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The Flattening of Pandemic Drift – Part II, Now Flatter
The Flattening of Pandemic Drift – Part II, Now Flatter
Others In This Series:
The Flattening Of Pandemic Drift | Covid-19 Fanfic | Flat As A Pancake - Part III
[In our last episode, our plucky viewpoint character died repeatedly, and in one episode, crippled giving a glimpse of how bad a pandemic disaster can actually get.]
We thought we had adapted. We really did. Masks, social distancing. The factories generated huge quantities of Personal Protective Equipment, aka PPE. Handwashing everywhere. An entire economy, reformatted and rebooted.
We were wrong.
We forgot that viruses in the wild mutate.
###
Well, shit.
What was left of the emergency response organization in the County consisted of three teams. Law, Medical and Operations.
Law was everyone trying to keep public order, to the extent that it could be kept. A handful of surviving police over a sea of scared people with guns, all ready to emulate Han Solo at any instant.
Medical was everyone trying to help the Sick, without becoming Sick themselves. Good fucking luck.
Operations was the entire rest of the economy. Feed the living, bury the dead. And trivial details like, you know, providing potable water, keeping house fires from becoming more wild fires, clearing blocked roads. Finding or in some cases making PPE.
I was in Ops. And I was on Morgue.
Don't fear the reaper. Dead is just dead. Bodies spread disease if not taken care of. But we had a plan. Public Works digs the trench. A trailer towed behind a pickup truck carries the bodies. Teams of volunteers, in carefully hoarded Tyvek suits, moving carefully to minimize the wear on them, pick up the bodies with great respect and lay them in the trench.
At first Public Works used bulldozers and backhoes. Then we ran out of Diesel with no way to get more.
So we went to the good old fashioned shovel.
The setup is just like a hazardous materials incident. Cold zone, warm zone, hot zone. Decon, operational area, tool clean up. Donning and doffing areas. All carefully socially distanced. One bench or chair per person, if you please.
I am in charge of printing the bodies.
This is a tedious task. Getting good prints requires cleaning the hands carefully. Then rolling the fingers, hopefully without them coming off. Improvising various substitutes for ink.
We need to know who died, you see. And when a whole family dies at once, we don't necessarily have anyone alive to tell us.
I am also helping run the count, along with the morgue photographer. We reconcile frequently.
At this one site, we are up to six hundred a day. No refrigerated trailers, see no Diesel. What little freezer space there is within homes and businesses is needed for food, not remains.
The work is tedious. The decontamination takes up most of the time.
And that's how I die.
A simple, simple mistake. I touched an outer garment with an ungloved hand, and then I wiped my nose.
Five days later, my temperature spiked.
Eight days after that, my own prints on a piece of blank cardstock.
###
We thought we had it handled. We thought we had a vaccine.
We did, sort of. But it had been rushed to prototype, and then to mass deployment.
Three days after the first inoculations – medical personnel, emergency response personnel, essential workers – the word came down from CDC.
Hard stop. Side effects.
But it was by then far too late.
Massive allergic reactions, two days delayed from the injection. With full medical support, a 60% fatality rate. But the sudden bum rush of victims – many workers dropping like flies in their own hospitals – crashed the hospitals in turn.
I hadn't been injected. I was too low on the priority list.
So I ended up driving an ambulance. A real one. Lights and siren and everything.
I got to wear a Tyvek suit in the cab. My mask's intake and exhaust port tube carefully fitted to a screen on the window. An overpressure system keeping me as the driver from being exposed to anything carried in the back.
At first I had a medic in the back. They kept dying.
So now I transported patients who were not attended. A camera on the dash showed me their status. A repeater showed me their vitals.
And more than once, more than a dozen times, I simply diverted mid-run, from the field treatment site to the morgue site.
Bring out your dead. Put them in the back. Sorry if they're still breathing. Say your goodbye, but hurry. I've got more to go get.
