ISS (2 page)

It was several minutes before the anxiety eased enough to allow reasoning again and when he looked up at the sky he realized the International Space Station had passed beyond the horizon. It did not matter, all he wanted to do was get off the roof and back to the safety of his room. He picked up the telescope and quick-walked back to the skylight and climbing through pulled it shut it behind him. He made sure it was securely locked before stopping and listening at the top of the attic stairs brandishing the garden stake as improvised weapon.

He was considering the possibility of spending the night in the attic, even though it would be difficult breathing the crappy air, and waiting for daylight to check out the house. In his agitated state it seemed a reasonable thing to do and then he realized there was no way to lock the attic door. He decided to risk it and ran silently through the darkened house down to his bedroom in the basement.

He slammed and double locked the door behind him then found and lit the stubby candle melted onto a dinner plate. He felt relief when the murky details of his room came into view in the flickering light of the candle. Spooked from hearing the crash in the yard he picked up the plate and held it up high peering around the room to see if anything was crouching in the shadows. He walked around checking his rocket and aircraft models to see if anything had been disturbed and stopped by the four-foot tall Saturn Five rocket. He ran his hand over the smooth surface taking comfort in its familiar feel.

His nerves were jangled from his experience on the roof and he knew he needed to calm down or he would not sleep and it would be another long night of listening to creepy house noises. He reached under his bed and found the wires for the television and clipped them onto the car battery sitting on his dresser. He switched on the television, an ancient RCA model with built-in VHS and a DVD player, and waited for it to warm up.

He hung it from the ceiling two summers ago so he could watch movies in bed. It had belonged to his grandfather Joe, it was old technology when he owned it, but it still worked well enough. For the first few days, after everything went to shit, he watched movies but grew tired of the graphic violence and meaningless hero plots. The stories did not relate in any way to his life now and they only served to remind him of the pointless existence people led.

Now he only used the TV to fend off the loneliness he felt, mostly at night. It wasn’t much but it was comforting to put on the tape and hear his Uncle Ted’s voice. Hearing a familiar voice made him feel less alone, at least for a little while. The television crackled to life and filled the room with cold TV light and the weird smell of hot dust and old electronics. He rewound the tape and pressed play and the Channel 4 Action News theme music filled the room. Once again Jack thought the news announcer looked worried.

“There has been no further information released from the Centers for Disease Control headquarters in Atlanta as to the cause of the outbreak sweeping central Asia and the Indian sub-continent. It has been confirmed that CDC acting director of operations, John Wilson Cone, spoke with President McIntyre earlier today at the Whitehouse. It is rumoured that Cone recommended the suspension of all international travel and the closure of all points of entry into the continental United States.

Reports have come in that authorities in Mexico and Canada have closed their borders in an effort to stop transmission of what is being described as a plague. At this time these efforts appear to be working as there has been no cases reported in either country. The fear of this unidentified virus spreading throughout the world is very real as hundreds of thousands of people in Asia have already succumbed to the epidemic. World Health Organization officials in Zurich cited unconfirmed reports from survivors on the ground in India, where it is believed the outbreak began, that the plague is directly related to a recently developed genetically engineered bacterium.

This controversial hi-bred bacteria was designed to remove excess CO2 from the atmosphere and field tests of the hybrid were being conducted in the heavily polluted city of Bangalore when the outbreak began. In an exclusive interview with NBC news earlier today Dr. Theodore Yarrows, the head of the Infectious Disease program at MIT speculated that this engineered bacteria may have spontaneously mutated into a virus or a virus like entity. Here he is now speaking with NBC reporter Bill Rutledge.”

The scene on the television shifted to the inside of an office at MIT where his pale faced uncle sat speaking with the reporter.

“Dr. Yarrows can you tell our viewers what you think may have happened in India?”

His uncle blinked at the camera and then looked away. He appeared to be confused but he collected himself.

“If the reports we are receiving are correct the aggressive nature of this outbreak is-unprecedented in human history. There are no known agents, bacterial or viral, capable of causing the effects being reported within the population of India.”

He took a long breath and it seemed for a moment he might stop speaking but continued.

“The reports I’ve seen, though at this point they are unverified, say this entity, whatever it is, has a kill rate of between 70 and 80 percent within a few minutes of exposure. This is unknown in biology, nothing I know of can kill an adult human that quickly.”

As he spoke his voice faltered and his words were tinged with disbelief, his face grew pale. It was as though the meaning of what he was saying was sinking in as he was saying the words.

“Other reports indicate 15-18% of those infected but not killed outright fall victim to another effect which is again unknown to science. It is speculated that this virus attacks and destroys much of the victim’s prefrontal cortex. Degradation to this area of the brain results in the victim losing most if not all of their higher functions. It renders them, for want of a better word, into imbeciles. In this condition these individuals will almost certainly revert to a type of, “

He paused rubbing his eyes, searching for the right words, as if there could ever be right words to describe this.

”-animal existence. There remains some hope in that 1 to 2% of the population appear to be unaffected by the outbreak but….”

He stopped and looked directly into the camera with tears in his eyes.

”God help the poor bastards.”

Jack turned off the television and disconnected the leads from the battery. He rigged his mom’s stationary exercise bike with a tiny DC generator which was designed to power a bicycle light not charge a car battery. The old technology of the television and video combination quickly gobbled up battery power and using the bike and tiny generator it took a long time to recharge the battery but lately it was worth the effort to hear a familiar voice.

