Chapter 2

“When you come to a fork in the road, take it” – Yogi Berra

I pulled into the driveway at Joe and Gabriela’s suburban house to something less than a happy greeting. I’m sure wasteland raiders would have given me a more cheerful welcoming.

“You’re really fucking late!” She howled at me even before I’d gotten out of my truck. “I told you to fucking HURRY!” That’s Gab for you. Despite being one of the strongest pillars of her local church she could (and did) swear like a sailor in private, when she was pissed off, which in my opinion was most of the time. It made me wonder what she was like at work, at one of her executive board meetings.

“So, I hear the world is ending ... and what’s with the secret cloak and dagger stuff and why am I heading off to the Marston Lake ranch to watch it all go down? I believe your God gave us the rainbow as a pledge that he wouldn’t destroy the earth with a flood again, so do we all eat a meteor this time? A solar micro-nova fries earth’s weakening magnetic field and sends us all back to the Middle Ages in a world lit only by fire? Zombies? Please, let it be zombies! Or is it just some moron with a twitchy finger controlling nukes? That would be a real letdown after all of the social unrest and shit we’ve gone through these last few years! Should I have brought popcorn ... and does the kitchen up there even have a microwave? I don’t recall.” This was of course entirely the worst approach to take with Gab. Unlike my brother, she is entirely humorless. I believe she had it surgically removed, along with her tonsils when she was a child growing up in rural Chile.

Gab is barely 4’ 10” tall in her stocking feet, but she can unleash howls of outrage better than a hulking drill sergeant. I let her shriek for a good solid three minutes while I just vacantly smiled at her while paying absolutely no heed at all to anything she was saying. She was clearly stressed to the limits of her coping capacity and needed someone to vent at. I’d do. Joe wasn’t there and it seemed that he wouldn’t be returning home anytime soon and now she was having to deal with everything alone, all by herself. That’s why she made endless checklists in a big binder for this sort of thing. She took disaster prepping seriously ... for her it was serious life-or-death matter, and she had literally spent most of her adult life preparing for this eventually. Joe told me once in confidence that a maternal grandmother with a family reputation for having visions had told her as a young girl that her children would watch most of the world’s population die, and she took this prediction completely to heart ... and soul.

It took a while to get her to calmed down enough to dish out the whole dirt and nothing but the dirt ... before the dirt around us became hopelessly irradiated.

At a glance I could see that she had the two children bundled into their late-model Mercedes SUV and every inch of remaining space was packed tight with bags, boxes and endless red ‘priority’ storage containers, all ready to go. They had been ‘done’ and waiting on my arrival for nearly two hours, she told me ... repeatedly. The SUV appeared brand new, I hadn’t seen it before, but it was big, boxy and military looking and shrieked ‘SAFE’ – please try and fuck with me! She noticed my attentions on her new toy (leaving eye marks all over it) and she at last stopped her tirade long enough to show it off to me, clucking like the mother hen who’d hatched the biggest egg of all time.

“Mercedes G Class,” she smiled with a look of absolute wanton lust as she stroked the rear passenger glass where her son was strapped in. Her older daughter Camila seated up in the front passenger seat, oozing impatience from every teenaged pore she had, sighing with theatrical gestures of boredom at us at least once every minute. “It’s the very latest model I had special ordered from Germany and direct shipped to an aftermarket armoring and military accessories outfit up near Dallas.” And it sure was decked out for any SHTF situation! I’d been driven around in stuff that was way less armored while in the Big Sandbox.

Gabbie gave me the nickel tour of the SUV’s features, and I had to admit being seriously impressed. The entire body had been completely replaced and upgraded, including the passenger compartments, all now heavily armored with opaque light synthetic fiber laminates and air hardened, heat treated ballistic Kevlar alloys light enough to minimize added body weight while able to stop up to .50-cal rounds at close range and nearly all milspec grades of armor-piercing ammo. The new ballistic glass (heavily tinted) maintained the original appearance but allowed for superior optics, like a heads-up display of all thermal threats in a full 360 degree radius for the driver. The frame and suspension had been heavily reinforced, with extra armor protection under the hood for the battery, fuel tank and radiator. It had further protection against EMP attacks, local or atmospheric, solid composite Kevlar/solid-rubber hybrid puncture-proof tires, and a small assortment of other security devices James Bond certainly would have had included in his cars. It was a beast! Able to drive through most street obstacles, ford small rivers up to 8’ feet deep with a retractable snorkel, all while utterly ignoring most military-grade ammunition fired at it. Gab stroked the hood, just once more, with probably more sincere lust in her eyes than she’d likely ever shown to my brother. Maybe. Her church believed fervently in the immanent ‘second coming’ and Armageddon couldn’t come fast enough to suit her.

Noting the bracket on the roof next to the sunroof for mounting a Big Fucking Gun, like either a Ma Duce or a M249 SAW, it wouldn’t be long before she would be mowing down unbelievers (and/or zombies) by the hordes in a righteous fervor ... probably while smugly smiling. Smiting the unbelievers (post-rapture) was very much a signature point of her family religion.

“It cost me stupid money, most of a quarterly bonus check even, but it was worth every dime. This one was #4 off of their conversion line ... they told me that #3, the one they finished just before mine, went to Jeff Bezos for his doomsday bunker. Their waiting list of clients for ordering this model is over three years now. I’ve got a similar but different surprise for you ... but here’s a quick update on the situation. Don’t talk, just listen and I’ll tell you, quickly what you need to know.”

