The Beginning at the End of the World: A Post-Apocalyptic, Dystopian Series (The Survivor Diaries Book 2) (7 page)

“Well, the bad people who started the war left an illness with the bombs, and some people are getting sick from it. The doctors are working on making them all well,” I told her. It was my policy with her not to lie, but to give her truths in ways that she could understand. And she always astonished me with her ability to comprehend such adult issues.

“You mean like Adam?” she asked, this time looking at Bri. Bri stood up and lifted her from my lap. She sat on the floor and cradled the little girl in her arms.

“Yes, like Adam,” said Bri, voice cracking slightly. Bailey put her arms around Bri, and I couldn’t tell who was consoling whom.

“I have some things I need to discuss with all of you. I need to know if you would be willing to break up our cluster, here at Annie’s house. The doctors have said that it is dangerous, and we have been in pretty close quarters,” I said, hoping that they would understand.

“I think that we need to, and as much as I hate to be away from any of you, I am willing to do whatever it takes,” said Jake.

Bri and Ammie nodded their answers.

“Bailey,” I said. “I was thinking that it would be nice if we had some of the family move into your old house. I need to stay here and help Annie, but if you would like to go with Jake, Ammie and Bri, I would understand.”

She looked at me for a moment, considering. “No, I need to stay here with you and Mark. I need to help Grandma Annie, too.”

My eyes filled, and I felt Mark’s hand on my shoulder. He smiled, and nodded. “Would it be okay if the others moved into your house?” Mark asked.

Bailey sat up in Bri’s lap and gave her a big smile, “Yes, I would like for them to live there. Maybe they can come back home when it’s over, or they can live there forever if they want to.”

Again, I was blown away by this little girl with the huge heart.

“Thank you, Bailey,” I said. “Now, would that be alright with you all?” Everyone nodded their amenability. “There will be enough rooms if Brianna and Amanda bunk together. It is next door to Charlotte’s, so Amanda will have close access to the greenhouse.

“Mrs. Ingram, would you mind staying here with us?” I asked. “Both Ammie and Bri will be working outside the house, and I don’t want them compromising your good health.”

“Of course, dear,” she said, sweetly. “Whatever you think is best. I trust your judgment.”

Now that my family was taken care of, I was ready to move on with the rest of the plans.

Jackson stood up and stepped in front of the fire. “For today’s supper, we will deliver door to door using our cars. It’s going to be a push, but we can do it. I’ll radio everyone that we are worried about the storm that looks like it’s moving in and that we don’t want people out in it.”

I felt my breathing coming back under control.
We can do this,
I thought.

“Okay, let’s get rolling,” I said.

For the next two and a half hours, we brought rabbit soup to every doorstep in the Village. We worked as one determined group, and we pulled it off.

∞

It’s after two in the morning, and I am still working. Somehow, when I have big and complicated actions to plan, I do them better late into the night and early into the next morning. Those have become the only hours when I am able to work in peace.

The Sneaker Wave may do us in, but I plan to go down fighting. I know how cliché that sounds, but that doesn’t matter. If I don’t make it, others might. And they may be the seed that repopulates the planet. Humans created this destruction, and humans need to survive to set it straight.

The first thing I set out to do was to spread out the clusters of people who were living in the same homes. I asked our family’s resident mathematician, Ammie, to help me with the giant word problem that came from our lack of homes in the Village.

There were twenty homes that came together out of necessity after the fire; for proximity to work places, people who were working on certain projects, day and night shifts, and so forth. I was ready to use the two RVs the Village has, too.

We have eight homes that we are using for offices, and one that is now the jail. They all needed to be converted back into housing.

Steven Rolette was one of the Villagers who needed to be relocated. I considered placing him with the Reverend and his wife to see if they could talk some sense into him. I was not sure if it would work or not, and with things as extreme as they are now, I just couldn’t do that to Reverend John and Cynthia.

After we finished with the new housing arrangements, we moved on to meals. The only meal Ammie and I were concerned about was our biggest one; supper. Supper is when we received most of our nutrition and calories for the day, and we needed that to continue for obvious reasons. Most of us would be working from home and not getting as much exercise, so we could probably drop the calories down a bit for those people. Security, waste and trash services and anyone dropping off meals would need more calories and probably more carbohydrates. We would need to talk to Charlotte and Annie about this tomorrow, but that would be a good jumping off point for the Village’s nutritional needs.

The Sneaker Wave disease was the hardest part of the puzzle to place. The doctors couldn’t even tell us how far and fast it will spread. The only thing they seemed to know for certain was that it
would
spread. With all of the canned foods we have been consuming, it was a concern that we were never going to be able to battle it with our present immune systems. And, although we have had more exercise in the past few months then most of us have gotten in years, we were still weak. Our immune systems were compromised from the start, with little sunlight, food and water. Combine that with our mental and emotional states, lack of fresh fruit and vegetables and all of the toxins in the air, and we just didn’t have much left to fight with.

Ammie’s eyes were drooping, so I sent her off to bed while I continued on with the next problem. Hershey came to my side and slid to the floor next to me. He rested his head on my shoe while I reached down and stroked his soft fur.

At the morning meeting, the doctors will give walkie-talkie “classes” on hygiene, exercise at home and nutrition, but I feared that the knowledge of this new challenge may push some over the edge.

I needed to think of a way to make the community feel safe. That was my greatest challenge. For now, I have only come up with the idea of keeping everyone’s mind busy, like I had done with the “Clubs” when we were stuck inside all of those days following the attacks. We have come a long way since then, but I think that there were many projects that Villagers could do from home that would be truly helpful for our future.

A sound came from one of the walkies, and I practically jumped through the roof.

“I’m glad you finally let that girl go to bed,” the annoying voice said.