The candle guttered while he was watching TV and he sat in silence smelling the acrid smoke of the dead candle listening to the tick of cooling electronics. He needed to go into town and find food but he found it difficult to leave the house even in daylight. He knew from experience that not wanting to go outside was a bad sign; it meant he was depressed. He recognized the signs, some days he would not get out of bed until mid-afternoon. It was telling that he could have anything he wanted to eat from any store in town but he couldn’t think of a single thing he wanted badly enough to venture outside.

He recorded the newscast of his uncle five weeks earlier when his mom and sister Marion were still at home and things were almost normal. It was a few days after the recording that the rolling blackouts hit and soon then there was no internet or cable television. His mom tried to act cheerful for them, pretending nothing was wrong, but he knew it wasn’t true, there was plenty wrong. He wanted to go into town and see what was happening but she absolutely forbade him going, she would not let either of them leave the house or be out of her sight.

Marion cried the whole time and their mom sat for hours with her arms around her rocking her like a baby. The last night they were all together he went to bed early; his mom promised him things would be better in the morning. He went to his room but couldn’t sleep and after a while gave up trying and played Evoked Potentials on his laptop until the battery died. When he woke it was late afternoon, he could tell by the angle of the sunlight coming through his bedroom window, and he went upstairs to see why his mom had not called him to get up. She was gone. They were both gone.

At first he wasn’t too concerned; he thought she must have taken Marion somewhere. It was later when he looked outside and saw her car in the driveway and noticed her purse sitting where she always left it on the kitchen counter that he became concerned. He was still not really worried about them until later that evening when it got dark and they still had not come home and he discovered neither of them was wearing shoes. That was over a month ago. The first two weeks they were missing he spent every day searching the town and surrounding areas but he never found them. He saw lots of dead people, maybe hundreds, and he checked them all but he never found his mom or his sister.

He checked all the neighbour’s houses sometimes stepping over the bodies of his friends and their parents and walked for miles in every direction checking houses and buildings, nothing. The stink of decaying bodies grew more sickening with each passing day but he kept searching. One morning he walked past the Eloy Seniors’ center and saw an old man standing in the flower bed outside the main building looking in through a window. The man was quite old, Jack could tell because his face was wrinkled, he was also naked. This was the first living person he’d seen but he was cautious because the man was acting strange. He stood well back from the guy before calling out to him.

When the guy heard Jack’s voice he turned and ran towards him in an odd loose limbed lope, like a chimpanzee. Jack laughed but then figured out pretty quickly that, old or not, the man running towards him might be dangerous. He easily out-ran him but the encounter bothered him. The man did not try to speak to him; he was toothless and creepy and had a vacant look on his slack features, not quite ape-like but not quite human. He kept searching but after that incident he was cautious when he saw survivors. The few people he came across were disturbing to look at and he never approached or called out to any of them. They looked crazy and were always alone and standing in odd places like behind the Safeway Store or under the Highway 50 overpass. Some were completely naked some clothed in rags but all of them were covered in filth. He did not see any living children.

The strange part about all this was he did not recognize any of the survivors he saw, he’d lived in Eloy all his life and he was certain he must have seen or met at least some of them but their faces, what he could see of them, had lost personality, humanness. They seemed like lost animals confused and running away at the sound of his car. He came across one large man that did not run away he stood his ground glaring aggressively when he drove past, he was scary but the dogs were worse.

He watched helplessly as a pack of dogs chased a woman across a soccer field. The attack was brutal and it haunted him still. By the time he figured out how to put the car into four-wheel drive and find a way around the concrete barrier the dogs had knocked her down and killed her. They ate her face; he could still see the de-fleshed bones of her cheeks and jaw vividly in his memory, it was the most horrifying thing he’d ever seen. He arrived and scared them off but he stayed in the car. He was too terrified to get out, and he sat and watched as a knob of meat, what remained of her nose, dangled by a single strand of bloody sinew from her ruined face.

What made it worse in Jack’s mind was the knowledge that the dogs had once been beloved family pets. Later, in another part of town and from the safety of his car, he watched a tan and brown spaniel cough up a piece of the woman’s face, he knew it was part of her face because there was an eyebrow attached.

After that, whenever Jack saw dogs roaming, he headed home. The night it happened he could not sleep, he became obsessed with the idea that the faceless woman was his mom and for weeks afterwards he had nightmares about the attack. The possibility played on his mind until one day he found himself in his kitchen punching the refrigerator. He screamed every obscenity he could think of as he kicked and flailed and all but destroyed the appliance. When he stopped, spent, he stumbled back and looked at the damage he’d done and he worried that his mom would be mad at him, and for a brief moment his mom was alive.

He gave up the search after that, there was no point in continuing. His daily existence had become a dizzying blur of horrific images and he came to the realization he was not going to find his mom or his sister, they were not lost. He had to accept the fact they were dead. It was not hard to give up the search; the remaining unchecked bodies had become unrecognizable piles of fetid gore. The smell of decomposing human flesh was something he would never forget. It was at that point he decided he needed a survival plan
.
No one was going to save him, his dad was probably dead, his uncle too. It felt like everyone on the planet was dead.

He was sitting on his bed when his eyes fell upon one of the models he built when he was in grade five. It was the International Space Station. Seeing it gave him an idea. He could try to contact the ISS. If the astronauts had not used the Soyuz escape pod to return to earth, they must still be on board which means there could be up to thirty highly skilled scientists and engineers unaffected by the plague. Maybe they could help.