had hit much of Illinois and other parts of the Midwest, in southern Indiana, where Little Leap was, there were only a few cases, all mild.

When the second wave hit, everyone hoped it, too, would be mild. A hope that died by the end of the first week.

Later many people would say that if the schools had been closed right away, lives might have been saved. But at the time people argued that you couldn’t just close the schools, because so many parents worked. If they had to stay home to take care of their kids, a lot of them would lose income, maybe even their jobs. Not to mention that businesses were already shorthanded because of all the employees out sick. Closing the schools might just make things worse.

But even before schools were officially closed, many parents had started keeping their kids home. Because teachers were getting sick, too, and there weren’t enough subs, classes had to be combined.

“How stupid can you get?” a teacher who’d been fired for refusing to go in to work told reporters. “Anywhere people are crowded together is bad, but with school kids we’re talking about a perfect storm of contagion.”

From Addy in Berlin came the news that all social gatherings had been banned except for weddings and funerals, where the number of people could not be higher than twelve. (“I wonder if that’s counting the bride and groom,” Cole’s mother said, and his father joked: “How about the corpse?”)

In city after city, all over the world, the number of people appearing in surgical masks kept multiplying. Those still capable of frivolity added illustrations: luscious lips, stuck-out tongues, piano-keyboard smiles, and—most popular—vampire fangs. In Indianapolis, after hundreds of people fell ill over one weekend, no one was permitted to go out without a mask. But—as happened almost everywhere—there weren’t enough masks to go around. Some made do with scarves or other pieces of cloth, or they tried taping gauze or paper to their faces. A lot of people just ignored the rule—and got away with it, the police being out sick in droves.

But a homeless man caught spitting in the street was mobbed and beaten to death.

 

 

 

The day before Cole’s school finally closed was spooky. The halls had never been so quiet. The sound of a ball being bounced in the school yard was like the sound of a heavy door slamming. And when the bell rang, everyone nearly jumped out of their skin.

Cole’s last day of school turned out to be his father’s last day of school, too.

When the first college students started getting sick, some health officials called for nationwide campus quarantines. They warned that letting all those active young people—many of whom were already infected, though they might not know it yet—travel around the country, using all means of public transportation, would spread a disease that seemed to be growing more contagious by the hour. Much safer for them to stay put. A drastic measure, to be sure. But the rate of infection among college students was turning out to be drastically high—higher than any other group except prison inmates. Cancel classes and all other school business, these officials urged, but please keep those kids in the dorms.

The outrage with which students reacted to this proposal was matched by the outrage of their parents, who wanted their sons and daughters home
now
. So, leaving only those already too sick to get out of bed, the campuses began emptying out.

Not that any dormitory anywhere would remain empty for long. Most would be turned into makeshift clinics as hospitals started running out of beds.

 

 

 

Had his father killed another dog? No, it was just his expression.

Coming home that other time his father had explained how, out of nowhere, a dog had dashed in front of his car. “All I could do was run over the poor thing,” he said. He had looked shocked and awed, and for a while after, whenever he caught sight of Sadie, he’d mirror her own sad-eyed long face.

This time, though, it was the flu that had his father looking shocked and awed. The flu, which was now officially the only thing anyone could think about, the only topic of conversation. In less than a week, it had knocked half the student body flat. The lives of kids in perfect health just days ago now hung in the balance. Two freshmen and one sophomore had died.

The dude flu, people called it, as more and more young adults were taken down.

“Not to scare anyone,” his father said, “but I’m not feeling so hot myself.” Cole noticed that his father’s skin looked dirty, smudged in places, as if he’d rubbed himself down with a sheet of newspaper. “I don’t have a fever but I feel like I’ve been hit over the head or something.”

“Oh my god.” Cole’s mother looked as if she’d been hit over the head pretty hard herself. “Don’t touch Cole. Go upstairs. I’ll call the doctor. Go straight to bed.”

Without a word—like a sleepwalker, or someone obeying a hypnotist—his father turned and left the room.

“Don’t go near your father. Don’t touch him.”

Why were his parents behaving like bots? His mother held her arms stiffly at her sides. She held her eyes so wide open Cole thought it must hurt. He thought of the pod people in the famous old movie whose name he couldn’t remember. The way his father had climbed the stairs. They were changing—everything was changing.

Later, people would always say how everything had happened so fast—
overnight
, they said. But Cole would remember the feeling of dragging a ball and chain, of days unfolding in excruciating slow motion.

“I’ll go call the doctor. Keep away from your father. Stay down here. Keep away from our room.”

“Okay, Mom, I heard you the first time.”

Cole turned on the TV. Not that he expected to find anything besides news about the flu. As he touched the remote power button, he remembered that the movie was called
Invasion of the Body Snatchers
and how one of his teachers had said it proved you didn’t need to show a lot of violence to make a great scary movie. But Cole thought only a Neanderthal would find a clunky old black-and-white movie like that seriously scary.

He wondered how long school would be closed. Not that he missed it. In fact, it had disgusted him that his parents had made him keep going. It had not escaped his notice that it was mostly the cooler kids whose parents had let them stay home, even if they weren’t sick. Kaleigh, for example, had been one of the first to stop coming to school. Had this not been the case, of course, Cole would not have wanted to stay home himself.

Now he just wished there were some way to delete the last time they’d seen each other.

She had caught him staring (usually he was more careful). “Why don’t you just take a picture?”
Loud
, on purpose, so that half the cafeteria would hear. And stupidly he had shot back: “Why would I want a picture of you?” Not fooling anyone, of course. And then Kaleigh whispered something to the other kids at her table, something that made them all go
“Ooooo.”

Every day since then he had relived it, trying, at least in fantasy, to fix it. But he could never think of what to say. As usual, he couldn’t imagine what the cool response would have been. He just knew it existed: the response that instead of making her sneer would have made Kaleigh like him.

And now he wished he
had
had the nerve to sneak-take her picture, even though kids caught doing that got their cells confiscated. He couldn’t remember what clothes she’d been wearing that last time, but he remembered her hands. Only a short time ago he would have found green nail polish ugly. He would have found the stud Kaleigh wore in her nose vomitous. There were days when for some reason she had dark circles under her eyes. He knew they were supposed to be ugly (his mother hated it whenever she had them), but now they, too, were somehow attractive—one of those things, like the silver nose stud and the metallic green nails, that he liked looking at when Kaleigh was there and thinking about when she wasn’t.