“Damn you, Jackson. Are you spying on me?” I asked, attempting to keep my voice low so as not to wake the entire house. I got up and looked out the window towards his house. In one of the windows, there was some movement, but I couldn’t make out his face. “You are such a creepster.”

              “Heh, your kitchen window is within eye shot of my bedroom and the only light on in the Village,” he replied.

“So that means grab the binoculars?” I asked.

“I can’t sleep,” he said in a reluctant tone. I was not used to hearing reluctance from him. If Jackson’s worried, the man who acts as if nothing is too big a hurdle, what does that mean for our continued survival?

I tried to act as if I hadn’t noticed his concern. “We finished with the relocation issues, and now I am onto the biohazard aspect of it. What are your thoughts?”

We spoke until dawn, but I was still not sure if I was ready for the reactions of the people on the receiving end of our transmissions during our scheduled meeting in a few hours.

It was a good thing that this was a walkie meeting because I looked like hell.

I did not start the meeting with a happy greeting as I usually did. There was no pleasant way to say what needed to be said.

“This morning I have some news; news that won’t be easy to hear,” I began in a purposefully urgent tone. It was now or never. “When the attacks happened here in Monterey, the damage that was done was not only immediate. The terrorists added another surprise for us. It seems that the bombs came with a sleeper bio-chemical agent that is triggered when debris is stirred up.”

I stopped, and in my mind I could hear the gasps from my fellow survivors.

“The medical team is working on a cure; however, we have some ill Villagers who are now in the hospital. There are presently thirty people being treated for the disease that our doctors are calling the Sneaker Wave. That is two more since yesterday. It is airborne, and highly contagious. Over the next hours and days, we will be broadcasting vital information, information that will hopefully keep you well.”

I took a brief moment before I continued, but it was too long. There were the sounds of many people attempting to speak at once, but the walkies only allowed for one person to speak at a time. So, I waited until the cacophony of chaos ended.

“Please, I know that this news is disturbing, but we cannot have a mass panic. It will only make things worse,” I said calmly but firmly.

“We are doing everything we can, and we will answer all of your questions in an orderly way, but you must be patient while we get everything in place. Colonel Jackson will give you an assigned number, and we will take roll call and answer questions in that order,” I said, happy to hand the frightened, albeit faceless, mob over to Jackson.

The next two hours were spent covering everything that was known about the disease that Doc Malcolm explained as a plague. I had wished he could take it back because that word caused even more fear.

The most vocal and accusing of the terrified people were God’s Warriors.

“God is telling us that we are still
not pleasing Him,” said Rolette. Because you can’t really cut someone off on a walkie-talkie, he continued to spew his hate and fear to the vulnerable listeners.

“We need to come together in our faith, and only then will our heavenly Father protect us. Only through our belief will come our salvation,” Rolette postulated.

“Please, everyone listen,” said Malcolm’s tired voice when that idiot stopped talking. “If you come together, and any of you are infected, then you will spread it
.
Make no mistake, this disease
will kill
. We lost Sandy Sherman this morning, and if we can’t contain the disease, it has the potential to wipe out the entire Village. This disease is cruel. It causes pustules, fevers, vomiting, diarrhea, lung infections, bloody stool and coughing-up blood, and that’s just for starters.”

And that is how Doc Malcolm brought the crowd under control, at least for now.

∞

The rest of the day was comprised of informational conferences, moving day for some, and supper deliveries for others.

God’s Warriors held their own walkie meeting, and I can only imagine what they were discussing. This fringe group has the potential to bring us all down if they decide to do something stupid, like continuing to meet. Even though I could have easily listened in on their meeting, I couldn’t trade my integrity for the bit of information from those crazies. I’ll ask Jackson what he heard later (hee, hee, hee).

Saying good-bye to half of my family was very difficult. Even though they were just moving down the street, it felt like it did when the war had initially kept us apart.

Although I have not left the house, I am completely exhausted, and the sun hasn’t even gone down yet. All-nighters are rough.

Entire families have come down with the Sneaker Wave. We went from twenty-eight victims to forty-two in just five days. The doctors feel that it is because people have not been following the protocols closely enough, so we are using our valuable printer ink to make point-by-point flyers for each household.

We have also handed out much of our canned food, so that there is no chance that the disease is being conveyed through improper food handling from outside of the individual households. It is very doubtful that has happened, as we have been most careful in our food preparation. We are taking the “better safe than sorry approach,” as this disease is very difficult to contain, much less cure.

The doctors also sent down hundreds of biohazard bags from the hospital for us to line our “toilet buckets” with and implemented a pickup and disposal of any item that might have been touched by the infected. Full precautions were to be taken in order to keep those people carrying out that duty safe. The Council decided to make this a voluntary job, and I was the first person to sign up.

I also requested for Carrie and Samantha Santos, both artists, to take the sails of the fishing boat that we found just after the attacks and to paint one of the canvases with a skull and crossbones and the other with the biohazard symbol. They were both to be hung on the outside of the wall that was built to keep the Wanderers out. Now, I hope that the wall will somehow keep the Sneaker Wave in. My logical mind told me that the disease did not distinguish which side of the wall you were on, but we had to try to keep healthy people, as well as the infected, away.

The doctors are at their wits’ end. They have been working around the clock. We have lost two from the medical team to the disease, so far.

But there is a chance that we may be coming to the end of this plague. Katie Graham has been getting progressively better, and so has Adam. Unfortunately, we lost Shelby yesterday. Telling Bailey, who had become so close to Shelby, was brutal. I appreciated Mark’s help doing it.

“Bailey,” Mark said. “I have some sad news.”

When Bailey turned to look at him, she had the eyes of a middle-aged woman. Tears came before Mark could say another word. I quickly sat next to her and pulled her onto my lap.

“Who?” was all she said.

I am tired of death.