Despite the lights. Despite the siren. Driving through apocalypse has its risks. I slowed, came to a stop at the malfunctioning traffic signal … started to drive through … and WHAM! Sports car. T-bone collision. And the drunk driver ended up in the back with my patient. I caught a tire to the face, and had a moment to realize that it had taken off my face before I choked to death on my own flesh.
###
Well, the vaccine worked, sort of. The survival rate exceeded the fatality rate, at least, which was saying something.
The problem with a communicable disease is that you think you know how it's being communicated. Then it mutates on you.
It was such a subtle change we barely noticed it.
The original Covid-19 was fragile on surfaces. Sunlight would kill it. Fresh air would hamper it. UV light, ordinary antibacterials … death to Covid-19.
We ended up with a mutated strain that was no longer reliably impacted by that old standby, alcohol. Instead of dying in 2-4 days, it would stay alive on a surface for up to a week.
Toilet seats. Door handles. The very paperwork that someone signed to show that they were aware of the Covid-19 symptoms. The pens.
And the packages that carry-out food came in.
The sudden surge in transmission was spotty but thorough. Entire workplaces, down sick at once. Public health investigators used the same techniques that worked against hepatitis and salmonella at restaurants. Their finding … horrific.
The janitor's mop killed them. Instead of cleaning, it had spread.
And once they were sick, each person had then opened a door, used a toilet, signed a form...
Locked in my office, I designed a facility that could continue operating despite these constraints.
Outdoor sinks at the entrances to every building. Indoor sinks inside.
Thermal cameras that would take your temperature before opening the outer door.
All the doors retrofitted, to supermarket style sliding doors that you didn't have to touch. Two pairs, so that a broken door didn't take an entire entrance out of service.
The indoor restroom, as dead as the movie cinema or the auditorium. Portable toilets sanitized between each individual user.
Gurneys with zipper bags and a battery powered filtration system, for the newly Sick.
Smaller zipper bags, no filtration required or desired, for the newly Dead.
We were halfway through the retrofit when our last construction contractor abandoned the work.
We made do.
We had to keep running. We had to keep the data center up. Too much relied on it.
When everyone had to cross train as an IT technician, I knew we were in trouble.
When I zipped the body of my last co-worker into the body bag, used the rope and tackle to lift it so I could then wheel the gurney underneath...
I watch on the cameras. I try to keep the servers running. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing. I have a book of passwords, accounts of the dead. Superuser access to everything.
There's enough food in storage to last the team for a year. It will last me for the rest of my life, one way or another.
The first time the power goes out, the transition to the generators is smooth.
The fourth time, there is a brownout. Smoke pours from the electrical room. In practiced motions, I put on my SCBA and turnouts, go into the room, find the correct breakers and trip them.
I bring the site back up. Sort of. One quarter of the servers, on one of eight generators.
It takes me two hours to realize.
Packet loss 100%.
Our quadruple redundant connection to the Internet is down. And I don't have the vaguest idea of where to start to fix it.
I start calling around on the satellite phone. The NOC doesn't answer. The GNOC doesn't answer.
911 doesn't answer.
Inmarsat ground station GNOC doesn't answer.
I punch in a number, a number I shouldn't even know, let alone use for this purpose. North American Air Defense Command's 911 drop line for hijacked aircraft.
There is … no … answer. The call attempts, but is not picked up.
I have enough battery power to run the cameras and the access control systems, even if the generator goes down.
The streets are empty. I go into the recordings.
The last vehicle – a trash truck full of bodies – went past three weeks ago today.
There has been no vehicle traffic past, on a busy expressway in the heart of Silicon Valley, for twenty-two days now.
I'm already drinking the fire water. I have purification equipment, so that's OK.
Two days later, I smell smoke. I look outside. The sky is yellowish. Like the height of fire season.
I use the cameras to look at the mountains.
They are all on fire.
I rig up some additional filtration to keep the air breathable. No problem. I have more duct tape than any single person should ever have.
From laptops and books, I teach myself network engineering. It takes two months.