“Joe is on a flight right now to Wright-Patt,” she stated, “after spending most of yesterday almost as a virtual prisoner after a classified meeting in a sub-basement at the CDC, in Georgia. He contacted me early this morning from Dobbins, that’s a reserve base near Atlanta. While waiting for his military flight, he managed to get some privacy time while in the men’s room to call and warn me. They had confiscated his personal cell phone the moment he arrived at the CDC and he’s got strict orders not to talk to anyone about anything, but once he was sure he was alone he pulled out an emergency burner phone he kept hidden inside his briefcase and dialed my own emergency cell. He only had about ten minutes to say what he could say before his security team came looking for him and he had to ring off and re-hide the phone. The call shouldn’t be traceable, but I’m in a hurry to get us both on the road anyway, just in case.”

That was my smarter older brother to a T. Have a Plan A ... and also plans B, C, and D-Z just in case.

“In short,” she said with a long theatrical sigh, “there’s going to be another pandemic soon. A real one this time, not the bullshit sort that we had a few years ago when they locked the entire planet down and destroyed the supply-chain, but a big, NASTY, man-made one that probably didn’t come this time from a lab in China. Joe said this new virus shows every sign of being lovingly hand-crafted in some secret military-grade bio-weapons lab strictly for the purpose of killing off most, about 75% of the humans on the planet, plus or minus. This new bug is supposedly much more lethal to men, killing over 90% of cases he says, but it’s somewhat less dangerous to girls & women ... but they’re already hearing early rumors of some possible nasty side effects with the survivors as well. Too early to say for sure. The CDC discovered it really super early, like about a week ago, based on a couple of FBI reports he saw, but it’s so exotic and frankly alien to most other existing level 4 pathogens that no vaccine or drug can be crafted for it in time until it’s spread and done all the damage world-wide that it could ever hope to do. That’s what they called in Joe and other top brass from a dozen other military medical test facilities, to let them in on the situation, to see if any of the military level 4 lab had any vaguely similar viruses on-hand that a vaccine could be quickly cobbled together from, as in ready for use by last week. He said the FBI discovered it nearly instantly after it was released loose into wild and it’s stayed a tight governmental secret at the CDC for the last week, and already it’s far too late to do anything about it.”

“Ouch ... not a nice way to cull off 90% of the herd.”

“Nope, the FBI also reported that it was also deliberately being released here in the US and perhaps Europe and Asia also ... with multiple active spreaders via a radical woman’s group deliberately spreading it, the FBI said. They’ve caught some of them ... but not all of them, and likely it’s already spread out much too far to be stopped now. Needless to say, the top politicos all know about this by now and are crying to be the very first ones in the line for any vaccine that anyone can cobble together at the last minute. As for the general public, they’re fucked. Since the CDC thinks nothing can be done now to stop it, there’s no point then in informing or warning the media, as it would only cause panic and societal breakdown even sooner. The 1% crowd already know, of course, and are already slinking off to their doomsday bunkers ... and fuck it, so are we!”

“So, they’ve got multiple patient zeros and a probable likelihood of endless retransmission cases in the wild, probably nationwide – and then certainly international, increasing at a geometric rate ... and soon?”

“Ah, so you were paying some attention ... good! The FBI report alleges that the one group of operatives they have apprehended were out on the interstates, deliberately spreading the virus out into the general population at every place they could, especially major truck stops. Infected bottles of hand-soap placed in hundreds of restrooms, the FBI stated. Joe described it as a ‘Twelve Monkeys’ sort of situation ... said you’d know exactly what that means. This bug, fortunately for us, has an extended, if somewhat random, incubation period that’s at minimum about a week but usually longer. Joe thinks the median time in stage one after exposure is about 20 days. But equally unfortunately, it also has a long infection transmission window starting before significant symptoms appear or death results, so the bug can spread itself as far and wide as possible by both air and water contact before the host dies.”

“So, at least a few thousand people across multiple states are infected now, unbeknownst to them, and soon will be spreaders themselves, each to hundreds or thousands of others more. Repeat endlessly thereafter until most of the world is dead, and the government intends to remain quiet about it for as long as possible? Likely misrepresented as either a bad flu strain or the Return of the Son of COVID Strikes Again, Electric Bugaloo II, right up until the end.”

“I’d bet heavy on the latter option. Good ... you did listen. It’s March 7^th now, which means the first batch of infected deaths will start appearing by the end of this month. By April 7^th, at the latest, this bug will be headline news and this new pandemic will make the worst COVID varieties look like the common cold, by comparison. By May 7^th, this bug will be everywhere worldwide and masses of dead victims are going to overwhelm what’s left of orderly society and corpses are going to be rotting on every street and lawn. By June it should be pretty much all over, but by then there will be too many dead people, especially the sort of people that keep utilities running and civilization is going to come to a complete grinding halt. Specifically, I’m taking about men being by far the highest mortality demographic of this virus. If we’re lucky, the mostly female survivors can stabilize some portions of this country solidly back to 1830’s, pre-industrial levels of technology... if the survivors don’t all turn upon each other like insane madmen. Those were Joe’s words ... not mine. I’m not sure exactly what he meant by that. Your mission now is to prepare Mars to become one of those stabilized centers where at least some attempt at societal recovery can begin again from.”