CHAPTER 38
As the superflu epidemic wound down, there was a second epidemic that lasted roughly two weeks. This epidemic was most common in technological societies such as the United States, least common in underdeveloped countries such as Peru or Senegal. In the United States the second epidemic took about 16 percent of the superflu survivors. In places like Peru and Senegal, no more than 3 percent. The second epidemic had no name because the symptoms differed wildly from case to case. A sociologist like Glen Bateman might have called this second epidemic "natural death" or "those ole emergency room blues." In a strictly Darwinian sense, it was the final cut-the unkindest cut of all, some might have said.
Sam Tauber was five and a half years old. His mother had died on June the twenty-fourth in the Murfreesboro, Georgia, General Hospital. On the twentyfifth, his father and younger sister, two- year-old April, had died. On June the twenty-seventh, his older brother Mike died, leaving Sam to shift for himself. Sam had been in shock ever since the death of his mother. He wandered carelessly up and down the streets of Murfreesboro, eating when he was hungry, sometimes crying. After a while he stopped crying, because crying did no good. It didn't bring the people back. At night his sleep was broken by horrible nightmares in which Papa and April and Mike died over and over, their faces swollen black, a terrible rattling sound in their chests as they strangled on their own snot. At quarter of ten on the morning of July 2, Sam wandered into a field of wild blackberries behind Hattie Reynolds's house. Bemused and vacant-eyed, he zigzagged among blackberry bushes that were almost twice as tall as he was, picking the berries and eating them until his lips and chin were smeared black. The thorns ripped at his clothes and sometimes at his bare flesh, but he barely noticed. Bees hummed drowsily around him. He never saw the old and rotted wellcover half buried in tall grass and blackberry creepers. It gave under his weight with a grinding, splintering crash, and Sam plunged twenty feet down the rock-lined shaft to the dry bottom, where he broke both legs. He died twenty hours later, as much from fear and misery as from shock and hunger and dehydration.
Irma Fayette lived in Lodi, California. She was a lady of twenty-six, a virgin, morbidly afraid of rape. Her life had been one long nightmare since June twenty-third, when looting had broken out in town and there had been no police to stop the looters. Irma had a small house on a sidestreet; her mother had lived there with her until she had died of a stroke in 1985. When the looting began, and the gunshots, and the horrifying sound of drunken men roaring up and down the streets of the main business section on motorcycles, Irma had locked all the doors and then had hidden in the spare room downstairs. Since then she had crept upstairs periodically, quiet as a mouse, to get food or to relieve herself. Irma didn't like people. If everyone on earth had died but her, she would have been perfectly happy. But that wasn't the case, Only yesterday, after she had begun cautiously to hope that no one was left in Lodi but her, she had seen a gross and drunken man, a hippie man in a T-shirt that said I GAVE UP SEX AND DRINKING AND IT WAS THE SCARIEST 20 MINUTES OF MY LIFE, wandering up the street with a bottle of whiskey in his hand. He had long blond hair which cascaded out from under the gimme cap he was wearing and all the way down to his shoulders. Tucked into the waistband of his tight bluejeans was a pistol. Irma had peeked around the bedroom curtain at him until he was out of sight and then had scurried downstairs to the barricaded spare room as if she had been released from a malign spell. They were not all dead. If there was one hippie man left, there would be other hippie men. And they would all be rapers. They would rape her. Sooner or later they would find her and rape her. This morning, before first light, she had crept up to the attic, where her father's few possessions were stored in cardboard boxes. Her father had been a merchant seaman. He had deserted Irma's mother in the late sixties. Irma's mother had told Irma all about it. She had been perfectly frank. Her father had been a beast who got drunk and then wanted to rape her. They all did. When you got married, that gave a man the right to rape you anytime he wanted. Even in the aytime. Irma's mother always summed up her husband's desertion in three words, the same words Irma could have applied to the death of almost every man, woman, and child on the face of the earth: "No great loss."