100% packet loss. I start to hate those words.
I finally get a data link established. To another data center. Just down the street, in world terms. Palo Alto. But impossibly far away to risk driving in an unarmored vehicle, even if the roads hadn't been blocked, even if there weren't so many hazardous materials spills.
We Zoom each other. We talk, warily. Neither of us know of any other survivors.
We are the guardians of a lost world.
I get out the laminator. I go through the office supplies. I find my electronic copy of a book. “The Knowledge.” A guide to how to rebuild civilization. I check the formatting several times.
I fire up the printer. Three hundred and fifty pages per copy. Four copies. That's how much lamination material I have.
One copy here, with me, in the NOC.
At some risk, carefully, and heavily armed, I put another copy in the bank vault of the nearby bank. I know just enough about banking operations that I can figure out the vault keys and the time lock mechanism. It is one of the few buildings that I suspect will not burn, between the masonry exterior and the metal roof, and my pointed removal of all flammables from the premises.
A third copy, I wrap in many layers of food wrap, a final layer of paper to avoid polymerization, and put under the altar of a nearby church. I mortar around it with bricks.
The fourth and final copy, I carefully seal with dessicant in a Pelican case. I mark the outside of it. I take with me a shovel. I go to City Hall, to the basement. There, amid the other paper relics of a dead civilization, I hide the last copy of the backup plan for rebooting civilization.
I've made too many trips outside.
I am followed.
I give a good accounting of myself, killing three of them before I am shot too many times to keep fighting.
They patch up my wounds.
So as to eat me last. No refrigeration, you see.
I don't survive the third amputation.
###
If it isn't one thing, it's another.
The Collapse is sudden. Like flicking a switch.
The lethality of Covid-19 goes from 2% to 40% in three days.
Emergency response organizations shatter under the strain.
People go home to find their loved ones dead – or worse, shouting (or shooting!) at them to make them stay away.
The power goes down and stays down. Then the water. The trucks stop running, there is nothing to take anywhere and no one to unload it when it gets there.
I am in a secure facility owned by a paranoid corporation. When things started to get bad, they ordered several hundred metal storage containers, each forty feet long, containing everything necessary to run the site independently for a decade.
Our water tanks will last decades. The site is hardened. It is a all-hazard facility. Proof against wildfire. Even a fallout shelter in the basement. There are gas sensors and radiation detection equipment. The scientists are thoughtful and skilled, even if few of them made it, and willing to cooperate with anyone useful.
We are socially distanced with a vengeance. Once we make it through the first month of quarantine, we assemble the site hazmat team, gather up the corpses of our former co-workers, and with all the honor we can roll them down the hillside for the coyotes.
We plant gardens immediately. We send out foraging expeditions to the community around us.
If one percent of two million people survive, that is 20,000 people.
What we didn't count on was that these survivors, by whatever means, would hate science and scientists and everything having to do with lab coats, medicine, needles... you name it. It took a while for them to figure out where we were coming from. But they did.
Before we knew it, we were besieged. Small arms fire at first. We had all the supplies we needed but couldn't cross the death ground to get to them.
Then we heard the rumble and squeal of tracks.
One by one, the angry mob breached our buildings, despite our pre-Collapse fortifications.
I watched on cameras what they did to the scientists in the first wing.
I thought about it carefully. Weighed my options.
And while I could, while there was still time, and leisure to be certain to do it right.
Better to have my brains on the floor, than my guts pulled out a handful at a time, and burnt.
BLAM!
###
We beat it.
We beat the Pandemic.
After more Americans died of Covid-19 than died in all of World War II – Friday, March 5th, 2021 to be exact – America finally, finally finally got her shit together.
Social distancing. Masks. 24 hour curfew. Rationing. Training for everyone, in everything.
No more anemic “Stop The Spread” or “Flatten The Curve” bullshit.
America at war is not to be trifled with.
The vaccines were distributed like the draft. Four vaccines. Split up carefully, given to different groups selectively.
