A Pandemic, Part 3 of 7

9 Sept. 2008.
It’s Tuesday morning and my son has no cartoons to watch (he still likes them, and the G4 network). The TV stations all have a test pattern or Civil Defense patter. It’s all useless crap at this point. We watched a few episodes of Monty Python on DVD, brilliant! It lightened our moods.

Yesterday, around lunch, there was a freak I have NEVER seen before walking in wide circles out in the field. He was large and stocky with a ball cap and a black garbage bag with holes cut out for his bare arms. He looked like a creepy alien in his sun glasses…stunned, like something out of MIB. He went away after an hour or so and didn’t cause any alarm for me, but it’s just weird. People…

Last night I was listening to my scanner (a great gift from a good friend) and someone on the DC PD was talking to a local precinct about the “unexplained suicides” downtown. People were walking in front of ambulances and jumping off buildings. Some people blame the “Tami-flu” drugs that have been distributed sparingly to the second tier of “non-essential” government workers. They are the ones who didn’t rank the vaccine and are most of the people I work directly with. It’s supposed to help combat the flu, but it was reported to be the cause of like suicides in Asia and England. As a contractor, I didn’t qualify for a “share” of the drug, which is fine by me. I’ll get by without it, ahem. At this point I am feeling fine as is my son.

There was more activity outside last night, not right out front, but out in the field. There was a lot of screaming, very late. I looked this morning and there are 3 bodies out there, lying fairly close together. It’s raining today, but if it lets up, the animals are probably going to get to them. I will go out and sack them up tomorrow if they are still there. The news radio station announced that anyone with dead can bag them (as best you can) and put them out by the curb for removal and to identify the bag as a body, “Put something boldly red on it” they say. They are asking that the dead and living have their Social Security numbers written on their forearms in indelible ink. I did this for my son and myself. It was very freaky to do that.

I talked to my next door neighbor across the fence today and his son and daughter are very sick. They must have not been in school when shots were handed out, but I didn’t ask. They are Indian and often take their kids out of school, not sure why. I didn’t know what to tell him, except to take them to the Hospital if they are really sick. A sick kid with a cold sucks real bad, two are worse, so I can’t imagine what this must be like for him. He said they are all set with food and water though. I noticed later in the morning that his one car was gone.

Later in the afternoon, a car went ripping through the field, doing doughnuts and fishtailing all over the place. I watched while I had a smoke out back on the deck. It was obviously kids on the loose. They went on for about 10 minutes and trashed the ball field completely, mud everywhere. The car managed to not run over the bodies in the field, before loudly hitting a pine tree head on and catching on fire. Two people crawled out and were shouting the names “Ashley” and “Justin” back at the car, which was soon engulfed in flames. The two limped away as best they could, after a few minutes. The tree they hit caught fire too, which added to smoke plowing upward into the sky.

The fire department never came, or an ambulance.

Outside in the distance, I saw other plumes of smoke, obviously bigger than the one from the car and tree in the field. I went back to the scanner to try to get some details on what was happening, but I was not getting any local details, just more about late evacuation matters downtown in DC. Where will these people go at this point?

The police and emergency sirens I had been hearing most days recently have all but stopped, as has the bulk of interesting chatter on the Police and Emergency scanner channels.

11 Sept 2008.
Yesterday my son and I went out and bagged up the 3 bodies in the field early. We used two bags each with duct tape to seal them and had to fold their arms and legs tight to get them in. We used a plastic sled to drag them up to the edge of the parking lot, one at a time. My son was crying lightly because he thought he knew one of the kids. They were beaten badly and blood was oozing out of them, mostly around their heads. I probably should have bagged them alone first. We took shards of an old red T-Shirt to flag them as bodies for pickup.

This morning I got out the Circular Saw and cut a 4x4 wood plank to fit and propped it against the front door knob on the inside. I nailed 2x4’s around the base to the floor, to secure it in place at the base. Someone tried to get in the house last night and I was not going to allow myself to be robbed or killed like that. I was able to scare away whoever it was with some yelling, banging, flashing the lights on and off and then threats.

My son was petrified and he certainly had his vocabulary increased, listening to me during the whole scene. “Shove what where?” he asked me the next morning. He ran downstairs from his room, in the middle of the event, which ended when I smashed out one of the little windows near the top of the door and shone the bright flashlight out at them. I threatened to use my gun, which I don’t really have. It was a mixed group of young men and women, black and white. I think the lights being on are drawing attention.

I rigged the 4x4 so I can remove it if needed, but once in place, someone would have to pretty much take the whole door frame down to get in. What to do about the Sliding Glass door on the back of the house and the ground floor windows though?

Later, I heard banging and screams somewhere in the neighborhood. I expect the punks broke in to another house. I don’t really want to know what happened right now.

News is getting very patchy. The internet is all but down, connections to any site just hang. I was able to IM my friend to the north again to just find out that they had a major outbreak. Everything there is pretty much like here, except my friend and his whole family (kids too) are sick. I could only wish him luck and hope for the best. I could not get a VPN connection to work, so that appears to be down totally. Since I am a contractor, I will not be getting paid for the duration, but I bet the government employees will. I probably shouldn’t gripe.

I saw the body truck (one of the Recycling contractor trucks) come through the neighborhood this morning. There was nothing to pickup in our area that I saw, besides the 3 we had bagged. That reminds me, trash service hasn’t been operating and they should have come Tuesday. I didn’t have much so I didn’t put mine out.

We had a strong thunderstorm this afternoon and the power went out. I have had several ½ gallon bottles of water, frozen in the freezers, to help in this sort of situation. We have been eating the frozen food first, because the other non-perishable food was the last resort. I still have my gas stove to warm the food up.

I tried to call my family to the west (Detroit and Vegas) on my one land line phone and that is all dead. So the phones are dead, the internet too and my Blackberry. I charged the scanner last night, so that would be all I can use to get info for now. I heard on the scanner that some of the police and fire stations are closing. Before I went to bed, I noticed a bagged body was out, across the street, with a red sock around the tied off top of the bag.