166 Most of the boxes" contained nothing but cheap trinkets bought in foreign ports—Souvenir of Hong Kong, Souvenir of Saigon, Souvenir of Copenhagen. There was a scrapbook of photographs. Most of them showed her father on ship, sometimes smiling into the camera with his arms about the shoulders of his fellow beasts. Well, probably the disease that they were calling Captain Trips out here had struck him down in whatever place he had run off to. No great loss. But there was one wooden box with small gold hinges on it, and in this box was a gun. A . 45 caliber pistol. It lay on red velvet, and in a secret compartment below the red velvet were some bullets. They were green and mossy-looking, but Irma thought they would work all right. Bullets were metal. They didn't spoil like milk or cheese. She loaded the gun under the single cobwebby attic bulb, and then went down to eat her breakfast at her own kitchen table. She would not hide like a mouse in a hole any longer. She was armed. Let the rapers beware. That afternoon she went out on the front porch to read her book. The name of the book was Satan Is Alive and Well on the Planet Earth. It was grim and joyful stuff. The sinners and the ingrates had gotten their just deserts, just as the book said they would. They were all gone. Except for a few hippie rapers, and she guessed she could handle them. The gun was by her side. At two o'clock the man with the blond hair came back. He was so drunk he could hardly stand up. He saw Irma and his face lighted, no doubt thinking of how lucky he had been to finally discover "some pussy." "Hey, baby!" he cried. "It's just you and me! How long—" Then terror clouded his face as he saw Irma put down her book and raise the . 45. "Hey, listen, put that thing down... is it loaded? Hey-!" Irma pulled the trigger. The pistol exploded, killing her instantly. No great loss.
George McDougall lived in Nyack, New York. He had been a teacher of high school mathematics, specializing in remedial work. He and his wife had been practicing Catholics, and Harriett McDougall had borne him eleven children, nine boys and two girls. So between June 22, when his nine-year-old son Jeff had succumbed to what was then diagnosed as "flu-related pneumonia," and June 29, when his sixteen-year-old daughter Patricia (and oh God she had been so young and so achingly beautiful) had succumbed to what everyone-those that were leftWas then calling tubeneck, he had seen the twelve people he loved best in the world pass away while he himself remained healthy and feeling fine. He had joked at school about not being able to remember all his kids' names, but the order of their passing was engraved,on his memory: Jeff on the twenty-second, Marty and Helen on the twenty-third, his wife Harriett and Bill and George, Jr., and Robert and Stan on the twentyfourth, Richard on the twenty-fifth, Danny on the twentyseventh, three-year-old Frank on the twenty- eighth, and finally Pat-and Pat had seemed to be getting better, right up to the end. George thought he would go mad. He had begun jogging ten years before, on his doctor's advice. He didn't play tennis or handball, paid a kid (one of his, of course) to mow the lawn, and usually drove to the corner store when Harriett needed a loaf of bread. You're putting on weight, Dr. Warner had said. Lead in the seat. No good for your heart. Try jogging. So he had gotten a sweatsuit and had gone jogging every night, for short distances at the start, then longer and longer ones. At first he'd felt selfconscious, sure that the neighbors must be tapping their foreheads and rolling their eyes, and then a couple of the men that he had only known to wave to when they were out watering their lawns came and asked if they could join himprobably there was safety in numbers. By that time, George's two oldest boys had also joined in. It became a sort of neighborhood thing, and although the membership was always evolving as people dropped in and dropped out, it stayed a neighborhood thing. Now that everyone was gone, he still jogged. Every day. For hours. It was only when he was jogging, concentrating on nothing more than the thud of his tennis shoes on the sidewalk and the swing of his arms and his steady harsh respiration, that he lost that feeling of impending madness. He could not commit suicide because as a practicing Catholic he knew that suicide was a mortal sin and God must be saving him for something, so he jogged. Yesterday he had jogged for almost six hours, until he was completely out of breath and almost retching with exhaustion. He was fiftyone, not a young man anymore, and he supposed that so much running was not good for him, but in another, more important way, it was the only thing that was any good. So he had gotten up this morning at first light after a mostly sleepless night (the thought that played over and over in his mind was: Jeff-Marty-HelenHarriett-Bill-George-JuniorRobert-Stanley- Richard-Danny-Frank-Patty-and-Ithought-shewas-getting-better) and put on his sweatsuit. He went out and began to jog up and down the deserted streets of Nyack, his feet sometimes gritting on broken glass, once leaping over a TV set that lay shattered on the pavement, taking him past residential streets where the shades were drawn and also past the horrible three-car crash at the Main Street intersection.