Vaccine #3 killed another 37,000 people in four days. But we caught it, and only a third of them were healthcare workers. The hospitals were shaky but they held.
We were ready for sporification. Bleach, glorious bleach. To hell with hand sanitizer. Chapped red skin is the mark of every true American.
We were ready for the lethality surge. Our social distancing was vengeful – and enforced by gunfire.
Mask slackers were drafted to carry bodies. If their Internet-broadcast auto de fe was sufficiently heartfelt, as determined by a jury of their peers and the number of likes, they were even permitted to wear PPE while doing so.
We were even ready for the power failures. Everything important had generators, many natural gas, some Diesel.
The streets are quiet. It is a heavy, laden quiet. The unholy alliance of the US Postal Service, FedEx, DHL, Amazon and half a dozen smaller package delivery services provides a daily drop shipment to every address in America. Yes, even in rural areas.
Unauthorized use of motor vehicles is punishable by execution.
We gave up shopping for the duration. The retail store is as dead as the restaurant. Both are packaging facilities for the shippers. An army of drivers is winning the war for us.
Netflix and Disney Plus were shut down, except for the documentaries. The networks broadcast instructions on how to plant and grow Victory Gardens. “Every home is a factory, every bedroom is a hospital, every American a survivor.”
There's no such thing as homeless. Empty houses were issued as needed.
There's no such thing as prisons either. The cooperative prisoners were issued houses. The uncooperative ones were shot.
A little temporary fascism, nay, totalitarianism, is a small price to pay for national survival.
Then came the War.
Other countries just weren't taking Covid-19 seriously enough. We would show them.
The United Planet Of America. Plenty of Lebansraum for the survivors.
Every victory has its price. Some countries just wouldn't acknowledge This Is The Way.
“You are Marines in order to die. The Marine Corps will send you where you can die.”
I signed up. I went. I died.
###
“Perhaps when the history of the 2020s is written, the future historians will have mercy on us,” I wrote, most foolishly.
It's clear now that Covid-19 was not anywhere near the threat it seemed.
We overreacted. A death rate of merely 2% was merely six million dead, those mostly elderly and useless anyway.
It didn't mutate. It didn't become surface contagious. No enemies of America took advantage of our distractions. We handled our business. We cared for the living, we buried the dead. The civil wars we feared never materialized.
We kind of stumbled through to 2021, then 2022 and 2023. The new President, the old President, no one really cared. Was it Biden in 2021 and then Trump in 2024, or the other way around? Didn't hear much from the old farts anyway.
The Elder Pandemic gave rise to the Euthanasia Acts. The first Act was voluntary. The second, less so. The third involved failure to pay taxes. The fourth, failure to pay student loans.
It was all popular, popularly voted on and popularly elected. Not fascist, but eugenicist.
People were happy at the thought of not paying for useless mouths to feed, drains on the economy and on our society. First we dispensed with the disabled. Then the unproductive. Then the unpopular.
In 2025, the leading cause of death in America was euthanasia, followed by pneumonia. It was well known and never mentioned that pneumonia was another way of saying euthanasia.
It's not genocide if none dare call it such.
“We cranked our tolerance for mass death so high, that we became inured to it,” I continued.
A week later, I was convicted, and sentenced to Euthanasia Six, for doubleplusungood crimethink. Duly so by a jury of my peers.
Sentence to be carried out as soon as a Chamber slot became available. It was a busy day, so I had to wait seven hours.
###
No mass societal collapse. No falling in love with fascism, eugenics or simply Death. The lethality went down, not up. The contagion became less contagious over time. All the vaccines worked. There were enough for everyone.
Covid-19 joined polio, smallpox, SARS and Ebola on the list of diseases humanity had conquered.
The horse had learned to sing. And the advance of civilization continued at an accelerated pace.
We rushed headlong towards either Singularity or extinction, without a pause to think.
Would either come in my lifetime?
Or yours?
