Prologue

        I never even noticed when the end began.  Too wrapped up in my own problems I guess.  Looking back all these years later I cringe at my own stupidity, but then age does that to you.

         

           You asked me to write down what it was like in the beginning, but I'm no author really. And time plays with a person’s memories, changing them...twisting them into unrecognizable things.  If a crowd witnesses a crime and you ask what people what saw you'll get a different story from every person there even moments after the fact.  Ask those very same people for the same story years later and what they tell you will be completely different from what they said the first time around.

         

          You said you wanted "Just the facts, Gramma!"  Well I won't burden you with 'facts'.   Truth ain't nothin but a story everyone agrees on anyway.  What we used to call a 'social contract' back in my college years. 

         So no 'facts'.  Just a story.   My story, if you want it so bad.  Borin as it may be.

         I grew up poor.  My parents, grandparents and my two older brothers worked our butts off on a farm that had been in the family for generations.  Both of my parents were only children and they a shared a deep and abiding love for the land with their parents and my brothers that never really understood. 

         They never complained about getting up an hour before the sun rose to feed the animals.  They loved the early mornings, I hated it.  I hated the cows and goats and the pigs and the chickens and the crops and the smell of coffee. 

         What I did love was books.  I read everything I could get my hands on.  I’d hide in the barn in a little fort built of hay bales reading my brothers school books and thinking I was so clever for getting away with it.  I’d read anything.  And then remember it forever.  Anything I read just stuck in my head.  All those printed words clinging like burrs in my brain.  I read both versions of the Bible we kept in the house, all the manuals for all the farm equipment, the veterinary guides, the cookbooks my mother kept in the hutch in the kitchen, cereal boxes at the breakfast table, everything.  It was never enough.

         When I was six Gramma started taking me into town with her.  She showed me the library.  I thought I’d done died and gone to Heaven. After that first visit she’d just leave me there while she did her shopping or played bridge with the ‘church ladies’.  All anyone had to do get me to finish my chores was threaten to take away those library trips.

         Like my brothers, I was home-schooled.  And I was taught the running of a farm.  I learned everything and learned it well to keep the books coming into the house. 

         It all came crashing down during the first wave of M-flu pandemic. Everything was fine; my tenth birthday came and went with a cake and the gift of a ‘tablet’.  Then Lucas started coughing while he was milking the cows one morning.  By dinner time that night everyone was dead. 

         I called 911 over and over for hours but no one ever answered.  No help came.  The next morning I had a hard time crawling out of Moms lap.  She’d gotten cold and stiff sometime during the night after I’d cried myself into an exhausted sleep.  I rode Butterscotch into town and tried to find help.  Took me a few days.  They were bad days and the less said about that the better.

         Eventually I was taken into one of the state orphanages and there I stayed until I was admitted into a U of SC pre-med program.  I was going to be a virologist. I thought I was going to save world from another pandemic. I worked harder at my studies than I’d ever worked on the farm.  Worked harder on forgetting my past than I did my studies.

         TV was a distraction I didn't need I always told myself.  So were boys and parties and anything I deemed ‘frivolous’.  I was sixteen going on forty when the end began and I didn't even notice it. At least not until the air raid sirens went off.

Chapter One

         The pen flew across the room with enough force to embed itself into the cheap plaster and the notebook followed.  Almost growling with frustration I levered myself up off the floor and stomped the three and half steps across the tiny dorm room to retrieve them.  I was just bending over to pick up spiral bound paper when a scream like I’d never heard in my entire life split the air and my eardrums ache in response. 

         The unearthly racket got louder and louder and rose in pitch until I thought I would explode and then died down.  Shaking my head in confusion I tried to steady myself and the wail started ramping up again. It took a few minutes of the noise cycling before I figured out what it was, and before I noticed the sound of screaming and pounding feet under it all.  I panicked, straight up chicken-with-its-head-cut-off panicked. Screaming at the top of my lugs I ran right for the door, and bounced off twice as hard as I’d run into it.  Twice. Took me a few minutes for the simple physics to penetrate, when it finally did I threw open the door and rushed out into the river of terrified college kids.  I don’t even remember how it happened, one second I was trying to run for the exit with the crowd and the next second I was jolted awake.  

         Disoriented by the hushed whispers and rough swaying and forth I tried to struggle, to open my eyes, to ask what was happening.  None of it worked.  My body didn’t respond to my demands no matter what I tried.  After I’d exhausted myself without even so much as twitching an eyelid I started listening.

         “Female, Caucasian, approximate age fourteen.” The voice was strained, tired sounding and rough around the edges, male I thought.

         “Tag?” That voice was almost quiet to hear, resignation weighing down her words.

         “Red.” A sigh sounded right next to me ear and my body wanted to jump, but nothing moved.

         “Don’t worry sweetie…you’ll be ok. It’ll all be ok.” The rough male voice whispered so close to me that his breath stirred my hair a little.  Something warm and soft, sticky dripped down my forehead and I felt a smooth gloved hand brushing it away.

         My voice wouldn't speak and my hands wouldn't move, but my tears forced themselves out from under my closed lids and mingled with the tacky liquid on my face, thinning it enough to make it run in streaks all the way to my hair line.  Nothing hurts! I tried to say, tried to tell the voices that I was fine, and awake and there was no pain, but the blackness solidified and towed under.

         Waking up again hurt.  My head echoed the wail of siren superimposed over the sounds of a hospital.  The beeping of heart monitors and nurse call buttons were familiar noises for any pre-med student.  And they scared me.  The incessant beeping sped up with my heart.  I’d never been sick, never been a patient before, the prospect of being just another broken body for some doctor to fix was far more terrifying than the sirens or the panic at school had been.

         My eyes flew open and my mouth screamed, my torso dragged the rest of my upper body along for the ride when it flung itself forward.  Something tore at my left arm, just inside my elbow but the pain barely registered though my horror and fear. I had just enough time to realize that I was in a hospital bed surrounded by translucent plastic curtains before I crashed back down to the bed again.

         Panting and willing myself to calm down I tried to make sense of my surroundings.  The plastic curtains around the bed hung from a square framework of aluminum, not from the ceiling.  The ceiling was white and moved a little, as if in a breeze I couldn't feel.  There was a bloody IV needle dangling from left railing of the bed, and monitors and instruments were all built into the bed. 

         When I that little fact penetrated my panic I calmed down and started thinking.  The teaching hospital at the University couldn't afford that.  We had older pre-pandemic tech donated by the reclamation firms that either demolished or fixed up old buildings left empty after the M-flu. Blinking and wiping some sort of goop from my eyes I squinted at the ceiling and it was still twitching fitfully in irregular patterns.  A tent.  A white tent, the plastic curtains, automatic monitors and IV machines in the bed. 

         No private health firm could afford those stupid things.  Manufacturing was just too expensive.  And most government agencies couldn't either. Which meant I was in a FEAD tent. Fear crawled down and left me shivering, panting and determined to escape.