167 He jogged at first, but it became necessary to run faster and faster to keep the thoughts behind him. He jogged and then he trotted and then he ran and finally he sprinted, a fifty-one-year-old man with gray hair in a gray sweatsuit and white tennis shoes, fleeing up and down empty streets as if all the devils of hell were after him. At quarter past eleven he suffered a massive coronary thrombosis and fell down dead on the corner of Oak and Pine, near a fire plug. The expression on his face was very like gratitude.
Mrs. Eileen Drummond of Clewiston, Florida, got very drunk on DeKuyper crиme de menthe on the afternoon of July 2. She wanted to get drunk because if she was drunk she wouldn't have to think about her family, and crime de menthe was the only kind of alcohol she could stand. She had found a baggie filled with marijuana in her sixteen-year-old's room the day before and had succeeded in getting stoned, but being stoned only seemed to make things worse. She had sat in her living room all afternoon, stoned and crying over photographs in her scrapbook. So this afternoon she drank a whole bottle of creme de menthe and then got sick and threw up in the bathroom and then went to bed and lit a cigarette and fell asleep and burned the house down and she didn't have to think about it anymore, ever. The wind had freshened, and she also burned down most of Clewiston. No great loss.
Arthur Stimson lived in Reno, Nevada. On the afternoon of the twenty-ninth, after swimming in Lake Tahoe, he stepped on a rusty nail. The wound turned gangrenous. He diagnosed the trouble by smell and tried to amputate his foot. Halfway through the operation he fainted and died of shock and blood loss in the lobby of Toby Harrah's gambling casino, where he had attempted the operation.
In Swanville, Maine, a ten-year-old girl named Candice Moran fell off her bike and died of a fractured skull.
Milton Craslow, a rancher in Harding County, New Mexico, was bitten by a rattlesnake and died half an hour later.
In Milltown, Kentucky, Judy Horton was quite pleased with events. Judy was seventeen years old and pretty. Two years before, she had made two serious mistakes: she had allowed herself t4 get pregnant, and she had allowed her parents to talk her into marrying the boy responsible, a four- eyes engineering student from the state university. At fifteen she had been flattered just to be asked out by a college man (even if he was only a freshman) and for the life of her she couldn't remember why she had allowed WaldoWaldo Horton, what a yuck name-to "work his will" on her. And if she was going to be knocked up, why did it have to be him? Judy had also allowed Steve Phillips and Mark Collins to "work their will" on her; they were both on the Milltown High football team (the Milltown Cougars, to be exact, fight-fight-fight-fight-for-the-dear-blue-andwhite) and she was a cheerleader. If it hadn't been for yucky old Waldo Horton, she would have made head cheerleader her junior year, easy. And, getting back to the point, either Steve or Mark would have made more acceptable husbands. They both had broad shoulders and Mark had stone bitchin shoulder-length blond hair. But it was Waldo, it could have been no one but Waldo. All she had to do was look in her diary and do the arithmetic. And after the baby came she wouldn't have even had to do that. It looked just like him. Yucky. So for two long years she had struggled along, through a variety of crummy jobs in fast-food restaurants and motels, while Waldo went to school. It got so she hated Waldo's school most of all, even more than the baby and Waldo himself. If he wanted a family so bad, why couldn't he get out and work? She had. But her parents and his wouldn't allow it. Alone, Judy could have sweet-talked him into it (she would have gotten him to promise before she let him touch her in bed), but all four of the in-laws had their noses in things all the time. Oh Judy, things will be so much better when Waldo has a good job. Oh Judy, things would look so much brighter if you'd go to church more often. Oh Judy, eat shit and keep smiling until you get it down. Until you get it all down. Then the superflu had come along and had solved all her problems. Her parents . had died, her little boy Petie had died (that was sort of sad, but she got over it in a couple of days), then Waldo's parents had died, and finally Waldo himself had died and she was free. The thought that she herself might die had never crossed her mind, and of course she didn't. They had been living in a large and rambling apartment house in downtown Milltown. One of the features of the place that sold Waldo on it (Judy, of course, didn't have a say) was a large walk-in meat freezer in the basement. They had taken the apartment in September of 1988, and their apartment was on the third floor, and who always seemed to get stuck taking the roast and the hamburger down to the freezer? Three guesses and the first two don't count. Waldo and Petie had died at home. By that time you couldn't get hospital service unless you were a bigwig and the
168 mortuaries were swamped (creepy old places anyway, Judy wouldn't go near one on a bet), but the power was still on. So she had taken them downstairs and put them in the freezer. The power had gone off in Milltown three days ago, but it was still fairly cool down there. Judy knew because she went down to look at their dead bodies three or four times a day. She told herself she was just checking. What else could it be? Surely she wasn't gloating? She went down on the afternoon of July 2 and forgot to put the rubber wedge under the freezer door. The door swung shut behind her and latched. It was then that she noticed, after two years of coming and going down here, that there was no inside knob on the freezer door. By then it was too warm to freeze, but not too cold to starve. So Judy Horton died in the company of her son and husband after all.