Others In This Series:
The Flattening Of Pandemic Drift | Covid-19 Fanfic | Flat As A Pancake - Part III
[In our last episode, our plucky viewpoint character died repeatedly, and in one episode, crippled giving a glimpse of how bad a pandemic disaster can actually get.]
We thought we had adapted. We really did. Masks, social distancing. The factories generated huge quantities of Personal Protective Equipment, aka PPE. Handwashing everywhere. An entire economy, reformatted and rebooted.
We were wrong.
We forgot that viruses in the wild mutate.
###
Well, shit.
What was left of the emergency response organization in the County consisted of three teams. Law, Medical and Operations.
Law was everyone trying to keep public order, to the extent that it could be kept. A handful of surviving police over a sea of scared people with guns, all ready to emulate Han Solo at any instant.
Medical was everyone trying to help the Sick, without becoming Sick themselves. Good fucking luck.
Operations was the entire rest of the economy. Feed the living, bury the dead. And trivial details like, you know, providing potable water, keeping house fires from becoming more wild fires, clearing blocked roads. Finding or in some cases making PPE.
I was in Ops. And I was on Morgue.
Don't fear the reaper. Dead is just dead. Bodies spread disease if not taken care of. But we had a plan. Public Works digs the trench. A trailer towed behind a pickup truck carries the bodies. Teams of volunteers, in carefully hoarded Tyvek suits, moving carefully to minimize the wear on them, pick up the bodies with great respect and lay them in the trench.
At first Public Works used bulldozers and backhoes. Then we ran out of Diesel with no way to get more.
So we went to the good old fashioned shovel.
The setup is just like a hazardous materials incident. Cold zone, warm zone, hot zone. Decon, operational area, tool clean up. Donning and doffing areas. All carefully socially distanced. One bench or chair per person, if you please.
I am in charge of printing the bodies.
This is a tedious task. Getting good prints requires cleaning the hands carefully. Then rolling the fingers, hopefully without them coming off. Improvising various substitutes for ink.
We need to know who died, you see. And when a whole family dies at once, we don't necessarily have anyone alive to tell us.
I am also helping run the count, along with the morgue photographer. We reconcile frequently.
At this one site, we are up to six hundred a day. No refrigerated trailers, see no Diesel. What little freezer space there is within homes and businesses is needed for food, not remains.
The work is tedious. The decontamination takes up most of the time.
And that's how I die.
A simple, simple mistake. I touched an outer garment with an ungloved hand, and then I wiped my nose.
Five days later, my temperature spiked.
Eight days after that, my own prints on a piece of blank cardstock.
###
We thought we had it handled. We thought we had a vaccine.
We did, sort of. But it had been rushed to prototype, and then to mass deployment.
Three days after the first inoculations – medical personnel, emergency response personnel, essential workers – the word came down from CDC.
Hard stop. Side effects.
But it was by then far too late.
Massive allergic reactions, two days delayed from the injection. With full medical support, a 60% fatality rate. But the sudden bum rush of victims – many workers dropping like flies in their own hospitals – crashed the hospitals in turn.
I hadn't been injected. I was too low on the priority list.
So I ended up driving an ambulance. A real one. Lights and siren and everything.
I got to wear a Tyvek suit in the cab. My mask's intake and exhaust port tube carefully fitted to a screen on the window. An overpressure system keeping me as the driver from being exposed to anything carried in the back.
At first I had a medic in the back. They kept dying.
So now I transported patients who were not attended. A camera on the dash showed me their status. A repeater showed me their vitals.
And more than once, more than a dozen times, I simply diverted mid-run, from the field treatment site to the morgue site.
Bring out your dead. Put them in the back. Sorry if they're still breathing. Say your goodbye, but hurry. I've got more to go get.
Despite the lights. Despite the siren. Driving through apocalypse has its risks. I slowed, came to a stop at the malfunctioning traffic signal … started to drive through … and WHAM! Sports car. T-bone collision. And the drunk driver ended up in the back with my patient. I caught a tire to the face, and had a moment to realize that it had taken off my face before I choked to death on my own flesh.
