A Pandemic, Part 7 of 7

25 Sept 2008.
The gas came back on yesterday and the water had picked up enough for drippy showers. We had a hot meal of ravioli and I boiled some water and made hot chocolate from the powdered stuff. It’s getting cold at night now, so this helped warm us and having something sweet was great.

The news was getting better about things, here in the DC area at least. The Hospitals were able to get back to almost normal and they were starting to inoculate the people who had not been done before. The new A.B vaccine (covers both of the current strains of the virus) would be distributed, again from the local schools, but they were saying anyone who only had just the A vaccine before needed to get the A.B one. They were not saying how to tell who has had what inoculation before, though. Very frustrating. I asked my son if he had noticed A or A.B anywhere on the supplies when he was vaccinated back at school, so damn long ago. He couldn’t remember. I decided we would both go when our day came up. They are doing it by first letter of the last name. So we will wait and listen for our letter to come up. They were starting with the T’s and H’s.

The body trucks came through today, yes trucks! The second one waddled out into the field and put a bright yellow plastic flag on the car that had burned, I am guessing to identify it for investigation later.

One of the Oldie stations came on today, no commercials. Kind of cool. I am old enough to appreciate the Beatles and CCR and don’t really think of them as “Oldies”. It was a marathon of those, then the Stones, then The Who. I ran down the batteries in the radio and had to replace them with fresh ones, then I went back to just monitoring the news.

27 Sept 2008.
THE POWER CAME BACK ON YESTERDAY!!! The first thing I did was the very nasty job of cleaning out the fridge and freezer. Bagged everything and put the bags out front. Trash pickup has to resume sometime soon, or this will get messy. A neighbor told me the local grocery was reopening now that power was on. I figured we could walk up there to see what they had. I just wanted to get out of the house really.

I instructed my son to keep his distance from everyone, since our number had not come up for vaccines yet. They announce that “E” and “Q” named people were the lucky ones next and “U” and “I” would be the following day. While walking to the store, my son figured out that they were using “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” to schedule these. Hat’s off to you boy! So we don’t have too much longer to wait. He had taken a typing class in Middle School.

There wasn’t much at the store really (no batteries, consumables) and we did a really good job staying some distance from people. They had setup large fans to blow the smell of the food that had rotted, out of the place. It wasn’t working too well. When we went to checkout with the few items we had picked up, I found out they were not taking credit at all, cash only. The credit authentication services were not back up yet. I have a standing policy of keeping several 20’s tucked away in the back of my wallet, so we were covered. I keep a few hundred in cash stashed at home too, just in case.

The phones are back on and I was able to check-in with my family after multiple failed attempts. Everyone had gotten through this, but my next youngest brother was in the Hospital recovering from exposure to the virus. They are hopeful he will recover fully.

From this point things will start to get back to normal, for sure. This event will have to go down in modern history as a tremendous tragedy and one that I hope people and policy makers will learn from. I will have to wait and see what comes of my own fight to defend myself too. The police have a lot to deal with at this point, so maybe nothing. That will probably be another story for another time.

A Pandemic follow-up.

Ok, I didn’t have an animated Penguin or Speed Boats worked into the story, but I did have Aliens, Spaceships, Gore, Sex (kind of) and Swords. My house was the Castle, so shut up.

I am off on vacation the rest of this week, so there probably won’t be any posts till the weekend. I am sure I will have some tales from the trip. If you enjoyed the Pandemic story, tell a friend.