Jim Lee of Hattiesburg, Mississippi, hooked up all the electrical outlets in his house to a gasoline generator and then electrocuted himself trying to start it up.
Richard Hoggins was a young black man who had lived his entire life in Detroit, Michigan. He had been addicted to the fine white powder he called "hehrawn" for the last five years. During the actual superflu epidemic, he had gone through extreme withdrawal as all the pushers and users he knew died or fled. On this bright summer afternoon he was sitting on a littered stoop, drinking a warm 7-Up and wishing he had a pop, just a small, minor skinpop. He began to think about Allie McFarlane, and something he had heard about Allie on the streets, just before the shit hit the fan. People were saying that Allie, who was about the third-biggest in Detroit, had just gotten a fine shipment. Everybody was going to get well. None of that brown shit. China White, all kinds of the stuff. Richie didn't know for sure where McFarlane would keep a big order like thatit wasn't healthy to know about such things-but he had heard it said at different times in passing that if the cops ever got a search-writ for the Grosse Pointe house that Allie had bought for his great-uncle, Allie would go away until the new moon turned to gold. Richie decided to take a walk up to Grosse Pointe. After all, there was nothing better to do. He got the Lake Shore Drive address of one Erin D. McFarlane from the Detroit phone book and walked out there. It was almost dark by the time he made it and his feet hurt. He was no longer trying to tell himself that this was just a casual stroll; he wanted to shoot and he wanted to bad. There was a gray fieldstone wall around the estate and Richie went over it like a black shadow, cutting his hands on the broken glass embedded in the top. When he broke a window to gain entry, a burglar alarm went off, causing him to flee halfway down the lawn before he remembered there were no cops to answer. He came back, jittery and slicked with sweat. The main power was off, and there were easily twenty rooms in the fucking place. He'd have to wait until tomorrow to look properly, and it would still take three weeks to dump the place upside down in the proper way. And the stuff probably wasn't even here. Christ. Richie felt sick despair wave through him. But he would at least look in the obvious places. And in the upstairs bathroom, he found a dozen large plastic bags bulging with white powder. They were in the toilet tank, that old standby. Richie stared at them, sick with desire, dimly thinking that Allie must have been greasing all the right people if he could afford to leave a stash like this in a fucking toilet tank. There was enough dope here to last one man sixteen centuries. He took one bag into the master bedroom and broke it open on the bedspread. His hands trembled as he got his works out and cooked up. It never occurred to him to wonder how much this stuff was cut. On the street the heaviest hit Richie had ever taken was 12 percent pure, and that had put him into a sleep so deep it was nearly a coma. He hadn't even nodded. Just bang and off he went, outta the blue and into the black. He injected himself above the elbow and pushed the plunger of his spike home. The stuff was almost 96 percent pure. It hit his bloodstream like a highballing freight and Richie fell down on the bags of heroin, flouring the front of his shirt with it. He was dead six minutes later.
No great loss.