###
Well, the vaccine worked, sort of. The survival rate exceeded the fatality rate, at least, which was saying something.
The problem with a communicable disease is that you think you know how it's being communicated. Then it mutates on you.
It was such a subtle change we barely noticed it.
The original Covid-19 was fragile on surfaces. Sunlight would kill it. Fresh air would hamper it. UV light, ordinary antibacterials … death to Covid-19.
We ended up with a mutated strain that was no longer reliably impacted by that old standby, alcohol. Instead of dying in 2-4 days, it would stay alive on a surface for up to a week.
Toilet seats. Door handles. The very paperwork that someone signed to show that they were aware of the Covid-19 symptoms. The pens.
And the packages that carry-out food came in.
The sudden surge in transmission was spotty but thorough. Entire workplaces, down sick at once. Public health investigators used the same techniques that worked against hepatitis and salmonella at restaurants. Their finding … horrific.
The janitor's mop killed them. Instead of cleaning, it had spread.
And once they were sick, each person had then opened a door, used a toilet, signed a form...
Locked in my office, I designed a facility that could continue operating despite these constraints.
Outdoor sinks at the entrances to every building. Indoor sinks inside.
Thermal cameras that would take your temperature before opening the outer door.
All the doors retrofitted, to supermarket style sliding doors that you didn't have to touch. Two pairs, so that a broken door didn't take an entire entrance out of service.
The indoor restroom, as dead as the movie cinema or the auditorium. Portable toilets sanitized between each individual user.
Gurneys with zipper bags and a battery powered filtration system, for the newly Sick.
Smaller zipper bags, no filtration required or desired, for the newly Dead.
We were halfway through the retrofit when our last construction contractor abandoned the work.
We made do.
We had to keep running. We had to keep the data center up. Too much relied on it.
When everyone had to cross train as an IT technician, I knew we were in trouble.
When I zipped the body of my last co-worker into the body bag, used the rope and tackle to lift it so I could then wheel the gurney underneath...
I watch on the cameras. I try to keep the servers running. Half the time I don't know what I'm doing. I have a book of passwords, accounts of the dead. Superuser access to everything.
There's enough food in storage to last the team for a year. It will last me for the rest of my life, one way or another.
The first time the power goes out, the transition to the generators is smooth.
The fourth time, there is a brownout. Smoke pours from the electrical room. In practiced motions, I put on my SCBA and turnouts, go into the room, find the correct breakers and trip them.
I bring the site back up. Sort of. One quarter of the servers, on one of eight generators.
It takes me two hours to realize.
Packet loss 100%.
Our quadruple redundant connection to the Internet is down. And I don't have the vaguest idea of where to start to fix it.
I start calling around on the satellite phone. The NOC doesn't answer. The GNOC doesn't answer.
911 doesn't answer.
Inmarsat ground station GNOC doesn't answer.
I punch in a number, a number I shouldn't even know, let alone use for this purpose. North American Air Defense Command's 911 drop line for hijacked aircraft.
There is … no … answer. The call attempts, but is not picked up.
I have enough battery power to run the cameras and the access control systems, even if the generator goes down.
The streets are empty. I go into the recordings.
The last vehicle – a trash truck full of bodies – went past three weeks ago today.
There has been no vehicle traffic past, on a busy expressway in the heart of Silicon Valley, for twenty-two days now.
I'm already drinking the fire water. I have purification equipment, so that's OK.
Two days later, I smell smoke. I look outside. The sky is yellowish. Like the height of fire season.
I use the cameras to look at the mountains.
They are all on fire.
I rig up some additional filtration to keep the air breathable. No problem. I have more duct tape than any single person should ever have.
From laptops and books, I teach myself network engineering. It takes two months.
100% packet loss. I start to hate those words.
I finally get a data link established. To another data center. Just down the street, in world terms. Palo Alto. But impossibly far away to risk driving in an unarmored vehicle, even if the roads hadn't been blocked, even if there weren't so many hazardous materials spills.
We Zoom each other. We talk, warily. Neither of us know of any other survivors.
We are the guardians of a lost world.
I get out the laminator. I go through the office supplies. I find my electronic copy of a book. “The Knowledge.” A guide to how to rebuild civilization. I check the formatting several times.
I fire up the printer. Three hundred and fifty pages per copy. Four copies. That's how much lamination material I have.
One copy here, with me, in the NOC.
At some risk, carefully, and heavily armed, I put another copy in the bank vault of the nearby bank. I know just enough about banking operations that I can figure out the vault keys and the time lock mechanism. It is one of the few buildings that I suspect will not burn, between the masonry exterior and the metal roof, and my pointed removal of all flammables from the premises.
A third copy, I wrap in many layers of food wrap, a final layer of paper to avoid polymerization, and put under the altar of a nearby church. I mortar around it with bricks.
The fourth and final copy, I carefully seal with dessicant in a Pelican case. I mark the outside of it. I take with me a shovel. I go to City Hall, to the basement. There, amid the other paper relics of a dead civilization, I hide the last copy of the backup plan for rebooting civilization.
I've made too many trips outside.
I am followed.
I give a good accounting of myself, killing three of them before I am shot too many times to keep fighting.
They patch up my wounds.
So as to eat me last. No refrigeration, you see.
I don't survive the third amputation.
###
If it isn't one thing, it's another.
The Collapse is sudden. Like flicking a switch.
The lethality of Covid-19 goes from 2% to 40% in three days.
Emergency response organizations shatter under the strain.
People go home to find their loved ones dead – or worse, shouting (or shooting!) at them to make them stay away.
The power goes down and stays down. Then the water. The trucks stop running, there is nothing to take anywhere and no one to unload it when it gets there.
I am in a secure facility owned by a paranoid corporation. When things started to get bad, they ordered several hundred metal storage containers, each forty feet long, containing everything necessary to run the site independently for a decade.
Our water tanks will last decades. The site is hardened. It is a all-hazard facility. Proof against wildfire. Even a fallout shelter in the basement. There are gas sensors and radiation detection equipment. The scientists are thoughtful and skilled, even if few of them made it, and willing to cooperate with anyone useful.
We are socially distanced with a vengeance. Once we make it through the first month of quarantine, we assemble the site hazmat team, gather up the corpses of our former co-workers, and with all the honor we can roll them down the hillside for the coyotes.
We plant gardens immediately. We send out foraging expeditions to the community around us.
If one percent of two million people survive, that is 20,000 people.
What we didn't count on was that these survivors, by whatever means, would hate science and scientists and everything having to do with lab coats, medicine, needles... you name it. It took a while for them to figure out where we were coming from. But they did.
Before we knew it, we were besieged. Small arms fire at first. We had all the supplies we needed but couldn't cross the death ground to get to them.
Then we heard the rumble and squeal of tracks.
One by one, the angry mob breached our buildings, despite our pre-Collapse fortifications.
I watched on cameras what they did to the scientists in the first wing.
I thought about it carefully. Weighed my options.
And while I could, while there was still time, and leisure to be certain to do it right.
Better to have my brains on the floor, than my guts pulled out a handful at a time, and burnt.
BLAM!
###
We beat it.
We beat the Pandemic.
After more Americans died of Covid-19 than died in all of World War II – Friday, March 5th, 2021 to be exact – America finally, finally finally got her shit together.
Social distancing. Masks. 24 hour curfew. Rationing. Training for everyone, in everything.
No more anemic “Stop The Spread” or “Flatten The Curve” bullshit.
America at war is not to be trifled with.
The vaccines were distributed like the draft. Four vaccines. Split up carefully, given to different groups selectively.
Vaccine #3 killed another 37,000 people in four days. But we caught it, and only a third of them were healthcare workers. The hospitals were shaky but they held.
We were ready for sporification. Bleach, glorious bleach. To hell with hand sanitizer. Chapped red skin is the mark of every true American.
We were ready for the lethality surge. Our social distancing was vengeful – and enforced by gunfire.
Mask slackers were drafted to carry bodies. If their Internet-broadcast auto de fe was sufficiently heartfelt, as determined by a jury of their peers and the number of likes, they were even permitted to wear PPE while doing so.
We were even ready for the power failures. Everything important had generators, many natural gas, some Diesel.
The streets are quiet. It is a heavy, laden quiet. The unholy alliance of the US Postal Service, FedEx, DHL, Amazon and half a dozen smaller package delivery services provides a daily drop shipment to every address in America. Yes, even in rural areas.
Unauthorized use of motor vehicles is punishable by execution.
We gave up shopping for the duration. The retail store is as dead as the restaurant. Both are packaging facilities for the shippers. An army of drivers is winning the war for us.
Netflix and Disney Plus were shut down, except for the documentaries. The networks broadcast instructions on how to plant and grow Victory Gardens. “Every home is a factory, every bedroom is a hospital, every American a survivor.”
There's no such thing as homeless. Empty houses were issued as needed.
There's no such thing as prisons either. The cooperative prisoners were issued houses. The uncooperative ones were shot.
A little temporary fascism, nay, totalitarianism, is a small price to pay for national survival.
Then came the War.
Other countries just weren't taking Covid-19 seriously enough. We would show them.
The United Planet Of America. Plenty of Lebansraum for the survivors.
Every victory has its price. Some countries just wouldn't acknowledge This Is The Way.
“You are Marines in order to die. The Marine Corps will send you where you can die.”
I signed up. I went. I died.
###
“Perhaps when the history of the 2020s is written, the future historians will have mercy on us,” I wrote, most foolishly.
It's clear now that Covid-19 was not anywhere near the threat it seemed.
We overreacted. A death rate of merely 2% was merely six million dead, those mostly elderly and useless anyway.
It didn't mutate. It didn't become surface contagious. No enemies of America took advantage of our distractions. We handled our business. We cared for the living, we buried the dead. The civil wars we feared never materialized.
We kind of stumbled through to 2021, then 2022 and 2023. The new President, the old President, no one really cared. Was it Biden in 2021 and then Trump in 2024, or the other way around? Didn't hear much from the old farts anyway.
The Elder Pandemic gave rise to the Euthanasia Acts. The first Act was voluntary. The second, less so. The third involved failure to pay taxes. The fourth, failure to pay student loans.
It was all popular, popularly voted on and popularly elected. Not fascist, but eugenicist.
People were happy at the thought of not paying for useless mouths to feed, drains on the economy and on our society. First we dispensed with the disabled. Then the unproductive. Then the unpopular.
In 2025, the leading cause of death in America was euthanasia, followed by pneumonia. It was well known and never mentioned that pneumonia was another way of saying euthanasia.
It's not genocide if none dare call it such.
“We cranked our tolerance for mass death so high, that we became inured to it,” I continued.
A week later, I was convicted, and sentenced to Euthanasia Six, for doubleplusungood crimethink. Duly so by a jury of my peers.
Sentence to be carried out as soon as a Chamber slot became available. It was a busy day, so I had to wait seven hours.
###
No mass societal collapse. No falling in love with fascism, eugenics or simply Death. The lethality went down, not up. The contagion became less contagious over time. All the vaccines worked. There were enough for everyone.
Covid-19 joined polio, smallpox, SARS and Ebola on the list of diseases humanity had conquered.
The horse had learned to sing. And the advance of civilization continued at an accelerated pace.
We rushed headlong towards either Singularity or extinction, without a pause to think.
Would either come in my lifetime?
Or yours?
no subject
418,500 Americans killed in World War II
322,000 Americans killed by Covid-19 as of 22 December 2020.